The man said eagerly, “No. But I would like very much to travel to America.”

Shaw had seen that lustful look before. “Well, the streets aren’t really paved with gold and the women aren’t all movie stars, but there’s a lot to do and lots of room to do it in.”

“Maybe one day,” the passport man said wistfully before reassuming his duties. “Are you here on business or pleasure?”

“Both. Why come all this way and have to choose?”

The man chuckled. “Anything to declare?”

“Ik heb niets aan te geven.”

“You speak Dutch?” he said in a surprised tone.

“Doesn’t everyone?”

The man laughed and smacked Shaw’s passport with an old-fashioned ink stamp instead of the high-tech devices some countries were using. These, Shaw had heard, implanted a digital tracking device on the paper. He’d always preferred ink to tracking devices.

“Enjoy your visit,” said Shaw’s new Dutch friend as he handed back the passport.

“I intend to,” Shaw replied as he walked toward the exit and the train that would carry him to Centraal Station in Amsterdam in about twenty minutes.

From there it would only get more exciting. But first he had a role to play.

Because he had an audience.

In fact, they were watching him right now.

CHAPTER 4

THE CAB SHAW TOOK from the train station dropped him off at the grand Amstel Intercontinental Hotel. It housed seventy-nine rooms of great beauty, many with enviable views of the river Amstel, although Shaw was not here for the views.

Adhering to his role-playing over the next three days, Shaw was a tourist in town. There were few places more suited to that enterprise than Amsterdam, a city of 750,000 people, only half of them Dutch-born. He took a boat ride, enthusiastically snapping pictures of a city with more canals than Venice and nearly thirteen thousand bridges in a space of barely two hundred square kilometers, of which one-fourth was water.