Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [146]
Snow was falling as Jack drove out of Prague. Andie was in the passenger seat. It was their first trip abroad together. It wasn’t exactly a vacation.
“Funny,” said Jack, “an entire branch of my family tree is from this area. And every road I turn down, I see Jamal Wakefield in the trunk of a car heading off to a black site.”
Andie glanced out the window. “That location will never be public information.” She was right, Jack realized. The only living person who knew the exact location was Danilo Bahena, and he was sitting in jail for the murder of Neil Goderich. The likelihood of his talking was almost nil.
“To be honest,” said Jack, “it doesn’t really seem that important anymore.”
Andie reached across the console and held his hand. Her touch had a way of reaffirming something that he was now more sure of than ever: Andie was on his side. She’d taken a huge risk by calling him in London to explain how his case and her investigation overlapped, and to warn him about what he was up against. It was not yet clear how that would play out for her professionally, but she wasn’t fired, and she had the support of her supervisor. But Jack had a feeling there was more to come.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Jack nodded, and they rode on in silence, his thoughts drifting back to the mission at hand.
Grandpa Swyteck had died in his sleep. As best Jack could piece events together, it was right around the time doctors at the Royal Hospital of London were assuring Vince that his stab wound wasn’t fatal. Jack flew home from London for the funeral. Ten days later, he was back in Europe with Andie—and with a handful of his grandfather’s ashes.
“Turn left in one hundred meters.”
It was the mechanical voice of the GPS. Hearing it made Jack think of fifty-pound notes wrapped in aluminum foil.
The fatal shooting of Habib Warsame Dhamac was ruled self-defense, even though it was clear to Jack that Chuck had his plan to avenge McKenna’s death, and Shada had hers. The fact that neither had known what the other was doing could have gotten everyone killed—which seemed like a metaphor for their marriage. Chuck was being held in the U.K. on weapons charges. Shada had much bigger problems with the law. Her attorney would surely build a classic “Patty Hearst” defense and argue that her involvement in the murders of Ethan Chang and Neil Goderich was carefully choreographed by the Dark to cement his control over her—more specifically, that she’d had no idea she was administering a lethal dose of anything to Chang, and that she’d played lookout for Bahena outside Neil’s office only because the Dark had brainwashed her into thinking that it was her last chance to learn the truth about Jamal Wakefield.
As for Chuck, he seemed more concerned that Shada get psychological counseling than legal help. A divorce was in the works, and his commitment remained Project Round Up. Nothing could have driven home the importance of that work more than seeing a teenage girl reunited with her family after months of the Dark’s psychological abuse. The bomb strapped to her body had been real, and she was still looking at long-term therapy, but one life had already been saved. Jamal’s uncle had played a big role in that rescue, even if her fears and brainwashing did drive her back to the Dark after Hassan had been hospitalized. Jack felt like he still owed him an apology for harboring those initial suspicions about him.
“You have arrived at your destination.”
The tiny village of Lidice dates back to the fourteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century it was a busy mining village in the rolling hills of the Bohemia region. The old village was destroyed during World War II, and the new village sits near the original town site, about ten miles west of Prague. Much of the thirty-minute drive is on divided expressways, two lanes in each direction, a far cry from the roads traveled by the Nazis on their way to Prague.
Jack’s grandfather had few possessions at the time of his death, and the most important provisions of his will dealt with the disposition of his remains.