Afraid of the Dark (2 page)

She was fading. Vince tried again.

“Who did this to you?”

She coughed on the blood in the back of her throat. Vince checked the chest wound beneath the blanket. Even with the makeshift bandage, the foam oozing from the slit between her ribs emitted a gurgling noise. That hole in her chest was literally sucking the life out of her.

“McKenna, tell me who did this to you.”

He put the cell to her mouth, and her eyes closed. It was too much effort to keep them open and speak at the same time. “Jamal,” she whispered.

“Your boyfriend?”

She tried to nod but couldn’t. “My first,” she said, her voice barely audible.

The gurgling noise from her chest gave way to sudden silence. McKenna’s eyelids stopped quivering. Vince dropped the phone, threw his leg over her body, and jumped into CPR mode.

“Come on, McKenna!” he said as he pushed against her rib cage. Frothy blood squirted from her chest wound like seawater from a blowhole, and Vince froze, not sure what to do. He tried mouth to mouth, but he was breathing into a pool of blood that had risen up in her throat. He checked her pulse. There was none. Her body was motionless. Vince tried one last series of chest compressions, and more blood shot from the blowhole. Vince fell forward, pounding the floor with his clenched fist.

“Son of a bitch!”

He slid his hands behind her head and supported the back of the neck. McKenna’s beautiful face was deadweight in his hands. Tears filled his eyes as he took her in his arms, the blood-soaked blanket turning his shirt bright red.

Sirens blared from somewhere down the block.

Too late
was Vince’s first thought, but deep inside he knew he didn’t mean the ambulance and police backup. If only he had checked those text messages twenty minutes sooner.

I was too late.

Then he heard a noise downstairs.

Jamal?

He kissed McKenna’s forehead, quickly pulled the blanket up over her face, and jumped to his feet. In a matter of seconds he was down the hall and at the top of the stairs. The sirens were getting closer. There was another noise. It was coming from the garage.

He’s still here!

Vince flew down the stairs, ran through the living room, and stopped at the kitchen counter. He’d visited the Mays house many times before, and he knew that the pockmarked, pecky-cypress door on the other side of the kitchen led to the three-car garage.

The sirens were loud now, just outside the house. Vince could have—should have—waited for backup. But a complicated mix of emotions took over. Anger. Guilt. Grief. More anger. His pistol firmly in hand, he hurried across the kitchen and pushed open the door.

“Freeze!” he shouted, but even he couldn’t hear his command. The mere act of opening the door had triggered a noise that was deafening. The heat overwhelmed him. The flash blinded him. For a split second—it seemed much longer—it felt as if someone were pushing his eyes out the back of his skull, as his head snapped back with the force of a mule kick.

And then all was black.

January

Three years later

Chapter Two

I
t was Jack Swyteck’s second trip to Cuba in the past three weeks. He had yet to meet a Cuban.

Miami was his home, and while it was true that Miami was closer to Havana than to Orlando, Jack’s flight to the Oriente Province at the southeastern tip of the island was over four hundred air miles. His personal escorts from the naval airstrip to the detention facility were two U.S. marines, a blue-eyed farm boy from Kansas and a first-generation Mexican-American from Los Angeles. His co-counsel, a JAG lawyer assigned to the case despite her client’s obvious discomfort with a female attorney, was from the South Side of Chicago. The civilian translator from Mogadishu was delivering Jack’s words in Somali and, occasionally, Arabic. Jack’s client was from East Africa. A spinmaster might have made the argument that the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo was just as much a melting pot as the nation that ran it. To Jack, the whole place felt more like a ticking time bomb.

“I’m not a government interrogator,” said Jack, but he was essentially talking to the walls. Four of them, to be exact, an eight-by-ten steel-and-concrete shed, with a separate holding cell and bunk to the left.

Jack’s client said nothing. It was playing out exactly the way Jack’s first visit to Guantánamo had—the lawyer talking, the client too distrustful to acknowledge his existence.

The briefing material estimated that Prisoner No. 977 was in his mid-twenties, but three years of confinement and various forms of government “enhanced interrogation” tactics had aged him beyond his years. His thin, dark face was dull and weary. His long black beard was gnarled, his fingernails brittle and yellowed. His first language was officially listed as Somali, but no one seemed to know for certain. There were no confirmed reports of his ever having uttered a word to anyone at Gitmo.

“Maybe he speaks Pashto or Farsi,” said Jack. “Can we try another language?”

“Only if you get another translator,” the interpreter said.

There was no time for that. In sixteen hours Jack was scheduled to be in federal court in Washington arguing for the prisoner’s release. As habeas corpus proceedings went, this one was in a class by itself, but Jack had the pedigree to handle it. Some fifteen years ago, a four-year stint with the Freedom Institute had been Jack’s first job out of law school. His father was the governor of Florida at the time, a man who’d campaigned on a strong pro–death-penalty platform. Jack was hardly the perfect fit for a ragtag group of former hippies who worked only capital cases, but he and his old boss Neil Goderich had remained close over the years. It was Neil who’d asked Jack to take the case of Prisoner No. 977. Jack had no illusions of selling his friends and family on the everybody-deserves-a-lawyer argument. It was a huge pro bono undertaking for a sole practitioner, but Jack kept his involvement quiet—until it came time for the government to clear his visit to Gitmo, and the FBI background check left his neighbors wondering if he was a mob lawyer on the verge of indictment. Finally, he had to come clean. The reactions were pretty uniform.

Are you kidding me?

You’re defending a terrorist?

His best friend, Theo Knight—a death row inmate until Jack and a DNA test had proved his innocence more than a decade ago—was the only one to shrug it off: “Dude, know what GITMO stands for?
Giving Interrogation Teams More Options
.”

Funny, kind of—if you were pounding back beers at one of Theo’s bars in Miami. But once the airplane landed at Gitmo, there wasn’t a lot of laughter. Jack had read the report from the former prosecutor, who had resigned from the case in disgust. Prisoner No. 977 had been rounded up by Ethiopian troops from a suspected al-Qaeda safe house in southern Somalia. He was accused of sheltering Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, who was responsible for planning the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2002 car-bombing attack in Kenya and missile attack on an Israeli airliner. A handwritten confession was the centerpiece of the case against him. He didn’t write it. The one-page document was handed to him for his signature after several days of beatings, forced administration of drugs, and threats against his family. It was written in a language (Amharic) that he didn’t speak, and he signed with his thumbprint, which was consistent with reports that he was completely illiterate. The Ethiopians turned him over to the Americans, to whom he refused to speak. Prison logs reflected that Prisoner No. 977 attempted to kill himself eleven hours after arriving at Gitmo. Eight weeks later he was on the so-called “frequent flier” program, where, in a two-week period, he was moved to a new cell 112 times—an average of every three hours—in order to ensure he was sleep deprived and disoriented. Over the three years at Guantánamo, he was repeatedly subjected to extreme cold, bright lights, and various stress positions, and he was often kept in solitary confinement.

Still, he refused to speak to anyone—even to his lawyer.

“I’m here to help you,” said Jack, almost pleading now. “You have no way of knowing this, but in twenty-eight of the thirty-three detainee cases heard since last January, federal judges in my country have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. Many of those men were held without charges far longer than you.”

The prisoner’s gaze drifted away. He looked at the prayer mat rolled neatly and resting atop his bunk, then up at the large clock on the wall, then back out to nothing. There was no reason for him to trust Jack. None.

Fifteen minutes passed, Jack’s words meeting with silence. Even on death row, Jack never had a client ignore him like this.

What now?

Jack glanced at the JAG lawyer to his right, then looked at the prisoner, who was now leaning back in his chair. This was going nowhere. It was absurd, really—the Yale-educated attorney sitting at a card table in a dank shed trying to explain habeas corpus to an illiterate peasant who was chained to the floor. Jack was running out of time, and becoming anxious was not going to help. He considered his next move, then completely shifted gears.

“My mother and grandmother were actually born in Cuba,” Jack said.

Jack paused for the translator. He knew very little about the man in shackles before him. But he knew that he must have family. Maybe they could connect on that level. The prisoner hadn’t seen or spoken to his loved ones in years. With a deep breath, Jack pushed forward with his last chance at a breakthrough.

“My mother left the island when she was seventeen, a couple years after Fidel Castro came into power. Her name was Anna. My grandmother put her on an airplane alone and sent her to live with relatives in Tampa. I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been to watch her daughter go, but Abuela refused to let her child live under a dictator. She hoped to get off the island and reunite in a few months. It took much longer. She missed my mother’s wedding. She missed the birth of her only grandchild—that would be me. It took forty years for my grandmother to finally get out of Cuba. By then, I was in my thirties, and my mother was long gone. Doctors didn’t know much about preeclampsia back then. She died soon after I was born.”

The translation brought no reaction. Forget
“I’m sorry.”
Jack didn’t tell that story often, but it was the first time in his life that he’d told it without drawing so much as a blink of the eye.

“What I’m trying to say is that I know what it must be like to be separated from your family,” Jack said, and then he waited.

The prisoner looked up, impassive, his demeanor unchanged.

Time was running out. Jack could feel his heart beating faster, the prospect of failure strangling him. He struggled to maintain an even tone as he spoke.

“I also know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do.”

Jack told him about his friend Theo Knight—arrested as a teenager, an innocent man who had wasted four years of his youth on death row, twice having come so close to the electric chair that he’d eaten his last meal and had his head and ankles shaved for placement of the electrodes. It was hard not to get energized when talking about Theo, and Jack’s words were coming so fast that the translator was having trouble keeping up.

“Four years,” said Jack. “That’s even longer than you’ve been here. Now Theo is a free man. My best friend. He owns two bars in Miami, plays the saxophone every Saturday night at a joint he calls Cy’s Place in honor of his great-uncle. Everybody wants to be Theo.”

Jack didn’t mention that all of his other clients from those days were either dead or still on death row. He just let the thought of Theo and his newfound freedom hang in the gulf between them. But the prisoner was unmoved.

Family. Get back to family.

Jack was about to start talking again, then stopped, deciding to steer clear of his famous father. Tales of the former cop who had signed more death warrants than any other governor in Florida’s history probably wouldn’t endear Jack to a man in shackles. Jack was running out of angles. He was down to Grandpa Swyteck—his father’s eighty-seven-year-old father.

“I visited him in the nursing home a few weeks ago,” said Jack. “He has Alzheimer’s.”

Jack stopped. The prisoner looked at him curiously, as if—perhaps—he had been listening with interest to Jack’s stories about his grandmother and Theo and was expecting Jack to say more about his grandfather. But Jack wasn’t sure what to say next. It suddenly occurred to him how little he knew about the old man. A momentary sense of sadness came over him.

“He was born in the Czech Republic,” Jack said. “Czechoslovakia, it was called then.”

Finally a reaction—though Jack wasn’t sure what had triggered it. He simply watched as the prisoner sat up, rested his forearms atop the card table, and looked Jack in the eye. There was another long stretch of silence, and then finally, in a moment that nearly blew away Jack and everyone else in the room, the man’s lips moved.

“I have been there,” he said. “In Prague.”

The JAG lawyer looked at Jack, then at the prisoner, then back again. “He speaks,” she said in disbelief.

Jack took one more long look around the room, at the cell and the steel bunk and the steel toilet and the O-ring drilled into the floor attached to the man’s ankles. Then he leaned forward in his chair, looking straight at the man in front of him.

“Yeah, how ’bout that,” said Jack. “In perfect English.”

Chapter Three

I
t was a ten-hour car ride from Miami to Pensacola, like going to Alabama. The flight in Chuck Mays’ new Cessna took a little over two hours. Vince practically kissed the ground upon landing, thanking God that Chuck hadn’t suffered a midair heart attack that would have left Vince at the controls. At the terminal they piled into a rental car—Chuck, Vince, and Sam. Sam was Vince’s golden retriever.

His guide dog.

Since losing his sight, Vince had heard all the amazing stories. The guy who blew his nose so violently that his eye popped out. The firefighter whose eye was left hanging by the optic nerve after a blast from a fire hose. The child who ruptured her eye on a bedpost while bouncing on the mattress. What made these cases remarkable was that in each instance the ultimate visual impairment was nonexistent or negligible, or so the tales of medical miracles went. On the other side of the coin were patients who seemed to suffer only minor ocular trauma, the globe still intact, but whose vision was lost forever. They were the unlucky ones, the Vince Paulos of the world.

“You are going to be amazed by this technology,” said Chuck as he steered into the parking lot.

Vince heard him, but he didn’t answer right away. All this talk about some kind of military gadget that could effectively restore his vision had him drifting back to the day he’d lost his sight—to that pockmarked door again, the opening to his personal and permanent tunnel of darkness.

“Vince?”

“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking for a minute.” It was a lie, of course, at least the part about “a minute.” Vince had done far better than anyone had expected over the past three years, staying on as a full-time instructor with the police force and occasionally serving active duty as a negotiator, providing for himself, leading a surprisingly normal and enjoyable life without sight. Even so, a man couldn’t help thinking and rethinking from time to time, imagining how different things might have been if he just hadn’t pushed open that door.

The car stopped, and Chuck shut off the engine. “We’re here,” said Chuck.

Here
was the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a not-for-profit research institute where Chuck had some contacts. Vince had never heard of the place, but IHMC research partners included everyone from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to IBM and Boeing. They don’t just think outside the box, Chuck had told him, these guys are reinventing the box. The idea was to fit human and machine components together in ways that exploited their respective strengths and mitigated their respective weaknesses. For Vince, that meant the possibility of a whole new door to walk through.

“This way, Deacon Blues,” said Chuck.

Vince smiled as he and Sam climbed out of the car. Chuck had been playing “Deacon Blues” and other old Steely Dan songs on the car stereo ever since telling Vince that one of the board members at IMHC was Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, a self-taught specialist in terrorism, missile defense, and chemical and biological warfare who was better known as a guitarist with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. Skunk was one of those reinventing-the-box guys who worked alongside retired army generals, scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers, and social scientists of various stripes.

They got a name for the winners in the world . . . call me Vincent Paulo.

Vince was trying not to get too excited, but if this new technology for the blind did everything Chuck said it could, Vince would literally be looking at life through a new porthole.

Fuck that door.

Sam stopped, and so did Vince. They were at the entrance. Chuck pushed the intercom button and announced their arrival. The receptionist’s voice crackled over the speaker, a buzzer sounded, and Chuck opened the door. Vince stopped him before entering.

“Hey, I want to thank you,” said Vince.

“No need, dude.”

“Just . . . really. Thank you.”

“I haven’t done anything yet.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. The only man who had lost more than Vince in that explosion had been Chuck. McKenna’s body had been consumed in the blaze. Two months later Chuck’s wife was gone. Police had found Shada’s overturned kayak floating in a section of the Florida Everglades that was crawling with pythons and alligators. An empty bottle of Valium and a suicide note were in her car. Her body was never recovered. Not once had Chuck even hinted that Vince had dropped the ball while he was out of the country, that Vince could have done anything to prevent the tragedy. Indeed, watching Chuck rebound through his work had been a real source of inspiration for Vince. Eleven months after McKenna’s death, the fledgling data-mining company that had been sucking cash out of the Mays family was turning a profit. Six months ago, Chuck sold out to a media conglomerate for eight figures and formed a new venture—MLFC Inc.—which to most folks was an acronym for Mays Laser Fast Computers. It was over beers that Chuck and Vince had come up with the name My Last Fucking Company.

“You’re a good friend,” said Vince. “I mean that.”

Chuck sniffed the air like a golden retriever, then did his baritone Sam-the-dog voice. “Hmm, the shit’s really gettin’ deep here. Can I go inside and wipe my paws?”

The receptionist greeted them in the lobby and took them to the computer lab. It was a room like any other to Vince. He heard the hum of fluorescent lighting overhead. He felt the cool draft from an AC duct on the wall. It was actually
too
cool—a sign of how many computers they were trying to keep from overheating—yet Vince was perspiring with anticipation. Finally, Dr. Adam Feldman joined them. Feldman had a PhD in neuroscience, hours of experience with a device called Brainport, and the good sense to cut the small talk short. He quickly launched into business.

“The basic premise here,” said Feldman, “is that you see with your brain, not with your eyes.”

“Which means I’ve seen a lot of the inside of my skull over the past three years,” said Vince.

“I meant that
all
sighted species see with their brains,” said Feldman. “All the brain needs is the input. In your case, the eyes can no longer transmit. That’s where Brainport comes in. Could you remove your sunglasses, please?”

Vince always wore them. To the office, at the beach, inside the house. He even wore them on his rock-climbing vacation last August. He heard a panting noise as he tucked the sunglasses into his coat pocket.

“Is that Sam or me?” asked Vince.

Dr. Feldman chuckled. Vince figured he wasn’t the first blind man to get a little giddy over this device.

Feldman described what he was doing each step of the way, partly to educate Vince, partly to help him relax.

“These special eyeglasses I’m putting on you have a small video camera mounted on the nose bridge. The camera acts as the eyes to gather visual information. The images are transmitted wirelessly in black, gray, and white to this handheld computer,” he said as he slid the device into Vince’s hand.

It felt slightly larger than an iPod. “Okay. But I’m not seeing anything.”

“Hold your horses there, cowboy,” said Feldman. “The computer will translate the visual information into electrical signals. Let’s turn it on.”

Feldman guided Vince’s thumb to the switch. Vince pressed it and waited. “I’m still not seeing anything.”

“Vince,” said Chuck, “One step at a time, all right?”

The anticipation was even beyond his first step onto a battleground as a marine, at least a million times greater than his first time with a woman. Well, maybe not a million. He took a breath and said, “Sorry, guys.”

“No problem,” said Feldman. “Just to give you some idea of what’s going on, Brainport is built on the concept of sensory substitution, which means that when one sense malfunctions, another sense can compensate, serving as a stand-in. Even a blind person walking down the street with a cane is basically using a form of sensory substitution.”

“Been there, done that,” said Vince. He reached down and patted Sam on the withers. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’m keeping you.”

“You raise a good point,” said Feldman. “I don’t want to overstate the device. It’s meant to supplement the cane and the guide dog. The idea is to help you perform everyday tasks that may seem simple to the sighted, such as reading street signs and searching for empty seats on a bus. A little additional information will make your life easier and safer.”

“Tell him how you’re studying it here at the institute,” said Chuck.

Vince couldn’t see him, but somehow he knew Feldman was smiling. “Again,” he said, “we’re talking about sensory substitution. Imagine a Navy SEAL with superhuman senses similar to those of owls or snakes.”

“Are you saying I have to walk around sticking my tongue out at people?”

“No. But you’re on the right track. The tongue ultimately replaces the eyes in transmitting visual input to the brain. That camera mounted on your glasses acts as your eyes, the visual images go to the little computer in your hand, and the computer translates the visual information into electrical signals. Those signals are transformed into gentle electrical impulses that end up on your tongue.”

“How?”

“The lollipop,” said Feldman.

“The what?”

“It’s an electrode that you hold in your mouth to receive the electrical signal. The white portions of images become strong impulses, the gray become medium impulses, and the black result in no impulses. The tongue sends these impulses to the brain, where they are interpreted as sensory information that substitutes for vision. The whole process works in much the same way that the optic nerve in the eye transmits visual information to the brain.”

“That’s great if it works. What do you think about that, Sam?”

The bushy tail brushed Vince’s ankle as it wagged.

“You ready?” asked Feldman.

“Beyond ready,” said Vince. “Bring on the lollipop.”