Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [78]
“No!” the doctor shouted.
Neil braced for the crack of a gunshot, but it was the muffled sound of a silenced projectile. The doctor’s head snapped back, and as he tumbled backward in his chair, the crimson spray of blood reached all the way to the framed photograph of Bobby Kennedy.
Neil shrieked and ran for the other door. It led to the alley, but the second half of the attack team was right outside, dressed in the same black fatigues and playing lookout. The triggerman grabbed Neil by the ponytail and took him down hard. Neil’s spectacles flew from his face and slid across the linoleum. The wind rushed from his lungs as the attacker drilled his knee into Neil’s back. The man yanked harder at the ponytail, forcing Neil’s chin up from the floor. A cold, serrated blade was pressed so firmly to his throat that he could feel the blood starting to trickle down his neck, moistening his shirt collar.
“This is not going to end well for you, Mr. ACLU. So you might as well talk.”
Neil’s body was shaking, and his mind flashed with the memory of what Jamal had told him about his abduction three years ago.
“What . . . do you want to know?”
The masked man leaned closer, burrowing his knee deeper into Neil’s spine.
“I want to know everything about Jamal Wakefield,” he said, hissing into Neil’s ear. “You can start with what he told you about Prague.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
Midnight was fast approaching in central London—lunchtime in a day in the life of the Dark.
The tube ride from Bethnal Green to King’s Cross was about twenty-five minutes, most of which the Dark spent reviewing his plan. The man seated behind him was snoring like a drunk, and the grind and hum of the underground railcar had lulled a handful of other riders to sleep, or near sleep. The Dark, however, was wide awake. His regular six hours of rest were from nine A.M. to three P.M., which meant that London’s winter suited his needs perfectly. Some days he never saw the sun. Still, he wore his sunglasses everywhere, including the underground. He was no vampire; even artificial light bothered him. Not that vampires were a bad thing. Hell, the number of schoolgirls reading Twilight on the tube was enough to make him bloodthirsty.
“Farringdon Station,” came the announcement over the loudspeaker. One more stop until his destination.
The train squeaked to a halt, and the doors opened. The smell of urine and feces entered the car, and the Dark spotted the mess someone had left on the platform. He ignored it, but not entirely. He’d read somewhere that memory was most closely linked to the sense of smell, and this unmistakable odor was indeed taking the Dark around a strange bend of memory lane. It smelled like the central market in Mogadishu, and the fact that his mind was making that connection was far from random. He’d been thinking about the Bakara Market on and off, ever since he’d sent that e-mail to Jamal’s father.
The e-mail hadn’t been part of the original plan. It was definitely beyond the scope of what he’d been hired to do. But getting paid for this job was just the icing on the cake. The Dark wanted that Somali son of a bitch to know that his son was dead, and he wanted to be the one to break the news. There was history between the two men, and the root of his animosity was burned into the Dark’s memory. As much as he wanted to stay focused on the present journey to central London, his mind was taking him back to that hot summer day in the Bakara Market, when the East African sun made the stench unbearable, when the sounds of war were never far away, and when the smell of newly spilled blood was in the air. To a time when he was known only as Habib, a foot soldier for al-Shabaab, and he worked under a cell leader named Abukar—Jamal’s father.
It was midmorning, and Habib was looking east across the Bakara Market from the charred second story of yet another building that had been destroyed by mortar fire. Years of armed conflict had reduced the Italian architecture of Somalia’s colonial period to rubble. Despite the recent shelling, Somalia