The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  “A friend gave me a book. It has numbers—bank account numbers—and emails and photos in it. I think it’s a book used to extort people all over the world, people in positions of business and government.” Silence. “Do you fit those criteria?”

  “I might. Oh, my God,” the Watcher said. The fear in his voice wasn’t exactly false. He cursed. He was standing out near a taxi pickup line at JFK. He had no equipment with which to trace the call; no way to alert any of the technical resources of Novem Soles. He would have to draw Jack in himself. And, honestly, if you can’t do that with a grad student you don’t deserve your job. “Look, if this is a test, I’ve done what you said. I have. Everything. Please. Please.”

  “It’s not a test, I’m trying to help you. If you can tell me who you are and what they have you doing…”

  “I’m not confessing anything. Oh, my God, oh, my God. You tell me who you are, where you are. Give me a reason to trust you.” The Watcher made his voice a slice of panic.

  “I am going to give this information to the authorities,” Jack said. “The whole book. Now. If you want these people broken and off your back, I can make that happen. I can tear off your phone number from the book before I give it to the authorities. That way, you are never exposed.”

  You devious little bastard, the Watcher thought. I want to kill you all myself.

  “And then you’re never in trouble. I’ll do that for you, I’ll pull this page from the book, if you’ll tell me what they have you doing.”

  “I have to think for a minute,” the Watcher said. Delaying.

  “Well, one minute is what you have,” Jack Ming said, trying to sound tough.

  “Don’t threaten me, I’ll hang up.”

  “And then when the police show up at your work, or at your door, wanting to know why you cooperated with a criminal ring…”

  “I’m not going to talk to you on the phone,” the Watcher said. “Could we meet face to face?”

  “This is a Paris number and I’m not in Paris.”

  “I’m not either, I’m in New York.”

  It was a gamble to admit this, that he was in the same city as Jack Ming. Jack was silent.

  “I’m here for them, they’ve made me come here.” The Watcher said this as though tearing the words out of his own chest.

  “Your minute is about up,” Jack said.

  So the Watcher decided: “I work for a major financial services firm. I give them data from my company. I deliver it once a month. Financial particulars, insider information, plans for investment. Confidential knowledge that they can use to profit on the stock markets in France, the U.S., Hong Kong.”

  “What did they have on you?”

  The Watcher thought. He had to sell this. “I engaged in some insider trading. They found out about it. They said they would expose me if I didn’t help them. I don’t trade anymore, I just feed them the information. If I disobey them they’ll expose me and if I talk about them, they’ll kill my entire family. So please don’t tell anyone. Please.”

  “Why are you in New York for them?”

  “They wanted me to get some information on a stock deal.”

  “Whose deal?”

  “I won’t say. If it leaks then they’ll know I leaked it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “Thank you. I’ll tear your number from the book.”

  “You can’t give that book to anyone,” the Watcher said. He had to try. “You can’t. You’ll destroy dozens of lives.”

  Silence. “How did you know they’re blackmailing dozens of people?”

  “Stands to reason if it’s enough to fill a book.”

  The ten longest seconds—at least since he’d encountered Mila—of the Watcher’s life ticked past.

  “You’re not being blackmailed at all,” Jack Ming said. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “I think a person being blackmailed would probably disconnect the phone immediately and not say a word. How do you know I’m not the police?”

  “The police would show up. They can’t trick a confession from you, not this way.”

  “They could if they had a bug on your phone,” Jack said.

  “You cannot give them that book. Please.”

  “Your number won’t be in it now, so why worry? So concerned for your fellow victims?”

  “I just don’t want innocent people hurt.” The night breeze, the smell of jet fuel in the airport wind, blew over him. He had to stop this little lunatic, somehow.

  “Very considerate of you. This has been so illuminating,” Jack Ming said. “Thank you…”

  Time for Plan B. “They know who you are, Jack,” the Watcher said. “Which means they know who Ricki is, and who your mother is. They will find everyone you’ve ever cared about and they will burn them and everything you love to the ground. Oh, yes. You know why I’m really here? I’m going to destroy you financially, your family, everything you hold dear. Your mother will be selling herself in alleyways after I’m done.”

  Stunned silence on the other end. “What?” Jack said finally.

  “There is another option for you. I’ll buy the notebook. I’ll buy your silence.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Ten million. It’s a nice round number and you can easily live off that for the rest of your life.”

  “Unworkable,” Jack said. “Ask the dead dude in the Amsterdam hospital if you think I’m going to meet you face to face.”

  “That was done without my approval, in panic, by a fool. Let’s deal like adults. I’ll put half the money in an account for you. You mail me the notebook and I’ll pay you the other half.”

  “And when I show up at your bank or move the money, you find me and kill me. No thank you. Plus, you can’t trust I haven’t copied the notebook.”

  “Let me propose this. A cash drop. We agree on a place for you to leave the notebook. And a place for me to leave you cash.”

  “Ten million in small bills is not exactly transportable by one guy in a hurry,” Jack said. “I don’t trust you.”

  “I can give you a better deal than the CIA can. Twice the money.”

  “And dead twice as fast.”

  “Jack. Play nice, or I will burn you down.”

  “You’re just trying to lure me in. No. You know who I am. I know what you are. And when I’m done with you, you son of a bitch, there is no hiding place for you.”

  This little nobody, threatening him. The Watcher heard the snap in his own voice. “You are nothing but a contemptible punk. When you die, and you will, I’ll throw a party. I’ll have people over for drinks and we’ll watch you being slowly tortured to death. I’ll have it catered. It won’t happen in some dark warehouse or basement. It will happen, with people standing around having drinks, laughing while they watch your skin pulled off, your eyes gouged, your ears burned to a crisp.”

  “Someone’s going to burn,” Jack said, “but it’s not me.” Then he hung up.

  The Watcher stood there, the red rage slowly building in his eyes. He closed the phone and walked forward slowly to join the line of travelers awaiting a taxi.

  38

  Hotel Esper, Williamsburg

  I WANT TO KNOW WHO OWNS THAT PROPERTY in New Jersey,” I said. We were in the hotel room; Leonie sitting at the table, me standing at the window, looking down toward the Ming building’s boarded windows.

  She opened her laptop. “It would help if we had an address. It’s out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “It was marked as River Run Road. See if you can find a county property map. Or find it on Google Maps.”

  She tapped, and hummed under her breath. Leonie on a computer reminded me of my wife Lucy. My ex-wife. Lucy was very clever with computers, too. I stared out at the night and let her work. She tapped, found maps, compared them with the route we’d driven.

  “The property is owned by Associated Languages School.”

  “A language school?” No wonder it was d
erelict. Didn’t most people learn foreign languages these days through software programs? And it was out in the boonies. “Maybe it’s supposed to be an immersion program?”

  I watched her fingers fly across the keyboard; she nibbled her lip in thought. “They have a very basic website.”

  “Where are they headquartered?”

  “New York. They have immersion programs in rural New York, Florida, and Oregon that they offer. But it says their next three sessions are full.”

  “Maybe the driver knew that the house was unoccupied.”

  “Yes. Maybe he drove students out there before and knew it was shuttered now.”

  But it didn’t quite ring true. “Would it be shuttered if business was booming?”

  I picked up my phone, sat down on the bed and called them. “You have reached the offices of Associated Languages School. We offer instruction and translation services in”—and then the recording went into a tiresome listing of every major language spoken on four continents. I considered hanging up the phone. Maybe that’s what they wanted me to do. Finally, I was invited to leave a message. I hung up.

  “Front company,” I said. “Nobody makes it that hard to do business.”

  “A front for Novem Soles?”

  “Maybe. Can we find out anything else on them?”

  “Yes, but is that going to help us find out anything about Jack Ming? Let’s not lose focus here, Sam. If we do this right we have our kids tomorrow. We vanish, and we don’t ever worry about Novem Soles again.”

  I got up and stared out the window. She tapped away at her computer while I watched the night.

  “I got into Proxima Security,” she said. “Via Sandra Ming’s account. I’ve got access to a monitor log. It will tell us if anyone enters the building and punches in a code.”

  “We know the guard has the code.”

  “And we can assume Jack does. We know the guard’s schedule. If someone comes at a different time, I think we’ll know it’s Jack.”

  “Could you disable the alarm?”

  She shook her head. “Separate system.”

  “Well, at least we’ll know when people come and go.”

  “I’ll put an alarm on my laptop to chime if there’s an update to the log,” she said. “Can I give you some advice?”

  “No.”

  “Give up on fighting Novem Soles when this is done,” she said. “Revenge is the most worthless motive in the world. Your wife made her choice, yes? You get your son back, then you have all that matters. All right? Don’t try to keep fighting them. Go live a safe, good life.”

  “Move on and put out of my mind that I’m going to kill a young man who could bring them down.”

  “To save your son? Yes. Put Jack Ming as a human being out of your mind. People put ugliness out of their heads all the time. Jack Ming made his choice, same as your wife.”

  “And now he’s trying to unmake it,” I said. “Does that count for nothing?”

  She was silent.

  “He’s trying to be the good guy. If he’d turned on Novem Soles seven months ago he might be surrendering to me, and I’d be getting ready to take a bullet for him if that’s what it took to save him.”

  Leonie got up and sat at the window. She stared down at the building. “Some choices can’t be unmade. So we should watch for him?”

  “If you want. But I seriously doubt he’s going to come around to be discovered by the security guard. We have to trust Anna’s source.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I think so. He’s not a trained operative. Daylight is easier. He can see what he’s facing. I’m thinking he’s camped somewhere else tonight. He needs his sleep, too.”

  “But why not go to the CIA already?”

  “He must have a reason. He’s in control of the meeting. We know he wanted to spend time with his mom, but she kicked him out onto the curb and he lost his hiding place. So he might be seeing another friend, he might be studying the evidence he’s got against Novem Soles and—I don’t know—building his case. He could be making this up as he goes along. Don’t hackers improvise?”

  We didn’t have an unobstructed view of the Ming building. We could see the back alley approaches to it, but not the entrance itself. The angle was impossible. I kept watching the black, boarded windows, for any seep of light, but there was none.

  I left her at the window and lay down on the bed. My head ached. My eye hurt. Sleep. Just for an hour or two, I thought. “When you got Mrs. Ming away during the fight…”

  “I wasn’t trying to abandon you. But only she could tell us where Jack was. So I thought.”

  “Your focus is admirable,” I said.

  “So is yours,” Leonie said softly. “You killed that man.”

  “Yes.” I kept my eyes closed.

  “Is it upsetting?”

  “You should hope not. I have to do it again tomorrow.”

  We listened to the distant hum of traffic, the breathing of New York. “If only we’d caught Jack at his mother’s house.”

  “I got to see his room. He’s just a kid, in many ways.”

  “Not in any ways that matter. Don’t you start to feel sorry for him.”

  “I’ll feel what I like, thank you,” I said. I thought I should have kept my mouth shut. All I did by showing sympathy to our target was increase Leonie’s distrust of me.

  “I knew a man who killed. It never, ever bothered him.”

  I opened an eye. “Did you help him disappear, too? Give him a new identity?”

  “No. I gave myself one, to get away from him.” She sat huddled by the window, knees drawn up to her chin. “I left him because he didn’t want kids. Too much of a hassle with his… work.”

  “Leonie.” I wondered if it was her real name. It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t ever see her again when this was done.

  “I mean, you know, I could have had a killer as the father of my kids. There’s a wise choice. What a laugh he would have been at careers day.”

  “Leonie, it’s okay.” I had killed and I was a father. What she was talking about wasn’t the same. Or was it? Yeah, I was going to be a cold-blooded killer by tomorrow. All so I could be a father. What a screwed-up world.

  She moved a lock of her auburn hair out of her face. She came to the bed. She put her fingertips on the side of my face and inspected the bruising. “You have little cuts here from the rock.”

  “They’ll heal.”

  She didn’t take her hands from my face.

  “You have to kill Jack, Sam. You can’t feel sorry for him. You can’t feel emotion for him. You just have to kill him. It will be… easy.”

  Easy because she didn’t have to claim a human life. I closed my eyes. Jack, in the pictures of him in his room. Arms around his thin shoulders, his protective college buddies looking out for the likable geek. The books he’d loved, the gap-toothed child smiling from the photos.

  I needed him to be a faceless stranger but his mother had died holding my hand.

  “I’m full of crap,” Leonie said. “It’s never easy, is it?”

  She moved her hand from my cheek to my forehead, caught her fingers in my hair.

  What? I thought. I’m just so clever.

  “You must have really loved your wife.”

  It was a strange observation to make. I opened my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Anna told me that you tried to find your wife… her way of saying you were a decent man. Anna didn’t want me to be scared of working with you.”

  Scared? I was supposed to be the good guy. Raised by globe-trotting Christian relief agency do-gooders, the nice boy who went to Harvard and stayed on track, the smart brother who didn’t go to Afghanistan and get himself and his best friend killed, the boy who became a man in the CIA, fueled by revenge but tempered (I hoped) by fairness. And now what was I? Someone who’d been accused of being a traitor because I’d married the wrong woman (an actual, technical traitor) and had dodged the CIA and now was
in an awful limbo of untrustworthiness as far as that fine agency was concerned.

  Death is a weird thing. The death for the driver was egregiously bad: being impaled is never anyone’s exit of choice. And for Mrs. Ming, she had died with an awful uncertainty clouding her mind and corroding her last moments. Leonie and I had nearly died tonight. Death makes us thirst for life and all its basics: a comforting meal, the breeze of our own breath in our lungs, the warm press of human flesh.

  Leonie leaned down and she kissed my bruised lips.

  No woman had kissed me since Lucy. I froze for a moment. This was crossing a line I’d seen from the corner of my eye, this was knowing Lucy was gone and was never, ever coming back and even if she did come back that I wouldn’t want her back. I felt myself… unfreeze.

  My whole face hurt but I pressed my lips to hers in response. The kiss didn’t accelerate, it grew slower. More thoughtful. She nibbled at my lower lip.

  “Sam,” she said very quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “Afterwards, will we be cool?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t exactly know what cool meant but I wasn’t going to say no.

  She started to kiss me again. With heat. It didn’t matter that my face ached. I wanted her with a sudden, fierce certainty. I had not been with many women before Lucy. The idea that every spy is a womanizer is a patent falsehood. You are usually keeping people at arm’s length. I never had time and I didn’t now but that did not seem to matter. Her kisses were quick and darting and urgent. Her tongue, her fingertips were everywhere. I’m not even sure we got all our clothes off and then I joined to her, Leonie groaning against me, a low, throaty growl, her face close to mine.

  After a delicious while, she shuddered, her breath warm against my bruised eye, looking deep into my face as though surveying curious terrain. Then she laid her face on my chest. I gasped in release a minute or two later, her urging me on with cooing sounds. Her body felt lush and warm and smooth.

  It was good but it was more comfort than passion. We stripped off the rest of our clothes and clutched at each other. Neither of us wanted to talk. We just wanted to be.