Choke Point

The 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.