James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“Who’s your boss?” asked Vince.

The Dark pulled up a chair and straddled it backward, his chin resting on his forearms as he stared at Vince. He was close enough for Vince to feel his presence-a technique he’d perfected on blindfolded women.

“Let me explain something to you, Paulo. Your life is in my hands, which means that you will live only as long as you are of use to me. You’re not the hostage negotiator here. You don’t get to ask questions.”

“Why did you kill McKenna?”

“Cute,” he said, scoffing. “Uncle Vince wants to know why. After I tell you, then what are you gonna do? Fly back in your time machine and make it all better?”

The Dark glanced across the room. The device that he’d ripped from Vince’s head in the scuffle outside his flat was on the floor. “This Brainport thing comes with a time-machine function, right?” he said, mocking Vince.

Vince said nothing, but the Dark could read his expression. The sunglasses had been smashed in their struggle, and Vince looked so much weaker without them.

“Very foolish of you to try to ambush me,” the Dark said. “Desperate, really, even with this cool technology.”

The Dark gave the device a closer look. He put on the head-gear with the mounted camera, but he wasn’t sure what to do with the tongue sensor. “What’s this little lollipop thing for?” he asked.

“You stick it up your ass,” said Vince.

The Dark pulled off the headgear, threw the Brainport onto the chair in the corner of the room, and punched Vince in the stomach so hard that it hurt his own hand. Vince gasped for air, hunching over.

The Dark shook the sting out of his fist. “How do you like that, smart mouth?”

“Did you rape McKenna?”

The Dark hit him again, and Vince let out a loud groan. “Yell, scream all you want,” said the Dark. “I can fire off my gun if I want to. No one is going to hear you, except maybe a crack addict or two on the first floor.”

Vince caught his breath. “Did you… rape her?”

“Kind of a one-track mind you’ve got there, partner.”

“Did you?” asked Vince.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re a sick bastard.”

The Dark gave him another blow to the solar plexus, the hardest one yet.

“Typical hostage negotiator’s seat-of-the-pants psychology. It always boils down to sexual sadism. I hate to disappoint you, genius, but I killed McKenna because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s as simple as that.”

“You’re a liar.”

The Dark grabbed him by the jaw and held his head up, as if daring Vince to stare at him through his blindness.

“My job was to find out as much as I could about Project Round Up. If that meant sleeping with Chuck Mays’ wife, so be it. If that meant hacking into Chuck Mays’ home computer while he was out of the country, no problem. Unfortunately, I had no idea McKenna was home at the time. She caught me red-handed.”

“There was no reason to make her suffer.”

“If you gotta do it, you might as well make the most of it.”

Vince lunged forward from the chair, but his hands were tied behind his back. The Dark dodged the head butt and pushed him hard to the floor. Vince was facedown, and the Dark bore his knee into Vince’s spine as he pressed the cold muzzle of the pistol to the base of his skull.

“That’s your second silly move of the day, Paulo.”

“You’re lucky I’m blind.”

“No, you’re lucky you’re blind. You weren’t the only one injured in that explosion. If you had walked away unscathed, I would have killed you three years ago. Probably after making you watch your wife have a go with me.”

Vince jerked his shoulders back, but his resistance was futile.

“Oh, did I hit a sore spot?” said the Dark. “I thought you knew your wife sleeps around on you.”

“Shut your mouth.”

“A beautiful woman like that. Of course she feels sorry for you and wants to be the good wife. But how long did you really expect her to hang with a blind guy?”

“You don’t know Alicia.”

“Oh, I know her all right. I’m sure she’s thrilled about this Brainport contraption you’ve been testing. The less dependent you are on her, the less guilty she’ll feel about leaving. She is going to leave you, Paulo. Don’t mistake pity for love.”

Every muscle in Vince’s back tightened, and the Dark sensed the hot rush of anger, but then he could almost feel the air escaping from Vince’s lungs. It was satisfying to have touched a raw nerve-to have literally deflated him.

The Dark leaned closer, whispering into Vince’s ear: “Yes, I raped McKenna. I stabbed her with a kitchen knife. And I enjoyed it.”

Vince lay motionless.

“Now you know everything, Paulo. Except for the one thing that I will let torment you all the way to the grave.” He waited for Vince to say something, but he had gone silent. The Dark said it for him:

“Why did she tell you Jamal did it?”

Jack was feeling the jet lag. It was technically still day one in London, but his body was telling him that he’d gone too long without rest. His chin snapped up off his chest as the sound of Chuck’s voice roused him from a state of semisleep.

“I cracked the code,” said Chuck, speaking over the computer.

“What took you so long?” asked Jack.

He was being facetious. Anything less than intelligence-grade encryption was no match for Chuck’s supercomputers.

“Does that mean we can view the files now?” asked Shada.

“No need,” said Chuck. “I ran them through my database. Part of Project Round Up is the cataloging of every single video file traded over the worst of the P2P networks. Trust me on this: The files that you copied from that creep’s computer are not the kind of things that any normal human being would want to watch.”

Jack was almost afraid to ask. “What kind of content are we talking about?”

“Some people would call it sexually explicit. I call it graphic violence.”

“Not against children, I hope.”

“No children in these videos. Interestingly, the violence is against grown men. By women.”

That took Jack aback. “Dominatrix stuff?”

“It goes beyond that. From a trading-frequency standpoint, the most popular video shows a woman ripping out a man’s pubic hair with her teeth.”

Jack squirmed at the thought, then refocused. “So are you saying that every single file that Shada copied has already been traded on the P2P networks?”

“All of them-except one.”

“Which one?”

“Jamal’s.”

Jack went cold. “What does that one show?”

“I haven’t watched it yet, and since it’s never been traded on the P2P networks, I don’t have the content cataloged. I thought I would pull it up now for the three of us to see.”

Jack and Shada exchanged uneasy glances.

“I don’t need to see it,” said Shada. “This may not matter to you, Chuck, but I feel bad enough for the mistakes I’ve made without watching these videos.”

Chuck didn’t bite, unwilling to acknowledge her contrition just yet.

“What about you, Swyteck?” he asked. “Jamal was your client.”

Jack wasn’t eager to say yes, but if Jamal’s mother was going to hear about this from anyone, he wanted it to be from him, not Chuck. “I should,” Jack said, bracing himself, “so I will.”

Andie put her head down, pulled her wool scarf up over her nose, and walked into the wind. It was snowing in the Washington area. Tiny flakes fell from the night sky, flickered beneath the glow of streetlamps, and gathered on the wet sidewalk in front of her. No doubt some tourist was giddy with excitement over postcard-quality photographs of the illuminated Capitol or Jefferson Memorial. Andie wished she were in Miami. The Ritz-Carlton Hotel was right across the street, which made her think of Jack. He’d probably booked the romantic-weekend package a half-dozen times at the Ritz on South Beach, but something had always come up and forced them to cancel. “Something” was code for the FBI.