Half-Past Dawn

CHAPTER 37

As they continued north on the Saw Mill Parkway, Jack tried to wrap his head around the fact that the items before him belonged to Toulouse, a man he had contact with not even a week earlier. Jack at once knew the necklace was not some token gesture by the UN but something far different. When Joy had researched him, it was in the context of the UN Peace Council and its mission, with no possible connection to Cristos.

Jack knew now who killed Mia’s priest, the man he knew as Toulouse. It was Cristos, his son. He had revealed to Jack on the roof of the highrise whom the contents of the box belonged to. Jack knew how desperate he was to possess the case and knew the man would stop at nothing, even patricide, to gain it. All of the pieces fell together.

As Jack continued to ponder the implications of the Cotis priest’s identity, he turned his focus to the other items before him. He put aside the prayer necklace and picked up the bejeweled dagger, ornate and deadly, its hilt covered in rubies and sapphires that glimmered under the lights of the highway. There were the two red prayer books, which, according to Griffin, held secrets and answers to mysteries that many desired to gain. But Jack’s eyes were drawn to something else, two drawings, incredibly lifelike.

Jack picked up the first, and his world began to spin.

“Jack, I know this isn’t the time, but if we’re to help you find Mia, we need to know what we don’t know. What aren’t you telling us? What are all those things?” Frank pointed to the object in Jack’s lap. “You go running off into the Tombs with this Cristos, leaving me not only to try and figure out where you are but to save your ass… twice, I might add. Then the cancer bombshell gets dropped in our laps, we overlook the insane-asylum thingy-”

“Pull over,” Jack said quietly.

“What?” Joy said. “No, we don’t have time to-”

“Pull over!”

Joy threw the wheel hard right onto the shoulder, locking up the brakes in an angry skid stop.

Jack leaped out of the car.

Frank threw open his door in a fit of rage. “What the hell was that all about?”

“You think I know what’s going on?” Jack shouted.

“More than I do!” Frank yelled back.

Jack yanked up his sleeve, pointing at his tattoo. “I think we’ve got this all wrong. I think we are being played. I don’t know how. I don’t know who’s pulling the strings, but there is a bigger picture here that we are not seeing.”

“What are you talking about it?”

“These items that Mia so desperately wanted hidden away… the murder she was investigating-the man is Cristos’s father.”

“You sure?”

“The necklace that Joy mentioned before, the one I gave to Mia, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was sent to me by the same man, this Marijha Toulouse.

“OK, as much as that is freaking you out, at least now we’ve got something to sink our teeth into.”

“I think we know only what people want us to know. As I said, we’re being played.” Jack reached back into the car and pulled out the two drawings.

“Played by whom?”

“Explain to me how this was in the case at least two days ago.” Jack shoved the first drawing into Frank’s face.

“What the hell?” Frank said as he backed up, annoyed by the closeness of the image. He glared at Jack before finally turning his attention back to what he now realized was a picture. His eyes slowly focused on a drawing, done in ink and charcoal pencil by an expert hand. The detail was intricate and refined, as if replicating a photograph. It was an outdoor scene, nighttime, a rushing river under a dark, cloud-ridden sky, and then he saw the body, the face pale, still, eyes open yet devoid of life. There was a bullet wound in the upper left chest. The face was dotted in small wounds, the hair and the clothes soaked.

An impossible drawing that predated its subject.

When Jack’s eyes first fell on the drawing, he shrugged it off. As the DA, he had received countless threats on an almost weekly basis. Whether by phone, by letter, or in person, they were always turned over to the police and found to be nothing more than attempts at intimidation. So, when he saw the image, even though he was shocked at the detail, at the near-photographic realism of the depiction, his reaction was minimal. He understood how it must have disturbed Mia, seeing him depicted as dead, understood how it scared her. He had not once told her of the numerous threats he had received. He never wanted to worry her, much in the same way that she minimized the dangers of her own job.

But when he looked closer, his mind exploded in a wave of disorientation. For the image drawn days early and sealed away in Mia’s box depicted him in the exact condition he was in early that morning, lying on the riverbank, a bullet in his chest, the cuts on his face, a spot-on match down to the smallest detail. It was as if the hand of fate had rendered him on the canvas, as if everything that transpired the night before was his destiny.

He was a pawn, or at least Alice chasing the rabbit down the hole.

He studied the picture again, its exacting detail down to the clothes he wore, the rushing river that lapped the bank. And that’s when he saw the shadow. It was next to him, faint yet distinct. Whoever had drawn the picture with foresight, with an attention to exacting detail, they were sure to include the singular shadow… there was someone else there.

Jack didn’t believe in fate; he didn’t believe in God or the hereafter. He didn’t believe in magic, ghosts, answered prayers, or superstitious mumbo jumbo. Yet this day had thrown it all into question. He refused to believe it, and so he cast the facts aside and focused on Mia.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Frank said. “This is some trick. Cristos must have slipped it into the case to mess with your head.”

“He never had the case; no one has touched the case since I put it down in the Tombs two days ago, before I was shot, before I crashed through the guardrail and awoke on the riverbank.”

Frank stared at Jack, lost for words before finally realizing. “You didn’t make us pull over to show us this picture. What the hell is going on?”

Jack held out the second drawing. Frank stared at it but didn’t touch it, as if doing so would somehow render it real.

What troubled Jack far more than the fateful image of himself was the one in the second drawing. The picture was of a beach, the first rays of morning peeking over the horizon; gulls hung suspended in the air, scampered along the sand in search of food; gentle waves lapped the sandy shore. And on the rocks was a woman’s shattered body. Jack felt his heart crumble in his chest. No doubt drawn by the same hand, it was a depiction of the future in much the way Jack’s image had been rendered. But this picture drew everything Jack was doing into question, casting doubt on his chances of success, of ever saving his wife. For the picture of the dead woman was of Mia, her lifeless body awash in the first light of dawn.

• • •

“Cristos said that our lives are preordained, that certain people within his religion can remember the future in the same way we remember the past.”

“Bullshit,” Frank said from the passenger seat. They were back in the car, heading north, with Joy at the wheel.

“I agree,” Jack said. “But then how do you explain the drawing of me?”

“Why do I need to explain it?”

“If there’s truth to them, then Mia will die at dawn tomorrow.”

“I don’t believe that. The picture of you on the riverbank, what do you see?”

“I see me lying dead on the riverbank.”

“But are you?”

“The newspaper said it-”

“But you’re not, and neither will Mia be if we find her. So let’s keep focused on that instead of all this mysterious magic bullshit. Cristos filled your head with nonsense. Quit dwelling on the words of a psychopath. It’s making you sound crazy.”

Jack said nothing, letting his friend’s words sink in. They finally did, and he smiled.

“No offense, Jack,” Frank said, “but the FBI and Cristos weren’t after those drawings of you and Mia. Not to downplay them, but they are not the earth-shattering type that conspiracies are built around.”

Jack nodded. “No, they were after these.” He held up the two red books, handing one to Frank. “Prayer books.”

“Prayer books?” Frank said as he looked through it. “Why the hell would they be after prayer books?”

Jack leaned over the car seat and opened the book. He took a bottle of water out of the cupholder and poured it on a napkin. He rubbed it on the first page, and the prayers disappeared, replaced by elegant handwriting, small and detailed

“How the hell did you know how to do that?”

Each notation was short, and there were thousands of them. Jack kept wetting the napkin, thumbing through the pages, until he came near the end, where he found a missing page, its shredded edge still bound within the book. He looked back and noticed the last date on the page before it was June 23, the week before. Whatever was missing contained pages either written about the present or blank for future entries. But as Jack turned to the next page, he saw that notations had already been made for the next week. He flipped back to the torn section.

“Whatever was written here was torn out for a reason,” Jack said, not looking up from the book. “Someone didn’t want anyone to see these missing pages.”

Jack flipped forward, looking at dates for the next week, and as he scanned the last notation, he was suddenly shocked. There was a name he recognized, completely out of context with everything else on the page. And while the language was Cotis, there was no question of the anglicized name appearing in the text: Mia Keeler.

“What the hell is this?” Jack said, turning the page toward Joy.

“Oh, God,” Joy said, glancing over at the book before looking back at the road.

“What the hell does it say?”

“I’ll see if I can find Professor Adoy,” Joy said as she looked at her watch. “But at this late hour…”

“Why would her name be in this book?”

“Guys,” Frank said. He wet the napkin and rubbed the pages of the second book in his lap.

Joy and Jack turned their attention to the second book. Frank was flipping pages, rubbing the wet cloth on them as he went, revealing Cotis text, but the page he was currently on revealed English.

“Oh, boy,” Frank mumbled.

It was all in a similar fashion, but they understood it. Small notations, dates in the corner, and they went on and on, five, ten, twenty pages.

As they continued to read, they began to realize why the FBI and the U.S. government were after this book. It contained every job that Cristos had done, every assassination, every bombing, every act committed on behalf of people and governments whose world image would be tarnished by such allegations.

As they read, they found several jobs engaged by offshore companies for which Jack knew the dots could eventually be connected back home. But on the last page, it seemed that Cristos connected those dots himself, for anyone who read the red book would find written a list of five names. Jack, Frank, and Joy knew them all; each one filled them with ever-escalating shock: a member of the Justice Department; a high-level FBI agent; two Cabinet-level positions in the current administration. And the final name-none of them would voice it, as it filled them all with confusion.

Jack understood where Cristos’s help came from and why he had certain members of the U.S. government at his beck and call, for the imcriminating evidence would doom not only careers but lives for acts of treason.

He understood how Cristos’s execution was a staged event of subterfuge, how he was just a pawn in prosecuting an assassin in a trial whose outcome was preordained by people pulling strings for show. Jack understood how Cristos managed to get the assistance of certain members of the FBI and the Justice Department in protecting him. If they didn’t act on his precise instructions, he threatened exposure; they had danced with the devil and had become his minions.

This book, the one with more than half of its entries in English, was not being sought for national security, as leverage against other nations who had illicitly engaged Cristos; it was being sought by a select few who were operating on their own within the confines of the U.S. government-arranging hits, assassinations, and who knew what in the name of national security while standing in the face of the constitution and laws of the United States.

And those select few, those five, were listed.

Jack was on his way to the first person on that list, someone who knew where Cristos was holding Mia, someone who would tell him even if he had to resort to unthinkable means.

He personally knew FBI Director Lance Warren; he was with him Thursday night, trading handshakes and smiles. There was no doubt he had sent Cristos’s men after him when they left the party. CIA Director Stuart Turner’s success in dealing with foreign governments and hostile adversaries was now clear. And if Jack was to survive this ordeal, he would pay a visit to FBI Agent Gene Tierney and see to it that he was convicted and made to suffer for the rest of his days.

But it was the fifth and final name that gave him pause, that none of them mentioned, that Jack couldn’t understand its presence on the list. And it caused him the most fear. For that name was Jack Keeler.

Tierney walked out of the Tombs humbled and humiliated. He had lain strapped to the bed for fifteen minutes, struggling with the leather bindings, before the nurse came in to free them. The two men he assigned to guard the room had left two minutes before him after being debriefed.

No one saw anything. Bullshit. Everyone saw everything. They just weren’t going to cooperate.

Tierney had simply followed orders, orders he didn’t agree with, but that’s what agents did all the time. Once someone didn’t follow orders, the entire system would crumble.

Tierney climbed into his white Mercedes. It was his one indulgence, a gift from his wife, who was the real breadwinner, toiling away her days on Madison Avenue creating ad campaigns for sneakers, soda, and erectile dysfunction medication. He started up the car and let Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Number 21 wash away his everrising stress.

He pulled out of the garage and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge, noticing how the bright lights of the city gave it a false sense of innocence.

Although he was told not to contact Warren, the circumstances demanded it. He tried six times but still had received no answer. The lower level of the Tombs was littered with bodies, and although he made the accusation that it was Jack’s doing, there was little doubt that Cristos had lost control of the situation.

Cristos wasn’t looking for the evidence case for them; he couldn’t care less if anyone’s secret agendas were laid bare. Something else was in that box, something far worse that had made Cristos desperate, that had made him scared. And in Tierney’s mind, there could be nothing worse than a scared, desperate assassin.

Tierney hit the Brooklyn Bridge. It was virtually empty, the city masses having already escaped for the long weekend. He looked to his right out at New York Harbor, at the Statue of Liberty, whose lit torch was held up in welcome.

And as he turned to look back at the roadway, the fabric of the night was shredded by an enormous fireball that rolled up high into the sky, the explosion tearing Tierney and his white Mercedes to shreds.