Sam Capra's Last Chance

by Jeff Abbott

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  (This story takes place between the events of the novels Adrenaline and The Last Minute.)

  Strasbourg, France

  I ran into empty air five stories above the pavement, the edge of the building falling away under my feet, spinning, aiming backward, firing behind me as I soared over the alleyway. The bullet caught my pursuer in the shoulder; I’d missed the chest shot. And the jump between the buildings over the alleyway was maybe ten feet. I realized I’d miscalculated and I wasn’t going to complete the leap.

  I dropped my suppressor-capped gun to the alleyway five stories below. I wasn’t about to drop the mobile phone I’d just stolen. That phone was the key to finding my son. I reached an arm far as I could, found a grip as I slammed into the side of the building. One-handed, I clawed a hold on the ornate stonework. I was a trained parkour runner and my hands, my legs, knew how to fight for purchase on a building’s ledge. I tucked the phone in my back pocket so I wouldn’t lose it, began to pull myself up. I glanced across the gulf.

  Oh, no.

  The gunman staggered to his feet, trying to steady the aim of his own gun at me while I struggled against the side of the opposite building. I’d hit his right shoulder and he was right-handed, but that wasn’t going to buy me more than a few seconds.

  He can’t kill me, I thought. I have to find my son. A panic surged through me, more than fear from being shot or plummeting to unforgiving pavement. If I didn’t find Daniel, no one would. There was no one left to fight for him but me.

  Resolve fueled me. I pulled my leg up onto the building’s edge, fighting for leverage, but now the easiest of targets. He’d shoot me before I could pull myself to safety. I heard laughter below, probably nice people coming into my bar down on the street level, eager to enjoy their evening, drink Alsatian Riesling and Kronenbourg beer, chat with their friends. Unaware of the drama above them.

  “Throw me back that phone!” he yelled. “Or… or…”

  The red dot of his laser sight, built into his modified Ruger’s grip, danced along my arm, moving toward my head. But behind him, I saw a petite form emerge onto the building’s roof, swing an object at him that looked like an oversized discus, and strike him in the throat.

  He toppled. The woman stood behind him, relieved him of his gun, and watched me pull myself fully up onto the neighboring roof. I tottered on the steep slope, got my balance. Then she waved the man’s gun at me. “What were you thinking, Sam?”

  “I was trying to draw him away from the crowd downstairs.”

  “I suppose it would not do to have customers shot your first night owning the bar,” she said.

  My hands were scraped; my body would be sore. But I had the thread to my son. I held up the cell phone I’d stolen from the man. I’d gotten the prize.

  “Wonderful, Sam. Go get your gun out of the alleyway before a drunk finds it,” Mila said.

  “What about him?” I could then see, in the setting sun’s light, that Mila had hammered the man with a heavy, circular, wooden serving tray brought from the bar downstairs. She shrugged, tucked the tray under her arm, and began to drag the unconscious man back into the building.

  Furious with myself, I started looking for a way to get inside the building from the roof. There was no door on the sloping roof. I’d have to find a window or drop down to a fire escape and hope no one noticed me clambering down the side of the building. All while the man who knew where my missing infant son was bounced down the stairs, dragged by Mila, perhaps bleeding out his life, and the answers I needed.

  Ten minutes later, my broken gun retrieved from the alleyway, I was in the apartment above Bar du Rhin, one of thirty bars and nightclubs I now owned. It’s a nice, cozy Alsatian pub, in the historic Orangerie district, close to the European Quarter where much of the European Union’s bureaucracies are located. Officials, high and low, from around Europe drink here at times, along with the locals and I wondered if Bar du Rhin existed simply for Mila, my new boss (of sorts), to listen to whatever words of power or intrigue might be dropped.

  This photo of a woman, carrying a child we believed to be my son, was my only clue.

  With the time stamp from the video of her departure, one of Mila’s hackers had lifted another photo off a closed-circuit traffic camera a minute later, on Rue de la Renaissance, leading to the clinic. We’d gotten a license plate and a man’s face in the driver’s seat. We’d traced the plates to a Strasbourg private car service owned and operated by one man, named Pierre Krug. There were many such services in the city; Strasbourg is the seat of the European Parliament and several other international agencies, and official visitors here often need drivers on call.

  We’d dug into the quilted past of Pierre Krug. He’d owned the car service for three years, having worked previously as a truck driver, but he’d also amassed debts for gambling. Ones higher than a chauffeur could easily pay. So I’d called Monsieur Krug about a lucrative long-term contract, one big enough to wipe away the unmentioned debt, inviting him to have a drink at Bar du Rhin with me to discuss. He agreed eagerly.

  Whatever he ordered, wine or beer, would be doctored to accelerate his drunkenness (Mila graciously volunteered to be our server). We had a table near the back stairs, away from the rest of the early evening crowd. The stairs led up to a private apartment and office for Mila and me. And up those steps, a laptop awaited a rendezvous with Pierre Krug’s mobile phone.

  My goal was to steal his mobile phone for a minute, to see if there was any number on it that we could trace back to the woman he’d chauffeured from the clinic. I am an adept pickpocket; so I’d get him drunk from the dosed beer, take the phone, slip it to Mila, have her copy the numbers to a laptop in a matter of seconds, and then I’d slip it back into his jacket. Not so different from the work I once did for the CIA. After an hour Pierre Krug was well lubricated on laced Kronenbourg and whiskey. I leaned in to tell him a crude joke, whispering in his ear. As he bellowed with laughter, I’d gone for the phone—but instead I’d touched the gun under his jacket.

  In my bars, I feel I’m the only one who should be armed.

  He’d looked at me, startled, and I abandoned subterfuge. I had to have that phone. I’d punched him and wrenched the phone from his jacket. I’d run up the stairs, preferable to making a scene in the middle of the Bar du Rhin. He’d given chase… and now he lay in the private apartment, shot in the shoulder. A complete mess. If I let him go then he might run back to the woman who’d taken Daniel, warn her I was on her track.

  But I wasn’t prepared to kill him in cold blood.

  Roused from his unconsciousness, one hand cuffed to a chair, Pierre Krug blinked and saw his shirt was off, the wounded shoulder wrapped in a bloodied bandage. My shot had lodged the bullet against the shoulder bone and he groaned at the pain. He blinked.

  “Pierre,” I said. “Hello. Again.” I let him see my gun, and then I put it away. “Let’s have a civilized conversation.”

  He winced, with his free hand probing the bruise discoloring his neck where Mila had smacked him with the tray. “Where…”

  “You’re above the Bar du Rhin.” I held up his phone. He blinked at me, eyes bleared with
beer and pain.

  Now he remembered. “I was here, talking with you. Drinking.”

  “Yes. Then you tried to kill me.”

  His gaze narrowed. “You’re a thief.”

  “And you drive around women who steal babies.”

  He looked at the floor. “I need a doctor.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said quietly. I glanced at Mila. She was silent; this was my hunt, my game. I held up the photo of the woman carrying the infant. “You drove this woman away from the Les Saintes clinic off Rue de la Renaissance, with a child that was not hers. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know her name,” he said. “And you don’t know the trouble you’ve bought, idiot.” He spat at me.

  I pushed his sleeve up. On the back of his forearm lay a small nine, crowned with a circle of flame. The mark of the Nine Suns, the international crime ring that was my mortal enemy. They’d destroyed my CIA career; they’d stolen my family. They still had my son. I’d seen the same mark on the arm of a dozen thugs back in Amsterdam. They owned Pierre Krug.

  I tapped the tattoo. “I know you’re not just some innocent limo driver, Pierre. I know these people. They brand you like you’re their property. You don’t have to be.” He bit his bottom lip at my words. He was still capable of feeling shame. That could be useful.

  “Who is this woman?”

  “I swear, I do not know her name.”

  “Where did you take her and this child?” It had been suggested to me that Nine Suns sold Daniel. And maybe that was true. So far Nine Suns had made no ransom demand against me. I kept pushing away the thought that they had simply murdered him. We’d been monitoring the Strasbourg news: no reports of an abandoned or dead newborn. Daniel was valuable, either in euros or dollars or leverage against me, I thought, and Nine Suns would use him with care.

  Krug didn’t answer. I started to turn to Mila but she had taken a telescoping baton from her boot—her preferred weapon—and she ran the top of it against the bandage covering his wound. Then she flicked the baton and the telescoping shaft extended to its full length.

  Krug flinched.

  “It hurts a lot to hit this against undamaged flesh, Pierre,” she said. “I think it will really hurt against bullet hole and torn muscle and damaged nerves and shoulder bone. I don’t wish to hurt you. But I will.”

  He spat at us, but his lip trembled. He said something so guttural I couldn’t tell if it was French or German.

  “You think we are the bad people, Pierre?” Mila said. “Find a mirror. You helped steal his son.” She pressed the baton into his flesh, gently, like a conductor moving his baton to a soft and lilting piece of music. The tip was solid, the better to deliver a hard blow.

  He gritted his teeth at the pressure.

  “Pierre,” I said. “We can get you to a doctor.” I put a hand on Mila’s, to stop the pressure. “And we can get you away from Nine Suns, if you want out.”

  At this, he glanced up. “But… we fought.”

  He’d also hesitated to shoot me, warning me to give up the phone. He wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. “We could have an arrangement, Pierre. They’ve kept you in debt. We can get you out of it. Fresh start. New life.”

  He shook his head, stared at the floor. “If they knew I’d let you take my phone they would kill me. I’m a dead man.”

  “Mila, put the baton up, please,” I said.

  She did, closing it against the wall with a click. She frowned at me, as though I’d interrupted her fun. I sometimes wonder what forge had shaped Mila. I knew next to nothing about her.

  I knelt before him, putting my gaze at his eye level. “Our side won’t mark you with a tattoo. We won’t own you.” I let a moment pass. “This is my son she stole. Please.”

  “I truly don’t know her name,” he said finally. “I took her to an apartment building, not far from the university. But… then, two days later, I took her to the train station.”

  “Where did she go?” I asked. Strasbourg had the second largest train station in France; she could easily vanish to anywhere from there.

  “She didn’t tell me. I didn’t see her tickets. But…” He paused.

  “But,” I said.

  “But I saw her passport. It was French issue.”

  “But you didn’t see her name?”

  “No, only the passport’s cover.”

  “My son would need a passport,” I said. That was true, even of infants. And she was taking him at a very young age, days old. They’d wanted the baby away from my wife as quickly as possible.

  “She would have to be posing as the mother, I think,” Mila said. “So we can assume Daniel is under a French passport as well, forged before he was even born. He is so young it might attract attention if he were traveling under a different flag, so to speak.” Lucy had told me his birth name on the certificate was Julien Daniel Besson; but I couldn’t assume that would be the name on his false passport as well.

  “I heard her speak English into her mobile phone. She said was going to London with the baby.”

  I glanced at Mila. “Why on earth would she take Daniel to London?” The city where my wife, Lucy, and I had been happiest, the city where my life became unraveled, the city where it could be very, very dangerous for me to go. The British authorities were unhappy with the bombing of a CIA office there, especially when the Agency had made it sound as if I might have been involved in it. I was the only survivor and I was willing to bet my name was on a watch list if I entered the country.

  Mila’s face paled. “Sam. We know Nine Suns had an active presence in London. If they want to hide your child from you… Let’s say they know you might trace Lucy to Strasbourg. They will want to make Daniel vanish, again. This woman could get him new documentation as a British child. Clearly they’ve already forged a passport for him to travel.”

  “France is a big country. They could hide him here. Why London?”

  Mila pulled me away from Krug, whispered in my ear: “Biggest metropolitan area in Europe. They can vanish there. Get him new documentation in case you’re busy looking for a French child. Sell him to a couple there, or get a couple from anywhere in the world to travel there and sell him to them. Remember, they don’t know what Lucy told you before she was… injured. They are taking no chances that Lucy might turn on them.”

  “Commodity,” Pierre Krug said.

  I turned to look at him. His gaze met mine, and for the first time I saw pity from him.

  “The Eastern European countries used to be big adoption centers. They’ve nearly halted the flow of children to the West. And most of those kids are older, and a lot of them have emotional troubles. I hear the people I’ve driven for the Parliament talk about it. A healthy newborn, with no parents? A baby like that is worth a great deal. Nine Suns are criminals. They are in it for profit.” Pierre Krug shook his head. An hour ago he was firing a gun at me and now he was helping me.

  “How long to get to London?” I said to Mila.

  She jerked a head toward Krug. “We’ll need to deal with him.”

  “What does that mean?” Krug asked, trying to hide the fear in his voice.

  “I either have to get you a doctor and decide to trust you, or kill you,” she said.

  Pierre Krug raised his free hand. “I don’t want to die for these people.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “No. Just my car, and chauffeur’s license.”

  “We can hide you, elsewhere in France, or Switzerland,” Mila offered. “Give you a fresh start.” That was what I wanted as well, once I found my son.

  His voice went to a whisper. “And what about Les Neufs Soleils?”

  Mila said, “You tell us what you know. We hide you until you don’t want to be hidden anymore.”

  Just like that. Life, reinvented. But she’d done the same for me, when I was trying to break free of the CIA. I wanted to tell Krug not to betray her; Mila would not tolerate betrayal. But the look on his face convinced me his cooperation was real. We
were offering him an escape hatch.

  After a moment, Krug nodded. Mila picked up a line to call for a doctor who would make a discreet house call at Bar du Rhin. She seemed to know such a doctor in every city where I owned a bar. She looked at me. “Go. To the station. Get to London. I will deal with our… new friend here.”

  I grabbed my bag, still mostly unpacked, and started shoving in clothes. I grabbed one of the fake passports Mila had had done for me weeks ago when we first met, a New Zealander named David Weston. It was the passport I’d used to enter France, so I’d use it to exit as well.

  One thought dominated my mind as I headed for the train station: They had taken my child, and they would pay.

  London

  I’d taken the late train from Strasbourg to Paris, spent the night in the apartment above the bar I owned there, and then taken an early Eurostar to London, arriving at St Pancras. I’d been involved in a shootout there a few weeks ago, a mad chaotic nightmare, and I hoped that the station’s security people didn’t know my face. As I departed the train I could see the long length of the station’s famous Champagne Bar, where murder and revenge had collided for me. Now it was full of late-morning travelers, some treating themselves to early bubbly. I didn’t look up at the restored architecture; I didn’t want my face on the cameras. I hated feeling hunted in London; I’d nearly come to think of it as home. I’d had a nomadic childhood, my brother and I wandering the world with my parents, who worked for a relief agency. I’d lived in more than a dozen countries in a dozen years. Life in London with Lucy had been the longest I’d been settled other than my years at Harvard, where my patchwork schooling made me feel an oddity.

  My New Zealand passport passed muster. I walked through St Pancras, past its shops and eateries, and out onto Euston Road. I could have asked Kenneth, the Nigerian-born manager at my bar here, Adrenaline, to pick me up in a car, or jumped on the tube’s Northern Line for a quick trip to Old Street station but I wanted to be sure I was clean—that no one was following me. London today was cool, clouds colored like steel. The air felt heavy with unshed rain.