Free Choke Point by Ridley Pearson Page B

couldn’t have possibly known she would run.”
    “She’s just a child, Mr. Steele. If you’d seen her.”
    “Then we’ll find her,” he says. “We’ll find her, and the authorities will shut this thing down.” He’s feeling authoritative.
    As she bends down, something slips from her satchel. He leans back trying to steal a look at its contents, but it’s out of sight. Her hand pushes a tourist map across the table. There are seven smaller inked circles at the center of seven larger dashed circles, also in ink. It looks like a Venn diagram, the dashed circles overlapping.
    “Health clinics,” she says.
    “Berna.” Pangarkar’s encounter with the girl.
    “Yes.” Her eyes chastise him for interrupting. “But here is the point. Seven areas of coverage.”
    “Got that.”
    Another dismissive look. “This is the clinic where I found Berna. When I was interviewing for my story.” She points to a small circle in the northwest of the city.
    Knox understands she’s testing him. “You’re thinking that with so many clinics available, she’d go to the nearest one. That or one she was familiar with. One in her neighborhood, if she’s a local.” He pulled the map closer. “She lives somewhere within the dotted circle.”
    Her eyes come alive, overcoming the fatigue and anxiety. “You’re good at this,” she says somewhat suspiciously. She’s in over her head.
    Knox wants to help her, but reminds himself of his role. He can’t reveal the
S
on his undershirt just yet. He senses she’s glad to have someone to share this with; oddly enough, he appreciates being that person. Dulwich believes in straight lines—he does not condone working Pangarkar. He has Grace working the streets. Believes Knox should be taking this route as well.
    “Someone within that circle knows her,” Sonia says.
    “It shrinks the net. It’s good work.”
    The compliment arouses more suspicion from her. Occupational hazard. Knox cautions himself.
    “I suppose she could work outside the circle.” He sounds uncertain. “Or not. The clinic might be a place she knows from her family, or it could simply be a storefront window she saw.”
    “It must be walkable, either from her home or the sweatshop.”
    “Interesting.” He was there already.
    “So, perhaps we widen the circle.” Sonia draws a slightly bigger ring around the outer boundary. The darker circle around the clinic becomes a bull’s-eye.
    “You find a picture worth making and I can be there in ten to fifteen minutes.”
    “Two of us—” She’s not going to beg.
    “I’m interested in Berna’s story,” he says. “More generically than you, but interested. Finding the knot shop would make a nice image. A school, not so much, but it might lead to something more worthwhile.”
    “The streets. The kinds of places people like Berna live.”
    She’s crafty. He likes that. He’d sensed this cunning in her article as well. While exposing the larger problems of health care, she’d personalized the problem by bringing in Berna’s story. By the end of the piece, the reader was ready to shut down every sweatshop between Amsterdam and Beijing. Sonia Pangarkar brought passion to her work, but she allowed it to possess her—which could make for bad decisions.
    “I could spend a day or two shooting the streets as background.”
    “You could ask after her while you do that work. I’m known on the streets. My face. The television.”
    “I suppose.” He nods. He’s not accustomed to making a game out of being sought after. He finds it interesting to be on the receiving end of such attention. Marvels at her ability to manipulate. Realizes the longer and deeper he allows his ruse to stray from the truth, the more damaging the eventual revelation will be. He’s locking himself into an identity he’s uncomfortable with.
    “It would help us both,” she says. “I don’t want to end up next on the victim list.” But of course he does. If he becomes the target, the