Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
S
top here,” Jack told the driver. They were in Bethnal Green, a half block away from the Carpenter’s Arms.
Like it or not, Jack had received a crash course in East End pub history from a driver who was apparently determined to become his new best friend. Plenty of pubs in the area claimed a connection to Ronald and Reginald Kray, the East End’s kings of organized crime in the 1950s and 1960s. Carpenter’s claim was more real than most. Once upon a time, it was actually owned by the Kray twins and run by their dear old mum. Somehow over the years the tiny old pub had avoided conversion to flats, and it stood in refurbished splendor at the corner of Cheshire and St. Matthew’s Row.
“Try the Greene King IPA or Staropramen ale on draft,” the driver said as Jack climbed out of the cab.
“Will do,” said Jack.
The cab pulled away, leaving Jack alone on the sidewalk. He was standing in front of a vacant shop that had apparently sold shoes of some sort; a tattered old sign in the window read
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA, BUT THE PEOPLE WEAR PLIMSOLLS—£5
. The narrow and crooked one-way street was made even narrower by a block-long construction site across from the Carpenter’s Arms. Jack peered through the cold mist and saw Vince at the pub’s entrance.
Jack felt a pang of guilt for tailing a blind man, but Vince’s claim that he didn’t know who he was going to meet was a crock, and but for the jet lag, Jack would have called him on it immediately. Factor in the pain he was still feeling over Neil’s death, and maybe Andie had been right about the wisdom of deferring to the police. Chuck Mays was not to be trusted, and even if Vince was reliable under normal circumstances, these were not normal circumstances. Jack was starting to feel used, and it wouldn’t be the first time that someone like Chuck had tried to hire the name Swyteck—the son of a former governor—to legitimize some scheme.
Jack was about two hundred feet away, his anger rising, when he saw Vince reach for the door at the pub entrance. Then Vince stopped. Jack’s cell rang, and he answered.
“Stop following me,” said Vince.
The words hit him like a brick. Jack didn’t know how Vince knew, but it didn’t matter. “If I go back to the hotel, I’m going back to Miami,” said Jack. “Either I’m part of this, or I’m not.”
“Don’t be a jackass. It’s not my decision. Chuck set up the meeting.”
“Chuck is about to be indicted for murder.”
“For the third time: That news story was a plant. Chuck didn’t kill his wife.”
“I’m talking about the murder of the guy who was sleeping with her. Who killed Jamal Wakefield?”
“Jamal was butchered. They cut off his foot.”
“I’ve seen more grisly murders for hire.”
“Now you’re talking crazy.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. But let’s have this conversation later. You have no idea what you’re screwing up.”
“Who is your meeting with?”
“I’m not meeting with anyone if you don’t get out of here.”
Jack picked up the pace, now almost close enough to read the chalkboard in the window. “Are you meeting with Shada Mays?”
“I told you: Chuck set it up.”
“That’s the point. I’m not going to lend my name and reputation to secret meetings that I’m not a part of.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jack was acting on a gut feeling that wasn’t his own, but he trusted Andie and Theo, and the fact that they were of the same mind about Shada’s infidelity was enough for him.
“Don’t be a fool, Vince. Don’t let Chuck use you.”
“Use me to do what?”
“To strong-arm Shada Mays into helping Chuck get away with the murder of Jamal Wakefield.”
“What?”
“You heard me,” said Jack. “Are you or are you not meeting with—”
Jack stopped cold, nearly flattening a woman who had rounded the corner from the opposite direction. She, too, was frozen in her tracks—and their eyes locked.
“Jack, please,” Vince said over the phone, but Jack wasn’t listening. Images flashed in his mind—photographs he’d seen of Shada Mays before her disappearance. And he knew.
“Shada?” he said.
She didn’t answer, and before Jack could say another word—before he could even react—she turned and ran.
“Shada, wait!”
Jack sprinted after her, trying his best to keep up. Two minutes into the chase, Jack was digging for a gear he didn’t have. She was pulling away, a blur of buildings flying by as the distance expanded between them.
“Shada!” he called out.
She never looked back, never broke stride. Jack hadn’t logged a five-minute mile since high school, and Shada was bettering that pace on a wet sidewalk. He pulled up at a zebra crossing, exhausted and fighting to catch his breath. The mist was turning to rain. Hunched over, hands on his knees, Jack looked up and watched Shada disappear into the old neighborhood. He wasn’t surprised in the least that a woman on the run could run like the wind.
Jack was still catching his breath when a taxi pulled up at the curb. The rear window rolled down, and he spotted Vince in the backseat.
“Get in,” Vince said.
Jack turned and walked the other way. The cab came up slowly beside him, matching Jack’s walking pace. Vince spoke through the open window.
“I made a mistake,” said Vince.
Jack didn’t answer. The cab pulled ahead with a quick burst of speed, and then it stopped at the corner. Vince got out, and the cab pulled away. He waited for Jack, who had no intention of stopping. In fact, Jack already had his smart phone in hand, searching the Web for return flights to Miami.
“I’m sorry,” said Vince.
Jack stopped. It wasn’t every day that a criminal defense lawyer got a heartfelt apology from a cop, and Jack found himself unable to ignore it. He put his phone away.
“You should have told me you were meeting with Shada Mays.”
“You’re right, I should have,” said Vince.
“It was beyond a mistake. Meeting with Shada Mays was the most important thing that could have possibly come out of this trip. You not only excluded me, but you flat-out lied to my face. There is absolutely no way for me to trust you anymore.”
“Let me try to explain.”
“Forget it,” said Jack. “I never trusted Chuck, and you may not be a murderer, but now I don’t trust you, either.”
“Chuck didn’t kill anyone.”
“Obviously, he didn’t kill Shada. But like I said: I have serious questions about what happened to Jamal. I should have listened to my fiancée and never come on this trip.”
“Does your fiancée seriously think that Shada was sleeping with Jamal?”
Jack was silent.
Vince shook his head, scoffing at the thought. “Look, Chuck and Shada didn’t have a perfect marriage. But Shada loved McKenna. She was not the kind of mother who would bed her teenage daughter’s first love.”
Vince was making sense, and it surprised Jack that Andie hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe the whole theory that Chuck killed Jamal in a love-triangle homicide was more posturing on her part to keep Jack from going to London.
“You did the right thing by coming,” said Vince. “Let me talk to Chuck and see what he can do to make this right.”
Jack stopped. He’d come this far, and now he had leverage. The next nonstop to Miami was not until Wednesday morning anyway. “All right, here’s one way to make amends. Chuck can tell me all about Project Round Up.”
“Exactly what do you think you can learn from Project Round Up?”
Jack remembered that Jamal had been working with Chuck on Project Round Up before he’d gone missing. “My bet is that it will tell me how Jamal ended up in a detention center, and why Chuck never really believed that Jamal killed his daughter.”
Jack studied his expression. Those were two huge pieces of the puzzle, but it was hard to read a man who lived behind dark sunglasses.
“It might even tell me what Shada has been doing in London for the past two and a half years,” said Jack.
He was fishing, and for Jack, the trust had indeed worn thin. But it spoke volumes that Vince didn’t deny any of the importance that Jack attached to Project Round Up.
“All right,” said Vince. “Let’s see if Chuck thinks you’ve earned your way into Project Round Up.”
S
hada ran all the way to her front step. Even then, she didn’t really stop. She pushed open the door, raced through the flat, and headed out the back.
Trusting Chuck had been a huge mistake. She wasn’t sure how he had found her online, but he
was
in the personal information business, and it had never been Shada’s intention to let her husband face charges for murdering a woman who wasn’t dead. A promise was a promise, and she had tried to keep hers by agreeing to meet with Vince Paulo at the Carpenter’s Arms. Instead, Chuck had sent a lawyer. Jamal’s lawyer. The lawyer for the monster who had murdered their daughter.
How could you, Chuck?
It was just over a mile to her flat from Cheshire Street, but she had taken the long route around Weavers Fields to lose Swyteck. Shada had set a school record for the 10K back in the Bahamas, and with her adrenaline pumping, she was barely winded. It was unlikely that a forty-year-old lawyer had kept up with her, but she wasn’t going to hang around her place to wait and find out. She ran down the alley, down the old brick streets of Vyner, past the picnic tables outside the Victory pub, past the whitewashed buildings spray-painted with gang graffiti.
Smash the Reds
. She remembered that one. She was getting close. She was running so fast that she slipped at the corner, but she caught her balance, ran inside the apartment building, and gobbled up two steps at a time to the second floor.
Her hand was shaking as she aimed her key at the lock. Even though it was crazy to think that Swyteck was closing in on her, Shada felt the need to hide, and no one would ever find her here. At least, no one had found her in the last two years.
The door squeaked as she opened it, which made her cringe. It was the middle of the afternoon—he always slept in the afternoons—and he would be furious if she woke him. She closed the door with extra care and set the deadbolt as quietly as she could, but the apartment was quiet as a tomb, and merely turning the lock sounded like a shotgun shucking.
“Maysoon, is that you?” he said, grumbling.
Funny, but the only time her new name gave her pause was when she heard the angry voice of the man who had given it to her.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
“Come here,” he said.
She hesitated. The shades were pulled, and with the door closed, the apartment was black as midnight. She needed time for her eyes to adjust.
“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.
T
he 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.