Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

Dulwich has a bloody lip and a scratched cheek but his opponent is curled up in a fetal position and groaning. He kicks him twice to move him out of the way of the door. Grace grabs up the laptop before following Dulwich into the mezzanine.

“What the hell?” Dulwich says.

“Porn,” Grace says. “Child porn dumped onto my machine so I could be arrested.”

“Shit.” Dulwich skids to a stop outside the door to the stairs. “Wait here.” He can move well despite the leg when he wants to. He returns only seconds later with an employee ID card and lanyard in hand.

“Security cameras,” he tells her. “We’re all over them.”

Grace now assumes hotel security was alerted to porn-casters using their lobby’s free Internet. The purpose was to get Dulwich and Grace arrested by Amsterdam police, to take Grace out of the sweatshop business while learning as much about her and her financing as possible.

The hotel security footage represents their arrest.

A limping Dulwich leads the way down the hotel fire stairs to the basement. She has spent a limited amount of time with him in the field. She could easily take the lead—his bad leg is a hindrance—but there’s an alpha dog air about him that cautions her.

From the back, Dulwich’s thick neck and massive shoulders intimidate. She has forgotten who this man is, the past he comes from. His soft gray eyes and unresponsive face belie the reality. She has been lulled into an opinion of him that’s shattered as she follows. He’s a wolf on a scent. The most she can hope for is to pick up a few scraps.

He never checks to see if she follows; he doesn’t care. He whips the bad leg ahead of him, hurrying down the bright, subterranean corridor out to prove something. To himself? To her? To others?

She can’t figure out how he knows his way until she realizes his upward head motion isn’t part of dealing with the leg. The ceiling holds metal brackets supporting dozens of blue Ethernet wires, round black cables and phone lines. They turn and terminate at the door he now stands before. He slides the ID card into the door’s mechanism; the doorplate beeps and a red light turns green. Dulwich pockets the card and leans against the door’s lever handle.

He dispatches a middle-aged woman sitting before a rack of flat-screen monitors by kicking her chair into the countertop and slamming her head down from behind. She’s out. A second man, coming out of his chair, drops an iPad as Dulwich backhand-chops him in the throat, elbows him in the chest and throws him to the floor. No more than five seconds have passed.

“Thumb drives, hard drives, DVDs,” he says. He must be talking to her, though he doesn’t look in her direction. “Here!” He grabs the unconscious woman’s purse, upends it, dumping its contents and passes it to Grace. “Everything. Nothing left behind.” He starts ripping Ethernet cables at random, concerned there may be a cloud backup in place. She’s never considered him much of a techie, but Dulwich works methodically through the chilly room at a feverish pace, stripping it of any memory capability. They confiscate a dozen thumb drives, thirty DVDs and half that many freestanding external drives. Ninety seconds after they’ve entered, they’re out in the hallway.

Five meters from the corridor’s exit sign, the door beneath pops open. A black-suited security man with a shaved head and quick eyes emerges. He’s outwardly suspicious of these two strangers, but forges a smile as he and Dulwich pass shoulder to shoulder. Dulwich stops at the elevator and slaps the wall button.

The security man continues toward the office. Ten meters . . . five . . .

Dulwich waits for the elevator. Grace can’t believe this decision. It’s costing them precious time. Worse, she has no doubt the elevator can be controlled from the security office.

The chirp of the door to the security office rings out. The man depresses the lever.

Dulwich darts across the corridor to the stairs as the elevator dings its arrival, Grace close on his heels. The leg is far more difficult to maneuver while climbing. Had he wanted to take the elevator, or was it only a ruse?

“How many on duty?” he says, rounding the first landing toward the lobby level.

“Six,” she says.

“Correct.”

In a bank of ten walkie-talkie chargers, five radios are missing. The woman dispatcher who won’t leave the office accounts for the sixth employee.

“Four down,” Grace says, “and the one we just passed, leaves one. Possibly more depending on the condition of the first two.”

“Give me that!” He grabs the security woman’s purse from her. Stuffs various pockets with samples of its contents. Returns it to her. “We separate from here. Rendezvous at Wing Kee on Zeedijk. One hour. You take the lobby.”

“You’ve got the lobby,” she says stubbornly. The leg will slow him down. The lobby is the quickest way to the street. She pulls the door open for him, and snags the ID card from his hand, balling up its lanyard in her fist.

He’s about to object.

“One hour,” she says, then nudges him and closes the door behind him. She climbs to the mezzanine level, where the ballrooms are letting out. She mixes into the crowd and leaves with others ten minutes later, walking within an arm’s reach of the security man she’d passed in the basement who stands a sentry surveilling the crowd. His eyes go right past her. He’d locked in on the alpha dog.

For once, Grace doesn’t mind being an afterthought.

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.