Amsterdam, November, 17.30 hours.
Autumn dusk descended on Amsterdam with dark clouds covering the moisture-laden sky. Katla Sieltjes parked her dented Vespa motor scooter across the street from the narrow pedestrian tunnel that led to the inner court of the apartment complex. She sat and watched the setting sun tinge the overcast sky the colour of fresh blood before she strolled to the tunnel, a one-and-a-half-meter long canister strapped to her backpack.
At the end of the tunnel an iron gate barred entrance to the inner court. A large metal plate around the lock intended to prevent people from reaching through the bars and twisting the knob to gain entrance. That would make the gate formidable if they hadn’t installed a standard profile euro cylinder lock that offered little resistance to her lock-pick gun. She wasn’t too worried about scratches, as the lock had obviously been used by people too inebriated to insert their key at the first attempt. The hinges squeaked and she sprayed them with lubricant to silence the noise before she opened the gate and stepped inside. At the top of the frame was a retarding spring to close the gate, but Katla held the handle and twisted the knob as the gate clicked shut.
The inner court featured gardens with flagstone paths through lush vegetation. The broad paths went to the main staircases, with smaller paths leading off to individual ground floor backdoor entrances. The tunnel was illuminated, but the inner court gardens were mostly dark with occasional motion-activated street lanterns along the paths for safety and burglary-detection. Three evenly distributed staircases led up to the galerijen, sheltered walkways for each floor that ringed the gardens and provided access to the entrances of the apartments. Each door had a small square backlit panel featuring the apartment number.
Dressed from head-to-toe in anthracite GoreTex WindStopper gear, Katla veered away from the paths and made her way to the blind wall on the other side of the gardens, her night-vision goggles guiding her through the domesticated jungle. Her large flat overshoes kept visible tracks to a minimum.
From the corner of her eye she spotted a row of street lanterns winking on to illuminate the path, and she crouched in the bushes. An older man with a Rollator crept with a snail’s pace across the flagstone path in the direction of the gate. Katla took out a small mirror and used a dark green camouflage stick to obscure her pale skin while she waited until the man entered the tunnel. When the lanterns extinguished themselves she continued stalking through the undergrowth and halted at the bottom and looked up at the twenty-two meter high wall.
In most Amsterdam apartment buildings, a blind featureless wall would remain unadorned or covered with graffiti, but upscale apartment buildings like this one often decorated such eyesores with ‘art’. In this case the dark red bricks were festooned with an abstract tree with white branches that featured illuminated leaves. Even muted, the glowing leaves would throw her silhouette in sharp relief.
Moving carefully through the bushes Katla made her way to the south-west corner of the garden where she located a small electrical box. She hunkered down and unscrewed the waterproof lid that opened with a sucking sound that sounded way too loud in the dark garden.
Pushing her night-vision goggles on her forehead she used the thin beam of her flashlight to locate the fuse. Unscrewing the fuse two full turns did the trick and the leaves went dark. She re-attached the lid of the electrical box after spraying the rubber seal with silicone to make sure removing the lid wouldn’t make the same noise when she came back later to put the fuse back.
Now for the tricky bit.
Huddled down among the wet foliage Katla unscrewed the canister and soundlessly slipped out the contents: a bicycle pump, a spring-loaded grappling hook, thirty meters of coiled climbing rope, and her launcher.
