The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  “She’s not working for herself,” I said. “She works for an incredibly dangerous group of people. They were plotting a mass assassination a month ago. You screw them over, you die.”

  Mr. Bell’s lip trembled. He was trying to find his bravery but failing.

  “You see them?” Mila pointed at the bodies.

  He nodded.

  “You’re not going to be like them unless you make trouble. You’re going to be locked up in a room and wait until we’ve taken care of Anna. And you tell my people all you know about Anna Tremaine and her operation,” Mila said. “Everything. And then you’re going to go back and live with your family and you’re going to stay the hell out of illegal activities.”

  He nodded.

  “Call your wife. Tell her you need to go out of town for a few days. Then call your office.”

  He nodded, eager, hopeful he would live.

  When he was done, he handed her back the phone. She took a pair of handcuffs off one of the dead men and cuffed Bell. I almost saw him shiver in relief. If she was cuffing him, she wasn’t killing him.

  I had the information I needed, finally. I was going to find my son.

  2

  The Bahamas

  IT WAS A BREAKING OF THE RULES, punishable by death. His project; his failure. His only shield was that he controlled access to many secrets that made their work and their profits possible. He smoothed out the thin strip of blond hair that bisected his scalp, a low-cut mohawk, and tugged at the jacket of his Armani suit. He stood on the porch of the large house and waited for the other eight to arrive in the darkening evening.

  Rain slashed the beach, wind whipped the waves. Thunder thrummed the sky and the world appeared to have been smeared with gray paint. Alongside the sodden beach ran an equally sodden road, with a sign marking that it had been closed for repairs. Over the course of two hours, eight cars came down the rain-smeared asphalt and went around the wind-buffeted sign without the slightest hesitation. Each of the Lincoln Navigators, with its windows tinted against prying eyes, had been hired out from a local company that usually specialized in transporting film actors and rock stars around the island.

  The passengers in each car, in this case, were not famous, and each liked their anonymity.

  The house nestled in a private cove. The drivers helped their passengers inside. Each had packed light and carried a single bag. The drivers—all former military, now security for hire, from a variety of English-speaking nations—then took up stations around the house, to ensure that no one approached via boat, or car, or plane. Shortly after the last passenger arrived, the sky began to break, the clouds parting as if a curtain was rising on a stage, the early evening stars as witnesses.

  The house smelled of Italian cooking: a heady mix of oregano, garlic, simmering beef, and red wine. The host for this gathering of the Nine Suns, or Novem Soles as it was also known, had spent part of his wandering childhood in Rome. He loved food, and his nanny had taught him how to cook. So for dinner there was salad, grilled fish, hearty pastas, and fine wines imported from Tuscany and Piedmont.

  The nine men and women ate and sipped wine and chatted about the world’s events: a financial crisis in South America, the increasing violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, the latest scandal in the American Congress—and the opportunities for expansion that all three presented.

  The man with the blond mohawk accepted compliments on the food; he smiled and encouraged the quieter members of the group—quiet, that is, in the way of cobras, observing, considering when to strike—to join the conversations. He had wanted to arrange prostitutes for the visiting group, but had been sternly warned that, given recent events, this was no time for debauchery. He missed sex; he was reduced to being a spectator nowadays, but even watching, a feeble substitute, was better than nothing.

  In these rooms they did not use each other’s names. They were known by their responsibilities: the Banker, the General, the Diplomat, the Courier. Titles passed down through long years, or kept by the original members of the nine. The blond mohawk was called the Watcher; it was a role he’d fought hard to get, and he had no intention of losing it now.

  The Watcher waited for the Banker and the General to get into their usual bickering, but for once they did not. He heard English spoken, Russian practiced, the silk of Arabic whispered. These gatherings were always a good chance for everyone to practice their foreign language skills. But the meeting would be conducted in English, the group’s lingua franca.

  After supper, the nine gathered in the large den. The Watcher stood at the head of the long table. He took a calming breath that he camouflaged under a welcoming smile. He was the youngest. Can’t be scared, boy. Be tough.

  “I’m a firm believer in bad news first,” the Watcher said. “As you know, our recent mass assassination plot in the United States failed.”

  Silence among the nine. It seemed like all the goodwill engendered by his fine food and wine evaporated like ice on summer concrete.

  “A smuggling ring that we used as a cover to get experimental weapons into the United States was destroyed. The ring was infiltrated by a former CIA operative named Sam Capra. He should have died in our bombing of a clandestine CIA office in London dedicated to stopping illicit transnational activities. His office was part of the Special Projects branch—which, as you know, does the work that even the CIA is not supposed to discuss.” The mention of Special Projects caused a bit of a stir in the room: glances exchanged, water sipped, eyebrows raised. “These days Special Projects is specifically interested in any criminal, non-terrorist activities that can affect American national security.”

  He paused; they stared. Waiting. He tapped on the laptop button and a picture of Sam Capra appeared on the screen. Brownish-blond-haired, green-eyed, the lean face of a runner, mid-twenties, boyish. “Capra survived only because he walked out of the office before it was bombed, however, and was regarded by the CIA as a likely traitor due to financial irregularities committed by his wife, and the inconvenient fact that his pregnant wife had told him to leave the office right before it was destroyed. Capra escaped from the CIA’s custody, went searching for his wife, infiltrated our group in Amsterdam, and disrupted the assassination plots.”

  The nine waited while the Watcher took a long drink of water. He studied their faces. Most of them would not have been recognized by any government official, any police department, any journalist, any intelligence service. They were, for the most part, so ordinary. Frighteningly ordinary. The person who might sit next to you on the subway, or stand behind you in the grocery store line, or drop off their child at the same time you did at school. They came from around the world, yet they all seemed to have that same urban sameness. It was, the Watcher thought, a superior camouflage. Yet they had come so close to delivering a history-changing death blow to American stability, to bringing the country to a mad level of chaos that promised an erosion of the rule of law and, in turn, enormous profit.

  Look how far we’ve come since the early days, the Watcher thought. A tremendous lesson could be learned from a tremendous failure. They were unbloodied and unbowed. “You will note that we lost our main CIA contact. He was killed in action by Capra. We have since lost two other low-level contacts I… recruited inside the CIA. They’ve been arrested. Fortunately we did not deal face to face with them, and they cannot betray us.”

  “So right now, we have no eyes inside the CIA?” the Banker asked.

  “We have an eye or two that never blinks.” He smiled. Let them know he still had information feeds inside the agency, but not exactly what kinds. “I do not know if they can see as well, or as far.” The Watcher cleared his throat. He could have shared a file two inches thick on Sam Capra’s life with his compatriots, but he’d decided not to play up the man’s importance. “We do, however, have leverage over Sam Capra. We have his infant child.”

  “Children,” sniffed the Banker. She was a Chinese woman, petite, thin, with a lovely face th
at could have sold cosmetics by the tonnage. She made a frown, as though the word held a sourness.

  “Control,” countered the General.

  “Control of a puppet with no strings for us to pull. While we have control over his kid, there’s no way the CIA will let him close to any information that is useful to us,” the Diplomat said. He spoke with a deep baritone, a South African accent, hands tented before his face. “I say we kill him. Show that we cannot be defied.”

  “Sam Capra,” the Watcher said, “doesn’t know that our group has steered him from six years ago, that we have guided his life as surely as a hand on a rudder. We made him into what he is, not the CIA. The setback with his wife was… unfortunate. But he only knows us as a name that means nothing, a vague threat. He doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know how we came to be.”

  “He has damaged us like no one else has,” the General said. “I truly prefer that he be dead.”

  “We should not be killing CIA agents unless absolutely necessary,” the Historian said. He was a heavy-set Russian, head shaved bald, muscles thick under the black of his tailored suit. “It provokes attention. It is bad for business. He’s no longer with the CIA, he is useless to us. He cannot hurt us. He cannot find us. He dies at our hand, the CIA will be coming to investigate.”

  “I agree,” several of the others murmured. The Watcher scanned their faces, taking the temperature of their reactions. The Banker stared at him and he nodded at her and said, “You have a thought to share?”

  “Yes. You wanted us to finance your ability to spy on very specific people. I want to know how much of that ability has been compromised by this failure.”

  “The whole reason we were able to attempt a project of this scale was because of me. Because I have made it easy for us to access information that is critically damaging to some of the most vitally placed people in the world and use it to force them to do what we need. We had a failure. It doesn’t change the fact that I—I mean we—now own several people in key positions in government and business around the world.”

  “So. You want to mount another project, using your resources.” The Banker’s tone mocked him. In another time he would have slapped her across the face, torn her silk suit from her body, taught her who was master. His jaw quavered. Those days were done. Instead he nodded gravely. “Yes. But first I want to clean up the mess that Sam Capra made for us, but I want you to understand why it’s a risk.”

  The Banker nodded.

  “We had an asset in Amsterdam, a computer hacker who had helped me with infiltrating the laptops of our targets so that we had a free view of the classified information that came into their systems. Nic ten Boom. He’s dead, killed by Capra. There is a loose end there that we have only now discovered.”

  “What? Who?” the General asked.

  “A young Chinese graduate student, a computer hacker named Jin Ming, was present at a shootout in a Rotterdam machinists’ shop that was owned by the smuggling ring we used in Amsterdam. He was Nic ten Boom’s hacking assistant. He wrote the software that enabled us to spy without being detected. But he doesn’t know who our targets were. Ming is in the hospital, recovering from his wounds.”

  “The assistant may know nothing that can hurt us.”

  “He may not. I would very much like to know if he is going to be a problem. We know that Nic ten Boom was most ambitious.” He had to be careful here. “In checking my own computer’s logs, I found out that ten Boom was trying to learn more about us, and about our organization when he died. We hired him to spy for us, but he was starting to spy on us.”

  “Then I’m glad he’s dead, and you should hire with a more careful eye,” the Banker said.

  “Nic was attracted by success. He wanted to move up the ladder.” The Watcher shrugged. “He didn’t seem to realize we require success before promotion.”

  “Kids today are lazy,” the General said.

  “Everyone else involved in the Amsterdam operation is dead, either killed by Capra or by one of our people, Edward, who sought to minimize our risks by eliminating those who could identify him. Edward is dead.”

  There was no sentimentality about the death of a hireling.

  “I did not know until now that this young man, Ming, was alive. He was grabbed by the CIA from an internet café, then we assume Ming gave them the Rotterdam address. They took him in when they raided our smuggling operation and Ming was shot. Apparently both our side and the CIA left him for dead. He is in an Amsterdam hospital, under police guard.”

  “So have him killed.” The Banker gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “I can assure you, if there is a surfeit of anything in the world, it’s Chinese grad students.”

  “I will. But why I’ve told you all this is because it’s all part of a bigger picture. We have shaped Sam Capra, over the years, like he was made of clay. And I don’t intend to let that wheel stop spinning until he is molded in just the way we need. The time has come. I have thought of a way in which Mr. Capra can be invaluable to us.”

  “Because we have his child,” the Banker said. “You just got a new pawn on your chessboard, darling.” She actually smiled at him.

  He did not like her changing his metaphor. “You have to seize what advantages you can,” the Watcher said. He felt the tension in his chest begin to loosen. At any moment any of the others would have been in their rights to call a vote on his life. They hadn’t.

  “The CIA will never trust him while we have his child. Ever,” the General said.

  “Oh, I know. I intend to take full advantage of that. It’s not like there’s a surplus of highly trained CIA operatives on the market. And most of them would never consider working for us.”

  “But he will,” the Banker said.

  The Watcher nodded. “Yes. He will.” He was going to get to live another day, he decided.

  3

  Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  THE WOMAN WHO WAS NOT A NURSE but was dressed like one entered the hospital shortly after 11 p.m. Amsterdam time, while a group met and talked in the Bahamas and Sam Capra got the best lead yet on his son. The woman had been most careful in forging her credentials; she had stolen a nurse’s uniform earlier in the day from the hospital laundry; she’d had to settle for buying shoes that looked good enough to pass. The real trick was getting the passcard for the secure floor where her target slept. That had taken time, to pierce the hospital’s security provider database, to imprint a card with the necessary code, to break into the police department’s voicemail system and finally find a message that told her which room held Jin Ming. But she had done it.

  And when she saw him, she was going to kill him.

  Jack Ming was playing the Quiet Game, the one where you tried to see how long you could go without speaking. He was going on three weeks now, three weeks of such careful, cultivated silence that he wondered if his voice would still work. He lay in the hospital bed, the sheets pulled up close to him like a damaged cocoon. His throat bore the raw scar from where a bullet had furrowed across skin and muscle, the giant bruise on his temple from where he’d fallen against a piece of machinery. The injuries had kept him in a coma for nearly two weeks. The doctors and the nurses and the police investigators all called him Jin Ming, which wasn’t his real name, and he did not correct their mistake.

  Keeping quiet became an exercise—like writing a program with the least possible lines of code, or breaking into a database in the fewest, most elegant steps. How long could you play the Quiet Game? His father and mother had made him do it, when he was a child and playing loudly or asking one of his endless questions about why was the sky blue or why did they fight so much or why couldn’t he buy a toy he wanted, and they would flash angry eyes at him, his father looking up from one of the books he always was reading, his mother from her desk where she seemed to live. Be quiet, Jack. You’re bothering me. Let’s play a game. See how long you can be quiet. But it was never a game; they were never quiet. A proper Quiet Game involved a stare down. T
his was simply a way for his parents to put him on a shelf.

  So he stayed quiet.

  He had woken up, sure that he must be dead. A bullet had scored along the flesh of his throat; another centimeter and he would have bled out in moments, his carotid artery emptying on the cool concrete floor of the smugglers’ den near the Rotterdam port. But the artery went untouched. Three days after he woke up the police moved him from Rotterdam to a hospital in Amsterdam. He slept: when he was wheeled inside they put a sheet over him, one of the officers told him. Like he was a secret they wanted to keep. He had his own room, he didn’t have to share. He wondered what this meant; he wanted to ask for a computer, but he didn’t want to speak. Not talking was, weirdly, very liberating. He didn’t have to tell the truth, he didn’t have to lie. After all these months he did not have to keep pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

  At night he dreamed of the red notebook. Nic, drunk, had told him: “The people we work for would kill us if they knew I had all their secrets. All bound up. That’s my insurance policy. The red notebook.”

  “If it’s a secret, why tell me? You’re drunk.” And foolish, Jack thought, but there was no point in stating the obvious.

  “Because if something happens to me, I want them to suffer,” Nic had said in a beery slur. “The red notebook. You find it at my place, hidden. You’re smart enough to find it. It will bring the Nine Suns down.” Or more grandly, in Latin, Novem Soles.

  The Nine Suns. Nic invoked them like they were cartoon boogeymen. Jack didn’t do an eye roll. No one wants to kill you, Nic, Jack had said. Stop being so dramatic.

  But in the machinists’ shop, with the smugglers working for Nine Suns in front of him, and the CIA behind him, he’d seen Nic lying dead on the floor, before all the gunfire erupted.

  If he had to protect himself, he needed to find Nic’s red notebook. Which was slightly difficult to do from a hospital bed.