Staughton went gladly, with no desire to be heroic. Barnes knew perfectly the strengths and weaknesses of those who served him and what they could tolerate. Otherwise he would’ve made him stay there for the entire observation. Staughton was good at other things, as he’d already proved in the bathroom at Amsterdam Centraal. To observe and deduce, summarize and process facts. Yes, no one could compete with Jerome Staughton in analysis.

A serious Barnes looked at the body. Totally naked of clothes and prejudices, sanctified by death. There were two entrance wounds corresponding to the police report, one in the chest and the other exactly in the center of his head, brown, lifeless, since even the blood loses vitality.

“Do you have the ballistics report?” Barnes asked without taking his eyes off the body of the old member of the agency.

“Yes, wait a minute,” the doctor answered, reluctantly returning to the small table, where he looked at the monitor. “Nine millimeter.”

“Nine millimeter,” Barnes repeated. “Of course. It had to be.” He continued looking at the corpse. “Were all of them killed with the same gun?”

He couldn’t take his eyes from the body. He knew that one day it could be him stretched out on another gurney in some other morgue, with a bullet in the head and wrinkles cut with age, if he made it to Solomon Keys’s age. Solomon’s world didn’t exist anymore-the time when people trusted strangers who came out of nowhere suddenly, manipulating them at their will, paying generously for information, eliminating those who had to be, and avoiding risks to those who took care of that. Today things were more dangerous, the criminals much more intelligent, cautious, always two steps ahead of the intelligence services, and never thinking twice. Besides, double or triple or totally invented lives, as in his time, didn’t make sense now. Everything was done at a distance on the Internet or other wireless technology. The demand was much greater. Communications were encoded, and millions of dollars required to validate or decode a message, with no certainty it was trustworthy. That was one of the reasons the company opted for surveillance on everyone, not just those who might be considered suspicious, since in reality they have no idea who is or isn’t. After an information scan in which the supercomputer uses key words such as “president,” “attack,” “bomb,” “United States of America,” “menace,” “gas,” among others on a long list, via Internet, audio, and video, from time to time they manage to catch someone. No, Barnes wouldn’t make it to Solomon Keys’s eighty-seven years, nowhere close. The shot to the temple was practically guaranteed. Hence the compassionate look he gave the deceased old man.

“Yes. All with the same gun,” the doctor concluded.

“I want to see the other two,” Barnes demanded.

More fast finger movement on the keyboard, and the information appeared on the computer screen. Doors 15 and 16 held the bodies of the English couple. Davids went to 15 first and slid out the rack to reveal… no body.

“This is unexpected,” Davids uttered, paralyzed with surprise.

“Are you sure this is the right one?” Barnes asked.

“It’s what the computer says,” the doctor informed him.

He opened 16. Nothing.

“Fuck,” Barnes swore. “Do you see this?” He whirled around to ask Thompson.

Irritated, impatient, Barnes started opening all the refrigerated compartments and sliding out the racks.

“Hey,” the doctor protested.

“Keep quiet,” Thompson warned, also opening the compartments and reading the tag attached to each corpse’s toe.

Thirteen corpses later, some compartments empty, they still hadn’t found a sign of the English couple. They reviewed the list, and everything seemed to be in order with the rest.

“Who could have taken them away?” Barnes asked the doctor.

“No one. The bodies aren’t even prepared for transfer yet.”

“And when will that be? Who takes them?”

“In this case, since they’re foreigners, the family or a representative of their country of origin, but always accompanied by a family member.”

“Could there be an error? Could they already have been handed over and the information not yet entered in the computer?” Thompson wanted to know.

“It seems strange to me, but I’m going to find out,” Davids informed him, much friendlier now than in the beginning. It was the morbidity of the situation. Irony. Irony.

He picked up a telephone attached to the wall next to the entrance door and punched three numbers, an internal extension. Three seconds later he started a conversation in his nasal Dutch that ended with violently slamming down the receiver, leaving it dancing on the end of the cord.

“He’s coming,” he explained.

“Who?” Barnes and Thompson asked.

“The boss. Dr. Vanderbilt,” he explained. “Zoon van een wijfje”-son of a bitch.

The reasons for his blasphemies were his own, of no interest to us, nor to Barnes, Thompson, or Staughton, who came in white as a cauliflower, cleaning his mouth with a cloth handkerchief and covering his nose with it.

“Everything is sterilized. It doesn’t smell of anything,” Davids pointed out, fed up with all the interruptions. They were going to set his work back. Staughton paid no attention to the remark. He looked at the open doors of the gigantic refrigerated bay and the thirteen corpses slid out from the compartments. He looked at Thompson curiously. The latter, seeing him, turned his eyes away.

“Don’t ask,” he advised.

Meanwhile, the doctor, who must have been the previously mentioned Vanderbilt, Dr. Davids’s boss, came in. He was wearing a blue suit with an indigo tie underneath his open white gown. His posture radiated confidence and arrogance. He cut short the “Goede nacht, heren”-Good evening, gentlemen-upon seeing the macabre spectacle. It looked like someone wanted to buy bodies, or parts of them.

“Davids, sluit alles, nu,” he shouted at Davids, the equivalent of ordering him to close up all the shit, without the profanity, but inherent in the tone he used. “What’s going on, gentlemen? Are you trying to screw things up?” he offered in a joking tone.

Barnes gestured to Thompson to place himself in Davids’s path and keep him from carrying out his chief ’s order.

“Stop there, Davids,” Barnes said. “Nobody is touching anything in here until you tell me where the two missing corpses are.”

“But what’s going on, gentlemen? Where do you think you are? In your own country? Here you don’t give orders about anything,” Vanderbilt made clear, abandoning his conciliatory tone.

“This American was murdered in your country in this city. If you knew how important he is for the United States, you’d think twice. If we were able to get to Baghdad in three weeks, we can easily get here in three days.”

“Okay, okay. You needn’t get all worked up. Besides, you’re under Dutch jurisdiction. That body isn’t going anywhere unless I give the authorization.”

He’s put us in our place, Barnes thought.

“Very well. Where are the corpses of the English couple?” he asked.

“They’ve been reclaimed. They’re on their way to London at this very moment.”

“It’s not in the computer,” Davids told him, surprised.

“Because I haven’t put it in. I just did the transfer forty-five minutes ago.”

“Who took the bodies?” Barnes’s voice cut through sharply. Something had gotten away from him. What?

“A family member.”

“Name,” Barnes demanded.

“He knows perfectly well that the matter is under investigation and secret-”

“The name.” This time he shouted to leave no doubt about who was giving orders here.

Dr. Vanderbilt went to the computer and entered several codes and other input. An instant later he turned the monitor so they could see the name. His face was unfriendly, but it didn’t matter. What was done was done.