Choke Point (9 page)

He heads back to his chair. Hears the shower curtain sing as she slides it aside and hears her ease down into the water.

“Why were you there?”

“A vendor in the market. I’m not so sure she recognized Berna in the photo so much as thought the community center director might help me.”

“Some help.”

“The director painted a different picture,” Grace says. “The girls providing income for broken families. A way to battle the poverty.”

“I’m not buying that,” Knox says. He tilts the Scotch in the cup and swirls it.

“I’m not selling. But she was.”

“It’s a load of shit.”

“More like realpolitik. No matter, it doesn’t help us any.”

Locals and residents,
he thinks. He tells her about Sonia’s theory of two classes of workers.

“If we can’t get help from the mothers of these girls—” Grace says.

“Yeah.”

“Graham Winston wants this shut down. We have our work cut out for us. If it’s finding someone to hang this on, you have a wallet in your pocket. I will testify. Fahiz, I’m not so sure.”

“Finding Berna and closing the shop are one and the same. Concurrent.” The Scotch warms him. He uncaps another minibottle and dispenses it into the plastic cup. “Refill?”

“Please.” He hears the shower curtain being adjusted. “You can come in.” He enters the bathroom. Her clothes are neatly folded on the counter. Grace. Her arm is extended from behind the curtain. He takes her empty cup and pulls the door nearly shut behind him. Hears her chewing ice.

“There was a woman . . . in the market. It was she who rescued me.”

It was she.
Grace. “I’m listening.”

“In the tunnel . . . She knew who I was. My EU persona. Warned me.”

“Threatened?”

“Warned.”

“Were the boys hers? Was it staged for your benefit?”

It’s a long time before she says anything. “I don’t like the way you think.”

“It’s the Scotch,” he says.

“No, I am afraid not,” she says. “She told me I ask too many questions and that I’d get myself killed.”

“Hardly a warning. That’s a threat.”

“It wasn’t. I’m telling you. She was hiding—waiting—in the tunnel. Waiting for me to leave the center.”

“And we have no idea who she is.”

“None.”

“You’re going back to Hong Kong. We’re getting you out of here.”

“Foolish. This is exactly what we’d hoped for. It just does not happen to be connected to the knot shop.”

Knox’s phone buzzes. A text.

in the lobby

“Dulwich is downstairs.”

“Your doing?”

“Yes,” he says. “Assaults, robberies and sexual assaults tend to win his attention.”

“He can’t come up,” she says. “My room could be watched. One man in my room can be explained. Two is an orgy.”

“No one is more careful than Sarge. Let me handle it.”

Ten minutes later, after Knox has walked the hallway and scouted the stairs, the three are in Grace’s room. The hotel doesn’t offer robes so she’s in pajamas with a towel wrapped around her head. She sits cross-legged on the bed. She looks about fourteen.

Dulwich drinks beer. Grace and Knox are on their third. They’ve run the minibar out of vodka and Scotch. Knox feels good for the first time all day.

Grace gives the recap.

Knox adds in enough of his meeting with Sonia to complete the picture. He looks over at Grace. “You’ve got to go,” Knox says.

“Not the way the EU would see it,” Dulwich explains. “They might assign a driver. That could be you.”

“Can’t be me,” Knox says. He reminds them about Gerhardt Kreiger’s efforts to connect him to a rug merchant, about his serving as Sonia’s photographer, about already being stretched thin.

“Me, then.”

“You limp. Some bodyguard.”

“All the better,” Dulwich says. “I look like a driver, as it should be.” He asks Grace, “Good with you?”

She nods. She looks like she’s in shock.
Or maybe drunk is more like it,
Knox thinks.

“Can we talk about Fahiz?” Grace asks.

“No,” Knox says.

“Sonia Pangarkar interviews Kabril Fahiz, but Kahil’s the enigma. Are we accepting that he intentionally lied on his health clinic admittance form
and
on the police report, all to protect himself? Is anyone that cognizant when admitted to a clinic in such bad shape?”

“He’s collateral damage. Forget him.” Knox sets down the rest of the Scotch vowing not to touch it.

“Agreed,” Dulwich says. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“You didn’t speak to him. His attackers were Dutch or Europeans. He saw it as a hate crime. I don’t think so.”

“Your attackers were Dutch,” Knox says.

“My attackers were kids.” She wraps herself in her own limbs more tightly. She can’t rid herself of the boy holding her down there, feels on the verge of screaming or vomiting.

“Has anyone spoken to the doctors?” Dulwich asks.

“Waste of time,” Knox says. “We’re off track.”

“We’re trying to stop whoever’s intimidating Sonia Pangarkar’s sources,” Dulwich says. “Kahil Fahiz was a victim of those people. Mistaken identity or not, we’re hardly off track.”

Knox thought Sarge was on his side. The adrenaline is wearing off. The booze is swimming around his head. He upends the waiting cup.
Better.
“You want this short and sweet,” he tells Dulwich. “That means we go for beheading, not cutting off fingers and hands. Who gives a shit that Kahil Fahiz was mistaken for someone else? Who gives a shit what condition he was in? They got the wrong guy. How can that possibly be worth our time?”

“What if we find out his attackers were two kids in their late teens?” Dulwich asks. “For instance.”

“I had this kid by the short hairs. He was not hired to attack her. Trust me.”

“Maybe he was led into it by his friend.”

“The doctors are going to tell us that? I don’t think so. Why am I the one drinking, but you’re the one talking like a drunk?”

“People explain their injuries. They’re in shock,” Dulwich says, casting a sideways glance at Grace, “their adrenaline’s screaming. They’re given sedatives. Their tongues wag. More secrets are spilled in the emergency room than the confessional. You two can carry on.” He sounds disgusted. “I can do this. I will do this.”

“My cover’s better,” Grace says, still in a tight ball. There’s only ice left in her cup.

“Suit yourself,” Knox says. “Waste of time.”

“Ours to waste.” Dulwich is angry with him.

“Between Sonia’s work and Kreiger wanting to sell me a container of rugs, we’re aimed at the top of the pyramid. Grace should chill out for a few days. Lose the fieldwork. We get a suspect and she goes to work on the person’s finances. If and when we have our evidence, we make our move.”

Dulwich cannot believe what he’s hearing. “So
your
work is the only work that matters?”

“For now.”

Grace rocks forward and back on the bed. She’s biting down on the hand that holds the cup. She removes her lips long enough to say, “I found a piece of your money.” Her dark eyes, wet now from the liquor, stare over her hand at Knox.

“Come again?”

“Grace and I have been involved in a little extracurricular activity.”

Knox looks suspiciously between them. “What the hell’s going on?”

“I found forty-seven thousand,” Grace says. “It’s a good lead. I’m going to find the rest. And then I’m going to find more.”

“My money? The money Eve—?” Knox says, though he can’t finish the sentence, can’t hear himself say it.

“If we find the money—
when
we find the money—we will find Evelyn Ritter along with it,” Grace says imperiously.

Dulwich hunches his shoulders. “It was a bum deal.”

“It was my deal. Is my deal.”

“What are friends for?”

Grace explains, “It was the change. The fifty-four cents. It’s all in the details. We’re having fun, John. Don’t spoil our fun.”

“And don’t talk to me about returning favors,” says the man whose life Knox saved—
twice
.

“Forty-seven thousand?”

“I do not have the money, but I know where to find it. I can determine how it got there—that is the key. Getting it back . . . That is not of primary importance at the moment. First, we find it. We find it all.”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Dulwich says.

But Knox is surprised. Flattered. Impressed. Guilt-ridden that they’ve taken the time to pursue his loss when it has nothing to do with Rutherford Risk.

“Does Primer know?” Knox asks.

“Hardly,” says Dulwich.

“But you’re on his payroll. His clock.” He looks over at Grace. “His gear.”

“Field testing the gear is critical,” she says.

“There are more than eight hours in a day,” says Dulwich.

The comment is laughable, though Knox doesn’t laugh. Dulwich lives his job—fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days. He doesn’t have time to tie his own shoes—he wears Top-Siders.

“Thank you.” Knox wishes he’d saved some of the Scotch. He thinks about suggesting a trip to the hotel bar, drinks on him, but knows that’s absurd. The three of them can’t be seen together.

“Thank us when you have her head on a stick,” Dulwich says.

“And the funds back in your account,” Grace says, still rocking.

She looks like a scared little girl. Knox considers reaching out to comfort her, but the timing is wrong; she’ll think it has to do with the money.

T
he rug shop is on Kinkerstraat, sandwiched between a bra shop and an
optiek
,
hardly a neighborhood for upscale rugs, but then again, looking around the narrow shop, Knox realizes the rugs are more Pottery Barn than Heriz.

Gerhardt Kreiger is smoking in the back with the floor manager. Kreiger looks like a history professor in a tweed sport coat and black turtleneck. The manager needs to gain more than a few pounds. Knox searches the stock for anything of quality.

“You’re wasting my time, Gerhardt.” Knox turns for the door.

“Easy!” Kreiger has all the panache of a Buick salesman. “Not these! Wait, my friend.” Gerhardt hasn’t had a friend since 1978. He sidles up to Knox. “This is our gallery, nothing more. Patience, please.”

It isn’t going the way Knox had hoped. He’d wanted a tour of the facility and says so. “As much as I appreciate you, Gerhardt, I’d hoped to talk directly with the seller.”

“For obvious reasons, my friend, this is impossible.”

Knox whispers, “For this much cash, nothing is impossible.”

“You wanted samples. I have brought you samples. Third stack, rugs two through five.” He points, his fingertip yellowed by years of cigarettes.

Gerhardt is being far too smart about this. Knox had hoped for incompetence.

Knox peels back the top rug from the waist-high stack of rugs. It’s like looking at high-def television: an eye-popping clarity with wonderful dye-lot imperfections and gorgeous symmetry to the traditional design. Knox has run himself through a crash course and he’s shocked by the quality. He’d expected something passable; he’s looking at floor and wall art. He realizes Gerhardt had no idea of a price range when they’d spoken earlier. These have five to ten times the value Knox had expected.

“Remarkable work,” he says, moving slowly back and forth among the five samples.

“It is,” says the store manager, trying to worm his way into the conversation. “Oushak,
for the region in Turkey. Vegetable dye. Hand-knotted. Two hundred fifty thousand per square meter. Persian tea rug design.”

The number swims around in Knox’s head. His jaw locks. He pictures Berna and her friends in leg irons circled around a rug tying all those knots. Each rug several meters. Enough rugs to fill a shipping container. It’s like looking at the Great Wall. It’s slavery at any wage.

As he speaks his voice cracks. “Gorgeous. But are you sure it’s not Chinese?”

The man approaches the stack. He ignites a cigarette lighter and places it close to the wool. If synthetic or plastic, the fibers melt quickly in a tiny puff of black smoke. Nothing happens. Natural fibers. He pockets the lighter and inspects the jute backing. “Turkish,” he declares.

Knox and Gerhardt know otherwise—this is a product of the sweatshop. That it convinces the merchant of its Turkish origin is impressive.

“I am sure you are right,” Knox says. He eyes Gerhardt, who arches his eyebrows declaratively. Knox thanks the merchant and moves to the door, Gerhardt alongside him like a dog heeling.

“Nothing is impossible,” Knox repeats. “Call me when it’s arranged.”

—

T
HE MOMENT
THE TEACHER’S EYES
fall upon her, Maja knows the man—her “father”—is waiting at the classroom door. As the teacher heads to the door, Maja slides out of her desk chair like every bone has gone to jelly. On hands and knees, she gathers her books and looks to the window. The steel-framed half windows hinge at the top and open out. She steals across the room to the jeers of her seldom seen classmates and opens a window. It comes open only fifty centimeters, forcing her to throw a leg over the frame and wiggle to get through. When no one else comes to Maja’s aid, a girl finally jumps up and helps get her books out the window. This child then leaps back into her chair as the door opens and the teacher turns around.

The visitor wears a heavy one-day beard. His face is florid and his eyes are glassy with rage. Many of the children stiffen, knowing such expressions well from home. Their teacher’s wide eyes and the sharp cry of Maja’s name are followed by her hurried approach to the window, from where she sees only the empty asphalt playground.

Maja wisely holds to the exterior wall, ducking beneath windows, racing to the end of the long building. Her first concern is for her mother.

She knows the shortest route through the streets, which bridges to take.

Maja won’t know until she gets home how bad it will be for her. She can stay into the evening if she chooses, making up for most of the lost money—two euros a day.

She has been betrayed. Either her shop boss contacted her father, or someone at school reported her. Neither of her parents owns a phone. The likelihood the shop would bother to contact them is slim, and then it would be her mother not her father, who is rarely at home. So who and why? Whoever it was has earned Maja’s mother a beating. Her own sentence is unknown.

Tension grips her tummy as she nears the shop, unsure if they’ll take her in. If they’ve reached their quota for the day, there will be no space for her. What then?

Home is not an option.

—

G
RACE PLAYS
THE
EU
CARD AGAIN,
trying to speak with a health clinic nurse about Kahil Fahiz. But it’s soon clear the daily volume of walk-in patients results in a bleary-eyed anonymity. No one remembers him, or if they do, they don’t want to get involved. She abandons her effort after fifteen minutes of being annoying, having lighted on a better idea.

Dulwich drives her to the southern boundary of the Oud-West neighborhood, to the health clinic where Berna was treated. She requests a stop at a computer store on the way.

At the clinic, she asks for Dulwich to remain in the car. “It could be a while.” She enters a crowded waiting area. She could stay in here an hour or two without sticking out. She may need to.

Vinyl flooring and overhead fluorescent tube lighting. Parents with kids. Adults with casts, or walkers, or their hands gripped tightly on the arms of the contemporary stainless-steel furniture. Flu and STD posters line the wall alongside Elmo and Tinker Bell. A TV running a cooking show hangs in the corner above the fire alarm and a water dispenser.

No EU card this time. The Great Wall of corporate IT is passwords. Sophisticated high-bit encryption schemes have made hacking more difficult and time consuming. Cracking a password can take weeks, not hours.

Grace comes prepared, having anticipated certain impossibilities: she won’t be able to get a video camera in place to watch a keyboard; she can’t install key tracking software without the password.

The Achilles’ heel of such systems is complacency. Working a computer terminal has become second nature. Employees are accustomed to the look and feel of the terminal—to switch out a keyboard might sound an alarm or win an inquiry. Conversely, they pay no attention whatsoever to the snarl of wires and blinking lights at the back of the machine, and Grace knows this. This is where she has been trained to attack. She will need thirty seconds.

Phase one is simple enough: a prescription bottle with a small amount of lighter fluid and a cotton wick lit as it’s placed into a trash can. This goes off smoothly. Grace steps up to the counter, her purse open. Inside her head the clock is running.

“Name, please?” the nurse asks.

Grace explains she’s waiting for a friend who asked to meet her here.

Poof.
The trash can ignites: her cue.

Grace, alarmed by the sight, knocks her purse across the counter, its contents spilling onto the desktop and the floor. The nurses rush the fire as a team. Grace comes around behind the counter and begins collecting her spilled items. On hands and knees, she scrambles under the desk’s ledge and, locating the body of the PC terminal, pulls the keyboard’s USB connector. In her hand is a thumb drive, a USB passthrough. One end of the device plugs into the terminal; the keyboard plugs into its opposite end. It’s a Wi-Fi memory stick tweaked to record and transmit each keystroke. She hears the discharge of a fire extinguisher.

“May I help you?” comes a voice from above. “Excuse me, please!” Irritation.

“My purse,” Grace says. “I apologize. The fire . . . I bumped my purse.” She motions to the Tampax on the desk and the lipstick, wallet and change on the floor beside her.

“No problem. May I be of help?” A nurse, by nature, is more kind than suspicious. She’s alongside Grace collecting her personal effects.

“The fire,” Grace says, “it rattled me.”

“Did me the first time as well.”

“The first time?”

“Are you kidding? Some fool dumps a cigarette in there at least once a week.”

Grace had not anticipated this. She fights off a smile.

Back in her seat in the waiting room, her tethered iPhone creates its own Wi-Fi network and is connected to the USB passthrough. She checks the device’s log. The nurse hit the spacebar to clear the screen and then typed her ten-character alphanumeric password. Grace has what she needs. The USB can transmit up to sixty feet.

It’s a waiting game now. Grace has an iPad sideways in her lap, her purse supporting and screening it from view. She can only take over the terminal when the nurse is away, which isn’t often. She builds macros to automate the process. The first time she has access, it takes her over a minute to menu through to records. The nurse returns.

The second time, Grace has only to push a macro button to access the records, saving her the minute. She builds on her past accomplishments: records, sorted by first name, Berna. Now she’s studying the admittance form: last name, Ranatunga.

Her country of residence jumps off the page: Belgium. Her language, French. A runaway, or a kidnap victim. There’s a note:
indigent
. A “citizenship” box checked:
immigrant
. It’s unclear if Berna walked in on her own or was dropped at the clinic. There’s no money trail to follow. She is required to have private insurance, but has none. The state takes over. Grace follows this in a series of checked boxes.

The nurse arrives. Grace returns the screen to how the nurse had left it.

Grace Googles “Ranatunga.” A common Sri Lankan family name. Berna is an Irish version of Brenda. Irish/Sri Lankan—that accounts for the young girl’s intriguing look. Irish/Sri Lankan living in Belgium. Chances are the parents can be found if they’re alive, if they didn’t sell their daughter into child slavery.

Grace is desperate to find connective tissue to follow back to the knot shop. Some hint, some clue to where Berna was being kept. She has to wait for the nurse to leave her station again, and the wait is interminable. Ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Finally, Grace macros through to Berna’s form. About to give up, she discovers two tiny paper-clip icons. She touches the screen.

Photographs. Her age or her situation required them to document her condition upon admittance. Grace gets a look at Berna prior to the hospital gown that she escaped in. She’s wearing a pair of filthy blue jeans and an equally soiled blue-and-white-striped long-sleeved tee. Her hair is matted and filthy. Her eyes are sullen and her face malnourished. She appears exhausted. Grace saves the image and the next—Berna shot from behind—to the iPad.

It’s the two dark stains below the girl’s knees that capture and hold Grace’s attention. The same height up the legs for both stains.
Water.
Berna had waded through water before arriving at the clinic.

A woman’s voice. Grace looks up sharply to see the nurse has returned to her terminal. The woman sees an image of a young girl’s backside on her screen instead of the screen where she left off. She calls over a colleague to have a look.

Grace’s finger hovers over the icon that will return the screen to the nurse’s last page view. She doesn’t dare trigger it until the nurse looks away . . .

“Maghan!” the nurse calls out. Her eyes lift.

Grace touches the screen, hoists the iPad and drops it into her purse. She leans her head back with her eyes closed.

Maghan joins the nurse, who is clearly befuddled by the terminal’s miraculous return to her original page.

Grace hears a discussion about how there was a picture of the girl—“
the girl!”—
just a moment prior. Berna is famous here since the publication of Sonia’s article.

It’s everything Grace can do to keep her eyes closed. Five minutes later she approaches the counter and, in an irritated tone, tells the nurse that if Julia Schmidt checks in, please tell her that her friend has left.

Muttering to herself, Grace leaves.

—

K
NOX IS
SUPPOSED
to be going door to door showing Berna’s photograph as he agreed to do for Sonia Pangarkar. But Knox is not great at following orders; he’s better at following people, and so it’s Sonia he follows.

She knows more than she is letting on. Reporters make their livings exploiting secrets. He has yet to determine where she lives, but she’s a creature of habit. She has chosen Melly’s Cookie Bar and Gourmet Coffee bakery several blocks west of Café van Daele on Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. It’s a small space that offers only a few bar stools looking out at the street. She arrives promptly—predictably—at 9:30. He needs to talk to her about that.