The First Order

by Jeff Abbott

  In his mind he began to build plans. Tearing them down, tossing them aside, beginning again when they did not satisfy. He did not hear the New York traffic, the laughter in the hallway, the distant honk of a taxi. His thoughts consumed him like fire.

  When the password program breached the laptop’s defense and beeped, he opened his eyes, stretched, and then started to read all the research on Morozov and his circle that Marianne had done, to see if his plan could stand up to reality.

  A chiming alert from his phone disturbed him. He checked it, as he received very few calls. It was an automated notice, telling him that a message had arrived at a particular voice mail account he had set up years ago. He accessed it and listened to a man from Afghanistan describe the arrival of a squad of Americans at the village of ghosts.

  He listened to the message five times. He wired money to an account in a bank in Kabul for the caller. Then he resumed his quiet sitting, but his heart pounded.

  Someone is looking for me. How much time do I have left?

  When Mrs. Claybourne got off the phone with the man she knew as Philip Judge, she drafted an e-mail—in Russian—to an account Firebird had given her. The account was one that would scramble and forward any e-mail sent to it, to a long chain of addresses, making it impossible to trace. And then their communications would be at an end.

  She wrote a short one, then thought Firebird might appreciate more detail. She didn’t delete the first e-mail, which simply confirmed the job. She moved the brief confirmation to the Drafts folder, knowing that she might write a long one and then decide the shorter one was better. This was a difficult client who had to be handled with great care. A single misstep could mean she and Judge would end up like Marianne and her team. She wrote a confirmation that Judge would take the job, that he had dealt with existing loose threads, and that he would be in touch as appropriate, confirming all safeguards previously agreed upon. She encrypted it and sent it on its way. Then she deleted it from her Sent folder.

  Then, at just that moment, her daughter called from Montreal, crying. It was jarring to move from planning an assassination to dealing with a distraught teenager who was homesick and hated boarding school. She kept telling her daughter that school in Montreal was for the best, but her daughter had locked herself in her room and could not be consoled. The conversation lasted for forty-five minutes. When she hung up with her daughter, after listening to tears and recriminations, she felt exhausted. Mrs. Claybourne then had to phone the school doctor about her daughter’s depression, then the headmaster, who seemed inclined to argue with her, and finally she called the Toronto-based parents of her daughter’s roommate and in icily polite tones suggested that perhaps their daughter could quit teasing her daughter. She thought, You people don’t even know what I could do to you. That I could send one of the world’s best assassins after you if your kid can’t quit picking on my kid.

  An hour later, emotionally spent, she got off the phone, forgetting about the first, shorter draft to Firebird that had joined dozens of other draft e-mails in her folder. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a coffee.

  She had made a critical mistake.

  5

  Budapest

  I APPRECIATE THE help,” Sam Capra said.

  “You’re most welcome,” Jimmy Court answered.

  The gentleman tied to the chair did not participate in the pleasant exchange. He hung his head down. The men were in the upstairs apartment above the Café Chosen bar, on Budapest’s hip and eclectic Kazinczy Street. They’d lured the man here with a free drink e-mail for ladies’ night and he’d come alone. One drink, spiked, and he didn’t feel well and no one in the bar paid any attention to Sam and Jimmy helping him up the stairs.

  “I remember you,” Sam said. “Do you remember me?”

  The man, who was fortyish, balding, with a small uncorrected gap between his front teeth, looked up and nodded.

  “You were a guard at a private prison in Brazil that unfortunately shut down a few weeks ago,” Sam said.

  The man’s mouth trembled.

  “Well, I guess, technically, I shut it down.” Sam had led a massive escape from the prison, a dark hole on no map where those who were threats or annoyances to the powerful criminal interests in the world were stashed. People they didn’t want to kill, or didn’t want to kill yet. Some were relatives, some were friends, some were rivals who would consider unending imprisonment worse than death. The prison’s matron, a psychopath who called herself Nanny, squeezed information from the prisoners that was then usefully sold to various criminal groups or back corners of governments. “But I remember you.”

  The man looked at the ground.

  “It took a while for me to find you. Most of the prison’s records were destroyed. I mean, I was very lucky to find this fragment of a photo in the wreckage.” He held up the photo, with his brother Danny’s face on it, but didn’t show it to the guard. “And some of my fellow prisoners heard you talk over the months you were there. That you lived in Budapest. That you have twin teenagers. That your wife died of a rare cancer four years ago and that’s why you took such a difficult, faraway job because it paid insanely well. Those are enough breadcrumbs to find a man.” Sam smiled.

  “I know nothing.”

  Sam kept a gun holstered on the underside of the desk. He had one in every bar, hidden at every desk. He cleared the gun from the holster and aimed it at the prisoner. This was a tranquilizer gun but the former guard didn’t know that. His eyes went wide with terror.

  “Please don’t kill me. Please…”

  “I’d like to get you home before your twins are home from school. I mean, I don’t want to be at your house when they walk through the door.” He gestured slightly with the dart gun. Sam would never hurt the man’s children, but this man didn’t know it. What the Hungarian did know was that Sam had killed every guard that stood in his way in the prison break. “But you were at that hellhole when this man was there.” Sam turned Danny’s picture so the Hungarian could see it. “Do you recognize him?”

  “Yes. He was a prisoner there. Number twenty-six.”

  “Number twenty-six.” Sam’s voice didn’t sound like his own. He saw, to his surprise, a concerned glance from Jimmy. Jimmy wasn’t exactly a friend and he’d been surprised Jimmy agreed to help him today. He put his gaze back on the former guard’s face. Sam well remembered being stripped of his name, the number “47” written in heavy marker on his forehead, on his prison overalls. “Did you know his real name?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who sent him to the prison?”

  The man’s lips thinned. “They told us nothing special about him but…”

  “But what?”

  “Two prisoners died while he was there. One strangled in his bed. The other, a neck broken, found dead in the library. Both of them were hired killers, I heard. Sent to the prison by Russians for failing in contract jobs.”

  “Are you saying…prisoner twenty-six killed them?”

  “I’m telling you what I know. He was only there seven months. Sometimes he was taken away…to another part of the prison.”

  “Another part?”

  “The unfinished part. I mean, it had a roof, but the cells weren’t built out. Prisoners weren’t kept there. I heard Nanny let people stay there. I always thought it was people who wanted a place to hide, because no one would ever find you there.”

  “Was he the only person there?”

  “Him and another man. Tall, big guy. Looked like a soldier. Dressed all in black, even in the heat of the jungle. I don’t know the man; I never heard him speak. I only saw him at a distance. I escorted Nanny to the empty part of the prison once, as her security. She told me to wait outside. But in one of the big rooms, when she opened the door, I saw they had shooting targets set up in a room. And there was a gym—mats on the floor, weights, boxing equipment, weapons, targets on the wall.” He shrugged. “It looked like a training facility of some sort. But the only
two people I saw were this big man and twenty-six. When he was over there, twenty-six didn’t wear chains or the uniform with his number. He didn’t even look like a prisoner. Then he was gone for good.”

  “Did he leave with this soldierly man?”

  He shook his head. “One day Nanny and another guard took him, and he was gone. My friend who escorted him took him to a woman in Buenos Aires. He saw her, for just a moment, although Nanny dealt with her while he waited. Said she was well-dressed, had a noticeable streak of gray in her hair.”

  “Where’s this guard that escorted him during the release?”

  “He was one of the several you shot during the escape.” The guard stared down at his lap.

  Sam swallowed the taste of bile in his mouth. What was done was done. “It wasn’t very common for prisoners to be released. I was told by a friend inside that he was the only one.”

  The former guard nodded. “I’ve told you all I know. Please…”

  Sam jerked his head at Jimmy and they stepped into one of the apartment’s bedrooms. They shut the door behind them. “My God,” Jimmy said. “That’s an incredible story.”

  “Someone kept Danny alive and…trained him at the prison. He was there not as a prisoner but…a guest.”

  “Who killed inside the prison when someone needed killing. Maybe you should leave this alone.”

  “No. Never. Let’s focus on how we can find him. A woman, who traveled to Buenos Aires, presumably from America, six years ago, on a certain date. Presumably alone, but who would have paid for an extra ticket flying back.”

  “That’s all data mining,” Jimmy said. “We could access the major credit card databases, see if we find a pattern.”

  “Does that description of the woman sound like anyone in the underground economy? A broker, a handler of some sort?”

  Jimmy shook his head. “Did your brother ever show a proclivity for violence?” he asked.

  “No!” Sam said, suddenly and sharply.

  “So yes,” Jimmy said. “Sam. Let’s be honest. He killed two men and was trained further at this prison. This mystery woman with the gray streak collects him. Perhaps she’s acting as his manager, his handler. She’s like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She has a cover, as do you in owning the bars. A person who handles money, payments, arrangements, they can’t really live off the grid. She has a business; she has to be able to explain her income and tie it to legitimate concerns. So when you travel, you do it as you. So would she.”

  “How would you find her?”

  “We have…relationships with the credit card companies. We can find out. Give me a few days.” Jimmy paused and then said quietly, “You loved your brother, but you didn’t know him. That’s a shock. Like if I thought I didn’t know Mila.”

  “I did know my brother. He saved my life once.”

  “Where?”

  “Burundi.” Sam froze. He never discussed that day with anyone.

  “I know we’re not truly…friends.” Jimmy made a sour face. “And we never will be. But someone has to tell you the truth, Sam. If Danny’s alive, and he’s kept away from you, then maybe you should honor his decision. No good can come of chasing after a man who doesn’t want to be found.”

  Sam went back into the room. The man tied to the chair stared up at him and started to babble, “I didn’t know the prison would be the way it was, and then I was stuck out there, too; they wouldn’t let anyone walk away…”

  Sam untied the former guard and shoved him out of the chair. “Go home to your kids, mister.”

  “But know this,” Jimmy said, in that clear, upper-crust voice that could be so unsettling. “You keep your mouth shut about our little talk.”

  “I will, I will,” the man jabbered. Sam took him down the back exit stairs and watched him leave, hurrying down the street. The guard looked back once and gave a pathetic little wave of gratitude.

  Sam went back upstairs. He put the gun back in its hiding place in the desk. “Will you and Mila help me?”

  “I’ll help you find your brother. But for that help, I want you to do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “I want you out of my and Mila’s life,” Jimmy said quietly.

  Sam went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. His stomach twisted. August thought he was hurting his family with this search; now he was being asked to give up his best friend. “State your terms.”

  “You give me back the bars, all of them. You no longer work for the Round Table. And you don’t ever see Mila again.”

  Mila was Jimmy’s wife, Sam’s closest friend. She was the person who had brought him into working for the Round Table, a secret alliance that, in Jimmy’s words, tried to be a force for good in the world. It was so secret that Sam didn’t know who he worked for. This didn’t trouble him when they gave him the resources to find and save his son; he’d not cared to ask a single question. But now he felt uneasy not knowing exactly who backed him. Sam was their pocket spy, using the many bars around the world the Table gave him as a cover. Each bar operated as a safe house and provided a way, he believed, for the Round Table to finance operations and move money around the world. Mostly the Round Table had left him alone, except for Mila helping him out when he’d gotten pulled into dangerous situations.

  “I know my wife loves me. But you are a temptation to her.”

  Sam set down the glass, his face coloring. “Mila and I have never…”

  “Your brother for the bars. And you don’t tell Mila of our arrangement. You tell her you’re quitting because of your kid, and you say nothing to anyone, ever, about the Round Table. And if I don’t find your brother, our deal stands, because he is clearly dangerous and finding and detaining him is no small undertaking. I am putting myself and my people at risk to find a killer. But I have the resources and contacts to do it, and you do not. Yes or no?”

  “Yes.” Sam could hardly hear his own voice. “I agree.” He was giving away his livelihood. His work. His closest friend. Fine, if that was the price to find Danny. He’d find another job to support himself and his friend Leonie and his son.

  Jimmy offered a hand and they shook on it. “Your hand’s a bit clammy,” Jimmy said with a smile. “You feeling all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good. I’m heading on to Vienna. I’ll get Mila started on searching for this woman and your brother.”

  Sam walked Jimmy downstairs to the bar. Café Chosen was what the Budapest nightclub crowd called a “ruin bar,” one of the trendy spots set in once-derelict buildings, of which Budapest had more than a few. Riotously mismatched furniture—a constellation of oval plastic tables, a line of Lufthansa airline seats, a set of leather chairs—stood in odd formations along the wall. The bar itself was neat and tidy and modern, specializing in a collection of Hungarian and Czech and British microbrews. It was casual, not trying to be refined or arty like so many Budapest nightspots. It was therefore terribly hip, as if by accident rather than design.

  And it would no longer be his. Nor The Last Minute in Manhattan, or Adrenaline in London, or the Tsar Lounge in Moscow, or the many others.

  “Thanks for the help, Jimmy,” Sam heard himself say.

  “You’re quite welcome.” And Jimmy turned and left, heading out onto Kazinczy Street among the pub crawlers and revelers.

  Sam watched him. The price to find his brother had just gotten much higher. Finally, he’d made a deal with his own devil.

  6

  En Route to Vienna, Austria

  JIMMY THOUGHT AS he drove from Budapest to Vienna, listening to his favorite Bach concerto, I am going to get everything I want.

  The next two days would be critical for his future, his life…everything. Sam would be gone. He hoped Sam saying to Mila I don’t want to do this anymore; I need more time with my son would be convincing. Mila was unusually attached to the Capra toddler, a constant thorn of worry for Jimmy. That child was the bond that Sam and Mila sh
ared, having saved him together, and the bond he couldn’t snap unless Sam was absent from their lives. Best to make a clean break. She should not see the Capra child—he usually thought of the kid as it—again. If he could give her a child of their own, then perhaps her attachment to Sam’s son would diminish. But that had not happened and Jimmy felt a sharp annoyance that he could not arrange nature to suit his interests.

  He clenched the steering wheel. He rang Mila on his cell phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, it’s me. I just helped Sam find a lead on his brother. We need to do everything we can to help him.” But only help him so far. Smoke and mirrors here. He had no intention of finding the talented Danny Capra.

  “I see.” He had hoped for Oh, darling, that’s wonderful and instead he got her instant suspicion for doing a good deed where Sam Capra was concerned. “I hope this is a new détente.”

  He explained about the search for the woman who’d come to Buenos Aires to collect Danny Capra and he gave her the specific date range. “Could you drive to Oxford and set up the safe house? And see if the hacker can meet you there? I’d prefer to run this operation from one location. I want to know everything the hacker finds.”

  “Why not use Sam’s bar in London?”

  Because soon it won’t be Sam’s bar anymore and I have my own secrets from Sam, so let’s keep him at a safe distance. “I just would rather use the Oxford house. It needs stocking. I think I’ll call Razur to do the hacking. And then you can help with the fieldwork.” Because Razur, one of the top criminal hackers in London, would do whatever Jimmy told him to do, including creating a false alias for Danny Capra, and a digital and credit history that would lead to a faked death for the false name. One good enough to convince both Mila and Sam of its veracity. Let Danny Capra—under any name—be dead again. Razur was very good and very determined. “Can you take care of that for me?”