The Red Room

by Ridley Pearson

  “Knox.” The truth is easier to defend.

  “In our culture, John Knox, even Jordanian women . . .” She doesn’t complete the thought.

  He needs to move her away from the ring’s importance. Doesn’t want her connecting the dots the way he has. “It caused a rift. Between you and Akram.”

  She assays him. Her eyes grow nervous. “I will be watching you, and I will turn you over to the ministry without a second thought. Do you understand?”

  “Mashe is the collector. I need to know it all.” He pauses. He’s gone too far. Decides on a more direct approach. “The last name on the ring, for instance. Something . . . it would allow me . . . I could run a credit check against that name. My accountant is here in Istanbul.” He tries to seed his operational cover; hopes Victoria might pass this tidbit about Grace along. “She will run the credit check, do background. You don’t sell this particular work without a firewall in place. You understand?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You don’t approve.”

  “I am art dealer, Mr. Knox. You are art smuggler. The enemy.”

  “The competition.”

  “Same things,” she says. “A divorce, perhaps. Adoption following a remarriage? It was never explained to me. Akram would not discuss it.”

  Knox tries not to hide his confusion.

  “Okle is the mother’s family name,” she says.

  “Both brothers took their mother’s maiden name? Doesn’t sound like a remarriage to me.”

  “The name on the ring. Mashe—”

  “Melemet,” Knox says. The ring, “labeled like a hospital bracelet,” holds significance. Is Mashe Melemet a medical doctor on some kind of mission? Based in Iran? His brain spins, seeking out the most outrageous possibilities. An MD whose patient list includes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

  Knox recalls Grace mentioning that Mashe’s investments were heavily weighted toward scientific companies. He sees Mashe Okle in a new light.

  “How could you know this? How could you possibly know this?”

  Knox chides himself for always needing to prove he’s a step ahead. His mind races, looking for an out.

  “A man named Melemet was the owner of the Jordanian restaurant prior to Akram. Records show he sold it for a third of its value. I never understood that transaction—but now I see: it was Akram selling it to himself after he changed his name. Simply updating the new name on the property would have left too easy a trail to follow.”

  “Who are you, Mr. Knox?”

  “John.”

  She nods demurely.

  “One cannot be too careful,” he says.

  “Nor too thin, nor too rich.”

  He appreciates the attempt. Grace is humor-challenged, pragmatic and grounded in fact. The few attempts she makes at jokes register with Knox as lame clichés. As with so many people, she’s at her funniest when it comes unintentionally. Why he’s thinking about her is beyond him.

  “You and Akram. Were serious?”

  “Was I sleeping with him?”

  Together they stop and appreciate a trio of intricately inlaid tables. The style is too busy for Knox’s taste, but there’s no dismissing the artistry. Why, he wonders, is such detail only seen in coastal Mediterranean cultures? Turkey. Morocco. Libya.

  She says, “As if it is any of your business.”

  “As if.”

  “You wish to make it your business. Our business.” She establishes eye contact. All knowing. Serene. “It makes things messy.”

  He’s thinking bedsheets. She is not.

  “Ten percent. I am expecting six figures U.S.”

  He coughs. “Low fives if we’re lucky.”

  “I call the ministry now? I believe they will be interested in what Mr. Obama is hiding.”

  “I think we can hold off on that.”

  “You would not like Turkish prison, Mr. Knox.”

  He remembers saying the same thing to Dulwich. What happened to a week of pay-per-view movies in the hotel and a five-minute meet-and-greet?

  22

  Grace has to see his face when she tells him. Though she’s unsure when competition became an integral part of her relationship with Knox, she nonetheless cannot resist a chance to put a hash mark in her column.

  She video-Skypes his phone. When he doesn’t answer, she sends a text. Five impatient minutes later, Knox answers her video call. He looks tired.

  “We could not have been more wrong,” she says, enjoying the look of confusion overtaking his face. It’s a handsome face, though she hopes he doesn’t know she sees it this way. “Actually,” she confesses, “you were close. In some ways, close.”

  “You’re enjoying this way too much,” Knox says.

  “The brother’s blue plastic ring is a Landauer dosimeter ring. Science, yes. However, a specific medical—”

  “Hazmat. Dosimeters measure exposure to toxins—”

  “And radiation,” Grace says, interrupting. “Landauer manufactures radiation dosimeters. In this case, a finger ring that carries your identity, as your lady friend said.” She enjoys needling Knox about his promiscuity; though she’s plucked the occasional businessman off a bar stool, she’s not proud of it. Currently her sex life is dismal to nonexistent. She is far more conservative than Knox, but that doesn’t take much. It also means she doesn’t see him as competition to her current life plan, which includes great financial gain and—eventually—her own security company. Rutherford Risk has paid too little attention to cyber crime and financial malpractice, two areas on which she would like her investigative company to focus. She cannot compete, nor would she, with Knox in the field. She considers it a symbiosis, mutualism more than parasitism, but if necessary she can see herself learning from him and draining him of his knowledge at his own expense, like a tick.

  “A radiologist?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Ahmadinejad is being treated for cancer?”

  “Who said anything about Ahmadinejad?”

  “Since when do bodyguards and agents follow a doctor around if—”

  She brings a file up on the screen that hides him for a moment, though the video connection remains active in a window beneath.

  “Mashe Melemet is a PhD, not an MD. He may design medical radiation equipment, but he does not practice on it.” Grace blames Knox for this cat-and-mouse gameplay. Prior to her working with John Knox, Grace was all facts and figures. She bowed at the altar of numbers. Knox has trained her by example to tease with information. She has come to enjoy the game. Immensely.

  “What have you done?”

  “I placed a call requesting his university transcripts, which were e-mailed to me.”

  “This is why you are calling. You’re calling to crow.”

  “Mashe Melemet took his doctorate at the Physics Institute’s LHEP—the Laboratory for High Energy Physics at Universität Bern. His early research and published material, highly regarded.” She gives him the best smug look she can conjure. “He studied abroad eleven years. Returned to Iran. He teaches for eight months and then goes off the grid.”

  “Mashe Okle surfaces,” Knox says, speculating while emphasizing the change in family name. Nuclear physics. This is the Middle East.

  “I love puzzles.” It’s true. Grace’s attraction to accounting, forensic accounting in particular, is the precision of the numbers always needing to agree. She loves a world where everything balances. Harmony. It’s the polar opposite of the family discord that drove her to seek independence.

  “Jesus,” Knox says.

  Grace gloats. She wants so badly to see his face. Is about to minimize the file in order to see the video window when the door to her apartment breaks open behind her.

  Two men come at her, closing the distance before she fully swivels in her chair. Sitting is a position of vulnerability.
She knows it. They know it. As she flexes to stand, one of them stiff-arms her back into the chair. Grace swings her foot, aiming for the outside of the other’s knee, but it’s a powerless blow and he barely reacts. Grace could try to fight, but reason gets the better of her.

  The men reach for her, clearly expecting resistance. But Grace uses their tactics against them, allowing them to turn her back to the keyboard. One pins her arms as the other struggles to get a cloth bag over her head. This gesture triggers the floodgates of terror: confinement, torture, rape. She screams, bucking and writhing and straining to be free. A hand clamps over the bag, muffling her, hits her hard enough that her lips swell and she tastes blood. This, in turn, causes another instinctive struggle to be free.

  Rutherford Risk deals with kidnapping on nearly a daily basis. Negotiation. Dead drops. The tracking and freeing of hostages accounts for over half of Rutherford Risk’s revenue. In this matter, Grace is far too well informed.

  She is overpowered—itself a dreadful feeling. Her left hand stretches blindly for the keyboard. It’s a three key combination. Her first try misses. She fights to pull her right arm from the man’s containing grasp. He’s now bear-hugging from the side. She snaps her head decisively, knowing that the crown of the forehead can deliver a head butt with surprising strength and sustainability.

  But that’s unavailable. Taking the blow just above her ear sends sparks shooting across her vision. Her opponent didn’t see it coming, though. He loosens his hold. It’s not much, more a reflex relaxation as the nervous system is stunned, but it’s enough for a final blind try at the keyboard.

  Grace slides the index finger of her left hand across the keys, feeling for the raised bump on the F. Her middle and ring fingers form an isosceles triangle and she pushes down, with no way of determining if she has succeeded.

  She hears the lid of the machine smack closed. Her hands are secured with a plastic tie. She’s gagged with duct tape; then the hood is lowered a second time. Stuff flies noisily off the desk. She imagines them taking both the laptop and iPhone power cords. In her mind’s eye: a face similar to one of the men guarding Mashe Okle. The same man?

  Hears something dragging across the floor as she’s moved toward the door. Each man has her under an armpit. She makes herself dead weight, letting her bound ankles drag.

  They bump her down the fire exit stairs, indifferent to her pain. She’s shoved into a car; a minivan based on the sound of its sliding door.

  “Her phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn it off. Pull the SIM.”

  Some noise indicating effort. “Yes.”

  “Battery from the laptop.”

  “Done.”

  The discussion between them is in Persian and surprisingly level-voiced. She retires any thought of overpowering them—it’s impossible with her wrists and ankles secured. The poison of fear has overcome her. She attempts to see through it and focus on the story. Story is everything. Story is the key to her survival.

  23

  Because of his brother Tommy’s often unstable and unpredictable condition, Knox uses a phone app to automatically record their video conversations. The same app records Grace’s abduction.

  The video is jumpy, contributing to its surreal look. The first nail of panic spikes his chest; he works to remove it, strains to emotionally distance himself from Grace, knowing the importance of his response to her recovery.

  His voice is deliberately, eerily calm, though his fingers tremble slightly as he dials Rutherford Risk’s emergency response number.

  A fax tone. He keys in his ID. Three pronounced clicks.

  “Case number?” A man’s voice.

  Knox doesn’t recall being given one. “Unknown.” He recites his contract ID.

  “ID comes back ‘on leave.’”

  “Leave? I’m on an op, you idiot! My partner’s a two-oh-seven! Do your job. I need a track-and-trace ASAP. Give me Digital Services!” Two-oh-seven is the police code used for a kidnapping.

  “Stand by.”

  He connects with Kamat, Xin’s boss. Again, Knox uses the police code 207. Kamat’s reaction is professional and immediate.

  “GPS tracks two blocks south-southeast and goes off-grid.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I will prioritize her signal with the lat/longs to be transmitted to you. Text number, please.” He sounds like he’s asking for a prescription.

  Knox recites the phone number for the SIM chip currently in his phone. He repeats, “South-southeast?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “CCTV?”

  “For Istanbul? They are not web available. Is it possible for us to hack the system? Likely. Probable, even. Six to ten hours.”

  “You’ve got operatives in theater here!”

  “You’re shown as on leave. I see no case number. Admin error, I suppose. But we are currently blind to you and the op.”

  “Well, how about we change that?”

  “Yes. Agreed.”

  “And I need traffic cams! Now!”

  “Copy.”

  Hearing his own tone of voice, Knox apologizes. No sense in taking this out on Kamat. Sarge or some bean counter has screwed up the paperwork. Murphy’s Law.

  He puts himself in Grace’s shoes.

  “Set alerts for traffic incidents or accidents,” he tells Kamat. “Alarms. Police, fire and ambulance deployments. Traffic violations. Erratic driving.”

  “Copy,” Kamat says.

  “I’m sending over a low-rez vid of the abduction. Request face recognition. Clothing. Voice. Tats. Anything you can give me on these two.”

  “Understood.”

  Knox e-mails the video in three parts. Wants to do more. Now! The “rapture of capture” that he typically experiences—the palpable excitement brought on by his being hired for an extraction—is absent. Instead, he cares, cares deeply about the outcome, though he knows such emotion is more of a liability than an asset. The mantra that reverberates through his mind is this: Grace can take care of herself; I know her; her captors have no clue what they’ve taken on.

  Through the anxiety, a hint of a grin steals across his face. Then a grimace, the sting of impatience. Her abduction implies her flat was under surveillance.

  Knox calls Kamat back. “The cell phone Grace had you geo-track. Has that number popped back up on the grid?”

  “That was Xin, I believe.”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “I can check the records. One thing to consider is an IMEI trace.”

  “Give me the shorthand.”

  “A different way to follow a phone. Hardware versus phone number. IMEI information moves with your billing. In a couple hours—”

  “I need this now.”

  “Affirm.”

  “One last thing . . .” Knox has been considering how to approach this. He doesn’t want to admit that he’s out of contact with Dulwich; that could raise a red flag. Given that he’s listed as “on leave,” it might look to Kamat like Knox has gone rogue.

  He continues. “Dulwich doesn’t want me contacting him directly on this op. This info is top priority.”

  “I can contact him. No problem, John. You want to dictate the message? Stand by.” A beat. “Go.”

  “G-C two-oh-seven. J-K Alzer.” The police code “207” to inform Dulwich about the kidnapping. “J-K” to indicate Knox is registered at the Alzer under his own name, not an alias.

  Knox waits for Kamat to read back his message.

  “Perfect,” Knox says.

  “It’s gone.”

  So is Grace.

  —

  KNOX’S PHONE VIBRATES as he’s on his way to Grace’s apartment. It’s a text with three lat/long coordinates and times; Knox transfers them to the phone’s mapping app. The coordinates are eight, four and two h
ours old. Kamat has managed to lift a phone’s IMEI from a cell carrier’s logs. It’s for the man who kept vigil outside Grace’s apartment, the man who sat on a bench at the Sisli Mosque. A patient man. The eight-hour and two-hour locations are within a block of one another—at their center, the apartment housing Mashe Okle/Melemet whose address Grace provided to Knox.

  Knox rides the Metro to Kabatas and the funicular up the steep hill to Taksim. Out on the streets again he enjoys the view across the Bosphorus, which is busy with white-wake ferries and boat traffic, to the city’s Asian side. Knox is unable to appreciate the beauty; instead, his head is crowded with plans. He shuffles imaginary tiles, trying to form an outline of the steps to come, the steps that will give him the greatest chance of success in his attempts to recover Grace.

  Timing is everything. If she’s not already dead, he has twelve to twenty-four hours. After that, it will take a ransom to return her, a ransom he can’t imagine receiving from Rutherford Risk. It’s irrelevant, though: Grace was not taken for money, but for information. They’ll either dump her or kill her once they have whatever they’re after, and Knox is not willing to play those odds.

  He returns to the Metro and rides to Sisli, the modernity of the train system juxtaposing everything else about the former Constantinople. It surfaces in front of the Sony Center and the enormous shopping mall. He takes a taxi to within a block of the lat/long locations, then pulls the Tigers cap low and stops to use the glass storefronts as dull mirrors, assimilating, memorizing. He’s in combat mode, as if a switch has been thrown, everyone’s a suspect, an enemy. No friendlies. His isolation armors him. He thrives, relishing the overwhelming data he must analyze, process and file. The woman with the two children is not dismissed, nor the squatting old man with the turban and a cigarette stitched to his lower lip. An aproned shopkeeper leans against his wooden stand of ripe red fruit, surveying the street no differently from Knox. There’s a baby stroller pushed by an attractive woman in her twenties who hides her waistline beneath a maternity blouse.

  No one gets a free pass. He studies shoes, knowing they can often reveal impostors. Looks for bulges suggesting radios or weapons. For lips moving without the appearance of Bluetooth or earbud wires.