The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  ‘OK,’ she said at last. ‘But this is your call, Sean, and yours alone.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that. And I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Tina.’ He took the tracker and pushed it down one of his socks. ‘Can I have my gun back?’

  ‘Aren’t they just going to take it off you?’

  ‘Maybe. But I figure I don’t have a lot to lose.’

  Reluctantly, Tina handed the gun over, knowing she was committing another crime to add to the ones she’d already committed on Sean’s behalf that week.

  He took it, flicked open the chamber and placed a single bullet inside. ‘That’s all I’ve got,’ he said, shoving the gun into the back of his jeans and covering it with his shirt.

  He turned to go, but something was bugging Tina.

  ‘How did they know your number, Sean?’ she asked. ‘I thought I was the only person who knew it.’ She sighed. ‘You called Jack Duckford on it, didn’t you? Even though I told you not to.’

  Sean nodded. ‘Yeah. He’s the one who’s picking me up. Sadly, he’s not on the side of the angels.’

  ‘But if you were working undercover for him, why’s he kidnapping your family?’

  ‘Well, that’s the problem,’ said Sean, after a pause that was just a little too long. ‘I wasn’t undercover.’

  The words hung heavy in the silence of the car as Tina took in this new piece of information. It made her feel a little sick. ‘What job were you doing for him then?’

  ‘Jack Duckford works on the side for a gangster. He hired me to work for the same gangster too. I guess I wasn’t on the side of the angels either.’

  Tina leaned forward urgently. ‘And what’s this gangster’s name?’

  ‘Only Jack’s got the answer to that.’ And with that, Sean got out of the car and started walking, leaving her sitting alone and feeling utterly betrayed.

  Fifty-five

  The next twenty-three minutes were the longest of my life. I stood on the street corner opposite the fast-food takeaway with my head down, bathed in the orange glow of the streetlight, wishing I could be any place rather than here, and wishing too that I could step back in time to when I didn’t know I had a family. This time the previous night I’d been sitting at Luda’s kitchen table laughing and chatting over a bottle of wine and good food. Now, twenty-four hours later, I was waiting for a car that was going to take me on a journey that would almost certainly lead to my death, to save the life of a daughter I’d never met.

  But you know what? Though the fear was coursing through me, I knew I was doing the right thing. I thought of my brother, John. The man I’d always looked up to. I wondered if he was watching me now from somewhere up above, and if he was, whether or not he’d be proud. I hoped so. I didn’t believe in God – I never had – but I’d always thought there was a place our souls went to when we departed this life, where we somehow lived on, and if I did have to die tonight, I clung to the hope that at least we might meet again.

  A black 4×4 with tinted rear windows pulled up at the kerb and, although I hadn’t seen him for a long time, I recognized Jack Duckford behind the wheel. I glanced briefly at the street outside the fast-food place, saw it was temporarily empty, then opened the front passenger door and looked inside.

  Straight away, I saw in the back seat the huge guy with the buzz cut who’d tried to kill me four nights earlier back at the house in Wales. He glared at me impassively, and I saw he had a gun with suppressor attached down by his side.

  ‘Get in, Sean,’ Jack said hurriedly. ‘It’s illegal to stop here.’

  I’d already slipped the gun from the back of my jeans, and before the big guy could raise his, I’d leaned inside the car and shot him in the face. The shot made a loud noise in the confines of the car but, as the gun was only a .22 and the street was empty, I was pretty confident it wasn’t loud enough to be heard by anyone.

  The big guy cried out in shock and his head snapped to one side. Blood poured from the penny-shaped hole in his upper right cheek, and he began to sway drunkenly in the seat, but even so he was still a fair way from being dead. Worse than that, he was trying to raise his gun and I had no bullets left.

  I jumped inside and shut the door, shoving the still-smoking gun against Jack’s temple. ‘Drive!’ I hissed.

  He opened his mouth to say something but I think he must have caught a glimpse of the look on my face because he pulled away from the kerb in silence, picking up speed as he joined the light flow of traffic.

  I swung the gun round in the direction of the big guy. There was blood all over the collar of his shirt now and he was pawing uselessly at the wound on his face with his free hand, but he’d managed to lift his own gun so that the barrel was at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor.

  ‘Drop it!’ I screamed. ‘Or I’ll shoot you again! Last chance!’

  But this guy was one stubborn fool and he kept lifting it, his eyes narrowing in defiance. A couple more inches and the gun would be pointing directly at my groin. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jack reaching towards me, looking for a way to relieve me of my own gun. I was in a very dangerous situation but I knew from experience that any hesitation was fatal. I had to keep them on the back foot.

  I lunged forward, grabbed the barrel of the big guy’s gun, catching him completely by surprise, and yanked it out of his hand, careful to keep the end pointed away from me. He pulled the trigger at the same time, the bullet making a festive pop like a champagne cork as it left the gun and ricocheted round the car, ending up God knew where. I dropped the .22 and turned the big guy’s pistol round, pointing at both of them in turn.

  But the big guy was slumped in the seat now, weakening fast, so I turned my attention, and the gun, on Jack. ‘Where are Claire and Milly, you bastard?’

  ‘You’ve just made a big mistake, Sean,’ he said. His hands had the steering wheel in a death grip and he looked suitably terrified.

  ‘Really? Maybe I should make another one and shoot you in the face as well.’

  ‘Kill me and you’ve got no chance of seeing your family again. You know that.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said evenly. ‘But I can still hurt you very badly. And you know I’ll do it too.’ I lowered the gun so it was pointed at his leg. ‘Now, answer my question. Where are Claire and Milly?’ We stopped at traffic lights at the A40 junction. Cars pulled up alongside us but I ignored them. ‘Answer me, you piece of shit,’ I hissed into his ear, ‘or I’ll blow your fucking kneecap off.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said hurriedly. ‘They’re about fifteen miles from here at a disused airfield.’

  I sat back in my seat. ‘So that’s where we’re going now. Who’s holding them?’

  ‘His girlfriend.’ He gestured over his shoulder towards the big guy. ‘We were just going to take you out there, you arsehole, give you a chance to say goodbye to your family.’

  I laughed. ‘You know the most important lesson I’ve learned these past few days, Jack? Everyone’s a fucking liar. So forgive me if I take that with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘You know, those two are engaged. When she finds out what you’ve done to her fiancé she’s … I don’t know …’ He shook his head, letting the sentence trail off, then turned west on to the A40 as the lights turned green.

  Jack didn’t have to tell me what that bitch was capable of. I’d seen her handiwork on Jane. I looked over at the big guy. His eyes were flickering and his skin had gone an unpleasant greyish pallor, but the bleeding had slowed to a constant trickle, and he still looked as though he’d live, which was something I realized I could use to my advantage. ‘Let me worry about that,’ I told him. ‘In the meantime, tell me about the job you hired me for.’

  ‘I thought your memory had come back.’

  ‘It has, but I want to hear it from you.’

  ‘I gave you a chance, Sean,’ he said bitterly. ‘When no one else would touch you.’ He shot me an angry sideward glance, as if somehow I was to blame for everything that had ha
ppened. ‘I set you up with a nice little pad in London and a salary of fifty grand a year, and all you had to do was provide some consultancy.’

  ‘I was working for a gangster, I know that much.’

  ‘You were working for a businessman.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘It’s best you don’t know.’

  ‘No, it’s best I do know,’ I said firmly.

  ‘OK. Alexander Hanzha. He’s a Ukrainian oligarch. Your job was to help me provide his people with security and counter-espionage advice. A lot of them are Russian and Ukrainian and don’t know the way things work over here. All you had to do was help them make their business run smoothly. No bad shit, like this.’

  ‘Except there was bad shit, wasn’t there?’ There always was when you worked with gangsters, and I’d known that when I’d taken the job. Yet still I’d taken it, because Jack was right. At that time, no one else would touch me. ‘What happened that night, Jack? Why were we at that house? It was his, wasn’t it? Hanzha’s.’

  Jack sighed and shook his head. ‘Oh Jesus, that was a fuck-up. No, it belonged to Hanzha’s son, Victor. He’d hired these two prostitutes with his friend and taken them back to his country pad. Except one of them wasn’t a prostitute. She was an industrial spy. Hanzha’s company have been trying to conduct a hostile takeover of a big British IT company for the past year. It’s always been a controversial deal because the company is partly owned by the family of the Home Secretary, Garth Crossman. Crossman hasn’t been able to block the deal legitimately, so his people have resorted to trying to dig up dirt on Hanzha.’

  Something clicked into place for me then. My girlfriend before the accident – Jen Jones. Maybe our chance meeting in the bar hadn’t been a chance meeting after all. Maybe she was just looking for a way into Hanzha through me. ‘The blonde one. She was the industrial spy, wasn’t she?’

  ‘The girl’s name was Jennifer Jones. She worked for Crossman’s company,’ he said, confirming my suspicions. ‘Victor caught her planting a bug in his room. According to his story, he confronted her; she denied everything and tried to leave; then he started hitting her. Things got out of hand and he thought he’d killed her, so he felt he had no choice but to kill the other prostitute, who was there with his friend. From what I gather, the friend helped him with the killing to prove he could be trusted not to say anything.’ Jack sighed. ‘Then Victor called me in a panic, as you would do when you’ve got two dead whores in your house. I called you, and we went over there to try to sort out the mess.’

  As Jack spoke, I began to remember how nervous I’d been in the car with Jack on the way over there, because he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. Then the shock I’d had when I’d first seen Lauren Donaldson lying dead on that bed with her head smashed in. Even now, it made me feel sick.

  ‘When we arrived, you went upstairs to check everything out while I called Victor’s old man and told him what had happened. He was pissed off but he didn’t lose his temper. He’s that kind of guy. He stays calm. But what he did say was that we couldn’t have any witnesses.’ Jack paused for a moment. ‘That meant you had to die as well. You might not believe it but I was gutted. I’ve always liked you, Sean, whatever you may think now.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mr Hanzha knew I didn’t want to kill you, so he said he’d send over his bodyguard and you and he would take the bodies away for burial. Except the plan was that you wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘And you decided to go along with that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. I was trying to think of ways to save you and when I went upstairs looking for you, a way presented itself. You see, Jennifer Jones wasn’t dead. She’d taken a real beating from that sadistic bastard Victor, but somehow she’d managed to get to her feet and walk around. When I got upstairs she was leaning against the landing wall, bleeding all over the place but still conscious, and you were just standing there, staring at her. I think you were in shock.’

  ‘I was. I was in love with her, so to find her half naked in someone else’s house, and dying too …’ I shuddered at the intensity of the memory.

  ‘You remember what I told you to do?’

  I shook my head and swallowed. I could remember my emotions: the anger, the jealousy, the sense of doom. But I couldn’t remember what had happened next. ‘No, I don’t. Tell me.’

  Jack’s face creased into a tight frown that showed a lot of new lines on his face, and for the first time it occurred to me how much older he looked since I’d seen him last. He took a deep breath. ‘I handed you a knife, and I told you to kill her. I did it because I thought it would show Hanzha that, like Victor’s friend, you could be trusted. I did it so you could live, and I’ll tell you this, I’m not proud of it, but at least it gave you a chance.’

  Still the memory wouldn’t come to me. I wondered if my mind had deliberately suppressed it.

  ‘And did I? Finish her off?’

  The car slowed in traffic, and Jack turned to me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You didn’t.’

  The moment he said those words, I took a deep breath, feeling a surge of relief.

  I’m not a bad man.

  ‘You couldn’t do it,’ he continued. ‘Neither could I. I’ve never killed anyone in my life. We had to wait for Mr Hanzha’s man. I dragged you into another room while he shot her. Then you both took the bodies of the two girls away for disposal.’ He sighed. ‘Only you know what happened after that, Sean, because the next time I heard from you was five hours later in the middle of the night. You phoned and called me a double-crossing bastard. You said you’d killed Mr Hanzha’s bodyguard and buried all three of the bodies, and that you were going to deliver a letter to your solicitor to be opened in the event of anything happening to you, which would detail everything that had gone on that night, and give the location of the bodies. You told me you wanted a hundred grand in cash to ensure your silence. I actually said that we could do that, and you finished the call by saying you’d be back in touch. Except you weren’t, because that was the last time we spoke before today.’

  ‘But you knew I was alive, right?’

  ‘Not right away we didn’t. Not until the blackmail started.’

  I frowned. ‘Blackmail?’

  Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. The Home Secretary, Crossman – his people made contact a few months later. They said they had you alive in a safe place. They even supplied us with footage of you, although you looked out of it. They said that the Crossman group was going to launch a counter-bid for Mr Hanzha’s company, and that if he didn’t accept the offer, they’d release the information on what happened, and give up the location of the bodies of the whores. They claimed there would still be enough DNA evidence on them to link their murders to Victor.’

  ‘But what I can’t understand is how Crossman’s people knew anything about the bodies.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that a lot, and the best explanation is that their spy, Jennifer Jones, had bugged your flat, so when you made the threatening call to me they heard everything you said. I don’t know what happened next but I reckon they were trying to intercept you when you had your accident. For all we know, they were responsible for it, and that would conveniently explain your lack of ID and how they knew what hospital you were in.’

  I shook my head in exasperation. ‘Jesus, I can’t believe this whole thing’s just about a company takeover.’

  ‘It’s big profits, Sean. The Crossman group stood to make a hundred million pounds if Mr Hanzha played along and sold his company to them on the cheap. People will do a lot for that kind of money. That’s why we had to pull out all the stops to find you. It took a long time but we finally tracked down one of Crossman’s people in St Lucia who knew where you were being held, and he coughed up the information. Then we brought in these two to deal with you once and for all.’ Jack paused. ‘Except they didn’t, which is why we’re here now.’

  ‘Help me get my family back, Jack,’ I said. ‘You’re bet
ter than this.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sean, I can’t. You’re thinking of your family. I’m thinking of mine.’

  A mobile phone started ringing in the back. It was the big guy’s. He made a moaning sound but made no move to get it.

  ‘That’ll be his girlfriend,’ said Jack.

  The big guy’s mobile stopped ringing and Jack’s started. He looked at me. ‘I’m going to have to answer this. If I don’t, she’ll know something’s wrong and she might hurt your family. She’s not a nice woman, Sean. Not a nice woman at all.’

  ‘I know. I’ve met her. Take out the phone and give it to me.’

  He did as he was told and I put the phone to my ear. ‘This is Sean Egan,’ I said. ‘If anything’s happened to my wife and daughter, I’ll kill your boyfriend nice and slowly.’

  ‘Let me speak to him,’ she hissed, but I could hear the fear in her voice.

  ‘No. He’s hurt, but he’s going to live if we get him to a hospital. Let my family go, and you get him back.’

  ‘You don’t make demands on me, you worm. I’ll cut your daughter’s eyes out unless you let me speak to Tank right now.’

  I swallowed hard, knowing I had to stay strong. Knowing too that I was gambling with my child’s life. ‘No,’ I said with a cold edge to my voice that I had to work far too hard to produce. ‘I’m going to send you a short video of him to prove he’s alive but that’s all you’re going to get. Then we’re going to meet and exchange your boyfriend for my family.’

  She started to say something but I ended the call, found the camera setting on the phone, and turned it on the big hulk in the back. As if on cue, he moved in his seat and his eyes flickered open. He gave me a vaguely puzzled look, as if I’d just disturbed his sleep, before closing them again. The blood had completely drenched the top half of his white dress shirt now, and he didn’t look in a good way, so I knew I was taking a big risk sending the film. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of choice.