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 . . .”
Her eyes fill with distrust once again. Dulwich’s warning hits home: it’s doomed to fall apart. Grace’s bugging Kreiger’s laptop or the attack on her computer had better deliver. They need results. He needs to connect with Grace.
He’s losing Sonia.
“I’ll make the call,” he says.
Having hacked Kreiger’s laptop and its built-in camera, Grace watches as her computer screen plays live images of the man at his desk. She turns the laptop to Knox.
On the screen, Gerhardt Kreiger leans back in his desk chair. His necktie is loosened, and he’s either smoking a hand-rolled cigarette or a joint. His left hand is held to his jaw, suggesting a mobile phone. He speaks in heavily accented English.
“It’s me . . . Ya . . . Two? This is good. Send them, please.” The “please” is an afterthought, a courtesy with zero conviction. “As to that other thing: yes, or no? It’s a big order. I thought you would want that. My customer is . . . anxious. No more dicking around, okay? Just give me a yes or no . . . Do you honestly think—? I’ve done business with him many times. He is for real . . . Just yes or no. A price and a date . . . I have no idea what you’re talking about. This is your problem, not mine . . . Okay, I’ll tell him. As to the two, I will get back to you when I have an offer. Send me the pictures. Ciao.”
Grace aims her laptop’s screen at herself, steering it away from Knox, whose head is spinning from what he’s heard. He chose the meeting place, a wine bar on Keizersgracht open well past midnight. The atmosphere inside is controlled drunkenness, a notch or two above that of a brown café.
“It may be possible for us—the office in Hong Kong—to get his phone records. If so, we will be able to identify the number he called. You get the point. We may have the dog by the tail. Short term it is a different story. I have been data-mining Kreiger’s laptop. One of the problems with machines like his is the large capacity of hard drives. Eighty gigs. Three hundred gigs. Could take months to read everything. So I focus on three components.” Grace sees Knox’s eyes glaze over and wonders if she’s causing his condition or if it’s the beer. She can see he’s not sleeping well, if at all. Wants to ask about the reporter, but she confines herself to her domain. She’s warming behind the effects of red wine.
“First,” she says, continuing, “e-mails, of course. Second, browser history. Finally, off-Web social media: Skype, iChat, SMS messaging. Each represents a specialized activity and offers unique information and insight.” She can’t stop herself from sounding like a technical manual. Knox rocks his beer side to side, watching the bubbles surface. “Eighteen minutes after this call, he receives an e-mail.” She angles the screen only slightly, not sure he cares to look. Senses he’d rather be told than participate. Wonders if his distraction is purely fatigue; or is the reporter involved? “Two attachments. Photos, just as he requested.” She displays the photos side by side.
Now Knox is looking. “He said to—”
“Send them. Yes. ‘Two,’ he said. Then, at the end, he said he would get back to him about the two after he has an offer.”
The screen shows the glum faces of two young girls. She waits for Knox to find his breath, knows what he’s going through. The girl on the right is Berna. The likeness isn’t perfect, whether the result of lighting or angle, or her swollen right cheek, but it’s Berna. Grace waits him out.
“Less than five minutes later . . .” She types and moves the cursor. “It’s a social networking photo site called Shutter Shot. He has it administered under password-only access.”
“He posted the girls’ photos onto the Internet.”
“Here’s his scrapbook.” She pages through several screens of one, two or three girls’ faces. Some are in their late teens, early twenties, but the majority are just children. The names are fake, given that Berna is captioned as Cindy.