The Last Minute sc-2

by Jeff Abbott

  I produced my cell phone. I didn’t say anything. I just wanted him to see it. Right now it was more frightening than a loaded gun.

  ‘I think he was from New York and he did something bad enough to hide out under a false name, Jin Ming, at grad school at Delft University of Technology. He has come back to New York, at huge risk, when he has every reason to dig a tunnel below a Dutch canal and hide for the next ten years. So I’m thinking it’s for a family reason.’

  ‘A lot of Asian kids study computers, but not a lot turn to hacktivism. Cultural mores. More respect for authority in Chinese families.’ Fagin studied his fingertips. ‘Not to stereotype or generalize, really.’

  ‘So how many do you know?’

  ‘Well, several, still. A few came through my, um, camp. I’ve kept tabs on them.’

  ‘Because you don’t want them talking about their work with you or because you’ll need them again?’

  ‘Both. If I show you their faces, will you leave?’

  ‘I need a name, Fagin.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘You don’t say anything to Special Projects that I was here, and I don’t give your home address and real name to your many enemies overseas.’

  ‘I’m really hurt. I don’t think you’d do that, Sam.’

  ‘My child. The rules are off.’

  He stood. I followed him to one of the computers. I leaned close. I wanted to be sure he didn’t send an email to August or anyone else in Special Projects. Hackers are trickier and more subtle than pickpockets. He could hit a keystroke and reformat the entire network for all I knew. Watching Fagin at a keyboard was like watching the cobra slowly rise and undulate from the reed basket.

  ‘I keep a dossier on all the Oliver Twists,’ he said. He entered in a passcode too fast for me to register it, then another one, then another. He had a file labeled TWISTS and he opened it up. Dozens of names. He clicked on a few and their files opened. Complete with pictures. I doubt Fagin had made them stand still for a picture; these looked stolen from passport and driver’s license pictures. Or even school pictures: some of the kids looked to be barely thirteen or fourteen. Your government at work, ladies and gentlemen.

  He began to click through the photos while I watched. ‘No. No. No,’ I said.

  It would have been too much to hope that Jin Ming had worked for him; if so, then if he wanted to surrender to someone he could have run straight back to Fagin. ‘None of these are Jin Ming.’

  ‘Jin Ming. Jin Ming. I remember a Jack Ming.’

  ‘Jack Ming. That name’s too close to Jin Ming for it to be a good alias.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Jin would be the surname, not Ming. He’d be called Ming by his friends, not Jin. And a good alias is one you can remember.’ He sat down, searched on Jack Ming on a Google search. News reports came up. A picture.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Fagin said. ‘Him.’

  It was the young Chinese hacker. ‘That’s him. What did he do?’

  ‘I only knew him by reputation. Supposedly he hacked Bruce Springsteen’s laptop once. Stole recordings of an album in development.’

  ‘That is such heresy. And that’s why he’s a fugitive.’

  Fagin fidgeted. ‘Um, no, he was really good at hacking copiers.’

  ‘Copiers?’ I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Yes. Office copiers. Most of them have microchips now, and they have internet capability. They can connect to the web if they have a repair that needs to be made. They can either self-download a fix if it’s a software problem or tell the repairman exactly what parts to bring.’

  ‘And Jack Ming would hack… copiers?’

  ‘Yes. He would rewrite the software in the copier.’ Fagin tented his cheek with his tongue.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Well, you could rewrite software on the chip to overheat the copier, damage it or destroy it. He set a copier on fire at a firm where his mother worked as a consultant. The sprinklers came out, caused several thousand dollars’ worth of damage.’

  ‘Big deal. Is his mommy ignoring him?’

  ‘Or,’ and Fagin gave his throat a polite clearing, ‘you could program the copier to save an image of everything it scanned and email it to you.’

  ‘Wow.’ Okay, that was huge. Consider what a compromised copier could give you: business proposals, legal filings before they were given over to the court, product plans, confidential memos. Even with email now, paper copies of critical documents were still used. You could learn a lot about a company, a project, sifting through every image that came across the copier. ‘Corporate espionage, Fagin?’

  ‘Maybe, just a touch.’

  ‘Is that why Jack Ming had to leave New York?’

  Fagin gave a slow nod. ‘He stole secrets from companies, and he must have tried to sell them. Or somehow they backtracked the hacking to him. I think if he could make copiers spy for him, he could write other software to do the same.’

  I considered. Maybe he had, maybe this was how he’d stolen Novem Soles’s secrets.

  Fagin shrugged. ‘Um, I don’t think he’d come back here to see family.’

  ‘Why?’

  Fagin cracked his first smile. ‘Well, the rumor was, he caused his dad’s death.’

  23

  Midtown Manhattan, New York City

  His mother’s apartment was several blocks north of the United Nations Plaza, on East 59th Street. It was convenient, and his mother had always treasured a smooth road in life. She was not a woman who cared for bumps along the ride.

  Jack Ming didn’t recognize the doorman, and he didn’t have a key, so he sat in a small, elegant tea shop across the street, sipping a strong cup of Earl Grey, staving off jet lag, waiting for her to come home. The sky rumbled, louder than the traffic. The clouds began to smother the hard, bright morning light. A warm, gusty rain began to fall fitfully. He watched an umbrella salesman suddenly appear on the street corner; it was almost as if the rain had conjured the man out of thin air. It was unusually warm in New York after the unseasonable chill of Amsterdam.

  He thought he would never be back here. He had expected a tidal wave of emotion; but instead, worse, he felt a slow, rising flood of remorse and sorrow. The kind that drowned you by inches.

  He tasted the risk, like wet steel on his tongue. Novem Soles might send a hired troll, like the one he’d killed in Amsterdam, to watch his mother and kill him if he turned up. Or maybe the CIA had figured out who he was after he made his offer. Of all the moves he’d made since being shot, coming home felt like the most dangerous one. He glanced around. If her apartment was being watched then the watchers should have grabbed him the moment he appeared across the street. He tucked an earphone bud into place but he kept the iPod silenced. He had called the house using a prepaid phone he had bought when he arrived in Manhattan. As he got his mother’s answering machine, he had hung up and decided simply to go to her apartment. His father had been wealthy and the Mings had invested carefully from their days in Hong Kong and she still worked as a consultant from her home when she pleased.

  Mom, come home, he thought. He tried her home phone again. No answer. She could be traveling for work, which could mean she was anywhere from South America to Hong Kong to Canada. She could be screening her calls. He could try and hack into her laptop; she wasn’t very security conscious. But that felt like rifling through her clothing drawers, or love letters from her teenage years. You didn’t hack your mom.

  He waited, watching the warm, intermittent rain streak the glass, his heart pounding. She might spit in his face. She might scream for the police. She might call him his father’s murderer again and he wasn’t sure he could take that pain.

  24

  Fagin’s Nest, Chelsea, New York City

  Fagin poured himself coffee. He didn’t offer me any.

  ‘Sandra Ming is former State Department. Now she consults. Very well connected in both business and government. She sits on boards of directors for two Fortune 1000 companies. American-bor
n but related to a prominent Hong Kong family. The husband’s name was Russell Ming. Real-estate developer, he died about the time that Jack vanished. Owned properties around New York and New Jersey. Heart attack about the time Jack lit out.’

  For a moment Fagin’s eyes went merry.

  ‘Heart attack over his son’s crimes?’ I asked.

  ‘The rumor mill suggested,’ Fagin said.

  ‘That’s a hard cross for a kid to bear,’ I said.

  Fagin made a noise. He’d seen as many damaged kids as a social worker. ‘Life is full of hard crosses. If I could have recruited him I could have shielded him. The Oliver Twists have never, ever been caught.’

  ‘Connected to government and business,’ I said, repeating Fagin’s own words. Could his mother shield him, or help him reach the CIA without me finding him? I had one choice: I had to go to the mother’s house. I glanced up at Fagin.

  ‘Would Jack contact hackers here in town? Did he know any of your Twists?’

  ‘Not if he wants to keep his head low. If there’s a price on him, I might be tempted to collect it.’

  ‘At least you’re consistent, Fagin.’

  ‘And what a joy that makes me.’

  ‘But you, you’re not likely to turn him into the police. You don’t like talking to the police, Fagin.’

  ‘In my defense, they don’t much like talking to me, either.’

  ‘Where does Mrs Ming live?’

  Fagin consulted a computer database. I looked at the photo of his mother we’d loaded into a browser: it showed an elegant woman touching her chin in that weird author-photo pose. She was pretty, but in a cold, cubic way.

  He gave me Mrs Ming’s address.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘That’s it? Thank you?’

  ‘You’re not going to tell anyone that I’m here, Fagin.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘Because I will tell the people who are looking for Jack Ming that you might know where he is. And if I do that, they will order me to force information from you, and then to kill you.’

  ‘You should find a better class of person for your associates,’ Fagin said. ‘And, really, you needn’t turn into a bully.’

  ‘Tell me, hacker man,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of a hacker in Las Vegas named Leonie?’

  ‘Leonie, growl, I like kitty-kat-style names,’ Fagin said.

  ‘Just answer.’

  ‘No. But you know, online, we don’t use our real names.’ He widened his eyes. ‘Shocking, I know.’

  ‘She’s a relocator for people who want to vanish. She deals with hackers around the world to get information or to help her create new identities.’

  ‘She’s not a hacker, then, she’s an information broker. Hires hackers to do a bit of a job for her, then uses someone else. That way you never know exactly what it is she’s working on or who it is she’s working for.’

  ‘You know anything about her?’ I showed him the picture of her I’d taken on my phone when she slept.

  ‘You bored her into a sense of complacency to get this picture, right?’

  ‘Have you seen her before?’

  ‘No. But isn’t she the pretty one?’

  ‘You ever hear of a woman named Anna Tremaine?’

  He considered, and shook his head.

  ‘How about Novem Soles?’

  ‘Sounds like a Catholic retreat.’

  ‘It means Nine Suns in Latin. You ever hear of a group with that name?’

  ‘No.’

  I got up. ‘Thanks for what you could give me, Fagin.’

  ‘I can give you one more thing. Good luck, Sam, on finding your kid.’

  I must have let my surprise show.

  ‘What, I can’t wish you luck?’

  ‘Just keep your mouth shut, Fagin, about me being here.’

  ‘I don’t stand between kids and their parents, man. By the time the kids come to me the parents have already shoved them away.’

  Fagin watched Sam leave. Then he reached for a phone. Sam Capra could make all the threats he wanted, but he did not pay the bills.

  Fagin reported the discussion, and then he hung up to go see if the Oliver Twists were done laying their electronic mousetraps inside Moscow’s power grid.

  25

  Midtown Manhattan, New York City

  An hour later Jack saw her.

  His mother came along the sidewalk, walking in her stiff, formal way, wearing a light blue raincoat. Her hair was impeccably styled and more gray streaked it than he remembered. She held bags from a local artisan grocery, and the plastic bulged with her purchases. He crossed the street, cutting toward her.

  Please don’t turn away, he thought. Please don’t.

  He stood and he waited for her to come to him. ‘Hi, Mom.’

  She stopped and glanced up from the sheltering curve of the umbrella and seemed to study him as though he were a picture she’d found in a drawer, and couldn’t place when and where it had been taken. Every moment of her silence was an agony. He wanted the concrete beneath his feet to open like a chasm and swallow him. Drops of rain curtained off her tilted umbrella. ‘Jack. Hello.’ She just didn’t seem… surprised.

  He reached for the bag of groceries. ‘Those look heavy.’ He could see in the bag rice and chicken, but also Oreos, apples, jalapeno potato chips. Weird, she still bought his favorites.

  She allowed him to take them. ‘Yes, they are. Thank you.’

  ‘Could we talk for a minute?’

  ‘For just a minute?’ she asked and now he heard the slight edge of pain in her voice.

  ‘Not for long. I know you’re busy, Mom.’ It had been the litany of his youth: not now, Jack, I’m busy. Yes, darling, I’ll look at your painting in a minute, Mama’s busy. I can help you with your math later, Jack, right now I’m busy. And finally: what do the police want to talk to you about, I’ve got a meeting with the Ambassador. He remembered announcing once, when he was nine, that he was Ambassador of Kidonia, the nation of kids, and she’d laughed and hugged him and not realized he was begging for her attention. He was proud of himself for keeping the bitterness out of his voice.

  ‘Actually, I’m not, and I’m very pleased to see you.’ She reached over and gave him an awkward hug. The last hug he’d gotten from her was when he graduated early from NYU, two years ago. Before the FBI showed up at the doorstep, looking for him. He resisted the urge to embrace her, to seize her hard in a hug from which she couldn’t easily escape.

  She put a hand on the side of his face. He tried not to close his eyes in relief. ‘What happened to you? Your neck, that’s a surgical scar.’

  ‘I was in an accident.’ They shot me Mom, I got shot. Your son got shot. But he couldn’t say this, even the thought of the words rising in his throat made him sick.

  ‘What accident?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it matters, Jack. Why didn’t you call me? Where have you been?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ The nakedness of the lie nearly made him gasp but instead he just held on tight to his mother. After a moment her hands touched his back, pressed into his flesh, cautiously.

  ‘Jack, are you all right? Perhaps we should go inside.’ A bit of panic edged her voice.

  He pulled back from her and he felt, mixed with the wet air, tears on his face. He felt mortified. She said nothing as he wiped them away with the back of his hand. Her own face was dry, as it always was.

  ‘Have you come back to turn yourself in to the police?’

  She was a diplomat, so he gave the diplomatic answer. ‘Yes. I’m tired of running, I’m tired of hiding. I wanted to see you first. Before I go to the police.’ No, Mom, I came to say goodbye, he wanted to say. Goodbye forever. I shouldn’t have come. It’s too hard.

  ‘Well come inside, we’ll have some coffee and we’ll call the lawyers.’

  She was still briskly efficient, he thought. ‘I just want us to talk first. You and me. Before lawyers, oka
y?’

  His mother hurried him past the doorman and they rode in silence in the elevator, up to the apartment. He wanted to look at her face but instead he watched the umbrella weep leftover rain onto the floor. Jack stepped inside and despite the muggy warmness of the spring day he felt chilled. The apartment was as he remembered: magazine-perfect, accented with her collection of Chinese art on the red walls, along with photos of his mother with presidents, business leaders, diplomats, and other notables. Art from her various postings in the State Department: Hong Kong, Vietnam, South Korea, Peru, Luxembourg. It was as though she’d played magpie around the world, plucking beauty wherever she stopped, decorating a nest where no other birds wished to live. There was a family picture of himself and his father, off in a corner. On the periphery of his mother’s life, the edge of the circle.

  ‘Would you like some decaf?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you have any regular coffee? I’m zonked.’

  ‘Um, no. I now find too much caffeine disruptive.’

  Only a food could be disruptive to you, Mom, he thought. Jack felt torn by need and resentment, two ends of the same rope, tugging straight through him. ‘Decaf is great.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘No.’ He followed her into the kitchen, watched her putter with the coffee maker. ‘How are you, Mom?’ I shouldn’t have come here. The sudden temptation to tell her everything, lay out an epic confession of the danger he faced, to ask her for help was overwhelming. Say your goodbyes, and go, and don’t look back, ever. No good will come of anything else.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘You still consulting?’

  ‘Yes, here and there. Thinking of writing another book.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  She poured water into the coffee maker. ‘Jack, where have you been hiding?’

  ‘The Netherlands.’

  ‘I suppose I should have considered that as a possibility. So many young people from around the world, crowding around the canals. You went there for the drugs, I suppose.’