Choke Point Read Online Free Page B

common enough. But for Grace, it is a minor shot of adrenaline. She reviews the initial newspaper article, skimming it for a name that’s echoing around her head. Finds it:
    Ka
br
il Fahiz.
    Sonia Pangarkar’s article quotes a Ka
br
il Fahiz, a local merchant who took a dim view of child labor sweatshops in his neighborhood.
    Ka
h
il . . . Ka
br
il.
    She places a call using the laptop.
    “Have you opened it yet?” she asks Knox over the VPN’s voice-to-Internet protocol software. As he speaks on his mobile, it is conceivable Knox’s end of the conversation might be eavesdropped on. Not so for her. In a perfect world they would both be on the VPN.
    “The police report? I have. My written Dutch is a little lacking.”
    “It’s the victim’s statement, short as it is, that interests me—us. That, and his family name of course.”
    “Okay,” Knox says.
    “It states that they beat him and robbed him. But at the end of the beating, one of them said something in Farsi along the lines of: ‘That’ll teach you to open your mouth.’ The victim said he spent hours trying to figure out what he might’ve said and when he might’ve said it, but came up blank.”
    “We all say things we later regret.”
    “No . . . it is not that. Not in this case. The sergeant filing the report made an interesting observation. Entirely speculative, but important to us.”
    “Okay?”
    “Ka
br
il Fahiz,” she says, emphasizing the second syllable, “the man Pangarkar interviewed for her story, is from the same neighborhood—Oud-West—and is the same approximate age as the victim, Ka
h
il
Fahiz, the one they assaulted.”
    “These apes go asking around intending to pound this guy who’s speaking to reporters into a different postal code—”
    “But they mispronounce his name. Kabril and Kahil—an easy mistake to make.”
    “They beat up the wrong guy,” Knox said, speculating. “I like the way you think. Have I told you that?”
    “It wasn’t me, it was the police. It is speculation. You’re jet-lagged. Stay on point.”
    “They got the wrong guy. Mixed up the names. Listen, I get it!”
    “Avoided using a car bomb this time because they didn’t want the assault connected back to the earlier murder. To the newspaper article. But the police made that connection. The police report suggests a follow-up on all of Pangarkar’s sources mentioned in the article. They will have sent them to ground, John. Protect them from the possibility of more reprisals.”
    “That won’t help us. Is there contact info in the report?”
    “There is.”
    “You should interview Fahiz.”
    “Who do you think you are dealing with?” She hears herself slip into her Chinese dialect—she sounds like her mother!—and resents Knox for triggering her anger.
    She resents a great deal about John Knox—his singular focus, his single-mindedness. The arrogance. Theirs is an evolving relationship. She imagines this is what an older brother would feel like—a combination of love, hate, respect, embarrassment. Together, they wander a no-man’s-land booby-trapped with buried mines of sexual innuendo but lacking the chemistry to go along with it. He is at once fascinating and intriguing, boorish and disagreeable.
    “If you go talking to . . . well . . . you know how I feel about it.”
    He had objected vehemently to Dulwich’s plan for Grace to take the cover of a low-level EU bureaucrat arriving to replace the victim of the car bombing. Dulwich believed it not only gave her an excuse to follow in Pangarkar’s footsteps, but that it also might “attract the bee to the pollen.” Dulwich showed little concern over using her as bait—a gamble given her increased importance to Primer. For Dulwich, it’s all about efficiency—getting the most out of his assets to reach the endpoint the quickest. He would argue that that included suffering the least collateral damage. But the way he stages an operation often runs contrary to that