Choke Point

The 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.”

—

KNOX REACHES DULWICH 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.

Twenty minutes later, the stolen car rendezvouses with Dulwich in a church parking lot less than a mile from the knot shop. Knox beams as he bumps the car into the lot.

To his surprise, Dulwich has done as he requested: he’s behind the wheel of a rented white van.

—

GRACE IS POSITIONED across the sedan’s backseat with a view of the park containing the fountain, the street market and the building with the knot shop beyond. Her mobile phone is connected by a Bluetooth earpiece; she hears Knox’s breathing and the low rumble of the van’s engine. They left her here in the car, with the keys in the ignition, but Dulwich took her laptop “for safe keeping.” A reminder that, with her leg wound, she is the most vulnerable.

“Three small girls in the market,” she reports.

“Copy,” Knox says.

The choice of location seems so obvious—so perfect—now that she sees it in person. A natural barrier of a canal to the east; a market where the girls can mingle and blend in before disappearing into the abandoned buildings beyond.

She wonders if this market is where the vendor, Marta, first spotted the girls. First wormed her way into a role of scout and recruiter. Eventually moved her stall to a different market to increase Fahiz’s reach across the community. Is reminded that to many who live in the area she and Knox and Dulwich are the enemy, not Fahiz.

The white van arrives, turns into the dirt lot and disappears.

“Nothing unusual,” she reports, keeping watch for police or a Fahiz guard.

“Stand by,” Knox says.

—

DULWICH HAS THE DRIVER’S SEAT pushed back to where he can’t be seen in profile. Knox is crouched facing the van’s rear doors, but the space is not meant for a man his size. His legs are cramping.

Dulwich throws it into park and waits. Knox has the dormitory girls to thank for knowing how the drop-off works. The white van he and Dulwich occupy stops outside, just as a different white van always does. A moment later, the van’s rear doors will be opened. The girls would normally climb out and be escorted inside—sometimes two at a time, sometimes all at once. In this rental there is a curtained divider in place that separates the driver from the girls, just as in the regular white van. Its back windows are covered by newsprint. A man from the knot shop escorts them; a guard in the back of the van will help to escort them inside. At least two other men remain inside the shop.

Knox doesn’t appreciate the wait. The van they’re in is a newer model than the one confiscated by the police. How will the men inside react? The girls claimed the van changed occasionally, but the lack of response to their arrival is troubling.

“What’s going on?” Knox asks.

Dulwich has the building’s rear door in his outside rearview mirror. “Nada.”

Knox’s thighs are killing him.

“Back it up,” he says. “Make like we’re bailing.”

Dulwich pulls the visor down to help screen his face as he eases the van into reverse and lets it roll backward.

The door to the shop opens immediately. A man waves for the van to stop. He has a short black beard and hair to match. He wears blue jeans and a New York Giants sweatshirt. He’s short, but strong.

Dulwich is more visible from having backed up, putting him and Knox at a disadvantage. He forces himself back into the seat, and leans his head back, hoping not to be seen.

After a moment’s hesitation, the man in the doorway reaches around to his back.

“Gun!” Dulwich shouts, popping open the driver’s door. He rolls out of the driver’s seat as the first shot penetrates the windshield. He has failed to put the van into park. It rolls back, still in reverse. Knox throws open the rear doors and jumps out. His cramped legs won’t hold him. As he attempts to stand, he collapses. The van backs up and Knox flattens, crawling out of the way of the rear axle’s differential, forcing himself into the space between it and the wheel. The front tires are turned slightly. Knox has to belly-crawl to the center of the undercarriage to avoid being paved by the right front tire. The van passes over him. Knox gets a clear shot at the shins of the man who’s put three more rounds into the door panel. His second shot shatters bone and the man drops like a broken bar stool.

Knox pistol-whips the fallen man and slides his handgun to Dulwich.

“Gracias,” Dulwich says. Hampered by his bad leg, he has every reason to fear a firefight.

The van continues backing up, colliding with the wall and scraping and grinding its way along the brick. It comes to rest, the driver’s door mirror bent and angled, its engine straining, back tires spitting dirt as they spin out. The engine stalls.

Top 40 music plays from a radio inside, the only sounds. If there are girls, they are eerily quiet. Knox scoots back along the wall below rows of fixed glass panes the size of bathroom tile. Has no intention of firing into a room full of young girls. Wonders if the two men inside know this. Are counting on it.

Bruno Mars is singing about grenades.

“Anything?” Dulwich says.

Knox shakes his head, only to realize Dulwich is speaking to Grace.

Knox has long since lost his earbud. The white wire dangles from his jacket.

Dulwich hand-signals Knox: No sign of the two men.

Knox works his way back to a narrow column of brick separating the sets of windows; he stands, his shoulder blades pressed to the wall.

A flicker of movement to his right. It takes him a half second to realize it’s coming from the van’s bent mirror. It shows the bridge of a nose and the peak of a man’s forehead. He’s as flat to the interior wall as Knox is.

Knox ducks down and works his way back to the van. Slips out of his jacket and wraps it tightly around his right hand, switching the weapon to his left. Eases his way up the brick, sweat breaking out everywhere. Dulwich knows better than to look in his direction, but has followed Knox’s every move.

Knox swings out, smashes through the glass with his wrapped hand and catches the man by the throat, pinning him to the wall. Hears a gun drop as the man reaches to fight the choke hold, but works against himself. In a deceptively fast move, Knox shifts the man’s throat to the inside of his elbow; Knox drops his weapon and, pulling the man to the window, effects a choke hold with both arms. He has the advantage of six or seven inches and fifty pounds. He hauls the man off his feet, breaking glass with the man’s head and shoulders. He extracts him, finishes the choke hold and drops the unconscious man to his feet.

“We’ve got one in the wind,” Dulwich reports, receiving notice from Grace. “Heading west on Bellamystraat.”

“Can she drive?” Knox calls across to Dulwich, who relays the request.

Knox risks a quick look through the broken glass. The place looks empty. He steals a second look inside. Moves to and past the door, gaining another angle. For the first time, he sees a girl prone on the floor by a stack of wool, her hands over her head. Then, another.

“Are there any more men?” Knox shouts in Dutch. One of the girls, with about the saddest eyes Knox has ever seen, looks up at him and shakes her head. Not afraid—sad. Knox kicks open the door fully, waits and then rolls inside, coming to prone with his weapon extended.

Two dozen brown eyes stare back at him from where the girls lie on the floor.

—

IT WASN’T EASY DRAGGING HERSELF behind the wheel. There are two kinds of pain at work—a dull, bone-penetrating throbbing, and an electric-sharp pang from the wound itself as her thigh muscles contract. The two combine to blur her vision with unwanted tears and steal her breath as her chest goes tight. She turns the key.

Thankfully, it’s her left leg and therefore not involved in the act of driving. But even small inconsistencies in the roadbed send her shuddering with chills.

She picks up her mark easily—the fool is locked in an awkward stiff-legged walk on the south side of Bellamystraat, glancing back with terrified eyes every twenty meters. He must be expecting someone on foot, for he misses Grace’s slow patrol.

For how long, she can’t be sure. He goes left at the next street. Rather than follow, Grace drives past, though slowly enough to determine he’s just running scared. This is a bedroom neighborhood he’s trying to find his way out of.

Grace, too. The next turn is a dead end. The one after that, a short lane that connects with a street perpendicular, forcing her to turn east toward where she last saw him. She passes a Caribbean restaurant, only to realize he’s nowhere in front of her. Swings a U-turn and an immediate left, and there he is crossing Kinkerstraat against a traffic light.

He’s come full circle. The knot shop is a block ahead on the left, and she briefly wonders if it’s on purpose, if he intends to return. These questions are put to rest when he boards a tram and rides toward the city center.

“The one who escaped is heading east on the number seven.”

Dulwich answers that he copies.

“Police,” she says, as a string of the flashing lights race toward and then past her.

She hears Dulwich repeat the warning to Knox. There’s a discussion between them but she only gets Dulwich’s side. He’s adamant that the white van they’re driving is a liability, that it’s time to notify Brower of where they’re heading—a saved location on the GPS device Knox liberated from the car she’s now driving. Knox must be arguing for more time to find Fahiz on their own.

“We’re close,” Dulwich tells her. “A few blocks south of here.”

“That does not match with my mark,” she says, but then corrects herself. “Stand by.”

The man she has followed has ridden the tram all of one stop. He disembarks on the far side of the canal and walks back a half block. She’s forced to give him more credit than she believed due. He rode the tram in order to get a look back for any tails. She continues past Bilderdijkkade to not fall into his trap. Maintains her speed while keeping watch in her two rearview mirrors.

“The mark is heading south on Bilderdijkkade.”

“That’s interesting.” Dulwich relays the information to Knox.

“I am turning south now,” she says, having reached another canal and not wanting to cross the bridge.

“Negative!” Dulwich commands. “Hang back.”

He’s concerned about her wound, her condition. He sees her as vulnerable, perhaps even a liability. The thought of that frustrates and angers her. She must not be seen as the soft forensic accountant who’s in over her head, the woman who can’t handle fieldwork.

She realizes too late it’s none of that. Dulwich has the GPS: the street she is on runs out ahead, forcing her back to the west—aiming her directly at her mark. Seeing him walking toward her in the distance, she does exactly what she shouldn’t do: she stops the car.

He stops. Perhaps he even recognizes the car as one of theirs. He breaks into an all-out sprint, turning right and crossing over a canal bridge.

“I am made,” she confesses, feeling an obligation to the team. Crushed by her own stupidity.

“Run him down!” Dulwich orders. “Stop him. Now!”

He doesn’t want the mark tipping off Fahiz.

She accelerates, tires peeling, and fishtails onto Bilderdijkstraat and across the canal. He begins climbing a chain-link fence into a construction site. Grace accelerates across the bridge and crashes the fence, knocking him off. He bounces onto the hood of her car.

But her collision has torn the chain link and he’s through it like a mouse into a hole. Grace kicks the car into reverse and swings right past the site, catching her left headlight on a retaining wall that defines a tunnel entrance to underground parking. The car lurches right and she’s gunning it down a narrow passage between the wall and the chain link toward a concrete bunker of a municipal building. The mark vaults the next fence effortlessly and sprints across a sand lot where the construction trailer is parked.

She slides through the next turn and accelerates across the lot, closing on him.

“Shit,” she says for Dulwich to hear. “A footbridge!”

At the end of the lot are red-and-white-striped stanchions that prevent vehicles from accessing a divided bike and pedestrian path that cross the canal she’s paralleling. If the mark reaches the footbridge, she’s lost him.

She throttles the engine, takes out a section of chain link and a lamppost as she avoids the red-and-white barriers, connecting with the mark’s legs. He’s thrown up onto the hood of her car and across the windshield. She can’t see.

The next thing she knows, the car no longer feels solid. It is dancing and weaving. Her feet are cold. The front dips forward.

Water.

—

THE GPS DIRECTS THEM the long way around, taking them down the west side of Bilderdijkstraat canal instead of Tollensstraat. Dulwich realizes the mistake too late. But it’s from Bilderdijkstraat that they see a black car at a distance as it crashes through a chain-link fence and plunges into a canal.

At this same instant, a silver Mercedes races from the bright red door of a garage. It’s headed away from them, to the west. Its speed alone tells them it’s Fahiz. Dulwich hesitates only a fraction of a second—then floors it. Straight ahead, toward the near side of the footbridge.

Knox is out before Dulwich skids the van to a stop. The canal bubbles eerily. No sight of the car. A man swims frantically for a nearby houseboat. Dulwich makes surprisingly good time in that direction, despite his bum leg.

Knox climbs between struts and drops into the murky water. The windbreaker, laden with its pockets of tools, weighs him down and he sinks quickly.

The car’s daytime headlights draw him. It’s landed on its side, the driver’s window facing the surface.

Knox tries his Maglite. To his amazement, it comes on.

A leaking air bubble stretches from the back window to the windshield. The trunk has opened on impact. The depleted airbag waves against Grace’s head. She’s out of the seat belt, sucking the remaining air while fighting the water pressure that holds the door shut.

Her eyes go wide with fright as Knox puts his face to the glass. He’s running out of air. He motions her back and tries breaking the glass with the butt end of the Maglite, but it just taps against the glass.

Grace returns to the pocket of air, her hair floating eerily. Knox holds up a single finger. Then he swims for the surface where his bursting lungs find relief. He sees Dulwich boarding the canal boat to capture the escapee.

He’s alongside the car again. More than half the air has leaked out. He pulls on the door. Nothing.

Bubbles of air burst loose and he’s blinded. He tries again to break the glass, but he lacks the proper force.

He leaves her. Grace pounds against the glass desperately. But Knox is headed for the car’s trunk. He pulls it farther open. Still no access to the backseat, to Grace. A floor mat floats into his face, startling him. He exhales most of his reserve air, digs for the tool kit, unscrews a large wing nut and takes hold of the tire iron.

As he comes around to the driver’s window, Grace is gone, lost behind a curtain of silver bubbles. He swims to the hood. Her face is pressed, eyes shut, into a tiny pocket of remaining air.

He takes out the driver’s window with three consecutive blows. The safety glass finally shatters, though in slow motion: small, brilliant cubes cascading down like ice crystals.

He takes her by the shirt and pulls. She breaks his grip, caught unaware by the contact. A second later, her hand gropes for his and they join. Knox draws her from the car.

Together, they kick for the surface.