Afraid of the Dark

by James Grippando

  The drafty apartment had a perpetual chill in winter, and the hot water felt so good that Habib could have stood there for another thirty minutes. But he had missed Magrhib as well as Zuhr and Asr, so he was determined to be timely about Isha. The starting time changed each day; it began when complete darkness arrived. Some Muslims were quite scientific about it, setting the time at precisely when the sun had descended at least twelve degrees below the horizon. But no one could pinpoint the commencement of Isha better than a man who thought of dusk as dawn—a man who, for the past three years, had called himself the Dark.

  Habib peered through the shower glass and looked out the bathroom window. The city lights had a certain glow when it was truly nightfall, and by his estimation, he had at least another fifteen minutes. He squeezed a glob of shampoo from the bottle, his mind awhirl as he worked the lather through his hair.

  The news from Shada had surprised him. It had come while they were lying naked on the bed, his heart still thumping from an intense climax. Out of the blue, she’d told him about Paulo. Habib had pressed her for details, but she’d denied that it was a prearranged meeting, and she’d offered up nothing in response to his questions:

  “What is Swyteck doing with him?”

  “No idea.”

  “How did they track you down?”

  “I swear, I don’t have a clue.”

  Habib still wasn’t sure if he believed her. His initial reaction had been to blame her for being careless and somehow blowing their cover. On reflection, however, perhaps it was his own damn fault.

  Could they know about the e-mail?

  He was thinking about the e-mail to Jamal’s father. “I killed your son. I wanted you to know that.” Sending it had been risky. But he couldn’t help himself. Memories of his sister—of how Jamal’s father had gotten her to “volunteer” for martyrdom in Mogadishu—still burned like a firestorm.

  I’m glad I sent it.

  The bathroom light switched on, and the blast of brightness was more than he could stand.

  “My eyes!” he shouted.

  “Oops, I’m sorry,” said Shada, and the light cut off.

  He closed his eyes, soothing them with darkness, and then he opened them slowly. It was all he could do since the explosion. Sleeping by day. Working by night. Living in shadows. Running from the sun. Showering in the dim glow of a tiny night-light. Photophobia was what the doctors called it, a diagnosis that spoke more to the symptoms than the cause. For three years he’d suffered, and even though it was his own bullet that had punctured the propane tank and unleashed the destructive flash of heat and light, there was only one person to blame.

  This is all your fault, Paulo. Even if you did get the worst of it.

  He turned off the water, stepped out of the shower, and toweled himself dry. The bathroom window had darkened. It was past Isha, but he didn’t feel like praying. His friends at the mosque would have told him he wasn’t a good Muslim, and they would have been right.

  I am The Dark.

  He pulled on a bathrobe and went to his computer. Shada was only pretending to be asleep, but he didn’t care, so long as she left him alone. A three-year-old anger burned inside of him. Vince Paulo had already lost his sight in the same explosion, and the Dark had shown him the mercy of leaving it at that. But if Paulo had come here like a blind fool thinking he could settle an old score, it was the Dark’s intention to make him pay an even steeper price. And just as he’d done with Jamal’s father, the Dark wanted the pleasure of telling him so.

  He entered a stolen user ID and password to log on to an e-mail account. It wasn’t the same account he’d used to contact Jamal’s father, and he used a new screen name as well. One that would definitely mean something to Vince Paulo. He banged out a quick message, then stopped.

  FMLTWIA. The simple act of typing in the screen name—seven letters that summed up his work for the past three years—triggered a brainstorm. The work had begun with McKenna, but it was ongoing, as enduring as the memory of what had happened to his sister in Mogadishu. He was suddenly thinking of the other little whore in the cellar, of her breach of security during his trip to Miami—her phone call to Swyteck.

  That’s why Swyteck is here.

  Maybe she had reached out to Shada, too. The thought chilled him, but he quickly calmed himself. There was no way. It would have taken a major breakdown in his spyware for any communication to Shada to have gone undetected. And Shada would never have set up a LMIRL hookup with kitty8 if she knew about a sixteen-year-old runaway in the cellar.

  Assuming there really was a kitty8.

  He retrieved Paulo’s e-mail address from the Miami Police Department home page before putting the finishing touches on the draft message. It didn’t matter if Swyteck had brought Paulo to London, or if Paulo had brought Swyteck. They were here together, and that made for a single threat. The draft e-mail seemed fine, but he didn’t want to fire off anything in knee-jerk fashion. He took a couple minutes to get dressed, then returned to the computer to read it again.

  Perfect. He hit SEND, then started across the bedroom.

  “Where are you going?” Shada asked from the bed.

  He put on his coat—the one with the key to the cellar in the pocket—and turned to face her in the darkness.

  “Taking care of business,” he said.

  “What does that mean?”

  He stepped closer to the bed, his expression deadly serious. “It means none of your business,” he said, letting her feel the weight of his stare for a minute. Finally, he turned and left the room, closing the bedroom door behind him.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Jack was glad to hear Andie’s voice on the line. It was lunchtime in Miami, and she had only a few minutes. Vince had gone down to dinner by himself to give Jack time alone to talk in the room. Jack wanted to tell her how much he missed her, but Andie wasn’t one to get all sloppy on the phone in the middle of her workday.

  “Theo wants to know if you’re planning to hit the Tanqueray distillery,” she said.

  Theo was like those relatives up north who expect you to bring them back a bag of grapefruit every time you visit Florida. Jack would rather fork over twenty bucks with directions to their local grocery store. He changed the subject.

  “How’s Grandpa?”

  “He’s doing surprisingly well. We’ve had some good talks since you left.”

  “You have?”

  “It’s weird. Your trip to London seems to have energized him. Or at least triggered some long-term memory.”

  “Are you telling me there really was a General Swyteck?”

  “No, but Grandpa was convincing enough that I did some research on your family.”

  Jack caught his breath. An FBI agent doing research on your family could be dangerous, even if she was your fiancée. “What did you find out?”

  “No General Swyteck, but it turns out there was actually a Czech general who went into exile in the U.K. right around the time period your grandfather was talking about—early 1940s. And his last name was Petrak.”

  “Is it the same Petrak as my grandmother?”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  The landline rang. Jack’s first thought—that Vince had gotten lost in the lobby and was calling for help—was a stupid one, as he quickly realized that somehow Vince had managed to survive pretty well without him for the past three years. He put Andie on hold and picked up. It was Chuck Mays.

  “Did you look at the file I sent you?”

  Chuck had e-mailed Jack a key file that he had obtained through Project Round Up. It wasn’t that Jack didn’t appreciate how important the work was. It just took some emotional preparation to dive into this particular type of P2P trading.

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for? Another dead friend?”

  Chuck had quite the way of reminding him that he was here for Neil. But he had a point. “I’ll do it tonight,” said Jack.

  “Let’s d
o it now.”

  “I said I’d get to it.”

  “I’ll walk you through it. It will be better that way.”

  Again, he had a point. Jack took a minute to say good-bye to Andie on his cell. Then he returned to Chuck on the landline and booted up his laptop. Chuck gave him click-by-click instructions to bring up the file. It was a video, as Jack had expected, and a thumbnail bearing the name Project Round Up appeared on Jack’s LCD.

  “That’s obviously not the original thumbnail,” said Chuck. “But everything else about the file is intact, exactly the material I traded for on the P2P network. Left click once, and that will bring up the original thumbnail; click again, and that will enlarge it to screen size.”

  Jack clicked once, and even though the icon was the size of a postage stamp, it was enough to give him pause. He clicked again and looked away.

  “Do you see it?” asked Chuck.

  Jack’s gaze returned to the screen. The girl staring back at him was wide-eyed with fright. Jack guessed that she was sixteen, at most, and her long brown hair was tied in pigtails to make her look even younger than she was. She was wearing only the skirt from a cheerleading outfit, and across her smallish breasts someone had written a message in bold red lipstick: FMLTWIA.

  Chuck said, “If you click again—”

  “Is it really necessary that I watch this?” said Jack.

  “Hey, if you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the art.”

  Jack had heard that analogy before, even from elite FBI profilers, and he’d never liked it. It was running way too far with Warhol’s concept that “art is what you can get away with,” as if there were art in savagery.

  Jack took a breath and clicked again. The image shocked him, as he wasn’t prepared for instant hard-core sex.

  Chuck said, “The guys who crave this stuff aren’t into foreplay.”

  The man was unidentifiable, his face completely off screen, his body filmed from the big hairy stomach down, the phallic version of the proverbial Everyman. Nothing about the girl suggested a willing participant. Jack looked away, but the audio was equally disturbing—the man inside her shouting at his underage victim, berating her on his way toward climax.

  “Who did this to you, huh?

  “You did.”

  “No! Who did this to you? Who made you into such a little slut?”

  “Me.”

  “Say it again!”

  “I did.”

  Jack closed the file, ending it. “That’s enough. I get it.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Chuck. “I’ve been studying these sick sons of bitches for three years, and I still don’t get it.”

  Jack felt a sudden urge to shut down his computer—to grab it and throw it out the window, he was so repulsed. He collected himself and said, “What I’m saying is that I ‘get’ the FMLTWIA. That was the text message that McKenna sent to Jamal before she was murdered.”

  “Let’s be more precise,” said Chuck. “The man who killed McKenna used McKenna’s phone to send that message to Jamal. That made it look like Jamal was the killer. That’s why I was so encouraged when I found these FMLTWIA videos being traded in the P2P networks.”

  “There are more?”

  “Many more. Some sick pervert took the text acronym that high-school girls send to their boyfriends and turned it into his pornographic video signature.”

  Jack was almost afraid to ask, but he had to know. “Is there a McKenna video?”

  “Not that I’ve been able to find. But my theory is that her killer made one before . . . you know.”

  Jack noted the break in Chuck’s voice, and it was a painful reminder that this was a father talking about his child. Chuck was a tough guy, but no one could be a John Walsh all of the time.

  Chuck continued, his composure restored. “That’s what drives me with Project Round Up. If I can find McKenna’s video, and if I can use Project Round Up to unwind the trades all the way back to the camera that created it . . . bingo.”

  “You found her killer.”

  “In fact, it may be the only way to catch this guy,” said Chuck. “There are no witnesses. All physical evidence was destroyed in the fire.”

  “Which would give McKenna’s killer good reason to go to great lengths to stop Project Round Up.”

  There was silence on the line, as if they were both ticking off the lives that had been lost so far. Finally, Chuck said, “I realize there are missing pieces to this puzzle.”

  “A few,” said Jack.

  “I think they’ll fall into place once we get an answer to the one part of the equation that doesn’t seem to add up.”

  Jack thought about it, and intuitively he knew it was the one thing that had troubled him all along. “Why did McKenna say Jamal did it?”

  “Remind me to ask that question,” said Chuck, “just as soon as I get my hands around this monster’s throat.”

  Chapter Fifty-six

  It was cold in the backseat of the taxi, but Vince didn’t ask the driver to turn up the heat. A little chill in the air would keep him alert.

  It was important to be alert around guns.

  Vince had lied to Jack about going down to dinner. Food was the furthest thing from his mind. He was singularly focused on the e-mail message that had landed in his work mailbox, and which his screen reader had converted from text to mechanical audio. “Are you afraid of the Dark? Admit it. You are. You shouldn’t have come to London. May the best blind man win.”

  The city streets were wet, and the whump-whump of the windshield wipers gave rhythm to his ruminations. The Dark. He imagined the words were capitalized in the e-mail, and the significance wasn’t lost on him. He’d heard about the signature before—scrawled on the cocktail napkin in a message to Jack at the Lincoln Road café; on the napkin from Club Inversion that police had found in Jamal’s back pocket after he was killed. In is own mind, Vince had already made the connection between McKenna’s killer and this man who called himself the Dark. But the reference in this e-mail to “the best blind man” was confusing. Was he blind, too? Was he talking about blindness in some other sense? Was it just more taunting? Vince wasn’t sure. Nor had he determined how the Dark knew he was in London. But he recognized fighting words when he heard them. If it was a showdown he wanted, then yes, by all means: Let the better man win.

  “Right turn at White Chapel High Street in twenty-five meters.”

  It was the computerized voice of his GPS navigator. He didn’t trust taxi drivers, who had been known to rob blind people . . . well, blind.

  The driver turned right, and Vince was glad to have kept him honest. They were headed for Brick Lane, an East End area once prowled by Jack the Ripper, now famous for curry houses and everything Bangladeshi. Streets were narrow and the one-way traffic was slow, so Vince used the travel time to phone his wife. The call went straight to voice mail. At the tone, he left a simple message.

  “I love you.”

  The taxi stopped. “I love you, too,” said the driver. “Four pounds fifty.”

  The GPS navigator announced, “You have arrived at your destination.” It was nice to have the reassurance of technology that he wasn’t being dropped off just anywhere, even if the satellite was a few seconds late.

  “Which way is the Kushiara ATM?” asked Vince.

  “Get out and you’ll be standing right in front of it.”

  That was exactly where Vince wanted to be—the corner of Brick Lane and Fashion Street, south of the old Truman Brewery. He paid the fare, stepped out to the sidewalk, and closed the door. The taxi pulled away, and even though he was alone, his old friend was with him. Rain. It was abundant in London, creating a world that didn’t depend on sight. Vince popped his umbrella and listened. He could hear footsteps around him, easily differentiating between the heavy plod of a passing jogger and the lighter step of a woman walking in high heels. He could feel the breeze on his face and smell the curry from the restaurant down the street. He heard a flag f
lapping in the breeze overhead, the clang of a bicycle bell. With a little extra concentration he could distinguish buses from trucks, trucks from cars, little cars from motor scooters. Nearby, a pigeon cooed, then another, and it sounded as though they were scrapping over a piece of bread or perhaps a muffin that someone had dropped on the sidewalk. A car door slammed. Men were talking in the distance. In some ways, he was more aware of his surroundings, or at least of certain details of his surroundings, than many sighted persons.

  Are you afraid of The Dark?

  The question had been poignant. Yes, sometimes he was—when he used his mind’s eye to step outside of himself, and he remembered a world that was so much more than sound, smell, taste, and touch. The fearful Vince was all too aware that he lived his life largely in a reactive posture—that things still existed even if they concealed themselves and did not call out to him for recognition. He wondered what lay hidden on these old streets, how close he really was to danger—to the Dark.

  “Are you Vince?”

  He turned at the sound of the man’s voice. “Who’s asking?”

  “Prince Charles.”

  The guy was every bit the smart-ass in person that he had been on the phone, and the Bangladeshi accent was just as prominent. Vince took the envelope from his pocket and handed it over. He could hear the man open it, presumably counting out the two hundred pounds in cash.

  “You sure you don’t want the submachine gun?” the man said. “It’s only another hundred pounds.”

  The U.K. had some of the toughest gun laws in the world, but the guy was only half joking. Even semiautomatic weapons could be had for as little as three hundred pounds, and bootleg DVDs and black-market tobacco weren’t the only illegal trade in Banglatown. It was all a matter of knowing the right person, and Chuck Mays had assured Vince that if he needed anything—anything—in the East End, an ex-pat from Dhaka named Sanu Reza was the go-to guy.