Afraid of the Dark (28 page)
Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
G
ood news, Paulo. The boss says I can take off your blindfold.”
The Dark grabbed him by the hair, then slapped his hostage upside the head, as if Vince were the absentminded one. “Oh, I forgot. You’re
not
wearing
a blindfold.”
He laughed way too hard at his own stupid joke, but Vince said nothing. He was seated in a desk chair, hands tied behind his back, unable to move. The Dark walked to the window and double-checked that the plywood over it was secure. They were in a spacious suite on the third floor of an abandoned hotel that was scheduled to be gutted and converted to flats. The nicest furnishings had been hauled away for auction, and only a wobbly table, a few old chairs, and a beat-up leather couch remained. There was no water or electricity, but the battery-powered lamp on the table was adequate, and when nature called, the toilet in the suite across the hall would suffice, even if it didn’t flush.
“Who’s your boss?” asked Vince.
The Dark pulled up a chair and straddled it backward, his chin resting on his forearms as he stared at Vince. He was close enough for Vince to feel his presence—a technique he’d perfected on blindfolded women.
“Let me explain something to you, Paulo. Your life is in my hands, which means that you will live only as long as you are of use to me. You’re not the hostage negotiator here. You don’t get to ask questions.”
“Why did you kill McKenna?”
“Cute,” he said, scoffing. “Uncle Vince wants to know
why
. After I tell you, then what are you gonna do? Fly back in your time machine and make it all better?”
The Dark glanced across the room. The device that he’d ripped from Vince’s head in the scuffle outside his flat was on the floor. “This Brainport thing comes with a time-machine function, right?” he said, mocking Vince.
Vince said nothing, but the Dark could read his expression. The sunglasses had been smashed in their struggle, and Vince looked so much weaker without them.
“Very foolish of you to try to ambush me,” the Dark said. “Desperate, really, even with this cool technology.”
The Dark gave the device a closer look. He put on the head-gear with the mounted camera, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the tongue sensor. “What’s this little lollipop thing for?” he asked.
“You stick it up your ass,” said Vince.
The Dark pulled off the headgear, threw the Brainport onto the chair in the corner of the room, and punched Vince in the stomach so hard that it hurt his own hand. Vince gasped for air, hunching over.
The Dark shook the sting out of his fist. “How do you like that, smart mouth?”
“Did you rape McKenna?”
The Dark hit him again, and Vince let out a loud groan. “Yell, scream all you want,” said the Dark. “I can fire off my gun if I want to. No one is going to hear you, except maybe a crack addict or two on the first floor.”
Vince caught his breath. “Did you . . . rape her?”
“Kind of a one-track mind you’ve got there, partner.”
“Did you?” asked Vince.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re a sick bastard.”
The Dark gave him another blow to the solar plexus, the hardest one yet.
“Typical hostage negotiator’s seat-of-the-pants psychology. It always boils down to sexual sadism. I hate to disappoint you, genius, but I killed McKenna because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s as simple as that.”
“You’re a liar.”
The Dark grabbed him by the jaw and held his head up, as if daring Vince to stare at him through his blindness.
“My job was to find out as much as I could about Project Round Up. If that meant sleeping with Chuck Mays’ wife, so be it. If that meant hacking into Chuck Mays’ home computer while he was out of the country, no problem. Unfortunately, I had no idea McKenna was home at the time. She caught me red-handed.”
“There was no reason to make her suffer.”
“If you gotta do it, you might as well make the most of it.”
Vince lunged forward from the chair, but his hands were tied behind his back. The Dark dodged the head butt and pushed him hard to the floor. Vince was facedown, and the Dark bore his knee into Vince’s spine as he pressed the cold muzzle of the pistol to the base of his skull.
“That’s your second silly move of the day, Paulo.”
“You’re lucky I’m blind.”
“No,
you’re
lucky you’re blind. You weren’t the only one injured in that explosion. If you had walked away unscathed, I would have killed you three years ago. Probably after making you watch your wife have a go with me.”
Vince jerked his shoulders back, but his resistance was futile.
“Oh, did I hit a sore spot?” said the Dark. “I thought you knew your wife sleeps around on you.”
“Shut your mouth.”
“A beautiful woman like that. Of course she feels sorry for you and wants to be the good wife. But how long did you really expect her to hang with a blind guy?”
“You don’t know Alicia.”
“Oh, I know her all right. I’m sure she’s thrilled about this Brainport contraption you’ve been testing. The less dependent you are on her, the less guilty she’ll feel about leaving. She
is
going to leave you, Paulo. Don’t mistake pity for love.”
Every muscle in Vince’s back tightened, and the Dark sensed the hot rush of anger, but then he could almost feel the air escaping from Vince’s lungs. It was satisfying to have touched a raw nerve—to have literally deflated him.
The Dark leaned closer, whispering into Vince’s ear: “Yes, I raped McKenna. I stabbed her with a kitchen knife. And I enjoyed it.”
Vince lay motionless.
“Now you know everything, Paulo. Except for the one thing that I will let torment you all the way to the grave.” He waited for Vince to say something, but he had gone silent. The Dark said it for him:
“Why did she tell you Jamal did it?”
J
ack was feeling the jet lag. It was technically still day one in London, but his body was telling him that he’d gone too long without rest. His chin snapped up off his chest as the sound of Chuck’s voice roused him from a state of semisleep.
“I cracked the code,” said Chuck, speaking over the computer.
“What took you so long?” asked Jack.
He was being facetious. Anything less than intelligence-grade encryption was no match for Chuck’s supercomputers.
“Does that mean we can view the files now?” asked Shada.
“No need,” said Chuck. “I ran them through my database. Part of Project Round Up is the cataloging of every single video file traded over the worst of the P2P networks. Trust me on this: The files that you copied from that creep’s computer are not the kind of things that any normal human being would want to watch.”
Jack was almost afraid to ask. “What kind of content are we talking about?”
“Some people would call it sexually explicit. I call it graphic violence.”
“Not against children, I hope.”
“No children in these videos. Interestingly, the violence is against grown men. By women.”
That took Jack aback. “Dominatrix stuff?”
“It goes beyond that. From a trading-frequency standpoint, the most popular video shows a woman ripping out a man’s pubic hair with her teeth.”
Jack squirmed at the thought, then refocused. “So are you saying that every single file that Shada copied has already been traded on the P2P networks?”
“All of them—except one.”
“Which one?”
“Jamal’s.”
Jack went cold. “What does that one show?”
“I haven’t watched it yet, and since it’s never been traded on the P2P networks, I don’t have the content cataloged. I thought I would pull it up now for the three of us to see.”
Jack and Shada exchanged uneasy glances.
“I don’t need to see it,” said Shada. “This may not matter to you, Chuck, but I feel bad enough for the mistakes I’ve made without watching these videos.”
Chuck didn’t bite, unwilling to acknowledge her contrition just yet.
“What about you, Swyteck?” he asked. “Jamal was your client.”
Jack wasn’t eager to say yes, but if Jamal’s mother was going to hear about this from anyone, he wanted it to be from him, not Chuck. “I should,” Jack said, bracing himself, “so I will.”
A
ndie put her head down, pulled her wool scarf up over her nose, and walked into the wind. It was snowing in the Washington area. Tiny flakes fell from the night sky, flickered beneath the glow of streetlamps, and gathered on the wet sidewalk in front of her. No doubt some tourist was giddy with excitement over postcard-quality photographs of the illuminated Capitol or Jefferson Memorial. Andie wished she were in Miami. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel was right across the street, which made her think of Jack. He’d probably booked the romantic-weekend package a half-dozen times at the Ritz on South Beach, but something had always come up and forced them to cancel. “Something” was code for the FBI.
Sorry, Jack.
Andie still wasn’t convinced that it was safe to return to Vortex. She’d left the company heliport on Sunday with the definite impression that Bahena was having doubts about his trainee. But it wasn’t Bahena who had called to insist that she return tonight to discuss her “immediate activation.” The call had come from the top. From the CEO of Vortex’s parent company. From Sid Littleton himself.
“You’re close,” Harley had told her. “You have to go back.”
Andie knew her supervisor was right.
An inch of new snow blanketed the sidewalk, and it squeaked beneath each step. Commuters had been heading home since lunchtime in anticipation of the coming storm. Even so, a long line of glowing orange taillights streamed up the street toward the on-ramp to the expressway. There were few pedestrians—just Andie and a lone lunatic jogger. A woman, Andie noted as she trudged by her. A pregnant woman. Now
that
was dedication: In her sixth month, easily, and superwoman was out jogging in a snowstorm. She probably worked sixty hours a week at a major law firm, too. Dropped off her three older children at three different private schools on her way to work. Hit the gym every morning at five
A.M.
, even if it meant getting up at four to put the cookies in the oven for the Cub Scout bake sale. Teleconferenced with teachers over lunch, organized charity events on weekends, sang the barking puppy to sleep at two
A.M.
, always had her highlights done before her hair hit “scare alert,” and made love to her husband four times a week whether they wanted it or not.
Is that who Jack thought he was engaged to marry?
Andie hurried up the granite steps to the building’s after-hours entrance. The adrenaline was kicking in. From the very beginning, Black Ice had been an exhilarating mission: uncover the truth about the interrogation tactics used at black sites operated by Black Ice through its highly secretive subsidiary, Vortex Inc. The plan was to place an FBI agent in the role of an interrogator in training. And now the reason was clear why it had to be a female agent: Black Ice used female interrogators to berate and humiliate Muslim men in the name of “enhanced interrogation.”
Still, there was the question: Why her? Of all the female FBI agents who worked undercover, why did the bureau choose Miami agent Andie Henning? True, she was an experienced undercover agent who, over the years, had fooled everyone from cult leaders to Wall Street investment bankers. But she was no expert in counterterrorism. And that was beginning to bother her.
Really
bother her.
She stopped at the top of the steps before entering the building and dialed her supervisory agent.
“Harley, it’s me.”
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Fine. Before I go back in, there’s just something I need to get off my chest.”
“What is it?”
Andie stepped closer to the building, away from the falling snow. “I’m in this role, and it’s my duty to see it through. But I’m not naïve about why I was chosen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This is a broad investigation into private security firms. I don’t see it as coincidence that I’m investigating Black Ice.”
“Of course it’s no coincidence. There is a key role for a woman.”
The cold air made her sniffle. “Or is it a key role for Jack Swyteck’s fiancée?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know for sure yet. But my instinct tells me that I’m about to find out that I’m investigating the same black site in Prague that was at the heart of Jack’s alibi defense in the murder case against Jamal Wakefield.”
There was silence on the line. Andie took it the only way she could.
“I knew all along that Jack and I were playing on the same field,” she said. “But I can’t believe the bureau would put me in a position where my job would intersect with Jack’s like this.”
She heard his sigh on the line. “I’m sorry,” said Harley.
“It’s sleazy, at best,” she said.
“I agree,” said Harley. “I want you to know that I was just as surprised as you are.”
Andie paused. Something about the way he said it—something about Harley—made her believe him. “I’m still going to raise hell about it when this is all over.”
“Okay. But there’s something else I want you to know,” he said.
“What?”
“I’ll help you.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Andie ended the call and tucked her phone away. She brushed the snow off her shoulders, then slid her passkey through the electronic reader at the main entrance.
The door to Vortex Inc. opened. The security guard greeted her in the lobby.
“Welcome back, Ms. Horne.”
“What do you think, Leon?” she said as she shook the snow from her scarf. “Do we get extra points for working the night shift in a blizzard?”
“No, ma’am. But at least we’re not alone. Mr. Littleton still hasn’t gone home yet.”
“That’s good to know,” she said—and she meant it.
J
amal’s video was short. Jack’s recovery time would be much longer. It was amazing how high a naked man could be made to jump from the table with a well-placed cattle prod. More than the image, however, it was the sound of Jamal’s screams that would stay with Jack.
“Okay,” said Jack, collecting himself. “If being Jamal Wakefield from Miami gets you this kind of treatment, I now have a better understanding of why he went to Gitmo pretending to be a Somali peasant who didn’t speak English.”
“Not to mention the fact that being Jamal Wakefield could land you on death row for a murder you didn’t commit,” said Chuck, who was still on speaker.
Shada shook her head. She hadn’t watched, but Jack’s summary gave her the flavor. “I don’t understand why they would record this kind of conduct on video.”
“This came up at Gitmo,” said Jack. “It’s a matter of interrogation expedience. If I’m questioning you, it may be that all I have to do is show you the video of what I did to Jamal. You’ll probably start talking before I do the same thing to you.”
“Let me make sure I understand,” said Shada. “All those videos that I copied from Habib’s computer—those are all men who were tortured at the same black site Jamal was at?”
“It looks that way,” said Chuck. “The interesting thing is that we would never have made that connection if you had not brought us the Jamal video.”
“Explain that to me,” said Jack.
“I mentioned to you before that one of the functions of Project Round Up is to trace video files all the way back to the camera that created them. My computers confirm that all these files—Jamal’s included—were created with the same camera. Without Jamal’s file, you might think that all the other files were just more sick pornography traded on the P2P network. Jamal’s was the only one not traded on P2P. His video is the missing piece in the puzzle that links all of this activity to torture at a black site.”
“There’s something that still doesn’t add up for me,” said Shada.
“Tell me,” said Chuck.
“I understand what Jack said about interrogation expedience as a reason to create these videos. But creating them is one thing. Somebody took these files and put them on the P2P network. Why?”
“That’s a good question,” said Jack.
“I can answer that in two words,” said Chuck. “Trade value.”
“What does that mean?” asked Shada.
Jack was with him. “It means that the way to get content on a P2P network is to trade something in return.”
“You got it,” said Chuck. “In plain English, if I’m a sick son of a bitch who wants to watch movies of a preteen girl having sex with her mommy’s boyfriend, the easiest way for me to get it is to trade something for it.”
“Hard to imagine someone wanting to watch a woman rip out a man’s pubic hair,” said Shada.
“Are you kidding me?” said Chuck. “Do you remember the photos of that female soldier sitting on a pile of naked men at Abu Ghraib? That left a lot of men clamoring for more explicit abuse. For some guys, this stuff is very sexual, very much a turn-on.”
“Obviously someone saw this black site as a P2P trading gold mine,” said Jack.
“And that someone was Habib,” said Chuck. “He had a steady supply of videos that showed leather-clad women torturing men. Not simulated stuff. Real blood, real violence. He could trade that for whatever turned him on. Torture of women. Child pornography. Snuff. You name it.”
Shada closed her eyes, absorbing the blow, as if the pain of her terrible miscalculation kept digging deeper.
Jack heard a phone ringing over the speaker. Someone was calling Chuck.
“It’s from London,” said Chuck. “Let me plug you guys in so you can hear. Don’t say a word.”
Jack moved closer to the computer, and Chuck answered. The voice on the line matched the one in the recording Chuck had shared earlier—but this was live.
“I want two hundred fifty thousand pounds, cash,” the Dark said. “Small bills. Or I kill Paulo.”
“When?” asked Chuck.
“Tomorrow morning. Early.”
“That’s very short notice.”
“You’re a rich man. Make it happen.”
Jack wanted to speak, but he held his tongue and, instead, fired off an e-mail to Chuck.
“How do we make the exchange?” asked Chuck.
“I’ll call you tomorrow at half past five with instructions.”
“Five thirty
A.M.
London time
?”
“Yes.”
“You must be joking.”
“I’m joking only if your idea of a punch line is a bullet in your friend Paulo’s head.”
Chuck paused, and Jack hoped he was reading his e-mail. “One thing,” said Chuck. “I want to talk to Vince. I need to know he’s alive.”
Jack could breathe again; his e-mail had gone through.
“Blow me,” said the Dark. “Get the money and you get to talk to Paulo. And by the way: Shada, if you’re listening, I know you copied some files from my computer.”
Shada stiffened, and Jack squeezed her hand for reassurance—and to make sure she said nothing.
“That makes me very angry,” the Dark said, “but I’m a reasonable man. I want you, personally, to deliver the money tomorrow. If you do, we’ll call it even. If you don’t . . .”
The line went silent. The Dark was gone.
Jack tried to get Shada to look at him, but she was staring at the floor, numb. “Listen to me,” said Jack. “If that’s the game he wants to play—insisting that Shada deliver the ransom—we need to revisit the idea of just calling the police.”
“No,” said Shada. “He’ll kill Vince.”
“It’s not an option,” said Chuck. “I could run this guy through every conceivable database, and I guarantee you he’d show up on every terrorist watch list in the world. You know what that means for hostage negotiation.”
Shada looked even more worried. “What does it mean?”
Until now, Jack hadn’t thought it all the way through, but he quickly caught Chuck’s drift.
“The United States has repeatedly stated that as a matter of official government policy it does not negotiate with terrorists,” said Jack. “Even though we’re not on U.S. soil, Vince is an American law enforcement officer. Scotland Yard will likely respect U.S. policy.”
Shada’s eyes widened. “If we don’t negotiate, Vince is a dead man.”
Chuck said, “Do you disagree with that analysis, Jack?”
Jack processed it. “I can’t disagree.”
“So what’s it going to be, Shada? Can you deliver?”
She was staring at the computer screen even though it was blank.
“Shada,” Chuck repeated, “what’s it gonna be?”