“Gracias,” Dulwich says. Hampered by his bad leg, he has every reason to fear a firefight.
The van continues backing up, colliding with the wall and scraping and grinding its way along the brick. It comes to rest, the driver’s door mirror bent and angled, its engine straining, back tires spitting dirt as they spin out. The engine stalls.
Top 40 music plays from a radio inside, the only sounds. If there are girls, they are eerily quiet. Knox scoots back along the wall below rows of fixed glass panes the size of bathroom tile. Has no intention of firing into a room full of young girls. Wonders if the two men inside know this. Are counting on it.
Bruno Mars is singing about grenades.
“Anything?” Dulwich says.
Knox shakes his head, only to realize Dulwich is speaking to Grace.
Knox has long since lost his earbud. The white wire dangles from his jacket.
Dulwich hand-signals Knox: No sign of the two men.
Knox works his way back to a narrow column of brick separating the sets of windows; he stands, his shoulder blades pressed to the wall.
A flicker of movement to his right. It takes him a half second to realize it’s coming from the van’s bent mirror. It shows the bridge of a nose and the peak of a man’s forehead. He’s as flat to the interior wall as Knox is.
Knox ducks down and works his way back to the van. Slips out of his jacket and wraps it tightly around his right hand, switching the weapon to his left. Eases his way up the brick, sweat breaking out everywhere. Dulwich knows better than to look in his direction, but has followed Knox’s every move.
Knox swings out, smashes through the glass with his wrapped hand and catches the man by the throat, pinning him to the wall. Hears a gun drop as the man reaches to fight the choke hold, but works against himself. In a deceptively fast move, Knox shifts the man’s throat to the inside of his elbow; Knox drops his weapon and, pulling the man to the window, effects a choke hold with both arms. He has the advantage of six or seven inches and fifty pounds. He hauls the man off his feet, breaking glass with the man’s head and shoulders. He extracts him, finishes the choke hold and drops the unconscious man to his feet.
“We’ve got one in the wind,” Dulwich reports, receiving notice from Grace. “Heading west on Bellamystraat.”
“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!”