Jack was betting on the latter.
So what should he do? Abandon this whole crazy idea or ratchet it up a notch? He may have been without a witness—or suspect—to interview, but there was no telling what the man’s flat might reveal. Jack hadn’t scooped up a handful of paper clips at the business center for nothing. Plan B had been in the back of his mind all night.
He didn’t fancy himself a burglar, but he’d assisted in a few break-ins as a kid, when he and his friends got their kicks rummaging around in homes, raiding refrigerators and purposely rearranging furniture. They were harmless pranks, but Jack wasn’t particularly proud of that time in his life. His father hadn’t been too thrilled when he found out about it, either, and Jack could still vividly see the disappointment in his old man’s expression, and the verbal tirade he had to endure because of it.
His dad wasn’t likely to approve now, but the Reb’s words about the greater good kept circling through Jack’s mind. After waiting another half hour, as windows went dark up and down the street, he checked for any unwanted eyes then crossed to al-Fida’s building and went to work on the entryway door.
* * *
Getting into the flat was easier than he expected. Picking a lock wasn’t exactly like riding a bicycle, but with patience he was able to make do with a couple of the unfolded paper clips. The main parts of this type of lock are small pins. All he had to do was simultaneously push the ones on top up and the ones on the bottom down and the lock popped open. He credited his work with watch mechanisms for his success. Fortunately, he hadn’t encountered any curious neighbors from across the hall in the process.
Pushing the door open, he listened carefully for any sounds of activity, but didn’t hear any. Stepping inside, he quietly closed the door behind him and looked around at what appeared to be a modest one-bedroom flat. There was enough light from the street lamps outside to reveal that al-Fida had decent taste in furniture, but the place had a kind of stark, spare coldness to it that didn’t particularly appeal to Jack.
Not that it mattered.
The living room was to his right, and a small uncluttered kitchen to the left, and beyond that was a narrow hallway that undoubtedly led to the bedroom. He was hoping to find a computer desk out here, but no such luck.
Jack crossed to the hall and stopped, listening carefully for any sounds of breathing or soft snores that might indicate that al-Fida was at home and asleep.
Nothing.
The bedroom was at the far end of the hall. As he worked his way toward it, he stopped at a door that hung ajar about halfway there. He carefully pushed the door open and checked inside. It was too dark to see much, so he fumbled for a light switch and flicked it on.
It was a walk-in closet but there was nothing hanging inside. No shelves or storage boxes. The closet was completely empty except for a compass and a mat on the floor. Set in a round brass frame about the size of a pocket watch, the compass was a qibla indicator, pointing the user toward Mecca. It lay in a corner of the closet, with a prayer mat carefully placed in proper alignment behind it. The order displayed impressed Jack. He could see how the simplicity and order of the Islamic faith appealed to so many.
This was al-Fida’s prayer room. A small, clean space free of distraction that he undoubtedly used several times a day.
The compass was compact enough to be used for travel, and its presence here led Jack to believe that al-Fida hadn’t left London. Which meant if he wasn’t dead, he might walk through his front door at any moment.
Flicking off the light, Jack continued down the hall to the bedroom. There was another window back here that opened onto an alleyway with very little light coming in. He didn’t want to turn on the overhead for fear someone might take notice, but he could hear the hum of a computer and was able to make out the edges of a monitor sitting atop what looked like a small desk in the corner of the room.
Stepping past the neatly made bed, he moved over to the desk, nudged the mouse with his finger, and an iMac screen came to life. He was hoping to do a thorough search of al-Fida’s desk drawers and hard drive, but what he saw on the screen stopped him cold.
It was open to a word processing application. And typed at the very top of the page were two simple words:
Forgive me
Jack’s jaw tensed.
This looked suspiciously like a suicide note.
His heart racing, he spun around, looking past a closet slider to a closed door that was now illuminated by the light from the computer screen.
A bathroom, no doubt.
And then he saw it—a tiny sliver of light coming from the crack beneath the door.
Someone was in there. And he doubted they were using the facilities.
Grabbing a lamp as a weapon and moving away from the desk, Jack hurried to the bathroom and yanked open the door, freezing in motion at the horrific sight inside.
The tub was full, and Abdal al-Fida lay chest-deep in the bloodied water, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling—eyes that reminded Jack of his old friend Riley after their Humvee was ambushed. His dark skin had a pale cast. Both arms were concealed in the murky red water and there was no visible wound that Jack could see.
Jack took in a sharp breath but didn’t rush forward to check his neck for a pulse. There was no point. Al-Fida was dead.
There was nothing to be done for him now. Jack also knew that he needed to get out of here but there was something he wanted to check first. He was about to go back to the desk when he heard a sound from the living room—the rattle of keys and the front door being pushed open.
“Abdal?” a voice said. “Abdal, are you home?”
It was a woman. She sounded concerned.
Then a moment later she was inside and moving down the hall.
21
“Abdal?” she said again.
British accent, but not quite. Something else in there.
By the time she stepped into the bedroom, Jack was already cramped inside al-Fida’s slider, nestled amid the hangers full of clothes, the door open just a sliver so he could see what he was dealing with.
She flicked the light switch, saying, “Abdal? I’ve been calling all night! Why didn’t you answer your—”
She halted, leaving the question unfinished when she saw that the bed was empty and neatly made.
She glanced around the room. “Abdal?”
Like many Muslim women, she wore a hijab on her head, a scarf that covered her hair, ears, and neck and shoulders. She had a regal look about her, with flawless skin, an angular, almost perfectly sculpted face, and large brown eyes. Her dress was modest and loose-fitting and hid her body, but Jack had no doubt she was exquisitely proportioned. Despite his predicament—and what he’d just seen in that bathroom—Jack found her beauty mesmerizing. There was a faint smell of aloe—hand lotion, he guessed—which only added to her exotic appeal.
As she moved farther into the room and turned toward the bathroom, Jack wanted to call out to her, to protect her, warn her away, keep her from seeing that horrifying tableau inside. But he hesitated and then it was too late. Her eyes widened slightly as she took in the bloody tile and al-Fida’s body, frozen in death.
To Jack’s surprise, she didn’t break down. Didn’t even utter a sound. She just stared at al-Fida for a long moment, then reached into her purse and took out a cell phone.
She didn’t use it immediately. Instead she stood there quietly, still staring at al-Fida, looking more disappointed than bereaved. Jack had no idea what her relationship was to the dead man, but the fact that she’d had keys to his flat seemed to indicate that they were close.
Yet there was no sign of tears in her eyes.
Was she in shock?
Keeping her gaze on the body, she took a deep breath and shifted her shoulders as if preparing for something. Then she punched in a number, a short one, and put the phone to her ear.
Jack could hear it ringing even in the closet. And when the line was picked up, the woman began to cry—so abruptly it s
tartled him.
Her voice choked with emotion, she said, “Please … please … you have to help me. My boyfriend—I think he … I think he’s killed himself.”
Jack watched in astonishment as she answered a few questions between sobs, trembling uncontrollably as she gave al-Fida’s address to the person on the line.
Then she hung up—and the moment she did, her demeanor abruptly changed again, the tears vanishing, her expression blank and unmoved by what lay before her.
Dropping the cell phone into her purse, she crossed to the bedroom doorway, flicked off the light, and went back out to the living room.
* * *
By the time the police and ambulance arrived, Jack was back outside.
After the woman left the bedroom, he climbed out the window then moved down the alley to the adjoining street and worked his way back around to the front of the building.
Waiting in the shadows under the oak tree, he watched the drama unfold. Neighbors awakened at the screech of approaching sirens and the flashing of lights against windowpanes. Soon the street was filled with people, and as the police and paramedics rushed in through the building’s entrance, Jack couldn’t help but think about the scene outside Jamal Thomas’s apartment.
The window was lit now and he saw the woman crying again as she pointed them toward the hallway.
She had called al-Fida her boyfriend, but her initial reaction to his death seemed to belie that. As much as Jack would have liked to attribute her behavior to shock, the changes in her demeanor were simply too abrupt to be believed.
She was acting. And doing a very good job of it.
So who the hell was she?
Jack had assumed that with al-Fida dead, his search for answers had come to a hard stop. But this woman’s puzzling reaction raised new questions, and her association with al-Fida, whatever it might be, was bound to be significant in some way.
Was it possible that Swain had been telling the truth? That al-Fida was an MI6 mole and this woman was part of the cell he’d infiltrated?
No. That explanation didn’t make any more sense now than it did before.
Jack knew he needed to talk to her.
He stayed in the shadows, unnoticed by the police or the neighbors. If anyone were to notice, they’d only look at him as yet another rubbernecker—or whatever the British equivalent of that was. As they carted al-Fida’s body out on a stretcher and loaded him into the back of the ambulance, Jack saw the woman standing in the window again, watching as they closed the doors.
A uniformed police officer was questioning her now, notepad in hand, and the woman played her part to perfection. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he didn’t doubt that her words were halting, filled with just the right amount of emotion, as she told them about al-Fida’s depression and the loss of his job, or whatever story made sense of the note that was left on his computer, and what they’d found in that bathroom.
But Jack knew this wasn’t suicide. He was convinced that, just like Copeland and Thomas—and just as Swain had threatened to do to him—Abdal al-Fida had been disposed of for the sake of expediency. He was a liability that had to be silenced.
Jack felt no love lost for a man who could very well have been planning to kill thousands of Americans, but the thought of yet another death rankled him.
When would these people stop?
And what the hell were they hiding? No matter how many times Jack ran the chain of events through his mind, however often he stopped to reexamine an event or a fact or even a half-cocked assumption, he still couldn’t make any sense of it.
By the time the ambulance left and the police finished taking the woman’s statement and started wrapping things up, the neighborhood crowd had already lost interest and people had wandered back into their homes. From the shrugs and brief conversations and lack of anything approaching shock or sorry, Jack gathered that not many people had known al-Fida.
Before long, the woman was back at the window, watching the last of the police cars drive away. Jack decided to give her a few minutes before he crossed the street and knocked on the door. But to his surprise, when the lights of the last police car had faded, she immediately doused the light and a few moments later emerged from the entryway of the building. She stepped out to the sidewalk, stopped, and once again pulled the cell phone from her purse.
Jack quickly stepped backward, moving deeper into the shadows beneath the oak tree, hoping she didn’t look his way. But she seemed intensely preoccupied as she put the phone to her ear.
Despite the distance between them, he could clearly hear her when the line was answered and she said, “There’s a problem. We need to talk.”
She listened for a moment, then hung up, dropping the phone back into her purse as she started up the sidewalk in the direction of the pub.
Jack waited until she was about half a block away, then started out after her.
22
The woman caught a train at the Upton Park underground station. She took the Hammersmith and City Line toward Liverpool Street. It was nearly half past midnight as she boarded a car along with a handful of others.
Jack had to run to get in before the doors closed. He took a seat, careful not to glance in her direction as she headed for the opposite end of the car and sat.
He kept his gaze forward, trying to catch his breath as he puzzled over who this woman was and what she was up to.
“There’s a problem. We need to talk.”
She was certainly no girlfriend—although he couldn’t be sure her alleged boyfriend knew this. They had obviously been intimate enough for her to feel comfortable walking into that flat, and Jack had a feeling al-Fida would have been just as surprised by her reaction to his death as he was.
But she also didn’t seem to be aligned with Swain and MI6, or whoever had killed the terrorist. Otherwise, why would she have shown up at the flat at all? Why would she have notified the police and made that phone call when she left?
What was the problem?
Who did she need to talk to?
Jack sat there through stop after stop—West Ham, Bow Road, Mile End, Stepney Green—running various scenarios through his mind. Once again, none of them fit. Too many missing pieces. It was starting to agitate him.
About fifteen minutes into the ride, the woman got up from her seat as they approached Whitechapel Station. Watching with peripheral vision, Jack waited for her to pass as she moved to the doors in preparation for the stop. Chancing a glance as she walked by, he noticed that she was no longer wearing the hijab. She had removed it in the train, revealing a head of luxurious dark hair that only enhanced her beauty, and he once again felt that tug of attraction, a stirring of feelings he was hard-pressed to describe. Some women just had a certain thing, a star quality, and she had it in spades.
As she waited for the train to slow, he casually got to his feet behind her—just another passenger anxious to get home.
The train pulled into the station, its brakes hissing, then finally eased to a stop and opened its doors.
The woman and three other passengers stepped through to the platform and Jack followed, moving with the group toward a flight of stairs, but lagging behind slightly to put some distance between them.
A few minutes later he was outside the station and on the street, the woman several yards ahead of him, walking through an empty car park toward a narrow road flanked by blocky brick factory buildings the color of sandalwood.
The road was dimly lit and sparsely populated, and judging by the graffiti Jack saw scrawled across a Wholesale Fabrics building to his left, it was one of the poorest of East London neighborhoods.
The only thing he knew about Whitechapel were stories of Jack the Ripper, who had used this area as his hunting ground over a three-year period in the late nineteenth century. The streets the Ripper had roamed were very different than these, but you couldn’t walk along here without thinking about his brutal butchery and the hysteria surrounding it.
> The woman didn’t seem bothered, however. She kept moving at a steady pace until she reached the end of the block and turned left.
Jack hurried to catch up, slowing again as he made the turn and saw her about forty yards ahead. She moved past a darkened dry cleaning store, then a low wall—which he soon discovered offered a view of the train tracks—then crossed to her right at the intersection and turned down Whitechapel Road.
Again he sped up. He wasn’t in the habit of stalking women, but that’s exactly what he was doing right now.
He thought of Jack the Ripper again and shuddered.
When he finally did turn the corner, she walked briskly past a row of closed shops—a kebab house, a stereo store, a real estate agency—
Near the middle of the block she took a sharp left, moving into an alleyway. Jack crossed to her side of the street, but again he held back. He knew that stepping into that alley might alert her to the fact that she was being followed, and he didn’t want to tip his hand. Or find her waiting for him with a .45.
Waiting what he hoped was enough time, he continued toward the alley and made the turn. It was short and narrow and came to a dead end at a graffiti-scarred wall.
The woman was nowhere in sight.
Where the hell has she gone?
In the wall to his right was a dilapidated metal door marked EXIT ONLY. Jack moved to it, checked the knob.
Unlocked.
He stood there a moment, thinking about what he might be getting himself into, wishing he had his .357.
Well, you don’t, he thought. How badly do you want more pieces of the puzzle?
He took a calming breath then pulled the door open.
When he got inside he heard music. The steady thump-thump-thump of a bass drum. A short set of cement steps led downward toward a narrow hallway, lit by a flickering fluorescent light.
Jack navigated the steps and headed toward the end of the hall, its walls and ceiling adorned with enough Day-Glo graffiti to trigger an epileptic seizure. There was an adjoining hallway to the right. He took it.
Abuse of Power Page 18
