James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark
Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Триллер, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.
- Название:Afraid of the Dark
- Автор:
- Жанр:
- Год:неизвестен
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:5 / 5. Голосов: 1
-
Избранное:Добавить в избранное
- Отзывы:
-
Ваша оценка:
- 100
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
Afraid of the Dark: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Afraid of the Dark»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.
Afraid of the Dark — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком
Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Afraid of the Dark», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.
Интервал:
Закладка:
“My father is a recruiter for al-Shabaab,” said Jamal, “the Mujahideen Youth Movement.”
That got Jack’s attention. While preparing for the trip to Gitmo, he had heard of al-Shabaab. Officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States in March 2008, it had been waging a war against Somalia’s government to implement sharia-a stricter interprentation of Islamic law.
“Yesterday I stood before a federal judge and assured him that there was no basis to detain you at Gitmo,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing. “Now you’re telling me that you were an al-Shabaab recruit?”
“I have nothing to do with them,” said Jamal, “but they definitely tapped into my old neighborhood in Minneapolis.”
Neil added, “Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to push the Islamists out of Mogadishu. It was an outrage to most Somalis, which made it an easy rallying cry for al-Shabaab. Ever since then, they have been reaching out to young Somalis all over the world, recruiting them to fight.”
“At least two of my friends from high school ended up dead in Somalia,” said Jamal.
Jack settled back into his chair, willing to listen a little longer. “What does any of this have to do with your being abducted?”
“Two high-school friends of mine were killed fighting in Somalia. My father was a recruiter in Mogadishu. Obviously, my name landed on somebody’s list of suspected terrorists.”
Things were slowly starting to sound more plausible. Jack checked his watch again. Time was short. “Tell me what happened. The short version.”
“Like I said, I was working for McKenna’s father in Miami. He did a lot of secret projects, some for the government, some for private industry. I never knew who the clients were, never got the details. But he had this one called Project Round Up, and I knew it was big.”
“Big in what way?”
“The supercomputer ability, the amount of data being gathered, the data-mining capabilities-everything was out of this world.”
“What part of the project were you involved with?”
“Encryption,” said Jamal.
“How to encrypt your own data, or how to read through someone else’s encryption?”
“At the time I was abducted, I was doing both.”
“Let’s get back to that. When you say you were abducted…”
“I mean exactly that,” said Jamal. “Some goons came into my apartment in the middle of the night, threw me on the floor, put a hood over my head, stuck me in the ass with a syringe… and then it was lights-out.”
“Did you get a look at them?”
“No way.”
“Then what happened?”
“I woke up in a dark room strapped to a table. And from then on, it was like a scene out of 24.”
“What to you mean?”
“Bright lights, then total darkness. Loud calypso music, then total silence. Exteme cold temperature, then hot. Every time I fell asleep, a sprinkler in the ceiling squirted me with ice-cold water. The only time I wasn’t shackled to the floor was when they put a hood over my head, so I kept walking into the walls. They wouldn’t let me use the bathroom when I needed to, didn’t feed me until I was starving, and then after I finally got something to eat they served me another three meals ten minutes apart. All of this was obviously designed to disorient me. Then the interrogation started.”
“What did they ask you about?”
“Project Round Up. I told them everything I knew about the encryption, but they insisted that I knew more than I was telling them.”
“And all of this happened in Prague?”
“I had no idea where it was. Until they let me go.”
“They just turned you loose?”
“They gave me another injection to knock me out. I woke up on a bench near a bridge. As soon as I figured out where I was, I ran to a pay phone and called my mother in Minneapolis. That was when I found out that McKenna had been murdered and that the cops were looking for me.”
“How long had you been out of the country at this point?”
“I had no idea, until my mother told me what day it was. It was even longer than I’d thought: seventeen days.”
“Did she believe you?”
“Of course. The last time we’d talked on the phone was ten days before McKenna was killed. I used to talk to her every day. She knew something had happened to me.”
“Did you talk about coming home?”
“Are you kidding? She said I would be handing myself over to a lynch mob. A cop was blinded, CNN aired a tape recording of McKenna naming me as the killer, my picture was all over the news, and every cop in America was on the lookout for me.”
“What did you do?”
“I headed for Somalia to hide with my father.”
“The terrorist recruiter?”
“At the time, I didn’t know he was involved with all of that. He was just my father, and I needed help.”
“Did you stay with him?”
“For about a week. He got me a fake passport to turn me into Khaled al-Jawar, which is the name you knew me by.”
“Was that a real person or a made-up name?”
“I have no idea, and I was so scared that I didn’t care. This was at the height of the Ethiopian invasion. I could hear the gunfighting in the city, especially after dark. Then one night the troops busted down the door to my father’s apartment, and they took me away. You know the rest of the story. It was exactly what you told the judge in Washington. The Ethiopians forced me to confess that I was sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, and then they handed me over to the CIA.”
“Probably for some amount of bounty money,” said Neil.
“I’m sure,” said Jamal. “Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Gitmo.”
“And you didn’t bother telling them who you really were.”
“Well, duh. I would have been sent to Miami on murder charges. I figured that if I kept quiet-if I could play the part of a Somali peasant named Khaled al-Jawar-the Americans would have to release me sooner or later.”
“So no one at Gitmo ever accused you of being Jamal Wakefield?”
“Nope.”
Jack looked at Neil. “They must have known. Fingerprints or something.”
Jamal glared, as if he resented having to repeat himself: “They never said anything about it,” said Jamal, his voice taking on an edge.
Jack said, “Obviously the interrogators in Prague knew your true identity, right?”
“Oh, they knew everything about me there. And they used it, too.”
“In what way?”
“Threats, mainly.”
“They threatened you?”
“All the time. It started mostly with threats against my mother-the things they were going to enjoy doing to her if I refused to talk about Project Round Up.”
“Any other threats?”
“Yeah. Including one that they kept.”
“Tell me.”
Jamal’s expression turned very serious. “They said if I didn’t give them the information they wanted, they would kill McKenna.”
His words hung in the air, as if her violent death had taken a whole new turn.
There was a knock on the door, and the door opened.
“Showtime,” the guard said.
Jamal’s arraignment was scheduled for eleven A.M., and there was just enough time to get the prisoner downstairs for a court “appearance” via closed-circuit television from the jailhouse.
“So,” asked Neil, “does this mean I get to keep my ponytail?”
Jack had almost forgotten that Neil had bet his precious locks that Jack would stay on the case after hearing Jamal’s story. But it didn’t take the smartest lawyer in the world to see the problems in Jamal’s case-even if he was telling the truth.
“For now,” he said. “But keep your scissors handy.”
Chapter Nine
It was 11:04 P.M. when Jack finally got home from the office. When it came to pro bono cases, the well-established rule that “no good deed goes unpunished” seemed to have an exponential ripple effect, as if every hour spent working for free put you three hours behind on billable files. He walked through his front door and plopped on the couch just in time for the tail end of the lead story on the late local news.
Читать дальшеИнтервал:
Закладка:
Похожие книги на «Afraid of the Dark»
Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Afraid of the Dark» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.
Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Afraid of the Dark» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.