FORTY-SIX
Jack decided to sit in his car and wait for Angela Constantine to get off work. Now that he’d found her, he didn’t want to lose contact and have her go to ground. He’d spooked people before and then had a hell of a time reconnecting with them. Several times he had found them again only after they had been murdered.
Although they might be able to recognize them, these people, after all, didn’t know how to deal with killers.
Jack hadn’t eaten since earlier in the day and his stomach was growling. He’d slept most of the time on the Israeli diplomatic jet as it flew all night from Israel to New York, but it wasn’t a restful sleep. They went into JFK airport to clear customs and let off a couple of diplomatic staff personnel to go meet with Gilad Ben-Ami in New York City. That delegation was the cover story, anyway.
They could have gotten special diplomatic clearance and not have had to go into JFK, but Ehud thought it better if they didn’t unduly raise the suspicion of US intel that they were conducting a mission of some kind. Ehud had said that if there really was something important going on that Jack needed to investigate, then US intel could possibly become a hindrance and/or even potentially blow Jack’s cover by unmasking his identity. Such leaks and unmaskings were becoming more and more common and had already gotten several agents killed.
There were super-predators who, besides hunting people with the special ability to recognize killers, also hunted Jack. That was a big reason he stayed off the grid. If those predators could somehow find him and eliminate him, it would be far easier to kill the people he was trying to protect.
If anyone in any of the American intelligence services leaked information about Jack to the press, those predators would then have a much easier time of finding him. The press loved printing spy stories and revealing names. The consequences were unimportant to them. Some in the intel agencies wished those consequences on him and so they were only to eager to leak to the press.
There were many in the press who loved nothing more than to help get an undercover operative killed. It made them feel important. They cared more about puffing themselves up than about the lives their reckless reporting cost. On top of that, there were hundreds of thousands of people with top-secret clearances who shouldn’t have them.
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.