Choke Point (18 page)

There’s a text from Dulwich.

meeting wrapping up. unable to hold him.

It’s time-stamped seven minutes earlier.

Now inside the office with the deadbolt locked, she texts:

how long?

Doesn’t wait for a response. Her bag is open. Game on.

on his way there now

She slips into the office chair. The key tracking software will provide them with passwords which will allow her to attack Kreiger’s laptop. She opens a port on the router to skirt virus security software. She video-bugs the top bookshelf where dust on the volumes tells her they’re rarely touched. She wants the audio closer to home. She’ll take over the laptop’s microphone and video once she’s inside.

She packs up her wires and shoulders the purse. Turning off the lights, she crosses to open the blinds. There are windows on opposing walls.

She twists the blinds open. A man on the sidewalk below jerks his head in her direction.

It’s Kreiger. He’s caught the movement in his own office windows. Whether instinctively or by chance, it hardly matters.

Without hesitation, Grace waves down to him.

He stops, head still aimed at her.

She waves again.

Kreiger waves back. He then marches furiously toward the front door.

—

“
Y
OU ARE?”

Grace displays herself resplendently on his love seat. Her best Mata Hari pose, borrowed from an Ingrid Bergman film she’d seen while getting her master’s in criminology at USC.

“A friend of John Knox,” she answers in English.

Kreiger waves off a bouncer and enters. He places down a briefcase that catches her eye.

“I lock my office,” he says, not having moved. “It’s marked private in case you can’t read. How, in the name of God, did you get in here?”

“I am a friend of John Knox,” she says.

She wins a laugh from Kreiger. “Yes, well, that
would
explain it.”

“I . . . I was interested in company . . . female company . . . and Knox recommended your establishment. He made me promise I would say hello.” As she sits up she makes sure to let a good deal of leg show. He must be immune to such sights, but she tries anyway. The robe comes open far more than she would have wished, but she makes no attempt to close it. Let him ogle her. To her surprise, he does just that. Men.

“I would expect nothing less,” he says. “Drink?”

“Vodka rocks, please.”

She regrets having placed the video camera on the bookshelf. Of everything she’s done, the video camera is the most likely to be detected if he gets suspicious. And how can he not? All the charm in the world cannot nullify breaking and entering.

He pours them both drinks, his back to her.

“He sent you to spy on me,” Kreiger says, paralyzing Grace’s diaphragm.

“I was to get the wholesale cost of the rugs, if I could,” she says without hesitation. “I won’t tell, if you won’t?”

“Identify the wholesaler,” he speculates. “Eliminate the middleman. Knox is not stupid. I might have done the same.”

“He is annoyed at the time it is taking,” she says.

“Yes. I’ve just spoken to his money man.” A wave of realization spreads over Kreiger’s face. “Oh, very good.” He hands her the drink and pulls out a chair to face her. He shows no further interest in her body; she pulls the robe shut and ties it tightly. “He’s a clever one, our Mr. Knox.” He lifts his glass and they toast. “Now . . . what to do with you?”

She peers over the rim of the glass, attempting to look unaffected by his comment.

“I find it most instructive to send a message when such advantage is taken. You are bold to have stayed after I spotted you up here. Very bold indeed.”

“I don’t get paid unless I can deliver actionable intelligence. The laptop is password protected. The desk drawers locked.”

“Hold your purse by the bottom two corners, turn it over and shake out its contents, please.”

“Is that necessary?” she pleads. She has nothing with which to bargain. Sex is a nonstarter in a place like this. She can’t buy him. This is the part of fieldwork she understands requires experience, and she has none. He sits between her and the door. To assault him would be easy enough, but would put Knox in a terrible bind. She’s already done enough damage.

“Please.”

She inverts her bag. Her knot of wires and cameras tumble out.

“How many of those were installed?” he inquires.

“One.”

“Do you assume me so naïve?”

“If I’d had more time . . .”

“Remove it, please.”

She uses a chair to access the top of the bookshelf and retrieve the video camera. The lens is smaller than a lentil. It attaches by a nearly nonexistent wire to a box half the size of a sugar cube. He has been staring at her legs as she climbed; he asks for it, and she hands it to him.

“Amazing,” he says.

To her surprise, he returns it to her and tells her to pack the bag.

In doing so, she manages to check the time. She’s been away from the room for thirty minutes. She has failed on all fronts.

“Tell Knox these things take time. His is a very large order. The manufacturer must carefully measure production before committing. There’s no saying he’ll go for the deal.”

She’s unable to tell if he’s talking about himself in third person.

“You should keep in mind—
yourself
—as well as pass along to Knox, that this operation . . . these rug merchants . . . Let’s just say they are acutely aware of, shall we say, the world opinion of their ethics. They are not the type to tolerate outside interference. You would have been raped and your throat slit by now if this had been their offices. I would not blindly follow everywhere Knox leads you, young lady. He would be quick to cut bait in a case like yours. You don’t see him knocking down the door to rescue you, do you?”

“If I should scream,” she says, “he will be through that door before you hear me.” She smiles and stands.

Kreiger stands as well, blocking her.

“We can try it, if you like,” she proposes.

A sheen forms on his face.

She marvels at the man’s instant reaction to Knox. She hoists the purse to her shoulder. Tightens the robe’s belt once again. Realizes she knows Knox in ways others do not.

“I’ll have the office swept.” He makes it a threat.

She looks down to the carpet. “It could use it.”

She provokes laughter from him.

“I could use a woman like you,” he says, smiling. “Here at Natuurhonig.”

“Get in line,” says Grace.

—

F
ROM THE
OBSERVATION ROOM,
Grace sees Veronique’s wrists tied with bows to the bed frame, her lean, blue body stretched out elegantly on the bed. Knox has blindfolded her. She is smiling while he, in briefs, runs a feather across her.

Grace feels a spike of sentimentality. It’s “us against the world” for her and Knox. She’s beginning to care for him, despite herself. Not romantically, not exactly; she’s unsure what it is she feels. She shakes off the feeling, but it’s sticky and stubborn.

She recognizes the scar on him she helped to mend. One among several. Recalls the story of Knox dragging Dulwich from the burning wreck of a transport, wondering if any of the scars are traceable to that incident. Or the streets of Detroit? Wonders at those unseen, the kind she carries. She spends a few seconds longer here than necessary, causing her to question herself. She is not given to such nostalgia. What’s happening to her? she wonders. She has loved before—loves, still—but this is not that. Is it? Not close. Then what?

An adrenaline hangover from Kreiger’s office, she convinces herself. Blood chemistry, nothing more. A narrow escape. She pulls herself together, realizing she will likely have to dress in front of him.

She opens the door.

“Ah . . .” Veronique says, smiling. She hears Knox’s belt buckle as he begins dressing. “What is this, please?” She unties herself, removes the blindfold.

“I am afraid I am not feeling well,” Grace says, eyes to the floor.

“I did not please you?” the woman says to Knox.

“We have to go,” Knox says. He reaches for his wallet.

“Not again,” Grace says to him. “Please . . .” They both know she’s harking back to Chongming.

He places a great many euros onto the bed. Many times what they owe. He keeps enough for cab fare.

“Find other work,” he tells the woman.

Veronique stares at the pile of cash. Looks between Knox and Grace.

“It is not you,” Grace says, nearly dressed. Struggling into the tight skirt. “He has this . . . it is an emotional problem. We thought tonight . . . that is, we had hoped . . .”

Knox has his hand on the doorknob, waiting impatiently. He holds the door for Grace, takes a fleeting look back at the naked woman stretched out on the bed and closes the door.

—

A
VOIDING PUBLIC
TRANSPORT,
they pause to overlook the black, still waters of a canal. Pale light seeps from the cabin of a boat tied a hundred meters downstream. A tension holds between them.

“He caught me,” she says, “inside his office.”

Knox remains focused on the mirrored water.

She recounts the events down to the exchange of dialogue.

“And we come away empty-handed?”

“No, not at all. He will have the office swept and discover no more bugs. He will have his computer scanned but will find nothing.”

“Is that possible?”

She sighs.

“I’m sorry.”

“We will have video and audio as long as the laptop is online. We will monitor his keystrokes, allowing us to obtain his passwords as well as his correspondence. We are inside his head now, John. His cell phone number will be listed among his contact information.”

“I have his number.”

“There may be others. How many chips do you carry? It is possible he will list bank accounts, credit cards and other financial information in his contacts. Many do. We will have his browser history.”

Knox whistles. The sound carries out across the water. “Less traffic out here,” he says.

“Yes. It is quite peaceful.”

“You must be wondering what I saw.”

“You believe me so childish?”

“Then you don’t care?”

“Do I look fourteen? I need to get started. We go separately from here.”

They walk to the end of the bridge. Grace turns left, Knox right. As she reaches the curb, she stops and turns. He’s standing across the intersection looking back at her.

“You do
not
look fourteen.”

K
nox has relocated them to another houseboat, this time on Keizersgracht not far from the Amsterdam Hermitage. It’s the same boat by the same manufacturer, the same layout as the first, but Sonia has been installed into the waterside cabin because Keizersgracht has a fair amount of foot traffic; Knox is taking no chances of an inadvertent sighting.

Perched on the berth, her laptop on her lap, Sonia clings to a glass of red wine, half full. It’s a familiar sight; she hasn’t moved from this pose in days. But it’s not the same woman; one look tells him as much. Tells him more than he wants to know. The wine bottle stands close to empty.

“What is it?” He speaks at a low volume. Closes the thin wooden door gently behind him. Latches its brass latch.

Sonia plays music from her laptop to cover their voices. Contemporary Top 20 pop. She’s full of surprises. Knox sits by her ankles.

Her eyes wander to his, then roll into the back of her head and her pupils reappear. She stares him down with angry eyes. He looks back at the near-empty wine bottle. Its glass refracts and displaces the camera tucked behind it. His Nikon.

“Who are you?” she says accusingly.

“You’ve had too much to drink.”

“Who—?”

“You know who I am!”

She spins the laptop to face him. “I needed to caption whatever photo I was to include with my article.”

On the screen is a shot of a tall woman in a scarf entering an eatery.

“The camera keeps information on all the pictures,” she says. “Date and time. So I ask again: who are you?”

“I followed you. It’s true. But for your security. To look after you because clearly you were not looking after yourself.”

“And this Chief Inspector Brower?”

Knox assumed he’d gotten away with that misspeak at the school. Her bringing it up now is a surprise. He’s underestimated her.

“Brower?” He won’t lie to her. Can’t tell the truth.

“He’s your boss, isn’t he? You’re police.”

Knox grins. Wishes he hadn’t. “No.”

“Get out!”

“Listen to me. I was following you. Yes. To protect you. After your meeting, I tailed that woman,” he says, pointing to the laptop, “into a park where
she
met with a man. As it turned out, a cop.

“Brower’s men caught me spying on their inspector and brought me in,” he continues. “I had to talk my way out. It wasn’t easy.” The truth. “Brower wants the knot shop shut down as much as we do. Brower will work with us. I thought if the head of school called into the police’s main number, we might lose our hold on this, lose control of it. So I recommended Brower.”

“We never had control in the first place.”

“We have this guy who claimed to be Maja’s father. We’re ahead of everyone on this.”

“Not we,” she argues. “I . . . do . . . not . . . trust . . . you.”

“Don’t do this.” Dulwich’s warning echoes in his head. He adds, “Please.”

She answers with hurt eyes. There’s a boat motoring on a nearby canal, a barking dog several blocks away.

“Who is that woman?” he asks.

Her words slur. “I have very good instincts when it comes to people. My work depends on it. I was wrong about you. I know it in here,” she says. “I don’t know who you are, but I know when I’ve been lied to.”

“Who . . . is . . . she?”

“An activist. All right with you? Google her, if you want. Christina Jorgensen. Swedish. Has been fighting child exploitation, worldwide, for nearly a decade. She read my article, okay? If she meets with the police, what do I care? The woman should be sainted!”

He takes this in. Christina Jorgensen could have been watching the market stall where Grace got the tip that led to her assault. Jorgensen followed and saved Grace when the time came.

“We have a phone number for the man claiming to be Maja’s father at the school,” he says. “We—both of us!—have people who can help us with that. This impostor is one of
them
. Has to be. You understand how close we are? The first twenty-fours hours are critical.”

“You even talk like a cop.”

“I am
not
a cop.”

“A photographer?”

He answers only with his eyes.

“An agent?” Horrified.

“We can finish this. We can close this.”

“We? I don’t think so. You followed her, didn’t you?”

“Who?”

“Why bother asking? You’ll just lie to me anyway.” She revisits the wine bottle, sloshing more into her empty glass.

“Sonia . . . listen to me—”

“Shut up!” She fumbles with her phone and places it past the laptop face up. She plays a voice mail for him.

It takes Knox a moment to recognize the hysterical voice as that of Maja’s mother.
“What have you done? I told you not to follow her. I told you to leave us al—”

“I called back. I recognized the caller ID and I called back.” She absorbs a long draught from the glass. “She never came home. Because . . . you followed her. Who the hell do you think—?”

“No! I did not follow her!”

“Just like you did not follow me?” The image on the laptop glares back at him.

“A friend’s house. School again.”

“No. Yasmina has checked everywhere. Gone. She has no idea where to start looking. She can’t contact the police, and she blames us.”

“We’ll get Maja back. But we have no time for this.” He motions between them. His mind is cluttered with prepared dialogue as he rehearses what comes next. He can drop her into his world but fears the shock would push her even further away. He can abandon her, accepting that he used her as best he could. Rutherford Risk is already running the impostor-father’s phone number. It’s the best lead they’ve had. All things come to a useful conclusion, including the Sonia Pangarkars. He hates that Dulwich could have foreseen this.

“You followed her and don’t have the balls to admit it.”

In a moment of clarity, he sees through the alcohol, through her.

“You blame yourself, not me,” he says.

“To hell with you.”

He can’t quite put his finger on it, but knows he’s scored a hit. “For writing the original story. For getting these girls into all this trouble.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“A photograph?” he says, thinking aloud now. “Captioning a photograph? That would be at the request of your editor.”

“You little shit.”

“You filed the story on Maja.”

Her eyes burn into him.

“You filed, and then Maja went missing.”

“No connection. Coincidence.”

He waits her out, both impatience and intolerance gnawing at him. He enjoys getting drunk as much as the next guy, but has little time for drunks. He’s never claimed to be fair. He eases the glass from her and sets it down.

“I filed the story around four this afternoon. It cannot possibly be the cause.” She sounds resolved to the likelihood she’s the cause of it all.

“You sent in one of my pictures without asking me?” It’s important to remain in character, but he’s losing John Steele to Knox’s temper. How much of this conversation will she even remember?

She seems to have just noticed Knox. “The grandmother. The cigarette by the window.”

“Which one? Which shot?”

“What do you mean, which one?” she asks.

“Are you insane?
”
It escapes before he can prevent it.

“There’s nothing in that shot to give Maja away. It’s a silhouette.”

“There’s
everything
to give Maja away,” he counters. “It took three tries to get the f-stop right to account for the depth of field. In the first two shots, the background was
in focus
—a store sign across the street.”

Her skin tone turns a sickly yellow. He reaches for the trash bin, but it’s too late. She vomits onto the floor. Knocks the laptop and phone into the bedding and slips off the berth, heaving a second time, this time on target.

He catches her as she’s heading for the floor. “You didn’t know.”

“Oh, God . . .”

He moves her out to the head. The proprietor’s in the galley and tries to pretend he doesn’t see them, hasn’t heard them arguing.

Knox helps her out of the stained top. Pulls the bottoms down and places the clothes into the sink as he turns on the water and steps out of the room. The showerhead is in one corner, a drain in the wood floor.

Knox approaches the proprietor and asks for cleaning supplies, and after some discussion accepts the offer for the proprietor’s wife to clean the forward berth. When Sonia comes out wrapped in a towel, Knox directs her into his room. He’s collected her laptop and phone as well as his camera. Hasn’t left anything for his hostess to come across.

A more sober Sonia sits on his berth, barely covered by the small towel. He offers her a T-shirt he’s been sleeping in. She declines.

“She never came home. Can you imagine?” She whispers, but Knox does not like ears so close. He’s already planning to move them again.

He puts a finger to his lips and they wait out the cleaning next door. It takes ten minutes. Feels longer.

The proprietor knocks. John answers the door and thanks him.

“Coffee,” he says. “No milk. One sugar.”

Sonia looks out from a curtain of wet, stringy hair over the rising mist from a mug of coffee. The mug is from Starbucks in Oslo. As she tilts it, its bottom reads:
MADE IN CHINA
. “I’m sorry for what I said, John.”

It hurts more than her accusations. “Listen—” The truth dances on the tip of his tongue.

She samples the coffee. “This tastes horrible.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I have to see her. Yasmina.”

“Never going to happen.”

“We must get her back.”

“Yes.”

“You are distracted.”

“Thinking,” Knox says. “A lot to think about.”

Her hand is occupied with the hot coffee, so when the towel falls open she has only the one hand to try to deal with it. Knox comes to her aid, reaching for the mug, but Sonia reconsiders and opens the towel fully. Finally, she passes Knox the mug as she lies back on the berth.

Knox locks the door.

—

L
ATER, AFTER
S
ONIA HAS RETURNED
to her cabin, Knox pulls out his phone—his version of smoking a cigarette.

“It’s John,” he tells the man who answers.
Daniel,
he thinks. But Daniel may have been the nurse before this. “John Knox.”

“Sure. Hello. How can I help you?”

“Just wondering how Tommy’s doing?”

“It’s a rough patch, Mr. Knox. It’ll pass.”

“Physical, mental, or both?”

“Let’s not limit him,” Daniel says. When Knox fails to respond, he says, “The new medication is causing insomnia. That’s triggering some of the old behavior. I have a call into his doc.”

“Which doc?”

“Foreman.”

“Okay. Good. But he’s okay?” Tommy’s progress toward at least the guise of independence has been promising—even encouraging; any reversion to earlier behavior is a blow. The suggestion that Tommy hasn’t progressed, his meds have simply improved, leaves Knox desperate.

“He’s okay.”

He’s never loved Daniel—if that’s even his name—but Tommy likes him. Daniel treats Tommy as an adult, which is more than can be said for the nurse that came before him.

“Can I call him?”

“A visit wouldn’t hurt.”

He remembers now why he doesn’t like the man.

“Thanks for everything you’re doing.” Knox’s version of a white flag.

“It’s my job, Mr. Knox.”

Knox ends the call, tempted to smash the phone.

Tommy’s number rings right to the edge of when the live answering service will pick up. Tommy struggles with mechanics. The live service is a godsend. But at last he picks up and Knox says hello.

“Johnny?” Sometimes his brother can sound especially young.

“Hey.”

“How ya doing? You sound kinda out of breath.” Tommy finds this amusing.

“Out for a walk,” Knox lies. He doesn’t like the sound of this already. Blames himself for so few visits.

“Where?”

Tommy knows better than to ask.

“How about you? How goes?”

“Darkest hour is just before the dawn.”

“Is it dark or dawn?” Knox asks, cringing. He knows this pattern: random quotations, inability to find words of his own.

Tommy takes the question literally, as always. “It’s just past three in the afternoon.”

The time. That’s progress, though Knox can’t mention it.

“And how’s business?”

“Dollars to donuts. Bob’s your uncle.”

“Tommy . . . Just hang on a second . . .”

“Just desserts. Rack your brains.”

“Stay with me here, Tom.”

“Stand and deliver. Silence is golden, duct tape is silver.”

Knox plays along. “Keep the ball rolling.”

A sudden silence.

“All’s well that ends well.” Knox checks the connection. As he does, a call comes in from Dulwich. Hanging up will crush Tommy.

“Tom, I gotta run.”

“Run amok. Run of the mill. Run out of steam.”

“It’s nice hearing your voice.”

“You, too. YouTube,” Tommy says.

“We’ll talk soon.”

“I miss you.”

“And I, you.”

“You said you were coming.”