Commander-in-Chief

13

Oud-Zuid is the most desirable quarter in Amsterdam. It’s centrally located, expensive, cosmopolitan, and beautiful.

Sibling assassins Braam and Martina Jaeger lived here in the neighborhood, residing together in a comfortable and ultramodern condo that took up the top two floors of a brownstone on leafy Frans van Mierisstraat.

They’d been home from Venezuela for just days; they’d spent them relaxing mostly, enjoying the neighborhood cafés along with late nights in clubs. Last night brother and sister had gone to a trendy nightclub and while Braam had sat on a VIP sofa lording over the scene, his sister had danced in the hot, thick space till four in the morning.

It was just ten a.m. now, and Braam had made breakfast for them both. Martina had just finished picking through her omelet, and now she took her coffee to the table in the middle of the living room and she opened her laptop. She logged on to Tor, software that enabled “onion routing.” Tor was an acronym for The Onion Router — and it offered the user anonymous communication by directing Internet traffic through some six thousand relays around the world, hiding both the sender and the receiver of a message.

She opened an e-mail sent late the night before, and reading through it saw she and her brother had been given their next assignment. The uniqueness of the situation was not lost on her, that here, sitting in a bathrobe and holding a mug of steaming coffee, her mind heavy from the booze and the noise and the pills she’d taken the night before, she could receive and accept a contract to kill a human being somewhere in the world, on the other side of the planet, even.

Braam sat across the room, himself in a robe, with a copy of De Telegraaf open on his lap.

She called out to him. “Braam. Kom hier.”

He climbed from the sofa and stepped behind her at a desk in the middle of the large open living area, nestled his chin on her shoulder, and they read their instructions together silently.

When he finished, Braam said, “Amerika. Mooi.” Nice.

She smiled herself. “Beverly Hills.” And then, in a fake American accent, she added, “Darling, this will be so much fun.”

They both stood up and went to start packing, because the timeline on this operation was short.

The conversion of the Jaegers from normal middle-class kids from Utrecht to international contract killers employed by Russian intelligence began quite innocently when their father, a colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army, convinced his video game — loving ten-year-old son to come with him on a hunting trip. Braam took to the shooting and the stalking naturally and with ease, but it would have been no great love of his had he not seen the pride in his father’s eyes.

When he did see it, he realized, quite simply, that his father’s love was conditional on his ability to hunt game.

Soon enough Braam began to enjoy the competition of shooting, so much so that he became a well-known teenage biathlete. After school he joined the Dutch military instead of going to college, for the simple reason that the military had a program that would allow soldiers to compete in national and international sporting competitions. He soon became an infantry sergeant, with plans to leave the military after four years to go on the professional biathlon circuit.

Then came Holland’s entrance into the Afghanistan war.

Braam found himself engaging in, and riveted by, the combat. By the end of his first day in a “real” war he had no further interest in wearing Lycra with a number on his back and shooting paper targets. No, the only real competition in a man’s life, as he saw it, was the two-way gunfire of battle.

He left the Dutch military after four years to take a job as a civilian military security contractor in Iraq. He found himself under fire with regularity, and life was good.

Martina was beautiful and intelligent, and she worshipped her brother and had followed in his footsteps since she was old enough to walk. She hunted and shot with her father, and she competed in the biathlon and other shooting sports. At eighteen she became world ranked in the ten-meter air rifle and ten-meter air pistol categories, and she missed out going to the Olympics at age twenty only because of a neck injury she picked up while training for a European championship judo competition.

In her early twenties she took up mountain climbing with all the gusto she put into everything she enjoyed, and by age twenty-six she had summited seven of the fourteen 8,000-plus-meter mountains of the world.

Her try for an eighth ended in disaster, however, when an avalanche on K2 killed four in her party and left her with broken bones.

While Braam was engaging insurgents in Iraq, Martina convalesced at home, bitter that all her competitive endeavors had ended in failure.

Eight years earlier, when they were still in their late twenties, Martina was working in a sporting-goods store in Amsterdam when Braam called and asked her to drop everything and meet him in Mali, Africa. She was surprised to learn he was no longer in the Middle East, but he explained he’d taken a job doing security investigations in the Third World.

As soon as she arrived she realized her brother had not asked her to Africa for a family reunion. Instead, he was working on a low-profile assignment and he needed a cover story — more specifically, he needed someone to play the role of his wife.

The cover worked, the operation was a success, and Martina Jaeger knew she would never work in some mundane profession again.

Braam began to use his sister on several more jobs, he found himself working deeper in the shadowy world of private security, and much of his work involved deep-cover operations.

It was Martina Jaeger who first suggested they offer their services as contract killers. They found work immediately, and they killed their first target together in Namibia. He was a white South African reporter who’d run afoul of local organized crime. Their white skin and their cover as urbane tourists allowed them to slip into bars and restaurants where black gangsters would have brought security officers running, and their skill and calm under fire helped them see the difficult assignment through.

After a few more hits in Africa, Martina decided they would branch out, so she contacted a Saint Petersburg bratva, a Mafia-like criminal organization.

Neither Martina nor Braam cared for politics. They worked for money and the thrill of it all, and the Saint Petersburg syndicate gave them two years’ worth of work around Europe. After this, they found themselves coopted into FSB operations, because of the close nexus between Russian business and Russian government interests.

They didn’t care. They were paid well and on schedule, and the FSB had all the work Braam and Martina could handle.

The Jaegers absolutely loved their work.

Killing, they agreed, was the best adventure sport on earth.