Half-Past Dawn (20 page)

The general was of little significance to the world order. His small jungle country had not moved much beyond colonial times, but he had grown to be a nuisance to certain countries’ national interests, with his border skirmishes with Cotis, India, and Bangladesh, military posturing, and the nationalization of private companies—nationalization being his word for personal take-over. And so certain affected parties turned to Cristos, a man with a one-hundred-percent success rate, whose face was not known to the world and whose chosen name meant “the risen ghost.”

Those who hired Cristos never imagined that he knew General Gjwain. He knew him as the ruthless, Napoleonic sadist who had killed his own family so as to inherit the family farm; he knew him as the man with not one iota of courage, military training, or experience who decorated his chest with medals of valor and bravery. Cristos knew Gjwain as the insignificant man who lived across the border not fifty miles from Cristos’s place of birth, a man who was disappearing those who disagreed with him or stood in his way.

Cristos was a man without conscience, but he thought if he ever had one, it would not be burdened by his coming actions. In fact, he considered it a magnanimous gesture to the people who shared his heritage to remove the depraved ruler. He had accepted the job at his usual rate, but it wasn’t about the money. It never was for Cristos. It was about the challenge, testing his skills, pushing his limits. In the end, if it did not raise his game, he would never accept, walking away in search of a new quest.

As the small general exited the black limo, his silver and gold medals glinting in the bright winter sun, Cristos lined up his gun sight, the cross hairs bisecting the diminutive man’s buzz-cut head. He adjusted for the three-mph cross wind and the dry winter air. He wrapped his fingers around the trigger as he had so many times before, fully exhaled, long and slow, purging his body and mind, tuning his focus. He took a half-breath, held it. And finally pulled the trigger.

Cristos rolled over into a crouch behind the parapet wall and out of sight of the world. He quickly broke down the rifle as he moved, and he had it stowed by the time he arrived at the bulkhead door.

He stripped off the blue jumper to reveal a charcoal-gray pinstriped suit, custom-tailored over a powerful body. He looked every part the nouveau-riche Wall Street banker, with his blue iridescent tie, polished cap-toe shoes, and perfect ponytail, as he walked down the stairs to the thirty-third floor and entered apartment 33A.

The apartment belonged to Naveed and Jasmine Bonsley, a society couple who had emigrated from India forty years earlier and had
amassed a fortune from thirteen pharmaceutical patents they held. Their four-million-dollar apartment had nine rooms with a view of the East River and a southerly view of Lower Manhattan.

The Bonsleys were in bed in the other room and had been all morning. They had been out the night before, arriving home after midnight to find Cristos sitting in a club chair and staring out the window.

Confused and impaired by too much champagne, Naveed questioned the man as his wife reached for the phone, but her fingers never made their way to the dial. With primal speed, Cristos burst out of the chair, his hand snapping out, grabbing her thin neck and lifting her six inches off the floor. Naveed stood there in panic as Jasmine’s frail legs uselessly kicked the air, her hands wrapping around her assailant’s as she struggled to breathe.

Cristos carried the fifty-five-year-old woman through the living room, past the dining room, to the master bedroom, flinging her about like a rag doll. He finally gripped her shoulder with his other hand and in a single move snapped her neck. He flung her to the bed, where her limbs splayed out as her dead eyes stared off.

Naveed ran to her side, clutching her, screaming her name as tears flooded his face. He turned to see Cristos above him and didn’t flinch, didn’t move—he just wanted it to end, to be reunited with his dead wife.

With the morning sun pouring in, Cristos looked out the living-room window to the south toward the entrance to the UN, where police had swarmed the area and cordoned off First Avenue. He knew the drill: they would fan out in hopes of finding the killer but knew he was probably long gone, lost in the city of eight million plus, never suspecting that he was five hundred yards away, looking down on them with the confidence of accomplishment and continued freedom.

Cristos stepped into the elevator, hitting the button for the ground floor. As the polished brass doors closed, he stared at his reflection,
adjusting the small knot of his tie. His face was pure, unblemished, a façade to the world in so many ways.

His private charter was scheduled to leave the Westchester airport upon his arrival, and with the half-hour drive, he estimated wheels up for 11:15. The six-hour transatlantic flight would put him back home before midnight local time. He was exacting in all areas of life, planning, timing, playing out every scenario in his mind before engaging in any task, be it the purchase of a new Bugatti, making personal investments, or committing murder. While he had used the rifle that day—leaving it on the bed between the Bonsleys’ cold bodies to taunt and confuse the authorities—he had engaged in all manners of dispensing death: poisons, accidents, knives slipped between the ribs of unsuspecting marks. There were assassinations of subterfuge and grandeur: politicians dying of heart attacks in the throes of illicit passion; crime figures sitting in Parisian cafés torn asunder by horrific explosions of world-headline proportions; prime ministers’ wives trapped in their cars as they tumbled down mountainsides.

And all the while, there was never a single piece of evidence tying back to Cristos. Credit was never taken, responsibility never assigned. His disparate methods never allowed the connecting of any dots. Too often, in so many jobs, pride was the greatest enemy. When credit was taken, egos were inflated, dulling the mind, softening drive.

The feeling of invincibility flowed in with such delusions of grandeur, and while they might not prove life-threatening to an ad exec, it was deadly to someone like Cristos.

When he arrived last night, slipping past the sleeping concierge, he stepped into the elevator, confident that his image wouldn’t be picked up by the security camera. The small device in his pocket emitted a magnetic pulse that interfered with the circuitry of the camera. It was of Israeli design, the Mosad having developed it to help them hide under a cloak of invisibility. Now, as he rode toward
the lobby, he dug his hand into his pocket, running it over the small matchbook-sized device.

But all of the planning and preparation in the world cannot eliminate pure chance. Sometimes the wheels of fate turn in different ways. And in such a manner, the bearings on the counterweight cable of the elevator wore out with a belabored squeal, fusing themselves under the grinding pressure, bringing the cab that Cristos was riding in to a halt.

At the same time, a tall, matronly woman named Charlotte Newman arrived at the concierge desk, flowers in hand and a small elegant gift box under her arm. She was there to surprise her friend Jasmine Bonsley for her birthday and to whisk her off to a surprise-filled day of massages, facials, and lunch.

The cab was out of service for all of two minutes when the maintenance staff entered the shaftway one floor above the crippled elevator to make sure that none of their elderly tenants was in the car. With no video feed, no one was going to take the chance of some senior having a claustrophobic panic attack because of faulty security equipment.

But when they pried open the sixteenth-floor door and peered down the shaft onto the car ten feet below, they saw the impeccably dressed man climbing up through the emergency hatch, a man none of them recognized, a man who was now trapped with nowhere to go in the thirty-five-story shaftway.

With the sudden radio call about the horror found inside apartment 33A by Charlotte Newman happening in conjunction with the mayhem out in front of the UN, you didn’t need a detective to put the pieces together.

The headlines screamed of the arrest of Nowaji Cristos, the murderer of the head of state of Pashir and the executioner of a wealthy couple in their bed. The New York City police were praised by all for apprehending the criminal so quickly. But as he was arrested, no one had any real idea who they had in custody or the atrocities he had committed the world over.

And so the man who had remained invisible to mankind, who killed without witness, who walked the world like a ghost, was brought down by the failure of a handful of twenty-cent ball bearings and an overeager best friend.

T
WELVE HOURS LATER
, under cover of darkness, a four-boat flotilla headed out to Trudeau Island. The boats were driven without running lights, their captains aided by infra-red goggles as they peered through the cold night.

Jack rode out with Peter Womack, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District. He knew him well; following parallel ascending career paths, they had worked together on several cases, even sharing dinner, with their wives, on occasion. While many complained about friction between the state and federal levels, none of that existed between Peter and Jack.

The evidence against the assassin was overwhelming. They had the rifle, the bodies, Cristos in the building at the time of incident, and while there were no prints, the circumstantial evidence was undeniable. The interim Pashir government, although secretly happy about the death of the despot, pressed for an expedient trial and execution, blaming the New York City police for the failure to protect their leader. The city of New York cried out for justice for the Bonsleys, and the public demanded a trial on the world stage to show that you don’t mess with New York.

The debate facing them was whether to charge Cristos on the local, federal, or military level. As an enemy combatant, he would not be afforded the rights of an American citizen, but this alternative, while satisfying the Pashir government, would not provide needed justice to the city of New York. If there were separate trials—the general’s murder in federal and the couple’s by the state—the matter could drag on for years with independent resulting appeals, but if the matters were handled concurrently, swift justice could be served, satisfying all concerned.

The four boats pulled up to a long, deep water dock on the eastern side of the island. The varied topography of the small spit of land was mostly undulating hills of old-growth trees and scattered bedrock. The North Shore was truly a misnomer, as there was no shore, just a sixty-foot sheer dropoff onto a rocky, riptide sea. A once-grand lighthouse stood on a precipice, holding court with its outstretched hand of guiding light to the now-diminished fishing fleets returning home. The western and southern sides of the island were large, sandy beaches that would be the envy of any Hamptons resident and would fetch in the tens of millions for a fraction of their white sand and magnificent views, if not for the large stretch of graveyard just beyond the scrub and tree line, a potter’s field of forgotten dead.

Jack and Peter watched as the twelve-man lead team of police, FBI, and Justice Department personnel disembarked and disappeared into the shadows of the windswept island to prep and secure the vacant facility.

From the second boat, four guards in black military fatigues, pistols strapped to their waists and rifles on their backs, climbed down onto the dock. The four turned as Cristos emerged from the boat’s cabin with shackled wrists and leg irons around his ankles. The four guards flanked him as he shuffled down the gangway, and they, too, disappeared, swallowed by the cold night.

Jack and Peter, dressed in heavy winter coats, finally leaped from the boat as the two Justice Department guards tied it up.

A large man in a black pinstriped suit greeted Jack with an outstretched hand. “Special Agent Carter Dorran, FBI.”

Carter stood just over six feet, a commanding presence in both stature and voice, with a deep tone that his fellow agents mocked behind his back. Despite the weather, he wore no coat and seemed unaffected by the elements.

“Jack Keeler,” Jack said as he shook his hand.

Dorran helped his agents secure the unmarked powerboat and turned to Jack. “Please excuse the formality, but we need your ID and to check your person.”

Jack smiled, his breath coming out in great clouds. He fully understood the procedure. He pulled out his wallet, flipped it open, and displayed the two-year-old picture. At Dorran’s nod, Jack extended his arms out, allowing him to run his hands up and down his body in the usual manner. Jack looked at Peter, who was enduring the same treatment, smiling at the irony; neither had ever been on this side of a pat-down.

Under the glow of a full moon, Jack looked up at the mansion in the distance. The enormous Georgian-style house, made of field-stone quarried from the island’s bedrock, was more than twenty-five thousand square feet and was entirely self-sufficient, with a power plant, a water desalination station, and a communication center all installed in the late ’70s when the mansion had seen extensive use as a classified government facility. Being off the radar, the island and the once-magnificent home were the perfect location to be forgotten. During the first half of the ’80s, it had been used for everything from a safe house to a refuge for Russian defectors at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, its location and function had fallen off even the radar of the government.

Dorran led Jack and Peter up the gangway and ushered them into a waiting golf cart. He drove up the long cobblestone pathway, the sides of which were overgrown with knee-high grass and weeds that poked up through a dusting of snow. Several felled trees, evidence of hurricane season, had yet to be removed, their haphazard patterns adding to the ominous appearance of the mostly wooded island. The enormous Georgian mansion was overrun with ivy that wove and flittered along its stone, giving it a Gothic feel.

A belching choke filled the night, as a generator muscled to life in the distance. And almost immediately, lights around the estate began to go from a dull orange, intensifying like the rising sun, into a full glow. The shadows around the mansion were chased away as walkway lights and decorative sconces flanking the entranceway lit the stone home into a semblance of its former glory.