Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

“Hey.”

“There you are!” Tommy comes in two flavors: apathetic and charged. It’s the latter today, which is easier for Knox. When apathetic, Tommy is unreachable.

“How are things?”

“You know.” Tommy feels responsible for the embezzlement of over three hundred thousand dollars by their company’s former bookkeeper, Evelyn, a woman Tommy became infatuated with. No matter how many times Knox explains Evelyn fooled them both, Tommy can’t forgive himself. Part of the guilt revolves around Tommy’s crush, allowing her to manipulate him. Knox has plans for Evelyn when he finds her, and he will find her.

“I’m taking a job with Sarge. I don’t know for how long, but it will pay well.”

“How’d the buying go?”

Knox isn’t sure he’s heard him. Tommy can be funny that way. “Good. You got my e-mails?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know it went well.” There are those who treat Tommy like a ten-year-old. Not his brother.

“You shipped to the warehouse.”

“Correct.” They’re getting somewhere; Tommy is staying on top.

“We can put the new stuff online as soon as they’re inventoried.” There’s pride in his voice now, making Knox happy.

“Yes. That’s right. You can take care of the inventory?”

“No problem.”

That a boy. “ You heard what I said about Sarge?”

“Yeah.”

“It doesn’t mean you can’t call me.”

“I know.”

“I want you to call me.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Seriously.”

“But not too serious.”

Knox can’t wipe the smile off his face as he answers. “You got that right.”

“What kind of job? With Sarge?”

“Just a thing.”

Much as he knows he needs to keep the lines of communication open, Tommy is a liability. Someone might try to track down Tommy to get to Knox. Ignorance is bliss. People who run sweatshops are not to be messed with. The kind of person who chains a ten-year-old to a worktable thinks nothing of taking out a thirty-something Curious George. He and Dulwich rarely discuss the risks. The pay grade reflects them up front. None of that does Tommy much good if Knox doesn’t come home. Knox is wearing a bull’s-eye on his back before he ever leaves for Amsterdam.

“Yeah, okay.” Tommy knows the rules.

“So we’re good?” A loaded question.

“You’re saying you’re not coming to see me.”

The question hangs over Knox like an executioner’s blade. He can’t speak. Who’s the child now? Knox resents the responsibility for Tommy even as he moves to meet it.

“Take care, Johnny.” It comes out as a memorized line.

Grace enters the Netherlands on her own passport. One of the fallouts from 9/11 for companies like Rutherford Risk is the difficulty in forging identities. It can still be done, she knows, but it’s expensive and time consuming. It has been two weeks since Dulwich offered her the work. Two extremely busy weeks of conference calls with Dulwich and Knox, and Knox alone; CV creation and corresponding background support so that by the time she hands the hotel desk clerk her European Union business card everything will check out. Not exactly a new identity, but a solid academic and employment record that will hold up under all but the most intense and high-level scrutiny.

She is dressed in a conservative gray suit with low black heels. It was bought off a used-clothing rack in Hong Kong specifically for the slight fraying of both sleeve cuffs. She wears the worn, tired expression of an overtraveled low-level bureaucrat. At hotel registration her speech is clipped, but polite, and she displays a road warrior’s knowledge of everything expected of her: passport, credit card, business card, signature. She waves off the bellman and hauls her roll-aboard to the elevator, barely lifting her eyes as she punches her floor number.

Once into her room, she unpacks, maintaining the routine of an experienced traveler. Her mobile alerts her to an e-mail with an attachment she’d rather open on her laptop, so she takes a minute to set up her traveling office. Chargers, wires, the laptop with a Bluetooth mouse. She carries a data/Wi-Fi device that goes on the desk as well. The encryption between the laptop, the data device and the cell network requires a piece of USB hardware, the software equivalent of a tempered stainless-steel lock. Three passwords later, she’s into her corporate mail and is downloading a PDF sent by Dulwich—which turns out to be a scanned copy of an Amsterdam police report. The existence of the report should have been good news, for it signals Dulwich’s having established a local police contact for her and Knox. But it’s anything but.

She responds to her situation physically—an elevated heart rate, sweaty palms. This assignment is important, if not critical. Her moment has arrived; she intends to capitalize on it. Brian Primer will not be sorry he approved her participation.

Grace’s Dutch is better spoken than written and read. It’s true of her Italian, Russian and Arabic as well. But she’s fluent in German and finds it useful as she attempts to decipher the police report.

An Egyptian-born male, one Kahil Fahiz, thirty-two, was the victim of a mugging/robbery just west of the central district. He sustained multiple minor injuries and lacerations, was treated at a hospital as an outpatient and was discharged. On the surface it looks common enough. But for Grace, it is a minor shot of adrenaline. She reviews the initial newspaper article, skimming it for a name that’s echoing around her head. Finds it:

Ka br il Fahiz.

Sonia Pangarkar’s article quotes a Ka br il Fahiz, a local merchant who took a dim view of child labor sweatshops in his neighborhood.

Ka h il . . . Ka br il.

She places a call using the laptop.

“Have you opened it yet?” she asks Knox over the VPN’s voice-to-Internet protocol software. As he speaks on his mobile, it is conceivable Knox’s end of the conversation might be eavesdropped on. Not so for her. In a perfect world they would both be on the VPN.

“The police report? I have. My written Dutch is a little lacking.”

“It’s the victim’s statement, short as it is, that interests me—us. That, and his family name of course.”

“Okay,” Knox says.

“It states that they beat him and robbed him. But at the end of the beating, one of them said something in Farsi along the lines of: ‘That’ll teach you to open your mouth.’ The victim said he spent hours trying to figure out what he might’ve said and when he might’ve said it, but came up blank.”

“We all say things we later regret.”

“No . . . it is not that. Not in this case. The sergeant filing the report made an interesting observation. Entirely speculative, but important to us.”

“Okay?”

“Ka br il Fahiz,” she says, emphasizing the second syllable, “the man Pangarkar interviewed for her story, is from the same neighborhood—Oud-West—and is the same approximate age as the victim, Ka h il Fahiz, the one they assaulted.”

“These apes go asking around intending to pound this guy who’s speaking to reporters into a different postal code—”

“But they mispronounce his name. Kabril and Kahil—an easy mistake to make.”

“They beat up the wrong guy,” Knox said, speculating. “I like the way you think. Have I told you that?”

“It wasn’t me, it was the police. It is speculation. You’re jet-lagged. Stay on point.”

“They got the wrong guy. Mixed up the names. Listen, I get it!”