The Last Minute sc-2

by Jeff Abbott

  I said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m supposed to help you find this guy Jin Ming. We needn’t talk unless we’re discussing him.’ One stray tear of upset tracked her cheek and she wiped it away with quick resolve.

  ‘How are you going to find him?’

  ‘There is no place on earth he can hide from me.’ She stood. ‘We should probably go through security. I could use a drink. I really hate flying.’

  We had thirty minutes before they would be calling our flight. I followed Leonie to a private lounge where we were admitted by our first class tickets. Inside was a scattering of business types and lushed-up couples, a few keeping the Vegas party going. One guy, lubricated with gin and tonic, complained with his mega-phone voice about having lost ten thousand dollars. I would have traded problems with him.

  We sat down in a far corner. A sleek hostess – truly sleek, her hair was gelled back in a severe cut, her dress was silver, she looked like her day job was testing wind tunnels – brought Leonie a large glass of pinot noir and me a whisky, neat.

  ‘When did your kid vanish?’ I asked.

  She took a fortifying sip of the wine. ‘Earlier tonight. Anna, or her people, took her from her crib while I was working in my bedroom. I fell asleep at my computer. I never even heard them in my house.’ The moment her voice started to quake she caught herself.

  ‘Listen to me.’

  She looked at me.

  ‘Unlike most parents of missing kids, we know exactly what we have to do to get our kids back and we know who has them. We can’t waste mental energy on blame. We have a job to do. Our kids need us.’

  She nodded; took another sip of the wine. ‘Wow, do you double as a life coach on weekends?’

  ‘No. Where’s your husband?’

  ‘I’m a single mother.’ She watched, past my shoulder, the drunk complainer order another round. ‘Where’s your wife?’

  ‘Ex. In a coma.’

  ‘Coma.’

  ‘Yes. One of Anna’s buddies shot her in the head a few weeks ago.’

  She let five seconds pass. ‘That sucks.’

  Really, what else do you say? Then she said: ‘I mean, I’m really sorry. I’m not quite myself this evening.’

  Of course she wasn’t – she had to be in deep shock. ‘What’s your connection to Anna?’

  ‘None of your business. I don’t know you, Sam. All I want is my child back. That’s all.’ She rubbed at her jawline, glanced at the clock. She did not want to seem to look at me. Her daughter had been kidnapped only hours earlier. Her self-control was extraordinary. I reached out and touched her hand with my fingertips. Just a reflex. She flinched.

  ‘We’re on the same side. I’m in your shoes. They have my son, too.’

  ‘So Anna told me.’ She studied her wine. ‘Do we have to talk beyond finding Jin Ming? Seriously?’

  It occurred to me that maybe she was a plant; someone Anna sent along to make sure I killed Jin Ming and didn’t try to use him back as leverage against Novem Soles. I didn’t know if she really had a kid or really had suffered a kidnapping tonight. She could simply be a convincing actress. She could be lying through her teeth. But I couldn’t get anywhere with her if she knew I harbored suspicions. She was supposed to be a panicked mom, I was a desperate father. Let us, I thought, play true to our parts.

  ‘Yes, we do have to talk. I know you are upset. I know what you’re feeling because I’m feeling it, too. If we can’t trust each other, we won’t get far in finding Jin Ming.’

  She gave me a doubting look. ‘I tell you where he will be. You kill him. That’s all we have to discuss.’ She took another hit of the pinot.

  ‘Leonie-’

  ‘Listen. This is the single worst day of my life. You are a dude who kills people. So I don’t want to know you. I don’t want to be your friend or join your support group for parents of kidnapped kids. I just want my Taylor home.’ She picked up the wine glass. She stared past my shoulder toward the loud group in the back corner. ‘If those assholes are on our flight, I may end up punching someone.’

  A dude who kills people. That was so not what I was. But now wasn’t the time to reassure her I wasn’t some slavering ax-wielder. Winning her trust would be a slow process. ‘This target. What can you tell me about him? What does he know about Novem Soles?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She didn’t flinch at the name of the group; she’d heard it before.

  ‘You must. That knowledge would be key to tracking him, predicting where he will run, who he will ask for help.’

  ‘All you need to do is kill him.’ She set the wine glass down hard. ‘You’re the bullet, I’m the brains. I just tell you where to shoot. The bullet doesn’t need any details except a location.’

  Well. ‘Did Anna threaten your daughter if you tell me something you’re not supposed to?’

  ‘I would say kidnapping in itself would be threat enough. I… know Anna. Children are simply a commodity to her. Products that other people make for her and from which she profits. She’ll kill or sell our kids and we’ll never find them if we give her anything other than complete obedience.’

  Was she trying to provoke me? See how I’d react? I studied her again. Fierce intelligence in the eyes. I leaned forward.

  ‘Has it occurred to you that neither of us is getting our kid back? We have zero guarantees she’ll honor her side of the bargain. We need to find a way to protect ourselves, to make sure she hands the kids back. We could trade her Ming, alive, for the kids.’

  ‘You listen to me.’ Leonie pointed a finger at my face. ‘You hear every word I’m saying. Don’t you dare think of going against Anna. If we deviate from the plan, Anna will kill the children.’ She lowered her voice to the barest whisper. ‘We are doing exactly what she tells us to do. If you try to fight back… well, you won’t.’

  ‘You’ll kill me?’

  ‘I’ll do anything for my child. Anything.’ Stare down between us.

  ‘We are on the same side,’ I repeated.

  ‘This is crazy. Please, Sam. Let’s just try to get along out of necessity.’

  I’d mishandled this. But where was the primer for this situation? I got up and fixed us two sleek plates of appetizers, laid on the sleek buffet by the sleek hostesses. Leonie watched me. I brought back her food, set the silvery plate in front of her.

  ‘Thank you.’ She nibbled at a meatball, then at a carrot stick, out of politeness.

  ‘You hold yourself together remarkably well for someone whose child was just taken,’ I said. ‘I have the advantage. My child was taken weeks ago. I have had time to… adjust.’

  ‘That’s a white lie,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re adjusted at all. It’s all stifled just inside.’

  I ate a slider, sipped at the whisky.

  She looked at me. ‘Inside I’m a wreck.’

  ‘When my kid and my wife were taken – I couldn’t eat or sleep for days.’ I was also framed as a traitor, undergoing interrogation in a CIA-run prison in Poland, but that was an avalanche of detail right now for Leonie.

  ‘Your wife was taken. I thought you said… ’

  ‘Anna’s people grabbed my wife when she was seven months pregnant. I’ve never seen my son face to face.’

  She just stared at me for a long moment. ‘How awful. I am sorry.’

  ‘Let me guess why you can’t go to the police. Anna provided you with your baby girl.’

  She ate some more of the carrot. She did not seem the type for an impulsive admission. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘You said you work on hiding people which suggests to me you are breaking a few laws, committing forgery for new papers, maybe credit fraud. You know her. She got you your kid. What Anna giveth, Anna taketh away.’

  She was good at concealing her emotions – after all, me dissing her was nothing compared to the agonies she must be feeling for her kid – and the only sign of betrayal on her face was the momentary quiver of her lip. ‘No. Taylor is mine. But I’ve
done work for Anna. Sometimes the children she places with parents’ – note she didn’t say the unthinkable word of sells – ‘need birth certificates. I forge them for her. And I’ve helped hide people she sent to me.’

  ‘Did you do a birth certificate for Julien Daniel Besson?’ My breath couldn’t move in my lungs. I leaned in close and she leaned back. I grabbed her hands again. ‘That was the name my son was given at birth. He was born in France. Julien Daniel Besson.’

  ‘I didn’t. But if Anna’s using your child as leverage against you then she hasn’t placed him. She’ll only place him now if she doesn’t need him any more.’

  Her words were a knife across my throat. She saw it.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sam. I really am.’

  ‘You help her, forging certificates.’

  I thought I could hear the soft burr of her grinding her teeth. ‘It’s not a choice.’

  I stared at her. ‘They have more dirt on you.’ I didn’t know yet if I could trust her. Cornering her about her secrets wasn’t going to win her over to my side.

  ‘I am not up for Twenty Questions.’ She stood. ‘Don’t talk about defying Anna. We do what she says, and nothing else. I’m not putting Taylor’s life at risk. And you shouldn’t be endangering your own child’s life, either.’ She spat the last word like I was the scum of parenting.

  There was no point in saying, you’re wanting us to entrust babies to killers and murderers. ‘Okay, Leonie. Okay. Calm down.’

  ‘I don’t need to know you, you don’t need to know me.’ She downed the pinot noir in two hard gulps, picked up her bag. ‘Let’s go get on our plane.’

  17

  Flight 903, Las Vegas to New York

  We sat together in first class. Most of the cabin, weary from partying in the desert and not looking forward to a work day tomorrow in New York, slept. I watched an old movie, Aliens, on my personal viewer in the chair back and thought, now there’s a movie about how you save a kid. I had seen the film a dozen times before and I could watch it without thinking, without having to follow the story. Leonie’s eyes were closed. She had spoken so few words to me on the flight I felt sure no one believed we were traveling together. I got up to splash cold water on my face in the lavatory. Most of the other passengers were locked in their own digital cocoons, watching movies on their personal movie screens or hooked into their iPods or iPads. Technology has made it easy for us to be totally alone in a crowded room. I envied those who slept. I needed sleep, badly, but I couldn’t settle my mind. I’ve never been good at sleeping on planes.

  I sat back down and Leonie opened her eyes. She stared at me, blinking, as though unsure where she was wakening. I was surprised she’d managed to doze off. The adrenaline shock from her daughter’s kidnapping was fading, the inevitable exhaustion settling into her. She looked guilty at having done anything as weak and self-indulgent as sleep, when I knew it was the body’s natural response to cope with crippling stress.

  ‘You okay? You want something to drink?’ It’s the bar owner in me. I always want to offer a drink. The flight attendants should just let me man the beverage cart. They could go watch the movie.

  She shook her head. The silence hung, like smoke ruining the air.

  I started to put my earphones into place. No point in talking with her.

  She put a hand on my arm. ‘Your son, he was given that name. If you got to name him, what would it be?’

  ‘Daniel. My ex did get to name him. For my late brother.’

  Her mouth pursed, like she was tasting the name. ‘When did Daniel

  … vanish?’

  ‘Right after he was born. I’ve only seen a picture that Anna gave me.’

  ‘And you’re sure she gave you a photo of your kid.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Show him to me.’

  I showed her the picture of Daniel that Anna had given me. She studied it, then looked at my face. ‘He’s a handsome boy.’

  ‘He’s never been held by either of his parents,’ I said. ‘But there he’s smiling. How does that affect a kid – to not have been held except by people who want to use you?’ The words spilled, unexpected. I didn’t talk about Daniel. Who was I going to talk about him with? My crazy Moldovan boss with the million-dollar price on her head? My old friends in the CIA who weren’t my friends any more? My customers at the bar? No. Every flick of pain I felt about Daniel coalesced in my chest. I shut my mouth. I didn’t want to talk about him.

  ‘When you get him back, then don’t ever let him go.’ She handed me the photo. ‘How did you and your wife ever cross Anna’s path?’

  ‘My wife got bought by Novem Soles. She was a CIA officer. She was a traitor.’ It was a strange thing to say in the hush of a first class cabin. I glanced up from the photo. The flight attendants congregated in the galley ahead of us, people either slept or sat earplugged into oblivion. Yes, let me talk about my wife. The love of my life, the woman I gave my life to, the woman who betrayed both me and country and then tried to save me. Let me talk about the most incomprehensible person I ever knew and how machines keep her breathing and digesting and living like a ghost bound in flesh.

  ‘I’m sorry, that sucks.’ I was figuring Leonie was a master of understatement now.

  ‘It does.’

  Leonie pulled a photo from her purse. It was worn, dog-eared from too much handling, as though it had lived a hard life inside her wallet. ‘This is Taylor.’ She was a bigger baby than Daniel, a few months older, rounder-cheeked, with darker hair and soft, sweet, brown eyes.

  ‘She’s a cute girl.’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  ‘So never a husband?’

  ‘We’re not involved any more. I prefer to deal only with actual human beings these days.’

  ‘Not an amicable parting.’

  She took Taylor’s photo from me and carefully fitted it into a back slot in her wallet, away from the credit cards. I could see a smear of ink drawn on the back as she worked the photo into the slot. She dumped the wallet in her purse. ‘No.’

  ‘How will you explain to him that Taylor’s gone?’

  ‘He is utterly indifferent to her. He couldn’t care less. He’s seen her once and made it clear he didn’t care to see her again.’

  ‘How old is Taylor now?’

  ‘Almost a year.’ She took a heavy, restoring breath. ‘So, Taylor is my life, Sam. Everything.’

  ‘We’ll get her back. We’ll get them both back.’

  ‘Anna must get both kids to New York.’ Her voice was just a whisper. ‘If she sticks by the agreement. I’m wondering how she’s doing that so quickly with mine.’

  ‘Because they’re lying to us,’ I said quietly.

  Her gaze snapped to mine.

  ‘They might give us our kids back, but they’re not going to want us anywhere close by after we… deal with the target,’ I said. ‘This phone call, this church pickup – it has to be a lie, Leonie. They don’t want us getting caught. You don’t linger in the area after a job. You create distance.’

  She was silent. She tensed when I said the word ‘job’, as though the drowsing businesspeople and hung-over Vegas escapees around us would translate ‘job’ into ‘hit’.

  ‘You’re not used to violence,’ I said.

  She didn’t look at me. ‘No.’ She rubbed at her face. She leaned close to me. I could smell breath mints on her mouth. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like much of a killer.’

  I had killed. Never before my wife had been taken. But I had killed, multiple times, to save myself or save others since my life had been derailed by Novem Soles. I would like to say it weighed on me heavily, this human cost, but that would be a lie. They’d taken my wife, my child. They’d gotten in the way of me getting them back. They’d tried to kill me. Why should I feel guilty? The deaths were nothing I savored, and I never wanted to kill again. I dreamed about it sometimes, and I didn’t want to think that the experiences were rewiring my brain, like a soldier who se
es the worst horrors in battle.

  But this kid, this Jin Ming. He’d been grabbed by the CIA, clearly, in Amsterdam, forced to give them access to the machinists’ shop where the gunfight erupted. And now he was turning against Novem Soles. I ought to be applauding him, protecting him, picking his brain. Putting him into my own witness protection plan so he could tell me what lovely, dirty secrets he knew and then I could start slicing the core out of the so-called Nine Suns.

  He and I could have talks. The Best. Talks. Ever.

  Instead, I was going to kill him. I closed my eyes. He was, what, twenty-two, twenty-three? At the beginning of his years. The thought that someone barely out of his teens could be a mortal threat to an international criminal syndicate (that was my theory as to what Novem Soles was, fancy-ass Latin name aside – maybe one of them had read a branding book and wanted to sound more gothic, ancient or mysterious) interested me.

  I didn’t need to think about him. Just kill him. Be a weapon. I could do that and I’d worry about the mental cost later. Or, maybe, not worry about it at all. But if I did that, what sort of father would I be for my son?

  ‘I’m not much of a killer,’ I said to Leonie. ‘But I will be.’

  18

  Flight 902, Las Vegas to New York

  In first class we got a decent dinner: shrimp salad and steak medallions, a potato galette and a wannabe creme brulee.

  ‘So. It’s up to you to find our guy. Where do you start, beyond knowing he’s in New York City?’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll keep some secrets to myself.’

  ‘I think we need to discuss our options if they betray us.’

  ‘If I lose Taylor, it’s over for me anyway. I’m not continuing to breathe, Sam. I’m not existing then.’

  There was nothing more to say; the flight attendant stopped and asked us if we wanted coffee. We both declined. Leonie announced she would sleep the rest of the flight. I closed my eyes and thought about a plan of action.

  One thing I did do: I surreptitiously snapped a picture of Leonie while she dozed. I thought, for some reason, that it might be valuable to have a photo of her. She was a woman with a lot of secrets, and I might need to know more about who she was.