Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
T
heir taxi stopped in front of a tiny East End establishment with a big sign that read
BANGLATOWN CURRY SHOP
. Jack counted at least twenty restaurants up and down the narrow street that looked almost exactly like it. Not one was open for business.
“I told you everything would be closed,” the driver said. “If you’re hungry, I know a little place not far from here.”
“This will be fine,” Shada said.
Jack paid the fare, and when the cab left, they were the lone signs of life on the block. It wasn’t hard to imagine the street clogged with cars and delivery trucks, the sidewalks jammed with people from all walks of life from around the world. In a matter of hours, tourists and regulars alike would stop to decipher exotic menus posted in the windows, and by the end of the day, the guy at the pushcart on Brick Lane would hear customers order the jellied eels in at least twenty different languages. From two
A.M.
to four
A.M.
, however, was a dead zone, when the eerie pall of urban quiet fell.
“I guess this is why they call New York the city that never sleeps,” he said.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said Shada as they passed a wall covered with BLM gang graffiti. “This is Brick Lane Massive territory.”
Jack followed her around the corner to the back of the curry shop. Many of the windows along the alley had been bricked over, and burglar bars and metal shutters covered those that remained. Jack recognized more BLM graffiti tags on the walls, but most of them had been spray-painted over by “White Flatz” and “Bow E3,” suggesting a turf war. It made Jack want to walk faster. Chuck had called ahead to say they were coming, and the light burning over the rear entrance indicated that someone was indeed expecting them. Rather than knock, Shada made a quick call on her cell. Someone on the inside started working the locks, and from the sound of it, Jack had visited jails with less security. Finally, the door opened.
“Come in, please,” the man said.
Jack followed Shada inside, and the man introduced himself as he closed the door and refastened the locks. His name was Sanu Reza from Dhaka. Chuck had already told them about Reza’s earlier meeting with Vince.
“I’m so sorry to hear about Mr. Paulo,” he said.
“I’m sorry you sold him a gun,” said Jack.
“I do as Mr. Mays requests. That makes tonight your lucky night.”
Jack could only wonder.
Reza led them down a dark hall past the kitchen, and the lingering smell of curry made Jack hungry. They stopped at the solid metal door at the end of the hall. A separate alarm system protected whatever was beyond that door, and Reza entered the pass code. There was another set of locks to unfasten, too. Finally, he pushed open the door and switched on the light. Bags of rice were stacked from floor to ceiling. Boxes of spices lined another wall. Reza directed them inside and locked the door.
“An awful lot of precautions to protect rice and spices,” said Jack.
Reza smiled. “Old family recipe.”
A PC hummed on the desk in the corner. Reza took the chair in front of the glowing LCD and logged on. “You there?” he asked.
The computer screen flickered and Chuck’s image appeared. “Welcome to Banglatown,” he said. “First things first: Reza, show them the money.”
Reza popped a switchblade and cut open one of the bags. Rice spilled to the floor, but not much. Reza reached inside and, by the handful, pulled out twenty-five bundles of fifty-pound-sterling notes. Jack didn’t ask where it had come from, but with the East End’s history of organized crime and gang graffiti all over the neighborhood, he didn’t really want to know. Reza stacked the bundles of cash into four neat piles on the table.
“Two hundred fifty thousand pounds,” he said.
It wasn’t nearly as bulky as Jack had expected; he could have stuffed it in his coat pockets and walked out.
“What will I carry it in?” asked Shada.
“How about a big bowl of yogurt and cold cucumbers?” said Jack. It was how patrons of Bengali restaurants put out the fire in their mouths.
“Good one, Yank.” Reza pulled a backpack from a shelf and handed it to Shada. “In my neighborhood, this will draw much less attention than a briefcase.”
Jack picked up one of the stacks and examined it. “Is this real or counterfeit?”
“Absolutely real,” said Reza. “The only qualification is that in one of the stacks I will insert a bogus bill that contains a miniature GPS tracking system. Chuck will be able to follow the money after Shada delivers it.”
“Doesn’t GPS require a battery?” asked Jack.
“It’s all in the same bill. I’m talking
miniature.
The battery will only last twenty-four hours and is set to beep out the coordinates every fifteen seconds. It sleeps between signals.”
“Which bill gets the GPS system?” asked Shada.
“That’s not important,” said Chuck.
“I’d like to know,” said Shada.
“I’m not telling you,” said Chuck, his tone taking on an edge.
“What do you mean you’re not going to tell me?”
“It’s better that you don’t know,” said Chuck.
“Better for
whom
?”
“It’s for your own safety.”
“That’s bullshit, Chuck, and you know it. Tell me which one has the damn chip in it.”
“Shada, back off,” said Chuck.
Jack could see the anger in her eyes, and even though Shada had expressed remorse for what she had done, it was also clear that she was approaching her limit with Chuck. Jack jumped in before they could tell each other to shove it.
“Folks, can we all take a deep breath and remember why we’re here?”
Slowly, the tension drained from the room, and before anyone could stoke the fire, Jack changed the subject.
“I understand that there is no talking Shada out of making this delivery,” Jack said. “I can also understand why she feels the way she does. But I’m here for a reason, too.” He paused as thoughts of his friend caught up with him. “If Shada is going to put herself at risk, I want to provide backup.”
“No,” said Shada.
“Why not?” asked Jack.
“It’s better that you don’t,” she said, glancing at Chuck’s image on the screen while parroting his words. “It’s for your own safety.”
“Now we’re getting petty,” said Jack. “I’m sure everyone is overtired.”
“I agree with Shada,” said Chuck.
“What?” said Jack.
“There’s no reason for you to tail her,” Chuck said. “We’ve got the GPS tracking embedded in the bills. If something goes wrong, we’ll call the police.”
It didn’t sound like Chuck—taking the safe route and suggesting that they call the police in a pinch—but Jack was getting too tired to argue. “We have a little more than two hours until the call,” said Jack. “Let’s all try to get some rest.”
Reza said, “There’s a two-bedroom flat upstairs that you can use.”
“Works for me,” said Shada.
“Me, too,” said Jack.
“Shada, no hard feelings?” said Chuck. It was the first bone he had tossed since finding out about the Dark, and it seemed to take Shada by surprise.
“Whatever,” she said.
“Good night, everyone,” said Chuck.
Reza logged off the computer and led them from the storage room, locked the door behind them, and reset the alarm. A back stairwell led them up to the second-floor flat. Reza directed Shada to the bigger of the two bedrooms, and Jack took the small one with the twin bed. He needed sleep, and he hoped his mind would shut off and let him rest.
“I’ll wake you at five,” said Reza.
“Thanks,” said Jack. He sat on the edge of the mattress, and even though it was lumpy, all worry about falling asleep vanished. One shoe was off when his phone chimed with a text message. It was from Chuck:
Just between u and me
, it read, and the last two words were in all caps:
FOLLOW HER.
Jack pulled off his other shoe, typed a response, and hit
SEND
:
Do you trust her?
He settled back onto the mattress, exhausted and staring at the ceiling, his phone resting on his chest. Chuck’s response came sooner than he’d expected:
Would you trust your wife after she cheated?
The question hit Jack hard. Shada had been so contrite that he’d actually let himself believe that Chuck should be more like those I-love-you-no-matter-what guys who forgive and forget. But when the question was turned around on him—would
you
trust
your
wife?—he realized that this was the real world, not Lifetime TV or the Oxygen Channel. Jack typed out his response, then rolled over and turned out the light as he hit
SEND
once more:
OK. I’ll follow.
S
id Littleton watched from his office window as the snow fell on the illuminated buildings and monuments of the capital.
The phone call from London had been unsettling, but Littleton always had a backup plan. The plan’s name was Lisa Horne—or whatever her real name was—and he just hoped the weather wasn’t going to screw things up and keep her from coming to the office on short notice.
“She’s in the building,” said Bahena.
Littleton turned away from the window and saw his right-hand man standing in the doorway. Danilo Bahena had been with Littleton since the formation of Black Ice. Most of the company’s four hundred employees didn’t know him. Very few knew he was the mastermind of the black sites that the company ran for the CIA. Only Littleton knew him as the specialist who would do
anything
to see a mission succeed.
“Good,” said Littleton. “Go down, take her to the limo. I’ll meet you there.”
“You sure? I could just take her for a ride. Very treacherous roads tonight. Accidents could happen.”
“No,” said Littleton. “We need to know who she is first.”
“Her name is not Lisa Horne, that much is for sure.”
“If she’s an investigative journalist chasing rabbit holes, that’s one thing. If she has some other agenda, I want to get to the bottom of it.”
“Whoever she is, she knows too much.”
“That may be,” said Littleton. He turned back to the window, thinking. The gist of the warning from London replayed in his head:
I have my exit strategy. You need yours.
“Get the limo,” he said, watching his own reflection in the window. “And let’s be quick about this.”
J
ack lay awake in the glow of his smart phone.
The text message from Chuck had made it impossible to sleep, and Jack made the mistake of surfing the Internet to numb his brain. For the heck of it, he followed up on Andie’s conversation with Grandpa Swyteck and searched “General Petrak.” He could have spent all night reading about the daring plot of the Czech resistance to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s planned successor, and how the general in exile coordinated it from the U.K. It didn’t make them Jewish, but Jack hoped that there was
something
to his grandfather’s ramblings, that perhaps they were somehow related to this Petrak—but that was for another day.
He put the phone away and closed his eyes. He wasn’t dreaming—sleep that deep didn’t come so soon—but in his mind’s eye he saw himself at Brookfield Zoo with his grandfather. He was five years old and enthralled by the polar bear exhibit. Suddenly, Grandpa was gone. Jack was alone and surrounded by strangers.
He shot up in bed and grabbed his smart phone. Jack had been getting lost in strange places since childhood. Tailing Shada would require a working knowledge of the area, and Jack spent the next hour studying maps of the East End. In Miami, the rule was CRAP: Courts, roads, avenues, and places flowed north and south—top to bottom—like the stuff we get from our bosses. As best Jack could tell, the only way to make sense of London was to ask, “Which way to the nearest tube?”
“It’s five o’clock,” said Reza. He was outside the door.
Jack couldn’t believe it. “Be right down,” he said.
Jack went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He’d had no sleep in the last twenty-four hours and about five hours total—thankfully, he’d slept on the flight from Miami—in the last thirty-six. He’d tried murder cases on less rest. Another two hours tonight would have been just enough to revive the jet lag. A quick shower brought him to life, and he was downstairs in fifteen minutes.
The kitchen was already bustling. The Banglatown Curry Shop was a traditional Bengali restaurant where spices were ground by hand and mountains of vegetables were chopped with pride and precision. One team filleted the morning’s delivery of fresh fish, while another cut whole chickens into parts. Two men by the wood-burning oven were arguing in their native tongue, and Jack guessed it had something to do with the cooking temperature.
“Hungry?” asked Reza as he handed Jack a plate. It was fruit, a multigrain bread, and yogurt. Jack thanked him as they headed down the hall, but before they reached the locked door to the storage room, Reza pulled him into a tiny office and closed the door. “Shada is already inside,” said Reza, “so let me be quick. Chuck is going to extend an olive branch and tell her which bill has the GPS in it.”
That didn’t jibe with last night’s text message from Chuck, but Jack kept quiet, not sure if Reza knew about the exchange.
“Of course, there will be a second bill that we don’t tell her about.” He handed Jack a cell phone. “As for the backup, use this when you follow Shada.”
“My cell works fine here.”
“This one is linked to Shada’s cell. Chuck and I installed spyware last night while she was asleep. It allows you to hear what she says so long as she has her cell with her, even if she’s not talking on the phone.”
“How close do I have to be?”
“Technically, it’s supposed to work up to six or seven kilometers. But wireless can be dicey in urban areas, especially if she goes indoors. To be safe, Chuck wants you to stay within two hundred meters.”
“What if she sees me?”
“That’s more than likely, but it doesn’t matter. Chuck played it perfectly last night, and telling her where the GPS chip is this morning will reinforce the trust. The important thing is that she thinks it’s
your
idea to follow her, not Chuck’s. People get nervous when Chuck has one of his men on their tail. No offense, but you’re an amateur. She might get her knickers in a knot if she sees you, but she won’t abort the mission.”
Jack tried not to feel insulted.
“I’ve also programmed a panic button,” said Reza. “Just hit the star key if you want to call the police. For all other calls, use your own cell.”
Jack tucked the spy phone into his pocket. Reza unlocked the desk drawer and removed a pistol. “Chuck also thinks you should be armed. I have a Glock nine millimeter. Do you know how to use it?”
“No gun.”
“Chuck thought you might know how to use it, being engaged to an FBI agent.”
“Andie has actually turned me into a pretty good shot. But this is the U.K., not Texas. Not the place to risk arrest for carrying a concealed weapon.”
“Suit yourself.” He put the pistol away and locked the drawer. “Any questions about the cell phone?”
“Just one,” said Jack. “How long has Chuck had that same spyware on
my
cell?”
“Good one, Yank,” he said, smiling and shaking his head as he led Jack out of his office. “That’s a real good one.”