Initially there would be pain.

There would be loss.

There always was. Indeed, his own father had been a victim of keeping the spectrum of world power on a firm footing, so Creel quite clearly understood the level of sacrifice required. But in the end it would all be worth it.

He settled back in his seat.

The creator of Konstantin knew a little.

Caesar knew a little.

Only Nicolas Creel knew all.

As gods always did.

“WHAT’S THE ‘A’ STAND FOR?” the man asked in fluent English with a Dutch accent layered over it.

Shaw looked at the gentleman standing opposite him at Passport Control in Schiphol Airport fifteen kilometers southwest of Amsterdam. One of the busiest airports in the world, it rested five meters below sea level with trillions of tons of swirling water nearby. Shaw had always considered this the height of engineering daring. Yet much of the entire country was below sea level, so they didn’t really have much of a choice on where to park the planes.

“Excuse me?” Shaw said, though he well knew what the man was referring to.

The fellow stabbed the photo page of Shaw’s passport with his finger.

“There. Your given name is just the initial ‘A’. What does it stand for?”

Shaw gazed at his passport while the Dutchman looked on.

As befitted the tallest nation on earth, the passport man in his regulation uniform was six foot two, only one inch above a Dutchman’s average height, but still coming in three inches under Shaw’s imposing stature.

“It doesn’t stand for anything,” Shaw answered. “My mother never gave me a Christian name, so I named myself for what I am. A Shaw. Because that is my surname, or at least it was my mother’s.”

“And your father had no objection to his son not taking his name?”

“You don’t need a father to deliver a baby, only to make one.”

“And the hospital did not name you, then?”

“Are all babies born in hospitals?” Shaw jabbed back with a smile.

The Dutchman stiffened and then his tone became less adversarial.

“So Shaw. Irish, as in George Bernard?”

The Dutch were a wonderfully informed people, Shaw had found. Well educated and curious, loved to debate. He’d never had anyone before ask him about George Bernard Shaw.

“Could be, but I’m Scottish. The Highlands. At least my ancestors came from there,” he added quickly, since he was holding an American passport, one of a dozen he actually possessed. “I was born in Connecticut. Perhaps you’ve been there?”

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.

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.

Shaw was especially drawn to the houseboats, nearly three thousand of them, docked along the canals. They appealed to him because they represented roots. Even though they were floating on water, these boats never moved. They were handed down from one generation to the next or sold outright. What might that feel like, he wondered, to have such ties to one place?

He later donned shorts and running shoes and jogged across the wide-open spaces of Oosterpark near his hotel. In a very real sense Shaw had been running his whole life. Well, if things went according to plan that was going to end. Either that or he’d end up dead. He would gladly take the risk. In a way, he was dead already.

Sipping a coffee at the Bulldog, Amsterdam’s most famous café chain, Shaw watched people go about their business. And he also eyed the men who were so very clearly watching him. It was pathetic, really, observing folks undertaking surveillance who didn’t have the least clue as to how to do it properly.

The next day he lunched at one of his favorite restaurants in the city, run by an elderly Italian. The man’s wife sat at one table reading the newspaper all day while her husband acted as maître d’, waiter, chef, busboy, dishwasher, and cashier. The place only had four barstools and five tables, not counting the wife’s domain, and prospective customers had to stand in the doorway and be scrutinized by the husband. If he nodded, you were allowed to eat. If he turned away, you found another place to dine.

Shaw had never been turned away. Perhaps it was his imposing physical stature, or his magnetic blue eyes that seemed to snatch one up in their powerful embrace. But most likely it was because the owner and he had once worked together, and it wasn’t in the field of food and beverage.

That night Shaw put on a suit and attended the opera at the Muziektheater. After the performance was over he could’ve walked back to his hotel, but he chose instead to head in the opposite direction. Tonight was why he’d really come to Holland. He was a tourist no longer.

As he approached the red-light district he observed some activity down a dark and particularly narrow alleyway. A little boy stood there in the shadows. Next to him was a rough-looking man with his zipper down and one large hand stuffed in the boy’s pants.

In an instant Shaw had changed direction. He slipped into the alley and placed a blow to the back of the man’s head. It was a measured strike, designed to stun, not kill, though Shaw was sorely tempted to finish off the predator. As the man fell unconscious to the pavement Shaw crammed a hundred euros in the boy’s hand and sent him off with a hard push and a dire warning in Dutch. As the child’s frantic footfalls echoed away, Shaw knew the boy would at least not starve or die tonight.

As he resumed his original route he noted for the first time that the old stock exchange was directly across from the hookers in the red-light. This struck him as odd until he thought about it. Cash and prostitution had always been bedfellows. He wondered if some of the ladies accepted company shares in lieu of euros as payment.

Even more ironic than the exchange’s close proximity to the whores was that the red-light district completely surrounded Oude Kerk, or Old Church, the city’s most ancient and largest house of worship. Built in 1306 as a simple wooden chapel, it had been constantly tinkered with and enlarged for the next two centuries. One jokester had even inlaid a brass pair of breasts into the pavement by the front entrance. Shaw had been inside a few times. What had struck him was the series of carvings on the choir benches depicting men having massive bowel movements. He could only assume that masses must have been really long in those days.