Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
S
hada is sitting with the girl!” said Jack.
Jack was speaking into his cell phone, pacing back and forth in front of a crowded merchant booth. He had Chuck on the line.
“What girl?” asked Chuck.
“The one who called me yesterday after Jamal’s uncle rescued her.”
“Are you sure?”
A couple of restaurant owners were haggling with a South African lobster salesman, and it was getting loud. Jack stepped away.
“I’m sure it’s her,” Jack said. “I recognized the voice right away. Then I lost audio. I’m still in the trading hall about two hundred feet away, but I think I saw Shada take the battery out of her phone.”
“That’s the one way to deactivate the spyware,” said Chuck. “What can you see now?”
Jack’s gaze shifted back to the café. “They’re still sitting at the table talking to each other. No, wait. The girl just answered her cell phone. She’s handing it to Shada. Shada’s talking to someone. This is getting really weird.”
“Agreed, but the possibilities are limited.”
A forklift with bags of ice rolled down the aisle. Jack dodged out of the way. “Limited in what way?”
“Only two ways for that girl to have known how to find Shada. Either Shada made contact and told her where she was going. Or she’s here on behalf of the same lunatic who kept her in a cellar.”
Jack thought about it. “Like I said: This is getting weird.”
“Don’t call the police just yet,” said Chuck. “Let’s see where this leads. As long as they’re in the building and in your sights, the situation is under control.”
“Will do,” said Jack.
“I
’m sorry,” Shada said into the phone, pleading. “From the bottom of my heart, I want you to know that.”
“You had no right to copy files from my computer,” the Dark said.
“I should never have listened to Chuck.”
“You screwed up everything, Shada.”
“No, listen to me. I never gave the flash drives to anyone. Definitely not to Chuck. I haven’t even looked at all the video.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“It’s the truth.”
There was silence on the line. The girl sat all the way back in her chair, arms folded tightly, as if trying to figure Shada out. Shada avoided making eye contact.
“Habib, are you still there?” There was just enough noise around to keep Shada from distinguishing dead air from the sound of Habib mulling things over. Finally, he answered.
“Tell me why I should believe you, Shada. Why should I believe
anything
you say?”
Shada tried to stay cool, especially in front of the girl. But it wasn’t easy, knowing that the wrong words could be fatal. She cupped her hand and covered her mouth—an extra precaution against being overheard.
“Because I have a quarter million pounds in my backpack for you,” she said.
“That’s a good start,” he said. “Give the backpack to the girl.”
“It’s not that simple,” she said.
“
Give it to her.
”
“Wait,” she said, a bit unnerved by his tone. “You need to know that there’s a tracking chip embedded in one of the bills. Chuck can follow the money wherever it goes.”
“Do you have any idea which bill?”
“Yes. Chuck told me this morning. But knowing Chuck, I’m sure there’s more than one.”
“Is there someplace you can go to check the other bills?”
Shada lowered her voice further, increasingly nervous about holding so much cash. “Even if I had the time to do that—there are five hundred notes here—it’s a
microchip
I’d be looking for. It isn’t easy to see, unless you know it’s there.”
“That’s a problem.”
“If your personal assistant here brings the money to you, the police are sure to follow.”
“That’s an even bigger problem.”
“I can fix it,” said Shada. “Let me come with her. I’ll bring the money to you personally.”
“That doesn’t fix anything.”
“Yes, it does,” said Shada.
“What difference does it make if you come or not?”
Had the girl not been watching her, the cell phone would have been shaking in Shada’s hand. She kept her nerves in check.
“All the difference in the world,” said Shada. “I have a plan.”
T
hey’re leaving the café,” said Jack. He still had Chuck on the line.
“Together?”
“Yes,” Jack said. “They’re heading for the main exit.”
“Perfect. As soon as they leave the building, I’ll be able to pick up the tracking chip in the money. Stay with them, but keep your distance. If I lose the GPS signal for some reason, my backup is you.”
“Police officers are much better at this than I am.”
“We can call the police as soon as these two lead us to Vince. Just stick with the plan a few more minutes.”
It was after six
A.M.
, a full ninety minutes before sunrise, peak hour for the fish market. The crowd around the exit was almost double what Jack had seen on the way in. The men walking out with coolers on their heads were especially hard to see around, so he closed the gap to under a hundred feet in order to keep a bead on Shada’s yellow scarf. He phoned Chuck with an update.
“They just left the building.”
“I have them on my computer now,” said Chuck. “You can drop back a little farther out of sight. Stay on the line and I’ll tell you where to go.”
Jack pushed through the north exit doors, and a gust of cold air welcomed him to the parking lot. Security lights cast a yellowish glow around the loading docks, but most of the lot was dark, which was to Jack’s advantage. Still, he walked on the other side of a long line of refrigeration trucks to make sure he remained out of Shada’s sight. Chuck fed him almost step-by-step instructions past the loading docks to the fenced walkway along Aspen Way, a busy divided highway. It was the early phase of the morning rush hour. Six lanes of commuters, three in each direction, whizzed by at speeds that would have made hopping the iron fence and crossing the road suicidal.
“They’re on a pedestrian bridge across the highway,” said Chuck.
Jack looked up at the suspension-style bridge and saw them. It led directly to Poplar Station. “I think they’re getting on the underground,” said Jack. “That will kill your GPS.”
“My computer says it’s DLR—Docklands Light Railway. I’m pretty sure that’s aboveground. But they might switch over to the underground. Stay with them.”
A train was pulling into Poplar Station. Shada and the girl made a run for it, and their lead on Jack was at least a hundred yards.
“I’ll do my best,” he said as he tucked away the phone and sprinted toward the station.
T
he Dark was playing mind games. Vince was sure of it.
Vince was seated on the floor, his hands tied to an old steam radiator. The Dark had just gotten off the phone, and Vince had been able to hear only one side of the conversation—the Dark’s side. The Dark was filling in the other half—the half that Vince refused to believe.
“Amazing, isn’t it, Paulo? McKenna’s mother begging
me
for forgiveness.” The Dark stepped closer and grabbed Vince by the jaw. “So where’s
your
apology? Can I hear you say you’re sorry for what you did to me?”
Vince still had no idea what injuries the Dark had suffered in the same explosion that had taken his own sight. It took all his strength not to ask, but expressing any desire to know would only have given the Dark more power over him.
“Nothing to say for yourself, huh?” The Dark was squeezing hard enough to break Vince’s jaw, but Vince took the pain in silence.
“Fine,” he said, pushing Vince’s head away. “I’ll let your wife apologize—when she spreads her legs for me.”
Mind games
, Vince told himself, but he wasn’t sure how much more he could take. Every word out of the Dark’s mouth, every punch to the jaw or the solar plexus, every crack about Vince’s wife, only served to remind him that the last thing he remembered seeing—
really remembered
seeing—was McKenna Mays dying in his arms. Vince knew it would all come down to the next few minutes. He needed a plan, and he was glad he had one: six steps at eleven o’clock to the suitcase filled with weapons; three steps, nine o’clock to the Brainport.
Now, all he needed was a break.
J
ack pulled his black knit cap down to his eyebrows, but he wasn’t sure how much good the lame disguise was doing.
He’d been the last person to board at the Poplar Station before the doors closed and the train pulled away. His car was nearly full, and he found an open seat about halfway down. Shada and the girl were in the lead car—there were only two—and Shada’s was standing-room only. Ten minutes into the ride, his heart was still pounding, but not from the chase.
He was almost certain that Shada had spotted him.
Jack glanced out the window of the speeding train. Chuck had been right: The tracks were aboveground—so far, at least—which meant that Chuck’s GPS was working. Jack’s cell phone worked, too. The stations all along the line were elevated, and with each stop Jack got a postcard view of London in the morning twilight. He was westbound, and based on how the passengers were dressed and what they were reading, Jack’s quick take was that the train was headed toward London’s financial district.
“Tower Gateway,” the mechanized voice announced.
Jack leaned into the aisle and peered ahead through the windows in the emergency doors between cars. Shada was moving toward the exit doors. Jack gave Chuck another update.
“She’s getting off.”
“Did you see
The French Connection
?”
Of course Jack had, and he didn’t want to be the idiot left standing on the platform as Shada jumped back on the train and waved good-bye to him. “Got it covered,” said Jack.
“The train goes into a tunnel after Tower Gateway,” said Chuck. “All Shada has to do is ride through to the next station, and she’s in the underground. You’re the only set of eyes we have if that happens. Keep me on the cell as long as you have service. I want to hear from you in real time while the situation’s fluid.”
“Understood.”
The train stopped, the doors opened, and Jack moved with about six other people toward the exit. He let them get off first, and by the time he stepped onto the platform, Shada was heading for the stairs.
“She’s definitely getting off,” Jack said into his phone.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m following her down the platform now.”
“It’s almost like she’s trying to do us a favor by getting off before the tracking chip becomes ineffective.”
“Maybe she is,” said Jack. “This station is less than a five-minute walk from my hotel. She couldn’t have picked an area of London that I’m more familiar with.”
“Then why did she remove the battery to kill the spyware on her cell phone?”
Jack didn’t have an answer. He just kept walking with the morning-rush-hour crowd.
Tower Gateway is an elevated station, and Jack waited for her to ride the escalator all the way down to street level before he started down the adjacent stairway. She walked quickly, leading the girl with one hand and clutching the backpack with the other. They were out on the street faster than Jack had expected, and he had to leap down the stairway two and three steps at a time to keep from losing them. A group of lost Americans surrounded him on the sidewalk.
“Dude, which way is the Tower of England?”
Jack blew right past them—presumably they meant
London
, and if they were any closer, the old walls might have fallen on their heads—and he spotted Shada across the street. He followed her for another block beyond an old railway overpass.
“She just ducked into a breakfast shop,” said Jack. He was in a zebra crossing at one of those typical London intersections where pedestrians could be killed from no fewer than seven different directions.
“One heck of a time to stop for a muffin,” Chuck said.
Jack continued up Minories, weaving his way through pedestrians as he struggled to see beyond the big green lettering on the restaurant window. The charcoal sky was ebbing toward a lighter shade of gray. The end of eighteen hours without sunlight was near, and any additional light was helpful.
“It doesn’t look like she’s ordering food. She’s definitely buying something, though.”
A bus stopped in front of him, blocking Jack’s view.
“Buying what?” asked Chuck.
Jack hurried beyond the bus, and the few steps forward gave him a clear line of sight into the restaurant. “She’s buying aluminum foil, I think. A whole roll of it.”
“And paying whatever price the clerk names, no doubt—and it’s still a bargain, when you consider that the payoff is a quarter million pounds.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wrapping her backpack in all that foil will shut down the GPS. That bitch is stealing the ransom!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Tower Hill Tube Station is about a hundred yards from you. If she gets underground, she can go just about anywhere, and if the money is wrapped in foil, I’ll have no way of knowing where she pops up.”
Jack’s grip on the phone tightened. “I’m asking you a question: What do you want me to do?”
“Grab her!”
S
hada tucked the roll of foil in her backpack, careful not to let the salesclerk see all that cash inside.
“We have cellophane wrap as well,” the clerk said as he stuffed the fifty-pound note into his pocket.
“Next time,” Shada said. The chances were exactly one in five hundred that she’d just solved her microchip problem, but the foil would shore up those odds. She’d wrap the remaining 499 notes once they were underground. “Let’s go,” she said, and the girl followed her to the door.
“By the way,” asked Shada, “what should I call you?”
“Call me what he calls me: McKenna.”
Shada stopped cold. Had it not been for Jack Swyteck, Shada might never have found out about the teenage girl in the cellar. It had been a sickening realization this morning that the girl in the cellar was the same girl she’d met on the Internet and unwittingly brought into Habib’s web. Hearing now that he called her “McKenna” was more than sickening. It was Shada’s worst fear realized.
She stepped away from the door, found a spot at the counter facing the window, and hit
REDIAL
on the girl’s cell. Habib answered, and Shada talked fast.
“I have the foil,” she said. “We’re a stone’s throw from the Tower Hill Station. Tell me where to get off the train.”
“First stop on the District Line. Aldgate East. About three minutes.”
Shada was about to answer, then stopped. Through the plate-glass window, she could see all the way across the street. A streetlight enhanced the light of dawn, and the man standing at the bus stop looked just like the guy on the train wearing the black cap. Shada tightened her stare, and even from this distance, it made him look away nervously. There was no doubt in her mind.
That’s Swyteck.
“It might take me a little longer than three minutes.”
She tucked away the phone and grabbed the girl by the elbow. “Let’s go,” she said as they moved quickly toward the other exit.