Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
I
t was a ten-minute walk to the hotel. Not surprisingly, Shada was facile with the computer, and Jack zoned out as she set up communication with Chuck. Funny how the mind works, but Jack spent half that time trying to remember the name of the pub they had just left. Too many authentic pubs had converted into gastro bars—not much profit in Scotch eggs, but tuna tartare was a whole new world—and Jack thought he might want to return someday with Andie, when this insanity was over.
Hamilton Hall. That’s it.
“We’re good to go,” said Shada. “Chuck, can you hear me?”
Jack expected to see Chuck’s face on his computer screen, but it was his usual desktop even when Chuck’s voice came over the speaker.
“Yeah, I’m here.”
Shada explained. “Chuck has control over your computer now. We can watch what he clicks on, what files he accesses. It’s as if he’s in the room with us and we’re looking over his shoulder.”
Jack wondered how many times Chuck had done one of these remote-access jobs without people knowing it.
“Go ahead and insert the flash drive,” said Chuck. He was talking about the files Shada had copied from Habib’s computer.
“Which one?” she asked.
“How the fuck would I know, Shada?”
“You don’t have to be nasty about it,” she said.
Jack detected the tone of a man none too keen on his wife’s sleeping habits.
So much for any likelihood of long-term coordination between these two.
“I really don’t know which one to choose,” she said.
“Just pick one that has video content. I’m most interested in seeing what this fucker has been downloading.”
His tone wasn’t getting any sweeter. Jack just hoped Chuck could control his anger long enough to get the information they needed from Shada.
Shada sorted through the flash drives. She’d numbered them, presumably based on the order in which she’d copied the files. Jack filled the lull with what was on his mind. “Chuck, do you know where Vince is?”
Chuck didn’t answer right away, and it was more than just a Web transmission delay. Finally, the response came over the speaker: “I haven’t heard from him.”
“That’s not what I asked,” said Jack.
More silence. Jack pressed. “Chuck, do you know something?”
“Vince is a big boy. I’m sure he’s fine. Shada, the flash drive, please.”
Shada selected one and inserted it in the USB port.
“I don’t like being kept in the dark,” Jack said.
“You’re seeing the files the same time I’m seeing them,” Chuck said. “How is that being kept in the dark?”
“I’m talking about Vince. You don’t sound very happy with Shada, and I have this feeling that you’ve pressured her into creating this complete diversion to keep me from finding out what Vince is really up to.”
“The files are encrypted,” said Chuck.
Jack was being ignored.
“Can’t you break the code?” asked Shada.
Ignored by both of them.
Jack’s cell rang. He checked the number but didn’t recognize it. He answered on the third ring, and the urgent voice on the line was strangely familiar.
“Mr. Swyteck? Is this Jack Swyteck?”
“Yes, who is—”
Jack stopped himself, suddenly recognizing the voice. It was the teenage girl who’d called him from Bethnal Green, who’d talked to Jamal right before he was killed, who’d claimed to know McKenna’s killer—and who was too frightened to call the police. Jack drew a breath and tried not to spook her this time.
“I was hoping you’d call again,” said Jack in a calm voice. “Are you doing okay?”
“No—I don’t know,” she said, straining with confusion.
Jack wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to say, but he said it anyway: “You may not know this, but I’m in London right now. Probably not too far from where you are.”
“How do you know where I am?” She sounded more than a little paranoid.
“Don’t worry, I’m not following you. But I would like to meet with you, if—”
“No! I’m not meeting with anybody!”
Jack glanced at Shada, who was suddenly more interested in Jack’s phone call than in Chuck’s work on the computer screen.
“That’s okay,” Jack said into the phone. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“Is he dead?” she asked.
“Is who dead?” asked Jack.
“The man who killed McKenna Mays.”
“We don’t know who killed McKenna. Do you?”
“Yes! I told you before, and I told Jamal, too. He’s creepy and scary and showed me pictures on his computer, and he said if I ever tried to escape I’d end up just like McKenna Mays.”
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.
I
t 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.”
Y
our 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.