You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

Martijn tore the headlamp off his head. His eyes looked wild. “I really don’t want to harm you, Karin,” he said. “But if I don’t find these photos, I’m in trouble. I’m in a lot of trouble. I need these photographs he took because they help prove my innocence.”

Karin shook her head. She didn’t understand any of this. He didn’t make sense. “Maybe he meant it, like, metaphorically…” Karin started. “Like not really buried but, like, put away somewhere. Why would someone bury something in a forest?”

Martijn flashed his eyes back at her. “You’re pretty clever for a twelve-year-old, huh? Metaphorically…You think that hasn’t occurred to me? I have looked everywhere else where they might have been stashed. I have found all his old files, all his old computer files, all his digital photo archives…I have searched for two years. More…”

Karin felt her mind clicking little pieces into place. Is this why he always seemed so interested in everything that had to do with her dad? Is this why he was always asking her weird questions? Is this why he always asked her about her father when her mother wasn’t there? It wasn’t jealousy, she thought. It was like something out of a murder mystery…Maybe she had to start thinking faster, to start thinking like a murder-mystery writer. Or like a detective. Like Miss Marple in those Agatha Christie books. Like Nancy Drew in the series her mom gave her. Like Harriet the Spy.

“If you tell me,” she started, “maybe if you tell me exactly what happened and what he took from you and why he had these photographs, I could help you. It was a long time ago that we were here, but maybe if you tell me what it’s about, I could start to remember. It could jog my memory. I could help you find them and protect yourself.”

He looked at her in an odd way, obviously not sure if she was trying to trick him. He glanced down and then back at her, as if deciding that it was better to try this approach than not to.

“I wasn’t always working as an accountant,” he started to explain. “Before I did that, I had another job. I was in foreign affairs. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We do current events in school. I read the newspapers.”

“I know,” said Martijn. “I know you do.”

“So, what…Does that mean you were also working in Syria, like my dad?”

“Not there, no. I didn’t go there, but I worked for the government department that deals with things in that part of the world,” he said. “I was involved with the government’s…operations.”

Karin remained silent. She knew that if she didn’t talk, he would probably talk more. Maybe he would somehow tell her something that would allow her to figure out what to do. In the meantime, whenever he looked away from her, she tried to work on the knots behind her back.

“The Dutch are part of an international coalition that wants the Syrian government out of power,” he said. “The government of President Assad.”

“I know a lot about Syria,” Karin said. “I’ve read a lot about it since my dad died.”

“Well, then you know that it is a bad regime, killing its own citizens,” he said. “The Dutch originally had the idea that by supporting rebel groups, antigovernment organizations fighting the regime, we could help take them down.”

“Yes, I know that part.”

“One of the groups our government was supporting got away from us, you could say. They weren’t clean. They turned on us. This group turned out to be Salafist, which means they were anti-imperialists, which means…which means they were jihadists—do you know what that means?”

“I know what ‘jihadist’ means,” Karin said. “All the papers said the jihadists killed my father. I know what it means.” Karin thought, basically, that jihadists wanted all Europeans to be dead, and that’s why when they saw her father they shot him. Just like that. They never asked what he was doing there or if he was helping anyone or doing anything positive for their country; they just didn’t like who he was, what he represented.

“Yes, well, that was them,” said Martijn. “That’s the simplest way to put it.”

Karin thought about this, what she knew from the papers and what she’d heard from her mother, and what she’d learned in school.

“What do you mean? The Dutch government doesn’t fund jihadists,” she said.

“It did,” he said. “It did back then, without knowing it. The idea was to support anti-Assad rebel groups to try to diminish his power, and we didn’t know that they were jihadists at the time.”

“Is that who shot my dad? Is that what you’re saying? Someone paid by the Dutch government?”

He started pacing around in a circle. He was trying to explain himself. “It wasn’t clear from the beginning that they were jihadists, but we heard that might be a possibility. My job at the time was to do an investigation, to find out what was going on there. That was why I hired your father. We wanted someone who already knew the country, who had ways of getting around, who understood the politics. Your dad had spent a lot of time there, and because he was a photojournalist, he had access, he could do things other people couldn’t do.”

Karin wriggled against the tree, trying to maneuver so she could at least move a little. Her hands hurt so much. She tried to feel the tree to see if it had any sharper pieces of bark that she could use to latch on to the rope and loosen it.

“What does that mean, you hired my dad? My dad worked for newspapers and magazines. He didn’t work for the government.”

“Mostly he worked for newspapers and magazines,” said Martijn. “But he also worked for me. He worked for the government, doing some work for us.”

Karin felt the weirdest thing behind her. It was sharp, but not the way pieces of bark are sharp. More like