Sidney Sheldon's Angel of the Dark (21 page)

They had hypnotized Didier Anjou.

Enchanted Miles Baring.

Made a besotted fool out of Matt Daley.

Mocked Inspector Liu.

Each of the women's faces was different. But the eyes gave them away.

Azrael isn't a “he.” He's a “she.”

They're all the same woman.

T
HE MAN QUICKENED HIS PACE
. T
HE
alley was dark and smelled of spices and human shit.
Saffron, cumin and excrement: the essence of India.
The man laughed at his own joke, but it was a nervous laugh, only a shade or two from hysteria.

He was being followed again.

Weaving his way between the rickshaws and scurrying brown bodies, he ducked behind a baker's stall. A narrow passage opened through a brick archway into a yard where kilns heated the flat naan bread and
paratha
. Curious half-naked children swarmed around him, intrigued by his foreign, white man's face. He brushed them away, his heart pounding. The only way out of the yard was the way he came in. If his pursuer had seen him slip behind the bread stall, he would catch him for sure. Catch him and kill him. The man expected no mercy.

At first he thought his pursuers must be police, but no longer. The shadows lurking behind him were far more sinister. Wherever he went in the city, he could feel their presence, cold and threatening like a malignant ghost. His nerves were in tatters. It was getting harder to make decisions.

This time, however, he seemed to have lost them. No one had followed him into the baker's yard. He must have given them the slip. Cautiously, he made his way back into the alley. A few blocks later he emerged onto a main road where the ubiquitous rickshaws made way for the more modern yellow cabs.
Almost like New York.

He stuck out his arm.

“Taj Mahal Palace, please.
Jaldi karna!
”

 

T
HE MAN HAD SAT AT THE
bars of some of the most luxurious hotels in the world. The Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, the San Pietro in Positano, the Peninsula in Hong Kong. But for sheer opulence, nothing could beat the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai. A sumptuous mishmash of Moorish, Oriental and Florentine design, it was as majestic a home away from home as any maharajah could wish for. The main bar was accessed from the lobby, a vast space with marble floors and vaulted alabaster ceilings. An intricately carved arch supported by two onyx columns led into the darker, candlelit bar. The vibe there was more intimate, but just as luxurious, with wine-red velvet couches so soft you felt you were sitting on clouds and antique Persian rugs woven in every imaginable color. All around, richly dressed couples were laughing, their cut-crystal glasses glinting like diamonds as they sipped
caipirinhas
or Long Island iced teas. Royalty for a day.

He took his usual seat in the darkest, most recessed alcove and ordered a Diet Coke and some of the grilled cumin chicken they served as a bar snack. He wasn't hungry, but he had to eat. He had a long night of waiting and watching ahead of him.

 

S
ARAH
J
ANE
H
UGHES DIDN'T NOTICE THE
American man taking his seat in the corner. She was too agitated to think about anything other than David. It wasn't like him to be late.

Maybe he's had a change of heart after all the shit I've put him through?

She couldn't work out if the idea of him bailing on their prospective wedding made her frightened or relieved. The pressure was unbearable at times.

“I'm worth the better part of a billion dollars, Sarah Jane, okay? Whether you like it or not, that sort of money brings complications.”

Complications. Talk about an understatement.

Pulling a small black mirror out of her purse, Sarah Jane touched up her makeup and arranged her hair the way she knew David liked it. Smoothing down her knee-length skirt, she unbuttoned the top of her blouse just enough to hint at the glorious figure beneath. Like most men, David Ishag
liked the demure look. It made him feel secure. That the delights of Sarah Jane's body were for his eyes only. Which, of course, they were.

Till death do us part.

And there he was, walking toward her, lighting up the room the way that only he could, a human fireball of charisma. So handsome. So charming.

I can't go through with it.

She forced herself to take deep, calming breaths.

“Darling. Sorry I'm late.”

“Very late.” She kissed him on the lips, running her hands through his glossy dark hair only faintly tinged with gray at the temples. “I was starting to worry.”

Envious female eyes bored into her. Sarah Jane blinded them with a dazzling flash of her sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring.

David Ishag kissed her back.

“Silly girl. You never need to worry. Not now, not ever again. Not with me to take care of you.”

 

T
HE MAN IN THE CORNER HAD
the shakes. He couldn't bear to watch them, Sarah Jane and David. It was too painful. Yet he couldn't bring himself to look away.

A waitress approached him. “Are you all right, sir? Can I get you something?”

My sanity, please. If you're out of that, I'll have Prozac on the rocks with a twist of chlorpromazine.

“I'll take a bourbon. Straight up.”

 

O
N THE OTHER SIDE OF THE
bar, a different man was watching.

This man noticed everything: the pallor of the foreigner's skin, the cruel tremor in his hand as he sipped his drink. He'd been following the white man for days now and had come to think of him almost as an old friend.

Poor devil. His heart cannot accept the truths that his eyes see. Is there any madness in this world greater than the madness of love?

The man's heart swelled with compassion, with pity for a fellow lost soul.

It really was too bad he was going to have to kill him.

W
E CANNOT WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE
wedding. It's out of the question. We have to strike now.”

Rajit Kapiri, a senior officer in India's elite IB (intelligence bureau) division, folded his arms across his chest, as if to indicate that the subject was closed. He was sitting in Interpol's Mumbai field office across the table from Danny McGuire, whose body language was equally stubborn and uncompromising.

“We can't,” Danny repeated. “We must catch Azrael red-handed. It's the only way to be sure of a conviction.”

“But at what cost?” Kapiri spluttered. “Mr. Ishag's life? I'm sorry, McGuire. I'm not going to sit by while you play Russian roulette with the life of one of Mumbai's wealthiest and most prominent citizens.”

Danny McGuire bit back his frustration. He couldn't afford to alienate the IB officer. If Kapiri complained to Danny's bosses at Interpol that the Azrael team was taking matters into its own hands and riding roughshod over local decision makers, Henri Frémeaux would disband the task force faster than you could say “spineless bureaucrat.” But Danny needed Rajit Kapiri's cooperation for other reasons too. The IB had manpower, not to mention priceless local expertise when it came to intelligence gathering. It was they who'd provided the Azrael team with a shortlist of likely local targets—very wealthy, older, unmarried men based in Mumbai with no known family ties.
Ironically David Ishag had only just made the cut, being so much younger than the other victims. But when it emerged that the electronics magnate had recently made sudden, unexpected wedding plans, and that his bride-to-be was a relative newcomer in town, McGuire's surveillance team moved in. It wasn't long before they'd tracked down Ishag's fiancée, a woman calling herself Sarah Jane Hughes. Despite the lighter hair extensions and dowdy clothes, and the new identity as an Irish schoolteacher, the surveillance pictures showed that Sarah Jane bore an uncanny resemblance to Lisa Baring.

“What if she kills him during the honeymoon?” Kapiri asked.

“None of the attacks have happened during the honeymoon. They've all taken place in the victims' own homes. She knows the territory there. Plus, let's not forget that she's not doing this alone. She needs her accomplice, and he doesn't go on the honeymoons.”

Rajit Kapiri still looked uncomfortable. A wedding and a honeymoon meant allowing the suspect out of his sight and jurisdiction, out of his control. Four prior police forces had made that mistake.

Danny McGuire said, “I understand your anxiety. I share it, believe me. You think I'm not tempted to pick her up now?”

“Then why don't you?”

“I've told you why. Because this is our best chance, our only chance, to catch her red-handed, and to catch her accomplice too. If we move now, we'll have her, but he'll run.”

The thing that bothered Danny most about the surveillance operation on Sarah Jane Hughes was that so far they had yet to make any sightings of a third man. If Frankie Mancini/Lyle Renalto was in Mumbai, he was lying very low.

“We'll track them on their honeymoon every step of the way. Remember we have a global network of agents. This is what we do.”

“Humph.” Rajit Kapiri did not sound reassured.

“As soon as they're back in India, we'll go to Mr. Ishag together and put him in the picture. Nothing will be done without his consent. If he declines to help us, you can arrest Sarah Jane then. Of course,” Danny added slyly, “she won't actually have committed any crime on Indian soil at that point. Nothing you can prove anyway. You'd have to extradite her, probably to Hong Kong, so the Chinese authorities would get all the glory. But that would be your call.”

Rajit Kapiri's eyes narrowed. He knew he was being manipulated and he didn't like it. On the other hand, if anything did go wrong during Mr. Ishag's honeymoon, he had a formal record of today's meeting and could lay the blame squarely at Interpol's door.

“Fine,” he said. “But I want to be kept informed of their movements the entire time they're away.”

“You will be. You have my word.” Danny extended his hand across the table. Grudgingly the Indian shook it. “I do have one other request. Our boy may well come out of the woodwork while the couple themselves are gone. I don't have enough men to watch Ishag's house and office as well as Sarah Jane's school and apartment twenty-four/seven. Do you think you could help us out with that?”

The American had the cheek of the devil. But even Rajit Kapiri had to admire his chutzpah.

“I'll see what I can do, Assistant Director McGuire. You just focus on keeping David Ishag in one piece.”

 

L
ESS THAN FIVE MILES FROM THE
building where the Azrael team was meeting, a woman stared at her naked image in the mirror.

She ran her long fingers over each of her limbs, caressing the scars and bruises. They were the only parts of herself that felt familiar, that felt real. On her face she traced the faint signs of middle age that had begun to plague her in recent months: the fan of lines around the eyes and lips, the deepening of the purple shadows beneath her eyes, the more pronounced grooves running downward from the corners of her nose. She felt like crying. Not because she was getting older. But because the face was the face of a stranger.

She felt like crying, but she couldn't, she mustn't. She had to stay strong for her sister. Her sister needed her. The woman clung to that need desperately, like a newborn monkey clinging to its mother. It was literally all she had to live for.

“Why so sad?”

The man walked up behind her, kissing her neck and shoulders. The gesture should have been tender, but it was not. It was possessive. Chilling. She shivered.

“I'm fine. Just tired.”

“Try to sleep, angel.”

She had changed so much since they first met, but he had barely altered, inside or out. Behind her in the mirror he was still dazzling, his beauty as constant as the sun, as inescapable as death. A few months ago she had dreamed of escape. Now she knew how foolish that had been. Now she hoped only for her sister.

One day soon, he had promised, her sister would be free.

G
OOD MORNING
, M
R
. I
SHAG
. W
ELCOME BACK!”

David Ishag smiled at his secretary. “Thank you, Sasha. It's good to be back.”

Oddly, it
was
good to be back. As perfect as his life was right now, David Ishag was ready for a return to something like normality.

His honeymoon with Sarah Jane had been utterly magical. After an intimate, very private wedding service at the Catholic chaplaincy on Vidyanagara—only David's best man, Kavi, and Sarah Jane's colleague Rachel had attended—the happy couple flew to England to break the news to David's elderly mother before jetting off on a grand European tour.

“Do you think she'll ever get over it?”

Sarah Jane turned to David as they were touring St. Mark's cathedral in Venice.

“Who? Get over what? You must stop being so cryptic, my darling. I feel as if I've married a
Times
crossword setter.”

“Your mother. Do you think she'll ever get over you marrying a Catholic? And one so far beneath you too?”

David stopped, cupping Sarah Jane's perfect angel's face in his hands. “Beneath me? You're so far above me I get vertigo just looking at you.” He kissed her, then staggered backward, clutching at his head. “See? I'm dizzy already.”

Sarah Jane giggled. “Idiot.”

David Ishag had never been one to play the fool, or to go gaga over a woman. But he was a fool for his new wife and he wanted the world to know it. He took Sarah Jane to the finest hotels in the most romantic cities—the Georges V in Paris, the Hassler in Rome, the Dorchester in London, the Danieli in Venice. He made love to her in penthouse suites, on his newly refurbished Learjet and on the deck of his superyacht,
Clotilde,
as they cruised the Mediterranean together. But as joyous as the trip was, coming home to Mumbai was equally special, because it marked the start of their real life together.

David had expected them to start trying for a baby right away. Sarah Jane was over forty, so they didn't have time to waste, but surprisingly she was hesitant, insisting on going straight back to work at her school and taking things “day by day.” While David adored her independent spirit, and the fact that clearly her head had not been turned by his immense wealth, part of him wished he could lock her up in his castle and keep her all for himself.

“You need to get back to your other love: work,” Sarah Jane told him. As usual, she was right. Walking into Ishag Electronics offices this morning David had felt a renewed fervor and sense of purpose. He had the energy of a teenager again, which could only mean better times ahead for the business.

I should have gotten married years ago.

“So,” he asked his secretary, “what's on the agenda?”

As ever, his schedule was packed. After an hour to respond to the most pressing of his thousands of new e-mails, David had a board meeting at nine, a business development presentation at ten fifteen, lunch with the CEO of Zenon Technology, one of Ishag Electronics' clients, at one, then an afternoon reviewing new product sales figures with his head of components, Johnathan Wray. A board meeting at the end of the day meant David would be lucky if he got home to Sarah Jane before eight o'clock that night.

Sitting down at his desk, he turned on his computer and immediately buzzed Sasha again.

“Book me a table for two at Jamavar for eight thirty tonight. Something secluded, by the fire, if they can do it.”

“Yes, Mr. Ishag. By the way, there's a gentleman here to see you.”

“There is? Who?”

“He won't give me his name and he's not on your schedule.” There was no mistaking the disapproval in Sasha's voice. “I've asked him to leave, but he refuses. He says he must see you in person. Shall I call security?”

David hesitated.
A mystery!
He'd had a feeling today was going to be interesting. Since he married Sarah Jane—actually, since the day he met her—his life had become one long series of unexpected events. He hadn't realized quite how dull it had been before.

“No, that's all right. The e-mails can wait a few minutes. Send him in.”

A few moments later, David Ishag's office door opened. He stood up, smiling broadly.

“Hello there. I'm David. And you are?”

The smile died on his lips when he saw the gun.