Half-Past Dawn

CHAPTER 34

Frank had spent the last hour chasing down every friend, contact, and enemy he had in the New York City Police Department to find where Jack had been taken. He had lost Jack once he exited his car with the Suburban in pursuit. They had both disappeared up 48th Street.

Frank thought of taking up the chase on foot, but Jack was long gone, and he knew he would have no chance of finding him. He quickly set to work changing his front left tire, which the men in the Suburban had shot out, finishing in pit-stop time of two minutes. He was thankful for his intense workouts and large forearms as he muscled through the process but admitted that he felt his age as he climbed back into the car with an ache in his back and a sore shoulder. He had quickly started up the car and headed up 48th Street, where Jack had disappeared. He imagined that he sought refuge within the sea of tourists who prowled Broadway on a Friday night, a far better place to hide than in some isolated hole in the wall.

He raced west toward Seventh Avenue and couldn’t believe his eyes as he saw Jack carried out of on office building by three cops. Unconscious, his weight taxing the young police officers, he was stuffed into the back of a police cruiser and sped out of there. Frank took up pursuit and was quickly foiled by the slow-moving traffic out of Times Square, but the cop car managed to bob, weave, and vanish to who knows where. He flipped on his scanner, but there was no mention of the goings-on on West 48th Street. Frank knew that Jack was under VIP care, radio silence on whatever had happened, allowing the officers and the department to sort through what to do with the arrest of the city’s DA.

Frank had called in favors, had called in chits, had called upon captains and rookies, but no one had heard even a rumor about Jack being arrested. There was fractional chatter about an occurrence at the Tombs, but that was being handled by the FBI, where Frank knew he wouldn’t be afforded even a pleasantry. He had called out to Riker’s Island but knew that they would never take Jack there, into the heart of the enemy, whose population would flay the skin from Jack’s body before he was even placed in a cell. He called the central jail at the Tombs, but no one had been brought in during the last hour even anonymously. Frank headed downtown and circled back to the entrance to the Tombs, where he found the FBI poring over the lobby, dusting for prints, noting and cataloguing the bullet slugs and the scars they’d left in the marble walls and floors. Frank couldn’t believe what he saw and was amazed that Jack had made it out of there alive. He had searched for Larry Knoll but was told Larry was being debriefed by the FBI at a different location. The wall of silence on the matter was impenetrable.

He had been so furious with Jack for leaving him, for slipping into the Tombs. He had no idea what prompted Jack’s singular drive to get downstairs without him or any real idea of what had happened. He had only glimpsed the mythical box that Jack had spoken of, as he clung tightly to it while they raced up the FDR. And he did not get even a glimpse of its contents, let alone a mention of what was inside.

Frank was loved and respected by the NYPD, both top brass and lowly rookies, but he wasn’t about to get any information from his former colleagues; no one knew a thing. He had been a cop for twenty-five years. Even though he’d retired, he still considered himself one and would until they day he died. He thought back on his career and similar situations-the arrests of movies stars, the senator from Arkansas found unconscious at the Four Seasons with his battered wife next to him, and the incident twenty years ago involving the former mayor’s son, the underage girl, needles, and guns. He thought about each situation and the embarrassment it created, not just for the individual but for law enforcement, the country, and the city administration, all of whom sought legal, PR, and practical advice before informing the media and the world of a respected and loved VIP going off the rails. And the pieces fell into place…

Frank knew where Jack was.

Jack lay on the riverbank, his body broken and wet, the sound of the rushing river heavy in his ear, his body and mind enveloped by the darkness of night. Moonlight danced off the muddy shore, the wet leaves of the surrounding woods. And there was a presence beside him. The man who had emerged from the woods, cloaked in the shadows of night, knelt behind his head, just beyond the periphery of his vision.

An incredible pain coursed through Jack’s body, his head pounded, his face was dotted with multiple stings, his chest throbbed on the left side, and his torso felt as if a vise was closing around it.

And a voice rose, a quiet chanting, a prayer uttered in the soft whispers of a foreign tongue. But somehow, despite the fact that he spoke no language beyond English, Jack understood the words that poured from the man’s mouth.

“In between life and death, between the deepest dark of night and the first rays of dawn, in that moment where we begin to drift up from sleep to wakefulness, is where anything is possible, Jack.”

The man reached over and drew Jack’s naked arm to him. Under the rays of moonlight, the man withdrew a quill from his pocket, a bottle of ink from the other. He dipped the quill in the dark brown ink and began to write. His hand was that of an artist, his focus and demeanor those that of a wise man.

“You can still save her, Jack,” the man whispered as he wrote, “but time is slipping away and will soon fall through your fingers, where all will be forever lost.”

Jack’s eyes flashed open, and he desperately tried to recapture the fading thread of the dream, trying to hold on to the answers that floated up from his memory while he slept. He lay in the hospital bed, the strap around his chest reaffixed, his arms tethered back down. He was filled with such agony, such grief, such confusion.

Everything he held as reality had slipped away. Mia was everything, his better half, his lover, his best friend, and she was dead.

He reviewed the last fifteen hours in his mind, every conversation, every action he took. It had all seemed so real. Talking to Jimmy Griffin… he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t have been an imposter. He had not set Jack up. He was her friend. He didn’t lead him down some rabbit hole. He merely said that her salvation lay with the fate of the evidence case.

And Cristos, he was not some illusion, some spirit come back to haunt him. He was flesh and blood. The bullets were real, not dreamed. Jack would not go off randomly shooting his way into the Tombs. He wouldn’t have killed Charlie or shot some innocents. He had seen death at his own hand in the past. It was what had brought him to law and away from guns. He wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.

But above all, it was Mia’s voice that rang in his ear. He had spoken to her from Cristos’s car. It wasn’t imagined. It was not the wishful thinking of a grieving man. He heard her desperation, her surprise at his being alive.

He had known Ryan for too many years to count; he had always been a good friend, someone he could always count on. He couldn’t imagine him lying to him, making up some elaborate story. But was he, too, being manipulated? Was he drawing conclusions off facts that he couldn’t possibly verify himself in such short order? Had he fallen into the trap of being fed information that could only lead to one conclusion? Jack couldn’t imagine his friend toying with him. He had seen Ryan’s pain when Ryan told him of his cancer diagnosis; he had seen his agony at seeing Jack tied to the bed. And above all, Ryan was not one to fake tears or grief at the loss of a friend’s wife at the behest of the FBI. Ryan believed everything he told Jack… and Ryan believed he was crazy.

He and Emily had left the room to consult further on Jack’s “condition” and “illusions,” leaving him alone for the last ten minutes, which felt more like ten hours.

They never explained how Mia died, simply implying that she died in the car accident, but he had seen her kidnapped, driven away. Or had he? Everything was so murky. Had his mind played tricks on him? Had he blocked out what he had seen, suppressed the tragedy of her death? Had she been lying there next to him on the riverbank, or was she drowned in the car only to be washed downstream? Had her death been the impetus for his insanity, for some desperate act within a reality of his own making? Did a crazy man ever know he was crazy, or did he simply create his own reality?

And he thought about the parallels to Cristos. Was it coincidence that he, too, had risen from the afterlife? Both had been declared dead: Jack by the newspaper, Cristos by the coroner. The world, in both cases, was convinced of their passing only to have them walk the earth again. Had his current state of mind been brought about by Cristos’s prophetic statement of death not being the end, the implications being that he couldn’t die? Could Jack’s mind have truly snapped, creating this elaborate scenario all in order to do what he had failed to do: save the woman he loved?

Jack looked at his bandaged arm. It wasn’t injured as the nurse had said; the mehndi tattoo was real, his visit to Professor Adoy was real… the warning of death to come tomorrow at dawn was…

If he could somehow tear away the bandage, see the tattoo once more, it would be the anchor that could pull him back to reality, that could give his mind the footing it so desperately needed now. It could wipe away any and all doubt. For if the elaborate tattoo was there, it meant that someone had been with him after the accident and had saved him, that it wasn’t all a figment of his imagination. It meant that he was being lied to, a cog in some conspiracy in much the same way as the system was manipulated to keep Cristos alive.

He pulled at his restraints, his arms straining with the effort, but it was to no avail. There had to be a way. He looked to the door, pondering escape. There were so many barriers in his way-FBI, police, building security-insurmountable obstacles, but so had been stealing the case from the basement of the Tombs.

But the biggest barrier was the fragility of his mind.

If it was a choice between an insane existence where Mia was alive or a reality where she had perished, he would simply choose the madness. And that sudden thought terrified him. Had he already made that decision subconsciously?

Hope was lost. It was lost for him, for his two girls, for Mia. And it was bone-crushing. To be faced with death by cancer was one thing. To have your body fail, as tragic as it was, was part of life. But to have your mind slip away, to have your wife ripped from existence, to leave your children alone in the world, was far more devastating, for there was nothing to cling to, nothing to give a glimmer of optimism, nothing but a forever night where the sun would never rise again.

He looked again at his arm and the thick white bandage. He just needed to see. What had once brought him confusion and panic could give him the one thing he would need. For if it was there, then, truths could be washed away, minds could be brought back to sanity, and Mia, despite everything he had been told, could be brought back to life.

All Jack needed was a little hope.

F RANK AND J OY rode up the elevator to the fifth floor of the Tombs. Joy had spent the last several hours poring over the old case files on Cristos while cross-referencing them with the information on Cotis from Professor Adoy and the note of appreciation Jack had received with the blue necklace from the Cotis government. Hoping for some kind of link or clue, she found none.

As they emerged from the cab, they were greeted by the security desk officer, who sat behind thick bulletproof glass similar to the setup in the evidence room. Nolan Ludeke was at the end of a double shift, a shift that brought tragic surprises that he could never have anticipated.

Frank had known him for too many years to count, since back when Nolan was on the street. He had always spoken of retiring, moving to Florida with his wife, to be closer to his kids, but as that fateful day approached, Nolan realized that work was his life, and if work stopped, how far behind would the end of his life be? So he regrouped. His years of service and his reputation gave him the inside track on a job with little to no stress that would alleviate the forever fears of his wife getting that 3:00 a.m. call of death in the line of duty.

“Frank,” Nolan said in a warm greeting, buzzing him and Joy through.

“Hey,” Frank said as he walked through the heavy metal door, which closed with a thud behind him. “We’re here to see Jack.”

Nolan looked at the two. “I don’t know. He’s down the hall, the feds have two posted outside his door, and they’ve labeled him a suicide watch.”

“This still is under our jurisdiction, correct?”

“Come on, Frank, semantics.”

“What can you tell me?”

“They brought him in an hour ago. He was in rough shape, out cold. Tucked him in a psych room. A nurse patched him up. A couple of doctors came in, evaluated him, and declared him nuts. A hot-shot FBI guy has been all over this thing. I heard whispers of all kinds of mayhem downstairs on sub five, but no one will confirm a thing. The rumor is it’s not hard to connect Keeler to it, though that seems so wrong. I heard the guy was killed last night in a car accident along with his wife, but then he shows up here. Whole thing seems crazier than that mess years back with the mayor’s son.”

“We need to see him,” Joy said.

Nolan looked between the two. “I’ve got no problem with you seeing him. He’s a good man, as far as I’m concerned. Of course, getting past Tweedledum and Tweedledee may prove difficult.”

“Who else from the feds is up here?”

“Tierney, deputy director of the New York office. He commandeered an office down the hall, haven’t seen him in a while. I’m sure he’ll come blustering through shortly.”

“Let me ask, what kind of security you got on these rooms?”

Nolan’s eyes filled with concern. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of-”

“Nolan, relax. Just tell me.” Frank had a way about him; he was trusted and used that faith to bend people to his way of thinking. “I just need to know. You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid, particularly with Joy here.”

“The nut rooms are for nuts-nothing in there where you can hurt yourself, no long wires, cords, phones, pretty much free of everything except a bed and a bolted-down table. The doors are keylocked from the outside. No lock access on the inside, though there is a door handle. The room Keeler is in, five-oh-four, fits the bill perfectly.

“Has he had any visitors, family, an attorney?”

“No.” Nolan shook his head. “I don’t think anyone really knows he’s here. He is just anonymous patient nine-five-three-oh with no one permitted access.

“Well, I’m his friend, and I’m going to see him. Where’s this nurse?”

Nolan picked up his phone, spoke quickly, and hung up. “She’ll be right out. You’re going to cause a problem, aren’t you?”

“Nolan, I will not be breaking any laws, I promise you. But imagine if your best friend was stuck in a mental ward. Would you want to get to the bottom of it or just let him slip away into the system?”

“May I help you?”

Frank turned to see the blond nurse behind him

“I’m Susan Meeks.”

“Sue, these two are here to see Mr. Keeler.”

“He’s not to have any visitors-”

“So the only people who can have contact with him are the FBI and their doctors? Do you work for the FBI or the city of New York?”

“The city.”

“Who gave you the order not to let him see anyone?”

“Mr. Tierney.”

“Do you work for Mr. Tierney?”

“No.”

“Good, because Jack Keeler, as you know, is the DA for the city of New York. He was thought to have been killed this morning along with his wife, who is either missing or dead. He is being denied counsel, contact with his family, and all of his rights. I am his closest friend, and this here”-he pointed to Joy-“is his secretary. We are here to see him, and we will see him now unless you want to have a much larger problem that will be resolved by a judge.”

Meeks looked at Nolan.

“Frank, she’s good people. Lose the bluster.” Nolan turned to Susan. “He’s just upset. He’s doing the right thing. You can let him see Mr. Keeler.”

Susan nodded and led Frank and Joy to room 504 just down the hall.

“You know he’s very sick?” Susan said quietly.

Frank and Joy stared at her, confused.

“What kind of sick?” Joy asked.

Joy looked at them a moment. “You said you were close friends of his?”

“What kind of sick?” Frank asked, his voice stern. “We’re family. What kind of sick?”

Meeks inhaled, pausing. “He’s dying. Cancer.” Susan paused. “If you’re his friends, you should know that, because his file says he’s not dealing with it, nor has he told his wife.”

Joy looked away, trying to hold back her compounding emotions. Frank remained stoic, but the shock was visible in his eyes.

They arrived at the door to Jack’s room. Two FBI agents stood on opposite sides.

“Can we help you?” the first agent said.

“And you are?”

“Special Agent Matt Crews,” the taller agent said.

“Have you notified Jack Keeler’s family of his presence here? Have you notified anyone? Has he spoken to an attorney?”

“You need to speak to Director Tierney-”

“No, we are his family, and we are going in to see him.”

“I can’t permit that.”

“Has he been charged with a crime?”

“No.”

“Are you holding him against his will, then?”

“You need to speak to Deputy Director Tierney.”

“I don’t give a shit if you come in there with me, but I’m going to speak to the DA.” Frank nodded to the nurse, who slipped the key into the door and opened it.

Crews stepped in her way.

“You,” Frank said to Crews, “come in with me. And you,” he said to the other agent, “you go get your boss. Bring him in here to speak to me. You guys have crossed the line. You have denied this man his lawful rights, and there will be hell to pay.”

The short agent hustled off down the hall as Frank and Crews stepped into the room. Frank turned to Joy. “Get the car. If I’m not down in fifteen, go home, because I won’t be leaving here for a long time.” And he closed the door.

“Hey, Jack,” Frank said, seeing his friend bound to the bed, his eyes red and tired.

“Frank.”

“They say you’re nuts.” Frank smiled.

“I think I am.”

“Well, I’m glad you finally admitted it. Now, do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

Jack looked at him. “Yeah, but first, can you do me a favor and loosen my wrists?”

“Sure, just give me a second.”

Frank spun around, his gun drawn and aimed in Crews’s face. “Could you please kneel down?”

“They’re going to be here any second,” Crews said as he complied, putting his hands on top of his head.

“Which is why we have no time to waste.” Frank pulled out his first set of handcuffs and slapped a cuff on Crews’s right wrist. He pulled him to the other side of the bed, laid him on the floor, threaded the cuff around the bed leg, and slapped the other cuff around his left wrist. He pulled a handful of tissue from the side table and stuffed it into the agent’s mouth.

“Now, about that favor.” Frank nodded as he tore back the Velcro straps from Jack’s arms and released the strap around his chest. Jack sat up and quickly climbed out of the bed.

Without a word, he tore the layers of white bandages from his left forearm.

And he felt his heart fill with hope.

• • •

The door exploded open, and Tierney and the shorter agent, Philippe, charged in to find Jack out of the bed and standing in the corner. Philippe drew his gun as the door slammed closed behind him, but it was too late. Frank’s pistol was pressed against the back of his head.

“Either of you make a sound, he’s done,” Frank said, thwacking the agent in the back of the head with his pistol.

“What the hell, Frank?” Tierney yelled.

“What the hell, Gene?” Frank shot back. “You’ve got Keeler strapped to a bed, without counsel, family, anyone notified?”

Frank took his second set of cuffs and secured Philippe’s hands behind his back, threading the cuffs through the leg of the bed, where he was awkwardly crouched.

Frank turned his gun on Tierney and motioned him to the bed. “Get your ass in bed.”

Tierney glared at him. “You have no idea what you’re doing.”

“Oh, I have every idea what I’m doing. Now, lay the fuck down.”

Tierney complied; Jack strapped him to the bed.

“You want to tell me what’s really going on?” Jack asked as he leaned over Tierney.

“You’re insane.” Tierney struggled against his bindings.

“So I’ve heard.”

“Where is Cristos holding my wife?”

“Your wife is dead-”

Jack drew back his fist and pile-drived Tierney in the jaw. “Don’t you say that. I know she’s alive.”

“She died in the car accident,” Tierney growled. “You know it, and I know it.”

“What is the FBI so scared of? What’s in that box that you so desperately need?”

Tierney said nothing.

“Can I tell you a little secret?”

“Fuck you, you’re nuts.”

“I wanted to be caught. I knew full well where you would bring me.”

“What? That’s ridiculous.”

“You think so? You don’t think I’m fully aware of police protocol when it comes to the arrest of high-level people, when it comes to bringing in someone like a DA on charges that no one will believe? I knew I’d be brought up here to the psych ward.”

“Why would you do that? You wanted to be committed?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Jack said. “You’re good; you had me convinced, using my friend to bear your false news. Talking about all of those dead people, trying to convince me it was all in my head.”

“So you think you’re not crazy?”

“I know I’m not crazy. Now, where is Cristos holding my wife?”

“Fuck you.”

“You know why I think you’re working with Cristos? Because once I was captured, once he got what he wanted, it would be far easier to pin it all on me, to kill my wife, dump her body where it would never be found, convince me and the world that I was crazy, no trial, just lock me up in a padded room until I succumbed to the cancer.”

“That sounds like a pretty good plan,” Frank said, half joking.

“But you know what? There is something in that box that Cristos was not expecting.”

Tierney’s eyes narrowed slightly, just enough for Jack to see.

Frank thumbed through Tierney’s phone, through the names of his last twenty calls, and passed the phone to Jack. “You know this guy?”

Jack looked at the phone log, the last eight calls all to the same number, the same person. Someone Jack knew and trusted above all. “Son of a bitch.”

Cristos sat in the passenger seat of the Suburban. Josh drove at a leisurely pace so as not to draw any more attention. Cristos had raced down the stairs, his prize in hand, and exited through the back of the unfinished structure. He’d cut through the alleyways and hidden in the shadows of a parking lot while police swarmed the area searching for him. He had lain motionless, the case tucked tightly against his body, blending with the shadows. He had avoided two cops who had taken up position not thirty feet away, watching the rear of the office building, keeping focus on the alleyway, never realizing their prey lay just feet away.

Cristos slowed his heart, focused his senses, and became motionless, his mind taking on a Zen quality. He had used the technique during countless situations in which he would take up a position ten hours before his mark was to arrive, patiently lying in wait until the precise moment of pulling the trigger. He would finally rise from his position, shake off the moment, and exit the area, without cramp or ache.

It was nearly an hour later when the cops were called off, and he slipped from the garage to arrive on 47th Street, where Josh lay in wait.

Josh told him the moment he got into the car: Jack Keeler was in the mental ward of the Tombs, preliminarily diagnosed as insane, with the slaughter in the evidence room blamed on him.

Cristos felt like a child with a wrapped gift in his lap. He had maintained such a singular focus on it that everything else in the world had become secondary. He had spent months tracking down his father, tracking down what he so desperately needed, secrets he was promised but in the end had to kill for.

As they turned onto Broadway, heading downtown, Cristos was actually only two blocks from where he last saw his father.

One month ago, Cristos had realized he was following him in Istanbul. He allowed it to continue through the Middle East into Africa. After a week of cat-and-mouse, he found his father in his hotel suite in Marrakech, sitting calmly on the floor, looking out the large living-room window at the Atlas Mountains in the distance.

“You survived,” Cristos said, with no hint of emotion as he laid his briefcase on the coffee table and sat on the couch.

“Come home with me,” his father said, continuing to look out the window.

“I’m no longer your son,” Cristos reminded him.

His father sat there a moment and finally turned to look at him. “I have foreseen your death… and it is soon.”

Cristos stared back. “You are so fond of reminding me of the inevitability of fate, of the difficulty in altering its path, and yet here you sit telling me this?”

“Our will, our love, is much stronger than fate. Surely you haven’t forgotten that.”

Cristos laughed. “Really? Love is what made me who I am.”

“Then allow my love for you, my son, to save you.”

“After all this time.” Cristos shook his head in disbelief. “After all that I have done over the last twenty years…”

“Your death is soon, Suresh. It will come from where and when you least expect it.”

“Then tell me,” Cristos said. “If you are my father, if I am truly your son, then you will tell me so I can save myself.”

His father remained silent.

Cristos stared at his father and for the briefest of moments remembered what it was like to be a son, to be part of the world, to be not alone. He finally stood. “I am going to get us something to eat.”

He went to the small kitchen and set out a tray of bread and cheese. He reached into the cabinet and withdrew his gun, tucking it into the back of his waistband. He picked up the tray and returned to the living room

But his father was gone. He knew his son too well.

Cristos turned to see his briefcase on the coffee table, wide open, his papers in disarray. And with shock, Cristos realized what his father had done.

He had taken his red prayer book, the book he gave to him when he was a child. Cristos had written everything in this book, his entire life, every job, the people he contracted with, the fees he was paid, a record of every assassination.

And so Cristos turned the table on his father; the hunted became the hunter. Cristos tried to capture his father on the train to the port city of Casablanca, only to find that he had eluded him by slipping out of the country before Cristos was even aware.

He had to get his prayer book back for obvious reason. But even that paled in comparison with the obsession he felt growing inside himself, the desire to know his own fate. By knowing, he would change it, would stop it from ever happening, killing anyone and everyone remotely connected to his demise before it arrived.

Cristos knew that his father had recorded it in his own prayer book, a place where he wrote his most important prophecies, his greatest secrets, wondrous things that were not meant to be shared with the world or any living soul.

It became like a game, a deadly game, for Cristos would go to any lengths to extract from his father not only his fate but also his secrets, the grand mysteries and objects that he possessed and always carried on his person.

It was well after midnight, the past Monday, when Cristos tracked his father to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City. The suite was large, four rooms with an elegant marble bathroom provided by the Cotis government to their respected diplomat.

Cristos opened the door to see his father sitting calmly on the couch, as if in wait.

“Come back home with me,” his father said, his words filled with emotion. “Leave this world behind. It has corrupted your heart.”

“I knew from the moment I killed you that you’d survive, you with all your tricks and magic. But with all that wisdom, all that power, you couldn’t stop me,” Cristos said.

“I’m sorry for you,” his father said without reaction.

“I should have used a larger blade.” Cristos walked into the room and stood over his father. “You stole my prayer book.”

“You have corrupted it, using it for everything but what it was designed for.”

“Oh, it contains my inner thoughts, my life, painting a pretty detailed picture.”

“Of death…” his father said sadly.

“Where is your book?” Cristos said. “That’s what I want to see.”

“You do not want to know the future I have written in mine. Yours is very short.”

“Show me the book!”

“Suresh-”

“That has not been my name for more than twenty years.”

“Our identity is our heart, not what we call ourselves.”

“Return my book, and give me yours, and you’ll save yourself,” Cristos said as he drew his gun and screwed on a silencer.

“Know that in what you are about to do, you will seal your fate. You will set in motion a series of events that will end with your own death before this week is through. If you come back with me now, you will live.”

Cristos stared at his father, absorbing his words, and without further thought pulled the trigger. The bullet struck his father in the stomach, and as he collapsed on the couch, Cristos reached across and tore open his shirt, looking at his bare chest, at the wound in his stomach that began to bubble with blood.

Cristos turned to his father’s bag on the floor and rummaged through it. Beyond prayer robes and some personal effects, there was nothing there.

“Where are they?” Cristos shouted in desperation.

“You will never find them,” his father said as he held his stomach. “Soon to be placed in the hands of someone pure of heart-”

“I’ll tear the heart from their chest.”

“I’m sorry for you,” his father said through labored breaths.

Cristos searched the suite, the safe, every inch of the hotel room, but found nothing.

“Does it hurt yet?” Cristos spat out in anger. “The poison in the bullet is for two purposes: to ensure that your death is painful but, more important, to make sure this time it is permanent.”

“Know this, my son, it will not be long until we are together again.”

Now, riding in the Suburban, Cristos looked down at the case, which he felt would soon provide all the answers. Cristos finally had what he came for; he would carry out the second part of his mission without distraction and disappear from the world like a ghost, as he had done so many times before.

Cristos finally turned his attention to the small lock on the case and smashed it with the butt of his gun.

Savoring the moment, the anticipation of victory, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, knowing that he possessed the power to cheat his own death. He finally lifted the lid, his heart holding in expectation, the culmination of his quest; he dug his hand inside, and as he looked at the contents…

… he lost his mind in rage.