Ridley Pearson - Choke Point

Kreiger arrives at the top of the stairs and returns to his desk, where he sees the note ahead of when Knox would have wanted. It reads:

Nice banana plant. Get me the rugs.

Kreiger checks his safe. Roars to where the building shakes. Lumbers quickly downstairs shouting in Dutch.

Knox slides a chair into the hallway to make up the height he needs. Climbs up and out the jimmied window, the duffel over his shoulder. Knows the chair’s placement will give him away.

—

“YOU MISSED THE SHOW.”Sonia has succumbed to a glass of red wine and a calamari appetizer. Maybe two or three glasses, because she looks entrenched and comfortable, her earlier trepidation calmed. She emotes an air of respect for him.

“Did I?” Knox signals the waitress and orders a coffee. Maybe it’s all an act, adrenaline giving way to shock. Or a fatalistic surrender. But she’s eerily stable as she crosses her legs and treats him like they’re out on a date.

“No beer?”

“No beer.”

She angles the laptop in his direction. Knox is watching the restaurant’s back exit, the foot traffic in front on the sidewalk and, across the canal, the mouth of the alley that leads to Natuurhonig. One eye finds the laptop.

Kreiger’s office chair is empty. Suddenly a man screams.

“That would be Kreiger checking his safe,” Knox says.

Four minutes later, the florid-faced, winded man deposits himself into the desk chair and begins typing. Knox borrows Sonia’s wineglass and upends it. She covers her smile. When the waitress delivers the coffee, he orders her another.

Knox now divides his attention to include two smaller windows open on the laptop screen. The first scrolls code he doesn’t understand. The second shows a map where a red line stretches from Amsterdam to Berlin and back to Amsterdam.

“I captured these screen shots,” Sonia says. The resulting screen shots play out like a slide show. The last shows a district in Amsterdam as an island of pink. Knox studies it long enough to get its street boundaries.

He tests the temperature of the coffee and then drinks down half the cup. He can feel her watching him.

“You are not going to tell me,” she says.

He passes her the duffel. “To help Berna and the other girls. I’m assuming the hard drives will give you a story worth publishing, including human trafficking. Enough evidence to bring down Kreiger. Hopefully, Fahiz. That’s a work in progress.”

She unzips it, peers inside at the cash and gasps. Zips it back up. “I cannot,” she says, aiming the strap back at Knox. Her eyes stray to the bag repeatedly. She consumes a good deal of the wine as it arrives. “Jesus! It’s so much, John.”

He studies the laptop one more time to make sure he has it right. The Dutch street names drive him nuts. Alphabet soup. He enters several numbers from Grace’s contacts into the new phone: Primer’s direct office number; the tech center; Dulwich’s mobile; the Rutherford Risk emergency number. Some of these he has memorized, but the mind does strange things when juiced on adrenaline. Knox knows what’s coming.

“I want to help you,” she says. He won’t look at her. Knows the power of those eyes.

“Then get as far away from me as possible. Go to ground. Write your story. The pen is mightier, and all that.”

“And you are the sword?”

“I’m dull, but I’ll have to do.”

“Not dull,” she says, “just not honest.”

He nods. Finishes the coffee. It’s not as good as the earlier cup.

—

KNOX DROPS THE LAPTOPinto the canal as he crosses the bridge. Feels its loss in his chest for it signals the endgame, a point of no return. There might be a dozen routes to the same end but he can only think of the one. Having started it in motion there’s no going back, even if he wanted to. This is what he tells himself, though a voice of conscience suggests otherwise; there’s always time to change plans. But he’s robotic, preprogrammed. His pace increases, his demeanor intensifies. He passes the curious and the creeps, the Indiana innocents and the perverts. The full-length windows are alight with wan skin and scant underclothing, navel rings and wigs. The air reeks of marijuana, tobacco and perfume. Of Indian food and motorboat exhaust. A dozen songs compete, Euro-rock to The Fray. Oddly enough, it’s the perfect place to hide—all attention is on the window girls and the promise of depravity.

He reaches the front door to Natuurhonig. Thinks back to his and Grace’s entrance. The receptionist, the gorgeous Tarantinoesque blonde. Doesn’t recall a male bouncer, but assumes that he—or they—blended in with the customers. But Kreiger is a cheap son of a bitch: there will only be the one bouncer.

“Good evening,” he tells the attractive receptionist, as he hands her fifty euros. Perhaps she remembers him. But his sour smell and sweat-stained face and hair must set off an alarm, along with the fact he doesn’t wait for her to admit him.

Knox is facing the stairs when a wide body in designer jeans and a mock turtleneck crosses toward him.

“Nice shirt.”

An amateur, the guy reaches out to grab Knox by the forearm. Knox pins the man’s thumb to his wrist and drops him to his knees. Crushes his nose with his own kneecap, then toes him in the solar plexus. The bleeding man collapses to the floor unable to breathe. Knox has barely broken stride. He climbs the stairs, two at a time, turning right at the top.

He shuts and locks Kreiger’s door and is behind the man’s desk before Kreiger has the desk drawer open that contains what turns out to be a .45. Unloaded, after Knox handles it.

He strips the man’s sport coat partially off his shoulders, pinning Kreiger to the office chair. Ties the man’s hands with phone cord. Pulls up a chair and sits cross-legged facing Kreiger.

Hears heavy footfalls coming upstairs.

“Tell him everything’s fine,” Knox advises.

Kreiger has only now begun to process what’s happening. The smell of pot smoke alerts Knox to the man’s dulled condition. Following the discovery of his empty safe, he blew a blunt.

The one in the hall sounds intent on bringing the door down. Kreiger calls out and assures him everything is okay. It takes two tries. The man calls back that he’s not leaving. He’s waiting outside the door.

Knox shakes his head at Kreiger, who then instructs the man to wait downstairs.

“I will get you the rugs,” Kreiger says pleadingly.

Knox offers a winsome smile.

It takes an inordinate amount of time for Kreiger’s stoned brain to process what’s happening. “Oh, shit.”

“Now you’ve got it,” Knox says. “You know that e-mail you just sent to Fahiz—or whatever name he goes by?” Knox smiles a shit-eating grin. “He called himself ‘Fahiz’ to the police. He’s a clever one. But you just gave him up, Gerhardt. He’s done. Which means you have one, and only one, play. You work with the police and maybe they protect you. Maybe, just maybe, they save your life.”

Kreiger is green. It’s a bad high. He’s wishing he hadn’t taken those last two tokes.

“Work with me,” Knox says.

Kreiger’s eyes wander to the open safe.

“I have the hard drives.”

Kreiger shakes his head.

“We know each other, Gerhardt. We’ve done business together for what, four, five years?”

Kreiger can’t speak, or knows he shouldn’t.

“And I am the guy you think I am. A simple businessman like yourself. Right?”

Kreiger rattles off a string of profanities in Dutch. Knox doesn’t know them all, but recognizes one as a piece of female anatomy.

“Stop me when I’m wrong,” Knox says.

Kreiger simply stares back at Knox.