Choke Point (19 page)

Knox silences Dulwich’s incoming call.

“I’m working on it,” Knox says.

“How much longer?”

“I wish I could say. Don’t know. I’m being honest, Tommy. Treating you like an adult.”

“I know.”

“Your meds are off.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Daniel’s working on it. Hang in there.”

“It’s noisy in here.”

Knox isn’t sure what to do with that. In his head? In his apartment?

“I’m here for a reason. For you, man. We both want the same thing for you—”

“But it costs money.”

“I know you don’t want to hear that.”

“I want to see you.”

Knox won’t lie. His voice catches.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. That’s the truth, Tommy.”

“Truth hurts. Truth or Consequences. You can’t handle the truth!”

It hits Knox in the chest. Jack Nicholson. A favorite film scene of the brothers.

“Gotta go.”

Knox calls Sarge back.

—

T
HE EXTERIOR
OF THE FIVE-STAR
Sofitel Grand on Oudezijds Voorburgwal harks back to Europe’s glory days a century or more before. Inside, its Gothic-arched ceiling is painted ceramic white and supported by massive columns. Two seven-foot-tall metallic vases hold purple alliums reaching five feet higher, a contemporary dazzle where form meets function and where blue jean–clad millionaires mix with the business elite. Sitting before the glass-enclosed gas fireplace, in two of the modern overstuffed seats, Grace and Dulwich sip a Pimm’s and a lager as conversation blurs around them.

Grace is connected to the lobby’s free Wi-Fi. Dulwich has one eye on the front door, the other on their escape route to the dining room.

“Your upper lip,” she says.

Dulwich pats the perspiration away. This is the third time they have lounged like this around the city in as many days, sometimes for hours at a time. Grace acknowledges her boss’s impatience; Dulwich comes out of fieldwork, he’s not wired for stakeouts, physical or virtual. He’s a leader of men, good at running supply convoys from the safety of Kuwait into the killing fields of Iraq. He’s tough and durable, filled with titanium screws and pins and enough stitches to make a quilt. Apparently incapable of holding down a relationship, he is a single-minded workaholic. But sitting around in the lobby of a luxury hotel is anathema to him. The perfume, the piped-in classical music, the distant chiming of arriving elevators—everything here conspires against him.

“They are in,” Grace says calmly. The moment they’ve been waiting for: Grace delivers it with all the aplomb of a telephone operator.

The announcement nullifies Dulwich’s former sarcasm and disrespect for the process. Grace made the investigative procedure intentionally difficult. Too easy, and they would be suspected; too difficult, and the enemy would never connect the dots. It’s a cat-and-mouse game where, the mouse can leave nothing but a scent and a whisker or two to follow.

Grace has been planting the crumbs to follow: the business card left with the real estate agent; listing an e-mail address; her persistence with Marta; the thumping she gave Marta’s runners. All pieces of a whole—a woman looking to set up a sweatshop of her own. Dulwich, the doubter, failed to believe anyone would figure it out. But Grace knew. She would have. Knox, as well. Those who establish a beachhead can smell the enemy coming.

She’s the enemy, and she awaits notice. An e-mail address she has used has led back to a service provider; the service provider to an ISP; the ISP accessed via a router; the router tracked to the hotel whose lobby Grace and Dulwich now occupy. Bread crumbs. Grace’s firewall will require several attacks before submitting. This because it’s expected.

The third time’s the charm. The hacker opens a port on Grace’s laptop. The hacker is so consumed with the attack he misses being outflanked. Grace has been expecting him.

While her hacker is downloading her files, she is a spawning salmon swimming up the data stream. Bytes are flowing in both directions.

“It is good,” she says, trying to dissuade Dulwich from his penchant for worry. “The connection is established. We’re in.”

It’s a double-blind: the data the hacker is collecting is disinformation, positioning Grace as a direct competitor. Piggybacked onto the raid, she is downloading pertinent data. A digital battle has begun. For all she knows, the data she’s collecting is as bogus as the data she’s dishing out. Time will tell. Data is only as good as the analyst interpreting it.

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-casters 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.