The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  Several blocks later, along West 58th Street, I saw her approaching a parked van. It advertised a floral delivery service. I thought that was funny because it’s an old CIA joke that Langley does more to keep florists and chocolatiers in business because spouses get neglected and we have to make frequent apologies.

  I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

  I ran. I caught up with her, put my palm under her ribs, and gently—and rather gentlemanly, I thought—propelled her forward.

  “Open the door,” I ordered.

  She did. She was smarter than Gato. She tapped on the van door, three times, and it opened.

  My best friend sat on the other side. August Holdwine is a smart Minnesota farm boy: big, broad-shouldered, cherub-faced, with a blond burr of hair and ruddy cheeks and eyes of sky-pale blue. I love him like family.

  “Cheese? Wine?” I offered.

  He frowned at me. “Well. You can wipe the Cheshire cat smile off. Where’s my guy?”

  “Sleeping it off.”

  “Don’t tell me you actually hurt him.”

  “Bruises heal. He’s okay and probably awake now. He might be too embarrassed to check in. I left him his cell phone. Call him.”

  “You assaulted a CIA officer.”

  “And you used the names of your childhood pets for your team. Stupid.” I glanced at the woman. “Lucky was the nice cat, so August says.”

  “Get in the van, Sam,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  “That might be an illegal action. You aren’t supposed to be operating on American soil.”

  “Go get yourself a coffee,” August Holdwine said to the woman. “We’ll talk later back at the office.”

  “Your earrings,” I said to her. “The blue is a shade too bright against the gray of the street and the buildings. Too memorable. But they do set off your eyes.”

  “Don’t be a punk,” she said and she turned and vanished into the river of people.

  “Get in,” August said. “Please.”

  “That would be stupid if the point of following me is to grab me.”

  “It’s not. It’s to talk to you.”

  “You could walk up and say hello.”

  “Not while you’re with that woman. Mila.” He tossed his headphones on the computer keyboard in the back of the van.

  “No one’s here, August. Don’t lie to me. Are you thinking I’m going to lead you to her?” But I needed to know why August and the CIA were interested in Mila. I needed to know now. So I got into the van. August moved up into the driver’s seat.

  “Where to?” August said.

  “What about your guy?”

  “He can find his way home. Where can we go and talk in private?”

  “I know a bar.”

  5

  Amsterdam

  JACK MING COULDN’T SLEEP. He watched the clock tick toward midnight. He remembered reading once that there were eighteen million cellular phones in the Netherlands, and it frustrated him that not a single one was within reach. With one call he could be out of the hospital, his bill settled, safe. He should have asked Ricki to leave him hers. But her showing up had surprised him too much, and she’d left before he’d thought to ask.

  August. That had been the muttered name of the kind CIA officer who’d grabbed him, the one who stopped the others from beating him further. That was the name he was going to use when he phoned the CIA. He would call and ask for August. That was his ticket to safety, to money, to freedom.

  Ten minutes after Ricki left, Van Biezen reappeared in his doorway, looking tired and rumpled, looking ready to go home. “Your story checked out about being grabbed from the café. I thought you would want to know.” He raised an eyebrow to see if Jack would speak.

  “Am I going to be released now?”

  “From the hospital or our protective custody?”

  “Both.”

  “I cannot speak for the doctors. But I think you should be careful. These smugglers were apparently part of a much bigger criminal enterprise.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On ten Boom’s laptop we found evidence he had been hacking into police databases, downloading classified documents relating to far-ranging investigations. The sort of information that a criminal network would like to buy.”

  “I know nothing about whatever this man was doing,” Jack said. “And if you are going to question me further along these lines, I would like to see someone from the embassy and I would like a lawyer.”

  “I wasn’t questioning you. I was warning you. These are dangerous people, Mr. Jin.” Van Biezen’s voice was measured and careful, sleek as a diplomat’s. Just like his mother. “Are you planning to return to Hong Kong? I understand you have not given the doctors a clear answer.” Just a bit of sarcasm in his tone.

  “I haven’t decided. I am already ruined for this semester. I have much work to do.” He paused. “You said you were giving me a warning. Do you think I’m in danger?”

  “We have kept a guard by your room. He’s not for show.”

  Immediately after Van Biezen stepped out, a polite functionary from the Chinese embassy stepped in, now that he was speaking; to be sure that he was all right, and that there was no issue of embarrassing the motherland with the police. It was frightening to Jack because he had no desire to be shipped off to Hong Kong and the fact that a bureaucrat was here so late at night made him nervous. But his false identity held. Yes, he said as Jin Ming, his parents and his grandparents were dead, he had no family back in China. He had been careful to craft an identity without family. The Chinese diplomat was concerned for his well-being and Jack reassured the man he was the innocent victim of a crime. He thanked the embassy visitor and when the man had left Jack stared at the window.

  He wondered if his mother was looking for him; he thought not. She didn’t want him. He had been lucky, too lucky, and it was time to place a surer hand on the reins of his own fate.

  He couldn’t sleep. He got up for a walk.

  Each day, the doctors had encouraged Jack to walk to stretch his leg muscles, even if it was just around the floor for five tottering orbits, ambling past rooms and equipment in the hallway. His mind full of Ricki and his rapidly unraveling situation, he was walking back to his room and as he turned the final corner he saw, from down the hallway, a man he didn’t know in an orderly’s uniform enter his room.

  His police guard was gone.

  Jack stopped. The man looked short, thickly built. He shut Jack’s door behind him. He knew the night-shift orderly; he had seen him on the opposite side of the floor, during his walk.

  If Ricki could steal a uniform…

  He can see I’m not in the bed, Jack thought. He must think I’m in the bathroom.

  He ducked back behind the corner, keeping one eye focused on the hospital door.

  After thirty seconds, the man stepped into the hallway. Heavy eyebrows, pale skin, a soft mess of a mouth, a bottom lip long ago disfigured in a fight.

  You’re a loose end, Jack thought. And now either someone who knew Nic, or someone who knows Novem Soles has come looking for you. They know you’re alive. They’ve either waited for the guard to go to the bathroom or they’ve paid the guard off. They want to be sure you can’t talk.

  And if he was wrong, then no harm done. But if he was right…

  The man saw Jack. The twisted lip smiled. He raised the eyebrows as if in greeting. Like he was a friend, come by to talk to Jack.

  Jack ran.

  Or, rather, Jack stumbled in a loping run. He wasn’t entirely recovered from the bullet that had grazed arteries and windpipe. He wore a bathrobe and the hospital gown and flimsy slippers the nurses had given him. He saw a stairway and he hit the door, leaning out into the cool, slightly stale air of the concrete staircase. His mind moved as fast as it did when he was crafting a software program. If the guy was here to silence Jack he would expect Jack to try and escape.

  Most immediate escape meant down, toward the ground floor.
>
  So Jack headed up. He wasn’t used to physical exertion and little black clouds dotted his vision. His breath sounded loud in the stairwell. He hit the next floor, opened the door, stepped out into the unit. More recovery rooms but this floor was less crowded. He was on the opposite side of the floor from the main nurses’ station.

  An old man in a brown bathrobe walked past him, ambling with an insomniac’s shuffle, carting an IV feed on a wheeled pole. Jack moved in the other direction. He had to hide. Get to a phone, get Ricki to come and pick him up at a nearby pub or café. He couldn’t stay out on the streets of Amsterdam dressed like a patient; even in the world’s most laid-back city after midnight, it would attract too much attention. He looked like someone who might have wandered away from the hospital and needed help.

  He opened the door of one room, saw an elderly woman sleeping inside. He eased it shut, moved to the next door.

  Behind him he heard the stairwell door open with a steely crank. As it did he stepped into another patient room, this one holding two beds, both empty. He left the lights off. An IV pole stood on duty by each bed, a drawn curtain dangling between them. He had no real place to hide. He pulled the curtain partway between the beds, and ducked behind its cover, the IV pole clanking into the wall behind him. Next to him was one of the adjustable wheeled tables for patients to use while lying in bed.

  He closed his hands around the cool steel of the pole. He heard the door open. Maybe a nurse coming to see why he was trespassing in this room. He couldn’t see through the curtain.

  He heard two footsteps and then silence.

  The nurse wouldn’t just stand there, right? he asked himself. He was suddenly consumed by fear and certainty that this man was here to kill him.

  Jack pushed the patient table into the curtain.

  The two bullets sang out, cut through the fabric, pounded into the wood. The impact was louder than the firing.

  Jack moaned, in fear, without thinking that he was baiting a trap.

  As the man stepped around the curtain, Jack swung the pole, like a baseball bat, and he caught the man’s face between the bushy eyebrows and the tattered mouth.

  “Uggghhhh,” the guy grunted.

  Jack rocked his feet, swung again in the same vicious arc, hit again and again and then there was an oddly wet noise that sounded… final. The guy collapsed onto the floor. Shuddered, shook, gasped. He looked at Jack with blind surprise. Then his head fell back and a sagging shift downward trembled through his body.

  The man’s nose was a splintered mess. Jack had not known he had the strength; it was as if all the energy he’d stored in the past few weeks roared out of him when he needed it. The man was very still. Jack knelt by him, dropping the pole with a clank to the tiled floor. He tested for a pulse, found nothing but a warm and sudden silence in the man’s throat.

  Bone shard, Jack thought. First blow broke the nose, second sent a bullet of bone into the brain.

  He clapped his hands over his face in shock. He had killed a man. Killed him.

  Because he was going to kill you.

  Jack picked up the gun and he stood. He footed the body under the adjustable bed. He picked up the gun and put it into the pocket of his robe.

  He stepped back out into the hallway. In the next room the old woman still slept. He went through her bureau and he found ten euros and a mobile phone. He took it, feeling guilty about the theft, and he laughed because he didn’t feel guilty about killing the man. He hurried out into the hallway and back down the stairwell. In a few minutes he was in his room, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  Who could he call?

  Ricki. He could call her. They were still friends. He still kind of liked her even though she’d only really been his girlfriend for several weeks after he arrived in Holland, after he’d stepped into the secret life he’d made for himself. And clearly she cared about him, to have gone to so much trouble to find him. He cajoled her into coming to the hospital, picking him up, and bringing him clothes. The police had taken the clothes in which he had been shot as evidence, and they were stained with blood anyway. Ricki agreed and said she’d be there within an hour. He told her to meet him at a coffee shop nearby that he knew well.

  When he got off the phone he lifted a pair of jeans from a room down the hall where a man lay zonked out on painkillers and grabbed a rugby jersey from the man’s closet. He left, sneaking past the nurses, riding the elevator down, stepping out into the cool quiet of the night. There was an old café down on the corner.

  He walked out into the street. They found out you’re still alive. They’re coming after you. You’ve got one weapon to fight back. If Nic was lying about that notebook, you’re a dead man.

  6

  Midtown Manhattan, near Bryant Park

  WE WALKED INTO THE LAST MINUTE, my bar near Bryant Park. The Last Minute’s a nice joint. Elegant, refined, oriented toward jazz. The bar itself is exquisite Connemara marble. The mirror behind the bar is huge and ancient, a leftover from a New York establishment from before the Civil War. We get a bit of tourist trade—any high-end bar in New York does once good reviews land on Yelp or on the guide sites—but we get a lot of Midtown office people, bored wealthies, regulars who actually know what goes into a proper Old-Fashioned or Sazerac. The post-work crowd had started to melt away. Eloise is at the piano, softly playing a Thelonious Monk arrangement. She’s older than God but the sparks of jazz in her body are apparently going to keep her alive forever. When I’d acquired the bar from Mila a few weeks ago, it had been called Bluecut, but I’d renamed it. The Last Minute was my base of operations in searching for my son, and it reflected my sense of urgency and my determination that I would never give up.

  I nodded at the bartender and pointed at a stool for August. He sat. Then I went back behind the bar to make our own drinks, which is a statement in itself. I knew I had to let go of some secrets right now to protect others.

  August looked like what he is, a Minnesota farm boy of Swedish and German descent. He glanced around at the beautiful people, at the elaborate décor, at the shimmer of lights. He’d met me here for a drink a few weeks before and, five minutes after he left, Mila showed up and gave me ownership of The Last Minute, and of thirty other bars in cities around the world. I hadn’t told him because so far he didn’t need to know. But as I moved to the other side of the expanse of Connemara marble, he raised an eyebrow at me. “You bartending now?”

  I gestured, open-handed, at the charm and the glory. “The Last Minute is mine.”

  “The bar is yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  He glanced around at the finery and absorbed the news. “Well. I was going to order a beer. But if you own the joint, then I’ll have a martini made with good gin.”

  “All right.”

  I crafted his martini, with all the care you would take for your best friend having his first cocktail in your new bar.

  I slid a Plymouth English Gin martini in front of August, two olives. Not the most expensive gin but really a strong choice for a martini. August took a sip and nodded in approval. I poured another one for myself.

  “Let’s go sit in a booth,” he said.

  Old banquette-style leather booths lined one wall; they provided a modicum of quiet. August followed me to one.

  “Why have you bought a bar?” he asked.

  “I need a livelihood to support my search for my son,” I said. There was a lot more to the story, but he didn’t need to know how I’d come into possession of The Last Minute and its thirty sisters around the world. Mila’s bosses—a group known as the Round Table, who claimed to be a force for good in the shadows—had offered me the bars as a cover to travel the world, to track down my son, and to do the odd job for them that required my skills.

  “You could have come back to work at the Company.”

  “They don’t like to accuse you of treason and then backtrack by offering you gainful employment.”

  My past with the CIA was a sore spot wit
h him; he almost cringed as I spoke. To camouflage his embarrassment, he glanced around the bar, drinking it in as carefully as he’d sipped his martini. Some spy; he couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. “Really nice place, Sam.”

  “So now you know where to find me. Why are you following me?”

  He twisted the toothpick holding the olives. “This woman. Mila. Who helped you fight Novem Soles in Amsterdam. I want to know about her.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “Sam, let’s not insult each other.”

  Fine, I thought. I’d play. “You followed us today. Mila, too.”

  “Yes.”

  I had had an early dinner in a favorite old haunt of mine; that must have been where August’s watchers had picked me up. Mila and I had met in Central Park, then gone to the apartment address Bell gave us. She hadn’t been here at The Last Minute in weeks. And she’d left with Bertrand. With her cap and sunglasses and moving van uniform the followers must not have spotted her leaving, else they would have followed her, not me.

  “Why?”

  “I want to know who she is.”

  “Stop following her and ask her.”

  “I’m not going to kidnap her off the street.”

  “Because the CIA isn’t supposed to operate on American soil. And yet here you are, tailing people. I guess I should be grateful you haven’t set the FBI on me.”

  August took an appreciative sip of the martini.

  “I don’t need to kidnap her when I think you’ll tell me what I want to know.”

  I slid the olives off the stick with my mouth and dropped the toothpick next to my glass. “Mouth full,” I said. “Can’t talk.”

  “You’ve really picked your side, haven’t you, Sam? You’ve picked this Mila.”

  “I can rely on her.”