The Red Room

23

Because of his brother Tommy’s often unstable and unpredictable condition, Knox uses a phone app to automatically record their video conversations. The same app records Grace’s abduction.

The video is jumpy, contributing to its surreal look. The first nail of panic spikes his chest; he works to remove it, strains to emotionally distance himself from Grace, knowing the importance of his response to her recovery.

His voice is deliberately, eerily calm, though his fingers tremble slightly as he dials Rutherford Risk’s emergency response number.

A fax tone. He keys in his ID. Three pronounced clicks.

“Case number?” A man’s voice.

Knox doesn’t recall being given one. “Unknown.” He recites his contract ID.

“ID comes back ‘on leave.’”

“Leave? I’m on an op, you idiot! My partner’s a two-oh-seven! Do your job. I need a track-and-trace ASAP. Give me Digital Services!” Two-oh-seven is the police code used for a kidnapping.

“Stand by.”

He connects with Kamat, Xin’s boss. Again, Knox uses the police code 207. Kamat’s reaction is professional and immediate.

“GPS tracks two blocks south-southeast and goes off-grid.”

“That’s all?”

“I will prioritize her signal with the lat/longs to be transmitted to you. Text number, please.” He sounds like he’s asking for a prescription.

Knox recites the phone number for the SIM chip currently in his phone. He repeats, “South-southeast?”

“Affirmative.”

“CCTV?”

“For Istanbul? They are not web available. Is it possible for us to hack the system? Likely. Probable, even. Six to ten hours.”

“You’ve got operatives in theater here!”

“You’re shown as on leave. I see no case number. Admin error, I suppose. But we are currently blind to you and the op.”

“Well, how about we change that?”

“Yes. Agreed.”

“And I need traffic cams! Now!”

“Copy.”

Hearing his own tone of voice, Knox apologizes. No sense in taking this out on Kamat. Sarge or some bean counter has screwed up the paperwork. Murphy’s Law.

He puts himself in Grace’s shoes.

“Set alerts for traffic incidents or accidents,” he tells Kamat. “Alarms. Police, fire and ambulance deployments. Traffic violations. Erratic driving.”

“Copy,” Kamat says.

“I’m sending over a low-rez vid of the abduction. Request face recognition. Clothing. Voice. Tats. Anything you can give me on these two.”

“Understood.”

Knox e-mails the video in three parts. Wants to do more. Now! The “rapture of capture” that he typically experiences — the palpable excitement brought on by his being hired for an extraction — is absent. Instead, he cares, cares deeply about the outcome, though he knows such emotion is more of a liability than an asset. The mantra that reverberates through his mind is this: Grace can take care of herself; I know her; her captors have no clue what they’ve taken on.

Through the anxiety, a hint of a grin steals across his face. Then a grimace, the sting of impatience. Her abduction implies her flat was under surveillance.

Knox calls Kamat back. “The cell phone Grace had you geo-track. Has that number popped back up on the grid?”

“That was Xin, I believe.”

“Yes, sorry.”

“I can check the records. One thing to consider is an IMEI trace.”

“Give me the shorthand.”

“A different way to follow a phone. Hardware versus phone number. IMEI information moves with your billing. In a couple hours—”

“I need this now.”

“Affirm.”

“One last thing…” Knox has been considering how to approach this. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s out of contact with Dulwich; that could raise a red flag. Given that he’s listed as “on leave,” it might look to Kamat like Knox has gone rogue.

He continues. “Dulwich doesn’t want me contacting him directly on this op. This info is top priority.”

“I can contact him. No problem, John. You want to dictate the message? Stand by.” A beat. “Go.”

“G-C two-oh-seven. J-K Alzer.” The police code “207” to inform Dulwich about the kidnapping. “J-K” to indicate Knox is registered at the Alzer under his own name, not an alias.

Knox waits for Kamat to read back his message.

“Perfect,” Knox says.

“It’s gone.”

So is Grace.

Knox’s phone vibrates as he’s on his way to Grace’s apartment. It’s a text with three lat/long coordinates and times; Knox transfers them to the phone’s mapping app. The coordinates are eight, four and two hours old. Kamat has managed to lift a phone’s IMEI from a cell carrier’s logs. It’s for the man who kept vigil outside Grace’s apartment, the man who sat on a bench at the Sisli Mosque. A patient man. The eight-hour and two-hour locations are within a block of one another — at their center, the apartment housing Mashe Okle/Melemet whose address Grace provided to Knox.

Knox rides the Metro to Kabatas and the funicular up the steep hill to Taksim. Out on the streets again he enjoys the view across the Bosphorus, which is busy with white-wake ferries and boat traffic, to the city’s Asian side. Knox is unable to appreciate the beauty; instead, his head is crowded with plans. He shuffles imaginary tiles, trying to form an outline of the steps to come, the steps that will give him the greatest chance of success in his attempts to recover Grace.

Timing is everything. If she’s not already dead, he has twelve to twenty-four hours. After that, it will take a ransom to return her, a ransom he can’t imagine receiving from Rutherford Risk. It’s irrelevant, though: Grace was not taken for money, but for information. They’ll either dump her or kill her once they have whatever they’re after, and Knox is not willing to play those odds.

He returns to the Metro and rides to Sisli, the modernity of the train system juxtaposing everything else about the former Constantinople. It surfaces in front of the Sony Center and the enormous shopping mall. He takes a taxi to within a block of the lat/long locations, then pulls the Tigers cap low and stops to use the glass storefronts as dull mirrors, assimilating, memorizing. He’s in combat mode, as if a switch has been thrown, everyone’s a suspect, an enemy. No friendlies. His isolation armors him. He thrives, relishing the overwhelming data he must analyze, process and file. The woman with the two children is not dismissed, nor the squatting old man with the turban and a cigarette stitched to his lower lip. An aproned shopkeeper leans against his wooden stand of ripe red fruit, surveying the street no differently from Knox. There’s a baby stroller pushed by an attractive woman in her twenties who hides her waistline beneath a maternity blouse.

No one gets a free pass. He studies shoes, knowing they can often reveal impostors. Looks for bulges suggesting radios or weapons. For lips moving without the appearance of Bluetooth or earbud wires.

With a half block to go, Knox’s pulse elevates as his body works to keep up with his mind. His senses heighten to a point at which every sight, sound and smell is analyzed in nanoseconds. Possible threats enter his mental hotbox, a quarterback’s read of a sudden change in defense by the opposing team.

It’s four cigarette butts lying on the asphalt outside the driver’s door that alerts him to a man behind the wheel of a Fiat parked at the curb. The driver’s seat is cleverly laid back to take advantage of the frame between front and back window, and to position his head with a clear view of the apartment building now directly in front of Knox.

Across the next intersection, Knox lifts his phone as if checking a text but uses its camera to snap a photo over his right shoulder that includes the parked car. At the next intersection, now twenty meters past Mashe Melemet’s apartment, Knox crosses to the west. Out of sight of the car, he enlarges the photo until he can see the last five digits of the license plate. Progress. Texts the partial plate and the vehicle model to Kamat. Circles around the block, a plan of action defining itself. Feels sure he’s the victim of a conspiracy, one that’s primarily the result of Dulwich’s autonomy.

Rounding the final corner, Knox catches a wink of light in a passenger-side rearview mirror. The location of the car is consistent with what he’s observed. Whether it’s the driver or a second man in the passenger seat, it suggests the occupant of the car could be watching for him. This, in turn, indicates sophistication, a level of training that doesn’t match with a basic bodyguard or police. It kicks his opponent up a level to operative or agent, and reminds him of the surveillance conducted outside the Sisli Mosque and the tracked FedEx package.

What the hell has Dulwich gotten him into?

If these are operatives defending Mashe Okle, then the closer Knox draws, the more trouble will ensue. If he’s to play out his role as Knox the art dealer, he can’t be recognized as Knox the provocateur. The duality won’t work.

On the other hand, if Mashe’s people grabbed Grace, then this person or persons, also connected to Mashe, can likely provide information. Currently, Grace’s recovery is all that matters. Her abduction possesses him. It’s personal. It’s wrong. More important: it’s urgent.

Timing is everything.

He lowers the brim of the cap to disguise his face. Closer now, he sees it’s just the driver. The wink of the mirror must have resulted from its adjustment on the driver’s side. It moves again. Knox slips through two parked cars, coming up on the car’s left.

The agent will not anticipate Knox’s pick gun. Nor will he be prepared for Knox’s approach point. He may shoot Knox, but not if Knox is fast.

And Knox can be very fast.

The car’s trunk lock yields to the ingenuity of the pick gun — springs tripping tumbler keys at the squeeze of a trigger. Knox turns the device and the trunk pops open. His eyes go wide at the sight of the armory — Tavor assault rifle with nightscope, MP5 shotgun, stun grenades.

The Tavor confuses: Israeli-made, it could as easily signal a Mossad agent as someone pretending to be Mossad. This flashes through Knox’s mind as he rears back and kicks down the car’s backseat. He dives through, pulls like a swimmer and comes up behind the driver. Knox’s invasion has caught him by surprise.

Knox grabs the driver’s unclasped seat belt and pulls it tightly against the driver’s chest, pinning him to the seatback. Knox one-hands the seat belt and pats with his left hand, pinning the man’s hand as they both encounter the concealed handgun against the man’s hip and ribs. Knox briefly eases, giving the man a false sense of victory. Then Knox steals the gun from under the leather coat, drops the seat belt with his left hand and leans around to lock his forearm across the man’s throat. He grabs the man’s wrist and applies the chokehold. The driver bucks off his seat so hard he smashes his groin into the steering wheel. Knox feels him momentarily go limp.

“Where is she?” Knox asks in Arabic. From his time in Kuwait, his accent is good enough to mask his country of origin. “The Chinese woman. Where… is… she?”

The driver tries to shake his head. Knox releases long enough for a single gulp of air. “Do not know!”

The man’s move is swift and decisive. The driver has freed the seat adjustment with one foot while driving the seat back with the other. He crushes Knox’s knees, pins Knox into the broken backseat, and drives his right elbow into the gap between the seats, catching Knox on the cheek. The driver rips the rearview mirror from its support and swings awkwardly for Knox’s head.

Knox counters the blow with his forearm. His right hand goes numb, his arm wooden. The driver propels the back of the seat into Knox’s lap, pinning him further, and comes over in a reverse somersault, a move that has to be practiced. Knox doesn’t often find himself in over his head. He battles an unfamiliar surge of panic, pushes back the lactic acid that threatens to stiffen his joints. Pulls his right knee free. Feels something nearly lift his kneecap off the joint.

The driver, inverted and leveraging his strength by pushing against the ceiling, wedges his weight into Knox’s chest. The effect is like a scissors lock — Knox cannot breathe.

Knox scrabbles to find the man’s ear and pulls hard, like he’s trying to undo a stuck zipper. A scream, and blood.

Through it all, Knox hears the click of metal. Recognizes it immediately. Struggles to shift right, reaches down and yanks the cigarette lighter from where his knee has punched it. Plants it into the driver’s palm as the man chops at him. Knox pulls it back and makes contact with his adversary’s neck.

The screaming is deafening.

Knox punches the man in the temple, dumps him off, pops open the car door and rolls outside. He’s up and gone, running down the street as fast as his legs will carry him. The man’s words, Do not know, reverberate in his head.

Knox takes them as genuine.