The Last Minute

by Jeff Abbott

  THE BUILDING WAS A LONG, low affair, hidden in the dense growth of red cedars and sugar maples, with a curving gravel driveway before it. It looked like a grand mansion, one perhaps left over from the Catskills’ Borscht Belt days, a shrunken resort. A toy, ignored and misplaced in the heavy forest. The windows were boarded. The grass around the building needed cutting. Abandoned, like the house in New Jersey. Or, if not abandoned, then not in use to help tourists conjugate their French verbs or contract out to business employees who needed to master Spanish or Japanese in between shuffleboard and trout fishing.

  “What do we do?” Leonie said as she pulled up to the shuttered house.

  “We trade him for the kids and we get the hell out of here.”

  “Sam…”

  “We did what they wanted but we’re done playing by their rules,” I said.

  “What about what he said… about you being some kind of project…?”

  “Ignore him,” I said.

  No one emerged onto the porch.

  I opened the car door, got out. Put both hands on Zviman’s head, one along the jaw, the other on the throat. “Honk the horn.”

  Leonie hammered twice on the horn. It sliced through the hush of the woods.

  A moment later the door opened. Anna Tremaine stepped out onto the porch. She wore a cream-colored T-shirt and green cargo pants. She was pale and did not look quite so confident as she had a million years ago in Las Vegas.

  She held a gun in her hand.

  “Hello,” I said. “We’re here to pick up our kids.” My voice rose. I didn’t sound quite human.

  “So I see.”

  “Who else is inside, Anna?”

  There were no other cars parked in the lot. She just stared at me.

  I held Zviman up. “Answer me, or I break his neck.”

  “Let him go.” Now she raised the gun. Toward Leonie.

  “No.”

  “I’ll shoot her.”

  “And I’ll snap his neck. Answer me. Who’s inside?”

  “No one.” She could be lying. It’s what I would have said, if there was a full house of guards.

  “Okay, drop the gun.”

  “I don’t believe you can break his neck,” she said. “With your arm in a cast.”

  “It’s all in the fingers and the biceps, baby, and those are working just fine.” I strangled Zviman more than a little. He obligingly purpled and gagged for me. I thought about what he’d tried to do to Mila, and what he’d done to Nelly, and it took control not to crush the life out of him.

  “Okay, Sam, let’s talk.”

  “My friend already maimed the son of a bitch. I will be happy to finish him off.”

  “Please, Sam, let him go,” Anna said. “Let’s all calm down and…”

  “I am done negotiating with you!” I screamed at her. I’m not sure I’d ever quite heard my voice sound this way. “This is what is happening. Either you drop that gun right now, or the next sound you hear is his vertebrae snapping. No. More. Talking!”

  Then silence, the wind crying in the trees.

  Anna’s gaze went to Zviman’s purpling face, and she dropped the gun. I doubted he would have done the same for her.

  “Leonie, go get it,” I said.

  Leonie hurried up to the porch. She took the gun, eased it away from Anna.

  “Okay, stay calm.” Anna tried to smile at Leonie. “Leonie, I want you to know, I’ve taken good care of—” and Leonie shot her, in the heart. A curl of smoke, a flower of blood on Anna’s T-shirt, and then she fell wordlessly.

  Leonie ran inside the house.

  Damn it. I hammered a fist into Zviman’s face and dropped him to the gravel. I tore into the house after her. The house was old, perhaps a grand country estate built back in the early 1900s. The entranceway was hardwoods, with a large staircase leading up to a mezzanine on the second floor. Sheets covered most but not all of the furniture. Leonie ran, searching, through the adjoining rooms: study, library, dining room, kitchen.

  “Leonie, come back here,” I yelled at her. Hell, if Anna was lying, we could be gunned down. And she had the gun, not me.

  “Taylor!” she screamed.

  I lost her, then heard footsteps caroming up a flight of stairs I couldn’t see. I followed the noise through the kitchen. A bottle was warming on a stove. I saw a formula box on the kitchen island, the remains of a grown-up’s meal of steak, salad, and French fries.

  A couple of soiled bibs. A noise between grief and joy surged in my throat.

  Beyond the main room of the kitchen was a servants’ staircase. She had already run up to the second floor.

  “Daniel!” I screamed. Like he was going to answer. But my mind was shuttered or sharpened, I’m not sure which. On the second floor I saw a hallway of rooms, one of them open.

  I ran into the doorway. Leonie, standing at a crib, picking up a baby, holding the child close to her shoulder in a mother’s embrace, nearly weeping in relief. I looked around the room.

  There was only the one crib.

  I bolted down the rest of the hallway, opening every door. Next was an empty bedroom, a woman’s clothes tossed on the foot of the bed. No crib. Anna’s room.

  The next was another room, men’s clothes littering the floor. Where Zviman had stayed.

  The other rooms were empty.

  “No, no!” I screamed. “Daniel!”

  I ran back to the first room. Leonie stood there, holding the baby, cradling its blond hair against her shirt.

  Blond hair. I remembered the weathered picture, handled with love. The smiling dark-haired girl. Taylor was a bigger baby, and brown-haired.

  “Sam,” Leonie said, and her voice turned into a broken sob. “Sam. I’m sorry.”

  And she pointed the gun at me.

  87

  In the back of a van

  THIS WAS HOW MILA THOUGHT it might end: bound and handcuffed, riding in a bounty hunter’s car, to be delivered to her fate, because Zviman wanted her alive.

  Six had tried in the past three years, and six had died. Two had come closest, handcuffing her (which she respected: it was much quicker than tying her with rope or even plastic cuffs) and binding her feet. The first of the two were ex-IRA, seized her outside The Adrenaline Bar, the Round Table–owned drinking spot in London, in the hipster Hoxton neighborhood. Kenneth, the manager of (now) Sam’s bar in London saw her grabbed, injected in the neck with a sedative, and forced into an Audi’s trunk. Kenneth had caught up the kidnappers on the A5 and shot the driver through the car window. The car crashed and Kenneth shot the other kidnapper, then politely carried Mila out of the trunk. She was grateful, of course, but humiliated to be saved.

  Another attempt was made barely three weeks ago, two Filipinos trying their luck. They had gotten her handcuffed in her London apartment but before they bound her feet she had, to put it bluntly, kicked and stomped the two of them to death. The unpleasantness made for a gruesome evening, when all she’d been in the mood for was a nice Thai green curry for dinner, a cold bottle of lager, and watching Emmerdale on TV. But both times she’d had to have Kenneth slice the cuffs off her. Then, of course, she had to vanish and get an entirely new apartment, under a different name, on the other side of London. Very inconvenient. It made her think.

  Word had spread among the shadowy vines that connected hired killers that she was very dangerous. Kill six people who come after you and everyone recalculates the value of hunting you down.

  She blinked back slowly from the chloroformed unconsciousness. Her nose ached and her lips were thick where he’d hit her. She could see, on the van floor, splinters from the boxes where she and Bertrand had loaded in the dead guards she and Sam had killed when they got the best lead on Anna Tremaine and Daniel. She should have swept it more thoroughly.

  Why are you in New York? Sam had asked her when he’d come to The Last Minute after leaving Las Vegas, and she answered, with a smile: shoes. He thought she was being Mila, joking, parrying his question. But wha
t Sam had not quite learned was that she spoke the truth more often than not.

  She had indeed gotten shoes in New York. Custom-made boots. She eased the back of her heels closer to her hands. On the left boot she maneuvered her fingertips into place and gave the heel a slight twist and push all at once, like on a medicine bottle. The right heel popped off. Embedded in it was a handcuff key. A universal key, especially made for her by a master locksmith who had once been the KGB’s finest lock designer. She freed the key from the heel with a finger flick, and then repositioned herself gently, trying to ease the key into the lock.

  “I can hear you, you know,” the man driving the van said. “Nice sleep?”

  “I had bad dreams.”

  “Baby, you’re about to have much worse. But then your dreams will end.”

  “You have a poetic soul.”

  “I have received many compliments in my life but that is a first. Thank you, Mila.”

  “What is your name?”

  “Oh, I should keep some secrets. I’m just a nobody.”

  “I have seen your face on a camera. A picture I think Sam will send to the CIA.”

  Silence.

  “Ah. You do not like that,” Mila said. “You are a nobody they will know, yes?”

  “My name is Braun.” He said it with pride. “I want you to know who’s beaten you after others have failed.”

  “Well, Mr. Braun, I will pay you more than a million dollars to let me go.”

  “Tempting. But this isn’t about money. It’s about cleaning house. Setting a mistake to right. I understand that’s how you got your start, setting a mistake to right.”

  “It’s hard to be the star of your own legend.”

  “I find your confidence in the face of death charming. I like you. If Mr. Zviman wasn’t so specific about getting you alive and in a state to be tortured, I might give you a mercy bullet.” His voice sounded almost merry. “Out of respect.”

  “I am curious…”

  “Why would you be, when you’re about to die? I wouldn’t bother learning new facts. I would be reflecting on all the old choices that brought me here. We have a duty to learn more from our mistakes. I mean, you’re one of my mistakes, and I’m learning from you. I would have liked to have dinner with you, Mila. Talked to you. You fascinate me. Both you and Zviman.”

  He wasn’t talking about her but she wanted him to keep talking. He would be less likely to notice anything she did.

  “I am not sure how I am your mistake,” Mila said. The handcuff pick slid home. Now, if it would work. It better. She had paid very good money for it.

  “You. Zviman. Two sides of the same coin, my dear. I mean, there’s an irony that I’m going to profit from my mistake. But after all I am cleaning up the mess. I was retired. I had a place to live in Florida. I was going to focus on golf and fishing. Mistakes shouldn’t come back to haunt you at that point in life. Mistakes should die first and then let you die.”

  This Braun was a crazy man. The handcuff opened. She gave out a little sigh.

  “I do not know what you mean. I am not a coin.”

  “No, Mila, you’re a jewel. But you are worth a great number of coins. Retirement doesn’t go as far as it used to.” He gave a sigh. “Now I can retire in peace, knowing my past mistakes are rectified. It should really help my golf game.”

  She eased a wrist free. She was careful not to make a clicking sound.

  Now the other heel. She loosened it, and wedged in the heel was a small, sheathed knife. She flicked off the sheath and the knife, forged from Japanese steel, rested in her hand. It was actually harder to cut the ropes around her feet than open the cuffs; it required more movement to saw through the fibers.

  “Well, I find it odd that I am your mistake when I have never seen you before. Are you my long-lost father, Mr. Braun?”

  “Not biologically, but, yes, I am your father, in a manner of speaking.”

  Okay, she thought, entirely crazy. “You cannot answer straight questions,” she said. “You must have been CIA. You talk all vaguely, just like Sam.”

  “Yes, he’s the problem, isn’t he? It all comes back to him.”

  She felt the van slow, make a turn. They had been driving north in a relatively straight stretch; she couldn’t see, but she assumed he had the GPS monitor up in the seat with him.

  “We’re here, Mila. Here where it all began,” he said. “Where it was all born.”

  He stopped the van.

  “Well, that’s not good,” he said. “I better not be too late.”

  And then he got out of the van and slammed the door.

  Mila writhed, slashing at the ropes. She had maybe eight seconds before Braun opened the van’s rear door.

  Not enough time.

  88

  The Nursery

  LEONIE.” My glance kept flickering between the gun and the baby. “What are you doing?”

  She wept, tears bright on her cheeks. “I’m sorry. I can’t let you take him.”

  “That is Daniel. Where is your child?”

  She glanced at Daniel. He cooed and moved against her, gently. As though he knew the smell of her skin, the swell of her breast.

  I shook my head. “No. No.”

  “He’s mine. I’m all he’s ever had, all he’s ever known,” she said. “He’s not yours anymore. His name is Daniel Taylor Jones. I sometimes call him Dat. Like in a peek-a-boo game, I go who, then I go dat, and he laughs.” Fresh tears, but her mouth curled into a twist of resolve.

  “He is my son,” I said, and she steadied the gun. “Okay, okay,” I said. I raised my hands. “Leonie. We can talk about this.”

  “No. No talk. I am leaving. With my son.”

  “The child in the picture you showed me…”

  “That was my first child. My daughter. I had to leave… Ray Brewster when I got pregnant. I didn’t want him to be the father. He wouldn’t have let me be tied down with a child; in case I ever had to run with him. Children complicate everything. So I went.” She steadied her voice. “I would have liked… someone like you, Sam, I so don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to. I will keep him safe in a way you can’t, not with the life you lead, the enemies you have. So move to the wall, and keep your hands up, and let me leave.”

  “What happened to your daughter?” As long as she was talking, she wasn’t shooting me or leaving.

  “She died. She died.” And I thought the grief would make her body fold. “Meningitis. It takes them so fast. She… I had done work for Anna. On the babies’ new identities. She gave me Daniel. She said… he could be mine. A replacement, but he’s not. I loved Taylor just as she was, she was the greatest, Sam… oh, God…”

  “I bet she was.” My own face felt hot and heavy. “Leonie, please.”

  “… but… but she gave me Daniel and I love him just as much…” Her voice broke to a whisper. “And you are not going to take him away from me.”

  I could see how Zviman and Anna had planned this ending. I, the ex-CIA, killed Jack Ming, the one man CIA Special Projects wanted more than anyone else. Then I died, at Leonie’s hand, when my defenses were down, when victory was in my grasp. Leonie as a partner would ensure that I would not betray or move against Nine Suns, and, if I did, she had every reason to kill me.

  Leonie would have a bigger motive for wanting me dead than anyone in Nine Suns. I could take away the thing most precious in the world to her.

  “Give me my son,” I said. I opened my hands toward her.

  “He isn’t yours. I’m his mother. I’m the only mother he’s ever known. That… that… traitor you married, she gave him up, she gave him up…”

  “I never did,” I said. “You know how hard I have fought to find him—” And then I heard it.

  “You!” she screamed, and the sympathy she seemed to feel for me turned instantly to venom. “I have fought a thousand times harder…”

  I raised a finger to my lips. “I heard something. Downstairs. Someone’s here.”


  She shook her head. “You’re trying to scare me or trick me… you want to go down there and get a weapon because I’ve got the gun…”

  “Leonie!” I hissed. “Someone is downstairs.”

  She shut up, my tone slicing through her fury. Listening.

  I held out my hand for the gun. After a moment she stepped forward, hand shaking, and gave it to me.

  “Hide,” I whispered. And she nodded, my son gurgling against her shirt. I looked at him for one second. His eyes met mine, his little mouth parted and a spit bubble formed and burst like a flower given a five-second life. I have never wanted to hold another human being so badly in my life.

  Instead I checked the gun for the remaining clip and I eased onto the mezzanine.

  89

  BUT, TO MILA’S SURPRISE, Braun didn’t come around the van’s back door.

  He walked away from the van. She could hear the soft hiss of his footsteps on the gravel.

  Unloading his prisoner wasn’t a priority. Fine by her. She risked a glance out the front window. Braun stood by a BMW, looking down at the ground. Talking to the ground.

  It must be someone lying next to the car.

  Then Braun shook his head and he walked into the grand house, a gun in his hand.

  She sliced through the remaining ropes, kicked them away. Her hand went to her watch. The garrote’s wire was inside, just as when she had used it against Anna’s men in New York. She palmed the heel of her boot, with the miniature Japanese knife. The blade protruded between her ring and middle finger. Two small weapons. She hoped they would be enough.

  She let herself out of the van through the driver’s door and dropped to the ground. She looked under the van to see if she could spot who was lying by the BMW. She saw legs, but they were upright now. Gray pants, nice shoes.

  She heard a trunk open. She peered around the van.

  The blond mohawk. Yaakov Zviman. He looked up toward the house and she saw a rising bruise on the side of his face. Sam hit him, she thought.

  Zviman hoisted an ax out of the BMW. He took two steps toward the house.