The Devil's Due (The Blackwell Files Book 5)

by Steven F Freeman

  “That does give me an idea, though. Maybe I could use the IP address associated with her e-mail message to track down the internet café itself. It can’t be too far from her house, assuming she walked.”

  “That might work,” said Kamaal, “but if you discover the location of the business, then what?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ll be a lot closer to finding her uncle’s house than we are now.”

  CHAPTER 31

  That evening, Divband donned his ceremonial black robe. The crimson sash he used to cinch it delineated him from his followers, who wore their robes without embellishments.

  He entered the ceremonial chamber. The atmosphere was redolent with incense, and the light from a hundred candles cast grotesque shadows on the walls.

  Like a bride before the wedding, Divband never entered the chamber until the ceremony began. As such, he had to hide a thrill of excitement as he passed through the door and took slow, deliberate steps toward the altar. Look at the turnout! Every sacrificial ceremony had seen an increase in the number of attendees. These people represented his most dedicated followers, the ones who would obey orders without question.

  He forced himself to maintain the solemn demeanor the grim ritual demanded. There would be plenty of time later to reflect on the rapid growth of the Brotherhood.

  Divband executed the ritual as before, beginning with the creation of a circle-and-pentagram pattern on the girl’s abdomen, followed by the waiting period, then concluding with the consummation of the girl’s marriage to Iblis—a consummation in blood.

  Passing through the chamber’s doorway, he leaned over to Ghoyee. “Remind the followers of the meal in the Gathering Sanctuary. And once they’re seated, give each person one of these.” He passed a canvas bag knotted at the top.

  Ghoyee loosened the knot and peered inside. “Silver coins, Master?”

  “Yes. Our followers must reap a reward from the ceremony. It gives them reason to believe in Iblis’ power and generosity.”

  “Where did you get—?”

  “I can’t answer too many questions, Ghoyee, but remember how I told you it would be to our advantage to admit professionals to our ranks?

  “Yes.”

  “One of our members is a treasury director.”

  Ghoyee hoisted the bag to eye level. “So this comes from our government?”

  Divband smiled. “Let’s just say it started in America and made a brief stop in our national coffers before ending up in this bag.”

  “I’ll do as you say, Master.”

  “Don’t forget one for yourself.”

  Following the post-ceremonial banquet, Divband returned to his antechamber-turned-office. During times like this, a mixture of thoughts flickered through his mind. Reviving the Brotherhood of Stones had been his brainchild. Would he have garnered so many followers had the fabric of Afghanistan society not been slowly unraveling? He didn’t know, but in any case, the point was moot. Desperate people needed a message of empowerment, a message he delivered in spades.

  Most of the time, the uninterrupted success of his project helped Divband forget the anger for a while, but in quiet moments like this, the rage returned. The painful memory of his life’s inflection point, the day everything changed, materialized unbidden in his mind. On a June day in his eighteenth year, he had sneaked to the house of Veeda, his girlfriend, while her parents were away. He had begun the encounter filled with anticipation and desire, but everything had gone horribly wrong. After finding himself unable to satisfy her, Divband had retreated that night in blinding shame and humiliation, frustrated with his body’s insubordination. Worst of all had been his girlfriend’s laughter, a mocking sound he still heard in the wind on cold nights.

  Perhaps he would never experience the pleasure of carnal knowledge, but then again, neither would the brides of Iblis. Like him, they would retain their purity against their will, carrying it with them to their graves. But unlike him, they would never know the thrill of power he experienced in his role as leader of the Brotherhood of Stones. People lived and died by his command. Such power might not be quite as satisfying as possessing a fully-functioning body, but it provided a measure of compensation for his sexual deficit, as did the inevitable arousal Divband experienced during the sacrificial ceremonies.

  Would the roll call of brides ever cease? Divband doubted it. There could never be too many girls dying for Iblis—or himself.

  CHAPTER 32

  A few hours ago, Mastana had heard the shuffling of many feet outside her cell door. She believed she had also heard the whimpering of a female voice, followed by gruff recriminations from several men. If true, that implied she wasn’t the only prisoner here. Was that why her captor had commanded her on the first day to remain quiet? So the prisoners would remain unaware of each other?

  After hearing the other girl, Mastana had maintained a vigil, hoping to learn the location of the girl’s cell by listening for her return. As the hours dragged on, though, a sick dread filled Mastana’s heart. The prisoner never returned. While Mastana wanted to believe the girl had been freed, every experience during her captivity refuted this conclusion. She promised herself to do everything she could to avoid making that walk herself.

  Hours later, the large man, her abductor, opened her cell door once again.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m just here for the view.”

  “May I speak?” asked Mastana.

  “Depends on what you have to say.”

  “I was only going to comment that the view from here is also quite pleasing.”

  The man snorted. “So you think I look good?”

  “Indeed. A burly man such as yourself would catch any girl’s eye. May I ask your name?”

  “I am called Ghoyee.”

  “Ah—a fitting name. Ghoyee, can you tell me what your master wants with me?”

  He dropped his gaze to the floor. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Very well. But can you at least tell me how I was selected? I mean…why me?” asked Mastana, desperate to gather more information about her abductors.

  “He only goes for the young, pretty ones—like you,” replied Ghoyee with a malevolent grin.

  Mastana grabbed onto that fact. “So no older ones, or young ones whose bodies are broken?”

  “Absolutely not—Divband knows what he wants.”

  “And do you, Ghoyee, know what you want?”

  Ghoyee snapped his head up and fixed her in a penetrating gaze. Mastana produced what she hoped was an alluring smile.

  “I think this conversation has ended,” he mumbled.

  “I hope I will see you again, Ghoyee.”

  Her captor left, locking the door behind him.

  Mastana shuddered at the false attraction she forced herself to show the abhorrent man. But she hadn’t been dealt too many favorable cards in this game, and she intended to make the most of any potential opportunities to escape.

  CHAPTER 33

  The following morning, Fahima busied herself on the phone, reaching out to her Kabul friends for information on recent Al-Qaeda activity. Meanwhile, Alton booted up his laptop and activated its encryption program. He then opened an e-mail tracking program he had personally helped develop as a manager for Kruptos.

  “Okay, here’s the e-mail message Mastana sent to me during my honeymoon,” he said, opening the file. “Let’s see what it can tell us.”

  For a few minutes, the chattering of laptop keys merged with the muted sounds of traffic and pedestrians from the street outside, producing an air of quiet anticipation.

  “I think I have it,” said Alton. “Yep, here’s the IP address of the node that Mastana used to send the message to me. Let me activate a trace back to the source location. Okay…yes, there it is. It’s registered to ‘Internet Café of Taimany.’”

  “That is a Kabul neighborhood,” said Kamaal.

  “Can you find this particular internet café?” asked Alton.

  “I think
so,” said Kamaal, as he broke out his smartphone. “Let’s see…yes, here it is. I have an address. Shall we go there now?”

  “Yes,” said Alton. “We can give Hanif a call on the way, but I don’t see any reason to wait for him even if he can’t make it.”

  They left Kamaal’s house and proceeded directly to the internet café. Given the late-morning hour, Hanif could not yet join them, but he promised to do so when his workday ended.

  Alton led the group through the doors of the business. The dim lighting and background hum of clattering keyboards gave the room an otherworldly feel.

  They approached the cashier’s cage. A young girl chewed a wad of gum and gazed at them with a bored expression.

  After verifying the date/time stamp on Mastana’s message, Alton turned to Kamaal. “Ask her who was working here at three-seventeen in the afternoon on March twenty-fifth.”

  Kamaal did as instructed, carrying out a conversation in Pashto. At first, the girl seemed unable—or at least unwilling—to supply the information. Kamaal continued to press his case, and at last, with a resigned sigh, the worker opened a week-at-a-glance calendar and folded it back a page. She uttered a short sentence.

  “She says she was working here at that time.”

  “Good,” said Alton. “Do you have a photo of Mastana from this week?”

  “Yes,” replied Kamaal with an embarrassed laugh. “She insisted on taking photos of the two of us every evening during our dinner.”

  “Awesome. Bring up one of her pictures and show it to the worker. Ask her if she recognizes Mastana.”

  The cashier studied the picture and nodded.

  Kamaal and the worker exchanged a few sentences in Pashto. “She says she does not know Mastana well, but they go to the same school.”

  “Ask her if she knows where Mastana lives,” said Mallory.

  After another exchange, Kamaal nodded to the girl and stepped away from the cage. “She says to take a right out of here, then turn right at the fourth intersection. She does not know which house Mastana lives in, but the bus drops her off at the end of that street every school day—until last week.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Alton. “Let’s take the car for a recon trip. We don’t want to be spotted, so let’s drive past Mastana’s road on the first run to see what we’re dealing with.”

  They arrived at the indicated street and glided by. Kamaal turned into a gas station several blocks down the road.

  “We’re in luck,” said Mallory. “Mastana’s street is only a block long, then it ends in a T-intersection.”

  “Let’s drive down the street itself and see if we spot anything that suggests Mastana’s house,” said David.

  “Kamaal,” said Mallory, “Did Mastana ever describe her house? What it looked like?”

  “No, not that I remember.”

  “What about her neighbors? Did she ever talk about them?”

  Kamaal squinted his eyes in concentration, reducing them for the moment to a more normal size. “You know, she didn’t mention any human neighbors, but she did tell me about a yellow dog that lived next door. She said she’d look over the wall and call to it.”

  “Fantastic,” said Mallory. “We find that yard, and we’ve narrowed Mastana’s house down to two possibilities: one of the houses on either side of it.”

  David rubbed his chin. “If we’re driving, we’re not going to have much time to look. I’m a little worried about missing something.”

  “That’s a good point,” said Alton. “When we go up Mastana’s street, do you think we can use our phones to take photos without being spotted?”

  “Yeah,” replied David. “The sun is still pretty bright. With its reflection off the window glass, people looking at us won’t be able to see inside the car very well.”

  “Good,” said Alton. “I’ll take pictures from the right side. Mallory, why don’t you take the left?”

  Mallory nodded.

  “I will write down the street name and house numbers,” said Fahima. “We might need that information, too.”

  “Okay, let’s go find that dog,” said Alton. “We do that, and we’re one step closer to finding Mastana’s uncle.”

  Pulling onto the block, Kamaal motored along slowly, allowing his passengers time to snap pictures and take notes. Doubling back, he travelled up the street and turned onto the main thoroughfare.

  “Did anyone see the dog or anything else important?” asked Alton.

  A chorus of negatives formed the answer.

  “Okay,” said Mallory. “Let’s head back to Kamaal’s place. If we stay here too long, we could be spotted. The last thing we want to do is raise any suspicions.”

  As they left the area, Alton spoke up. “I counted twelve houses. Even though we don’t know where the dog lives, maybe we can use the process of elimination to help us figure out which house belongs to Mastana’s Uncle Dani.”

  “Sounds good,” said David, “but exactly what do you mean?”

  “Well, any house that does have internet access probably isn’t Dani’s. We’ve already established the fact that Mastana’s family didn’t have a computer at home, so why would they pay for an internet service they didn’t need?”

  “I don’t think many houses in that neighborhood will have internet,” said Kamaal, “but is worth checking.”

  Back in the interpreter’s house, Alton worked to crack the security of the internet service provider for Mastana’s former neighborhood. As he did so, the others scanned the photos of Mastana’s neighborhood for signs of the yellow dog but could find none.

  At the end of nearly two hours, Alton stood and stretched his back. “Okay, got it. Kamaal, I’ll need your help again. KI, the ISP for that neighborhood, uses security software written in English, so I was able to crack their firewall. However, the company’s databases themselves are in Pashto. Do you think you can look up the addresses Fahima wrote down and see which ones have internet?”

  Kamaal looked a little worried. “I will try.”

  While Kamaal worked, Alton studied the photos they had taken earlier, noting the identifying characteristics of each house.

  After another two-hour interval, Kamaal looked up with a twinkle in his eye. “I am done. Five of the houses have internet. Is a little more than I would have guessed.”

  Everyone gathered around the laptop computer. Alton removed a spiral notebook from his backpack and turned it to a blank page. He sketched a bird’s-eye picture of Dani’s neighborhood. “Each of these twelve squares represents a house, six on each side of the street. Fahima, can you label the houses using the addresses you recorded earlier?”

  Referring to her notes, Fahima finished the task in the space of a minute.

  “Kamaal, can you put an X through each house that has internet service?”

  Swiveling his head between the computer monitor and Alton’s notebook, the interpreter eliminated five houses.

  “Okay, that narrows the list down to these seven,” said Alton.

  “But now what?” asked David. “We still don’t know which one is the right one.”

  Alton glanced at his watch. “It’s getting close to five o’clock. Why don’t I call Hanif and see if he has any ideas?”

  Alton rang the ex-policeman and brought him up to speed.

  “I have to admit,” said Hanif, “I am a little surprised you were able to find out this much information already. But is good. We are close to finding Dani’s house. It is too bad you didn’t spot the dog, but I have a suggestion to make regarding that.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t I drive down there myself when I leave work? You have already been on that street once today, and we don’t want to raise any alarm if someone notices the same strange car driving through their neighborhood again.”

  “Okay—that’s a good idea. I’ll put Fahima on the phone to guide you to the street. It’s a little out of the way. Will you be able to come over here to Kamaal’s house after your r
econ?”

  “Yes, I will be there as soon as I can, probably in an hour or two.”

  Later, Alton looked up as he heard the squeal of tired brakes outside the window. He stood up and met Hanif at the door. “So, did you find the dog?”

  “Yes, I saw a big, yellow one.”

  Alton produced the map he had constructed earlier. “Which house has it?”

  Hanif studied the map. “Is here—the fourth house on the right.”

  “Dang.”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Mallory. “Oh, wait. I see it.”

  “Want to enlighten the rest of us?” asked David.

  “The house with the dog has internet, but neither of the houses on either side do. That means Dani’s place could be either one of the adjacent houses.” He brought up the photos from their earlier reconnaissance trip. “It could be either this one, the house with the hammock out front, or this other one, the house with the junker in the driveway.”

  “So the ‘dang’ was about the fact that we still haven’t narrowed it down to just one house?”

  “Exactly,” said Alton, “but it doesn’t have to stay two houses for long.”

  “What do you have in mind?” asked Mallory.

  “We still have a few hours of daylight. Let’s stake out both houses. We have enough people to do that.”

  “I like the idea,” said David, “but how would we know Dani if we saw him?”

  “I was just getting to that,” said Alton. “Not long after Mastana went home from Camp Eggers’ hospital, she sent me a picture of her family in an e-mail, including her uncle. Let me blow up that photo and crop it to show just Dani’s face. It’s a little old—four years, more or less—but we’ll just have to hope it’s good enough.”

  “And if we see him, then what?” pressed David.

  “We adjust to the tactical requirements of the situation.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Fahima.

  David grinned. “It means we improvise, based on what we see when we get there.”

  “It also means we bring some of the equipment we bought this morning,” said Mallory. “If we do find a nest of Al-Qaeda insurgents, we’ll want to be ready for anything.”