WILL YOU BE LATE TONIGHT, DARLING?”
Sarah Jane Ishag leaned over the breakfast table to kiss her husband. David had been unusually distracted lately. They hadn’t made love in weeks.
Without looking up from the Wall Street Journal, David said, “Hmm? Late? Oh no. I shouldn’t think so.”
Sarah Jane studied his handsome head, with its thick, shining jet-black hair and skin the same shade of cappuccino as her silk La Perla robe. She watched his fingers trace the words of the newspaper article as he read. Everything about him seemed so vital, so alive. For a moment panic gripped her, but she quickly banished it.
“Good. I thought we could make it an early night. I’ll make you some of that horrid chicken noodle soup that you like, with the dumplings.”
David looked up. It was disconcerting the way he stared at her, as if he were seeing her face for the first time.
“Matzo balls,” he said dully.
“Sorry. Matzo balls.” She blushed. “Not much of a Jewish wife, am I?”
A few weeks earlier, on their honeymoon, David would have laughed at that line. Made some joke about Catholic girls being crap in the kitchen but virtuosos in the bedroom. Now he said nothing. He just sat there, staring. Something’s changed.
Inside, she was worried, but she made sure to betray no trace of her anxiety in her tone.
“So if I have dinner ready at eight, you’ll be home?”
“I’ll be home.”
David Ishag kissed her on the cheek and went to work.
TEN MINUTES LATER, BEHIND THE WHEEL of his Range Rover Evoque, David plugged in his MP3 player and listened again to the recording Danny McGuire had given him yesterday.
Sarah Jane’s voice. “We can’t, not yet. I’m not ready.”
A man’s voice, electronically distorted. “Come on, angel. We’ve been through this. We go through it every time. The gods have demanded their sacrifice. The time is now.”
Sarah Jane again. Angry now. “That’s all very easy for you to say, but it’s not the gods that have to do it, is it? It’s me. I’m the one who has to suffer. I’m the one who always suffers.”
“I’ll be gentle this time.”
A strangled sound, half muffled. Was it a laugh? Then Sarah’s voice again.
“He’s different from the others. I don’t know if I can do it.”
“Different? How is he different?”
“He’s younger.” There was a note of desperation in her voice, of pity even. Hearing her made David Ishag’s heart tighten. “He has so much to live for.”
The distorted voice took on a harder edge. “Your sister has a lot to live for too, doesn’t she?”
The line went crackly at this point, and the audio was lost. David had heard the recording fifty, a hundred times now, desperately searching for any meaning other than the obvious one: that his wife and some unknown lover were plotting his murder. Each time he reached this point, he willed the next line to be different. Prayed he would hear Sarah Jane’s voice saying: “No, I can’t, I won’t do it. David’s my husband and I love him. Leave me alone.” But each time, the nightmare recurred exactly as it had before.
“Yes, yes. Friday night.”
“I love you, angel.”
“I love you too.”
With David’s help, Danny McGuire and his team had finally managed to tap in to Sarah Jane’s cell phone, as well as the two pay phones in Dharavi that his men had observed her using. They still hadn’t traced the identity of the man. He was obviously a pro, distorting his voice and using sophisticated blocking software to prevent anyone from accurately tracking his number. But the Ishag mansion was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Any unidentified male coming within five hundred feet of the place was photographed and, if necessary, stopped and searched.
“You’re completely safe,” Danny McGuire told David. “If she tries anything, we’ll be there in an instant.”
But David Ishag didn’t feel safe. Not just because Interpol being there “in an instant” might not be quick enough. It could take less than “an instant” for a bullet to penetrate his skull or a kitchen knife to puncture his aorta. But because the real tragedy of all this, the thing he feared most, had already happened. He had lost Sarah Jane. Worse than that, he never really had her in the first place. Sarah Jane, his Sarah Jane, didn’t exist.
Even now, in the face of overwhelming damning evidence of her guilt—even without the audiotapes, David Ishag had seen McGuire’s pictures of the other widows, and the resemblances were too striking to ignore—he couldn’t fully make himself believe it. Sarah Jane had looked so heartbreakingly sexy in that negligee this morning. She’d sounded so vulnerable when he hadn’t been able to bring himself to laugh at her jokes, or even look at her properly when she spoke to him. Part of him, a big part, still wanted to tell Danny McGuire and Interpol and the rest of the world to go fuck themselves. To take Sarah Jane to bed, make love to her the way he used to and afterward simply ask her about the man on the tape and the lies she’d told him. Challenge her face-to-face to explain herself and give him a rational explanation.
And she would explain herself and apologize, and David would forgive her, and someone else would have committed these dreadful murders, not Sarah Jane, and they’d live happily ever after.
His car phone rang, shattering the fantasy.
“So we’re still set for an eight o’clock start tonight.” Danny McGuire sounded almost excited, as if they were talking about a kick-off at a football game and not an attempt on David’s life. “No last-minute changes. That’s good.”
“You picked all that up, then? At breakfast.”
“Clear as a bell.”
David thought, At least the bugging devices are working properly. The only thing more terrifying than going through with tonight’s plan would be going through it with technical hitches.
Danny McGuire said, “Try to relax. I know it doesn’t feel that way, but you’re perfectly safe in there. We’ve got your back.”
“I’ll try to remember that this evening when my wife’s boyfriend starts lunging at my jugular with a sharpened machete.” David laughed weakly.
“You’re doing the right thing. Come tomorrow morning, this will all be over.”
David Ishag hung up the phone and swallowed hard. He knew that if he allowed himself to cry once, the tears would never stop.
“This will all be over.”
No, it won’t.
For David Ishag, the pain of Sarah Jane’s betrayal would never be over. Without her, he might as well be dead.
AT SIX P.M., DANNY MCGUIRE SAT in the back of the transit van, dividing his attention between the screen in front of him and today’s London Times crossword puzzle on his iPad. It was Richard Sturi, the statistician, who’d gotten him hooked on British-style crosswords and Danny had quickly become a junkie. They helped relieve the stress and loneliness of running Operation Azrael, helped him forget how much he missed home and Céline, helped him block out the fear about the state his marriage might be in once this operation was finally over.
The London Times puzzle was usually the most challenging, far superior to that of the New York Times or Le Figaro, but today’s setter seemed to be having an off day.
One across: Wet yarn I entangled.
As anagrams went, it was laughably easy. As Danny typed in the answer—R-a-i-n-y—his mind started to wander. When had he last been in the rain? A month ago? Longer? It rained a lot in Lyon. Here in Mumbai the sun was relentless, beating down punishingly on the sticky, humid city from dawn till dusk.
“Sir.” Ajay Jassal, a surveillance operative on loan from the Indians, tapped Danny on the shoulder. “The catering van. That’s not the usual driver.”
Danny was alert in an instant. “Zoom in.”
Jassal was eagle-eyed. Even up close, it was tough to make out the van driver’s features on the fuzzy green screen. It didn’t help that he was wearing a cap and had one hand covering the lower part of his face as he waited for the service gates to open.
“You’re quite sure it’s a different driver?”
The young Indian looked at Danny McGuire curiously, as if he were blind. “Yes, sir. Quite sure. Look at his arms, sir. That is a white man.”
Danny’s pulse quickened. Ajay Jassal was right. The arm dangling out of the driver’s-side window was a distinctly paler shade of green than that of the rear gatekeeper waving him into the compound.
Was this him? Was this the killer?
Was the face beneath that cap the face of Lyle Renalto, aka Frankie Mancini?
Have we got him at last?
The barrier lifted. Lurching forward, the driver put both hands back on the wheel, turning slightly to the side as he did so. For the first time Danny McGuire got a good look at his face.
“I don’t believe it,” he whispered.
“Sir?”
“I do not fucking believe it.”
“You know the man, sir? You’ve seen him before?”
“Oh yeah.” Danny nodded. “I know the man.”
It wasn’t Lyle Renalto.