Choke Point

Grace enters the Netherlands on her own passport. One of the fallouts from 9/11 for companies like Rutherford Risk is the difficulty in forging identities. It can still be done, she knows, but it’s expensive and time consuming. It has been two weeks since Dulwich offered her the work. Two extremely busy weeks of conference calls with Dulwich and Knox, and Knox alone; CV creation and corresponding background support so that by the time she hands the hotel desk clerk her European Union business card everything will check out. Not exactly a new identity, but a solid academic and employment record that will hold up under all but the most intense and high-level scrutiny.

She is dressed in a conservative gray suit with low black heels. It was bought off a used-clothing rack in Hong Kong specifically for the slight fraying of both sleeve cuffs. She wears the worn, tired expression of an overtraveled low-level bureaucrat. At hotel registration her speech is clipped, but polite, and she displays a road warrior’s knowledge of everything expected of her: passport, credit card, business card, signature. She waves off the bellman and hauls her roll-aboard to the elevator, barely lifting her eyes as she punches her floor number.

Once into her room, she unpacks, maintaining the routine of an experienced traveler. Her mobile alerts her to an e-mail with an attachment she’d rather open on her laptop, so she takes a minute to set up her traveling office. Chargers, wires, the laptop with a Bluetooth mouse. She carries a data/Wi-Fi device that goes on the desk as well. The encryption between the laptop, the data device and the cell network requires a piece of USB hardware, the software equivalent of a tempered stainless-steel lock. Three passwords later, she’s into her corporate mail and is downloading a PDF sent by Dulwich—which turns out to be a scanned copy of an Amsterdam police report. The existence of the report should have been good news, for it signals Dulwich’s having established a local police contact for her and Knox. But it’s anything but.

She responds to her situation physically—an elevated heart rate, sweaty palms. This assignment is important, if not critical. Her moment has arrived; she intends to capitalize on it. Brian Primer will not be sorry he approved her participation.

Grace’s Dutch is better spoken than written and read. It’s true of her Italian, Russian and Arabic as well. But she’s fluent in German and finds it useful as she attempts to decipher the police report.

An Egyptian-born male, one Kahil Fahiz, thirty-two, was the victim of a mugging/robbery just west of the central district. He sustained multiple minor injuries and lacerations, was treated at a hospital as an outpatient and was discharged. On the surface it looks common enough. But for Grace, it is a minor shot of adrenaline. She reviews the initial newspaper article, skimming it for a name that’s echoing around her head. Finds it:

Kabril Fahiz.

Sonia Pangarkar’s article quotes a Kabril Fahiz, a local merchant who took a dim view of child labor sweatshops in his neighborhood.

Kahil . . . Kabril.

She places a call using the laptop.

“Have you opened it yet?” she asks Knox over the VPN’s voice-to-Internet protocol software. As he speaks on his mobile, it is conceivable Knox’s end of the conversation might be eavesdropped on. Not so for her. In a perfect world they would both be on the VPN.

“The police report? I have. My written Dutch is a little lacking.”

“It’s the victim’s statement, short as it is, that interests me—us. That, and his family name of course.”

“Okay,” Knox says.

“It states that they beat him and robbed him. But at the end of the beating, one of them said something in Farsi along the lines of: ‘That’ll teach you to open your mouth.’ The victim said he spent hours trying to figure out what he might’ve said and when he might’ve said it, but came up blank.”

“We all say things we later regret.”

“No . . . it is not that. Not in this case. The sergeant filing the report made an interesting observation. Entirely speculative, but important to us.”

“Okay?”

“Kabril Fahiz,” she says, emphasizing the second syllable, “the man Pangarkar interviewed for her story, is from the same neighborhood—Oud-West—and is the same approximate age as the victim, Kahil Fahiz, the one they assaulted.”

“These apes go asking around intending to pound this guy who’s speaking to reporters into a different postal code—”

“But they mispronounce his name. Kabril and Kahil—an easy mistake to make.”

“They beat up the wrong guy,” Knox said, speculating. “I like the way you think. Have I told you that?”

“It wasn’t me, it was the police. It is speculation. You’re jet-lagged. Stay on point.”

“They got the wrong guy. Mixed up the names. Listen, I get it!”

“Avoided using a car bomb this time because they didn’t want the assault connected back to the earlier murder. To the newspaper article. But the police made that connection. The police report suggests a follow-up on all of Pangarkar’s sources mentioned in the article. They will have sent them to ground, John. Protect them from the possibility of more reprisals.”

“That won’t help us. Is there contact info in the report?”

“There is.”

“You should interview Fahiz.”

“Who do you think you are dealing with?” She hears herself slip into her Chinese dialect—she sounds like her mother!—and resents Knox for triggering her anger.

She resents a great deal about John Knox—his singular focus, his single-mindedness. The arrogance. Theirs is an evolving relationship. She imagines this is what an older brother would feel like—a combination of love, hate, respect, embarrassment. Together, they wander a no-man’s-land booby-trapped with buried mines of sexual innuendo but lacking the chemistry to go along with it. He is at once fascinating and intriguing, boorish and disagreeable.

“If you go talking to . . . well . . . you know how I feel about it.”

He had objected vehemently to Dulwich’s plan for Grace to take the cover of a low-level EU bureaucrat arriving to replace the victim of the car bombing. Dulwich believed it not only gave her an excuse to follow in Pangarkar’s footsteps, but that it also might “attract the bee to the pollen.” Dulwich showed little concern over using her as bait—a gamble given her increased importance to Primer. For Dulwich, it’s all about efficiency—getting the most out of his assets to reach the endpoint the quickest. He would argue that that included suffering the least collateral damage. But the way he stages an operation often runs contrary to that objective.

“I don’t need hand-holding,” she claims.

“Just make sure to keep the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature turned on. I want you on a leash.”

She pulls the phone quickly from her ear not wanting him to hear her laugh. She knows he’d rather be shopping in Marrakesh than pursuing a bomber in Amsterdam, knows that for him this is about his brother—always will be. Senses there is residual guilt there, but has never heard Tommy’s full story. It bothers her that he has coaxed more out of her than she has from him.

“And you?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he says.

“Who said I was worried?”