James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“Where are you?”

Jack stopped to catch his breath. He could smell the River Thames. “Tower of England,” he said, parroting that numbskull at the DLR Station. The lack of sleep was catching up with him, and he knew that chasing a moving vehicle on foot just wasn’t going to work.

“I’ll grab a cab,” he said. “I want you to call the police and tell them exactly where that GPS signal is headed.”

“Will do,” said Chuck.

Jack spotted a taxi approaching from the opposite direction. He jumped out into the street, and the cab screeched to a halt to avoid hitting him. The driver rolled down the window, primed to give Jack a good tongue-lashing, but Jack’s mouth was already running as he opened the rear door on the driver’s side.

“I need to follow that cab about fifty meters ahead of-”

Jack stopped himself, having gotten a better look at the driver. It was the same cabbie from the Tower Hotel who just yesterday-it seemed much longer-had helped Jack tail Vince’s cab to the Carpenter’s Arms.

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Jack, still holding the door open.

“Again? This is getting a bit strange, mate,” the driver said, and the rear door slammed shut with the force of the taxi pulling away.

“Damn it!”

Up ahead, the traffic light changed, and Jack saw the girl’s taxi pull away. Hopefully Chuck was tracking it, but GPS wasn’t exactly golden in one of the most tunneled cities in the world. Jack had to keep up. Several cars flew by, ignoring Jack’s attempts to flag one down. Jack dug a handful of bills from his wallet and waved them at a boy on a bicycle.

“I’ll give you two hundred pounds for your bike!”

The kid stopped. “Are you joking?”

“No joke. Here, take it.”

The boy got off his bike, smiling as he grabbed the money. “Ta very much.”

Jack pedaled off in pursuit of the taxi, hoping like hell for a major traffic jam ahead.

Behind the gray blanket of winter clouds, the sun was starting to rise over London. The Dark removed his nighttime sunglasses and put on a darker pair. Then he reached for his cell phone. It was the middle of the night in Washington, but he dialed the number anyway, knowing that Littleton would be awake and take his call.

“This is your final update,” said the Dark.

“Tell me,” said Littleton.

He was standing across the street from the exit to the Aldgate East Tube Station. Morning rush hour was at full throttle, and he had to move around to keep from being jostled by commuters.

“For what it’s worth, I spoke with Shada. She admitted that she copied files from my computer. But she swears she didn’t give them to anyone.”

“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.

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.