A sense of humor. That’s new.
“My father still lives in Mogadishu,” said Jamal, “so I speak Somali as well as English. I lived with my mother until I dropped out of high school and got the hell out of the freezer. I hopped on a bus to Florida and took an apartment in Miami Beach. I waited tables for about a year, then finally got a job with Mr. Mays.”
“I presume that’s how you met McKenna,” said Jack.
“Yup. He’s a self-taught computer whiz who never finished high school. Just like me. We hit it off. He introduced me to his daughter. I was nineteen. She was sixteen-but very mature for her age.”
Neil popped open his briefcase. “I have pictures,” he said as he laid them out on the table.
The difference between Jamal’s appearance then versus now was not as dramatic as Jamal-the-client versus Jamal-the-Gitmo-detainee, but it was striking nonetheless. Not so long ago, Jamal had sported nothing short of movie-star good looks. Even so, one’s eyes naturally gravitated toward McKenna.
“Pretty girl,” said Jack.
“Beautiful,” said Jamal. “I used to kid her that she was the perfect blend of obnoxious blond father and stunning Bahamian mother that modeling agencies looked for.”
Jack held his next question, choosing instead to observe for a moment. Jamal was unable to look away from the photograph, his eyes moistening. It was the first real show of emotion Jack had seen from his client.
If it was real.
“Did you get along with her mother?”
“It’s funny. I thought we were going to get on just fine. McKenna told me that her grandfather was Muslim, like me. But I guess her mother had rejected Islam.”
“Did she reject you?”
“It wasn’t anything specific. I just got a vibe that she wasn’t nuts about me.”
Jack checked his watch. The arraignment was less than an hour away, and he needed to speed things up.
“Let’s fast-forward a bit,” said Jack, “to the time before McKenna’s death. Tell me how you came to leave the country.”
“I was abducted.”
“Abducted?”
“Yes,” he said with a straight face.
“By whom?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I believe it was the U.S. government.”
“Okay, I’m outta here,” said Jack as he pushed away from the table.
“No, no, listen,” said Neil.
Jack shook his head. “I took this case pro bono because you were right, Neil: Everybody deserves a lawyer. But I’m a sole practitioner, and I don’t have time to talk spy novels to a circuit court judge.”
“My father is a recruiter for al-Shabaab,” said Jamal, “the Mujahideen Youth Movement.”
That got Jack’s attention. While preparing for the trip to Gitmo, he had heard of al-Shabaab. Officially designated a terrorist organization by the United States in March 2008, it had been waging a war against Somalia’s government to implement sharia-a stricter interprentation of Islamic law.
“Yesterday I stood before a federal judge and assured him that there was no basis to detain you at Gitmo,” Jack said, his eyes narrowing. “Now you’re telling me that you were an al-Shabaab recruit?”
“I have nothing to do with them,” said Jamal, “but they definitely tapped into my old neighborhood in Minneapolis.”
Neil added, “Ethiopia invaded Somalia in December 2006 to push the Islamists out of Mogadishu. It was an outrage to most Somalis, which made it an easy rallying cry for al-Shabaab. Ever since then, they have been reaching out to young Somalis all over the world, recruiting them to fight.”
“At least two of my friends from high school ended up dead in Somalia,” said Jamal.
Jack settled back into his chair, willing to listen a little longer. “What does any of this have to do with your being abducted?”
“Two high-school friends of mine were killed fighting in Somalia. My father was a recruiter in Mogadishu. Obviously, my name landed on somebody’s list of suspected terrorists.”
Things were slowly starting 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?”
