Choke Point

by Ridley Pearson

  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.

  Knox starts into the first of two liverwurst sandwiches he’s brought with him and chugs down a beer while sitting on the side of her bed.

  Grace does not look up from her screen. “The hacker who dropped that kiddie porn on us? That happened after I was already drilling him . . . data mining him.”

  “I love it when you talk sexy,” he says through a full mouth.

  “I trapped the MAC address and have had it tagged since. It just surfaced again, five minutes ago.”

  Knox stops chewing, cheeks like a squirrel.

  “On Kreiger’s laptop,” she says.

  “Simplify,” he says. “Spying for Dummies.”

  “I had established a defense against a particular hacker. That hacker engaged Kreiger’s laptop, not mine.”

  “Hacking Kreiger?” Knox places the sandwich down.

  “No. It is not adversarial. A text message was sent via Skype. Today’s date. Eleven P.M. This was followed by the number three. Meaning unknown.”

  “A meeting? Fahiz?”

  “We can assume the computer in question is in some way related to the man we call Fahiz. As to the purpose of the message: a meeting, a conveyance? It could be something as benign as a television program on Channel Three.”

  “We haven’t got until eleven o’clock.”

  “Yes. Of course. I only meant to point out that whoever hacked into my laptop has contacted Kreiger.”

  “A rug shipment would have little reason to go out at that late hour,” Knox theorized. “What about the number? The three?”

  “If it involves Kreiger’s laptop, I will most certainly pick up on it. Otherwise . . .”

  “Sarge should have fought for more manpower. He rolled over. I didn’t expect that.”

  “The client dictates the endpoint.”

  He flashes her a disapproving look. He doesn’t want to be read from the manual. Knox’s size, his barely constrained power, can terrify her at times. She tries to never show him that he has such an effect on her, but wonders. It’s important that Dulwich see her at least as Knox’s equal.

  “Where is David?” She had expected him to follow in behind Knox.

  “Switching out rentals.”

  “At this hour?”

  He explains the events at the manufacturing compound.

  “We found it? You withhold such a thing from me?”

  “We . . . I need to watch the place this morning. For the girls arriving.”

  “The white van will not arrive.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Fahiz will be notified.”

  “Possibly.”

  “Their mobiles . . .”

  “Would help.”

  “You cannot attempt this alone. It is foolhardy, John.”

  His smirk tells her she’s misused a word, or amused him with her choice. “They’ll call the two in control of the van first. One’s dead, the other’s in police custody by now.”

  “We have their mobiles,” she says.

  “Yes,” Knox agrees.

  “They will do this before contacting Fahiz.”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “What am I missing?” She can see it in his eyes.

  “The same thing they are: the van.”

  —

  KNOX REACHES DULWICH at the off-airport Avis counter and lays out the plan. The painfully long silence that results suggests Dulwich’s resistance.

  “Brower can handle this.”

  Knox ends the call. Not because of the string of expletives that jump to his tongue, but because he’s receiving an incoming call from a number his phone doesn’t recognize.

  He’s sitting in the parlor of the apartment, the doors shut to the bedroom where Grace has fallen asleep with her laptop atop her.

  “Yeah?” he says. Waits. Is about to repeat himself when his dulled brain kicks in.

  “Don’t hang up,” he says.

  “You bastard!” Sonia says.

  “I had to reach you.”

  “You . . . It’s so unfair.”

  “A horrible thing to do,” he admits.

  “You gave me hope. You used her initials.”

  “I had to reach you. We raided the dormitory. Ten girls. All safe now.” He hopes to appeal to the journalist.

  “You tricked me in the most horrible way imaginable.”

  “We’ve located the knot shop. Have you heard from Fahiz?”

  “You are a monster.”

  “I’m an operative for a private security firm.” He gives that time to sink in. “My employers are backing out of the op, shutting us down today. If we’re going to find Berna and Maja, if we’re going to stop Fahiz from packing up and doing this same thing to other girls someplace else, then we need each other. You and me. Now.” Against his better judgment he adds, “You want to talk about a story . . .”

  “You think me so crass?”

  “Fahiz has the balls to leave his number with the police so he’ll be notified if they close in on his own operation. You’ve contacted him,” Knox states with certainty. He waits. Nothing. “If you go to him alone, it’s the last any of us will see of you.” He adds, “That’s unacceptable.”

  “You think me so stupid?”

  “Fahiz agreed to a phone interview,” Knox speculates. “He’ll trap your number. Your location.”

  “You played upon my emotions with that classified ad. My niece has been missing four years now. How could you do that?”

  He reminds himself that she wants Berna alive. She wants Fahiz punished. Why, after discovering he tricked her, has she stayed on the line?

  He’s overly tired. He’s allowed himself to believe she cares about him. It takes him added time to process her voice sounding apologetic instead of accusatory, time to realize that she still hasn’t hung up. She’s kept him on the call. A trapdoor opens beneath him and he falls.

  You think me so stupid? echoes in his head. Sonia isn’t interested in a story. She wants Berna back. Fahiz has agreed to a trade. Sonia knew exactly who had placed the ad. She’s offered up Knox in exchange for the missing girl.

  One glance out the window confirms it. A sedan double-parked at an angle. The heads of two men running toward the sidewalk.

  He moves as if he’s rehearsed this a thousand times: a chair is used to wedge the apartment door; he’s into the kitchen, stripping the refrigerator of its shelves and drawers.

  “John?”

  He’s awakened Grace.

  The crisper drawers go under the sink. The shelving goes under the bed as he scoops up Grace and runs her into the kitchen. He deposits her into the refrigerator in the fetal position, places his gun onto her lap. “Count to three after you hear it. Th
en open and shoot.”

  Grace stares back with koala eyes. Fresh from sleep, she cannot process any of this.

  “Breathe shallowly. Not much air in here.” He shuts the refrigerator’s French doors, entombing her.

  Grabs a knife on his way to the window as the first jarring blow is absorbed by the apartment door. He opens the kitchen’s only window and slides out on his belly so his chest is against the brick. Jabs the knife into the grout and, hanging by one hand, pulls the window shut with the other.

  A second and third crash as the door is kicked in.

  Knox hangs by his fingertips from the window ledge, the knife stuck between the bricks above him. He doesn’t look down; it’s two broken legs or shattered ankles if he lets go. In his mind’s eye, he sees two men searching methodically, surprised to find the apartment empty. Has every confidence they will not open the refrigerator. The living room glass is fixed.

  He violates his own rule, glancing down to see if the men have reappeared at street level. That’s when the window slides open and a man sticks his head out. Seeing Knox so close, the intruder jerks away instinctively, catching his neck on the open window frame. He’s dazed.

  One-handed, Knox liberates the knife and cuts open his opponent’s neck. Stabs the knife back into the grout, grabs hold of the man’s collar and pulls. The body stops halfway out, caught at the waist. Blood runs down the brick like bunting.

  A second face appears in the window. A gun is raised. Knox swings one-handed as a gunshot rings out. Knox bounces off the brick and returns like a pendulum to where he was. The second man’s face smacks against the glass and he slides down, dead before he reaches the floor.

  Knox drops the knife and claws his way up with two arms.

  Across the room, Grace is coiled in the open refrigerator, the semi-automatic in hand. She’s dazed and in shock. Climbing back through the window, Knox draws his victim fully out and the body falls to the sidewalk below.

  He eases Grace from the refrigerator. “We’re out of here,” he says, taking her into his arms.

  She nods.

  “Your first kill?” he asks.

  She looks up at him, then rolls nearly out of his arms and gags. “My laptop,” she chokes out.

  Knox places her on the bed, returns to the kitchen and searches the second man, lucky to find the car keys on him. He takes the man’s weapon. At ground level, he places Grace in the backseat. Retrieves the knife and wipes it down. Leaves the gun Grace used under the fallen man. The scene won’t add up for forensics, but this way it will take them longer to make sense of things.

  Knox drives the car he’s borrowed from his attackers four blocks before pulling over and taking a breath.

  “John,” Grace says. He turns to see she’s pointing at the dash.

  His eyes light on a GPS device suction-cupped to the windshield. A GPS used to find a waypoint established by Knox’s monitored phone; a GPS that would most likely have come from wherever Fahiz is hiding.

  Knox works through the menu, instructing the device to direct them to the origin of the last trip.

  “Is it the knot shop?” Grace asks expectantly.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s him. Fahiz.”

  “Could be.” Knox stares at the guidance system, wondering if Sonia’s hatred has led him to Fahiz.

  “How could they possibly have found us?” she asks.

  “Don’t know,” he lies. All he can think is that Sonia sold him out for Berna’s return. A woman scorned . . . Or Berna along with Fahiz’s full story.

  Knox can picture her with her knees up, laughing at him in the warm light of the houseboat’s cabin. He underestimated the damage done by running the classifieds using her niece’s initials.

  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.

  —

  GRACE 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.

  —

  DULWICH 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-whi
ps 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.”