Choke Point (26 page)

Twenty minutes later, the stolen car rendezvouses with Dulwich in a church parking lot less than a mile from the knot shop. Knox beams as he bumps the car into the lot.

To his surprise, Dulwich has done as he requested: he’s behind the wheel of a rented white van.

—

G
RACE IS
POSITIONED
across the sedan’s backseat with a view of the park containing the fountain, the street market and the building with the knot shop beyond. Her mobile phone is connected by a Bluetooth earpiece; she hears Knox’s breathing and the low rumble of the van’s engine. They left her here in the car, with the keys in the ignition, but Dulwich took her laptop “for safe keeping.” A reminder that, with her leg wound, she is the most vulnerable.

“Three small girls in the market,” she reports.

“Copy,” Knox says.

The choice of location seems so obvious—so perfect—now that she sees it in person. A natural barrier of a canal to the east; a market where the girls can mingle and blend in before disappearing into the abandoned buildings beyond.

She wonders if this market is where the vendor, Marta, first spotted the girls. First wormed her way into a role of scout and recruiter. Eventually moved her stall to a different market to increase Fahiz’s reach across the community. Is reminded that to many who live in the area she and Knox and Dulwich are the enemy, not Fahiz.

The white van arrives, turns into the dirt lot and disappears.

“Nothing unusual,” she reports, keeping watch for police or a Fahiz guard.

“Stand by,” Knox says.

—

D
ULWICH HAS
THE DRIVER’S SEAT
pushed back to where he can’t be seen in profile. Knox is crouched facing the van’s rear doors, but the space is not meant for a man his size. His legs are cramping.

Dulwich throws it into park and waits. Knox has the dormitory girls to thank for knowing how the drop-off works. The white van he and Dulwich occupy stops outside, just as a different white van always does. A moment later, the van’s rear doors will be opened. The girls would normally climb out and be escorted inside—sometimes two at a time, sometimes all at once. In this rental there is a curtained divider in place that separates the driver from the girls, just as in the regular white van. Its back windows are covered by newsprint. A man from the knot shop escorts them; a guard in the back of the van will help to escort them inside. At least two other men remain inside the shop.

Knox doesn’t appreciate the wait. The van they’re in is a newer model than the one confiscated by the police. How will the men inside react? The girls claimed the van changed occasionally, but the lack of response to their arrival is troubling.

“What’s going on?” Knox asks.

Dulwich has the building’s rear door in his outside rearview mirror.
“Nada.”

Knox’s thighs are killing him.

“Back it up,” he says. “Make like we’re bailing.”

Dulwich pulls the visor down to help screen his face as he eases the van into reverse and lets it roll backward.

The door to the shop opens immediately. A man waves for the van to stop. He has a short black beard and hair to match. He wears blue jeans and a New York Giants sweatshirt. He’s short, but strong.

Dulwich is more visible from having backed up, putting him and Knox at a disadvantage. He forces himself back into the seat, and leans his head back, hoping not to be seen.

After a moment’s hesitation, the man in the doorway reaches around to his back.

“Gun!” Dulwich shouts, popping open the driver’s door. He rolls out of the driver’s seat as the first shot penetrates the windshield. He has failed to put the van into park. It rolls back, still in reverse. Knox throws open the rear doors and jumps out. His cramped legs won’t hold him. As he attempts to stand, he collapses. The van backs up and Knox flattens, crawling out of the way of the rear axle’s differential, forcing himself into the space between it and the wheel. The front tires are turned slightly. Knox has to belly-crawl to the center of the undercarriage to avoid being paved by the right front tire. The van passes over him. Knox gets a clear shot at the shins of the man who’s put three more rounds into the door panel. His second shot shatters bone and the man drops like a broken bar stool.

Knox pistol-whips the fallen man and slides his handgun to Dulwich.

“Gracias,”
Dulwich says. Hampered by his bad leg, he has every reason to fear a firefight.

The van continues backing up, colliding with the wall and scraping and grinding its way along the brick. It comes to rest, the driver’s door mirror bent and angled, its engine straining, back tires spitting dirt as they spin out. The engine stalls.

Top 40 music plays from a radio inside, the only sounds. If there are girls, they are eerily quiet. Knox scoots back along the wall below rows of fixed glass panes the size of bathroom tile. Has no intention of firing into a room full of young girls. Wonders if the two men inside know this. Are counting on it.

Bruno Mars is singing about grenades.

“Anything?” Dulwich says.

Knox shakes his head, only to realize Dulwich is speaking to Grace.

Knox has long since lost his earbud. The white wire dangles from his jacket.

Dulwich hand-signals Knox:
No sign of the two men.

Knox works his way back to a narrow column of brick separating the sets of windows; he stands, his shoulder blades pressed to the wall.

A flicker of movement to his right. It takes him a half second to realize it’s coming from the van’s bent mirror. It shows the bridge of a nose and the peak of a man’s forehead. He’s as flat to the interior wall as Knox is.

Knox ducks down and works his way back to the van. Slips out of his jacket and wraps it tightly around his right hand, switching the weapon to his left. Eases his way up the brick, sweat breaking out everywhere. Dulwich knows better than to look in his direction, but has followed Knox’s every move.

Knox swings out, smashes through the glass with his wrapped hand and catches the man by the throat, pinning him to the wall. Hears a gun drop as the man reaches to fight the choke hold, but works against himself. In a deceptively fast move, Knox shifts the man’s throat to the inside of his elbow; Knox drops his weapon and, pulling the man to the window, effects a choke hold with both arms. He has the advantage of six or seven inches and fifty pounds. He hauls the man off his feet, breaking glass with the man’s head and shoulders. He extracts him, finishes the choke hold and drops the unconscious man to his feet.

“We’ve got one in the wind,” Dulwich reports, receiving notice from Grace. “Heading west on Bellamystraat.”

“Can she drive?” Knox calls across to Dulwich, who relays the request.

Knox risks a quick look through the broken glass. The place looks empty. He steals a second look inside. Moves to and past the door, gaining another angle. For the first time, he sees a girl prone on the floor by a stack of wool, her hands over her head. Then, another.

“Are there any more men?” Knox shouts in Dutch. One of the girls, with about the saddest eyes Knox has ever seen, looks up at him and shakes her head. Not afraid—sad. Knox kicks open the door fully, waits and then rolls inside, coming to prone with his weapon extended.

Two dozen brown eyes stare back at him from where the girls lie on the floor.

—

I
T WASN’T
EASY DRAGGING HERSELF
behind the wheel. There are two kinds of pain at work—a dull, bone-penetrating throbbing, and an electric-sharp pang from the wound itself as her thigh muscles contract. The two combine to blur her vision with unwanted tears and steal her breath as her chest goes tight. She turns the key.

Thankfully, it’s her left leg and therefore not involved in the act of driving. But even small inconsistencies in the roadbed send her shuddering with chills.

She picks up her mark easily—the fool is locked in an awkward stiff-legged walk on the south side of Bellamystraat, glancing back with terrified eyes every twenty meters. He must be expecting someone on foot, for he misses Grace’s slow patrol.

For how long, she can’t be sure. He goes left at the next street. Rather than follow, Grace drives past, though slowly enough to determine he’s just running scared. This is a bedroom neighborhood he’s trying to find his way out of.

Grace, too. The next turn is a dead end. The one after that, a short lane that connects with a street perpendicular, forcing her to turn east toward where she last saw him. She passes a Caribbean restaurant, only to realize he’s nowhere in front of her. Swings a U-turn and an immediate left, and there he is crossing Kinkerstraat against a traffic light.

He’s come full circle. The knot shop is a block ahead on the left, and she briefly wonders if it’s on purpose, if he intends to return. These questions are put to rest when he boards a tram and rides toward the city center.

“The one who escaped is heading east on the number seven.”

Dulwich answers that he copies.

“Police,” she says, as a string of the flashing lights race toward and then past her.

She hears Dulwich repeat the warning to Knox. There’s a discussion between them but she only gets Dulwich’s side. He’s adamant that the white van they’re driving is a liability, that it’s time to notify Brower of where they’re heading—a saved location on the GPS device Knox liberated from the car she’s now driving. Knox must be arguing for more time to find Fahiz on their own.

“We’re close,” Dulwich tells her. “A few blocks south of here.”

“That does not match with my mark,” she says, but then corrects herself. “Stand by.”

The man she has followed has ridden the tram all of one stop. He disembarks on the far side of the canal and walks back a half block. She’s forced to give him more credit than she believed due. He rode the tram in order to get a look back for any tails. She continues past Bilderdijkkade to not fall into his trap. Maintains her speed while keeping watch in her two rearview mirrors.

“The mark is heading south on Bilderdijkkade.”

“That’s interesting.” Dulwich relays the information to Knox.

“I am turning south now,” she says, having reached another canal and not wanting to cross the bridge.

“Negative!” Dulwich commands. “Hang back.”

He’s concerned about her wound, her condition. He sees her as vulnerable, perhaps even a liability. The thought of that frustrates and angers her. She must not be seen as the soft forensic accountant who’s in over her head, the
woman
who can’t handle fieldwork.

She realizes too late it’s none of that. Dulwich has the GPS: the street she is on runs out ahead, forcing her back to the west—aiming her directly at her mark. Seeing him walking toward her in the distance, she does exactly what she shouldn’t do: she stops the car.

He stops. Perhaps he even recognizes the car as one of theirs. He breaks into an all-out sprint, turning right and crossing over a canal bridge.

“I am made,” she confesses, feeling an obligation to the team. Crushed by her own stupidity.

“Run him down!” Dulwich orders. “Stop him. Now!”

He doesn’t want the mark tipping off Fahiz.

She accelerates, tires peeling, and fishtails onto Bilderdijkstraat and across the canal. He begins climbing a chain-link fence into a construction site. Grace accelerates across the bridge and crashes the fence, knocking him off. He bounces onto the hood of her car.

But her collision has torn the chain link and he’s through it like a mouse into a hole. Grace kicks the car into reverse and swings right past the site, catching her left headlight on a retaining wall that defines a tunnel entrance to underground parking. The car lurches right and she’s gunning it down a narrow passage between the wall and the chain link toward a concrete bunker of a municipal building. The mark vaults the next fence effortlessly and sprints across a sand lot where the construction trailer is parked.

She slides through the next turn and accelerates across the lot, closing on him.

“Shit,” she says for Dulwich to hear. “A footbridge!”

At the end of the lot are red-and-white-striped stanchions that prevent vehicles from accessing a divided bike and pedestrian path that cross the canal she’s paralleling. If the mark reaches the footbridge, she’s lost him.

She throttles the engine, takes out a section of chain link and a lamppost as she avoids the red-and-white barriers, connecting with the mark’s legs. He’s thrown up onto the hood of her car and across the windshield. She can’t see.

The next thing she knows, the car no longer feels solid. It is dancing and weaving. Her feet are cold. The front dips forward.

Water.

—

T
HE
GPS
DIRECTS THEM
the long way around, taking them down the west side of Bilderdijkstraat canal instead of Tollensstraat. Dulwich realizes the mistake too late. But it’s from Bilderdijkstraat that they see a black car at a distance as it crashes through a chain-link fence and plunges into a canal.

At this same instant, a silver Mercedes races from the bright red door of a garage. It’s headed away from them, to the west. Its speed alone tells them it’s Fahiz. Dulwich hesitates only a fraction of a second—then floors it. Straight ahead, toward the near side of the footbridge.

Knox is out before Dulwich skids the van to a stop. The canal bubbles eerily. No sight of the car. A man swims frantically for a nearby houseboat. Dulwich makes surprisingly good time in that direction, despite his bum leg.

Knox climbs between struts and drops into the murky water. The windbreaker, laden with its pockets of tools, weighs him down and he sinks quickly.

The car’s daytime headlights draw him. It’s landed on its side, the driver’s window facing the surface.

Knox tries his Maglite. To his amazement, it comes on.

A leaking air bubble stretches from the back window to the windshield. The trunk has opened on impact. The depleted airbag waves against Grace’s head. She’s out of the seat belt, sucking the remaining air while fighting the water pressure that holds the door shut.