“Maysoon!”
He was definitely angry. She took a deep breath and started down the hall. The bedroom was on the left, and she stopped in the open doorway.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
Her throat tightened. Even if she had known what she was going to say, she couldn’t have spoken.
“Maysoon, I asked you a question,” he said, his voice taking on an even harsher edge. “What are you doing here?”
She knew that tone, and it frightened her. Telling him about Chuck and the would-be meeting at the Carpenter’s Arms was not an option. She needed to deliver good news-and then it came to her.
“I have something for you,” she said.
“I’m not in the mood.”
She removed her coat and laid it on the chair. “You will be,” she said as she stepped toward the bed.
“Let me sleep.”
She pulled her smart phone from her pocket and sat on the edge of the mattress. The glowing screen assaulted his eyes.
“I said let me sleep, damn it.”
She adjusted the brightness. “Check this out,” she said.
His eyes narrowed as he tried to focus, and slowly the scowl on his face became a smile. The photograph obviously pleased him.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“Kitty eight,” she said. “Pretty, no?”
“When did that come in?”
“Last night. She desperately wants to meet you. LMIRL,” she said, invoking the texting shorthand: Let’s meet in real life.
“When?”
She reached beneath the covers and grabbed him where it counted. “Whenever he wants.”
Habib pulled her closer. “You are so good, Shada,” he said, reverting to her real name.
Shada felt him getting bigger already. She pulled away slowly, laid her phone on the nightstand, and turned on a little five-watt night-light. Then she started to undress for him. Slowly. With the lights low.
The way kitty8 would.
Chapter Fifty-three
The hotel suite was quiet, but Jack and Vince were not alone. Jack’s computer was on the desk, the LCD aglow with a live video feed from across the ocean. Chuck Mays was connected by webcam. Jack positioned himself in front of the built-in camera on his laptop so that Chuck could see him back in Miami. Vince sat off to the side in the armchair, close enough to hear Chuck’s voice on the speaker.
“Project Round Up is by far the most important work I’ve ever done,” said Chuck, his mouth moving a second or two behind the words, “even though I’ll never make a dime from it.”
“You’re doing this for free?” said Jack.
“This isn’t about money,” said Chuck.
Jack glanced at Vince, then back at the screen. “Exactly what is it about?”
Chuck paused. He wasn’t happy about it, but Vince had convinced him that the only way to make up for the way he’d treated Jack was to share the details of his prized project.
“It’s about catching criminals on the Internet,” said Chuck.
“Terrorists?”
“Worse.”
It took only a moment for Jack to conjure up images of those newsmagazine shows on television where fifty-year-old men meet teenage girls on the Internet and show up naked at their door only to find a camera crew waiting in the kitchen. “Pedophiles?”
“Even worse,” said Chuck.
“Worse than a pedophile” was a short list in anyone’s universe, but Jack had met and even defended them on death row. Chuck spelled it out:
“We’re talking about the sick bastards who not only savage the endangered runaways you see on the back of milk cartons, but who share their homemade videos over the Internet.”
Jack bristled at the thought. “That’s not at all what I expected Project Round Up to be.”
“You were thinking terrorism, I presume.”
“How else can you explain how Jamal ended up in Gitmo?”
“Let me rephrase your question,” said Chuck, “and you can probably answer it: What do terrorists and pedophiles have in common?”
Vince chimed in. “You mean other than the fact that they should both have their balls dipped in honey and fed to fire ants? Skip the guessing game, Chuck. A little history on Project Round Up might be helpful to Jack.”
“All right, here’s the quick version,” said Chuck. “Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Italian police raided a mosque in Milan and, to their surprise, found computers filled with images of sexually abused children. Five years later, British antiterrorism police focused on a preacher at the East London Mosque who also happened to be a former Mujahideen. They couldn’t get enough to convict him on terrorism charges, but again, police were shocked to find computerized images of hard-core child pornography. Fast-forward another couple of years, again in the U.K. A Nazi sympathizer was convicted on terrorism charges, and police found thirty-nine thousand indecent images of children at his flat in Yorkshire. I could go on, but the question is obvious: Were all these terrorists into the exploitation of children for personal gratification? Or was something else involved?”
“My guess is that the ‘something else’ would be encryption,” said Jack.
“You got it,” said Chuck. “The first reports out of the London Times were about terrorists encoding secret messages in the digital images of child pornography.”
“That seems really stupid,” said Jack, “considering all of the scrutiny it gets from law enforcement. Seems like it would be a much better idea to hide messages in pictures of cookware or something else random and off the radar.”
“Exactly,” said Chuck. “My take was that it wasn’t steganography-terrorists embedding messages in child porn. It was terrorists learning about encryption by studying the way online pedophiles traded files in peer-to-peer networks. That was when it hit me: If terrorists could go to school on these guys, so could I. Project Round Up was born.”
Jack knew about P2P, but something was missing. “I’m still not clear on what your project is,” said Jack.
“Show him,” said Vince.
Chuck nodded readily, as if the initial reluctance to share his work had faded. In fact, he seemed proud of what he was doing, almost eager to be able to demonstrate it. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” he said.
Jack braced himself, fearful that the horrific image of a pedophile’s work might appear. Instead, the image of Chuck’s face blinked off the screen, and it was replaced by a map of south Florida. A red dot appeared over a street on Key Biscayne.
“The dot on the screen marks the address of a convicted sexual predator who traded on the P2P network,” said Chuck.
“That’s less than a mile from my house,” said Jack.
“That’s why I chose it. Kind of brings it home, doesn’t it?”
“He was trading child pornography?” said Jack.
“Not just trading. He created it. What I’m going to show you is the digital version of time-lapsed photography. You’re looking at zero-hour for the launch of one of his video files. The first trade.”
There was a blip on the screen, and the map enlarged from south Florida to the eastern United States. A second dot appeared over Richmond, Virginia.
“Is it that easy to track P2P trades?”
“If you know what you’re looking for. Watch what happens twenty minutes later.”
The map grew again, now showing the entire United States. Jack counted six dots, one as far away as Oregon.
“Two hours later,” said Chuck, and suddenly there were several dozen dots spread across North America. “Four hours,” said Chuck, and the map stretched to the entire Western Hemisphere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dots from Brazil to Vancouver to Budapest and everywhere in between.
“That’s Project Round Up?”
“No. Project Round Up is the ability to work backward.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at that map,” said Chuck. He continued to advance the timeline-one day, three
days, a week-until there were so many dots that virtually every major city on the map was covered in red. “If you didn’t know that the file started in Key Biscayne, could you tell me who created it?”
“No way.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the point where law enforcement-usually undercover agents trading online-gets involved. After the file has been traded around the world. You nail these creeps for possession and trading, but not creation. This is what I want to do. Watch.”
There was another blip on the screen, and the timeline was in reverse-the map shrinking, red dots disappearing. Finally, they were back to the first frame: one red dot over a house on Key Biscayne.
“You can do that?
“I’m almost there. My goal is to be able to work back to the camera that made the video. Like ballistics for a bullet.”
“How does that work?”
The map vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Chuck’s face. “That’s for me to know and the sick bastards to find out.”
“Is that what Jamal was working on when he disappeared?”
“We were in the very early stages of creating algorithms to unravel trades of encrypted files. Basically he was cataloging the most popular encryption methods used by sexual predators. As I mentioned, some terrorist organizations have essentially borrowed those encryption methods from the pedophiles.”
Jack worked through the implications. “So Jamal was all over the Internet downloading files that were encrypted the same way al-Qaeda files are encrypted.”
“Not necessarily al-Qaeda,” said Chuck, “but yes, known terrorist organizations.”
“Couple that with the fact that he was of Somali descent, his father is a known recruiter for al-Shabaab, and two of his high-school classmates left Minnesota to fight in Somalia, and I can see where he would end up on an antiterrorism watch list.”
“A watch list is one thing,” said Vince. “A secret detention facility in Eastern Europe is another.”
Jack considered it, but he didn’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth. “What are you saying, Vince?”
“I’m saying that we still don’t know for sure that there ever was a secret detention facility in Prague. Even if there was, we don’t know if it was government run.”
“Actually, I’m convinced that it was not government run,” said Jack, though he still did not divulge Andie as his source.
“Hell, if that’s the case, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with the war on terrorism.”
Jack glanced at Chuck’s image on the screen, and with the slight transmission delay, the import of Vince’s words hit Jack first and then carried across the ocean like a tidal wave.
“I feel stupid for saying this,” said Jack, “but I’ve never actually considered that possibility.”
“Maybe it’s time we did,” said Vince.
There was a flicker on the computer screen. The map reappeared, but this time it was focused on London, and the city was covered with red dots.
“Maybe Shada already has,” said Chuck.
Chapter Fifty-four
Shada lay sleeping at his side. Habib was staring at the ceiling, deep in thought.
The sex had been good. Not as good as their first time, of course, but it was hard to top the illicit thrill of throttling another man’s wife in his own castle. To say that he had come between Shada and Chuck Mays would have been overstatement. Never had a married woman been so ripe for the picking. It had started with the exchange of e-mails, a little flirtatious online banter, and the eventual trading of photos. Things quickly heated up with the webcam, where it was her idea to undress for him, his idea that she touch herself, their idea to meet. From then on it was good-bye to the virtual world and hello to the real pink. Habib had the perfect arrangement. Until Vince Paulo came along. And now Paulo was pounding the sidewalks of London with Jamal’s lawyer. Or so Shada had told him.
Habib glanced at Shada, who was still sound asleep. The room was awash with shadows, brightened only by the dim night-light. He quietly rolled out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and washed up at the sink. Then he went down the hall to the study, unrolled his prayer mat on the floor, and faced toward Mecca. It was almost Isha, the last of the daily prayer times for Muslims around the world.
Salat-the formal prayer of Islam-is one of the Five Pillars of the religion, an obligatory rite for practicing Muslims that must be performed five times each day at the specified time. Habib tried not to miss Fajr (sunrise), Magrhib (sunset), and Isha (nightfall). Zuhr and Asr were another matter. Praying at noon and midafternoon would have required him to set an alarm clock. Sometimes he would wake himself and combine the two into one, a permissible practice known as Jam’ bayn as-Salaatayn. More often, he slept through and substituted a late-night prayer, twisting the words of `Amr ibn `Absah, who claimed to have heard Muhammad say, “The closest that a slave comes to his Lord is during the middle of the latter portion of the night, so if you can be among those who remember Allah the Exalted One at that time, then do so.” Never mind that the Prophet was talking about non-mandatory nighttime prayer in addition to Salat. It was one of the small ways in which Habib had distorted the teachings of Islam to suit his personal needs. He was guilty of bigger distortions. Much bigger.
Habib went to the dresser for his crocheted kufi, then stopped. Even after washing his face and hands, the smell of sex lingered, which made Ghusl-the cleaning of the whole body-mandatory before prayer. The removal of such impurities involved a certain step-by-step ritual, but he asked for Allah’s forgiveness and simply jumped in the shower.
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 cal
led 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.
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