Afraid of the Dark

by James Grippando

  “Pretty girl,” said Jack.

  “Beautiful,” said Jamal. “I used to kid her that she was the perfect blend of obnoxious blond father and stunning Bahamian mother that modeling agencies looked for.”

  Jack held his next question, choosing instead to observe for a moment. Jamal was unable to look away from the photograph, his eyes moistening. It was the first real show of emotion Jack had seen from his client.

  If it was real.

  “Did you get along with her mother?”

  “It’s funny. I thought we were going to get on just fine. McKenna told me that her grandfather was Muslim, like me. But I guess her mother had rejected Islam.”

  “Did she reject you?”

  “It wasn’t anything specific. I just got a vibe that she wasn’t nuts about me.”

  Jack checked his watch. The arraignment was less than an hour away, and he needed to speed things up.

  “Let’s fast-forward a bit,” said Jack, “to the time before McKenna’s death. Tell me how you came to leave the country.”

  “I was abducted.”

  “Abducted?”

  “Yes,” he said with a straight face.

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was the U.S. government.”

  “Okay, I’m outta here,” said Jack as he pushed away from the table.

  “No, no, listen,” said Neil.

  Jack shook his head. “I took this case pro bono because you were right, Neil: Everybody deserves a lawyer. But I’m a sole practitioner, and I don’t have time to talk spy novels to a circuit court judge.”

  “My father is a recruiter for al-Shabaab,” said Jamal, “the Mujahideen Youth Movement.”

  That got Jack’s attention. While preparing for the trip to Gitmo, he had heard of al-Shabaab. Officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States in March 2008, it had been waging a war against Somalia’s government to implement sharia—a stricter interprentation of Islamic law.

  “Yesterday I stood before a federal judge and assured him that there was no basis to detain you at Gitmo,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing. “Now you’re telling me that you were an al-Shabaab recruit?”

  “I have nothing to do with them,” said Jamal, “but they definitely tapped into my old neighborhood in Minneapolis.”

  Neil added, “Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to push the Islamists out of Mogadishu. It was an outrage to most Somalis, which made it an easy rallying cry for al-Shabaab. Ever since then, they have been reaching out to young Somalis all over the world, recruiting them to fight.”

  “At least two of my friends from high school ended up dead in Somalia,” said Jamal.

  Jack settled back into his chair, willing to listen a little longer. “What does any of this have to do with your being abducted?”

  “Two high-school friends of mine were killed fighting in Somalia. My father was a recruiter in Mogadishu. Obviously, my name landed on somebody’s list of suspected terrorists.”

  Things were slowly starting to sound more plausible. Jack checked his watch again. Time was short. “Tell me what happened. The short version.”

  “Like I said, I was working for McKenna’s father in Miami. He did a lot of secret projects, some for the government, some for private industry. I never knew who the clients were, never got the details. But he had this one called Project Round Up, and I knew it was big.”

  “Big in what way?”

  “The supercomputer ability, the amount of data being gathered, the data-mining capabilities—everything was out of this world.”

  “What part of the project were you involved with?”

  “Encryption,” said Jamal.

  “How to encrypt your own data, or how to read through someone else’s encryption?”

  “At the time I was abducted, I was doing both.”

  “Let’s get back to that. When you say you were abducted . . .”

  “I mean exactly that,” said Jamal. “Some goons came into my apartment in the middle of the night, threw me on the floor, put a hood over my head, stuck me in the ass with a syringe . . . and then it was lights-out.”

  “Did you get a look at them?”

  “No way.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I woke up in a dark room strapped to a table. And from then on, it was like a scene out of 24.”

  “What to you mean?”

  “Bright lights, then total darkness. Loud calypso music, then total silence. Exteme cold temperature, then hot. Every time I fell asleep, a sprinkler in the ceiling squirted me with ice-cold water. The only time I wasn’t shackled to the floor was when they put a hood over my head, so I kept walking into the walls. They wouldn’t let me use the bathroom when I needed to, didn’t feed me until I was starving, and then after I finally got something to eat they served me another three meals ten minutes apart. All of this was obviously designed to disorient me. Then the interrogation started.”

  “What did they ask you about?”

  “Project Round Up. I told them everything I knew about the encryption, but they insisted that I knew more than I was telling them.”

  “And all of this happened in Prague?”

  “I had no idea where it was. Until they let me go.”

  “They just turned you loose?”

  “They gave me another injection to knock me out. I woke up on a bench near a bridge. As soon as I figured out where I was, I ran to a pay phone and called my mother in Minneapolis. That was when I found out that McKenna had been murdered and that the cops were looking for me.”

  “How long had you been out of the country at this point?”

  “I had no idea, until my mother told me what day it was. It was even longer than I’d thought: seventeen days.”

  “Did she believe you?”

  “Of course. The last time we’d talked on the phone was ten days before McKenna was killed. I used to talk to her every day. She knew something had happened to me.”

  “Did you talk about coming home?”

  “Are you kidding? She said I would be handing myself over to a lynch mob. A cop was blinded, CNN aired a tape recording of McKenna naming me as the killer, my picture was all over the news, and every cop in America was on the lookout for me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I headed for Somalia to hide with my father.”

  “The terrorist recruiter?”

  “At the time, I didn’t know he was involved with all of that. He was just my father, and I needed help.”

  “Did you stay with him?”

  “For about a week. He got me a fake passport to turn me into Khaled al-Jawar, which is the name you knew me by.”

  “Was that a real person or a made-up name?”

  “I have no idea, and I was so scared that I didn’t care. This was at the height of the Ethiopian invasion. I could hear the gunfighting in the city, especially after dark. Then one night the troops busted down the door to my father’s apartment, and they took me away. You know the rest of the story. It was exactly what you told the judge in Washington. The Ethiopians forced me to confess that I was sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, and then they handed me over to the CIA.”

  “Probably for some amount of bounty money,” said Neil.

  “I’m sure,” said Jamal. “Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Gitmo.”

  “And you didn’t bother telling them who you really were.”

  “Well, duh. I would have been sent to Miami on murder charges. I figured that if I kept quiet—if I could play the part of a Somali peasant named Khaled al-Jawar—the Americans would have to release me sooner or later.”

  “So no one at Gitmo ever accused you of being Jamal Wakefield?”

  “Nope.”

  Jack looked at Neil. “They must have known. Fingerprints or something.”

  Jamal glared, as if he resented having to repeat himself: “They never said anything about it,” said Jamal, his voice taking on an edge. />
  Jack said, “Obviously the interrogators in Prague knew your true identity, right?”

  “Oh, they knew everything about me there. And they used it, too.”

  “In what way?”

  “Threats, mainly.”

  “They threatened you?”

  “All the time. It started mostly with threats against my mother—the things they were going to enjoy doing to her if I refused to talk about Project Round Up.”

  “Any other threats?”

  “Yeah. Including one that they kept.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jamal’s expression turned very serious. “They said if I didn’t give them the information they wanted, they would kill McKenna.”

  His words hung in the air, as if her violent death had taken a whole new turn.

  There was a knock on the door, and the door opened.

  “Showtime,” the guard said.

  Jamal’s arraignment was scheduled for eleven A.M., and there was just enough time to get the prisoner downstairs for a court “appearance” via closed-circuit television from the jailhouse.

  “So,” asked Neil, “does this mean I get to keep my ponytail?”

  Jack had almost forgotten that Neil had bet his precious locks that Jack would stay on the case after hearing Jamal’s story. But it didn’t take the smartest lawyer in the world to see the problems in Jamal’s case—even if he was telling the truth.

  “For now,” he said. “But keep your scissors handy.”

  Chapter Nine

  It was 11:04 P.M. when Jack finally got home from the office. When it came to pro bono cases, the well-established rule that “no good deed goes unpunished” seemed to have an exponential ripple effect, as if every hour spent working for free put you three hours behind on billable files. He walked through his front door and plopped on the couch just in time for the tail end of the lead story on the late local news.

  “Wakefield was denied bail,” said the anchorwoman. “A trial date has not yet been set.”

  Trial. The very thought made Jack shudder. Neil had offered to pay him out of the Freedom Institute’s operating budget, but Jack knew how that would play out. Jack would present a bill, and Neil would wax on about all the schoolchildren who would have to go without textbooks because there was no money to sue the mayor for paying six-figure salaries to his chauffeur, his barber, and a nineteen-year-old waitress at Hooters who was also his “secretary.”

  Jack switched off the TV, changed into jogging shorts and a T-shirt (his standard sleepwear), and headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

  He’d been too busy all day to think much about Jamal Wakefield, but, naturally, bedtime brought the nagging questions to the fore. Had Jamal been out of the country when McKenna was murdered, or did he go on the run after she was killed? Was he telling the truth about the first round of secret interrogation, or was he making up an alibi? The polygraph examination was clear enough: no signs of deception. But that had absolutely no bearing on what was perhaps the biggest question of all.

  “Why in the hell are you even doing this?” he asked his reflection in the mirror.

  It sure wasn’t for the pat on the back from friends and family. Grandpa Swyteck had seemed to sum up the absurdity of it all. It had taken Jack two hours to calm him down from his “combative” episode, and it had been hard to tell if Grandpa was grasping any of the things Jack was telling him about his day. Finally, he’d leveled off at a semilucid level—or so Jack had thought.

  “My grandson defending terrorists,” he’d said bitterly.

  Apparently he’d absorbed plenty. “Accused terrorists, Grandpa.”

  “That’s a hell of a job for a Jew.”

  Jack had blinked hard, not comprehending. “A lot of the lawyers representing the detainees are Jewish, actually.”

  The ceiling tiles had suddenly caught Grandpa’s attention, and he was swatting at dust floaters like a man catching flies. Jack needed to reel him back in before the nurse returned to chart him as “combative.”

  “Grandpa, you know we’re not Jewish, right?”

  “What do you mean we’re not Jewish?”

  In truth, Jack had never known his grandfather to be of any faith, but the angry glare had taken Jack aback. “You were born in Bohemia in what used to be Czechoslovakia. We’re Czech.”

  “Yes, Czech Jews.”

  Jack could have spent the next ten minutes trying to explain that even though Grandpa had never been a churchgoing man, his son—Jack’s father—had gone to Mass every Sunday, married a Catholic girl from Cuba, and even taken communion from the pope during his second term as governor. But Grandpa had dozed off, exhausted from his earlier struggle with the nurse.

  “Getting old sucks,” Jack said to the forty-year-old man in the mirror.

  Jack heard a car door slam. He returned his toothbrush to the rack and peered out the bathroom window, but overgrown palm fronds blocked his view of the driveway. He listened.

  Footsteps.

  Someone was definitely out there. Key Biscayne was safe by Miami standards, but the last time anyone had shown up unexpectedly at his house after midnight, a couple of pissed-off Colombians had decided to express their displeasure with his courtroom performance by turning his 1966 Mustang into a charred hunk of metal. Jack went down the hall to the living room and waited. It was dark, lighted only in places by the dim glow of an outdoor porch lamp that shined through the open slats in the draperies. He listened, hearing nothing. But something—a sixth sense—told him that someone was on the other side of that door.

  “Who’s there?” he asked.

  There was no answer, but as he started forward, the knock startled him. It had the familiar rhythm:

  DUH, duh-duh-duh-duh, DUH. . .

  He stood in silence, waiting for the final DUH, DUH. Instead, there was the voice he knew well:

  “I’m baaaaack,” said Andie.

  She couldn’t carry personal items—including a house key—when she was working undercover. Jack smiled as he hurried to turn the deadbolt and open the door. He barely got a look at her face before she burst across the threshold, threw her arms around his neck, and planted her lips on his. The passion was contagious, but finally she stopped for air.

  “You’re blond,” he said.

  “You like it?”

  He wasn’t sure—but he was glad the FBI hadn’t forced her to cut her hair for her assignment. “Looks great.” He laced his fingers with hers and noticed she was not wearing the engagement ring he’d given her.

  “Sorry,” she said, attuned to his discovery. “I love my diamond, but it doesn’t fit the undercover role.”

  It was the most she’d told him about her assignment to date. “Are you going to tell what role that is?”

  “If I told you . . .”

  “I know, I know: You’d have to kill me.”

  “That’s the bad news,” she said, smiling coyly. “The good news is: Wait until I show you my preferred method of execution.”

  “So you are going to tell me?”

  “No. In your case, I punish the ignorant.”

  “You mean innocent.”

  “Keep arguing, Counselor, and you’re going to end up with a suspended sentence.” She closed the door with a hind kick, her eyes never leaving his. “I have to be back at noon.”

  Jack glanced toward the bedroom, then back. “That doesn’t give us much time.”

  “I’m going to take a quick shower,” she said. “How about you join me?”

  “Hmm. Very tempting, honey. But there’s absolutely no way we’ll get out of there without having sex, and sex in that teeny-tiny shower stall rates right up there with sex on a coffee table. Alluring in theory, but what the hell’s the point when there’s a perfectly good mattress twenty feet away?”

  “You’re such a putz.”

  “It’s a gift. I’ll open some wine.”

  She kissed him and went off to the bedroom. Jack found a bottle of red in the wine chiller. Hi
s collection was comprised mostly of gifts from clients, and this bottle of Betts & Scholl Hermitage Rouge was from Mr. Scholler himself—an old friend who’d had the good sense to listen to his wife and buy up declining apartment buildings on Miami Beach right before Miami Vice made art deco cool again. Timing was everything in life.

  “Jack,” Andie sang out from the shower, “naked, sex-starved woman wants her wine.”

  Luck didn’t hurt, either.

  “Coming,” he said, a glass in each hand.

  Theirs was not the perfect engagement, but Jack had given up on perfect long ago, right about the time he’d discovered that his first marriage was the perfect storm. A man didn’t ask an FBI agent to marry him and then tell her not to do her job. No more than Andie would tell Jack not to do his—with the exception of Jamal Wakefield. Andie had made it her business to tell Jack to stay away from him. More than anything else—more than the grief he’d caught for defending an accused terrorist, more than the emotional burden of a murder case involving a blind cop and a dead teenager—Andie’s decision to step on his wing tips was eating at Jack.

  A billow of steam moistened his face as he entered the bathroom.

  “Here you go,” he said as he opened the shower door. She was gorgeous even when shaving her legs.

  Andie gave him a kiss, took a long sip of wine, and handed the glass back to him. Jack leaned against the wall, keeping an eye on the blurred beauty behind the foggy shower door. And he was still thinking about Jamal Wakefield. He just couldn’t let it go.

  “So you really don’t want me to take that case, huh?”

  The shower door opened a crack. She had shampoo in her hair and a look of incredulity on her face. “You want to talk about that now?”

  She disappeared back into the shower, and Jack tasted the wine from his friend’s vineyard. Timing was everything, it reminded him, but for Jack, “no time like the present” was the general rule.

  Probably why the wine is Betts & Scholl, not Betts & Swyteck.

  “It just took me by surprise,” said Jack. “You’ve never tried to steer me away from a case before.”

  The shower stopped. Jack handed her a bath towel, and Andie stepped out, wrapped in terry cloth. She towel-dried her newly blond hair and then stood before the mirror, speaking as she combed through the snarls.