“Let me try to explain.”
“Forget it,” said Jack. “I never trusted Chuck, and you may not be a murderer, but now I don’t trust you, either.”
“Chuck didn’t kill anyone.”
“Obviously, he didn’t kill Shada. But like I said: I have serious questions about what happened to Jamal. I should have listened to my fiancée and never come on this trip.”
“Does your fiancée seriously think that Shada was sleeping with Jamal?”
Jack was silent.
Vince shook his head, scoffing at the thought. “Look, Chuck and Shada didn’t have a perfect marriage. But Shada loved McKenna. She was not the kind of mother who would bed her teenage daughter’s first love.”
Vince was making sense, and it surprised Jack that Andie hadn’t thought of that. Or maybe the whole theory that Chuck killed Jamal in a love-triangle homicide was more posturing on her part to keep Jack from going to London.
“You did the right thing by coming,” said Vince. “Let me talk to Chuck and see what he can do to make this right.”
Jack stopped. He’d come this far, and now he had leverage. The next nonstop to Miami was not until Wednesday morning anyway. “All right, here’s one way to make amends. Chuck can tell me all about Project Round Up.”
“Exactly what do you think you can learn from Project Round Up?”
Jack remembered that Jamal had been working with Chuck on Project Round Up before he’d gone missing. “My bet is that it will tell me how Jamal ended up in a detention center, and why Chuck never really believed that Jamal killed his daughter.”
Jack studied his expression. Those were two huge pieces of the puzzle, but it was hard to read a man who lived behind dark sunglasses.
“It might even tell me what Shada has been doing in London for the past two and a half years,” said Jack.
He was fishing, and for Jack, the trust had indeed worn thin. But it spoke volumes that Vince didn’t deny any of the importance that Jack attached to Project Round Up.
“All right,” said Vince. “Let’s see if Chuck thinks you’ve earned your way into Project Round Up.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Shada ran all the way to her front step. Even then, she didn’t really stop. She pushed open the door, raced through the flat, and headed out the back.
Trusting Chuck had been a huge mistake. She wasn’t sure how he had found her online, but he was in the personal information business, and it had never been Shada’s intention to let her husband face charges for murdering a woman who wasn’t dead. A promise was a promise, and she had tried to keep hers by agreeing to meet with Vince Paulo at the Carpenter’s Arms. Instead, Chuck had sent a lawyer. Jamal’s lawyer. The lawyer for the monster who had murdered their daughter.
How could you, Chuck?
It was just over a mile to her flat from Cheshire Street, but she had taken the long route around Weavers Fields to lose Swyteck. Shada had set a school record for the 10K back in the Bahamas, and with her adrenaline pumping, she was barely winded. It was unlikely that a forty-year-old lawyer had kept up with her, but she wasn’t going to hang around her place to wait and find out. She ran down the alley, down the old brick streets of Vyner, past the picnic tables outside the Victory pub, past the whitewashed buildings spray-painted with gang graffiti. Smash the Reds. She remembered that one. She was getting close. She was running so fast that she slipped at the corner, but she caught her balance, ran inside the apartment building, and gobbled up two steps at a time to the second floor.
Her hand was shaking as she aimed her key at the lock. Even though it was crazy to think that Swyteck was closing in on her, Shada felt the need to hide, and no one would ever find her here. At least, no one had found her in the last two years.
The door squeaked as she opened it, which made her cringe. It was the middle of the afternoon—he always slept in the afternoons—and he would be furious if she woke him. She closed the door with extra care and set the deadbolt as quietly as she could, but the apartment was quiet as a tomb, and merely turning the lock sounded like a shotgun shucking.
“Maysoon, is that you?” he said, grumbling.
Funny, but the only time her new name gave her pause was when she heard the angry voice of the man who had given it to her.
“Yes, it’s me,” she said.
“Come here,” he said.
She hesitated. The shades were pulled, and with the door closed, the apartment was black as midnight. She needed time for her eyes to adjust.
“Maysoon!”
He was definitely angry. She took a deep breath and started down the hall. The bedroom was on the left, and she stopped in the open doorway.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
Her throat tightened. Even if she had known what she was going to say, she couldn’t have spoken.
“Maysoon, I asked you a question,” he said, his voice taking on an even harsher edge. “What are you doing here?”
She knew that tone, and it frightened her. Telling him about Chuck and the would-be meeting at the Carpenter’s Arms was not an option. She needed to deliver good news—and then it came to her.
“I have something for you,” she said.
“I’m not in the mood.”
She removed her coat and laid it on the chair. “You will be,” she said as she stepped toward the bed.
“Let me sleep.”
She pulled her smart phone from her pocket and sat on the edge of the mattress. The glowing screen assaulted his eyes.
“I said let me sleep, damn it.”
She adjusted the brightness. “Check this out,” she said.
His eyes narrowed as he tried to focus, and slowly the scowl on his face became a smile. The photograph obviously pleased him.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“Kitty eight,” she said. “Pretty, no?”
“When did that come in?”
“Last night. She desperately wants to meet you. LMIRL,” she said, invoking the texting shorthand: Let’s meet in real life.
“When?”
She reached beneath the covers and grabbed him where it counted. “Whenever he wants.”
Habib pulled her closer. “You are so good, Shada,” he said, reverting to her real name.
Shada felt him getting bigger already. She pulled away slowly, laid her phone on the nightstand, and turned on a little five-watt night-light. Then she started to undress for him. Slowly. With the lights low.
The way kitty8 would.
Chapter Fifty-three
The hotel suite was quiet, but Jack and Vince were not alone. Jack’s computer was on the desk, the LCD aglow with a live video feed from across the ocean. Chuck Mays was connected by webcam. Jack positioned himself in front of the built-in camera on his laptop so that Chuck could see him back in Miami. Vince sat off to the side in the armchair, close enough to hear Chuck’s voice on the speaker.
“Project Round Up is by far the most important work I’ve ever done,” said Chuck, his mouth moving a second or two behind the words, “even though I’ll never make a dime from it.”
“You’re doing this for free?” said Jack.
“This isn’t about money,” said Chuck.
Jack glanced at Vince, then back at the screen. “Exactly what is it about?”
Chuck paused. He wasn’t happy about it, but Vince had convinced him that the only way to make up for the way he’d treated Jack was to share the details of his prized project.
“It’s about catching criminals on the Internet,” said Chuck.
“Terrorists?”
“Worse.”
It took only a moment for Jack to conjure up images of those newsmagazine shows on television where fifty-year-old men meet teenage girls on the Internet and show up naked at their door only to find a camera crew waiting in the kitchen. “Pedophiles?”
“Even worse,” said Chuck.
“Worse than a pedophile” was a short list in anyone’s universe, but Jack had m
et and even defended them on death row. Chuck spelled it out:
“We’re talking about the sick bastards who not only savage the endangered runaways you see on the back of milk cartons, but who share their homemade videos over the Internet.”
Jack bristled at the thought. “That’s not at all what I expected Project Round Up to be.”
“You were thinking terrorism, I presume.”
“How else can you explain how Jamal ended up in Gitmo?”
“Let me rephrase your question,” said Chuck, “and you can probably answer it: What do terrorists and pedophiles have in common?”
Vince chimed in. “You mean other than the fact that they should both have their balls dipped in honey and fed to fire ants? Skip the guessing game, Chuck. A little history on Project Round Up might be helpful to Jack.”
“All right, here’s the quick version,” said Chuck. “Two months after the 9/11 attacks, Italian police raided a mosque in Milan and, to their surprise, found computers filled with images of sexually abused children. Five years later, British antiterrorism police focused on a preacher at the East London Mosque who also happened to be a former Mujahideen. They couldn’t get enough to convict him on terrorism charges, but again, police were shocked to find computerized images of hard-core child pornography. Fast-forward another couple of years, again in the U.K. A Nazi sympathizer was convicted on terrorism charges, and police found thirty-nine thousand indecent images of children at his flat in Yorkshire. I could go on, but the question is obvious: Were all these terrorists into the exploitation of children for personal gratification? Or was something else involved?”
“My guess is that the ‘something else’ would be encryption,” said Jack.
“You got it,” said Chuck. “The first reports out of the London Times were about terrorists encoding secret messages in the digital images of child pornography.”
“That seems really stupid,” said Jack, “considering all of the scrutiny it gets from law enforcement. Seems like it would be a much better idea to hide messages in pictures of cookware or something else random and off the radar.”
“Exactly,” said Chuck. “My take was that it wasn’t steganography—terrorists embedding messages in child porn. It was terrorists learning about encryption by studying the way online pedophiles traded files in peer-to-peer networks. That was when it hit me: If terrorists could go to school on these guys, so could I. Project Round Up was born.”
Jack knew about P2P, but something was missing. “I’m still not clear on what your project is,” said Jack.
“Show him,” said Vince.
Chuck nodded readily, as if the initial reluctance to share his work had faded. In fact, he seemed proud of what he was doing, almost eager to be able to demonstrate it. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” he said.
Jack braced himself, fearful that the horrific image of a pedophile’s work might appear. Instead, the image of Chuck’s face blinked off the screen, and it was replaced by a map of south Florida. A red dot appeared over a street on Key Biscayne.
“The dot on the screen marks the address of a convicted sexual predator who traded on the P2P network,” said Chuck.
“That’s less than a mile from my house,” said Jack.
“That’s why I chose it. Kind of brings it home, doesn’t it?”
“He was trading child pornography?” said Jack.
“Not just trading. He created it. What I’m going to show you is the digital version of time-lapsed photography. You’re looking at zero-hour for the launch of one of his video files. The first trade.”
There was a blip on the screen, and the map enlarged from south Florida to the eastern United States. A second dot appeared over Richmond, Virginia.
“Is it that easy to track P2P trades?”
“If you know what you’re looking for. Watch what happens twenty minutes later.”
The map grew again, now showing the entire United States. Jack counted six dots, one as far away as Oregon.
“Two hours later,” said Chuck, and suddenly there were several dozen dots spread across North America. “Four hours,” said Chuck, and the map stretched to the entire Western Hemisphere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dots from Brazil to Vancouver to Budapest and everywhere in between.
“That’s Project Round Up?”
“No. Project Round Up is the ability to work backward.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at that map,” said Chuck. He continued to advance the timeline—one day, three days, a week—until there were so many dots that virtually every major city on the map was covered in red. “If you didn’t know that the file started in Key Biscayne, could you tell me who created it?”
“No way.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the point where law enforcement—usually undercover agents trading online—gets involved. After the file has been traded around the world. You nail these creeps for possession and trading, but not creation. This is what I want to do. Watch.”
There was another blip on the screen, and the timeline was in reverse—the map shrinking, red dots disappearing. Finally, they were back to the first frame: one red dot over a house on Key Biscayne.
“You can do that?
“I’m almost there. My goal is to be able to work back to the camera that made the video. Like ballistics for a bullet.”
“How does that work?”
The map vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Chuck’s face. “That’s for me to know and the sick bastards to find out.”
“Is that what Jamal was working on when he disappeared?”
“We were in the very early stages of creating algorithms to unravel trades of encrypted files. Basically he was cataloging the most popular encryption methods used by sexual predators. As I mentioned, some terrorist organizations have essentially borrowed those encryption methods from the pedophiles.”
Jack worked through the implications. “So Jamal was all over the Internet downloading files that were encrypted the same way al-Qaeda files are encrypted.”
“Not necessarily al-Qaeda,” said Chuck, “but yes, known terrorist organizations.”
“Couple that with the fact that he was of Somali descent, his father is a known recruiter for al-Shabaab, and two of his high-school classmates left Minnesota to fight in Somalia, and I can see where he would end up on an antiterrorism watch list.”
“A watch list is one thing,” said Vince. “A secret detention facility in Eastern Europe is another.”
Jack considered it, but he didn’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth. “What are you saying, Vince?”
“I’m saying that we still don’t know for sure that there ever was a secret detention facility in Prague. Even if there was, we don’t know if it was government run.”
“Actually, I’m convinced that it was not government run,” said Jack, though he still did not divulge Andie as his source.
“Hell, if that’s the case, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with the war on terrorism.”
Jack glanced at Chuck’s image on the screen, and with the slight transmission delay, the import of Vince’s words hit Jack first and then carried across the ocean like a tidal wave.
“I feel stupid for saying this,” said Jack, “but I’ve never actually considered that possibility.”
“Maybe it’s time we did,” said Vince.
There was a flicker on the computer screen. The map reappeared, but this time it was focused on London, and the city was covered with red dots.
“Maybe Shada already has,” said Chuck.
Chapter Fifty-four
Shada lay sleeping at his side. Habib was staring at the ceiling, deep in thought.
The sex had been good. Not as good as their first time, of course, but it was hard to top the illicit thrill of throttling another man’s wife in his own castle. To say that he had come between Shada and Chuck Mays would have been overstatement. Never had a married woman been so ripe for the picking. It had sta
rted with the exchange of e-mails, a little flirtatious online banter, and the eventual trading of photos. Things quickly heated up with the webcam, where it was her idea to undress for him, his idea that she touch herself, their idea to meet. From then on it was good-bye to the virtual world and hello to the real pink. Habib had the perfect arrangement. Until Vince Paulo came along. And now Paulo was pounding the sidewalks of London with Jamal’s lawyer. Or so Shada had told him.
Habib glanced at Shada, who was still sound asleep. The room was awash with shadows, brightened only by the dim night-light. He quietly rolled out of bed, walked to the bathroom, and washed up at the sink. Then he went down the hall to the study, unrolled his prayer mat on the floor, and faced toward Mecca. It was almost Isha, the last of the daily prayer times for Muslims around the world.
Salat—the formal prayer of Islam—is one of the Five Pillars of the religion, an obligatory rite for practicing Muslims that must be performed five times each day at the specified time. Habib tried not to miss Fajr (sunrise), Magrhib (sunset), and Isha (nightfall). Zuhr and Asr were another matter. Praying at noon and midafternoon would have required him to set an alarm clock. Sometimes he would wake himself and combine the two into one, a permissible practice known as Jam’ bayn as-Salaatayn. More often, he slept through and substituted a late-night prayer, twisting the words of `Amr ibn `Absah, who claimed to have heard Muhammad say, “The closest that a slave comes to his Lord is during the middle of the latter portion of the night, so if you can be among those who remember Allah the Exalted One at that time, then do so.” Never mind that the Prophet was talking about non-mandatory nighttime prayer in addition to Salat. It was one of the small ways in which Habib had distorted the teachings of Islam to suit his personal needs. He was guilty of bigger distortions. Much bigger.
Habib went to the dresser for his crocheted kufi, then stopped. Even after washing his face and hands, the smell of sex lingered, which made Ghusl—the cleaning of the whole body—mandatory before prayer. The removal of such impurities involved a certain step-by-step ritual, but he asked for Allah’s forgiveness and simply jumped in the shower.
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