table. He didn’t speak, but bent his head and took a deep breath. After a lengthy silence, he met her gaze, his expression defiant. “What if I don’t want to save him?” He turned the pictures face up, then pushed them across the table.
She winced at the images and set her plate aside, no longer hungry. Even though she knew what the guy had done to Mark; had even seen the pictures of it, she couldn’t hate him. Jessie recalled the day she met Sheridan. Her first impression had been that he was cold, but then she saw something else. A dedication that she understood, and she couldn’t help admiring his attempt to seek the truth.
Jessie searched his eyes, knowing that she had to word this just right. “I know that Sheridan isn’t high on your list of favorite people.” Ignoring his ‘ya think’ expression, she continued, “but he still doesn’t deserve to die.” She swallowed hard, shooting another glance at the picture. “None of these people deserve to die.”
“Maybe it’s karma.” Mark pulled the picture in front of him and his arms rested on either side of it, his fingers still drumming. The table jiggled rhythmically and Jessie knew without looking that Mark’s leg would be bouncing.
It would be so easy to agree. Jessie squared her shoulders. Easy was never the best option. “It probably is karma or payback or whatever the hell you want to call it, but there’s a reason you get these photos and dreams, Mark. You have this…gift-this power, to see the future.” He cringed at that, but Jessie forged on, “I don’t think you are supposed to pick and choose who you’ll save.”
Mark glared at her before shoving away from the table. He snagged his beer off the counter and stormed into the living room.
Jessie sighed, resting her forehead in her hands. What a mess. She stood and began to put the food away, deciding to let Mark settle down a bit before approaching him again. Refilling her water glass, she took it out to the living room.
Mark leaned a shoulder against the window frame, his back to Jessie as he stared out the window. Every so often, he tipped the bottle and took a swig.
“I should hate the guy.” He sounded weary.
Jessie muted the ball game.
Mark tilted the bottle, draining it. He absently picked at the label, peeling it back. “The things he did to me…” He sighed, then crossed to the sofa and sat beside her. “I should have felt glad when I saw him in the picture.” He raised one shoulder in a half-shrug as he pulled the label completely off the bottle. “But I didn’t. All I felt was sick.”
“Sick at what happens to him? Or…” She left unsaid the other option, that he felt sick that he would have to save Sheridan.
“I’ve been thinking…what if he interrogates someone and they have information. Real information. Not…not like what I had.” His voice dropped and it sounded like he almost swallowed the last words. Mark set the bottle down on the coffee table and smoothed the label flat. He turned to look at her. “What if he learned something that would save other people’s lives?”
Jessie hadn’t considered that, but now that he mentioned it, it made sense. “And if you don’t save him, then that information remains unknown.” The idea was mind boggling.
Mark nodded. “Yeah. It would mean that, maybe, there was a purpose for…for everything.”
“Like that was the reason you were locked up?”
“Ya know, when I was gone, I thought about the camera a lot.” Mark slouched back against the arm of the couch, his legs splayed at an angle under the coffee table. “There wasn’t much else to do, and I must have gone over every picture that ever came out of it…and every dream I had.” He paused as though organizing his thoughts, his gaze flicking to hers. “I realized that I had a connection with at least one person in every single photo.”
Jessie pulled her leg up under her and leaned against the other arm, facing him. “What do you mean? What kind of connection?”
He took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “I didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight, I found connections in at least eighty percent of them, and I’m sure if I researched it, I could find some for the other twenty percent.” Mark sat up, his pose mirroring hers. “Some were people I’ve passed on the street in the neighborhood, or relatives of people I know…someone from college. Things like that.”
“And you never realized this before?” She reached for her water and took a sip.
Mark shook his head. “Nope. I guess I should have, but I didn’t. I mean, I realized some of them were familiar.” He lost the smile. “But most photos weren’t so obvious.”
“I don’t understand how you could have all those pictures, and dreams, yet not know that you knew the people in them?”
He stood and ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I sound stupid, but think about it. How many people are you acquainted with? You know, faces you nod to as you pass them in the supermarket, or at the bank. When you see them out of context, you don’t know where you know them from. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”
Jessie pursed her lips. How many people did she come into contact with every day whose faces were a blur to her? Too many. “I see your point. You said most of your photos take place right around here, right?”
Mark nodded and began pacing behind the couch. “So, Sheridan-he came to Chicago, right? If he hadn’t met me, the camera wouldn’t have produced his photo.”
Jessie stared at the silver label lying crinkled on the table as she thought things through. She still had questions. “So…what about nine-eleven?”
“What do you mean?” Mark stopped mid-pace, his brows knit in confusion.
“It took place a thousand miles from here.”
He nodded and bent his head for a moment. When he raised it, his eyes had a haunted expression. “Yeah. That occurred to me too, but I have a feeling I must’ve had a connection to someone who died that day.”
“You knew someone who was in one of the Towers?”
Mark shrugged. “Maybe, or maybe one of the planes. I don’t know for sure. For days afterwards, I avoided all the coverage. I-I couldn’t even look at a newspaper.”
Jessie imagined that it would have been torture for Mark to watch all of that when he had tried to stop it. It had been hard for her, and she didn’t have the guilt factor. “I’ll bet you did know someone. I think just about everyone in the country knows someone who knows someone who died that day.”
He was right. She felt it in her gut. “There were a lot of people from the Chicago-area killed.” There had been lists in the Chicago papers and she had recognized a few names. Nobody she knew personally, but she had felt saddened by even the small connection.
She became lost in her thoughts and barely noticed when Mark wandered to the windows again. A woman she had gone to school with had lost her husband on one of the planes. And a guy from her precinct had lost a brother who had been a New York police officer caught when the towers collapsed.
“So, I guess I had to meet Jim Sheridan so that I could save him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jim scrolled through his newest memos. In the last month, intelligence chatter had picked up clues to something big, but details were sketchy. The only intelligence they had said the plan was going to happen soon, and the code name for the operation was ‘Cracker Jack” He skimmed the memos again, jotting down anything that might be of importance.
On the top of the legal pad, he’d written Cracker Jack, then listed questions he wanted answered. Timing, location and target. He closed the memos and opened another file with older memos. Maybe there was something in them that didn’t mean anything at the time he’d read them, but might point to something now. He pulled up the notes from current investigations. A gun dealer in the suburbs had reported a couple of men trying to buy ammunition for automatic weapons. When told that wasn’t possible, they’d asked if the owner knew how they could get it. He’d declined to help them. Security tapes had provided pictures of the men, but without names, it didn’t help much.
“Damn it.” He rolled his chair away from the desk and put his hands behind his head, elbows out as he searched his mind. If he were a terrorist, what would be an inviting target? It would have to be somewhere with
