CHAPTER FIVE
Five men entered. Three sat at the table, facing Mark. Two of them had pads of paper and pencils and almost immediately began writing. The third sat back and raised one ankle to rest on his other knee and tilted a bottle of water, taking a long drink.
Mark didn’t like the way the man seemed to be settling in and making himself comfortable. It was as though he expected to be there a long time.
The other two men spoke quietly in the corner for a few minutes. One had dark hair cut short and he moved with a military bearing. The other sported a shaved head, and appeared to be trying to convince the first of something. The dark haired man shook his head, his jaw set.
Mark strained to hear what they said but couldn’t make out the words. After a few minutes of looking through a folder, they appeared to come to some agreement and turned towards Mark. The shaved one ambled up to Mark, halting just in front of him.
“Hello. I’m Bill and this is Jim.” He jabbed his thumb in the direction of the other man. “This group behind me will be observing and taking notes. How it works is like this-we ask you some simple questions, and you answer them. If the answers are satisfactory, then we’ll all have a pleasant session.” He spread his hands and smiled. “We all like when a session is easy, don’t we, Jim?”
Jim grunted and glared at Mark, his arms crossed. “Let’s just get on with it.”
Mark squirmed under the scrutiny. What more could he tell them that he hadn’t already told the FBI? What was this Jim guy so pissed about?
Bill shrugged. “Okay. You go first, Jim. I’ll just go sit over here.”
Jim directed a glare at the guard on Mark’s right. “Why is he sitting in a chair? This isn’t a goddamn social call.”
“Sorry, sir.”
The guard yanked Mark up by the arm and Mark staggered as the chains connecting his ankles and hands pulled his arms down. He didn’t know why he felt guilty, like he had done something wrong. The guards had told him to sit, so he had, but Jim aimed his annoyance at Mark, not the guard.
He stood as straight as he could and tried to meet Jim’s stare without flinching. The shackles tugged on his arms and kept his shoulders hunched. Instinct told him to stand straight and tall, but it was physically impossible. To compensate, he refused to look away from Jim’s glare.
“What are you looking at?” Jim approached Mark, stopping when their faces were less than a foot apart. “You have something you want to say?”
That did it. Mark broke eye contact for an instant.
“I didn’t hear you.” Now Jim’s nose almost touched Mark’s.
Mark flinched, drawing back, but the guard poked him in the spine with something hard.
He struggled not to wince and licked his lips, the desert in his mouth making speech difficult. “Yes. I do have something to say. I want to state that I’m innocent.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the men with the paper scribbling and hoped they noted his declaration.
Jim’s expression didn’t change and he spoke as if Mark hadn’t said anything. “You are to address me as sir, understand?” He never raised his voice, but threat laced every syllable of the sentence.
Mark nodded. “Yes, sir.” His face burned with humiliation. It must be easy being a tough guy when your adversary was trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
“Now, I have some simple questions. I just want the facts.” Jim stepped back and opened the folder. “It says here that your name is Mark Andrew Taylor. You’re thirty-five years old, never married and you live in Chicago. Is that all true?”
Mark nodded.
Jim cocked his head. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Yes, sir. That’s all true,” Mark said. The menace in Jim’s voice sent shivers shooting through him.
Jim asked some more questions, verifying the names of Mark’s parents, where he grew up, the college he had attended. Mark knew all that information had to be in his file and tried to determine the motive for asking it all again. The questions moved on to Mark’s photography and despite the circumstances, Mark felt his enthusiasm for discussing his craft begin to surface.
“What kind of photography do you do?” Jim’s voice sounded almost friendly, as if he and Mark were chatting at a party.
“I do portraits and commercial photography in the studio in my loft.”
Jim didn’t reply, just nodded and waited, so Mark continued, “Commercial jobs are for magazines and advertisements, mostly. Portraits are anything from family and group shots to head-shots for actors and models.”
“Is that all you do?”
Mark shook his head and just in time, remembered to add the sir to his next reply. “No, sir. Those jobs pay the bills, but what I love to do is take candid photos of people and try to capture their…their spirit.” He knew it sounded hokey, but he didn’t know how else to explain it. When he caught someone on film with that unguarded expression that invited the camera in, it was like hitting a home run.
“What kind of photography did you do in Afghanistan a few years ago?” Jim’s voice had an edge to it. “I don’t expect there are a lot of actors looking for head-shots in Kandahar or Kabul.”
“Um, no sir. I was there to do photos for a friend’s book.”
Jim paced in front of him and then halted and quirked an eyebrow at Mark. “And did that pay the bills?” Sarcasm dripped from the words.
Sensing that Jim was zeroing in on key questions, Mark considered his reply carefully. “No, sir. Mo offered a partnership of sorts. He paid for the trip, but I would get a percentage from the sale of the book.”
“How much did that turn out to be?”
“Nothing, sir. He is still shopping the book around, the last I heard.”
“So you’re telling me that you went there out of the goodness of your heart to help out a friend?”
“I thought it could be a good opportunity. It was a chance I took.”
Jim shook his head, as though Mark had been cheated. “So, Mo was your friend for how long?”
Mark counted back to the time he’d met Mo at a red carpet event they were both covering. “About five years. He helped me out with some photo shoots when I needed another photographer. Sometimes, he even waited for payment until I was actually paid for the shoot. Photography is a small world and we try to help each other out when we can.”
Jim chuckled. “Oh, really?”
Mark remained silent, not sure if Jim asked a question or was just commenting. The look on the other man’s face frightened him. He had seen a cat play with a mouse before, swiping at it with his paw, letting it crawl away, only to pounce in for the kill when the mouse was only a few inches from the safety of it’s hole. Jim looked like that cat.
Flipping to another page in the file, Jim smiled. “You might consider Mohommad a friend, but he sure doesn’t feel the same about you. Do you know what he told us?”
Mark shook his head. His stomach twisted. He hadn’t spoken to Mohammad for six months. Every time he called him, he got voice mail.
“He said that you were at an al-Qaeda training camp. That you and he trained there and agreed to take pictures of targets in the U.S. Your area was Chicago.”
Confused, he had no idea how to reply. Had Mo really said that? Why would he lie? “That’s not true, sir. I don’t know why he would say those things. I only took pictures of the subjects for Mo’s book. I never saw any training camps. And I definitely never agreed to take pictures of targets in any city, let alone Chicago.”
Jim shrugged, his head tilting. “Hey, he’s your friend.”
He let that statement hang in the air, and the men sitting at the table bent their heads, the scratch of their pens the only sound in the room. Fear coursed through him-a desperate fear that they would judge Mark guilty by association.
Jim turned to Bill. “I’ve finished with my questions for the moment.”
