“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.
Chapter Seventy-nine
Jack 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.
Chapter Eighty
Shada 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 pre
ssed the gun right against her head.
“Tell him!”
Chapter Eighty-one
The outburst from beyond the closed door—“Tell him!”—stopped Jack in his tracks.
Rushing inside the old hotel had been an instinctive reaction to the scream, and he’d raced up three flights of stairs hoping that the Dark had already fled with the money and left his hostages behind. Clearly, that was not the case, and as Jack stood frozen in the dark hallway, not sure what to do, he wished he was packing that gun Reza had offered him. He didn’t even have a cell phone, but hopefully the police were on the way. Surely Chuck had called them. Or the cabdriver. He inched closer to the door, stepping carefully on floorboards stripped of carpeting, and listened.
“Shada, do it now!”
He stopped and put his ear to the wall, trying to hear other voices inside the room. What he really wanted to hear were police sirens wailing on Brick Lane. If they didn’t come soon, Jack would be forced to make a move—either bust down the door or run for help. A wrong decision could be disastrous, and he was deep in an anxious state of disbelief over the fact that he was in London tracking down a psychopath when his week from hell—everything from Jamal’s murder and the loss of his friend Neil to the lack of sleep and Jamal’s uncle in the hospital—suddenly caught up with him, propelling him to do something.
“Do not harm the hostages,” he shouted. “I have a gun!”
The crack of gunfire was the response—a bullet exploding through the wall just inches from Jack’s nose. Jack dove to the floor.
Brilliant bluff, Swyteck.
The door swung open, but no one came out. The dim lighting from inside the room spilled a faint glow into the hallway, and Jack crouched low in the shadows. The rain continued to beat down on the roof of the hotel, and his only hope was that nature’s hiss would drown out the sound of his own panicked breathing.
“Toss your gun into the room,” the Dark said, calling out into the hallway. “Then step into the doorway where I can see you.”
Jack bit his lip, not quite believing that his bluff was going this badly. It was almost comical—until Shada screamed in pain.
“Do as I said, or the next scream is her last.”
Where the hell are the cops?
“He’s serious,” said Shada. “He already stabbed Vince!”
The fear in her voice was palpable, and the thought of Vince down and perhaps dying raised the stakes yet again—if that was possible. But he stayed put.
“One,” said the Dark, counting down.
“Jack, please!”
“Two.”
It was a split-second decision, but all Jack could do was buy time. “I’m stepping toward the doorway,” he shouted from the hallway, “and I don’t have a weapon.”
The Dark stopped counting, and for the next few seconds, there was only the sound of falling rain on the roof.
“Hands up where I can see them!” the Dark shouted.
Jack took a deep breath. This was definitely not the plan. Jack moved into the doorway with hands up over his head. The sole source of light in the room was a battery-powered lantern on the table, but it was sufficient, and the sight took Jack’s breath away—especially the blood on the floor beside Vince. Shada was on her knees at his side. The Dark stood behind her with his gun pressed against the back of her head.
“I swear I don’t have a gun,” Jack said.
“It wouldn’t help you anyway,” the Dark said. “Come out, McKenna.”
Jack did a double take at the name “McKenna,” but when the girl from the fish market stepped out from the shadows in the corner of the room, he knew it was just more of the Dark’s sickness.
“Everyone is going to do exactly as I say,” the Dark said. “Show them, McKenna.”
The girl opened her coat to reveal what she was wearing underneath. Even in the dim lighting of a boarded-up hotel room, it didn’t take an expert to see that she was wired for explosives. Her earlier exchange with Jack—when she told Jack that the Dark didn’t have to find her in order to kill her—hadn’t been paranoia. Now it made sense.
The Dark showed Jack the cell phone in his free hand. “Remote detonator,” he said. “Something I learned from Jamal’s father. Life’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Nobody else has to die,” said Jack. “Just take the money and go.”
“I’ll go,” he said, shoving Shada’s head forward with his pistol, “but I’m taking this slut with me.”
“You don’t need Shada,” said Jack.
“Don’t tell me what I need,” he said, his anger rising. “We’re talking real Internet porn-star potential—right, Shada? Let’s give your friends a little sneak preview. Tell them who made you into such a slut.”
She didn’t answer. The Dark only berated her further. His voice turned into that same abusive rant that Jack had heard on those unwatchable P2P videos.
“Who did it, huh?” he said, getting into role. The pistol forced Shada’s head forward, and again he shouted: “Who did it to you?”
She answered in a weak voice. “Not Chuck,” she said. “He was number six.”
“Then who? Tell me!”
“Not the men in college. Not number five. Or four. Or three.”
She looked up just enough to catch Jack’s eye—and Jack had a double epiphany. The Dark’s interrogation of Shada was like a replay of his final moments with McKenna before stabbing her to death. He was forcing her to go back to that first lover, the one who had taken her virginity and—in his twisted mind—turned her into a slut. For McKenna there had been only Jamal, and it suddenly came clear to Jack. When Vince found her on the bedroom floor, dying and delirious, and asked her that same question—Who did this to you?—McKenna had been conditioned to give him the answer that she’d given the Dark: Jamal.
“Not that boy on the beach,” Shada said. “Number two.”
She paused, again catching Jack’s eye, and the second half of the two-part epiphany was confirmed. Shada wasn’t just counting down her lovers.
“Definitely not two,” she said, making sure that Jack was with her as she counted down like mission control toward a synchronized launch time for a simultaneous attack.
“One!” she said, and they sprang into action.
Shada jerked away from the gun. Jack dove at the Dark and knocked the phone—the detonator—to the floor. His momentum carried them both all the way to an old chair against the wall. Their combined weight smashed the chair to pieces, their bodies hit the floor, and the gun discharged. The girl screamed as the errant bullet splintered the door casing behind her.
“Run!” Jack shouted.
He heard someone racing toward the door as he and the Dark fought for control of the gun. They rolled hard to Jack’s left and slammed into the radiator. Jack got hold of the Dark’s wrist and smashed his hand against the pipe until the gun dropped to the floor. The two men were still locked in a wrestling match as Jack swung his leg around and kicked the gun across the room. Jack saw it disappear somewhere in the shadows—but he didn’t see the broken chair leg coming at his head. The blow stunned Jack, and as much as he tried to fight through the pain, he could feel the Dark slipping out of his grasp. Only then did Jack see the cell phone resting in the center of room. He knew that if the Dark got to it first, they would all be blown to bits. He tried to pull the Dark back to him, but his strength was gone.
The Dark reached for it.
“Freeze!” Shada shouted, and the crack of a pistol stopped everyone. It was her warning shot. The gun that Jack had wrestled free in the struggle was now in her hands, and the Dark was in her sights. The Dark didn’t move, but his open hand hovered ominously over the cell phone on the floor.
“Put the gun down, Shada,” the Dark said.
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
With tentative steps, and with her gun aimed at the Dark, Shada slowly crossed the room to check on Vince. Her warning shot seemed to have roused him. Shada knelt at his side,
but he didn’t speak.
“Shada, I’m talking to you,” said the Dark.
Jack struggled to focus, fighting off the blow to his head. “Don’t listen to him, Shada.”
“Quiet, everyone!” she said.
Jack backed off, but the Dark continued in a chilling tone. It was the strong, almost hypnotic voice of control.
“Shada, this isn’t what you came back to do.”
“Yes, it is. I want you dead.”
“Only I can help you now.”
“You deserve to die!”
“You need me, Shada. That’s why you brought me the money.”
“You killed my daughter, you monster. I brought the money so I could get close enough to kill you.”
Jack could see the anger on his face, but the Dark continued in the same even tone that almost seemed to cast a spell over Shada. “And then you were going to make a run for it, weren’t you?” he said.
She didn’t answer.
“You don’t have to run alone, Shada. We can run together.”
“Shut up!”
“Tell Jack why you have to run, Shada.”
“Quiet!”
“If you kill me and let Jack live, it’s only a matter of time before he figures out that you were in Miami when Ethan Chang was killed.”
“Stop it!”
“And that you were also in Miami when his friend was killed.”
She didn’t deny it. She wouldn’t even look at Jack, and her connection to Neil hit Jack like a sledgehammer.
“You tricked me,” said Shada. Her gun was trained on the Dark, but Jack could hear in her voice that she was beginning to crumble.
“Nobody tricked you, Shada. You knew the truth.”
“You made me think Jamal was out to kill me, and you said Chang could lead him to me.”
“That was true.”
“Not true!” said Vince, groaning. It startled everyone. It was the sound of a dying man, and Jack wished he would save his strength.
Afraid of the Dark Page 34
