Josef Gunther – “Business deal gone bad”
The client was a soft-spoken Austrian named Klaus Reiter who owned a mid-sized logistics firm. “We had a handshake deal with a Rotterdam partner. Container of precision parts. Payment cleared. Container arrived empty. Partner has stopped answering calls.”
Josef took the job for the usual fee plus expenses, no questions about why Reiter preferred not to involve the police yet.
He flew to Rotterdam the next morning. The warehouse on the Maasvlakte was legitimate on paper. The security footage from the night the container was unloaded had a twelve-minute gap exactly when the seals were broken. The partner, a Dutchman named Van Dijk, had checked into a hotel near Schiphol under his own name and then simply walked out the back entrance with a small duffel.
Josef tracked the duffel through three train stations and one ferry booking to Hamburg. Van Dijk was not running from Reiter. He was running from the people Reiter had borrowed the original capital from—quiet men who preferred their investments returned with interest or not at all.
In a rain-slicked parking garage near the Alster, Josef found Van Dijk loading the precision parts into a different truck. The parts were real. The empty container had been a distraction. Van Dijk had simply decided the original deal was no longer profitable enough once the silent partners started asking for their cut early.
Josef did not draw a weapon. He simply stood in the open doorway of the garage and said, in the flat German that still carried a trace of the East, “Reiter wants his goods. The others want their money. You can give both, or neither. Choose quickly.”
Van Dijk chose both. The parts returned to Rotterdam. The money moved through the proper accounts. Josef collected his fee in cash, counted it once, and took the night train back to Berlin. He never asked Reiter what the silent partners would have done if the goods had stayed missing. Some questions, he had learned long ago, were better left unasked.
