The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  He wanted to cry for his mother, but he couldn’t. Maybe later.

  He picked up his cell phone and he dialed Amsterdam. It was very late there, actually early the next morning.

  “Ja?” She sounded sleepy.

  “Ricki. It’s Jack.”

  “Oh, my God, where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I just want you to know that… I want to thank you. For helping me.” What was he going to say to her? My mom died, and, well, you’re the only friend I have left. There wasn’t much to say about him and his mom.

  Ricki started to cry. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “They came… after you were gone. They came and they made me tell them where you went and they wanted to know what you knew about them. I’m sorry. They said they would kill me if I didn’t talk.”

  “It’s okay, it’s okay. Are you all right?”

  “Not really. They… they took over my business. I have to work for them now or they’ll kill me. They’re taking all the money.”

  “Oh, Ricki. Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”

  She sounded as though she might cry but she didn’t. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Listen. Tomorrow, I will either be dead or I’ll have the money to vanish forever. Do you want to vanish with me?”

  “What, go off with you? It… that is just stupid and crazy.”

  “I like you that much,” Jack said. “I’m sorry I waited until now to tell you.”

  Ricki gave what sounded like a half-sob, half-laugh. “Why would you trust me not to tell them? They own me now.”

  “Because, well, I don’t know. I do trust you. Do you want to come with me?”

  “I would have to walk away from everything,” she said.

  “It’s not yours anymore.”

  She sniffed. “True. Yes, Jack, I think I would like a new start.”

  “Okay. I kind of love you a little.”

  “I know. I’ve known for a while. I love you a little, too.”

  His chest made a slight lurch. “Okay, that’s good then.”

  “Well, don’t die now,” she said. She started crying again.

  “I won’t. I won’t. I’ll call you back when I have the money and I’ll tell you where to go. If I don’t call, you figure out some way to get out from under these people. Just walk away if you have to, Ricki. You don’t want any part of them.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to mail you a key to a locker. It has a copy of the notebook. If I die then it’s yours, and you can do with it what you want. If you’re too afraid of Nine Suns, then give them the key and they’ll burn it, and I’ll already be dead so I won’t care. Or come to New York and get it yourself and give it to the police or to the FBI or sell it to the Brits or the French. I wouldn’t deal with the CIA.”

  “But if you’re okay, then I’ll be gone when the key gets here.”

  “It won’t matter. If I’m okay, I’ll have the copy with me. You just be ready to get on a plane.”

  “Okay. I wish I was there with you.”

  “I do, too. I’ll call you tomorrow night.”

  “I’m going to be an optimist and pack my bag.”

  “All right. I love you.” The three hardest, the three easiest, words to say.

  “I love you, too.”

  He hung up. If Ricki had kept her mouth shut his mother might be alive. But Ricki would be dead. He couldn’t know how it would have turned out, and he couldn’t hold it against her. If someone had said in his senior year of college he would get caught hacking, cause his father to have a heart attack, dodge arrest, hide out in Holland and fall for a Senegalese movie pirate, well, it wouldn’t have ranked very likely in his mind.

  Welcome to life. Life, something so sweet, something worth fighting for.

  He had to get ready for tomorrow. He didn’t have his gun anymore. And he didn’t know where he could get another one. You had to get close to hand over a notebook. A hand had to reach out to you.

  His mother wasn’t a great cook, but she’d loved having a gourmet kitchen.

  In a drawer he found a pearl-handled chopping cleaver. He liked the unexpected.

  75

  The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan

  THE BAR WAS CLOSED. Mila had vanished into whatever back corner of the night she lived. I was exhausted as I walked up to the apartment and reset the bar’s alarm system.

  Leonie sat at her computer. I couldn’t be on a computer so much. I sort of hated them.

  “Where have you been?” Leonie said.

  “I’m not going to tell you, but it’s going to get us our kids back,” I said.

  She looked at me. And she said, “All right.”

  I went into the bedroom. I fell onto the bed. Bad day. Broken arm, missed the target, didn’t get my son back. Exhaustion surged through me like a fever.

  “We all looked at that man in the bar you thought was suspicious. He stayed another hour and ate some tapas and he left.”

  “So maybe he was just a nobody,” I said. “I know your name was Lindsay Partridge once.”

  She sat on the bed’s edge. Her back to me. I reached over and touched her shoulder.

  “And who told you that?”

  “Someone in Special Projects. The CIA has a file on you.”

  “You know what I don’t miss? Partridge Family or Partridge in a Pear Tree jokes. I don’t miss those at all.”

  “I think I’d still like to call you Leonie.”

  “That’s fine. That’s my name now.”

  “The CIA file on you has sections that are locked.”

  “I can’t imagine why. I’m just a soccer mom–wannabe who’s good with computers.”

  “I’d really like to know why you ran.”

  “I needed a change.”

  “Brewster has to be deep inside the CIA.”

  “Or some group the CIA helps.”

  “You were given a lot of money.”

  “Yes.”

  “To hide people off the books.”

  “Yes.”

  “That isn’t in your file, so I’m told. So your file is about work you did for the CIA. Or for Brewster, on behalf of the CIA.”

  She rubbed at her face. “I think it’s safe to say he did… favors for the CIA.”

  I didn’t say anything to this. She had done dirty work, and doing it for Ray Brewster meant, like me, she was a CIA dirty secret. I felt her back tremble under my fingers.

  “You went and talked to your friend August.”

  “Yes. He got relieved of duty. We’ve declared a temporary truce.”

  “So you can find Jack Ming.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re not going to be able to find him. They’re going to kill our kids.”

  “Listen to me. As long as we’re chasing him, they have every reason to keep Taylor and Daniel alive.”

  She seemed to decide not to cry. But I could feel the shudder under her skin, the tenseness, and I rubbed her upper back with my fingertips.

  “One-armed man gives massage,” she said.

  “House special,” I said.

  “I should be tending to you. You’re the one who went off a building.”

  “I don’t make a habit of that,” I said. I dropped my hand from her back.

  She looked over her shoulder at me. “If Taylor dies my life is over. Done. I will have nothing.”

  “Don’t talk that way.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It only feels true.”

  “But there would be nothing left for me.”

  “Revenge. If they hurt the kids”—I couldn’t bring myself to say kill—“ then I am going to hurt them, like they’ve never seen.”

  “Revenge isn’t a reason to live.”

  “Mila once told me revenge is underrated. She might be right.”

  “I don’t think I could kill someone unless it was for Taylor.” Leonie stayed on the edge of the bed, I lay on my back.

&
nbsp; “Well, if someone’s about to kill me and you can stop it, feel free.”

  She laughed. Not really a laugh, but a cross between a sigh and a smile. “All right. Deal.”

  “Even if Jack Ming is operating under a different name, he needs help. Resources. He can’t access money in his name or his mother’s right now. I’m sure August froze those accounts. So. Who are his friends? Who will he turn to? That’s where we need to go.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So I checked his Facebook page. Not as Jack Ming, but back in Holland as Jin Ming. He only had ten friends on it. I imagine, posing as a Chinese student, he decided to keep a very low profile.”

  “Ten is a nice workable number.”

  “Now, in Holland, he’s wanted for questioning about the death of that man in the hospital. So. It would have to be a good friend.”

  I waited.

  “So I got into his university records again. He had a majority of his classes with two of his friends. A Dutch kid and a Chinese kid. I checked their university email accounts and there was no sign that Jack has contacted them. But I found a photo of Jack with one of them on Facebook, and so I looked at all the photos of Jack on Facebook. The majority of the photos where he is tagged on Facebook belong to a girl named Frédérique Diagne, called Ricki for short. She’s from Senegal but lives in Amsterdam. He is tagged in fourteen of her photos. Not in any others.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Hard to say. The most recent photo is from five months ago. They might have had a falling out. I asked around my hacker network and two of the guys told me there’s a prominent female copyright pirate in Amsterdam. From Senegal. Her hacker code name is RT-Tavi.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. It’s a Kipling story about a mongoose that kills cobras.”

  I remembered it now. “You think this Ricki is RT-Tavi.”

  “Yes. So I paid a guy to get into her phone log. She got a call about an hour ago from New York.”

  “Jack.”

  “It seems a distinct possibility. So I checked the line that called her. It has only called four numbers.” She showed them to me, written large on a legal pad with a black marker.

  “One of those is August’s cell phone.”

  “And this is the main number for the Central Park Conservancy.”

  “The other two?”

  “Ricki’s phone in Amsterdam. And an unknown.”

  “You can’t trace it?”

  “No. The last number is Israeli. I haven’t been able to access a call log for it.”

  Israel. Zviman was from Israel. But why would Jack Ming be calling the people who got his mother killed?

  Because he wanted to find them and kill them himself.

  “Do you want to call Ming?” she asked me.

  “And what? Apologize?” I stared at the Israeli phone number.

  Well, I could think of one good reason. But it was suicide for him, alone, to try and take them on.

  “It fascinates me that he’s calling Central Park. Why do you call an info line?”

  “Maybe to get their hours, or to find out if there are events going on in a certain section of the park.”

  “You think he’s meeting someone there.”

  “Yes. It’s open, it’s crowded, he might feel comfortable meeting there.”

  “To do what?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know what he’s actually going to do tomorrow. He doesn’t know it yet. But I do.”

  I took a screen capture from the security monitor tape of the man in the corner. August didn’t have a phone of his own; in Special Projects you are only allowed to have a phone that can be monitored by the group, and he’d said he’d surrendered his to Braun. Unfair maybe but you give up a certain expectation of privacy when you do this work. If he had his own phone then I could send this to him. Tomorrow he’d get one. I’d send it then.

  I stood and I winced. My body hurt. And I didn’t want Leonie thinking much more about this phone number.

  “Your arm is hurting. Let me get you a pain pill.”

  “I can’t be fuzzy. I have to be ready.”

  “It won’t make you fuzzy for tonight. Here.”

  I grudgingly took half the pill, swallowed it with cold water.

  “You rest.”

  I stripped out of my clothes, put on pajama pants I dug from a bureau, lay on the bed. I closed my eyes. I thought she would show more reaction when I knew her real name. But what, really, did it matter, when our children were in danger? I looked through the bedroom door and she sat at the computer desk. Looking at her picture of Taylor. The worn-with-love picture.

  I closed my eyes again. Darkness fell on me.

  Leonie awoke me when she slid into bed next to me. I raised my head up with a start.

  “Is this okay?” she asked. “I can sleep on the couch.”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  I lay back down.

  “Sam?”

  “What?” I opened my eyes. I must have bruises going to the bone. I thought granules of sand had been driven past my clothes into my skin.

  Leonie’s face was close to mine. I blinked, hazy with sleep. The pain wasn’t so bad; the pill must have taken off the edge.

  “I feel sorry for you,” she said softly.

  I don’t do pity. I hate it. I got it from every kid who felt bad for me, always being the new kid in school, the new American who couldn’t decipher the slurs or the name-calling in the native tongue. “Well, don’t.”

  “You haven’t even gotten to hold your child.”

  I stared past her into the darkness. My skin itched under the cast, probably along the stretch of arm where Daniel should rest when I did get to hold him.

  “Time will come,” I said.

  “Yes. I want that for you, more than anything. It is the best feeling ever. Nothing matches it for love, for terror, for hope.”

  “That sounds like a slogan for parenting.”

  “And you and I can be the poster children for single parents.”

  In the dim light from the street’s glow I smiled. “I shouldn’t be on anyone’s poster.”

  She lay close, but not pressing against me. For a minute the only sound was our breath in the room, the soft grind of the air conditioner, the distant murmur of the city.

  I turned my head to say something—I don’t remember what—and she kissed me, softly, then more insistently, her mouth hungry, nipping at my lips. The kiss grew, deepened, her tongue tracing a delicious path.

  The first time was from fear and stress. What was this? I was half dead but I felt my blood stir.

  I tasted salt: the sting of her tears.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” I said. I could smell toothpaste on her breath; she’d brushed her teeth before she came to me.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Why are you alone, with a child?”

  “I wanted to be alone.”

  “I never believe that. No one wants to be alone like that.”

  Her hands had moved to my chest; her fingernails moved along my skin and my breath nearly left me.

  “You don’t have to use your arm, you know. I’ll do the work.” She kissed me again. “How sore are you?”

  The correct answer was very, but I said, “Not a bit.”

  Probably people whose kids are in mortal danger shouldn’t be having sex together. We’re wrecks. It’s not like this moment could bring intimacy or grace.

  But there was none of that. Only an exhausting, fierce rawness of energy and anger and fury. At one point, her atop me and deep in her pleasure, she hammered at my shoulders, forgetting in the dark that I was a bruised beast. It was pain and glory all at once. That or she decided to fake an orgasm and beat the snot out of me at the same time.

  She collapsed on me when we were both spent and her body was warm and wonderful and rich, lying against mine. Silence, only broken by breathing. I nuzzled her hair.

  “That was good,” she breathed.<
br />
  “Yes. Very for me,” I said.

  “And very for me.” She cupped my face in her hands. “We have to get them back, Sam. We can’t fail.”

  “I know. I know. We will.”

  “Tell me what you’re planning.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I do, you’ll say no.”

  “Don’t… don’t you trust me?” Her breath seeped against my throat, her nails traveled my chest.

  “Yes.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Tomorrow Jack Ming goes down and our kids are going to be okay. All right?”

  She lay next to me, not cuddling, but lying there. Present, our breath close together. I suspected she wanted to beat me to a pulp in her trembling anger, but she needed me functioning. So she let me keep my secrets.

  While she kept all her own.

  I got up while she slept, put on my clothes despite my exhaustion, and slipped out into the night.

  76

  The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan, upstairs

  SAM’S PHONE, buzzing, woke Leonie. She groped across the empty bed for him; he was gone.

  She sat up and grabbed for the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Leonie. Let me speak to Sam.” She didn’t know this voice. It was the phone Anna Tremaine gave them as the lifeline to Nine Suns, to get their instructions, but it was not Anna on the phone. A man’s voice, crisp and precise and cold.

  “He’s… he’s not here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I was asleep. Who is this?”

  “This is the man who can have your kid killed with one phone call.”

  “Please. Please don’t.”

  “I presume you are capable of taking a message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell Sam I will call back in one hour. I am not happy that he is not near this phone. What if I was calling him to tell him that I knew where Jack Ming was?”

  “Then I’d go kill Ming,” she said. “We already know where he’s going to be tomorrow. Central Park.”