Afraid of the Dark by James Grippando Read Free Book Online Page B

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