The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  Between her threat of a bomb in the club and my son, she had me pinned. I hate being pinned. Really, really hate it.

  “I’m going to leave now.” She held up the remote control, another iPhone, with a call number selected. “You do not follow me. If you do, I call the cell phone attached to the C-4 and we have bits and pieces of drunken dancers landing in the parking lot.” She kept her thumb right above the number. One tap and we were all done.

  “Goodbye, Anna,” I said. “I’ll see you very soon.”

  “No, you will never see me again. Do your job, earn your son, and then go on your way.” She stood. “Don’t test that I’m bluffing.” She moved toward the front door and a drunken guy bumped into her and for one moment I thought her thumb would hit the screen. She recovered and she pushed roughly by the drunk. I saw her go past the bouncer and out into the desert-cool night.

  I ran toward the back of the club as Mila zoomed down the stairs. “Evacuate,” I called to her. “Right now.” Anna didn’t want me dead, but I couldn’t risk that there was a bomb here in a bar full of innocent people. Mila sprinted toward the DJ’s stand and before I reached the ladies’ room the lights were up and her voice boomed out over the loudspeakers, the music silenced.

  “People, hello, attention please. Please move to the exits in an orderly fashion. We need to clear the building immediately. There is no danger, no fire, but please move outside and across the street.”

  I heard groans of dismay, but the staff moved quickly through the crowd, herding them.

  I busted into the ladies’ room. Three women at the mirror, fixing makeup.

  “Hey, get the hell out of here!” one turned and screamed at me, fueled by Cosmopolitans.

  “Evacuating the building, out now.” There were six women total in the room and I hustled them out fast.

  Where would she have put it?

  The ladies’ room boasted a mirror edged with a fake lasso to continue the canyon theme. Stars to duplicate the night sky glittered on the tiled ceiling. I looked in each stall. Nothing. The air vents? It would have taken her minutes to unfasten the grates and put the bomb in; she would have been noticed, with a steady stream of customers.

  I looked under the sink; nothing. Then I turned, my face level with the paper towel dispenser, and, beneath it, the metal disposal bin. You needed a key to open it, to access and pull out the trash can. I peered down into the piles of dirty paper towels. Jammed my arm down as far as I could reach.

  At the bottom I ran into a package. Rectangular. I felt a flick of wire along its edge.

  Slowly, bracing myself against the wall, I pulled my arm up. The distant hum of people evacuating was growing quieter.

  I pulled the package free from the pile.

  C-4. It was wrapped in gift paper that read BABY’S FIRST BIRTHDAY. Four wires led off a cell phone, a cheap prepaid model, to curl into the packaging. I had no idea which wire to cut, no idea if the bomb was functioning.

  I ran out the back door. Several patrons had gone out this way and I saw people getting into cars, leaving The Canyon now that the party had ended. I ran, holding the package, trying to find a deserted spot where I wouldn’t put anyone at risk. A small shopping center stood to my left and I arrowed behind it. Every store was in darkness.

  Gingerly I unwrapped the package, careful not to disturb the wires. The bomb’s setup was simple. Three of the wires were fakes, simply taped under the paper. But a blue wire fed from deep in the explosive to the cell phone. I pulled out my knife and I cut the blue wire.

  I leaned against the building and then twenty seconds later the bomb’s phone rang.

  When my heart settled back into my chest I answered. “You bitch.”

  “I don’t like being called names,” Anna said. “You can tell how serious we are. You don’t deviate from the plan. You don’t cross us.”

  “You’re an idiot to give me a job and then risk blowing me up a minute later.”

  “There was no risk. You did exactly what we knew you would do. Just keep doing what we tell you.” Anna hung up.

  My hands wanted to shake and I wouldn’t let them, I fought the fear down. I walked back to the club.

  Lots of the patrons had left but a good-sized crowd remained in the parking lot, curious or optimistic. I took it as a compliment to The Canyon that they hung around. I was sure many had walked their tabs. It didn’t matter.

  Mila met me at the front door. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “She knew who I was. The trap was on me, not Anna.”

  “Ah, Sam. I am sorry. What did she say?”

  I took a deep breath. “Rough night. Let’s talk tomorrow. You have a place to stay?”

  Her gaze burned like fire. “What are you not telling me, Samuil?” Tension broke her voice; she only used the Slavic form of my name when she was upset.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Mila. Thank you for coming. This is my problem and mine alone now.”

  “If she knew who you are, then she had a reason to come meet you.” Realization dawned in her eyes. “Daniel. She wants to make a deal for Daniel.”

  “This is now my problem,” I said again. “Thank you for your concern.”

  “Do not do this alone. What is the ransom? God, let me help you.”

  “I can’t tell you. She’ll kill him.” I kept my voice from breaking. Just barely.

  “Sam.” So much in that one syllable. Pain for me, desperation to help, a simmering fury.

  “I play by their rules, and that means no you hanging around. Go, Mila. I’m sorry.” The approaching whine of police sirens sliced through the night. Now, empty, the bar was quiet. The air weighed like steel between us. “I have to go. I have to be on a flight in two hours. If you want to help me, deal with the cops. Oh, and there’s a pound of C-4 explosive behind a Dumpster in the shopping center. Get rid of it. I’m not really inclined to leave it lying around.”

  “Sam.” Her mouth worked. “What do they want you to do?”

  “It has nothing to do with you,” I said, my voice rising. Her face was stone. This was the woman who had helped ensure the CIA didn’t find me while I hunted for my wife’s kidnappers, the one who had given me every support in my new life. She deserved better than my silence. “They want me to kill a man.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone who is a threat to them.”

  “You commit one murder for them to save your son, they can ask for a thousand more. They can tell you a thousand lies, make a thousand promises, give you a thousand orders, and you will be their slave to save that child.”

  I couldn’t breathe. “I don’t need you debating me. I do what I have to do.”

  “Then go. Go before the cops want to talk to you.” Mila didn’t wait for me to answer. She bolted past me and out the door toward the arriving police cars.

  I stood in the mess of knocked-over chairs, and half-full drinks, and the eerie serenity of a bar that has been emptied of people in a matter of minutes. The light machine kept playing and gleaming dots danced along my face, my skin.

  Get to the airport. Get to New York. Find and kill this Jin Ming. Save my boy.

  15

  Henderson, Nevada

  LEONIE OPENED HER EYES, then blinked. She’d fallen asleep at the desk and her cheek felt mashed and drool-stained. Charming, she thought, wiping at her face with her fingers. The computer kept playing music from Rent, turned low, set on repeat. She preferred songs with a story these days. She’d filled her iTunes library with musicals and movie soundtracks. She hit the space bar and the rising voices, imploring her to live for today, went silent. She blinked again in the sudden quiet, forcing herself to stay awake.

  My God, what happened to me? Fourth or fifth time she’d fallen asleep while working this week. It was getting to be a bad habit. She’d had an early morning.

  She glanced at the clock. She’d fallen asleep after putting the baby down. It was close to 10
p.m. Exhaustion had caught up with her. She was still in T-shirt and jeans and got up from the desk in the corner of her bedroom, shucked her clothes, put on thin cotton pajamas. She brushed her teeth, wiped the sleep from her eyes. Now she’d probably have trouble going back to sleep, and the baby would sleep straight through the night. Oh, well, she could get some work done. Leonie had decided early on that they called it single motherhood because you had to make every single second work to your advantage.

  “Honey,” her well-meaning octogenarian neighbor, Mrs. Craft, would say, “why don’t you hire a nanny? I’m sure you can afford it.” And Mrs. Craft would look around at the granite countertops, the vaulted ceilings, the plush Persian rug over the immaculate hardwoods.

  “I don’t like having strangers in the house,” Leonie said.

  “A nanny, once you get to know her, she’s no stranger.”

  And Leonie had just shrugged instead of saying what was in her heart: I can’t take the security risk. I can’t have a nanny finding out what I do. The load of long, solitary working hours and taking care of Taylor was endurable. Taylor was worth every sleepless night.

  Leonie brewed a pot of hazelnut decaf and switched to the Chicago soundtrack on her iPod, connected to a small set of speakers. The saucy strains filtered out quietly over the bedroom. She opened her laptop and checked her emails; she kept several anonymous accounts to stay in touch with clients.

  Nothing from Gunnar. She heaved a sigh of relief. As clients went, Gunnar was being rather difficult. Kept changing his mind on what he wanted. First he wanted to relocate to New Orleans; no, he decided it was too close to Atlanta, he would see someone he knew, in the bars of the French Quarter. Too likely he’d be found. Then he wanted Canada. No, he realized actual winters, with actual snow, took place in Montreal. Now he wanted Panama but had started making noises about there being nothing to do in Panama, as though the entire country lacked nightclubs or movie theaters, beaches or bookstores. She couldn’t start creating his fake life without him choosing where to hide.

  She wanted to say: when you leave your old life behind, you leave it behind, and not soon enough for me, and you have to decide. But you had to avoid getting too snotty with Gunnar, or any desperate client. She knew that too well. Handle him with care, get him set up where he could never bother her, and his life would start again. Panama. She would tell him that was the solution to keep him safe. She was the expert, after all; he would simply have to listen to her. He couldn’t continue to waffle.

  Once a person had made the conscious decision to vanish, and contacted her for help, then indecision was a nightmare. It made exposure much more likely. A slip of the tongue, time spent on a traceable computer researching locales and such: any of those mistakes could return to haunt you. If you had ever looked in your browser at Seattle or Vancouver or Paris, then you needed to cut them from your vanish list. Fine. Decision made. She would create for him bank accounts in Panama, find him a suitable house in Managua, in a good neighborhood where he would not attract interest. Get him a private Spanish tutor, one who could be trusted. Make him a New Zealander. She could get the right kind of paper for that passport, and the watermarks, within two days. She would rely on her network to cobble together a new name, and a new world for him. Best to get started now.

  She got her coffee, ignored the thirst for a cigarette (six months now no smoking), and then she heard the traffic noise outside, a car rushing past, a rise of night breeze. And then a flap of curtain.

  The sound seemed much louder than it should. She paused Chicago’s singing murderers in the middle of the cell block tango. Listened again. She heard a hard gust of wind.

  There was a window open somewhere.

  A cold itch wriggled between her shoulder blades. She got up from the computer and went down the hall. She stopped at the nursery door, eased it open. The door faced the window, which looked out onto the backyard. The window stood open, the Pooh Bear drapes dancing in the gust.

  Her heart shuddered to stone.

  She hurried forward in the dark. The moonlight gleam showed her the crib was empty. Her baby was gone. She screamed, short and sharp, picking up the wadded-up yellow blanket as if Taylor might have shrunken and fallen into its maze of folds. Her scream turned molten in her throat.

  She stumbled through the house. Be here, be here, be here, she said to herself.

  But the rest of the house was empty, and the fear and the shock juddered through her like a hammer hitting bone.

  The phone. Stunned, she stumbled to it. Picked it up. Pressed the 9, then the 1. Then she stopped.

  What was she going to tell them? My child is gone. Questions would be asked. Who are you, ma’am? Who is the father? How long have you lived here, who might take your baby from you? What if their questions pierced the truth, that she lived here under a false name, that she wasn’t who she said she was.

  She hung up the phone. She had to think before she called the police. She had been so careful. She had hidden so well. No one knew where to find her. Except…

  The phone rang in her hand and she nearly dropped it as though the sound could turn to heat, scald her skin. She stared at the screen. The number, blocked.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Leonie. How are you?” A woman’s voice, gentle, and known to her. Anna Tremaine.

  “Where? Where?” she sobbed into the phone.

  “Oh, are you missing someone? Young mothers can be so forgetful.”

  “Where is my baby?” she screamed. Now the fear was gone. Snap, vanish. Just a fury in its place.

  Anna’s voice was calm. “Let me assure you your child is safe.”

  A ragged moan escaped Leonie’s throat.

  “Are you listening, Leonie?” Anna said. “It will be tiresome if I have to repeat myself.”

  “Why have you done this? Why?”

  “Because, Leonie, you are going to do something very important for me, and you’re going to do it right away, no argument.”

  Leonie forced herself toward calm. “What do you want?”

  “You’re so good at hiding people for us, darling, but can you do it in reverse? Can you find someone who’s hiding?”

  “Yes,” Leonie said. It was inconceivable to give any other answer. She’d do anything for Taylor.

  “All right. If you have another client right now, get rid of him.”

  She thought of Gunnar. He needed to be hidden. Okay, whatever, he couldn’t decide what he was doing or where he wanted to go, screw him for eternity. He would have to wait. “Okay. Please don’t hurt Taylor. Please. Please.”

  “Get ahold of yourself. I need you to be calm.”

  “You could have just asked! You could have just asked me for help! You know I would, I already…”

  The woman’s voice was a slow purr. “I needed an assurance you would act.”

  “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “You’re going to work with a gentleman. He, like you, is very motivated to do a good job for us.”

  “I don’t work with other people.”

  “You will now, Leonie. Unless you’re willing to pull the trigger on a gun yourself and kill a man in cold blood. Your job is easy. All you have to do is find a target. This man will then kill the target. And then you get Taylor back. Easy.”

  Panic churned her guts. She sank down onto the couch. Okay, she thought, this is the reality of the moment. Deep breath and deal. “Um, who is this man I’m supposed to find and who is it I’m working with?”

  “I love the smell of cooperation in the morning,” Anna Tremaine said. “You’re very good at making last-minute travel arrangements, darling. I’ll let you meet him at the airport. His name is Sam Capra. He can tell you the details.”

  “Anna, is Taylor all right?”

  “Perfectly fine. Asleep on a blanket.”

  Leonie felt fear like ice pierce her skin. She forced herself to listen intently. Anna, or one of her people, must have taken the baby in the past couple of hours,
while she was absorbed in her work, or dozing at her desk. Which meant that Anna might still be in Las Vegas, or was in a car driving away from the city. She tried to hear the hiss of tire against road on Anna’s side of the phone. She heard nothing. If Anna was pulled over, then there might be traffic as the background noise. A clue that would tell her where Anna was. The rumble of an eighteen-wheeler, a whine of engine passing Anna’s car. She heard nothing. She cursed herself for not listening sooner. But shock had frozen her. She tried to manipulate her memory: force herself into replaying every word of the conversation again. Every nuance. Because if she did what was asked, and her child wasn’t returned, the person she would be finding and killing was Anna Tremaine.

  “You know not a hair on the head will be hurt,” Anna said in a babyish sing-song. “Haven’t I always been nice to you? Check the email address we used in the past. Details will be there, and final instructions. Pack a bag for a few days. Be at your smartest. Be brave. Do a good job, Leonie. For your child’s sake.” Then the phone went dead in her hand.

  Final instructions? Leonie got up and ran toward the laptop.

  16

  Las Vegas

  I HURRIED TOWARD THE TICKET COUNTER at McCarran when a woman stopped me. She was slightly built, auburn-haired, with a full mouth and purple-smudged eyes. She wore jeans and a green blouse and carried a small briefcase and a travel bag. She was pretty but she looked like she’d had a night as rough as mine.

  “Sam Capra?” Her voice shook slightly.

  I nodded.

  “I have your ticket. For the flight to New York. I just bought it for you.”

  “Okay,” I said. This was the woman who would find Jin Ming. My motivated partner, as Anna had said.

  She gave me the ticket. Her hand trembled. Then she looked at me, studied me as if my face were an interesting map, then she turned away from me and went and sat down. The security lines were long but moving.

  I followed her. We were being forced together and I did not want anyone else knowing my business; especially when my business involved killing a man. “Who are you?”