Choke Point (20 page)

“Thumb drives, hard drives, DVDs,” he says. He must be talking to her, though he doesn’t look in her direction. “Here!” He grabs the unconscious woman’s purse, upends it, dumping its contents and passes it to Grace. “Everything. Nothing left behind.” He starts ripping Ethernet cables at random, concerned there may be a cloud backup in place. She’s never considered him much of a techie, but Dulwich works methodically through the chilly room at a feverish pace, stripping it of any memory capability. They confiscate a dozen thumb drives, thirty DVDs and half that many freestanding external drives. Ninety seconds after they’ve entered, they’re out in the hallway.

Five meters from the corridor’s exit sign, the door beneath pops open. A black-suited security man with a shaved head and quick eyes emerges. He’s outwardly suspicious of these two strangers, but forges a smile as he and Dulwich pass shoulder to shoulder. Dulwich stops at the elevator and slaps the wall button.

The security man continues toward the office. Ten meters . . . five . . .

Dulwich waits for the elevator. Grace can’t believe this decision. It’s costing them precious time. Worse, she has no doubt the elevator can be controlled from the security office.

The chirp of the door to the security office rings out. The man depresses the lever.

Dulwich darts across the corridor to the stairs as the elevator dings its arrival, Grace close on his heels. The leg is far more difficult to maneuver while climbing. Had he wanted to take the elevator, or was it only a ruse?

“How many on duty?” he says, rounding the first landing toward the lobby level.

“Six,” she says.

“Correct.”

In a bank of ten walkie-talkie chargers, five radios are missing. The woman dispatcher who won’t leave the office accounts for the sixth employee.

“Four down,” Grace says, “and the one we just passed, leaves one. Possibly more depending on the condition of the first two.”

“Give me that!” He grabs the security woman’s purse from her. Stuffs various pockets with samples of its contents. Returns it to her. “We separate from here. Rendezvous at Wing Kee on Zeedijk. One hour. You take the lobby.”

“You’ve got the lobby,” she says stubbornly. The leg will slow him down. The lobby is the quickest way to the street. She pulls the door open for him, and snags the ID card from his hand, balling up its lanyard in her fist.

He’s about to object.

“One hour,” she says, then nudges him and closes the door behind him. She climbs to the mezzanine level, where the ballrooms are letting out. She mixes into the crowd and leaves with others ten minutes later, walking within an arm’s reach of the security man she’d passed in the basement who stands a sentry surveilling the crowd. His eyes go right past her. He’d locked in on the alpha dog.

For once, Grace doesn’t mind being an afterthought.

T
he Tassenmuseum Hendrikje protects them from prying eyes. Unlike the tourist-jammed Van Gogh, here is a small museum dedicated to bags and purses. It is visited only by women on this day, tourists speaking everything from German to Urdu. Knox and Sonia occupy a padded bench in front of the case of jeweled clutches.

The map forwarded to Knox’s iPhone by the Hong Kong office of Rutherford Risk shows dozens of small blue pins, each representing where Maja’s “father,” Mert Demir, remained in any one place for over five minutes. The pins are time-stamped and address-stamped and, if a business, listed by company name. What’s readily apparent, and what is the focus of the e-mail message accompanying the map, is that huge chunks of time are unaccounted for, sometimes hours at a time. Time spent in the knot shop, Knox assumes. Time the man’s phone has been turned off and/or its
SIM card removed.

“Where did you get this?” Sonia asks.

“Yeah, right!” Knox has slipped up in his enthusiasm to share the data. “And you’re going to reveal all your sources, I suppose?”

“I am a journalist.”

“And I’m not, because I make pictures instead of sentences?” He waits, but she isn’t going to let him off. “Okay.” He vamps. “I have a friend very high up at the BBC. He/she has contacts in agencies that end with numbers. That’s as much as you get.”

Her eyes soften from outright distrust to vague suspicion.

As he studies the map, several things jump out.

First, the repetition. Patterns are schooled out of undercover cops and covert agents. Walk a different path every day in the woods and the hunter doesn’t know where to lay his trap. Walk the same path, and you put your foot in it. Yet Demir—the name listed with the school and therefore most likely an alias—frequents a particular lunch spot, a smoke shop and a brown café close to downtown.

Second is the gaping hole left in the map by the
absence
of pins. The Hong Kong office has explained that the international carrier purges location data to storage in seventy-two-hour time spans. The data Knox is looking at represents the most recently stored seventy-two hours and includes a pin at the school, confirming its accuracy. Hong Kong is working on retrieving the archival information but is not hopeful.

“What’s interesting,” Knox tells Sonia, who’s tucked in close to him to view his phone’s screen, “is this area here. A whole section of the city he avoids.”

“Or a zone where he pulls his phone’s chip in order to keep himself off of the radar.” She blushes. “But you already knew that.”

“We have to consider it an area of interest.”

“It is not small.”

“No, it’s not.”

“We cannot go door-to-door hoping to find a knot shop.”

“No. But we can watch for young girls walking alone.”

“And get them killed? Like Maja?”

“They watch for people following the girls, not people in wait. It’s like setting a tail from in front—impossible to detect.”

“A photographer knows this, how?”

“I watch a lot of movies. Read a lot of books.” He’s too flip by a long shot.

She disapproves. “We are not putting the girls at risk.”

“We know they walk to the shop on their own. We spend a day or two, early in the morning, watching from a coffee shop window for a young girl alone. No harm, no foul.”

“The only way to see where they go is to follow them.”

“You know leapfrog? We play leapfrog. You take her. I take her. We pass her off to each other. Difficult if not impossible to pick up on.”

“No, John. No more girls go missing.”

“Then it’s Brower,” he says, hoping to change her mind. “It’s us, or it’s Brower. And he’ll take some convincing, I would imagine.”

“We get nothing out of Demir’s arrest.” She sounds frustrated and irritable, a different woman from that of the night before when the towel had come off. When the inhibitions had been dropped and the alcohol had inflamed another Sonia.

“We have two possible lines of pursuit: the girls, and Demir. If you’re ruling out the girls, then it’s down to Demir, and trust me, you and I are not going to handle a guy like that. If we do, it won’t be anything you can write about. It’s called persuasion by force. You wouldn’t like it.” He waits for her to school him. She does not. Instead, she seems to pull away. “Which leaves the police, because they’re good with people like him. They know exactly what to do, which buttons to push. If we feed him to Brower, Brower owes us. We can bargain up front what we get in return. Maybe you get in on Demir’s interrogation—”

“Never happen. Not the KLPD, not Brower.”

“You know him?”

“Of course I know him. I’m a reporter here. I know everyone!”

“You never said anything.”

“No.” She lets that settle, wanting to drive home a point. “Joshua Brower is a climber. If he is working with you it’s because it helps him, nothing more. He is not to be trusted.”

“He’ll owe me for this.” She huffs. “Maybe you observe the interview.”

A pair of American grandmothers draws too close.

Knox stands and leads Sonia away to a display of shoulder bags.

He says, “We don’t give him Demir without participation.” He keeps his voice low. “Once we get past twenty-four hours, all bets are off for our friend. We act now. The girls, or Brower . . .”

Her eyes fill with distrust once again. Dulwich’s warning hits home: it’s doomed to fall apart. Grace’s bugging Kreiger’s laptop or the attack on her computer had better deliver. They need results. He needs to connect with Grace.

He’s losing Sonia.

“I’ll make the call,” he says.

H
aving hacked Kreiger’s laptop and its built-in camera, Grace watches as her computer screen plays live images of the man at his desk. She turns the laptop to Knox.

On the screen, Gerhardt Kreiger leans back in his desk chair. His necktie is loosened, and he’s either smoking a hand-rolled cigarette or a joint. His left hand is held to his jaw, suggesting a mobile phone. He speaks in heavily accented English.

“It’s me . . . Ya . . . Two? This is good. Send them, please.” The “please” is an afterthought, a courtesy with zero conviction. “As to that other thing: yes, or no? It’s a big order. I thought you would want that. My customer is . . . anxious. No more dicking around, okay? Just give me a yes or no . . . Do you honestly think—? I’ve done business with him many times. He is for real . . . Just yes or no. A price and a date . . . I have no idea what you’re talking about. This is your problem, not mine . . . Okay, I’ll tell him. As to the two, I will get back to you when I have an offer. Send me the pictures.
Ciao.
”

Grace aims her laptop’s screen at herself, steering it away from Knox, whose head is spinning from what he’s heard. He chose the meeting place, a wine bar on Keizersgracht open well past midnight. The atmosphere inside is controlled drunkenness, a notch or two above that of a brown café.

“It may be possible for us—the office in Hong Kong—to get his phone records. If so, we will be able to identify the number he called. You get the point. We may have the dog by the tail. Short term it is a different story. I have been data-mining Kreiger’s laptop. One of the problems with machines like his is the large capacity of hard drives. Eighty gigs. Three hundred gigs. Could take months to read everything. So I focus on three components.” Grace sees Knox’s eyes glaze over and wonders if she’s causing his condition or if it’s the beer. She can see he’s not sleeping well, if at all. Wants to ask about the reporter, but she confines herself to her domain. She’s warming behind the effects of red wine.

“First,” she says, continuing, “e-mails, of course. Second, browser history. Finally, off-Web social media: Skype, iChat, SMS messaging. Each represents a specialized activity and offers unique information and insight.” She can’t stop herself from sounding like a technical manual. Knox rocks his beer side to side, watching the bubbles surface. “Eighteen minutes after this call, he receives an e-mail.” She angles the screen only slightly, not sure he cares to look. Senses he’d rather be told than participate. Wonders if his distraction is purely fatigue; or is the reporter involved? “Two attachments. Photos, just as he requested.” She displays the photos side by side.

Now Knox is looking. “He said to—”

“Send them. Yes. ‘Two,’ he said. Then, at the end, he said he would get back to him about
the two
after he has
an offer
.”

The screen shows the glum faces of two young girls. She waits for Knox to find his breath, knows what he’s going through. The girl on the right is Berna. The likeness isn’t perfect, whether the result of lighting or angle, or her swollen right cheek, but it’s Berna. Grace waits him out.

“Less than five minutes later . . .” She types and moves the cursor. “It’s a social networking photo site called
Shutter Shot
. He has it administered under password-only access.”

“He posted the girls’ photos onto the Internet.”

“Here’s his scrapbook.” She pages through several screens of one, two or three girls’ faces. Some are in their late teens, early twenties, but the majority are just children. The names are fake, given that Berna is captioned as Cindy.

“If there’s more of a connection,” Grace says, “I have not yet found it.”

“More? Berna’s alive! They’re posting her for sale. She’s alive!” he repeats.

“Bidding,” she says. “Your Mr. Kreiger is selling the girls, John.”

He turns away from her use of “your.”

“From what I can tell,” she says, “there are only seven people able to access this scrapbook. The ISPs for all seven are distributed among Thailand, Indonesia and Russia.”

Knox shakes his head. Over the past year she has seen Knox display any number of emotions—he’s not shy when it comes to expressing his feelings. But never like this. The closest was a minute before they entered Natuurhonig. He doesn’t speak what he’s thinking.

“Not yet,” she cautions. “Your Mr. Kreiger is useful to us.”

“Stop calling him mine.”

“Strangely enough, the phone call . . . his subsequent actions suggest he may not be directly involved in the knot shop. Just tangentially profiting by agenting their rugs and selling the castoffs. Berna is a liability. They mean to get her out of the city. We can be thankful they apparently have no plans to kill the girls.”

“They might be better off,” he says.

“No, John. You must not think so. As bad as this is, they can heal. They will heal.”

“You can’t know that. None of us know that.”

“Our focus,” she says strongly, “must remain on our objective. We will shut them down. I am not suggesting we overlook the more immediate concern for the well-being of the girls, but we must not allow ourselves to be distracted. One hand washes the other. We are close now.” She hears herself sound so clinical.

She has lost Knox. He’s retreated inside himself.

“Pressing Kreiger for information could backfire for a number of reasons.”

“Who said anything about pressing?”

“First, he may not know the identity of the person who called. Second, even should he know this person’s identity, he may be used as a firewall: by the time he gives us what we are after, the person is long gone. We do not know the structure of their defenses.”

Knox broods, ready to take this out on her.

“My suggestion would be to monitor Kreiger closely. I am privy to all of his communications. If we learn of more dealings with the girls, of course we act. Presently, we continue to close in on the knot shop. Ultimately, getting Kreiger will not contribute to the endgame. It may, in fact, prevent it.”

“Shut up. Spare me the ‘Human Trafficking for Dummies’ speech, would you? Jesus! Listen to you! Is there a human being anywhere inside there?” He glares. He seems ready to strike her.

It is as if he has pulled the batteries out of her. Grace the robot winds down. Her eyes flicker once and shut tightly. She fights back the need to cry; she will not give him that.

“I’m sorry. That was . . . I didn’t mean that. I’m upset.”

She manages to nod.

“Seriously. I didn’t mean—”

“The next step,” she chokes out, clearing her throat, “is to trace the e-mail containing the photos—”

“An underling,” Knox says. “You don’t actually believe this guy would be sending the photos himself?”

“The routing may help us. They could have been taken with a mobile phone, for instance.”

“So?”

“So that would do it. With Hong Kong’s help, that might do it. Might lead us back to the nest.”

“The older girls?” Knox asks.

“One would assume it has to do with what we saw at the coffee shop. Kreiger’s stable at Natuurhonig. Perhaps we have it wrong about Kreiger.”

“He’s not putting them up for adoption,” Knox says cynically.

“They are experienced labor. We don’t know absolutely that they are destined for the sex trade. Perhaps we have that wrong.”

“Yeah. When are you ever wrong?” He intends it as a compliment, but it stings her just the same. Runs his hand through his hair. Upends the beer and gulps.

She lays a hand on his forearm, having no idea why she’s doing so. “It is progress, John. Think of it as progress.”

He looks down at her hand and she removes it.

Knox isn’t ten meters out of the wine bar when he hears, “I’ll take my phone.”

It’s Sonia’s voice.

Grace stops and turns to glance back but is smart enough to keep walking.

Knox doesn’t move, his mind on damage control. He processes Sonia’s request. There are a dozen things bad about this. No good can come of it.

He pats the various internal pockets of the Scottevest realizing that she beat him fair and square—which makes it all the more humiliating. He finds her iPhone zippered into one of his many pockets.

“I underestimated you,” he says. He underestimated the slyness of the wily reporter. Was sucked in by their intimacy and partnership, something that clearly escaped her.

At the purse museum she must have slipped her phone into Knox’s jacket. She then used its lost-phone app to follow him to the wine bar. She has observed him with another woman, and she will know by the way they interacted it was not romantic, but professional. That has triggered a dozen alarms in her.

“Have you interviewed her already? Is that it?” he asks. The one way he can see clearly to get around this.

“My phone.” Her hand extends. She’s not taking the bait.

By doing so, she gives him his hold on her. He grabs the phone more tightly.

“That was clever of you.” He wags the phone.

Her hand begins to tremble. Nerves, or fatigue? “Please.”

“The woman—this woman—has replaced the murdered EU worker.” He pauses. “That’s why I thought you might have already interviewed her.”

Her eyes twitch—at least he has her thinking.

“She has been nosing around herself. Has heard of someone who’s come in trying to make competition for these guys. Have you heard about that?”

“I’m not going to fight you for it. You’re a pig.”

“Interview her yourself!”

She gives him her backside.

He calls out. “Here!” He extends the bait, hoping to lure her back.

Her disgust calves off her. She can’t look at him.

“What you’re thinking; it’s not right.”

“Shut it.” She reaches for the phone and he acquiesces. She slips it into her purse. “You could have told me the truth the first time.”

“I am
not
a cop.”

“You . . . and I . . .”

“Sonia—”

Her eyes glaze over. She purses her lips, shakes her head, discouraged. “Shit.”

“You’re at risk. I can protect you.”

“You probably arranged all that, didn’t you? Set me up so I needed you.”

“Not true.”

“I thought I’d seen it all.”

“You’re at risk!”

“You’re a liar.”

And she’s gone. Words dance on the tip of his tongue, words he must swallow. She turns back. “If I see you . . . at any distance, I will have you arrested—if that is even possible.”

He lets her go. As long as her phone is left on, Hong Kong can, and will, track her. He arranges it with a call to Dulwich, who, in a rare moment of compassion, doesn’t rub it in. It’s Dulwich’s lack of condemnation that leaves the taste of crow. But there are other tastes that linger as well, ones he savored and is sorry to lose. He wants her back. Wants the knot shop closed down, Berna found and peace restored. A week with Sonia in Berlin or Bruges.

She’ll go to the houseboat and clear out what few belongings she’d collected. Or maybe she’ll avoid it altogether. If she returns to her apartment, he’ll have to intervene, but he assumes she’ll have the sense to find another houseboat, or a friend’s place.

He is reminded that women bring a heavy heart, that he avoids investment because he can’t tolerate the interest. That the weight of Tommy can’t handle any more piling on. That he knows better. But Sonia’s gotten to him. He pays for it in anger and frustration and shame. A self-loathing and self-pity that wells up in him like a toxin. He is poisoned. God help the next person to cross him.

He finds a bar and rediscovers single-malt amnesia. Anesthetized, he works through his phone chips, checking for messages.

“We should meet.”
Kreiger’s heavily accented voice does not identify itself. Just the three words, but in an assertive tone that implies paragraphs. Knox knows too much because of Grace; he’s reading too much into it. Impatience, determination, suspicion. He cycles out that chip, replacing it with the original. How long has it been? Five minutes? Thirty? But as the next SIM card logs on to the Dutch mobile carrier, there’s already a message waiting.

The number is “
UNKNOWN
.”

He slurps another Scotch down. Scarfs some bar nuts and chases it all with a beer. It’s all so easy now—his throat doesn’t fight it. An elixir. It pulls an opaque curtain across the past few hours, adds a dash of humor where none was possible. It allows him to acknowledge the babe at the end of the bar who makes eyes every few minutes. Doesn’t know why he does it. Can’t figure out who’s doing this from inside him. He’s possessed. He can blame it on the Scotch. He can blame it on Sonia. But he knows better.

The babe isn’t interested, adding insult to injury. Or maybe she’s on the meter and figures him light in the wallet. No matter.

Can’t bring himself to retrieve the message. It’s either Dulwich or Sonia. Painful, no matter what. But Tommy and Daniel have this number as well as others. It can’t be ignored. He touches his shot glass, ordering number five. He’s a big boy, he tells himself; he can handle it. He and everyone else leaning over the bar barely moving.

“For what it is worth,”
says the recorded male voice,
“I did not expose you. Out of professional courtesy. She is a celebrity here. You must know that. It was not so difficult to make sense of it, Mr. Steele, but you might have—”