Free Little Men - The E Book by Ronnie Yax Page B

containers and bottles with white labels stuck to them, depicting the name of the contents, usually something ridiculously long and unpronounceable.
    He walked past the enormous wall-chart representing chemical compositions and switched off the three sets of strip lights. He returned to his office, locking the door behind him.
     
    Sean made the Channel crossing uneventfully. He caught the first ferry of the day from Dover to Calais. As Tony had predicted, there were plenty of football fans aboard, travelling via France to Belgium for the match. Sean avoided talking to anyone and did his best not get noticed, burying his head in a newspaper for the entire journey.
    His plan was to drive through France and Belgium and arrive in Holland in the early evening to make the pickup. He would then drive back overnight to catch another early morning ferry back to the UK. It was a tight schedule, with little margin for error. Sean wanted to spend as little time as possible on the job, so it was essential to constantly keep moving.
    Had he been a refined man he would have appreciated the beautiful scenery as he travelled along the coast road through France. Every so often the rugged wilderness was interrupted by an ancient castle or walled ruin, designed centuries ago to prevent invasion from foreign aggressors. The windswept fields looked incredibly peaceful, giving no indication that they ’ d seen so much unimaginably gruesome bloodshed over the centuries.
    Sean kept to the main highways, passing the Belgian cities of Brugge and Gent until he reached the ring road around Antwerp and its skyline dominated by the Gothic cathedral spire. He was faced with an array of routes to the Dutch border, but he chose the scenic E19 autosnelweg, which took him past the town of Zundert, the historic birthplace of Vincent Van Gogh.
He continued resolutely across the flat country, passing lush forests and fields of tulips in bud, the first signs that winter was finally drawing to a close.
    Sean tensed slightly when his progress slowed as he negotiated the traffic heading into the city of Arnhem, then relaxed as the cluster of vehicles gave way to open road again and he glided north through the beautiful Hoge Veluwe National Park.
    Sean checked the map. He was still about a hundred miles from the city of Groningen, near to which he was due to meet Henrik at his factory. The sun was close to setting and night was drawing in. Sean looked at his watch, the rendezvous was scheduled for just over an hour. He would need to put his foot down. He would be late, but not desperately. Henrik would surely make allowances for that sort of thing, he reasoned. Eventually he turned off the main road and into the minute town of Noordenveld. It was around 6 p.m. and people were on their way home from work, mainly commuting from the cities of Assen, Emmen and Groningen.
    The largely rural area was home to a few small factories and warehouses, one of which Sean was looking for as he tentatively drove his old Citroën Berlingo around the open streets.
    Sean often struggled with written instructions when they were in English. Now he was looking at a piece of paper with the name of a street and town in Dutch: ‘232 Esweg , Noordenveld, Dynamisch Internationaal. Henrik Van Liessen. Meet at rear. Tel: +31 26 468 4442’ Sean found the town easily, but the street and the factory were proving to be far more problematic. Driving around the dimly-lit foreign roads very slowly was doing nothing for Sean ’ s paranoia. He was tired and growing frustrated. It seemed every vehicle he passed was the police and he felt sure he was arousing suspicion in a van marked with English plates crawling slowly through an industrial area of Holland.
    Eventually, Sean turned into a street with a name corresponding to what he had written down. After several more minutes driving he finally saw the sign he was looking for, identifying a building as belonging to ‘ Dynamisch Internationaal ’