“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 operatives, and then they handed me over to the CIA.”
“Probably for some amount of bounty money,” said Neil.
“I’m sure,” said Jamal. “Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Gitmo.”
“And you didn’t bother telling them who you really were.”
“Well, duh. I would have been sent to Miami on murder charges. I figured that if I kept quiet-if I could play the part of a Somali peasant named Khaled al-Jawar-the Americans would have to release me sooner or later.”
“So no one at Gitmo ever accused you of being Jamal Wakefield?”
“Nope.”
Jack looked at Neil. “They must have known. Fingerprints or something.”
Jamal glared, as if he resented having to repeat himself: “They never said anything about it,” said Jamal, his voice taking on an edge.
Jack said, “Obviously the interrogators in Prague knew your true identity, right?”
“Oh, they knew everything about me there. And they used it, too.”
“In what way?”
“Threats, mainly.”
“They threatened you?”
“All the time. It started mostly with threats against my mother-the things they were going to enjoy doing to her if I refused to talk about Project Round Up.”
“Any other threats?”
“Yeah. Including one that they kept.”
“Tell me.”
Jamal’s expression turned very serious. “They said if I didn’t give them the information they wanted, they would kill McKenna.”
His words hung in the air, as if her violent death had taken a whole new turn.
There was a knock on the door, and the door opened.
“Showtime,” the guard said.
Jamal’s arraignment was scheduled for eleven A.M., and there was just enough time to get the prisoner downstairs for a court “appearance” via closed-circuit television from the jailhouse.
“So,” asked Neil, “does this mean I get to keep my ponytail?”
Jack had almost forgotten that Neil had bet his precious locks that Jack would stay on the case after hearing Jamal’s story. But it didn’t take the smartest lawyer in the world to see the problems in Jamal’s case-even if he was telling the truth.
“For now,” he said. “But keep your scissors handy.”
Chapter Nine
It was 11:04 P.M. when Jack finally got home from the office. When it came to pro bono cases, the well- established rule that “no good deed goes unpunished” seemed to have an exponential ripple effect, as if every hour spent working for free put you three hours behind on billable files. He walked through his front door and plopped on the couch just in time for the tail end of the lead story on the late local news.
“Wakefield was denied bail,” said the anchorwoman. “A trial date has not yet been set.”
Trial. The very thought made Jack shudder. Neil had offered to pay him out of the Freedom Institute’s operating budget, but Jack knew how that would play out. Jack would present a bill, and Neil would wax on about all the schoolchildren who would have to go without textbooks because there was no money to sue the mayor for paying six-figure salaries to his chauffeur, his barber, and a nineteen-year-old waitress at Hooters who was also his “secretary.”
Jack switched off the TV, changed into jogging shorts and a T-shirt (his standard sleepwear), and headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth.
He’d been too busy all day to think much about Jamal Wakefield, but, naturally, bedtime brought the nagging questions to the fore. Had Jamal been out of the country when McKenna was murdered, or did he go on the run after she was killed? Was he telling the truth about the first round of secret interrogation, or was he making up an alibi? The polygraph examination was clear enough: no signs of deception. But that had absolutely no bearing on what was perhaps the biggest question of all.
“Why in the hell are you even doing this?” he asked his reflection in the mirror.
It sure wasn’t for the pat on the back from friends and family. Grandpa Swyteck had seemed to sum up the absurdity of it all. It had taken Jack two hours to calm him down from his “combative” episode, and it had been hard to tell if Grandpa was grasping any of the things Jack was telling him about his day. Finally, he’d leveled off at a semilucid level-or so Jack had thought.
“My grandson defending terrorists,” he’d said bitterly.
Apparently he’d absorbed plenty. “Accused terrorists, Grandpa.”
“That’s a hell of a job for a Jew.”
Jack had blinked hard, not comprehending. “A lot of the lawyers representing the detainees are Jewish, actually.”
The ceiling tiles had suddenly caught Grandpa’s attention, and he was swatting at dust floaters like a man catching flies. Jack needed to reel him back in before the nurse returned to chart him as “combative.”
“Grandpa, you know we’re not Jewish, right?”
“What do you mean we’re not Jewish?”
In truth, Jack had never known his grandfather to be of any faith, but the angry glare had taken Jack aback. “You were born in Bohemia in what used to be Czechoslovakia. We’re Czech.”
“Yes, Czech Jews.”
Jack could have spent the next ten minutes trying to explain that even though Grandpa had never been a churchgoing man, his son-Jack’s father-had gone to Mass every Sunday, married a Catholic girl from Cuba, and even taken communion from the pope during his second term as governor. But Grandpa had dozed off, exhausted from his earlier struggle with the nurse.
“Getting old sucks,” Jack said to the forty-year-old man in the mirror.
Jack heard a car door slam. He returned his toothbrush to the rack and peered out the bathroom window, but overgrown palm fronds blocked his view of the driveway. He listened.
Footsteps.
Someone was definitely out there. Key Biscayne was safe by Miami standards, but the last time anyone had shown up unexpectedly at his house after midnight, a couple of pissed-off Colombians had decided to express their displeasure with his courtroom performance by turning his 1966 Mustang into a charred hunk of metal. Jack went down the hall to the living room and waited. It was dark, lighted only in places by the dim glow of an outdoor porch lamp that shined through the open slats in the draperies. He listened, hearing nothing. But something-a sixth sense-told him that someone was on the other side of that door.
“Who’s there?” he asked.
There was no answer, but as he started forward, the knock startled him. It had the familiar rhythm:
DUH, duh-duh-duh-duh, DUH…
