Read Afraid of the Dark Online
Authors: James Grippando
Afraid of the Dark (33 page)
S
he saw me,” Jack said into his phone.
“Then go now!” Chuck shouted.
Jack put away the cell as he darted across the street, making the American mistake of checking left instead of right. Two cars slammed on their brakes, and Jack narrowly missed mention in tomorrow’s paper under the headline “Death by Mini Cooper.” Shada and the girl flew out of the restaurant and ran in the opposite direction, headed down a side street. Shada covered the city block in no time, but the girl seemed to be struggling to keep up.
Damn, that woman can run.
“Shada, stop!” he shouted. It felt like the fiasco at Carpenter’s Arms all over again, only this time he knew the area—he was glad he’d studied his map—and he knew that she was headed for the Tower Hill Tube Station.
Shada was in full stride, and as they made a hard left down another street, Jack could hear her yelling at the girl to keep up. Then the girl went down in the shadows beneath the overpass. Shada kept going. The girl had fallen, and Shada just left her.
Or did Shada push her down?
The girl was still on the sidewalk, holding her ankle, when Jack caught up with her.
“Are you okay?”
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. She got up slowly, then nearly fell over again when she put weight on that ankle.
Jack glanced ahead, beyond the darkness of the overpass. Shada was out of sight, long gone—with the cash. Jack hated to think what might happen to Vince without the ransom, but he couldn’t let a teenage girl go back to the Dark.
“Let me help you.”
“No!”
She was panic-stricken, and Jack tried his most soothing voice. “You’re safe now. Stay with me.”
“Leave me alone!”
Jack looked around for help and saw that they were right in front of a place called Pitcher & Piano, which, to a jet-lagged attorney from Miami, sounded like a law firm. “I’m going to take you inside here and call the police.”
“No!”
“You’ve been brainwashed by—”
Her punch to his chest took Jack’s breath away. “I’m not brainwashed,” she shouted, “and I can’t call the police!”
“Yes, you can.”
“If I’m not back with the money in ten minutes, he’ll kill me!”
“He has to find you to kill you!”
“No, he doesn’t!” she shouted.
“Just let me—”
Her scream was deafening—long and shrill, like the cry of a mortally wounded animal, and the fact that they were beneath an overpass made it even louder. A man came running out of Pitcher & Piano—it was a bar, not a law firm—and grabbed Jack.
“Let go of her!” the man shouted.
“I’m trying to help her.”
“I said,
Let go!
”
He took a swing at Jack, but Jack deflected it. Jack managed to keep a tight grip on the girl’s coat, but she only encouraged her Good Samaritan.
“Help! Get him away from me!”
The man was smaller than Jack, but the girl’s plea gave him added strength. He pulled Jack to the ground, and the girl broke free. The two men rolled on the sidewalk, and the speed with which the girl ran away—right through the pain in her ankle—left no doubt that her life was on the line. Hers and Vince’s. Jack pushed the man aside, jumped up from the sidewalk, and chased after the girl.
“Stop!”
She flagged a taxi to the curb. Jack was still a hundred feet away, but the thought of the girl getting away in a taxi made him kick into a higher gear. He had his cell phone in hand and was trying to dial the police, but that was impossible while running at full speed. He closed the gap quickly—that ankle was really bothering her—and she was almost within reach when the man from Pitcher & Piano tackled him from behind. Momentum carried them all the way to the taxi, and Jack reached for the girl’s ankle as she yanked the car door open. The man knocked Jack’s arm aside, and the girl jumped into the taxi.
“No!” Jack shouted, but the door was swinging shut, and the girl would soon be on her way to God only knew where. Jack was still on the ground, the man was on top of him, and he couldn’t stop the door from closing. In a split-second decision, Jack tossed his cell phone onto the floor in the back of the cab.
The door slammed shut, and the cab pulled away.
“Sorry, pal,” Jack said as he swung at the man’s jaw. The blow stunned the poor fellow, and it was enough to discourage him from giving chase as Jack hurried down the street in pursuit of the girl’s taxi. He dug the cell phone from Reza out of his coat pocket as he ran, stopped for a second to dial Chuck, and took off running again.
“You have spyware on my cell, right?” said Jack.
“Well . . .”
“It’s okay, Reza told me as much this morning!”
The black taxi was well ahead of him, but in the light of dawn it was still in sight. Jack talked fast as he raced down the sidewalk. “I tossed my phone into the back of the cab.”
“What cab?”
“I lost Shada, but the girl’s in a taxi with my cell phone. Follow that GPS signal and she’ll lead you right to the Dark.”
“Where are you?”
Jack stopped to catch his breath. He could smell the River Thames. “Tower of England,” he said, parroting that numbskull at the DLR Station. The lack of sleep was catching up with him, and he knew that chasing a moving vehicle on foot just wasn’t going to work.
“I’ll grab a cab,” he said. “I want you to call the police and tell them exactly where that GPS signal is headed.”
“Will do,” said Chuck.
Jack spotted a taxi approaching from the opposite direction. He jumped out into the street, and the cab screeched to a halt to avoid hitting him. The driver rolled down the window, primed to give Jack a good tongue-lashing, but Jack’s mouth was already running as he opened the rear door on the driver’s side.
“I need to follow that cab about fifty meters ahead of—”
Jack stopped himself, having gotten a better look at the driver. It was the same cabbie from the Tower Hotel who just yesterday—it seemed much longer—had helped Jack tail Vince’s cab to the Carpenter’s Arms.
“You gotta be kidding me,” said Jack, still holding the door open.
“Again? This is getting a bit strange, mate,” the driver said, and the rear door slammed shut with the force of the taxi pulling away.
“Damn it!”
Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Jack saw the girl’s taxi pull away. Hopefully Chuck was tracking it, but GPS wasn’t exactly golden in one of the most tunneled cities in the world. Jack had to keep up. Several cars flew by, ignoring Jack’s attempts to flag one down. Jack dug a handful of bills from his wallet and waved them at a boy on a bicycle.
“I’ll give you two hundred pounds for your bike!”
The kid stopped. “Are you joking?”
“No joke. Here, take it.”
The boy got off his bike, smiling as he grabbed the money. “Ta very much.”
Jack pedaled off in pursuit of the taxi, hoping like hell for a major traffic jam ahead.
B
ehind the gray blanket of winter clouds, the sun was starting to rise over London. The Dark removed his nighttime sunglasses and put on a darker pair. Then he reached for his cell phone. It was the middle of the night in Washington, but he dialed the number anyway, knowing that Littleton would be awake and take his call.
“This is your final update,” said the Dark.
“Tell me,” said Littleton.
He was standing across the street from the exit to the Aldgate East Tube Station. Morning rush hour was at full throttle, and he had to move around to keep from being jostled by commuters.
“For what it’s worth, I spoke with Shada. She admitted that she copied files from my computer. But she swears she didn’t give them to anyone.”
“Do you believe her?”
“In two hours, I’m out of the country with just enough money to make sure no one ever finds me. Which means there’s only one question that matters: Do
you
believe her?”
“Damn it, Habib! Don’t play games with me! More than just my company is on the line here. The shit that went on at that black site is nothing short of blasphemy to some Muslims. I’ll be al-Qaeda’s poster child for ‘Death to Infidels.’ Do you hear what I’m saying? Some extremist group out there will be pissed off enough to make its own video and cut my head off—literally! So tell me straight: Do you believe her, or don’t you?”
The Dark kept an eye on the tube station exit. Just then, he spotted Shada in the crowd. She was carrying the backpack like a baby in her arms. A smile creased his lips.
“I wish you luck, Mr. Littleton.”
The Dark put the phone away and started across the street.
J
ack pedaled furiously, crouched like an Olympic cyclist, his elbows on the handlebars and the cell phone pressed to his ear.
“I can’t see her!” he shouted into the phone. “Which way, Chuck?”
It was an old bicycle, but the boy had maintained it with speed in mind, having stripped away the fenders, chain guard, kickstand, and all other unnecessary weight. A light rain was falling, and the spinning tires gave Jack his morning shower.
“Go left at the fork in the road,” said Chuck. “She’s headed up Mansell.”
Traffic was heavy at the fork, four lanes splitting into two diverging roads, but Jack was in the bicycle lane and moving faster than the morning rush hour. He pedaled hard around the corner, concerned not in the least that the bicycle lane up Mansell was shared with buses. The last cyclist from Miami who couldn’t outrun a bus had been killed decades ago.
“I see her,” said Jack, and he continued to trade information with Chuck all the way up the busy street. He’d covered less than a mile so far, but his thighs were starting to burn, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep up the Lance Armstrong pace. Another quick turn put him on Whitechapel High Street, and within the span of thirty seconds, the mirrored windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland gave way to the Aldgate Warehouse and other buildings in serious need of a paint job and repair.
“She’s heading up Osborn,” said Chuck.
Jack oriented himself with a mental image of the East End map he’d studied last night, and he realized that the taxi was leading them back toward Brick Lane, near the south end of Bengaltown and Somaal Town. More and more of the old buildings Jack saw along the street were covered with gang graffiti. The rain started to fall harder, and it was darker now than when the chase had started.
“The taxi stopped,” said Chuck.
The phone was getting wet, and Jack made the mistake of weaving through a narrow gauntlet of standing cars, illegally parked cars, and slow-moving cars while jostling the phone to protect it from the rain. It slipped from his hands and smashed on the wet pavement.
Shit!
Jack kept going. A delivery truck was blocking the one-way street and most of the sidewalk. Jack dropped his bicycle and ran around the truck. The taxi was in front of a three-story brick building that appeared to be slated for demolition. Graffiti-covered plywood sealed off the main entrance, and the windows facing the street were boarded shut. The worst of the building bordered a vacant lot to the south, where a couple of crackheads huddled amid the burned-out shell of crumbling brick walls, twisted sections of chain-link fence, and weeds.
The steady rain was suddenly a downpour, and Jack was soaking wet. He could only imagine how he must have looked to a frightened sixteen-year-old girl as he caught up with her. She shrieked as if hit by lightning upon seeing him.
“Please!” Jack said, catching his breath.
Before he could tell her that the police were on the way, she turned and ran toward the vacant lot. Jack followed her to a side entrance to the building. He’d given up trying to persuade her with words. He grabbed her by the wrist and said, “You’re coming with me!”
“No!”
“Where is Vincent Paulo?”
Jack probably should have seen it coming, but the driving rain made everything a blur, and he was suddenly blinded by pepper spray. He fell to his knees, the girl broke away, and the metal door knocked him over as she yanked it open. Even with rain falling hard around him, he could hear her running up a flight of stairs, her footfalls echoing inside the stairwell. Blinded and on his hands and knees, he looked up to the sky and let the rainfall soothe his eyes. Slowly, the stinging subsided, and as his vision returned, a man’s voice boomed behind him.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Jack focused as best he could, hoping Chuck had sent the police. “The girl went upstairs!”
“That little thief owes me eight pounds for the fare!”
A scream from inside the building cut through the driving rain. Jack’s immediate thought was the girl, but the second scream was more like a woman’s.
Shada?
“Call the police!” Jack shouted to the cabdriver, and then he ran inside.
S
hada was on the floor. A blow from Habib had put her there, but she was okay. Vince was a different story.
“You didn’t have to stab him!”
“Shut up!” the Dark shouted back at her.
Vince lay on the floor next to her, bleeding badly, and Shada went to him. The knife had entered somewhere beneath his rib cage. Possibly a punctured lung. Blood from his left side had soaked through the shirt, and a dark crimson pool was gathering beside him. Shada removed her coat and used it to apply pressure to the wound.
“He needs an ambulance,” said Shada.
“Why do you pretend to care?”
“You can’t let him die. I warned you about the tracking chip. I brought you the money myself. I did everything you wanted.”
Shada heard a whimper from across the room. The girl—the one Habib called McKenna—was in the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest. She seemed to know better than Vince or Shada that the Dark had never intended to simply take the money and run.
The Dark stepped closer to Shada. “Tell him, Shada. Tell Paulo the truth.”
Vince lifted his head at the sound of his name. Shada took it as a good sign that he was not only conscious but listening.
“This man needs a doctor,” said Shada.
The Dark tightened his stare, his exclusive focus on Shada. “You’ve known it was me for a long time. Haven’t you?”
Shada didn’t answer. She suddenly wished Vince weren’t able to listen.
“You definitely knew yesterday,” he said, “when we were having sex. When you looked in the mirror and saw what I had written on your back with red lipstick. The letters were backward in the mirror, but I saw it register on your face. Tell Paulo what it said, Shada.”
She kept pressing on Vince’s wound, but her hands were shaking. The Dark aimed his pistol straight at her head. He was just five feet away from her.
“Tell him!”
Shada swallowed hard, then said it slowly, each letter filled with hatred: “F-M-L-T-W-I-A.”
Vince let out a noisy breath, one that was wet with blood. The sound gave Shada chills, and her feelings of shame and disgust for the things she’d done with the Dark forced an image into her head—that of Vince kneeling on the floor beside McKenna three years ago as the life drained from the stab wounds in her body. A thousand times over, she would have taken McKenna’s place. Now she wished it were her own life on the line, not Vince’s.
“Please don’t die, Vince.”
“Tell him why,” said the Dark. “Tell him why McKenna said Jamal did it.”
“I don’t know why!”
“You
do
know! Tell him what you told me.”
She knew exactly what he meant, but she tried to keep the focus on saving Vince. The Dark would have none of it. He stepped closer and pressed the gun right against her head.
“Tell him!”
