Choke Point (25 page)

“You’re talking shit. When was the last time you slept?”

“What day is this?”

Dulwich can’t summon it. He starts laughing from the gut, a contagious laugh that Knox tries hard to escape, but can’t.

“I’m stopping at the next light. You’re out of here,” Dulwich says. “Wheels up at sixteen hundred. You want your paycheck, you’re on that plane.”

“I thought you’re coming back with a different car.”

“In case I don’t.”

“Screw that.” Knox knows it’s impossible, but he hears the dashboard’s digital clock ticking. He needs sleep. And food.

“You get Grace onto that plane.”

“Shut up.”

The car stops at the light. Knox climbs out with difficulty. His ankle’s frozen, every muscle tight or bruised. The Audi peels out. Dulwich never talks smack in an op. Embattled by the Turkish mob on one side and the Amsterdam police on the other, he’s dropped out of the Optimists’ Club. He comes from an operational mind-set, a pragmatism Knox can’t afford. He’s placed his bet: the three of them won’t make the plane. Someone, or more than someone, is going to be left in the jet’s backwash. He’s suggesting it will be him, but only out of politeness. He knows it’ll be Knox, or Knox and Sonia. His mention of Grace was a not-too-subtle statement that said she would be on the plane no matter what sacrifice it requires. Of the three of them, she’s the most valuable to Brian Primer and Rutherford Risk. She’s the mathematical savant who can change into the cape in the phone booth and double in the field. She’s Primer’s rising star, and it’s Dulwich’s job to protect her.

Primer has barracks full of John Knoxes. The Grace Chus come around rarely.

Knox keeps his head down for the sake of the CCTV cameras. It’s a long walk back to Grace. He starts humming Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” It helps his ankle, improves his mood.

Dawn is suggested as a pink dust against the gray clouds behind him, but Knox doesn’t see it. He’s focused on the traffic, the next street corner, and every shadow within fifty meters.

T
he service apartment on Goudsbloemstraat, northwest of the city center, is warmly furnished in a contemporary style. With a full working kitchen and washer/dryer, living room and bedroom, the suite’s opulence bothers Grace. For all her Westernization, she still feels uncomfortable when alone in such places. With the deposit, it cost Dulwich over fifteen hundred euros—a month’s rental for a suite of rooms they intend to occupy for less than a full day. But it’s in a quiet part of town on a narrow street where people apparently keep to themselves. She doubts there’s been more than two people at a time out on the sidewalks; she rarely hears a car drive past.

Stretched out in bed, having taken a long hot bath to clean her wound, and an oxycodone to wash away her pain, she navigates her laptop through the company’s VPN, a Web proxy server called Hide My Ass, and a second Australian proxy service she learned about from Kamat. Trying to find her now would be like searching for Nessie. She finds the meds calming. The lack of stress is so foreign to her that she briefly experiences a kind of mental vertigo, only to find herself giddy. Instead of foggy, she’s intensely focused and mentally nimble. Giggles at the sound of her fingers tapping arrhythmically on the keyboard.

A few minutes past four, Gerhardt Kreiger’s face appears in an open window on the laptop’s screen. Natuurhonig,
his brothel, has closed for the night. When the ladies head home, Kreiger is seen counting a good deal of cash. Her screen-capture software reveals that he examines the electronic credit card charges as well. He matches amounts with girls, leaves nothing to chance. She envisions a business where shorting the house is commonplace. He removes the cash from the desk; there are noises—he’s still in the office. He returns to the desk empty-handed.

Another open window monitors Kreiger’s data console in a scroll of green numbers on a black screen. A long search string resides in a tiny box and the automated software routinely checks for a match. When a set of numbers goes, a bell tone sounds, drawing Grace’s attention.

She hears the door come open. Her right hand finds the weapon below the sheets. Her finger lays across the trigger.

“It’s me,” Knox calls out. He’s carrying a grocery bag; his neck is patched up with four flesh-colored Band-Aids.

She lets go of the gun.

“Good timing,” she says. “We may be onto something.” Her eyes dart among the half dozen open windows on her screen. For her this is like a game of Sudoku, establishing patterns by supplying missing pieces while trusting all along that those pieces fit. Computer traffic and data flow is no more random than vehicles in a city at rush hour. It
appears
chaotic, but every vehicle’s driver has a destination; there is a logic to the routes they take. So it is with each piece or packet of data: someone directed it, someone else received it. For her to break every encryption used by Kreiger would take months, perhaps years. So she allows his machine to do this for her; she merely captures the incoming stream, and mirrors the resulting images on his screen, reading or viewing, or listening to it, just as Kreiger does.

Knox starts into the first of two liverwurst sandwiches he’s brought with him and chugs down a beer while sitting on the side of her bed.

Grace does not look up from her screen. “The hacker who dropped that kiddie porn on us? That happened after I was already drilling him . . . data mining him.”

“I love it when you talk sexy,” he says through a full mouth.

“I trapped the MAC address and have had it tagged since. It just surfaced again, five minutes ago.”

Knox stops chewing, cheeks like a squirrel.

“On Kreiger’s laptop,” she says.

“Simplify,” he says. “Spying for Dummies.”

“I had established a defense against a particular hacker. That hacker engaged Kreiger’s laptop, not mine.”

“Hacking Kreiger?” Knox places the sandwich down.

“No. It is not adversarial. A text message was sent via Skype. Today’s date. Eleven
P.M
. This was followed by the number three. Meaning unknown.”

“A meeting? Fahiz?”

“We can assume the computer in question is in some way related to the man we call Fahiz. As to the purpose of the message: a meeting, a conveyance? It could be something as benign as a television program on Channel Three.”

“We haven’t got until eleven o’clock.”

“Yes. Of course. I only meant to point out that whoever hacked into my laptop has contacted Kreiger.”

“A rug shipment would have little reason to go out at that late hour,” Knox theorized. “What about the number? The three?”

“If it involves Kreiger’s laptop, I will most certainly pick up on it. Otherwise . . .”

“Sarge should have fought for more manpower. He rolled over. I didn’t expect that.”

“The client dictates the endpoint.”

He flashes her a disapproving look. He doesn’t want to be read from the manual. Knox’s size, his barely constrained power, can terrify her at times. She tries to never show him that he has such an effect on her, but wonders. It’s important that Dulwich see her at least as Knox’s equal.

“Where is David?” She had expected him to follow in behind Knox.

“Switching out rentals.”

“At this hour?”

He explains the events at the manufacturing compound.

“We found it? You withhold such a thing from me?”

“We . . . I need to watch the place this morning. For the girls arriving.”

“The white van will not arrive.”

“Exactly.”

“Fahiz will be notified.”

“Possibly.”

“Their mobiles . . .”

“Would help.”

“You cannot attempt this alone. It is foolhardy, John.”

His smirk tells her she’s misused a word, or amused him with her choice. “They’ll call the two in control of the van first. One’s dead, the other’s in police custody by now.”

“We have their mobiles,” she says.

“Yes,” Knox agrees.

“They will do this before contacting Fahiz.”

“Of course,” he says.

“What am I missing?” She can see it in his eyes.

“The same thing they are: the van.”

—

K
NOX REACHES
D
ULWICH
at the off-airport Avis counter and lays out the plan. The painfully long silence that results suggests Dulwich’s resistance.

“Brower can handle this.”

Knox ends the call. Not because of the string of expletives that jump to his tongue, but because he’s receiving an incoming call from a number his phone doesn’t recognize.

He’s sitting in the parlor of the apartment, the doors shut to the bedroom where Grace has fallen asleep with her laptop atop her.

“Yeah?” he says. Waits. Is about to repeat himself when his dulled brain kicks in.

“Don’t hang up,” he says.

“You bastard!” Sonia says.

“I had to reach you.”

“You . . . It’s so
unfair
.”

“A horrible thing to do,” he admits.

“You gave me hope. You used her initials.”

“I had to reach you. We raided the dormitory. Ten girls. All safe now.” He hopes to appeal to the journalist.

“You tricked me in the most horrible way imaginable.”

“We’ve located the knot shop. Have you heard from Fahiz?”

“You are a monster.”

“I’m an operative for a private security firm.” He gives that time to sink in. “My employers are backing out of the op, shutting us down today. If we’re going to find Berna and Maja, if we’re going to stop Fahiz from packing up and doing this same thing to other girls someplace else, then we need each other. You and me. Now.” Against his better judgment he adds, “You want to talk about a story . . .”

“You think me so crass?”

“Fahiz has the balls to leave his number with the police so he’ll be notified if they close in on his own operation. You’ve contacted him,” Knox states with certainty. He waits. Nothing. “If you go to him alone, it’s the last any of us will see of you.” He adds, “That’s unacceptable.”

“You think me so stupid?”

“Fahiz agreed to a phone interview,” Knox speculates. “He’ll trap your number. Your location.”

“You played upon my emotions with that classified ad. My niece has been missing four years now. How could you do that?”

He reminds himself that she wants Berna alive. She wants Fahiz punished. Why, after discovering he tricked her, has she stayed on the line?

He’s overly tired. He’s allowed himself to believe she cares about him. It takes him added time to process her voice sounding apologetic instead of accusatory, time to realize that she still hasn’t hung up. She’s kept him on the call. A trapdoor opens beneath him and he falls.

You think me so stupid?
echoes in his head. Sonia isn’t interested in a story. She wants Berna back. Fahiz has agreed to a trade. Sonia knew exactly who had placed the ad. She’s offered up Knox in exchange for the missing girl.

One glance out the window confirms it. A sedan double-parked at an angle. The heads of two men running toward the sidewalk.

He moves as if he’s rehearsed this a thousand times: a chair is used to wedge the apartment door; he’s into the kitchen, stripping the refrigerator of its shelves and drawers.

“John?”

He’s awakened Grace.

The crisper drawers go under the sink. The shelving goes under the bed as he scoops up Grace and runs her into the kitchen. He deposits her into the refrigerator in the fetal position, places his gun onto her lap. “Count to three after you hear it. Then open and shoot.”

Grace stares back with koala eyes. Fresh from sleep, she cannot process any of this.

“Breathe shallowly. Not much air in here.” He shuts the refrigerator’s French doors, entombing her.

Grabs a knife on his way to the window as the first jarring blow is absorbed by the apartment door. He opens the kitchen’s only window and slides out on his belly so his chest is against the brick. Jabs the knife into the grout and, hanging by one hand, pulls the window shut with the other.

A second and third crash as the door is kicked in.

Knox hangs by his fingertips from the window ledge, the knife stuck between the bricks above him. He doesn’t look down; it’s two broken legs or shattered ankles if he lets go. In his mind’s eye, he sees two men searching methodically, surprised to find the apartment empty. Has every confidence they will not open the refrigerator. The living room glass is fixed.

He violates his own rule, glancing down to see if the men have reappeared at street level. That’s when the window slides open and a man sticks his head out. Seeing Knox so close, the intruder jerks away instinctively, catching his neck on the open window frame. He’s dazed.

One-handed, Knox liberates the knife and cuts open his opponent’s neck. Stabs the knife back into the grout, grabs hold of the man’s collar and pulls. The body stops halfway out, caught at the waist. Blood runs down the brick like bunting.

A second face appears in the window. A gun is raised. Knox swings one-handed as a gunshot rings out. Knox bounces off the brick and returns like a pendulum to where he was. The second man’s face smacks against the glass and he slides down, dead before he reaches the floor.

Knox drops the knife and claws his way up with two arms.

Across the room, Grace is coiled in the open refrigerator, the semi-automatic in hand. She’s dazed and in shock. Climbing back through the window, Knox draws his victim fully out and the body falls to the sidewalk below.

He eases Grace from the refrigerator. “We’re out of here,” he says, taking her into his arms.

She nods.

“Your first kill?” he asks.

She looks up at him, then rolls nearly out of his arms and gags. “My laptop,” she chokes out.

Knox places her on the bed, returns to the kitchen and searches the second man, lucky to find the car keys on him. He takes the man’s weapon. At ground level, he places Grace in the backseat. Retrieves the knife and wipes it down. Leaves the gun Grace used under the fallen man. The scene won’t add up for forensics, but this way it will take them longer to make sense of things.

Knox drives the car he’s borrowed from his attackers four blocks before pulling over and taking a breath.

“John,” Grace says. He turns to see she’s pointing at the dash.

His eyes light on a GPS device suction-cupped to the windshield. A GPS used to find a waypoint established by Knox’s monitored phone; a GPS that would most likely have come
from
wherever Fahiz is hiding.

Knox works through the menu, instructing the device to direct them to the origin of the last trip.

“Is it the knot shop?” Grace asks expectantly.

“No.”

“Then it’s him. Fahiz.”

“Could be.” Knox stares at the guidance system, wondering if Sonia’s hatred has led him to Fahiz.

“How could they possibly have found us?” she asks.

“Don’t know,” he lies. All he can think is that Sonia sold him out for Berna’s return.
A woman scorned . . .
Or Berna along with Fahiz’s full story.

Knox can picture her with her knees up, laughing at him in the warm light of the houseboat’s cabin. He underestimated the damage done by running the classifieds using her niece’s initials.