The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  I pulled free from the surujin, kicked back from her, just in time for Beth to nearly open my throat.

  She had my blade, the one Lizzie had handed her from my ankle. I ducked as she slashed at me; she was only missing by a centimeter.

  I threw myself back in a herky-jerky dance as she advanced, chasing me. The blade scored along the front of my jacket, slicing the lapel. She overextended on her thrust and I caught her and threw her to the side. I groped at my tie for my blade.

  My tie was gone. She’d sliced the whole thing off, severing the silk, leaving a faint score on the shirt. Where was it?

  Beth stumbled, back on her feet, her hand bleeding from where the blade had turned on her. Lizzie, untangling her deadly Japanese not-really-a-toy. My severed tie lay on the floor between them.

  I ran, grabbed the cloth, felt the reassuring weight of the knife under the silk. I skidded under the row of tables bordering the boxes where Russell Ming stored his junk. I worked the knife free from the silk, closed fingers around the handle.

  The top of the table exploded into splinters, punctured by the weight of the surujin.

  My shield—the table I was under—flew up, the two of them throwing it off me.

  Which meant they each had one hand otherwise occupied.

  I slashed with the knife, at knee-level. I caught Lizzie but not Beth. Lizzie howled but hammered the weight into the small of my back. Pain exploded along my spine. My knife clanged against Beth’s, slash, parry, slash. She cut at my suit sleeve. I sliced across her knuckles.

  I backed away. She stayed level, knife out. She knew what she was doing. Next to her, Lizzie raised and started whirling the surujin. Then I saw the weight in her hand.

  She whirled the end with the spike.

  Lizzie exploded it toward me and it missed me by a bare inch, drilling into one of the crates. She yanked at it with a gasp but it caught in the hole she’d pierced in the wood. Beth crouched before me, defending her partner. All that mattered was that for one moment the field was equal.

  “It doesn’t have to end this way, bitch,” Beth told me. “We are going to win. We are going to wear you down.” The fact that she was even negotiating was telling me I’d fought harder, hurt them more than they figured I would.

  “You’re between me and my kid. So you either walk away and don’t look back or you’re dead,” I said.

  “When I get you in the playpen…” Lizzie hollered. “You will not ever make another threat to us again.”

  “We could see. Trade the notebook for my son,” I yelled.

  For the barest moment Beth paused. “What notebook?”

  “The one Jack Ming filled with dirty secrets.” Our knives clanged as she pressed the attack. Behind her Lizzie yanked the spike free from the crate. She started whirling the damned surujin again, running toward us.

  “We’re sort of kind of on the same side,” Beth said.

  “Who’s your boss?” I answered.

  Lizzie whipped the spike toward me, arcing hard. I parried it with the blade and it slammed, sideways, back into Beth’s head. Her temple, the soft part. The impact was squelchy and thudding and Beth fell, timbering, boneless, her head a sudden brutal mess on the side.

  For a moment neither of us moved. The blade was broken by the blunt weight of the spike. I held it because I had no other weapon.

  And then Lizzie began to scream, incoherent rage, the kind of fury that rises like a storm in the soul. She screamed: “Meggie!” She yanked back the spike by seizing onto the chain, whipping it into a cloud of frenzy.

  I dropped the broken knife, grabbed the one still clutched in Beth’s hand. I stood and the weight of Lizzie’s surujin began to spiral around my neck. Instinct to save my throat kicked in and I raised my arm. The weight and the chain caught it, pressing it against my face, the blade now above my head, wedged and useless. Lizzie yanked me toward her, the spike raised. The whirring had cleaned a fair amount of Beth’s brain and blood off of it.

  No playpen for me. No keeping me alive now. Now there was just the vast, awful, empty rage in her eyes.

  So I flowed with the tug on the chain and I threw myself into her.

  We crashed to the floor. She hit me in the head with the spike and the weight at the same time, cymbaling my head. I couldn’t shrug free from the chain to release my arm and she whirled me loose and snapped a brutal kick into my face. I fell back and then she looped the chain around my throat in a savage noose and began to squeeze, her knees in my back.

  Colors swam before my eyes, broke apart, descended into grays. I gritted my teeth. The blade was beyond my reach. I pulled away from her, like a plow horse dragging an impossible weight. Grasping for the knife. She howled and shoved her foot hard against my spine.

  Daniel. The thought of him fueled me. My hand closed around the knife.

  She leapt over me, clawing for it. And this is how a person dies.

  The pressure on the chains eased.

  We both grabbed for the knife.

  I could hardly breathe. When she tried to pull it away from my grasp, I let her do the work and I just steered it. With a thrust that surprised us both the blade pierced her chest.

  She gasped, a very quiet sound for such a loud, bragging fool. I lay beside her. There was not a lot of blood because it had slid into the heart with a pure straightness.

  She didn’t die as fast as Beth but then she was gone. I pushed her off me.

  Special Projects operated like a rogue group. What happened when you had a rogue inside the rogue? They know about Mila, and they know about my son. I’ll do what they want and they’ll just ask for Mila next. It won’t ever end. Ever.

  I staggered to my feet. I pulled the chain free from my throat like a man just spared from the gallows. I got to the window and I spat blood.

  Think. I dug in my pocket, I found my cell phone. I just hoped I still had my voice.

  44

  Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan

  THE PHONE BUZZED EARLY, at 11 a.m., and August had changed the ring tone to match an appropriate song: Aretha Franklin’s classic version of “Until You Come Back to Me.”

  “Hello,” the informant said.

  “Hello,” August said.

  “So, we’re doing this. An hour early. Forgive the change of plans.”

  It didn’t surprise August; the informant was trying to keep him slightly off-kilter. He supposed it gave the informant a sense of control. “Yes.”

  “I want you and you alone showing up.”

  “Why?”

  “Those people I pissed off are threatening to kill me and say they can do it as soon as I surrender to you. That they’ve got people inside your team ready to bring my head on a platter.”

  “That is what is known as a scare tactic, my friend.”

  “You’re not my friend.”

  “I’m trying to save your life.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “I can assure you of your safety.”

  “I am so reassured, August.”

  “You haven’t told me how you know my name.”

  “I’ll tell you when you’ve made me safe.”

  August was silent.

  “You don’t tell anyone where you’re going. You come alone. Understood?”

  “And when I’ve seen the evidence we get you to a safe house and we get you your money.”

  “It’ll be worth it, August, I promise. They are insane that I have this. Insane.”

  “Understood.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I have had a shitty week. I want this to go smoothly and to be a day you talk about when they hand you the gold watch.”

  “I’m all for that,” August said.

  “Go to the United Nations Plaza. Be there in thirty minutes. Alone, like you promised. I’ll call you then.” He hung up.

  August folded the phone. He headed out the door. He told no one where he was going. But two men on the street followed him.

  A vistor might expect the Unit
ed Nations Plaza would be a riotous color of international garb, but it seemed most people wore the same dark suits nowadays. And everyone seemed to be speaking English. August stood at the plaza’s edge for four minutes before his phone rang.

  “You came alone.”

  “As promised. Where are you?”

  “Not here. Go to FAO Schwarz on Fifth. I’ll call you there. Stay alone. I’m watching.”

  How? August thought. He pocketed the phone in annoyance. He understood the informant’s precautions but this seemed almost theatrical. Was the informant watching him now? He glanced around, smoothing out his pale hair with his hand. He walked and doubled-back. He did not spot a tail.

  The two men tracking him fell off, to be replaced by two new ones, one staying ahead of August, one behind, frowning.

  At FAO Schwarz, tourist children danced on keyboards and August thought: they still make those? Kids swarmed the aisles and standing there alone, childless, August thought: I don’t want to draw attention. One mother, with four-year-old twin boys orbiting her, gave him the greasy eyeball of doubt. He told himself he was a visiting businessman buying a gift for his own child and that’s how he would act.

  The phone rang as he surveyed an astonishing display of action figures. I’d like my own action figure, August was thinking. New York Spy Skulking Guy. He answered the phone.

  “You’re supposed to be alone, August,” the informant said. “I spy, with my little eye, two goobers who picked you up at the UN and are still with you.”

  August kept his poker face in place. How did he know he had agents following him, tasked to help him scoop up the informant?

  “Now. Those guys could be your buddies, backing you up, or Novem Soles, following you to get us both into a corner and to kill me dead. Lose them.”

  August was silent. Shocked.

  “Do you know what they look like?”

  “No,” August lied.

  “One is black, wearing a blue suit and dark rectangular glasses. The other has brown, slightly longish hair, wearing jeans and a maroon shirt. Lose them. When you have lost them I’ll call you back.” He hung up.

  August lingered for a moment in the aisle, shaken, and doing his best not to show it. When he walked out of the store he brushed his hand twice through his thick, blond hair. It was a signal: the meeting was off. The trackers would retreat back to the Special Projects office. He had not anticipated his shadows being spotted. He stood outside the store, hailed a cab and got inside.

  The phone rang before he had the door shut.

  “Go to Brooklyn. The flea market in Williamsburg. Don’t be followed.”

  August figured it out en route to Brooklyn. The clever little punk had hacked his way into the traffic camera system. And into the private security cameras at the toy store. Anyplace he sent August had an active, multiple-camera presence—all were very public spaces. That’s how he was watching August. He would have an entrance into the flea market’s camera system as well.

  He called the Special Projects office.

  “He’s tracking us via traffic and store security cameras. See if you can trace him off the FAO Schwarz or Williamsburg Brooklyn Flea Market camera feeds, he’s hacking into them right now. Get a team to Brooklyn now, we need to scoop him up immediately when he gives me a final destination.”

  “Will do.”

  August leaned back in the cab. The phone rang.

  “Yes.”

  “I changed my mind. Here’s where I want you to go.”

  45

  Ming building, Brooklyn

  LEONIE STARED DOWN AT BETH and Lizzie. Her mouth trembled.

  “I know them,” she said, in a hushed tone.

  I sat on the floor, inspecting my injuries. I was sore and exhausted but I didn’t have time to hurt. Nothing was broken, as far as I could tell. I unknotted my slashed tie, threw it on the floor. “How do you know them?”

  Her mouth worked. “I made new identities for them.”

  “As Lizzie and”—I remembered the name Lizzie had screamed—“Meggie?”

  “No. Those were their real names. Lizzie and Meggie Pearson. They were from Oregon. Their father… he killed their mother in front of them and then told everyone his wife and kids had left him, but he kept the sisters in a cage in his basement for three years when they were little. The father finally got too close to the cage and the girls strangled him against the bars. They were maybe ten and nine. Didn’t you hear about that? One of those stories where they were all over the news for five minutes then the world forgot about them.”

  “I grew up overseas; no, I never heard of them.”

  “They got put into foster care but… I don’t think they ever recovered. No family would keep them for long. Meggie was cold and calculating, Lizzie was crazy and vicious. They were in trouble with the law a lot; there was talk that they had killed a college student who knew Lizzie slightly, nothing was proven, but he was found dead in a cage in an abandoned cabin.”

  Cage. Playpen.

  “They had to vanish.” Leonie’s voice broke. “Oh, God, oh, God, we have to get out of here.”

  “Why?”

  Leonie stepped away from Lizzie’s body. Shuddering. “Because… someone I knew once wanted them to come work for him, and he needed them to have new identities. Not be the least bit notorious. New names. New histories. So they could work for him… unimpeded.”

  “As hired killers.”

  “Yes, and as interrogators. Lizzie is supposed to be good at getting information out of people.”

  “And you hid them.”

  “Yes. That’s what I did, for three years, hid people for him. Before I hid myself.”

  “Who?”

  “The man I’m hiding from, Sam.”

  “Who, Leonie?”

  “His name is Ray Brewster. He must be behind all this. He must be.”

  “Who is he?”

  She stared out the window, through the slats. Her fist pressed against her mouth. “They’re here.”

  46

  Ming building, Brooklyn

  I STEPPED NEXT TO LEONIE and I watched through the slats. August Holdwine approached the building from the sidewalk, via the back entrance along the alleyway. Alone. He was in jeans, a dark, untucked shirt, a summer-weight jacket, probably to conceal his weapon.

  So if August was here, where was Jack Ming?

  August moved along the alleyway, hand tucked under blazer, being careful. Maybe if I stood and waved he’d wave back. Could invite him up to hang out with Leonie and me and the dead sisters. After all, we’re all looking for the same guy.

  “Stay here,” I said to Leonie. She’d heard my shocked intake of breath, come closer to the window.

  “What is it? Is it Ming?”

  “No. Someone else has shown up here.”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “The CIA.”

  She sucked in breath. “Has he tracked him here?”

  “Either that or he’s meeting him, which means Anna’s source is dead-on right.” Anna had someone inside Special Projects. Was it this Ray Brewster? I wasn’t sure if that theory made sense.

  I had thought I could grab and deal with Ming before the meeting, before August or anyone else showed up. Now I was literally out of time. Where was Ming? He had to be close, probably watching August to ensure that he showed, and perhaps that he showed alone. Conditions for the meeting would have been set.

  “Stay here. Don’t let him see you. Let me handle this,” I said. “If this goes wrong and we get separated or I’m captured, go to a bar called The Last Minute. It’s right by Bryant Park in Manhattan. Ask for Bertrand, tell him you’re a friend of mine. He’ll protect you.”

  She nodded. “You know this man,” she said, pointing down toward August.

  “Yes.”

  Leonie clutched my arm. “You are not negotiating with this man, Sam. You have to kill Jack Ming. End of story. You must.”

  “I—”

  “Will your
friend there walk away without a fight?”

  “His name is August. No. I know him too well. No.”

  “Then are you going to kill August? Who matters more, your friend or your kid?”

  No, never, I thought. How far would you go to save your son? Leonie’s words ricocheted around my brain.

  “Quit being so bloodthirsty. It’s not your friend and your finger on the trigger. It’s not your conscience.”

  She flinched. “I’m not bloodthirsty. I just want my child back. Don’t you?” Then, before I could answer, she made her voice a knife. “Maybe not. It’s not like you’ve seen him. It’s not like you could really love him.”

  I yanked my arm from her hand.

  The shock on my face must have been reflected on her own. “Oh, my God, Sam, I am so sorry—I don’t know why I said that… Please…”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “Right now, call my cell phone. I’ll listen on the earbud. I’m going to keep August downstairs and talk to him. But I want to know if Ming comes into sight. I want to know immediately if you see him.”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t hang up and don’t panic.”

  47

  Ming building, Brooklyn

  I HURRIED DOWN THE STAIRS to the second floor. Were the doors unlocked? I waited at the top of the stairs that led down to the ground floor.

  August opened the door. He came through with gun drawn, arm extended, classic stance to sweep the room. He froze when he saw me. I kept my hands raised, empty of a weapon.

  “Hi.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  My best friend stared up at me in shock. For one moment he wavered. Five long seconds ticked by. But he kept his gun leveled at me. “You look like you’ve been beaten to hell, man.”

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “What are you doing here, Sam?”

  “I have a favor to ask you. Biggest one ever.”

  “Come down here.”

  I stayed put. “This is what I need you to do. Turn around and leave. You hear from Jack Ming again, you ignore it. Let him go.”