Jack’s expertise was not politically correct, so there were those who would be only too eager to destroy his ability to find the kind of people he looked for. There were even those who would leak the story or reveal his name in the hopes of getting him killed. Political correctness didn’t extend to the lives of those they didn’t like.
Jack’s safety—and thus the safety of those he tried to help—depended on him remaining a ghost.
After clearing customs at JFK, by midafternoon they had hopped over to the Elmira Corning Regional Airport in central New York State, where he had a car waiting for him. He knew, of course, that American intel would be tracking an Israeli plane, so Ehud managed to let it be known that it was a vacation flight to the Finger Lakes region for some of their people.
After getting his car, Jack had parked it and then walked until he found a used-car lot with an older Ford that seemed to be in good running condition. He paid cash for it and used one of his fake IDs to make the purchase. If the intel services were tracking his rental car, which he assumed they were, that would break the link with a dead end, at least for a time.
Jack had been in a hurry to get to Milford Falls and find Angela Constantine, so he had filled his new car with gas and driven the rest of the way without stopping.
All he had with him was a protein bar and a bottle of water that he’d picked up at the gas station. Now that he was waiting for Angela to come out, he didn’t want to leave to go get something more to eat, so he ate the bar slowly to make it last.
He briefly considered using the time to go see Sally Constantine, but his experience told him that Angela was the one he needed to talk to, and he feared losing contact with her.
After having seen her eyes, he knew beyond a shadow of doubt that she was the one.
He didn’t know if she might get off work any moment, or not until the bar closed. He had the truck she drove in sight so that he wouldn’t miss her leaving. He was determined to stay there until she came out.
A little after 1:00 a.m. she finally emerged from the bar and walked toward her truck. The bar was still open and the lot had about two dozen customer cars still there. Jack got out of his car and made his way toward her pickup.
She saw him coming. She’d seen him the first moment she came out of Barry’s Place, but that was okay because he wanted her to see him. He didn’t want to look like some psycho trying to sneak up on her.
As she reached her truck, he walked up on the passenger side so she would feel safer with the truck between them. He knew that a woman who was this attractive, and dressed the way she did in those shorts and boots, undoubtedly had to deal with guys hitting on her all the time.
She glared at him from the other side of the truck. “I thought I told you to get lost.”
Jack held up a hand in confession. “You did. Look, Miss Constantine, I’ve come a long way to speak with you. Just let me show you one photo—one—and then if you still want me to leave, I will. I swear.”
“Not interested,” she said as she unlocked her truck.
He spread his hands to show her that he wasn’t holding a weapon. “Just one photo, that’s all. I’ll stand over here, and you can stay over there, and I’ll slide it across the hood of your truck so you can look at it.”
She watched him with those eyes that had him sweating. “Why? What is this photo supposed to tell me? That I should go out dancing with you?”
Jack couldn’t help smiling at the way she’d put it. “No. I’m not trying to get you to go out with me. I’m not hitting on you, I swear. Just take a look at it, okay? This is really important.”
Her steady gaze was still locked on him. “Important to who? To you, or to me?”
“Just look at it, would you, please?” He hated the way he sounded like he was begging. But he supposed he was.
She let out a deep breath and stepped from the driver’s door to the opposite side of the hood of her truck from where Jack stood waiting.
“And once I look at this photo, then will you leave me the hell alone?”
Jack nodded his sincerity. “If you want me to, yes.”
“All right. Show me this super duper special fucking photo.”
Jack pulled the photo out of his shirt pocket. It had been printed on photo paper from a negative. Only a photo printed on photo paper from a negative would work for people with the ability he now knew Angela had. Any other kind of digital photo or electronic representation lost some essential quality that they would otherwise be able to see in a killer’s eyes. Those other types of photos were useless for Jack’s work.
For a person with Angela’s ability to recognize a killer, if she couldn’t see him in person, then the photo had to be a photo printed on photo paper from a real negative.
Jack set the photo down on the hood of the truck, turned it to face toward Angela, and with two fingers carefully slid it toward her across the gray-primer hood of her truck.
Angela finally took her eyes off him just long enough to lean in a little and glance down at the photo.
He didn’t think she had looked at it for a full second when she twisted her arm back and in a lightning-fast move came back up with a gun. Before he knew it, she had it pointed right between his eyes. The click he had heard was the safety coming off as the weapon came out of her holster.
Jack froze.
Even more disturbing, that gun had a suppressor. By how steady the weapon was in her hands, he had no doubt that she knew how to use it. Her first finger wasn’t resting along the side of the slide, which would have been somewhat less alarming, but was instead on the trigger. One twitch and he would be dead.
This stunningly gorgeous young woman was more than she at first appeared. A lot more.
Slowly, not making any fast moves, Jack put his hands up.
“Where is he,” she hissed. “Tell me where I can find him.”
This girl was a live hand grenade wrapped in a lollipop shell.
Without realizing it, he had just pulled the pin.
FORTY-SEVEN
Jack tried to keep his voice calm. “What do you see, Miss Constantine, when you look at this photo? When you look at his eyes?”
“Where is he!” she screamed.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find him myself. That’s why I wanted you to look at the photo. I was hoping you might be able to help.” Jack kept his hands up, hoping she wouldn’t shoot him. He wasn’t entirely confident of that. “Do you know this man?”
“No, I’ve never seen him before.”
Jack let one hand come down just enough to gesture toward the photo lying in front of her on the hood of the truck. “Miss Constantine, can you tell me what you see when you look at this man?”
“What are you, some kind of fucking cop?”
“No. I’m not any kind of cop, or anything like that. Please, tell me what you saw when you looked at the photo of this man?”
She still had her gaze, as well as her gun, locked on him. It was pointed right between his eyes and rock-solid steady. When he shifted his weight to the other foot, the gun barrel tracked that minimal movement without the slightest deviation from its target.
“Please, Miss Constantine, what did you see when you looked at him?”
“That man is a killer.”
“Are you sure?”
She glared at him a moment before speaking. “When he was still in his teens, he had a girlfriend, Zahra. She had long, straight black hair. He called her his little princess. One day she went to visit relatives. He thought she was visiting a lover. He found her cutting through an alley on her way home. He called her a whore. He hit her in the face and threw her on the ground. He straddled her and hit her with his fists as she begged him to stop. The begging excited him. He picked up a brick and used it to pound her face as hard as he could. He didn’t stop until her head was smashed flat in a puddle of bone and brains and blood.
“Then he spotted an old man nearby who had been sleeping in the alley under some cardboard. Th
e old man was horrified. Enraged that someone had seen what he had done, he found a piece of scrap metal, held the old man down with a knee on his chest, and used the piece of metal to gouge out the old man’s eyes, then he strangled him to death.
“That night in the alley he learned that killing was more exciting than anything he had ever done. It made him feel powerful.
“After he was grown, and had killed several more times, he grew bored of the place where he had been born, so he traveled to Jordan. He found that he liked the nomadic lifestyle, traveling as he wished with money he took from victims. He killed an entire household in Jordan because he could see that the husband knew him for what he was. He killed them all—father, mother, grandmother, two children. He held them captive the entire night, every hour or two he started cutting on another one of them before slicing their throats. He likes bloody kills, like that first time with Zahra, who he thought was a whore and had betrayed him.
“He killed eleven members of the Maarouf family in Egypt. The mother could recognize him as a killer by looking into his eyes, just as he could look into her eyes and see her ability. He tied them up, and then bashed in their skulls with a hammer. One at a time. The children first. He likes to hear people scream in terror. They lived in an apartment over a nightclub, so that night no one heard those screams.
“He killed a woman in Germany—an immigrant. He could tell by her eyes that she could see the truth about him, just as I can. She had long black hair. She reminded him of Zahra, his first love he thought had cheated on him. Her name was Ibadah. He raped her first, stabbed out her eyes, cut out her tongue—while she was still alive.
“He made it last because it had been a while since he had killed and he was hungry to do it again. He finally cut her throat. When he was done carving on her to see what she was made of, to see if she was really Zahra, his first love, inside someone else’s body come to taunt him, he threw the remains off a high bank into a river.
“It Italy, he tracked down a man he had seen. He had recognized that same, rare ability in the man’s eyes. He went to the man’s house in a bad neighborhood of Naples where there is a lot of crime, and played a recording of a baby crying outside the door. When a woman, Camilla, heard it, she thought it might be her granddaughter. She was frightened for the little girl’s safety. When she opened the door, without knowing it, she let death itself into her house. Her daughter was in a back room with the little girl. He slaughtered the whole family.”
“Do you know their last name?”
“Constantine.”
The hair on the back of Jack’s neck had stood up on end. The blood had drained from his face as he’d listened.
The Mossad had known some of it, but not nearly all of it. The intelligence agencies hadn’t even known about some of those killings, much less suspected Cassiel. They also hadn’t known, of course, what drove him to kill.
He was one of those super-predators who hunted people with the ability to recognize him as a killer.
Jack knew that the ability to recognize killers was a product of evolution, as was the ability of some killers to in turn recognize those individuals. He had theorized that the process of evolution would eventually produce people who could see into the minds of killers, see what they had done. Kate had proven his theory correct.
But Angela had taken it to an entirely new level. With Angela, he was in uncharted waters. He was looking into the eyes of a new evolutionary step.
He was looking into the eyes of a different kind of human.
He finally mustered the courage to ask. “Anyone else?”
“Lots.”
“Anyone in particular stand out to you?”
The gun stayed steadily locked between his eyes as tears started running down her face. Her jaw trembled. Her voice came in a painful whisper.
“He killed my grandparents. Vito and Gabriella Constantine.”
Jack ached at seeing her obvious pain. “I’m so sorry.”
“Tell me where I can find him!”
He opened his hands. “I don’t know. That’s the truth. I’m looking for him, too.”
“Why?”
“Among other reasons, to keep him from killing you.”
“Who is he?”
“His name is Cassiel Aykhan Corekan. He is a very dangerous man.”
“No shit.”
“Miss Constantine, I came here to help you. We’re on the same side. I wouldn’t be here if we weren’t. I’m trying to stay a step ahead of Cassiel to stop him from killing again, from killing innocent people, from killing you.”
“You didn’t come here just to save my ass. You came here for some other reason. What do you want from me?”
“Do you really need to keep that gun pointed at me?”
“You’ve killed people. A lot of people. You usually use two small knives. You have one in each back pocket. You favor cutting their carotid artery so that they lose consciousness quickly and die shortly after. Simple and quick. There have been times when you’ve had to cut tendons to cripple them, first, and then go for another artery, like the femoral artery. Do you want me to tell you their names?”
“No,” he said quietly. He swallowed back the anguish. “I don’t need you to tell me their names.”
“You’re a lot faster at killing than most people would believe possible. That’s why I have a gun pointed at you.”
Jack knew this woman was not playing games. He suspected that if he lied to her, she would know that, too.
“There have been people, good people, innocent people, that I wanted to protect. People who couldn’t protect themselves. People who were afraid—terrified. People like those Cassiel murdered. I killed those murderers to stop them from killing any more innocent people. If you can see in my eyes those I killed, then you must know I’m telling the truth that they needed killing. Despite what some would say, I really don’t think that’s wrong. Do you?”
After staring at him for a long moment, she finally clicked on the safety and raised the barrel away from him, holding the gun up against her right shoulder, pointed skyward.
“No. That’s not wrong at all.”
Some of the tension went out of his muscles. He sagged just a little with relief. He was relieved, too, to see her finally holster the weapon at the small of her back.
“There are a lot of things I’m unsure of, things I’m trying to find out to help me keep innocent people from being murdered,” he told her. “I think you might be able to help me. In fact, you already have with part of it by recognizing what kind of man Cassiel really is just by looking at his photograph.”
The fury seemed to have drained out of her voice. “I’ve never had that kind of reaction just from looking at a photo.”
He wondered if she had ever seen real killers and had a similar reaction.
“Well, that’s part of why I’m here—to help you understand all of this. I’m hoping that you in turn can help me understand some things.”
She looked back over her shoulder when she heard the bouncer call her name.
He trotted across the lot and came to a stop beside her. “You?” he said, glaring at Jack. “I thought I told you to leave her alone.”
Angela put her arm out to stop him from going around the front of the truck to confront Jack.
“It’s all right, Nate.”
“It is? Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He leaned closer to look at her face. “You’ve been crying.”
“No, it’s not that,” she said as she pulled a tissue from her pocket and quickly wiped off the mascara running down her face. “It’s the smoke in there from that jerk’s cigar. It made my eyes burn and they’re watering, that’s all. Thanks for letting me know that it’s running my mascara.”
He didn’t look to believe her. “Angela, I don’t—”
She put a hand on his shoulder as she smiled at Jack. “He’s someone I haven’t seen in a very long time. It’s kind of dark back in the b
ar, so I just didn’t recognize him, especially with the smoke burning my eyes, that’s all.”
Nate still didn’t look convinced. “Really? What’s his name?”
Jack realized he hadn’t told her. He immediately stretched over the hood of the truck to extend his hand. “Hi. I’m Jack Raines. I knew Angela from before. When she was younger.”
Nate shook the hand. “You don’t look that much older than Angela.”
Jack grinned. “Why thank you. Aren’t you kind.”
Angela looked from Jack’s eyes back to her knight in shining armor. “Thanks, Nate. But everything is fine.” She put a hand against his chest. “Why don’t you go back in and watch out for the other girls. I’ve had a long day. I just want to go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Nate finally gave in. “Sure. Nice to meet you, Jack.” He turned toward the bar but then turned back. “Sorry about before.” He flicked a hand toward the bar. “You know, in there. Before Angela realized she knew you.”
Jack flashed him a smile. “Forget about it.”
“Smooth,” she said to Jack once Nate had disappeared back inside.
Jack turned his attention back to Angela.
“Look, Miss Constantine, there are a number of serious things I need to talk to you about. I don’t think we have a lot of time.”
She continued to appraise him for a moment. “All right. Get in the truck. I can at least hear you out. But you have to promise me, first, that the minute you find out where Cassiel is, you’ll tell me.”
“Deal,” Jack said as he opened the passenger door.
FORTY-EIGHT
Closing the doors to the truck shut out of lot of the harsh light from the streetlamp. With the sounds from outside also shut out, she didn’t have to talk very loud to be heard.
“All right, this is your chance. Talk.”
“Listen, Miss Constantine—”
“You said you weren’t a cop.”
Not knowing her point, he paused. “I’m not.”
“Then stop calling me ‘Miss Constantine,’ would you? Only the fucking police call me ‘Miss Constantine.’ If you’re not with the police, then who do you work for?”