Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

“It’s an ideal setup,” Knox says conversationally, dabbing his neck wound. It’s going to need a butterfly bandage or several Band-Aids to hold it closed, but it’s manageable for now. “There’s a market street to the west, giving an excuse for the girls to be in the area. They disappear inside the abandoned complex. Reappear when the market is shutting down. No one’s going to see them or question them being around.”

Dulwich taps the brakes, slides through a changing traffic light and nearly collides with a tram. He times it perfectly, sticking the Audi on the far side of the tram where anyone following would no longer see them.

“There’s a coffee shop on the corner. And the market itself. I need to be there early.”

“You’re out of your mind. They made you.”

“We don’t know that. And it’s guaranteed they won’t be looking for me anywhere around there. I’d be crazy to go back there.”

“My point exactly.” Dulwich slows the Audi to the proper speed limit. “We’ll be all over the traffic cams. I need to return the car, pronto. I’ll use the key drop. Rent another in the morning.”

Checking his phone, Knox says, “Drop me with Grace, or someplace near.”

Seeing the phone in Knox’s hand, Dulwich says, “You didn’t really think that would work, did you?”

“It’s three in the morning,” Knox says. “Ain’t over ’til it’s over.”

“Kreiger’s the better play.”

“Grace is all over that.”

Glancing back at Knox’s phone, Dulwich takes his eyes off the road. “Give it up.”

“Not a chance,” Knox says.

“You poisoned it, same as every woman you’ve ever been with.”

“Says the man who can’t carry a relationship beyond a drink order.”

Dulwich chuckles, takes a right and an immediate left, narrowly missing an oncoming car. “Got that right.”

“It will have taken her a day or two to reach Fahiz. Maybe more. Based on the way he dealt with Grace, his curiosity won’t allow him to deny her.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“She’ll bait him. Sonia’s a pro. She’s not inviting him to tea.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“You get close to somebody, you get to know them. You ought to try it sometime.”

“He’ll stuff her into the back of a van and dump the body.”

“Not if we’re there to stop him.”

“You’re talking shit. When was the last time you slept?”

“What day is this?”

Dulwich can’t summon it. He starts laughing from the gut, a contagious laugh that Knox tries hard to escape, but can’t.

“I’m stopping at the next light. You’re out of here,” Dulwich says. “Wheels up at sixteen hundred. You want your paycheck, you’re on that plane.”

“I thought you’re coming back with a different car.”

“In case I don’t.”

“Screw that.” Knox knows it’s impossible, but he hears the dashboard’s digital clock ticking. He needs sleep. And food.

“You get Grace onto that plane.”

“Shut up.”

The car stops at the light. Knox climbs out with difficulty. His ankle’s frozen, every muscle tight or bruised. The Audi peels out. Dulwich never talks smack in an op. Embattled by the Turkish mob on one side and the Amsterdam police on the other, he’s dropped out of the Optimists’ Club. He comes from an operational mind-set, a pragmatism Knox can’t afford. He’s placed his bet: the three of them won’t make the plane. Someone, or more than someone, is going to be left in the jet’s backwash. He’s suggesting it will be him, but only out of politeness. He knows it’ll be Knox, or Knox and Sonia. His mention of Grace was a not-too-subtle statement that said she would be on the plane no matter what sacrifice it requires. Of the three of them, she’s the most valuable to Brian Primer and Rutherford Risk. She’s the mathematical savant who can change into the cape in the phone booth and double in the field. She’s Primer’s rising star, and it’s Dulwich’s job to protect her.

Primer has barracks full of John Knoxes. The Grace Chus come around rarely.

Knox keeps his head down for the sake of the CCTV cameras. It’s a long walk back to Grace. He starts humming Paul Simon’s “Graceland.” It helps his ankle, improves his mood.

Dawn is suggested as a pink dust against the gray clouds behind him, but Knox doesn’t see it. He’s focused on the traffic, the next street corner, and every shadow within fifty meters.

The service apartment on Goudsbloemstraat, northwest of the city center, is warmly furnished in a contemporary style. With a full working kitchen and washer/dryer, living room and bedroom, the suite’s opulence bothers Grace. For all her Westernization, she still feels uncomfortable when alone in such places. With the deposit, it cost Dulwich over fifteen hundred euros—a month’s rental for a suite of rooms they intend to occupy for less than a full day. But it’s in a quiet part of town on a narrow street where people apparently keep to themselves. She doubts there’s been more than two people at a time out on the sidewalks; she rarely hears a car drive past.

Stretched out in bed, having taken a long hot bath to clean her wound, and an oxycodone to wash away her pain, she navigates her laptop through the company’s VPN, a Web proxy server called Hide My Ass, and a second Australian proxy service she learned about from Kamat. Trying to find her now would be like searching for Nessie. She finds the meds calming. The lack of stress is so foreign to her that she briefly experiences a kind of mental vertigo, only to find herself giddy. Instead of foggy, she’s intensely focused and mentally nimble. Giggles at the sound of her fingers tapping arrhythmically on the keyboard.

A few minutes past four, Gerhardt Kreiger’s face appears in an open window on the laptop’s screen. Natuurhonig, his brothel, has closed for the night. When the ladies head home, Kreiger is seen counting a good deal of cash. Her screen-capture software reveals that he examines the electronic credit card charges as well. He matches amounts with girls, leaves nothing to chance. She envisions a business where shorting the house is commonplace. He removes the cash from the desk; there are noises—he’s still in the office. He returns to the desk empty-handed.

Another open window monitors Kreiger’s data console in a scroll of green numbers on a black screen. A long search string resides in a tiny box and the automated software routinely checks for a match. When a set of numbers goes, a bell tone sounds, drawing Grace’s attention.

She hears the door come open. Her right hand finds the weapon below the sheets. Her finger lays across the trigger.

“It’s me,” Knox calls out. He’s carrying a grocery bag; his neck is patched up with four flesh-colored Band-Aids.

She lets go of the gun.

“Good timing,” she says. “We may be onto something.” Her eyes dart among the half dozen open windows on her screen. For her this is like a game of Sudoku, establishing patterns by supplying missing pieces while trusting all along that those pieces fit. Computer traffic and data flow is no more random than vehicles in a city at rush hour. It appears chaotic, but every vehicle’s driver has a destination; there is a logic to the routes they take. So it is with each piece or packet of data: someone directed it, someone else received it. For her to break every encryption used by Kreiger would take months, perhaps years. So she allows his machine to do this for her; she merely captures the incoming stream, and mirrors the resulting images on his screen, reading or viewing, or listening to it, just as Kreiger does.