Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

A quick learner.

Following the address contained in the police report, Grace arrives at a nondescript brick apartment building, one of a line of identical structures on Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam’s Oud-West. The suburban neighborhood has all the elegance of a community college campus.

Grace double-checks the house number against the photocopied report.

The door is unlocked. She passes an umbrella stand and a boot brush. Finds a two-person elevator and a door marked as fire stairs. The staircase holds the unpleasant aftereffects of curry and cigarettes. The space is well lighted, with no graffiti. Posters warn of AIDS.

The man she confronted in the shisha café knew nothing of a newspaper reporter; had no bruises or signs of having been attacked. The man who’d checked into the hospital had provided a bogus address, but one that was registered to a man with his same name. Clever, yes. But also premeditated. He’d known how he would fill out the forms well before arriving at the emergency room. The beating had scared him. Finding such a cautious man will not be easy.

She walks the second-floor hallway, past doors muting the sounds of music and television, conversation and radio. She stops, recalling the police report. She grins, amused. The address is apartment 9. There are only eight apartments.

She retreats and knocks on the door. A Slavic woman answers, too pretty for such a place. She’s wearing a clean yet well-worn frock.

Grace displays her EU credentials. She speaks Dutch slowly. The woman has no trouble understanding. There is no man named Fahiz, Grace is told. Not that she knows of. People come and go. It is hard to keep track. We don’t know each other well, the woman confesses.

A second dead end from the elusive Kahil Fahiz, a man mistaken for another.

Grace is about to inquire if the police have been around, but thinks better of it. She thanks the woman and compliments her on her child, asleep in a springed rocker. Grace’s attention lingers a little too long on the infant.

“You have children of your own?” the woman asks.

Grace offers a half-smile, reminded of the wedding ring she wears as part of her cover. Thanks the woman. Descends the stairs in something of a trance. She feels weary. Old. She has left her high school sweetheart behind in China for a second time. Twice she has felt the skin peeled from her body; twice she has been forced to heal. She calls Knox, wondering why this is the first thing she thinks to do.

“Can you talk?”

“And listen,” he says. “With pleasure.”

She throws an internal switch: back to Grace the spy. “He provided a fake address. Twice, actually, but the second time to the cops.”

“That’s ballsy.”

“Afraid the police report would leak,” she says.

“And it did. He was right about that. You and I should not forget.”

“I’m going to try the mobile number he provided to the police. I thought you should know.”

“First, can you get into billing records for the mobile carriers?”

On their first job together, a kidnapping case in Shanghai, they had used a third-party hacker. It had bothered Grace to involve an outsider. Since their return to Hong Kong she had devoted herself to studying with the Data Sciences division at Rutherford Risk, a group that included a cadre of prepubescent freaks who kept their own hours and could drill into any server unobserved. Knox can tell by her silence that she takes offense at his asking.

“To see if the number’s valid, et cetera, before dialing it yourself,” he says. “There could be more accurate billing information with the mobile carrier.”

“Point taken,” Grace said. “And for the record, I had not planned to call from my own mobile.”

“No. I didn’t mean to imply—”

“Of course you did.”

“I want to back you up.”

“We’ll see,” she says.

“Just as you helped me at Centraal.”

“It is possible.”

“It’s nonnegotiable.”

“Did you connect with Pangarkar?”

“In a manner of speaking. We were in the same room for a few minutes.”

“We need her.”

He returns the silent treatment.

“I will check the carrier. Then I will call.” She hangs up. She finds a wireless connection in the lobby of the Hotel Pulitzer on Prinsengracht. The mobile’s number Fahiz supplied the police is a pay-as-you-go, rechargeable SIM card from SingTel, a Singapore cellular provider. The pay-as-you-go cards are not registered because there’s no billing; their owner remains anonymous. She and Knox carry several such cards, providing them different, untraceable numbers. But use of a SIM card from a faraway country is an interesting choice for an Amsterdam local. A foreign provider means far higher costs: ten times what one would pay using a local pay-as-you-go card. Fahiz’s use of a foreign SIM tells her that the increased cost doesn’t matter to him, and that distance—real anonymity—does. She wonders if he bought it after the assault to assure he can’t be easily found. But a second check reveals he’s been recharging the card for nearly three years. This takes her into interesting territory.

“Fahiz is something of a curiosity.”

“Aren’t we all.”

She fills him in on the man’s use of a SingTel SIM card, pointing out the added expense, the implication of long-distance travel. She juxtaposes this with the false address he supplied to the police, and his listing his employment as “consultant.”

“You and I, it’s much the same,” Knox says. “Three different cards, three different numbers, three different uses.”

“But an average person?”

“None of us is average,” Knox says. “He could owe child support. He could be a closet billionaire who just wants his privacy. Doesn’t make him a person of interest in and of itself. Maybe he has five wives and five different families.”

“Whose fantasy are we talking about here?”

“It would explain,” he says, “why he gives the police a false address, but a working phone number. He wants to be contacted; he doesn’t want to be able to be found.”

She doesn’t like it when Knox outthinks her. She loses her train of thought.

“All we care about,” Knox says, “is that someone beat the snot out of him in a case of mistaken identity.”

“For safety’s sake, I will call him from a landline. A hotel over on Prinsengracht,” she tells Knox.

“Good idea,” Knox says.

“You wanted to know when I was going to call him.”

“If you make arrangements to meet with him, I want in on that.”

The call is placed from the hotel lounge, brown faux-leather chairs and couches grouped around black marble coffee tables on stainless-steel legs. Grace leaves a credit card with the desk to pay for the call. An automated voice tells her to leave a message. She does so.

Twenty minutes later, she receives a call.

“Ms. Chu?”

“Speaking.”

“Fahiz, here.”

She reintroduces herself as an EU official investigating hate crimes. The police report implied he’d been beaten for something he may have said. She would like to speak with him, if possible.

“The police were not to share my information,” the man protests.

“I am afraid in instances such as yours they have no choice. Brussels is always notified in the case of hate crimes.”

“I was . . . It was a mistake. It was an attack aimed at someone else.”

“Yes. The man quoted in the newspaper article. Similar names. It is horrible.” He says nothing. She continues. “This man, this other Fahiz, has left the city, along with the other sources quoted in the article. It might be wise for you to do the same.”