The Last Minute sc-2

by Jeff Abbott

  He loaded the reconstructed face into a search database for CIA personnel. He got back eighty-nine matches. He scanned through the faces. None were the woman.

  He loaded the face into a search database for known British intelligence agents. Sam had spent most of his career working out of London. A dozen matches. None were exact.

  He accessed a database of retired CIA personnel. Again, a scattering of matches but not his woman.

  Special Projects, whose purview was where criminality intersected with national security, had its own set of databases. He accessed them.

  He pulled up a list of known computer hackers. Ming was a hacker and the redhead coming back to grab his knapsack seemed odd. While the number of female hackers was growing, it was still a male-dominated field. If she’d been arrested in the United States or by a Western ally for hacking, her smiling face should be in this database.

  It wasn’t.

  He got up, began to pace the floor. He ate the pizza, chewing on the discs of pepperoni until his jaw hurt, settling the hunger in his stomach. He studied her face. He changed the hair, made it longer. He put glasses on her.

  He opened another database of CIA informants. People who had traded information to the Company, people who ranged from foreign dignitaries to common criminals. The list numbered in the thousands. He entered the woman’s face into the search parameters.

  Three matches.

  There she was. Her name on the file was Lindsay Partridge.

  Lindsay Partridge had vanished from New York two years ago on 17 April. August rubbed his eyes. ‘Hello, there,’ he said.

  She had provided the Company with information on a forgery ring, creating both counterfeit cash and passports. No charges filed against her, her name never given to the police. She dropped out of the ring and vanished, and the authorities arrested the remaining forgers. He opened her file. No other information. She had not done any other work for the Company. He entered in a special password that would open any encrypted parts of her file, which were for Special Projects eyes only.

  The file was locked. That couldn’t be. He couldn’t be locked out.

  He phoned Fagin.

  ‘What?’ Fagin sounded tired and stressed.

  ‘Why would I be locked out of an SP file? I have a master access code.’

  ‘I don’t know. The stars didn’t align. Someone doesn’t want you to see it. The operation was mothballed. Or it’s embarrassing. Or maybe it’s gruesome and your delicate little eyes can’t handle it, August.’

  ‘I need that file cracked.’

  ‘Well, get in line, we’re really busy.’ Fagin could sound as irritable as any corporate IT help desk. ‘Fill out a ticket… ’

  ‘Now, Fagin. This is highest priority.’ He gave Fagin the file details. ‘I want to know what’s inside there. Get your smartest Twist on it. Now or-’

  ‘Or what? Damn, every one is quick with a threat this week. Really.’ Fagin hung up.

  What did that mean? He’d ask Fagin when he heard back from him.

  Via tunnels carved out by Fagin and the Twists, Special Projects could dive into all sorts of databases – even illegally – to provide a path of footprints to follow. August scanned her trail. There were no recorded activities on Lindsay Partridge’s charge accounts past that final April date. Her email and social networking accounts had been abandoned. She’d dropped out of the graduate program in design at NYU. A CIA informant and art student, maybe that was a first, or she had design talents to be put to legitimate use. She had not paid her taxes for the past two years and she had not reported any income. Here one day, gone the next. No one seemed to miss her. This didn’t feel like foul play. This looked like someone rolling up the loose threads of her life, tying them into a tidy knot. Walking away.

  Lindsay Partridge wanted to vanish. Had the CIA looked for her? Just to keep a tab on her?

  August opened his phone and started to make calls. He gathered the threads of her vanishing: Lindsay Partridge handed her landlady a check for the rest of the year’s rent, said she had to go home to Miami for a while, but never came back. The landlady received a letter that followed two months later, giving notice on the lease. He got a copy of her transcript, faxed over from NYU, and called her academic adviser. She’d told her instructors at NYU she was withdrawing due to a family emergency, returning to Miami.

  And now she was just a locked file.

  It was like she and Sam were both dirty secrets, ignored and forgotten by the Company.

  He entered in the scant information they had on the sisters. He fed the photos of their faces, taken at the Ming building, into the facial recognition system to let it work its magic. One had a New York driver’s license in the name of Amy Bolton and a Brooklyn address. The other lacked an ID on her.

  He checked the databases: Amy Bolton had a credit history, a mortgage. She worked for a company called Associated Languages School. He checked the company’s website. Very bare bones, and pages where there should have been more detail were ‘under construction’. But they offered instruction in a wide range of languages and translation services. But no photos of the staff, no outlining of classes or programs, no listing of upcoming schedules.

  Business must not be good.

  August tapped at his lip, then went to Google and entered the following: foreign language schools Brooklyn. He got back a few results, with locations highlighted on the Google map of the borough.

  No Associated Languages School.

  Now, he wondered. A modern business, especially a service business, needs to come up on search engines these days to thrive. And here was one that didn’t appear in the search results at all. Almost as if it were hiding.

  He pulled up the address for Associated Languages School on Google StreetView. The building was under renovation, being converted into condos.

  So much for Associated Languages School. It was a sham.

  The computer kept checking its digital rogues’ gallery for a facial match on the two women.

  He grabbed a soda from the refrigerator and returned to his office. And he activated the camera.

  Lucy Capra lay in her bed, the wires and the feeds branching about her. She rested on her side; the nurses must have come in and moved her, regular as clockwork. He could see the savage scar along her skull, the mark where the bullet had left its fragments, her ticket to this long limbo of sleep. It had torn her soul and mind away, if not her body. The monitoring camera was fixed in place. He looked in on her once a day, sometimes more. He wondered why he did. It was a thing he would not have told Sam.

  He didn’t love Lucy. He had toyed with loving her once, but then she and Sam got involved and he’d taken what he’d felt for her and put it away, like a gift you can’t use gets put on a shelf. And in his moments of shame he thought: thank God she didn’t pick me. How different his life would have been; he might have been the one caught in this awful limbo instead of Sam.

  But he could not understand why she had done what she did, why she had betrayed everything. Sam told him she claimed it was money. Money; it boggled August. She was lost in a shadow world, a nothingness where he suspected not even dreams intruded. But he knew that if she could have risen from the bed in pursuit of her child she would have.

  He turned off the camera to see what the facial software kicked back to him, to see what news the field reports held.

  And then his phone rang.

  58

  August stared at the number on the cell. Blocked. ‘Hello?’ he answered.

  ‘You screwed me,’ the informant yelled. ‘You screwed up!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Jack.’

  A shocked pause. ‘And oh, great, screw-up, now you know my name.’

  ‘Yes. We do. All we want to do is help you.’

  ‘All you did was nearly get me killed. Do you know what I’ve been through?’ Jack’s voice quavered.

  ‘Come in to us. We can protect you. I’m sorry, I didn’t know the surrender had been compromised… �
�

  ‘Well, clearly not. You’re an idiot. Do you know how he knew?’

  ‘No. But the man that is after you is ex-CIA.’

  ‘Yes, and you’re going to stop him from coming after me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s agreed to meet me tomorrow at three at the Statue of Liberty. Be there, grab him, arrest him and this woman who’s with him, who, incidentally, also tried to kill me, and then maybe we can talk.’

  ‘You talked to Sam?’

  ‘They took my computer and I erased it long-distance. But first I set up a meeting with him, you’re welcome, now take him out. I’ve done your hard work for you.’

  ‘He’s after you because Novem Soles has his infant child as a hostage.’

  Silence. In the background August could hear a pulse of music, a hiss of traffic. ‘I’m sorry for that, I am, but it’s not my problem. Sam Capra is your problem now. You want Novem Soles, you take this guy down and then maybe I’ll think about coming out of hiding.’

  ‘Okay. Part of the info you can turn over to me: does any of it include anything on his kid?’

  A long hesitation. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’ His voice went to a low whisper. ‘How do I know you’re not the one compromising me, selling me out?’

  ‘Well, you don’t. You called me.’

  Silence again. ‘Sam Capra said my mom’s dead.’

  August digested this. ‘Then it’s true. He wouldn’t lie about it. I’m sorry, Jack.’

  ‘He said her body could be found at the only house on River Run Road in Morris County. Will you go get my mom’s body, please?’ Jagged breathing now.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ August said. ‘You come in, now, though, let us protect you.’

  ‘If he’s telling me the truth about my mom, maybe I’ll tell him what this notebook says about his kid, once you have him in custody. I’ll call you back later.’

  Jack Ming hung up.

  August checked the address, in rural New Jersey, on a satellite map program. A large house, on acreage, with a good-sized pond. He scoured the database for an owner.

  Associated Languages School.

  He stood. He should tell Braun, pull Griffith down, get a team together.

  You’ve been compromised.

  But someone in this office was a leak. Maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone. He sat down, though, and entered in a report on what he had found so far. He passworded it and secured it on the private Special Projects network.

  Then he looked up. Braun stood in his doorway. Not holding his collection of cell phones, not pleading Special Projects’ case.

  ‘We need to talk. My office. Now.’

  59

  Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan

  ‘Do you know what they called me in the old days, August?’ Ricardo Braun asked.

  ‘No, sir.’ August could hardly get the words out.

  ‘Mr Ideas. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was willing to try what was never tried before inside the Company. Do you know how hard it is to innovate inside a large bureaucracy?’

  ‘It’s difficult.’ He wondered where this was leading.

  ‘Special Projects was my idea. I tested many ideas for ways for the Company to fulfill its duty, do its work, the most important work in this nation.’ Braun paused. ‘Not every idea is a success, of course, but you must have a willingness to try, to fail, and to learn from that failure.’

  Maybe, August thought, this was a talk about redemption.

  ‘I failed today, sir,’ August said.

  ‘You did. And I’ve been trying to come up with an idea or an innovation that will save you, Mr Holdwine, and I am failing.’ Braun cleared his throat. ‘I want to be sure I understand the unfolding of events. You came into a rendezvous site to meet possibly the most important informant we could get on Novem Soles and you failed to secure it. You saw a former officer on the site, one who you knew could be under the control of a hostile group, and you did not secure him.’

  ‘He appeared to be unarmed, sir. He had clearly been in a fight.’

  ‘Appeared. He beat you up and then he nearly killed your informant. I’ve just spent the past hour on the phone to Langley, trying to explain how we failed to capture a computer geek and how that resulted in open warfare on the streets of Brooklyn.’ Braun crossed his arms. ‘You understand, we’re not supposed to be operating on American soil. We are breaking laws here, August, for the common good. We all take that risk that it could come back and bite us. And here your team is, screwing up, and putting our entire branch at risk.’

  ‘Sam Capra killed those two women who apparently wanted to kill Ming. It could be argued he saved Ming’s life.’

  ‘Because he wanted to kill him himself.’ Braun shook his head.

  ‘These people have his child. They’re using Daniel Capra for their own ends. Forcing him to act. He told me himself.’

  ‘I am not unsympathetic to his motivations, August. On the contrary, it breaks my heart. But we can’t have him interfering in our work. I cannot have it. Sympathy doesn’t play beyond a certain point. Sam could tell them anything about our operations against criminal networks.’

  ‘Our operations have completely retooled since Sam Capra left Special Projects,’ August said. ‘They’re not mining him for information. They’re converting him into a weapon.’

  ‘Capra could have come to you, August. He could have said, “they have my kid and they want me to grab their traitor for them”. He could have worked with us.’

  ‘If they were holding a gun to my baby’s head,’ August said quietly, ‘I believe I’d do whatever they say.’

  ‘I think I would first remember my duty,’ Braun said.

  ‘You certainly enjoy using that word,’ August said. Anger rose in him. ‘You don’t think Sam has a duty to his family?’

  ‘The Company is family, too, August, and you should remember that.’

  August was silent. He wished Braun had stayed in his glorious retirement.

  ‘Now. These two women in the building,’ Braun said.

  ‘We’re working on getting an ID on them. They drove a car registered to a Beth Marley, who works for Ming Properties. We sent someone to the office, they found her handcuffed in her kitchen. She’s being questioned by our people, but she doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Braun said. ‘Novem Soles has Capra hunting Ming, but who is hunting Capra?’

  ‘Someone else who wants Ming. Who wants what he has.’

  Braun turned to him from the window. ‘So how do you intend to get both Ming and Capra?’

  ‘I’m not worrying about Sam. I sent a man to his bar, they haven’t seen him. He may be more of an absentee owner since he’s searching for his son. From what the witnesses said, he’s hurt. We’ll monitor the emergency rooms, but I’d rather put the people we have on finding Ming, not Sam.’

  ‘Ming can’t expose us. Sam can. We are not going to be exposed. Ever. We are not going to be embarrassed.’

  ‘So, I’m chasing him or I’m chasing Jack Ming. Which is it?’

  ‘I’m simply being practical. I’m thinking like the bad guys.’ He smiled, tapped his temple, and August thought: it’s not about innovation, it’s about your ego. ‘They’re playing on Sam’s emotional vulnerability as far as his child is concerned. We can’t fall into the same trap. I swear to you, we’ll take Capra alive if possible and if we find where his son is, we will move heaven and earth to bring that baby home.’

  The line was drawn in the imaginary sand on Braun’s desk, drawn with those many ifs. He was putting catching Sam, for having defied them, ahead of catching Jack Ming.

  ‘If you don’t,’ August said, ‘I’ll make sure the whole Company knows that we didn’t go after an employee’s captive child.’

  ‘Sam Capra is not an employee.’

  ‘He was. Didn’t you just say we were all family, Ricardo? Or is that only when you make a point.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expose Special
Projects work.’ Braun’s voice went icy.

  ‘I would. How much loyalty would employees give the Company if they knew we hadn’t already moved heaven and earth, as you like to say, to get back the Capra baby? If that baby isn’t safe, none of our loved ones are, Braun. I’m tired of this bullshit attitude of ours. We should have fixed this months ago, we should have found and rescued that child. You talk about duty. What about our duty to Sam?’

  ‘I advise you to be careful about what you say next. You messed up today, August, you don’t have a great deal of wriggle room with me. Worry about your own duty.’

  ‘Duty. Innovation. They have to be more than buzzwords, Ricardo.’ August couldn’t keep the disgust out of his voice. ‘We’ve kept everything about the Capras quiet. What Lucy did, what we did to Sam. We control hundreds of intel assets in the world, and none of them knew to look out for leads that could have given us Daniel Capra. We turned our backs on Sam and we helped create this situation. That gets out, there’ll be investigations, there’ll be cuts in funding, there’ll be resignations.’

  ‘The Capras were an anomaly. Not standard operating procedure and Lucy Capra was a confirmed traitor.’ Braun nearly spit as he said traitor. ‘People will not see themselves as the Capras, it won’t happen.’ He steeled his voice. ‘I gave up my retirement to come back here, after more years of service than you’ll ever see. Don’t you dare to suggest that duty is simply a buzzword to me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ August said. ‘But there is a disconnect between what you say and what you’re proposing.’

  ‘I think you have too much emotional involvement, August. You were his friend. You’re relieved. I’m not going to keep taking bullets for an ingrate who can’t do his job.’

  ‘What does that mean, I’m fired?’

  ‘Of course not. But turn in your gear, your keys, your access codes. Take a week off to think about what you want to do because you’ll never be doing field work again. Then crawl back to Langley and you can beg them to keep you. I think you’ll be very good at pushing paper and,’ Braun put disgust into his voice, ‘writing long emails full of bullet points.’