Choke Point gc&jk-2 Read online

  She can’t appear to give the hacker endless access. It’s a dance. She sends some bogus e-mails to dummy accounts. Suddenly the hacker is not downloading but uploading large packets of data to Grace’s laptop. Too big for a virus. The deadliest trojans and worms are a tenth this size.

  “Something is wrong. I am not sure exactly what. Data bomb? I cannot explain what I am seeing.”

  “Try.” Until this moment, Dulwich has been like a boy coming downstairs Christmas morning. He doesn’t understand the technical side of the raid, but has approved the strategy.

  Grace closes her laptop, ending the connection.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Dulwich is beside himself.

  “I am telling you: it is some kind of sabotage I have not seen.” Her eyes land on a point beyond him. Dulwich looks there.

  Two thirty-somethings in dark suits. Hotel security.

  “We are blown,” she whispers. “They may have tagged the laptop.”

  Money has been spread around the city to try to find Sonia. This has never been in question. It seems unlikely Sofitel’s security team would bother a guest about hacking the hotel’s wireless, as Grace has. Much of Dulwich’s attention has been fixed on the front doors; a raid from within wasn’t part of the game plan.

  The security men stand before them. Dulwich is clearly considering a physical response, and though Grace will go along—especially given the man’s bad leg—she hopes it doesn’t come to that. The surprise raid could play in their favor. There’s not time to explain it to Dulwich. Her disquiet comes not from the men facing them, but from unexplained data bombs loaded onto her laptop. She can’t explain that act; in Grace’s world, numbers must add up.

  “Good evening,” the taller of the two says.

  “Hello?” Dulwich returns. “How may we help you?” Ever on the offensive.

  “May I see a room key, please?”

  “We are not registered guests,” Dulwich says. “We are awaiting some friends for drinks.”

  “I asked another guest for her log-on,” Grace explains. “She gave it to me freely.”

  “I see. No problem. If you would come with us for a moment. Please.” He tacks this on for appearances, but the man has made up his mind how this is to proceed.

  “Concerning?”

  Dulwich is already plotting their escape. She places a hand on his knee.

  “It is all right. I am sure it is nothing.”

  “The hotel conforms to International Internet Usage Regulations, as explained in the wireless agreement. We merely wish to inspect the lady’s laptop as is our right. It won’t take but a minute.”

  “Of course.” Dulwich is still plotting.

  “It is all right,” Grace repeats. She stands, slipping the laptop into a stylish case.

  “I will take that, if you don’t mind,” the security man says. “Just until this is all cleared up.”

  True hackers might have magnets in their case, or a way to erase the drive prior to detection. Her real laptop—not this substitute—possesses not only a general password, but a second, unprompted security code. If the second code is not input within thirty seconds of other use of the track pad or keyboard, the drive erases. This man knows about such systems; he’s concerned about timing.

  She passes him the case and he wisely removes the laptop and returns the case to her. Dulwich stands. Other people in the lobby are now watching them. The security men—one in front, one behind—walk them to the elevator. They are taken to the mezzanine level and shown into an unimpressive office that has gone too long without a spring cleaning.

  Dulwich and Grace take seats in uncomfortable chairs while the one who has done all the talking walks around and takes his place behind the desk. More troubling: the second man stands behind Grace and Dulwich with his back to the door. They aren’t going anywhere.

  The man behind the desk spins the laptop toward Grace and says, “Password, please.”

  “No, thank you.” Resistance now may offer her useful information. She wants to see what’s coming, knows how important her anticipation is right now, but also doesn’t want to appear too willing.

  “If you have not read the terms of our agreement,” he says, rifling a drawer, then another, “I can provide one.” He produces a printed copy of the three-page agreement. The clause he points to is already highlighted in yellow: Users grant the hotel access to their hardware and software. His eyebrows arched, he awaits her. “Any violation of this agreement can result in criminal prosecution.” He leans forward and turns to the last page, stabs the penultimate paragraph.

  Confiscating a business person’s laptop could put the hotel in a serious PR jam. But short of confiscating, how does he hope to download the laptop’s contents, a process that could take an hour or more? Perhaps the plan is to gain access to the machine and then spend at least an hour in discussions. Maybe the man standing behind them is a runner to be handed the machine the moment it’s unlocked.

  “I have done nothing wrong,” she says, playing her role well.

  “Perfect. Then enter your password, please—as required by the agreement—and let’s have a look. You’ll be gone within minutes,” he says, an intimidating and insincere snarl overtaking his lips.

  It’s the “criminal prosecution” that’s ringing in her ears. Dulwich’s too, judging by the look of him. If she fails to supply the password they can, and presumably will, call the police. Whoever’s behind the cyber attack on her machine knows this. The man speaking to her may only be doing his job, unaware he’s part of someone else’s plan; or he may be on the take, and part of it. All this is going through her head as she places her hands on the keyboard and enters the password.

  “Thank you,” the man says. He places a one-page agreement before her, writing the time of day as: 20:16. The agreement grants the hotel the right to search the laptop and establishes what files were part of the machine when confiscated. She doesn’t like the way this is going.

  “I will now call up the most recent activity.” He angles the laptop so that she can observe his actions.

  Dulwich can’t see and makes no attempt to join Grace, his attention instead on the man guarding the door. The vein in Dulwich’s forehead is pronounced. His breathing is deep and controlled.

  Oh, shit, she nearly blurts out, but holds herself back. The equal-sized data packets make sense now. She should have guessed their content by their size: Images. JPEGs.

  Her computer screen fills with a photograph of a girl—a naked girl no older than ten—touching herself. Grace’s stomach lurches and she nearly vomits.

  “It is chilly in here,” she gags out, looking at Dulwich.

  Her use of the safe word triggers an explosion of energy. Dulwich stands, bringing the chair he was sitting in up over his back, and plants it into the man at the door. Grace scoops a desk stapler up in her left hand and delivers it full force into the temple of the man behind the desk. She vaults the desk on her side, clearing the desktop, and careens into the lap of the stunned and bleeding security man. The bridge of his nose is crushed with the second blow from the stapler. She wedges her hand into his throat as together they ride the chair over backward. She drives his head down hard onto the thin carpet. It strikes with a thud and he’s unconscious.

  Dulwich has a bloody lip and a scratched cheek but his opponent is curled up in a fetal position and groaning. He kicks him twice to move him out of the way of the door. Grace grabs up the laptop before following Dulwich into the mezzanine.

  “What the hell?” Dulwich says.

  “Porn,” Grace says. “Child porn dumped onto my machine so I could be arrested.”

  “Shit.” Dulwich skids to a stop outside the door to the stairs. “Wait here.” He can move well despite the leg when he wants to. He returns only seconds later with an employee ID card and lanyard in hand.

  “Security cameras,” he tells her. “We’re all over them.”

  Grace now assumes hotel security was alerted to porn-cas
ters using their lobby’s free Internet. The purpose was to get Dulwich and Grace arrested by Amsterdam police, to take Grace out of the sweatshop business while learning as much about her and her financing as possible.

  The hotel security footage represents their arrest.

  A limping Dulwich leads the way down the hotel fire stairs to the basement. She has spent a limited amount of time with him in the field. She could easily take the lead—his bad leg is a hindrance—but there’s an alpha dog air about him that cautions her.

  From the back, Dulwich’s thick neck and massive shoulders intimidate. She has forgotten who this man is, the past he comes from. His soft gray eyes and unresponsive face belie the reality. She has been lulled into an opinion of him that’s shattered as she follows. He’s a wolf on a scent. The most she can hope for is to pick up a few scraps.

  He never checks to see if she follows; he doesn’t care. He whips the bad leg ahead of him, hurrying down the bright, subterranean corridor out to prove something. To himself? To her? To others?

  She can’t figure out how he knows his way until she realizes his upward head motion isn’t part of dealing with the leg. The ceiling holds metal brackets supporting dozens of blue Ethernet wires, round black cables and phone lines. They turn and terminate at the door he now stands before. He slides the ID card into the door’s mechanism; the doorplate beeps and a red light turns green. Dulwich pockets the card and leans against the door’s lever handle.

  He dispatches a middle-aged woman sitting before a rack of flat-screen monitors by kicking her chair into the countertop and slamming her head down from behind. She’s out. A second man, coming out of his chair, drops an iPad as Dulwich backhand-chops him in the throat, elbows him in the chest and throws him to the floor. No more than five seconds have passed.

  “Thumb drives, hard drives, DVDs,” he says. He must be talking to her, though he doesn’t look in her direction. “Here!” He grabs the unconscious woman’s purse, upends it, dumping its contents and passes it to Grace. “Everything. Nothing left behind.” He starts ripping Ethernet cables at random, concerned there may be a cloud backup in place. She’s never considered him much of a techie, but Dulwich works methodically through the chilly room at a feverish pace, stripping it of any memory capability. They confiscate a dozen thumb drives, thirty DVDs and half that many freestanding external drives. Ninety seconds after they’ve entered, they’re out in the hallway.

  Five meters from the corridor’s exit sign, the door beneath pops open. A black-suited security man with a shaved head and quick eyes emerges. He’s outwardly suspicious of these two strangers, but forges a smile as he and Dulwich pass shoulder to shoulder. Dulwich stops at the elevator and slaps the wall button.

  The security man continues toward the office. Ten meters . . . five . . .

  Dulwich waits for the elevator. Grace can’t believe this decision. It’s costing them precious time. Worse, she has no doubt the elevator can be controlled from the security office.

  The chirp of the door to the security office rings out. The man depresses the lever.

  Dulwich darts across the corridor to the stairs as the elevator dings its arrival, Grace close on his heels. The leg is far more difficult to maneuver while climbing. Had he wanted to take the elevator, or was it only a ruse?

  “How many on duty?” he says, rounding the first landing toward the lobby level.

  “Six,” she says.

  “Correct.”

  In a bank of ten walkie-talkie chargers, five radios are missing. The woman dispatcher who won’t leave the office accounts for the sixth employee.

  “Four down,” Grace says, “and the one we just passed, leaves one. Possibly more depending on the condition of the first two.”

  “Give me that!” He grabs the security woman’s purse from her. Stuffs various pockets with samples of its contents. Returns it to her. “We separate from here. Rendezvous at Wing Kee on Zeedijk. One hour. You take the lobby.”

  “You’ve got the lobby,” she says stubbornly. The leg will slow him down. The lobby is the quickest way to the street. She pulls the door open for him, and snags the ID card from his hand, balling up its lanyard in her fist.

  He’s about to object.

  “One hour,” she says, then nudges him and closes the door behind him. She climbs to the mezzanine level, where the ballrooms are letting out. She mixes into the crowd and leaves with others ten minutes later, walking within an arm’s reach of the security man she’d passed in the basement who stands a sentry surveilling the crowd. His eyes go right past her. He’d locked in on the alpha dog.

  For once, Grace doesn’t mind being an afterthought.

  The Tassenmuseum Hendrikje protects them from prying eyes. Unlike the tourist-jammed Van Gogh, here is a small museum dedicated to bags and purses. It is visited only by women on this day, tourists speaking everything from German to Urdu. Knox and Sonia occupy a padded bench in front of the case of jeweled clutches.

  The map forwarded to Knox’s iPhone by the Hong Kong office of Rutherford Risk shows dozens of small blue pins, each representing where Maja’s “father,” Mert Demir, remained in any one place for over five minutes. The pins are time-stamped and address-stamped and, if a business, listed by company name. What’s readily apparent, and what is the focus of the e-mail message accompanying the map, is that huge chunks of time are unaccounted for, sometimes hours at a time. Time spent in the knot shop, Knox assumes. Time the man’s phone has been turned off and/or its SIM card removed.

  “Where did you get this?” Sonia asks.

  “Yeah, right!” Knox has slipped up in his enthusiasm to share the data. “And you’re going to reveal all your sources, I suppose?”

  “I am a journalist.”

  “And I’m not, because I make pictures instead of sentences?” He waits, but she isn’t going to let him off. “Okay.” He vamps. “I have a friend very high up at the BBC. He/she has contacts in agencies that end with numbers. That’s as much as you get.”

  Her eyes soften from outright distrust to vague suspicion.

  As he studies the map, several things jump out.

  First, the repetition. Patterns are schooled out of undercover cops and covert agents. Walk a different path every day in the woods and the hunter doesn’t know where to lay his trap. Walk the same path, and you put your foot in it. Yet Demir—the name listed with the school and therefore most likely an alias—frequents a particular lunch spot, a smoke shop and a brown café close to downtown.

  Second is the gaping hole left in the map by the absence of pins. The Hong Kong office has explained that the international carrier purges location data to storage in seventy-two-hour time spans. The data Knox is looking at represents the most recently stored seventy-two hours and includes a pin at the school, confirming its accuracy. Hong Kong is working on retrieving the archival information but is not hopeful.

  “What’s interesting,” Knox tells Sonia, who’s tucked in close to him to view his phone’s screen, “is this area here. A whole section of the city he avoids.”

  “Or a zone where he pulls his phone’s chip in order to keep himself off of the radar.” She blushes. “But you already knew that.”

  “We have to consider it an area of interest.”

  “It is not small.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “We cannot go door-to-door hoping to find a knot shop.”

  “No. But we can watch for young girls walking alone.”

  “And get them killed? Like Maja?”

  “They watch for people following the girls, not people in wait. It’s like setting a tail from in front—impossible to detect.”

  “A photographer knows this, how?”

  “I watch a lot of movies. Read a lot of books.” He’s too flip by a long shot.

  She disapproves. “We are not putting the girls at risk.”

  “We know they walk to the shop on their own. We spend a day or two, early in the morning, watching from a coffee shop window
for a young girl alone. No harm, no foul.”

  “The only way to see where they go is to follow them.”

  “You know leapfrog? We play leapfrog. You take her. I take her. We pass her off to each other. Difficult if not impossible to pick up on.”

  “No, John. No more girls go missing.”

  “Then it’s Brower,” he says, hoping to change her mind. “It’s us, or it’s Brower. And he’ll take some convincing, I would imagine.”

  “We get nothing out of Demir’s arrest.” She sounds frustrated and irritable, a different woman from that of the night before when the towel had come off. When the inhibitions had been dropped and the alcohol had inflamed another Sonia.

  “We have two possible lines of pursuit: the girls, and Demir. If you’re ruling out the girls, then it’s down to Demir, and trust me, you and I are not going to handle a guy like that. If we do, it won’t be anything you can write about. It’s called persuasion by force. You wouldn’t like it.” He waits for her to school him. She does not. Instead, she seems to pull away. “Which leaves the police, because they’re good with people like him. They know exactly what to do, which buttons to push. If we feed him to Brower, Brower owes us. We can bargain up front what we get in return. Maybe you get in on Demir’s interrogation—”

  “Never happen. Not the KLPD, not Brower.”

  “You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. I’m a reporter here. I know everyone!”

  “You never said anything.”

  “No.” She lets that settle, wanting to drive home a point. “Joshua Brower is a climber. If he is working with you it’s because it helps him, nothing more. He is not to be trusted.”

  “He’ll owe me for this.” She huffs. “Maybe you observe the interview.”

  A pair of American grandmothers draws too close.

  Knox stands and leads Sonia away to a display of shoulder bags.

  He says, “We don’t give him Demir without participation.” He keeps his voice low. “Once we get past twenty-four hours, all bets are off for our friend. We act now. The girls, or Brower . . .”