James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“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.”

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.

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 met 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?”