Choke Point by Ridley Pearson Read Free Book Online Page A

She’s gotten under his skin. He reaches her just before she opens the door to the street. Takes her by the arm, brings lips to her ear.
    “Let me tell you something,” he whispers. “You had better adopt a new attitude. Check your surroundings. Switch sides of the street. Reverse directions. Learn to follow no patterns—none. Assume—do you hear me?—you assume you are being watched or followed at all times and you do everything in your power to lose them, to make them work at it, to expose themselves to you. Remember faces. If not me, you let someone close to you know when you suspect something. Stay at hotels and switch often. Pay cash. Do not use your apartment. Avoid your regular crowd. Maybe you stay alive. You march out of the hotel without precautions, as you are about to do now, you won’t last a week.” He releases her. She has been pulling against his grip and he’s held her too tightly. Her perfume or deodorant—something—envelops her in a warm, earthy glow.
    Her arm is free. They meet eyes.
    “Thank you.” She leaves his head spinning as she now takes in the lobby’s clientele and slips out the hotel doors and onto the busy sidewalk. She pauses, studying the passing pedestrians and the vehicles along
Keizersgracht.
    A quick learner.

F ollowing the address contained in the police report, Grace arrives at a nondescript brick apartment building, one of a line of identical structures on Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam’s Oud-West. The suburban neighborhood has all the elegance of a community college campus.
    Grace double-checks the house number against the photocopied report.
    The door is unlocked. She passes an umbrella stand and a boot brush. Finds a two-person elevator and a door marked as fire stairs. The staircase holds the unpleasant aftereffects of curry and cigarettes. The space is well lighted, with no graffiti. Posters warn of AIDS.
    The man she confronted in the shisha café knew nothing of a newspaper reporter; had no bruises or signs of having been attacked. The man who’d checked into the hospital had provided a bogus address, but one that was registered to a man with his same name. Clever, yes. But also premeditated. He’d known how he would fill out the forms well before arriving at the emergency room. The beating had scared him. Finding such a cautious man will not be easy.
    She walks the second-floor hallway, past doors muting the sounds of music and television, conversation and radio. She stops, recalling the police report. She grins, amused. The address is apartment 9. There are only eight apartments.
    She retreats and knocks on the door. A Slavic woman answers, too pretty for such a place. She’s wearing a clean yet well-worn frock.
    Grace displays her EU credentials. She speaks Dutch slowly. The woman has no trouble understanding. There is no man named Fahiz, Grace is told. Not that she knows of. People come and go. It is hard to keep track. We don’t know each other well, the woman confesses.
    A second dead end from the elusive Kahil Fahiz, a man mistaken for another.
    Grace is about to inquire if the police have been around, but thinks better of it. She thanks the woman and compliments her on her child, asleep in a springed rocker. Grace’s attention lingers a little too long on the infant.
    “You have children of your own?” the woman asks.
    Grace offers a half-smile, reminded of the wedding ring she wears as part of her cover. Thanks the woman. Descends the stairs in something of a trance. She feels weary. Old. She has left her high school sweetheart behind in China for a second time. Twice she has felt the skin peeled from her body; twice she has been forced to heal. She calls Knox, wondering why this is the first thing she thinks to do.
    “Can you talk?”
    “And listen,” he says. “With pleasure.”
    She throws an internal switch: back to Grace the spy. “He provided a fake address. Twice, actually, but the second time to the cops.”
    “That’s