The Rapids Read online

  Praise for the novels of

  CARLA NEGGERS

  “No one does romantic suspense better!”

  —New York Times bestselling author Janet Evanovich

  “Neggers’s brisk pacing and colorful characterizations sweep the reader toward a dramatic and ultimately satisfying denouement.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Cabin

  “These pages don’t just turn; they spin with the best of them.”

  —BookPage on The Waterfall

  “Neggers delivers a colorful, well-spun story that shines with sincere emotion.”

  —Publishers Weekly on The Carriage House

  “Suspense, romance and the rocky Maine coast—what more can a reader ask for? The Harbor has it all. Carla Neggers writes a story so vivid you can smell the salt air and feel the mist on your skin.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

  “Tension-filled story line that grips the audience from start to finish.”

  —Midwest Book Review on The Waterfall

  “Carla Neggers is one of the most distinctive, talented writers of our genre.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber

  Also by CARLA NEGGERS

  DARK SKY

  NIGHT’S LANDING

  COLD RIDGE

  THE HARBOR

  STONEBROOK COTTAGE

  THE CABIN

  THE CARRIAGE HOUSE

  THE WATERFALL

  ON FIRE

  KISS THE MOON

  CLAIM THE CROWN

  Look for the latest novel from

  CARLA NEGGERS

  THE WIDOW

  CARLA NEGGERS

  The Rapids

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A special thank-you to my Dutch cousins Henk and Christine Nouwen, Jan and Martha van de Leur, Amy Knechten, Sonja van den Akker and Bart, Leo, Marie Louise, Nanny and Rob Neggers for their warm welcome and many family stories on our visits to the Netherlands. Christine was my “Dutch pen pal” when I was growing up in small-town western Massachusetts and she was growing up in Eindhoven. Henk—who for some mysterious reason thinks the Neggers family is a bit argumentative!—went above and beyond the call of duty in answering my many questions for this book and even put me in touch with a Dutch police inspector, who was equally generous with his time and expertise. I’ve promised to keep working on my Dutch vocabulary…but I’ll never get those “g’s” down!

  I’m so glad we got to see my cousin Carla, for whom I’m named, before her recent death. I will always remember our lunch in her beautiful garden…she and her husband, Daan, had the most gorgeous roses….

  Many thanks to the deputy U.S. marshal who was so gracious and helpful in talking with me, and to my brother Mark and sister-in-law Kathy Neggers for showing me around the scenic and very special Hudson River Valley.

  As I write this, hiking season is about to get under way here in northern New England. I’m still determined to hike all forty-eight peaks over 4,000 feet in the White Mountains…but it’s going to take a while, because I really like walking on the beach, too! I’m also diving into my next book. If you’d like to get in touch with me, please visit my Web site, www.carlaneggers.com.

  Thank you, and take care!

  Carla Neggers

  P.O. Box 826

  Quechee, VT 05059

  To Kate Jewell and Conor Hansen

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  One

  Maggie Spencer stood paralyzed in front of the glass case in a small Dutch bakery not far from her apartment. Decisions, decisions. She’d arrived at the American embassy in The Hague three weeks ago, her first foreign assignment as a diplomatic security officer and already had fallen in love with Dutch bread.

  “You’ll kill for a Krispy Kreme in another two months.”

  She laughed as Thomas Kopac, a midlevel diplomat at the embassy, joined her. “Be careful. I’m talking myself out of chocolate sprinkles.”

  “Ah. Hagelslag. It’s more like dessert than breakfast.”

  “So’s Krispy Kreme.” Maggie smiled at him. “You said that so well. Hagelslag. My Dutch vocabulary is improving, but pronunciation? Forget it. Nobody understands what I’m saying.”

  But she’d had chocolate sprinkles on buttered bread two mornings in a row and decided, instead, on a whole-grain roll with smoked gouda.

  Tom didn’t order anything. “I just saw you in the window and figured I’d make you homesick.”

  “Do I look like the doughnut-eating type?”

  “Uh-uh. I’m not going there.”

  They headed outside into the late August sun. A midnight rain had washed the humidity and pollution out of the air and perked up the summer roses and hydrangea blooming in dooryard gardens. The embassy was only a few blocks away. Maggie walked comfortably alongside Tom, a balding man in his mid-fifties who’d never married, a career foreign service officer who’d never rise to the top ranks of his profession. He was the sort who would wear the same suit for days on end. His job was his life. Maggie was trying to have more balance for herself, but it wasn’t easy. Still, she’d turned thirty in July and had already learned the hard way that life was too short.

  There was, mercifully, nothing romantic in Tom’s offer of friendship.

  “You can eat your broodje in front of me,” he said. “I would.”

  “Do I look hungry?”

  He smiled. “Starving.”

  “I’ll have to pound the pavement after work to burn off the extra calories.”

  Dutch breakfasts notwithstanding, she kept in shape. At five-five, she couldn’t count on her size to get her out of a jam. Fitness, training, experience and mental toughness were the trick.

  And luck.

  There was always the luck factor. But since luck wasn’t her long suit, she didn’t count on it, either.

  “Look there,” Tom said. “Your hair’s the same color as those roses.”

  She noticed the cluster of orange-red roses in a dooryard. “It’s not that red.”

  “Is the red hair from your mother or your father?”

  “Father.”

  He hesitated. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about him.” She smiled to prove she wasn’t just being nice. “My wanderlust is also a Spencer trait.”

  The day she’d arrived in The Hague was the eighteen-month anniversary of her father’s death. Philip Spencer, ordinary American businessman, had walked into the middle of a bank robbery in Prague.

  Talk about no luck.

  The bank robbers still hadn’t been caught. Nobody seemed to be looking too hard for them.

  Maggie gave up on resisting, took her roll out of the bag and bit into it, welcoming the smokiness of the cheese and the softness of the bread. Normalcy. She had to establish her routines, focus on her job and continue to move forward with her life. She couldn’t dwell on the past. And it wasn’t her job to investigate her father’s death.

  She and Tom walked up Lange Voorhout, a tree-lined street of stately historic buildings that was said to be one of the prettiest in The Hague, or, as it was known formally in
Dutch, ’s-Gravenhage, which meant “the count’s hedge.” Even the Dutch shortened it to Den Haag. Although Amsterdam was the official capital, The Hague was the seat of the Dutch government and the residence of its royal family, as well as home to dozens of foreign embassies and the International Court of Justice.

  The functional concrete American embassy was often called the ugliest building on Lange Voorhout, possibly in the entire city. The original embassy—presumably more graceful—had been accidentally destroyed by an Allied bomb during World War Two.

  “Enjoy your bread and cheese,” Tom said cheerfully when they arrived. “And don’t work too hard.”

  “You’re one to talk.”

  He laughed. “Not me. An eighteen-hour day’s my limit.”

  Maggie made her way to her desk, pouring herself a mug of coffee before she sat down. As a special agent for the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service, she had a wide range of duties and responsibilities. First and foremost was the safety and security of the embassy’s personnel, property and information, whether in or out of the building, and of American citizens in the country. She’d completed six months of training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, then worked in U.S. diplomatic security field offices for four years, investigating passport and visa fraud. She’d come to The Hague straight from the Chicago field office, on the heels of a major joint counterterrorism investigation that had culminated in the arrest of a sophisticated trio of Americans producing and selling fraudulent visas.

  She ate the last bite of her roll and drank some of her coffee.

  Having a father killed by bank robbers in Prague hadn’t hurt her security clearance, nor did it even seem to trouble anyone—at least, not beyond sympathy for her loss.

  It troubled her.

  But she’d had to put her questions and doubts out of her mind, because there was nothing to be gained by sticking her nose into her father’s murder investigation. The American embassy in Prague and the FBI would keep her informed of any progress. She had her own job to do.

  She buried herself in it, and by midafternoon, she realized she’d forgotten lunch. She found some peanut butter crackers in her desk and opened up a bottle of water as she scanned her e-mail.

  Re: Nick Janssen.

  Now, there was a subject heading, she thought, noticing the message was from a free e-mail account she didn’t recognize. She opened it up and took in the neatly typed words in a single glance, then read them over more slowly. Twice.

  Special Agent Spencer,

  You must hurry.

  Nick Janssen is in ‘s-Hertogenbosch near the entrance of the Binnendieze boat tour. If necessary I can keep him there for another hour or so. But please hurry if you want him.

  Sincerely,

  A friend

  Maggie read through the e-mail a fourth time.

  A joke. It had to be.

  Nick Janssen was an American fugitive with the rare distinction of being on the “most wanted” lists of both the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service. He’d fled the country a year ago to avoid prosecution for tax evasion. That was enough to put him in hot water with the FBI and the marshals, but he wasn’t considered violent. Then he tried to extort a presidential pardon, a disaster that had left three marshals wounded and three of his own men dead. That the whole mess had come to a climax in the backyard of the Tennessee boyhood home of the President of the United States didn’t help matters.

  As if that weren’t plenty, Janssen’s antics also exposed him as the violent, amoral mastermind of a lucrative criminal network of buyers and sellers of illegal arms, drugs and commodities.

  Charlene Brooker, an American army captain, was the first person to suspect he was more than a simple tax evader. Janssen had ordered her killed last fall while she was in Amsterdam.

  He was in Amsterdam himself during the pardon debacle in May and had managed to disappear shortly after it all blew apart.

  Everyone wanted his hide.

  Since arriving in the Netherlands, Maggie had worked with various American and Dutch investigators on the Janssen case, but she couldn’t think of a single “friend” who would know Nicholas Janssen’s whereabouts and alert her by an anonymous e-mail.

  ’S-Hertogenbosch was a small city in the southern Dutch province of Noord-Brabant.

  She didn’t know what in blazes the Binnendieze was. The name of a canal? A boat tour company?

  You must hurry.

  It was almost four o’clock.

  Maggie abandoned her peanut butter crackers and got up to go find her boss.

  Libby Smith welcomed the breeze that seemed to float up from the Binnendieze, the shallow waterway that encircled most of the old city of ’s-Hertogenbosch. “What happened to your dogs?”

  “What?” Nick Janssen seemed confused, but it was obvious he hadn’t liked anything about their meeting from the moment she’d joined him on his bench. It was, he’d said rather pathetically, his favorite spot nowadays. “How did you know about my dogs?”

  “Rhodesian ridgebacks, weren’t they?”

  He’d dyed his distinctive silver hair a stupid-looking black. As notorious as he was, it was unlikely that anyone in the sleepy southern Dutch city would recognize him, even if he hadn’t colored his hair.

  Tourists—most of them Dutch themselves—stood in line for the boat tour of the Binnendieze.

  Libby was bored out of her mind. She’d put on a frumpy denim skirt, a cheap tank top and ergonomic sandals and carried a canvas bag over her shoulder loaded with all the usual tourist paraphernalia. Her .22-caliber Beretta was tucked inside her foldable, packable, squishable traveler’s rain jacket.

  If necessary, she could get to the Beretta, shoot Nick Janssen and be gone before anyone realized what had happened. If people didn’t expect him to be an international fugitive, they didn’t expect her to be an accomplished killer.

  But she hoped violence wouldn’t be necessary. She had very big plans for her new relationship with her fellow American.

  “I had to give the dogs away,” he said.

  She’d almost forgotten she’d asked about them. “That’s too bad. Still, it wouldn’t be easy to be on the lam with two dogs, never mind ones as large as they were.”

  “Samkevich shouldn’t have sent you here,” Janssen said tightly. “We should have met somewhere else.”

  “That would have had its own risks.”

  Vlad Samkevich, a Russian who lived in London, was a well-known arms dealer who also had an international warrant out for his arrest. But he wasn’t as rich or as desperate as Janssen, and Libby needed someone who was both.

  Janssen stared at the tourists talking loudly to one another in Dutch. “Samkevich says you’ve done work for him. You look like a child. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “You look younger.”

  It wasn’t a compliment. She was small and wiry, and although her very short hair was prematurely gray, it still hadn’t added years to her appearance. It was her size and her cute face that made people think she was younger—always too young.

  “I can do the job, Mr. Janssen,” she said. “Just give me your list.”

  “I’ll need you to prove yourself.”

  She was prepared. “I already have.”

  He glanced sideways at her. “How?”

  “I killed Vladimir Samkevich before I left London two days ago.”

  No reaction from Janssen. Not shock, not respect, not anger.

  Libby responded in kind and kept her mix of satisfaction and fear to herself. What if she’d guessed wrong? But she knew she hadn’t. The man next to her had no more feeling for the Russian than she did. “Samkevich wasn’t your friend. The authorities don’t have solid evidence on you. You were as much a victim in May as anyone else. You didn’t shoot the two marshals in Central Park or have the Dunnemores kidnapped in Amsterdam. Your guy had his own agenda.”

  Janssen made a little noise at her mention of Stuar
t and Betsy Dunnemore, parents of one of the wounded marshals, friends of John Wesley Poe, the current U.S. president. Libby wasn’t sure she should have brought them up. Janssen had fancied himself in love with Betsy, his former college classmate, and tried to manipulate her into interceding on his behalf with Poe.

  He’d thought Betsy would dump her elderly diplomat husband and marry him.

  But Libby understood what it was to have unrealistic dreams, dreams everyone else thought were insane—not that most people gave a damn about anyone else’s hopes and dreams. Nick Janssen didn’t. He’d wanted a presidential pardon and let it be known he’d pay for one. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process. His blindness to the aspirations of others had backfired on him as well.

  When he didn’t speak, she went on. “You had a guy use you in May for his own ends. The two men you sent to the States to clean up after him could have been a problem, too, but they’re dead. They can’t testify against you. They were two of your most trusted bodyguards, but who’s to say they wouldn’t have turned on you?”

  “What does any of that have to do with Samkevich?”

  “He could testify against you. The authorities were closing in on him. He knew it. He’d have cut a deal in a heartbeat, given them you in exchange for a lighter sentence.”

  Janssen thought a moment. “You’re right, of course.”

  She hid her relief. “I don’t want payment for him.”

  “His body—”

  “He won’t be discovered for a few more days.”

  “You’re a very cold woman, Miss Smith.”

  She tried not to bristle, but she wasn’t cold. Not at all. “I’m good at what I do.”

  “This is a nice town,” he said absently. “I could have stayed here for a long time. I was on an island off the coast of Scotland for two months. Did you know that?”