forward, pounding the floor with his clenched fist.
“Son of a bitch!”
He slid his hands behind her head and supported the back of the neck. McKenna’s beautiful face was deadweight in his hands. Tears filled his eyes as he took her in his arms, the blood-soaked blanket turning his shirt bright red.
Sirens blared from somewhere down the block.
Too late was Vince’s first thought, but deep inside he knew he didn’t mean the ambulance and police backup. If only he had checked those text messages twenty minutes sooner.
I was too late.
Then he heard a noise downstairs.
Jamal?
He kissed McKenna’s forehead, quickly pulled the blanket up over her face, and jumped to his feet. In a matter of seconds he was down the hall and at the top of the stairs. The sirens were getting closer. There was another noise. It was coming from the garage.
He’s still here!
Vince flew down the stairs, ran through the living room, and stopped at the kitchen counter. He’d visited the Mays house many times before, and he knew that the pockmarked, pecky-cypress door on the other side of the kitchen led to the three-car garage.
The sirens were loud now, just outside the house. Vince could have-should have-waited for backup. But a complicated mix of emotions took over. Anger. Guilt. Grief. More anger. His pistol firmly in hand, he hurried across the kitchen and pushed open the door.
“Freeze!” he shouted, but even he couldn’t hear his command. The mere act of opening the door had triggered a noise that was deafening. The heat overwhelmed him. The flash blinded him. For a split second-it seemed much longer-it felt as if someone were pushing his eyes out the back of his skull, as his head snapped back with the force of a mule kick.
And then all was black.
January
Three years later
Chapter Two
It was Jack Swyteck’s second trip to Cuba in the past three weeks. He had yet to meet a Cuban.
Miami was his home, and while it was true that Miami was closer to Havana than to Orlando, Jack’s flight to the Oriente Province at the southeastern tip of the island was over four hundred air miles. His personal escorts from the naval airstrip to the detention facility were two U.S. marines, a blue-eyed farm boy from Kansas and a first- generation Mexican-American from Los Angeles. His co-counsel, a JAG lawyer assigned to the case despite her client’s obvious discomfort with a female attorney, was from the South Side of Chicago. The civilian translator from Mogadishu was delivering Jack’s words in Somali and, occasionally, Arabic. Jack’s client was from East Africa. A spinmaster might have made the argument that the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo was just as much a melting pot as the nation that ran it. To Jack, the whole place felt more like a ticking time bomb.
“I’m not a government interrogator,” said Jack, but he was essentially talking to the walls. Four of them, to be exact, an eight-by-ten steel-and-concrete shed, with a separate holding cell and bunk to the left.
Jack’s client said nothing. It was playing out exactly the way Jack’s first visit to Guantanamo had-the lawyer talking, the client too distrustful to acknowledge his existence.
The briefing material estimated that Prisoner No. 977 was in his mid-twenties, but three years of confinement and various forms of government “enhanced interrogation” tactics had aged him beyond his years. His thin, dark face was dull and weary. His long black beard was gnarled, his fingernails brittle and yellowed. His first language was officially listed as Somali, but no one seemed to know for certain. There were no confirmed reports of his ever having uttered a word to anyone at Gitmo.
“Maybe he speaks Pashto or Farsi,” said Jack. “Can we try another language?”
“Only if you get another translator,” the interpreter said.
There was no time for that. In sixteen hours Jack was scheduled to be in federal court in Washington arguing for the prisoner’s release. As habeas corpus proceedings went, this one was in a class by itself, but Jack had the pedigree to handle it. Some fifteen years ago, a four-year stint with the Freedom Institute had been Jack’s first job out of law school. His father was the governor of Florida at the time, a man who’d campaigned on a strong pro- death-penalty platform. Jack was hardly the perfect fit for a ragtag group of former hippies who worked only capital cases, but he and his old boss Neil Goderich had remained close over the years. It was Neil who’d asked Jack to take the case of Prisoner No. 977. Jack had no illusions of selling his friends and family on the everybody-deserves- a-lawyer argument. It was a huge pro bono undertaking for a sole practitioner, but Jack kept his involvement quiet-until it came time for the government to clear his visit to Gitmo, and the FBI background check left his neighbors wondering if he was a mob lawyer on the verge of indictment. Finally, he had to come clean. The reactions were pretty uniform.
Are you kidding me?
You’re defending a terrorist?
His best friend, Theo Knight-a death row inmate until Jack and a DNA test had proved his innocence more than a decade ago-was the only one to shrug it off: “Dude, know what GITMO stands for? Giving Interrogation Teams More Options.”
Funny, kind of-if you were pounding back beers at one of Theo’s bars in Miami. But once the airplane landed at Gitmo, there wasn’t a lot of laughter. Jack had read the report from the former prosecutor, who had resigned from the case in disgust. Prisoner No. 977 had been rounded up by Ethiopian troops from a suspected al-Qaeda safe house in southern Somalia. He was accused of sheltering Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, al-Qaeda’s operations chief, who was responsible for planning the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the 2002 car-bombing attack in Kenya and missile attack on an Israeli airliner. A handwritten confession was the centerpiece of the case against him. He didn’t write it. The one-page document was handed to him for his signature after several days of beatings, forced administration of drugs, and threats against his family. It was written in a language (Amharic) that he didn’t speak, and he signed with his thumbprint, which was consistent with reports that he was completely illiterate. The Ethiopians turned him over to the Americans, to whom he refused to speak. Prison logs reflected that Prisoner No. 977 attempted to kill himself eleven hours after arriving at Gitmo. Eight weeks later he was on the so-called “frequent flier” program, where, in a two-week period, he was moved to a new cell 112 times-an average of every three hours-in order to ensure he was sleep deprived and disoriented. Over the three years at Guantanamo, he was repeatedly subjected to extreme cold, bright lights, and various stress positions, and he was often kept in solitary confinement.
Still, he refused to speak to anyone-even to his lawyer.
“I’m here to help you,” said Jack, almost pleading now. “You have no way of knowing this, but in twenty-eight of the thirty-three detainee cases heard since last January, federal judges in my country have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. Many of those men were held without charges far longer than you.”
The prisoner’s gaze drifted away. He looked at the prayer mat rolled neatly and resting atop his bunk, then up at the large clock on the wall, then back out to nothing. There was no reason for him to trust Jack. None.
Fifteen minutes passed, Jack’s words meeting with silence. Even on death row, Jack never had a client ignore him like this.
What now?
Jack glanced at the JAG lawyer to his right, then looked at the prisoner, who was now leaning back in his chair. This was going nowhere. It was absurd, really-the Yale-educated attorney sitting at a card table in a dank shed trying to explain habeas corpus to an illiterate peasant who was chained to the floor. Jack was running out of
