Afraid of the Dark js-9

by James Grippando

  Jack glanced at his computer, wondering if those pictures were among the files that Shada had copied onto the flash drive.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When did you see him last?” asked Jack.

  “A couple of hours ago,” she said, her voice cracking. “He came to the cellar and…”

  “And what?” asked Jack.

  She didn’t answer, and the crack in her voice had mushroomed into outright sobbing. Jack wasn’t sure how much longer he could keep her on the line.

  “Listen to me, please,” said Jack. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me where you are, but can you tell me where that cellar is?”

  “No! Not if he’s not dead. I saw the pictures. He showed me what he’d do to me if I ever told anyone!”

  “He doesn’t have to find out you told me anything.”

  “He knows everything! This sucks so bad. Why couldn’t he die? He looked dead. ”

  Jack did a double take. “He looked dead when?”

  “When we left.”

  “We?” said Jack. “Someone was with you in the cellar?”

  “There was a big fight, and he just laid there as I cut off the ankle bracelet. Then we ran.”

  “Ankle-” he started to say, but the bracelet was secondary. “Who was with you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Jack tried again. “Please, I need to know who was with you.”

  He heard her talking away from the phone. A few seconds later, she was back on the line. “I don’t know his name. And he’s not answering me.”

  “What do you mean he doesn’t answer?”

  Her voice was suddenly racing. “It was really a bad fight. They both got hurt, and he seemed okay when we ran. But I’m not so sure now. I’m taking care of him, and if he has to go to the hospital I’ll call an ambulance. But right now I don’t want to go anywhere until you tell me that I’m not going to end up like McKenna.”

  “I promise that is not going to happen.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know that I can help you.”

  “No one can. Not until the Dark is dead!”

  The Dark? “Did you just call him the Dark?”

  “That’s what he told me to call him-what he told me to be afraid of.”

  “Please, you have to tell me where you-”

  Jack stopped. The line had gone silent, and he could tell she was gone. Jack immediately dialed back, but she didn’t answer. It went straight to voice mail.

  “Hello, this is Hassan, I can’t come to the phone right now…”

  Jack knew the voice, and it gave him chills. It was Maryam Wakefield’s brother-in-law.

  Jamal’s uncle.

  Chapter Sixty

  It was almost six P.M. in Arlington, and Sid Littleton was working through dinner. The offices of Black Ice Security were on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and at sunset the shadows on the partially frozen river looked like black ice. It was on a winter day like this one, six years earlier, that Littleton had named his private military firm.

  Littleton was meeting with his Washington lawyers when his cell phone rang. He checked the number. It was from London. He excused himself from the conference room so that he could return the call in private on a more secure line.

  Congressional hearings into the possible existence of black sites in Eastern Europe had started on Monday. The highly politicized inquiry was making little headway, but at least one member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was chomping at the bit to grill the arrogant CEO of Black Ice Security. Littleton’s testimony would begin at nine A.M., and his lawyers’ job was to make him the most prepared witness from the handful of private military firms summoned to the Hill. Littleton wasn’t worried. He assured his counsel that it would be over his dead body that the committee would get to the bottom of any privately run black sites. He didn’t mention the other dead bodies-most recently, Neil Goderich.

  Littleton stepped into his corner office, where floor-to-ceiling windows offered power views of the Pentagon and the upscale area known as Pentagon City. Seated behind the two-hundred-year-old walnut desk that his father had used as director of the CIA, Littleton picked up the phone and dialed the number. He never took a call from his chief special operations man directly. They needed to account for the possibility that Habib might be calling with a gun to his head. The protocol was for Littleton to return the call using Diffie-Hellman top-military-level cell-encryption methods. If Habib answered with the correct greeting, Littleton knew that he was talking under his own free will.

  “F-M-L-T-W-I-A,” said Habib.

  It was the correct greeting. The men could talk freely.

  “Go ahead,” said Littleton.

  “Major problem. I have reason to believe that some files from my computer may have been copied.”

  “Which files?”

  “The ones Chang had.”

  Littleton sank in his chair. The elimination of Ethan Chang had been an easy decision. Chang had transported several detainees to the Black Ice site in the Czech Republic, and he’d even created videos of what went on there-including a few videos of Jamal Wakefield. It was brazen enough that Chang demanded serious money from Littleton to keep quiet about it. When he threatened to give the images to Jack Swyteck if Black Ice didn’t pay up, he’d left Littleton no choice. The CEO did, however, have issues with the Bond-like assassination technique that Habib had chosen.

  “You were supposed to destroy those files,” Littleton said.

  “Obviously, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look, if you want to second-guess, go back to three years ago, when you should never have let Jamal Wakefield leave the Czech Republic alive.”

  “A nineteen-year-old kid doesn’t deserve to die just because he’s a stupid punk in over his head.”

  “I beg to differ.”

  “I ordered his release because you were learning more about Project Round Up from Chuck Mays’ wife than our interrogators could ever squeeze out of one of his employees. So don’t put this problem on me, Habib. You should have destroyed the videos of what went on at that facility. Period.”

  “Fine, I should have. But I didn’t. Right now, it doesn’t matter why. We’ve got a problem that we have to deal with.”

  Littleton tried to control his anger. For purposes of handling the immediate problem, Habib was right: It mattered not why he had failed to destroy the files. But Habib would have some explaining to do once this fire was out.

  “How big is the problem?”

  “The only safe assumption is that the files are going straight to Chuck Mays.”

  “Son of a bitch! Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you do,” said Littleton. “The same technology that Mays is applying to kiddy porn can be used to reverse engineer the technological DNA of any video he gets his hands on. He can trace those black site videos back to Black Ice, and the things we did to those detainees make Abu Ghraib and Gitmo look like a spa.”

  “Fortunately, you’re not in the videos.”

  “It doesn’t matter! If Mays can link that kind of abuse to my company, I’m dead. You hear me? I’m not just talking about the cancellation of DOD security contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean this literally: I’m dead.”

  “Sounds like you’re hitting the panic button.”

  “I want to know what you are going to do about it?”

  “I have the upper hand on Chuck Mays. All I need from you is a green light.”

  “A green light to do what?”

  “To play my ace in the hole.”

  “Do I want to know what your ace in the hole is?”

  “That’s a good question. Do you?”

  Littleton considered it. There was always a danger of asking one question too many in this line of work.

  “You have the green light,” said Littleton.
“Do what you gotta do.”

  Chapter Sixty-one

  Your boyfriend is the Dark,” said Jack.

  Jack’s use of “the Dark” meant nothing to Shada, but he put the pieces together and brought her up to speed on the string of notes with the same creepy messages: Are you afraid of The Dark?

  “He killed your daughter,” Jack said. “He killed Jamal. He killed a guy named Ethan Chang. He probably killed my friend Neil and Dr. Spigelman along with him. And now it sounds like he almost killed Jamal’s uncle.”

  Chuck’s reply rattled over the computer’s little speaker. “How did Jamal’s uncle get involved with this?”

  “I’ve got a better question,” said Jack, looking at Shada. “Who is the girl in the cellar?”

  “I don’t know,” said Shada. “This is the first I’ve heard anything about that.”

  “It’s obvious that’s where Habib-the Dark-went today after he left you. And you’re telling me you had no idea-”

  “I had absolutely no idea,” she said firmly.

  “This wasn’t one of your threesomes you arranged for him?”

  “No way. I told you it wasn’t anything illegal. And it definitely wasn’t about sex with underage girls.”

  “Threesomes?” said Chuck.

  “Oh, Chuck, like you didn’t enjoy them.”

  “Oh, sure, here it comes. You’re sleeping with the sick son of a bitch who killed McKenna, and it’s all my fault because I turned you on to threesomes.”

  “I didn’t say it was your-”

  “Can we focus here, people?” said Jack, reaching for his cell. “Or I’m calling the police.”

  The sparring stopped.

  “Good,” said Jack. “I’m not asking you to settle all the issues between you here and now. Just behave yourselves. Now, whether you like it or, I’m calling Jamal’s mother. She deserves to know.”

  No one argued.

  It was midafternoon in Minnesota. Maryam Wakefield answered on her home phone, and Jack could hear her concern as soon as he said he was calling from London. He delivered the news as gently as he could. She caught her breath, but she didn’t sound totally shocked.

  “Is Hassan dead or alive?” she asked.

  “We don’t know,” said Jack.

  “I told him not to go,” said Maryam, her voice quaking. “Islam has no place for vigilantism. But Hassan was convinced that there would be no justice for Jamal in a court system that treated an innocent boy like a terrorist.”

  “I understand,” said Jack.

  “When I asked you to help us sue Chuck Mays, and, instead, you teamed up with him and Vincent Paulo, that pushed Hassan over the edge.”

  Jack understood that, too. “How did Hassan track down the Dark?”

  “His brother.”

  Jack started pacing as he spoke, as if energized by his own confusion. “I thought Hassan hated his brother for going over to al-Shabaab.”

  “He did, but Hassan would do anything for Jamal. His brother forwarded me an e-mail that he received: ‘I killed your son,’ it said. I showed it to Hassan, and he took it from there. I told you that the three of us used to live together in London before Jamal was born. Both brothers still have contacts in London-Hassan, especially, at the East End Mosque. As much as he hates his brother, he swallowed their differences and found Jamal’s killer.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t have a name. But it’s someone who used to be part of al-Shabaab with Jamal’s father.”

  Jack could hear the strain in her voice. She couldn’t afford to lose Hassan on top of Jamal. “Maryam, everything is going to be okay. I want you to take a minute to collect yourself, and then you and I are going to get on a conference call with Scotland Yard. You need to tell them everything you just told me.”

  “No,” said Chuck. “We can’t call the police.”

  “Watch me,” said Jack.

  “Stop,” said Chuck. “Listen to this for one minute.”

  “Listen to what?”

  “I was treating it as my business. Now we all have to deal with it.”

  “Look,” said Jack, “I agreed to keep the police out of this at first, but that doesn’t make any sense now.”

  “Just listen,” said Chuck. “It’s the tail end of a phone call I got about twenty minutes ago.”

  The computer screen flickered. The transmission was audio only, and the band on the audio tracker spiked up and down with each voice inflection on the recording.

  “Listen up, Mays.”

  Even though Jack didn’t recognize the voice, he somehow knew it was the Dark. The recording continued: “I have someone you’ll want to hear from.”

  Jack waited, the audio line on the LCD went flat, and suddenly it wobbled again with the beaten-down voice he instantly recognized.

  “The Dark is in charge,” said Vince, obviously saying what he had been told to say. “Do not come looking for me, and do not call the police. If you do, he will kill me. I’m afraid of the Dark. You should be, too.”

  The recording ended, and the audio line went flat again.

  Chapter Sixty-two

  Good news, Paulo. The boss says I can take off your blindfold.”

  The Dark grabbed him by the hair, then slapped his hostage upside the head, as if Vince were the absentminded one. “Oh, I forgot. You’re not wearing a blindfold.”

  He laughed way too hard at his own stupid joke, but Vince said nothing. He was seated in a desk chair, hands tied behind his back, unable to move. The Dark walked to the window and double-checked that the plywood over it was secure. They were in a spacious suite on the third floor of an abandoned hotel that was scheduled to be gutted and converted to flats. The nicest furnishings had been hauled away for auction, and only a wobbly table, a few old chairs, and a beat-up leather couch remained. There was no water or electricity, but the battery-powered lamp on the table was adequate, and when nature called, the toilet in the suite across the hall would suffice, even if it didn’t flush.

  “Who’s your boss?” asked Vince.

  The Dark pulled up a chair and straddled it backward, his chin resting on his forearms as he stared at Vince. He was close enough for Vince to feel his presence-a technique he’d perfected on blindfolded women.

  “Let me explain something to you, Paulo. Your life is in my hands, which means that you will live only as long as you are of use to me. You’re not the hostage negotiator here. You don’t get to ask questions.”

  “Why did you kill McKenna?”

  “Cute,” he said, scoffing. “Uncle Vince wants to know why. After I tell you, then what are you gonna do? Fly back in your time machine and make it all better?”

  The Dark glanced across the room. The device that he’d ripped from Vince’s head in the scuffle outside his flat was on the floor. “This Brainport thing comes with a time-machine function, right?” he said, mocking Vince.

  Vince said nothing, but the Dark could read his expression. The sunglasses had been smashed in their struggle, and Vince looked so much weaker without them.

  “Very foolish of you to try to ambush me,” the Dark said. “Desperate, really, even with this cool technology.”

  The Dark gave the device a closer look. He put on the head-gear with the mounted camera, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the tongue sensor. “What’s this little lollipop thing for?” he asked.

  “You stick it up your ass,” said Vince.

  The Dark pulled off the headgear, threw the Brainport onto the chair in the corner of the room, and punched Vince in the stomach so hard that it hurt his own hand. Vince gasped for air, hunching over.

  The Dark shook the sting out of his fist. “How do you like that, smart mouth?”

  “Did you rape McKenna?”

  The Dark hit him again, and Vince let out a loud groan. “Yell, scream all you want,” said the Dark. “I can fire off my gun if I want to. No one is going to hear you, except maybe a crack addict or two on the first floor.”

  V
ince caught his breath. “Did you… rape her?”

  “Kind of a one-track mind you’ve got there, partner.”

  “Did you?” asked Vince.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re a sick bastard.”

  The Dark gave him another blow to the solar plexus, the hardest one yet.

  “Typical hostage negotiator’s seat-of-the-pants psychology. It always boils down to sexual sadism. I hate to disappoint you, genius, but I killed McKenna because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  The Dark grabbed him by the jaw and held his head up, as if daring Vince to stare at him through his blindness.

  “My job was to find out as much as I could about Project Round Up. If that meant sleeping with Chuck Mays’ wife, so be it. If that meant hacking into Chuck Mays’ home computer while he was out of the country, no problem. Unfortunately, I had no idea McKenna was home at the time. She caught me red-handed.”

  “There was no reason to make her suffer.”

  “If you gotta do it, you might as well make the most of it.”

  Vince lunged forward from the chair, but his hands were tied behind his back. The Dark dodged the head butt and pushed him hard to the floor. Vince was facedown, and the Dark bore his knee into Vince’s spine as he pressed the cold muzzle of the pistol to the base of his skull.

  “That’s your second silly move of the day, Paulo.”

  “You’re lucky I’m blind.”

  “No, you’re lucky you’re blind. You weren’t the only one injured in that explosion. If you had walked away unscathed, I would have killed you three years ago. Probably after making you watch your wife have a go with me.”

  Vince jerked his shoulders back, but his resistance was futile.

  “Oh, did I hit a sore spot?” said the Dark. “I thought you knew your wife sleeps around on you.”

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “A beautiful woman like that. Of course she feels sorry for you and wants to be the good wife. But how long did you really expect her to hang with a blind guy?”