The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  “Uh, no. They’re afraid I might know more than they think I do. I’m a loose end. I’m a mouth that could talk.”

  “Do you really know anything that could hurt them?”

  “No,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The notebook—Nic’s self-described nuclear weapon—there was no point in mentioning it to Ricki. The less she knew, the safer she was.

  “So, what, you run for the rest of your life? This guy you killed, it was self-defense, right?” Her voice rose slightly. “You won’t be able to finish school.”

  “I was kind of bored with school. You and me, we’re not suited to day jobs.”

  She gave him a shy smile and sipped her tea. “So you run and to begin with I equip you.”

  “Well. If you can. I’ll pay, of course.”

  “What do you need?”

  “A laptop. I need to be able to transfer my money to a new account. I need to get documentation so I can get out of the country under a new name. And I know somebody who might be able to hide me from these guys, and I need a way to contact him without him finding me after I give him a call. I want to see him on my own terms.”

  “I can spare you a laptop, a year-old MacBook Pro with the latest operating system. I have an anonymizer program on it that can shield you from being easily traced. Is that good enough?”

  “Thank you.” To hackers laptops were like racehorses; they always preferred the most muscle. A year-old computer was an antique to Jack; he routinely bought a new system every six months. But it would do.

  Ricki tapped her lip. “A passport and credit cards? I know a guy in Brussels who works wonders, but he’s not cheap. He can probably have you a passport in three days, another day to overnight it.”

  “All right.”

  “Your money, I can ask a guy in Russia. He moves a lot of funds for me. But I can’t promise. Could you just withdraw all the cash?”

  “Yes, but I’d prefer to keep it electronic, less likely to lose it.” He did not want to add that he didn’t care to keep tens of thousands of euros he’d earned hacking for Nic’s criminal ring about his person. He wanted the money moved, cleanly, hidden where he could reach it under a new name. And where he wouldn’t have to worry about customs, or the police freezing his accounts if they figured out Jin Ming was a lie. He was a potential murderer in their eyes now; everything had changed. He needed to keep as many of his secrets close to him as he could.

  “Okay, this guy you need to contact. He doesn’t want to be found?”

  “He is part of a bureaucracy that can hide me.”

  “Government?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dutch?”

  “No. American.”

  Ricki stared. “You want me to penetrate a top-level American government network. Did you go to a smoke bar after you left the hospital?”

  “No. I’ll do it. But if I run into a wall I will want your expertise.”

  Flattery was the most potent currency in the hacker world. That and respect, acknowledgment of skills. She didn’t smile until she’d lifted the tea cup and she thought Jack couldn’t see her grin. “I thought you might have some programs to help me chisel my way in.”

  “I might. You hungry?”

  “Yes. Very.”

  “I can cook some pasta, open some wine. Oh, I didn’t think about giving you more alcohol, are you on meds?”

  “I would very much like a glass of wine. And, no, I have no meds.”

  “Now that would be a challenge,” she said. “Get an online pharmacy to send you what you need, without placing an actual order.” She laughed and so did he, and for a moment the memory that he had killed a man, albeit an assassin, edged from the center of his thoughts. He was always happier when he had a problem with which to play.

  “Is that all you need?”

  “Yes,” he said. But it was a lie. He knew where Nic lived. And now, with Nic dead by violence, the police would have examined all his computers to see if they could find a link to his killers. When they searched his apartment, would the police have found the notebook? Surely that would be news, if a murdered man’s notebook could blow open an international crime ring. But the police could keep the discovery silent, the same way they’d shielded his name and location while he recovered.

  Ricki brought him wine and sat down next to him. Close to him. She smiled at him, warmly. Was surviving a shooting… was that sexy? He’d avoided most girls at Delft because he didn’t want to risk blowing his cover story. Girls always wanted to know about you, to delve into secrets. But Ricki had secrets of her own. She might not ask too many more questions.

  They drank the wine and before he knew it, before he could analyze it, he’d taken her wineglass and set it on the coffee table and he was kissing her warm mouth. She kissed him back. He was alive. He’d forgotten how good it could feel. So he did all the things necessary for living: he kissed her, he laughed with her, they ate dinner, they made love. Then they lay in bed and watched a movie she’d stolen from a studio’s laptop, a film that wasn’t hitting theaters for another three weeks.

  When she fell asleep and the movie was over, Jack began to think. He needed a way to figure out where Nic would hide his most potent and powerful secret of all, and he would have to start by breaking into Nic’s house in the morning.

  8

  Las Vegas

  I HIT THE GROUND WRONG.

  I rolled too sharply, and felt a pull in my shoulder. I stopped and the early morning desert sky loomed above me. Back in my London days I ran parkour—extreme running, where you vault up walls and use handholds and drop from heights without breaking bones (hopefully). It had been my release from the tension of work, exploring abandoned buildings, turning walls into roads, using precision to power through a space in a more efficient way. But I was out of practice; when your child is missing you don’t really want to take the time for exercise. I’d arrived around midnight Las Vegas time last night, and couldn’t sleep, too wound with excitement and tension. Today was a waiting game, with the rest of the day to kill before Anna Tremaine arrived for our meeting. So I’d gotten up early to try my luck against gravity. It was 5 a.m. and the quietest hour in Vegas, and no one around to see me run.

  I chose a basic route: a run through an unfinished building not far from my bar. It had simple drops, vaults, and, most importantly, solitude. The last thing I needed to do before capturing Anna—and I had every intention of taking her prisoner—was to hurt myself. I needed to be at peak condition.

  But the parkour helped my head. When I had to plan a run, a vault, a leap that I could barely make, only then I didn’t think of Daniel.

  Then I tried not to think of Lucy. My ex-wife. My love, my liar, my beautiful traitor. She lay in a CIA hospital in Bethesda, in a coma from a bullet to the brain, waiting to either waken or die. She’d done so much that was wrong but she’d also saved my life. The Agency kept her alive in case they could ever ask her about her real employers: the Nine Suns. Or because if she lived they could put her on trial for treason. But she wasn’t ever going to wake up, I thought. Special Projects kept her alive out of caution or cruelty; I could never decide which it was.

  I put my mind back to the run. Distraction is a sure way to break a leg or an arm. I got up, dusted off my butt. Looked at the wall before me, five feet high; beyond its rim was air.

  I was tired of the walls around me, the false ones in the shapes of threats and violence. I wanted my son back. That was the only wall to conquer. I ran at the wall, did a saut de chat (jump of the cat). I went headfirst; my hands landed on the wall’s top surface. My legs powered past my arms as I flew from the wall. I landed fair and kept running.

  I hadn’t had a clean run since the bombing, when my wife was taken from me before my eyes in a London street and I did a parkour run through a remodeled building, bomb-damaged scaffolding collapsing around me, running like I never had before to keep her in my sight, to not lose her.

  But, of course, I did lose her, and in a worse
way than if she had been kidnapped and killed.

  I vaulted up a narrow staircase in the unfinished motel, bouncing off the walls, feeling the sweat explode from my skin. Burning off the too many drinks of the middle of the night, the worry about Daniel, the stress over whether I might be arrested or grabbed by August’s team to force me to tell them more about Mila and the Round Table.

  I reached the roof and the desert early morning sun shone on me. Las Vegas, even at its edges, is never entirely hushed. I wished there were neighboring roofs. I used to run the council housing projects in London, and on a roof I felt like I had wings. I ran in a circle here, staying warm, building up my power, stopping only to study the balconies jutting off the side of the building, wondering if I could navigate the seven stories in a series of controlled jumps and drops from balcony to balcony. Who needs stairs?

  Dropping from balcony to balcony might attract attention; the police are rarely parkour fans. I studied the line of movement it would take to do the balcony drops. Part of my mind said too risky, but another part wanted to feel like I’d pushed myself, like I was testing myself for the final stretch of confronting Anna Tremaine and getting my son back. I wanted to be sure I still had my nerve, my daring.

  Drop, roll, vault, drop again, roll. I played the run in my head.

  I dropped down to the first balcony and from the edge of my eye I saw the car on the facing road brake to a halt.

  I should have checked first. I’d needed to be sure that I didn’t have a witness, someone who might call 9-1-1 on the crazy guy doing the balcony surfing. I stood up from the balcony.

  The road near the unfinished motel was empty. Except for the one car, stopped at a light at a deserted intersection.

  Okay, I thought, not me, it stopped for a light. But the light was green.

  I could see the double glint of binoculars past the window.

  I dropped back out of sight.

  Waited. I heard the purr of the car’s engine moving. I glanced over the edge. I could see the driver below, a sleeve of purple jacket, a snug knit hat pulled tight over the head.

  The car sped away.

  Maybe he just stopped because he saw you jump. That’s it. Yes, that’s all.

  But the run was ruined for me. I dropped down the rest of the balconies and ran back to my car.

  Mila would be here this afternoon, and then Anna Tremaine. And, by tonight, I hoped, I would have my son back.

  9

  Amsterdam

  THE DOORKNOB TO NIC’S APARTMENT turned under his hand. Unlocked. But Jack stood and knocked for the fourth time, his heart hammering in his chest. If Nic had a woman or a roommate still living here, that person was also likely connected to Novem Soles. But he had to know. And he couldn’t wait. The police were looking for him. The dead man had been discovered at the hospital. The papers carried a picture of both Jack’s face and one of the man he’d killed. The online news site had the most up-to-date information, and by noon Amsterdam time the police had released the killer’s identity: a Czech immigrant named Davel, who had an arrest record a meter long, mostly as a rented enforcer for eastern Europeans who were muscling into illegal activities in the West.

  A hired thug, sent to kill Jack, and he’d ruined Jack’s plan to slip out of sight.

  Jack remembered Hollywood blockbusters about a man on the run. Being on the run could look like a bit of a lark. You could always outpace and outthink the pursuers. It was not fun. Jack was sick with the thought that even walking on the street he would be seen, noticed, made for the man on the front page of the paper.

  He pushed the door open and called out: “Hello?”

  No answer. The apartment was small and not tidy. Old newspapers sat stacked, unread, on a coffee table. He could smell spilled lager. A muted television played in the corner, offering news of the world, ignored.

  He had the gun he’d taken from his assassin in his pocket.

  He stepped down the hallway to where a door was half closed and inside the room lay an old woman. She slept, a vodka bottle clasped loosely in her hands. Her pose could have been a poster highlighting the blight of alcohol. He glanced at the label: very cheap vodka, the kind the university kids with no money drank, and the room smelled as though she didn’t invest much in soap, either. She looked like a female, fragmented version of Nic—strands of red in the graying hair, short, stocky, a fleshy mouth.

  Nic lived with his mother, at his age? Jack couldn’t imagine. Of course, Jack’s mother didn’t want him around. He stepped out and made sure the rest of the apartment was empty. He guessed a back bedroom had been Nic’s. Large desks with a slight settling of dust, with clean spots where computers and monitors had likely sat.

  Naturally the police had taken all of Nic’s gear. It was evidence—he was a hacker and a scumball and he’d been murdered. He searched the rest of the room. Nothing electronic remained. He saw no papers, no records. The room had been picked clean except for Nic’s computer books.

  No sign of a notebook. He didn’t even know how big it was, which could affect where it was hidden.

  He checked the room a final time, being extra careful, and then went back to the old woman’s bedroom. She was snoring now.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and shook her awake. He thought she would scream in horror at a stranger in her room. Her eyes stared at him, muddled, then widened in fear. “Who… Get away from me.”

  “I won’t hurt you. I’m a friend of Nic’s.”

  “Friend of Nic’s.” She spat at him, made her face a scowl.

  “I am. He gave me a job.”

  She stared at him. “Get out of my house.”

  He pointed to the healing wound on his neck. “The people who killed your son did that to me. I want to make them pay.” He tried to smile. What did you say in a situation like this? “I am his friend, I promise you.”

  “His friends got him killed. And now the police, they say all these lies about my Nic. That he did terrible things.”

  “Mrs. ten Boom, please, let me help you.” He got up and jetted water into a clean glass and brought it to her. She drank it down and then she glanced at the vodka bottle. Uncertain, he poured a tiny bit into the glass. She took a tiny sip, as though embarrassed, and then looked at him with sullen eyes.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” Jack said, “but I know of a way to get back at the people who hurt Nic.” Like avenging Nic was his motive. Lying to a grieving mother. Gosh, he was so proud of himself these days. A slow throb of headache began to pulse in his temples. He looked at the vodka glass instead of her, which was fine as she was looking at the vodka as well.

  “How?”

  “Nic was researching the bad people. So he could protect himself. He learned their secrets. I wrote the software that he used, but I don’t know where he would have hidden the information.”

  “He kept everything on computers. I don’t even know how to work one. I don’t like them.” She flapped her hands, as if computers were gnats floating near her face. Her voice turned a bit petulant.

  “It’s a notebook. With printouts in it from the computer. Where would he keep it?”

  Her gaze went sly. “How do I know you’re not a cop, or one of the people who hurt Nic?”

  “If I was a cop, I’d arrest you and take you down to the station,” Jack said. “If I was your enemy, I would not pour you vodka.”

  “You waited a long time to come.”

  “The people who shot me killed Nic,” he said. “I just got out of the hospital.”

  She blinked at him and then sipped the vodka as though it would sharpen her recollections rather than dull them. And maybe, Jack thought, they would. “Yes. I remember you. Nic’s friend. At the coffee shop. The smart boy from Hong Kong.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Yes. All right. Give me some more.”

  He dribbled more vodka into the glass, feeling guilty with each chug of the clear liquid. No vodka like morning vodka, he thought. She drank it down, wiped her
mouth with an age-spotted hand. “I can’t help you. The police came. They took all the computers. They said there were dirty pictures on them, and they said Nicky had hacked into the police’s own computers.” She threw up her hands. “He’s dead. No one cares about his reputation anymore except me.”

  “Well, I do. Do you remember him having a notebook, maybe one that he would have hidden?”

  She blinked, considered, drank more of the vodka. These seemed new questions to her, Jack thought, ones the police hadn’t asked.

  He poured another few fingers of vodka into the glass. “This notebook will protect you and it will protect me. Think.”

  “But you know him and his computers. He did everything on them.” She blinked again, slurped more of her poison. “But he asked me to go to the store, just this once, and buy a red notebook and tape, something he needed for writing and photos. We didn’t have any photo albums. Not after Nic’s father left. I don’t like them.”

  A few photos still dotted Nic’s room but Jack noticed he hadn’t seen any in this room, or the outer room. A lot of painful history in this apartment, he thought. That he understood. “So Nic asked you to buy a notebook for him.”

  “Yes, a big one, and it was red.”

  “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “No.”

  Jack thought his patience would explode and scatter his brains around the bedroom. He took a calming breath. She was old, drunk, grieving, and she was his only hope.

  “Did the police search the entire apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they give you a list of what they took?”

  She considered this. “Yes. They did.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know,” and then a rare neuron fired. “I signed it on the kitchen table.”

  Jack got up and shuffled among the debris on the table. Found it: a list from the Amsterdam Police Department, offering an inventory of what they had seized. Four laptops, two desktop computers, financial files, cell phones. Jack wondered if any record there would lead back to him. It made him feel as though time were moving faster. He felt feverish. But there was no mention of a notebook. The police hadn’t taken it.