Choke Point

by Ridley Pearson

  “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.

  —

  IT 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.

  —

  THE 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.

  Her eyes go wide with fright as Knox puts his face to the glass. He’s running out of air. He motions her back and tries breaking the glass with the butt end of the Maglite, but it just taps against the glass.

  Grace returns to the pocket of air, her hair floating eerily. Knox holds up a single finger. Then he swims for the surface where his bursting lungs find relief. He sees Dulwich boarding the canal boat to capture the escapee.

  He’s alongside the car again. More than half the air has leaked out. He pulls on the door. Nothing.

  Bubbles of air burst loose and he’s blinded. He tri
es again to break the glass, but he lacks the proper force.

  He leaves her. Grace pounds against the glass desperately. But Knox is headed for the car’s trunk. He pulls it farther open. Still no access to the backseat, to Grace. A floor mat floats into his face, startling him. He exhales most of his reserve air, digs for the tool kit, unscrews a large wing nut and takes hold of the tire iron.

  As he comes around to the driver’s window, Grace is gone, lost behind a curtain of silver bubbles. He swims to the hood. Her face is pressed, eyes shut, into a tiny pocket of remaining air.

  He takes out the driver’s window with three consecutive blows. The safety glass finally shatters, though in slow motion: small, brilliant cubes cascading down like ice crystals.

  He takes her by the shirt and pulls. She breaks his grip, caught unaware by the contact. A second later, her hand gropes for his and they join. Knox draws her from the car.

  Together, they kick for the surface.

  Three or four minutes, max,” Dulwich says, referring to the distinctive police sirens closing in. Grace and Knox lean against a brick wall, both panting. “With my leg, I won’t even make it to the van in time. And she’s not going anywhere.”

  Knox absorbs what he’s being told. He suspected all along that the three of them would not make the jet. But he didn’t see it working out this way.

  “Bullshit,” Knox says.

  “Pangarkar gave you up, Knox. Get while the getting’s good. I can try to keep Brower from going to the press on the knot shop, at least overnight. After that, bets are off. It doesn’t mean they won’t be after you,” Dulwich adds. “But shut this sucker down, and maybe you buy us some favors.”

  “Two minutes, tops. Go. I’ve got this.” Knox bends and pulls Grace gently toward him. She’s conscious, but the consistency of a rag doll. “Try to hold the jet. Work Primer for leverage here. Maybe it works out.”

  Knox is on his feet. He takes in the hostage by the van, the van itself, Grace’s condition. Dulwich is of military stock. Because of this, his thinking doesn’t always fit the situation; it’s Knox’s job—his duty to Grace—to make certain this is the right call. With so little time, it comes down to instinct. He bends and kisses Grace on the cheek.

  “You okay?”

  She touches his hand and pulls it to her lips. “Go,” she says. “Keep my laptop. They mustn’t find it.” She provides him her password.

  He rubs her hair, meets eyes with a surprised Dulwich. He jogs to the van, where he retrieves the laptop and the stolen GPS and power cord. Sirens bearing down on him, he recrosses the footbridge and hurries past Dulwich and Grace without acknowledgment.

  —

  LOSING FAHIZ HITS HIM MUCH LATER. He walks in the direction of the airport having little idea of where else to go. His iPhone is wet and dead. If he can find a store, he can buy a pay-as-you-go. Grace’s laptop must offer something, but he’s too dull to know exactly what.

  As each obstacle is addressed by a possible solution, the trauma subsides, freeing up more of his mind to work out additional complications. The web is woven from the center, out.

  He’s following along a tram route that will lead back to Centraal Station. Despite the likely presence of police there, a train is the fastest, most anonymous route out to the airport. He spots an electronics repair shop—the perfect place to inquire—and enters, setting off a dull buzzer as the door opens.

  The woman behind the counter is Armenian or Eastern European. She’s in her mid-twenties. The store is filled with everything from used toasters and blenders to tube televisions and plasma screens. Several of the televisions are running, each tuned to a different channel.

  “I am looking for a pay-as-you-go mobile,” he says in Dutch, resting the laptop on the counter.

  His clothes are damp, his hair matted. His shoes squish and have left a trail across the floor. “Oops,” he says. He proffers his iPhone. If she has an iPhone, all he will need to do is switch out his SIM card. If not, he has plenty of other SIMs to fit whatever she may offer.

  She nods and moves to a counter display of dozens of older model mobiles.

  And there’s Sonia.

  It’s a small color television, some kind of portable model with an extending antenna. It’s a local news piece. A weary-looking Sonia Pangarkar—the pride of Dutch journalism—stands with her arm around a shy, bashful girl, as her colleagues stand to ask questions. The sound is turned down. The girl is Berna. Behind the two is an image of a newspaper’s front page—a preview of tomorrow’s morning edition, if Knox has his Dutch right. She has an exclusive interview with the leader of a child labor ring. Fahiz.

  The merchant must speak to him repeatedly to win Knox’s attention. She can’t understand his fascination with the television.

  “You like?” she asks in halting English. “Good price, just for you.”

  One John Knox equals Berna’s freedom and an interview. It means something more to him: Sonia negotiated with Fahiz. She made contact. She knows things he wants to know.

  The merchant offers an iPhone 3GS, but it takes a different SIM than the 4. He settles on a RAZR that will accept two of the other cards he carries. Pays twenty euros for it.

  The shot of Sonia was a short piece for a news program. It’s replaced by a traffic pileup, which segues into weather coverage.

  “Do you have Internet?” he asks.

  She directs him to a coffee shop two blocks away.

  He notices two shelves of car electronics, including a dozen GPS devices. Digs into his jacket’s many pockets, producing the cigarette lighter wired to the stolen GPS.

  “Can you power this?” They’ve settled on English.

  “Of course.”

  He has to battle the device because it can’t lock onto a satellite, but the woman comes to his assistance. He borrows a pen and paper and takes down the last nine recent destinations that Fahiz’s men had driven to. Six are street addresses. The remaining are numbered one through four and represent latitude/longitude coordinates. He repacks his jacket and tips her five euros.

  Smiling, the woman calls after him on his way out, “God be with you.”

  He can’t stop that blessing from ringing in his head as he closes in on the coffee shop.

  A police patrol diverts him. He enters a dress shop, where even he knows he doesn’t belong. A giant of a wet man holding a laptop, his windbreaker bulging improperly. He doesn’t try to explain himself. Looks for a back door. Finds a narrow staircase, ducks his head and ascends, arriving into a kitchen where an elderly woman is smoking an unfiltered cigarette while drinking from a demitasse.

  “Toilet?” he says in English.

  He might as well be from the moon, and she, chiseled in stone. He retreats down the staircase, where he’s met by a silent but incensed shopkeeper. He leaves. The police car has moved on, allowing him to cross the street.

  Something catches his eye, nearly stopping him mid-street. He doesn’t know what it was. Arriving at the curb, he surveys the buildings’ facades—the store names, windows, doors. What stopped him? What was it he saw?

  He can’t spend time so exposed. He enters the crowded coffee shop, wishes he could order a beer, but settles for a straight coffee, no adjectives. Turning on Grace’s laptop is like stepping into a cockpit. He clicks on the browser. He uses her password for a second time and is presented with a stable browser frame offering a search window.

  He calls up an interactive map of Amsterdam and begins plotting the locations from the GPS. Nearly simultaneously he uses Grace’s interoffice mail system to send Brian Primer a message about the likely arrest of Dulwich and Grace, the schedule of the jet transportation and an appeal for assistance.

  He has decided on a course of action: he’s going to ring every ounce of information from Gerhardt Kreiger concerning Fahiz and leave it to Brower to mop up what’s left.

  For a moment, he’s not sure if the coffee is too strong or if he’s actually thinking clearly. He knows firsthand the aftereffe
cts of shock and trauma. In a hallucinatory vision he’s able to see not only the light at the end of the tunnel but what’s beyond the light. He stands, leaving Grace’s laptop on the table and moves automatically to the shop’s door. He moves outside, through the parked cars and nearly into the oncoming traffic as he surveys the shop facades. Something here stopped him and he has a sense of the answer, though he does not know what he’s looking for.

  And there it is: an address plate. A small tin rectangle above the shop to the left of the coffeehouse: 3. There’s a bird on the gutter looking down, mocking him. It tells him he’s stupid for having missed this.

  Back inside, he cuts a direct line to his table and Grace’s laptop. He does not go unnoticed, his size and determination nothing to mess with. His work is clumsy, his fingers too big to type easily. He pecks out a website address, lays down the list he copied from the stolen GPS.

  It must be the coffee: his heart rate is palpably quickened and sharp, painful. Is this how Grace lives each day? he wonders. He feels high. The possibility he might be right drives him like a whip. These few minutes are wildly exciting for him, parked in a chair in a coffeehouse. Of all things. It’s impossible. Yet it’s not going away.

  He enters the latitude/longitude for the GPS location labeled 3. His middle finger hovers over the RETURN key. He knows this is right; he’s no longer searching, he’s merely confirming. It’s a foregone conclusion.

  The blue pin drops onto the Google map. Knox gasps aloud, drawing attention to himself. He saves the map to the computer’s desktop.

  Swift movement approaching.

  He has the grace of a gymnast as he takes hold of the chair, raises it and lowers it onto the head of the policeman coming up behind him. The chair doesn’t splinter; it thuds like a club. The cop falls to his knees. People scream as they jump away. Coffee flies.

  Knox blocks the cop’s attempt to reach for his hardware belt; blocks him from taking hold of Knox’s leg. Doesn’t want to hurt the guy, but Knox is mechanical, robotic. He drives his knee forward, stomps down hard and a gush of surprise erupts from the onlookers. Two blows: the cop is down.