The woman opened the door and motioned Shaw in. She left him there facing the old man seated at a small table where a plain meal had been laid: a wedge of cheese, a piece of cod, a fist of bread, and a bottle of wine.

The man’s face was a cache of wrinkles, the white beard scraggly and the small belly soft and round. The eyes peered out from under tufts of ramshackle snowy hair badly in need of pruning. The eyes caught on Shaw’s and held.

The man motioned to the table. “Hungry? Thirsty?”

There was a second chair but Shaw chose not to use it. Indeed, if he had attempted to sit down, the man might have shot him, for there was a gun grasped in his left hand pointed right at Shaw and the prearranged instructions had been explicit. One did not sit. One did not eat or drink if one wanted to live.

Shaw’s gaze had already swept the tiny room. The only entry was the doorway he’d come through. He’d positioned himself so that he could keep one eye on this portal and one eye on the man. And his gun.

He shook his head and said, “Thank you, but I already ate at the De Groene Lanteerne.” It was a cheap place with traditional Dutch food served in a room that was three hundred years old and looked it.

The dopey code words out of the way, the man rose, slid a piece of paper from his pocket, and handed it to Shaw.

Shaw glanced at the address and other information on the paper, ripped it up, and tossed the pieces into the toilet set against one wall and flushed it. Seemingly on cue the old man put on a beaten-up hat and patched coat and left.

Shaw could not leave yet. Sexual encounters typically lasted a bit longer than two minutes even for the teenage first-timers. And you never knew who was watching. Well, actually, he did. There were several of them.