Choke Point

Three or four minutes, max,” Dulwich says, referring to the distinctive police sirens closing in. Grace and Knox lean against a brick wall, both panting. “With my leg, I won’t even make it to the van in time. And she’s not going anywhere.”

Knox absorbs what he’s being told. He suspected all along that the three of them would not make the jet. But he didn’t see it working out this way.

“Bullshit,” Knox says.

“Pangarkar gave you up, Knox. Get while the getting’s good. I can try to keep Brower from going to the press on the knot shop, at least overnight. After that, bets are off. It doesn’t mean they won’t be after you,” Dulwich adds. “But shut this sucker down, and maybe you buy us some favors.”

“Two minutes, tops. Go. I’ve got this.” Knox bends and pulls Grace gently toward him. She’s conscious, but the consistency of a rag doll. “Try to hold the jet. Work Primer for leverage here. Maybe it works out.”

Knox is on his feet. He takes in the hostage by the van, the van itself, Grace’s condition. Dulwich is of military stock. Because of this, his thinking doesn’t always fit the situation; it’s Knox’s job—his duty to Grace—to make certain this is the right call. With so little time, it comes down to instinct. He bends and kisses Grace on the cheek.

“You okay?”

She touches his hand and pulls it to her lips. “Go,” she says. “Keep my laptop. They mustn’t find it.” She provides him her password.

He rubs her hair, meets eyes with a surprised Dulwich. He jogs to the van, where he retrieves the laptop and the stolen GPS and power cord. Sirens bearing down on him, he recrosses the footbridge and hurries past Dulwich and Grace without acknowledgment.

—

LOSING FAHIZ HITS HIM MUCH LATER. He walks in the direction of the airport having little idea of where else to go. His iPhone is wet and dead. If he can find a store, he can buy a pay-as-you-go. Grace’s laptop must offer something, but he’s too dull to know exactly what.

As each obstacle is addressed by a possible solution, the trauma subsides, freeing up more of his mind to work out additional complications. The web is woven from the center, out.

He’s following along a tram route that will lead back to Centraal Station. Despite the likely presence of police there, a train is the fastest, most anonymous route out to the airport. He spots an electronics repair shop—the perfect place to inquire—and enters, setting off a dull buzzer as the door opens.

The woman behind the counter is Armenian or Eastern European. She’s in her mid-twenties. The store is filled with everything from used toasters and blenders to tube televisions and plasma screens. Several of the televisions are running, each tuned to a different channel.

“I am looking for a pay-as-you-go mobile,” he says in Dutch, resting the laptop on the counter.

His clothes are damp, his hair matted. His shoes squish and have left a trail across the floor. “Oops,” he says. He proffers his iPhone. If she has an iPhone, all he will need to do is switch out his SIM card. If not, he has plenty of other SIMs to fit whatever she may offer.

She nods and moves to a counter display of dozens of older model mobiles.

And there’s Sonia.

It’s a small color television, some kind of portable model with an extending antenna. It’s a local news piece. A weary-looking Sonia Pangarkar—the pride of Dutch journalism—stands with her arm around a shy, bashful girl, as her colleagues stand to ask questions. The sound is turned down. The girl is Berna. Behind the two is an image of a newspaper’s front page—a preview of tomorrow’s morning edition, if Knox has his Dutch right. She has an exclusive interview with the leader of a child labor ring. Fahiz.

The merchant must speak to him repeatedly to win Knox’s attention. She can’t understand his fascination with the television.

“You like?” she asks in halting English. “Good price, just for you.”

One John Knox equals Berna’s freedom and an interview. It means something more to him: Sonia negotiated with Fahiz. She made contact. She knows things he wants to know.

The merchant offers an iPhone 3GS, but it takes a different SIM than the 4. He settles on a RAZR that will accept two of the other cards he carries. Pays twenty euros for it.

The shot of Sonia was a short piece for a news program. It’s replaced by a traffic pileup, which segues into weather coverage.

“Do you have Internet?” he asks.

She directs him to a coffee shop two blocks away.

He notices two shelves of car electronics, including a dozen GPS devices. Digs into his jacket’s many pockets, producing the cigarette lighter wired to the stolen GPS.

“Can you power this?” They’ve settled on English.

“Of course.”

He has to battle the device because it can’t lock onto a satellite, but the woman comes to his assistance. He borrows a pen and paper and takes down the last nine recent destinations that Fahiz’s men had driven to. Six are street addresses. The remaining are numbered one through four and represent latitude/longitude coordinates. He repacks his jacket and tips her five euros.

Smiling, the woman calls after him on his way out, “God be with you.”

He can’t stop that blessing from ringing in his head as he closes in on the coffee shop.

A police patrol diverts him. He enters a dress shop, where even he knows he doesn’t belong. A giant of a wet man holding a laptop, his windbreaker bulging improperly. He doesn’t try to explain himself. Looks for a back door. Finds a narrow staircase, ducks his head and ascends, arriving into a kitchen where an elderly woman is smoking an unfiltered cigarette while drinking from a demitasse.

“Toilet?” he says in English.

He might as well be from the moon, and she, chiseled in stone. He retreats down the staircase, where he’s met by a silent but incensed shopkeeper. He leaves. The police car has moved on, allowing him to cross the street.

Something catches his eye, nearly stopping him mid-street. He doesn’t know what it was. Arriving at the curb, he surveys the buildings’ facades—the store names, windows, doors. What stopped him? What was it he saw?

He can’t spend time so exposed. He enters the crowded coffee shop, wishes he could order a beer, but settles for a straight coffee, no adjectives. Turning on Grace’s laptop is like stepping into a cockpit. He clicks on the browser. He uses her password for a second time and is presented with a stable browser frame offering a search window.

He calls up an interactive map of Amsterdam and begins plotting the locations from the GPS. Nearly simultaneously he uses Grace’s interoffice mail system to send Brian Primer a message about the likely arrest of Dulwich and Grace, the schedule of the jet transportation and an appeal for assistance.

He has decided on a course of action: he’s going to ring every ounce of information from Gerhardt Kreiger concerning Fahiz and leave it to Brower to mop up what’s left.

For a moment, he’s not sure if the coffee is too strong or if he’s actually thinking clearly. He knows firsthand the aftereffects of shock and trauma. In a hallucinatory vision he’s able to see not only the light at the end of the tunnel but what’s beyond the light. He stands, leaving Grace’s laptop on the table and moves automatically to the shop’s door. He moves outside, through the parked cars and nearly into the oncoming traffic as he surveys the shop facades. Something here stopped him and he has a sense of the answer, though he does not know what he’s looking for.

And there it is: an address plate. A small tin rectangle above the shop to the left of the coffeehouse: 3. There’s a bird on the gutter looking down, mocking him. It tells him he’s stupid for having missed this.

Back inside, he cuts a direct line to his table and Grace’s laptop. He does not go unnoticed, his size and determination nothing to mess with. His work is clumsy, his fingers too big to type easily. He pecks out a website address, lays down the list he copied from the stolen GPS.

It must be the coffee: his heart rate is palpably quickened and sharp, painful. Is this how Grace lives each day? he wonders. He feels high. The possibility he might be right drives him like a whip. These few minutes are wildly exciting for him, parked in a chair in a coffeehouse. Of all things. It’s impossible. Yet it’s not going away.

He enters the latitude/longitude for the GPS location labeled 3. His middle finger hovers over the RETURN key. He knows this is right; he’s no longer searching, he’s merely confirming. It’s a foregone conclusion.

The blue pin drops onto the Google map. Knox gasps aloud, drawing attention to himself. He saves the map to the computer’s desktop.

Swift movement approaching.

He has the grace of a gymnast as he takes hold of the chair, raises it and lowers it onto the head of the policeman coming up behind him. The chair doesn’t splinter; it thuds like a club. The cop falls to his knees. People scream as they jump away. Coffee flies.

Knox blocks the cop’s attempt to reach for his hardware belt; blocks him from taking hold of Knox’s leg. Doesn’t want to hurt the guy, but Knox is mechanical, robotic. He drives his knee forward, stomps down hard and a gush of surprise erupts from the onlookers. Two blows: the cop is down.

The laptop folded shut, his note stuffed into a pocket, Knox heads out the back, away from the cop car parked out front.

From behind the counter, a barista dares shout out for him to stop. Knox keeps walking. He feels surprisingly good, the brief confrontation helping to release some of his pent-up excitement.

The train is out. He’s closed that door on himself. Taxis are no good because of Fahiz’s network.

He’s chosen a ubiquitous VW Passat. Dark blue.

Knox heads for the airport, adjusting mirrors as he goes. The car’s ceiling is too low, but he’s used to it. As in all European countries, the Netherlands traffic cams report registration plates in real time and are searchable. From the moment the stolen car is called in, Knox is driving a time bomb. The highway to the airport will be lousy with traffic cams, less so on the surface streets. So he takes the slower route, paralleling the highway where possible, keeping it available if he’s pursued. He does all this without a second thought, again marveling at what he’s become. Would he have known to do this two years earlier? If he’d known, would it have been so automatic? Dulwich has shaped him, has gotten what he wants. He’s turned him into an adrenaline junkie who’d rather outrun cops in Amsterdam than go on a shopping spree in the Cambodian jungle. He resents it, but doesn’t resist it. Drives on, his eyes ticking from one mirror to the next, ready for anything thrown at him.

—

KNOX MAKES THE CALL under an overhang outside the KLM Jet Center. He parked the stolen car in a long-term lot a half mile away, walked here in a light drizzle, but still keeps a weather eye for police cars or anything unusual. Having the Dutch police after him is less than reassuring. He knows European security to be swift and efficient. He must stay a step ahead and never linger in one place for too long.

“Brower,” the man answers.

“John Knox.”

A brief pause. Knox can picture the man signaling his subordinates to trace the origin of the call. Knox keeps track of the time on his wristwatch. He’s giving himself thirty seconds. Twelve are behind him.

“Get yourself to the nearest constabulary and turn yourself in. It will go far easier for you.”

“I have a deal to propose.”

Knox ends the call, switches out the second of the three SIM cards that fit this phone. Calls back.

“Brower.”

“I give you a human trafficking ring, complete with kidnap victims and a person responsible. In all likelihood that person gives up the ringleader of the knot shop. You put my friends on a plane, no charges, no hidden agendas.” He adds, “You’ve got fourteen seconds.”

He waits.

“Seven seconds,” he says. “No more calls.”

“Done.”

Knox ends the call, throws his head back and steps out so the rain strikes his teeth.

He has spent time before in the waiting areas for private jets. The jet centers spoil their corporate customers or anyone waiting for them. Knox gets a catered meal, more coffee and a shower. Pays cash.

He calls his brother, but wakes him and promises to call back later. The clock grinds slowly toward three P.M. Much of the time—all of the time—is spent with pieces of a plan spinning in his head, coming together only to separate and refuse to bind like same-pole magnets. There’s much to accomplish.

Grace’s laptop comes to his aid repeatedly. He watches live video of Gerhardt Kreiger’s empty office as he navigates into the man’s contacts list. It takes him nearly thirty minutes to locate what he’s after, primarily because his written Dutch is so poor, and the online translators so confusing. But even this piece comes together for him, and he’s beginning to sense the tide has turned; losing Fahiz, the arrest of Dulwich and Grace, all marked the crest of the wave breaking. Now he rides calmly to the beach without need of paddle or sail.

Satellite maps and the jet center’s complimentary printer allow him to compile not only a plan of attack, but an atlas of pages with highlighted routes, notes about timing and Sharpie notations pointing to possible obstacles.

Brower will attempt to burn him—never trust an ambitious cop—making Knox’s job all the more problematic, demanding impeccable planning. He establishes relief valves and a time line that will invoke aborts. He projects three different competing perspectives, making a plan for himself, one for Brower and one for Gerhardt Kreiger. He looks for intersections and competition.

At last, he tries several times to channel Fahiz, wondering if he needs to be included. And again. But Fahiz hides behind a two-way mirror, impossible to see. Knox knows the unaccounted-for is what scuttles any op. Yet no matter how hard he tries, he can’t fully account for Fahiz, his knowledge of the man so limited as to be useless.

The plane has landed. Knox greets the captain at the door, a wiry man with flinty eyes and a soul patch who gives the impression of once having been a long-rifle sniper.

“The others are delayed,” Knox says.

“Wheels up, sixteen hundred.”

“One needs medical attention. It’s imperative she make the flight.”

“Which’ll work fine as long as she’s here by sixteen hundred.”

“I need twelve hours.”

“You need another plane.”

“You’re our plane.”

“I’m on a schedule.”

“Just put in the request for me. Can you do that?”

“There are rules. Hours aloft, hours of rest. Can’t be messed with. This crew is at the end of a run. We miss the wheels up, we don’t fly again before oh-four-hundred.”

“Twelve hours from now is oh-three-hundred,” Knox presses.

“What are you, my dispatcher?”

“Oh-three-hundred,” Knox repeats.

“You have any idea of the expense of parking the bird and the rest of us overnight? No way my dispatcher’s going for that.”

“Have her contact Brian Primer’s executive assistant. Give me two minutes to send an e-mail. Then you can make the call.”

“Is that right? And can I have your permission to take a dump while you’re sending your precious e-mail?”

“Works for me,” Knox says, straight-faced. “And take your time.”

He begs God: Give the man a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut.

—

“THE VEHICLE YOU WERE OPERATING struck and injured a man.” Chief Inspector Brower is fashionably dressed in a white Oxford button-down and a gray zip-neck sweater under a black corduroy sport coat. He looks remarkably well rested for a man who must not be. He drinks tea from a plastic travel mug.

“I lost control of the vehicle,” Grace says.

“It was captured on CCTV, you know? Coincidentally, you took down a man with a lengthy criminal record.”

Grace is unfazed by the attempt at a staring contest.

“You have a bullet wound in your thigh. We have blood stains at a perplexing homicide crime scene that I would be interested in testing against your own. Do you wish to explain your wound?” When Grace fails to answer, Brower continues. “One of two such homicide scenes.”

“I do not envy you your job. I am sure you are very good at it.”

“I am.”

“We all have our jobs to do.”

“And yours is?”

“I am employed by the European Union. But surely, you must know that by now.”

“It is a good cover. Very strong. I must compliment David.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. Cover? It is my job.” She adds, “My wound was a foolish mistake on my part during training. My colleague, as I am sure you are aware, was the victim of a bombing. I was given training in the use of a handgun, should the need arise. I was careless.”

“Then the blood at the scene will not match yours. I am sure you would be willing to allow us to take a swab.”

“My government will be wondering why I was treated like a common criminal. I cannot help but wonder how that will affect and influence your superiors. Their opinion of how you handled the case.” Despite her EU cover, she is a Chinese national, a fact she believes will help her situation if the worst comes. No one likes to upset Mother China.

“I have two staged homicides, a vehicle at the bottom of a canal, and a woman with a fresh bullet wound. All of this needs explaining.”

She knows that Dulwich gave Brower both the dormitory and the knot shop, that his star has risen substantially since Knox came along, that he can’t possibly want to muddy the waters. She expected the interview to be by the numbers, a video and report that could be filed away to cover his ass if the need arose. His persistence is a surprise to her. Dulwich would not sacrifice her. So it’s John he wants. Dulwich is willing to let Knox go if it means saving her. While that thrills her, it sickens her as well, and she wonders how far she’s willing to go, how much she’s willing to play along.

“I am sure you will make sense of it all.”

“You have the night to think about it,” he says. “I suggest you consider cooperating with the investigation.”

A continuance. The night ahead means something to Brower. And then she has it: the message intercepted that was sent to Kreiger—the date and time. Tonight.

She has to fight back a grin. Knox has sent them a message through Brower to give this time to play out.

He’s up to something.