The Last Minute sc-2

by Jeff Abbott

  He bolted from me, grabbed a ceramic tray off the coffee table, threw it at me. I dodged it.

  ‘I’m not here to hurt you,’ I said, calmly.

  From under the couch cushion he pulled out a pearl-handled cleaver.

  ‘I’m not armed,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to you.’

  He charged at me and he swung it at me. Twice. The blade made a sharp hiss in the air. Desperation and fear colored his face; he had no skill. I wasn’t really comfortable fighting him with an edged weapon one-handed. So I kicked him, hard against the wall, and then slammed my foot against the wrist holding the cleaver, pinning his hand to the wall.

  ‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I would have kicked you in the throat just now and broken your windpipe,’ I said. I pressed harder with my foot. He winced and the cleaver clattered to the floor.

  ‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you,’ I said again. ‘I’m going to let you go now, so we can talk like adults. I have a proposition for you.’ And I released his wrist. As a precaution I put my heel on the cleaver’s blade.

  He smacked a punch against my arm’s cast and, yes, that did indeed hurt a lot.

  I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Jack. Please.’ I was careful not to hurt him.

  He grew still.

  ‘May we talk?’

  After a long moment he nodded.

  ‘Can we go sit down in there and talk like two adults?’

  He couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. He sat on the couch; I sat on the leather ottoman next to it. I left the cleaver on the floor, but I was between it and him.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You don’t appear to be killing me. Yet.’

  ‘I have decided that even though I’ve been told to kill you, that is not how I am going to get my son back.’

  He stared at me, his mouth working.

  ‘Jack. Breathe. It’s okay.’

  ‘How… how did you find me?’

  ‘I got hurt in the fall, I figured you did, too. And you lost your knapsack. You were back accessing your computer very quickly using remote software. Hard to download and install that on a coffee shop or library computer – and if I was hurt, I’d run home. No one would think you would come back here. But you could mend here, and have a computer, and call people who might help you and have a nice private conversation, and probably have an easier time accessing your mother’s bank accounts and such. It was worth a try.’

  Jack said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry… about today,’ I said. ‘I know I… scared you.’

  ‘I do not accept your apology.’

  ‘All right. I am very mindful that you could have shot me in that hallway rather than shooting the lock on the door.’

  He rubbed his palms on his knees.

  ‘The only way Nine Suns is going to leave you alone is if we convince them that you are dead. They have to believe you’re gone for good for you to have a life. And for me to get my son back. Now. If we can make them think you’re dead, then we both have a chance.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Do you believe they have my kid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said that there’s something in the notebook about my son.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it, please?’

  ‘Where he was born. How much the doctor was paid, how much the forged documents cost to get him an American birth certificate. Who has him now: someone with the initials AT.’

  Anna Tremaine. ‘Anything else?’

  He bit his lip for a moment, considering. ‘No.’

  ‘Where is the notebook?’

  ‘In a safe place, and I don’t care if we’re new best friends now, I’m not telling you.’

  ‘I want you to go to your computer’s browser and enter in a web address.’

  He didn’t move.

  ‘Go ahead. I want to show you something.’

  Slowly he got up and went into his father’s study. He sat at the computer; I gave him the URL; the prompt then asked for a password. He looked at me and I gave it to him.

  He typed.

  The webcam’s screen opened. Lucy lay in her eternal bed, hooked to wires and tubes and a computer whose uncaring graphs and bars showed her lungs still breathed, her heart still pumped.

  ‘You and I have nothing in common,’ I said, ‘except Nine Suns has destroyed our families. That is my wife. They took her and they made her into a person I never knew and then they put a bullet in her brain. Now they have my son. He is only a few months old. I have never seen him in person, never held him.’ I pulled the photo from my wallet and I handed it to Jack. He looked at it wordlessly.

  Then he gave it back to me.

  ‘Your mother was killed by a stray bullet when I fought the guy who kidnapped her. If I could have saved her I would have… ’

  ‘Only to get her to help you find me.’

  ‘No. Did I kill the men from the CIA who were supposed to protect you? I knocked them out of the fight but I didn’t kill them. Did I shoot down anyone who got in my way while I was chasing you?’

  ‘And, what, you want a good citizen medal?’

  ‘I held your mother’s hand while she died, Jack. She asked me to help you. I had to lie to her then and say I would help you. I don’t want it to be a lie.’

  Jack closed the browser window; Lucy vanished. ‘Why would you risk your baby’s life to protect me?’

  ‘Because I no longer believe they’re just going to hand me my child. I know too much, I’m too big a threat to them. They have to be destroyed and you’re the guy who can bring them down.’

  ‘The notebook doesn’t contain the names and addresses of Nine Suns. It gave me one phone number for one of them, the person who set up this extortion network. It mostly just names people that they’re using.’

  ‘People they’ve spied on using your software.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could turn that around on them?’

  Jack said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do to them what they did to these people. Spy on them, using your code.’

  Jack Ming got up from the desk. I followed him into the living room. He picked up the cleaver off the floor, and I tensed. But he went into the kitchen and he set it on the granite counter top.

  ‘And who gets the information? You?’

  ‘When I get my son back, I’m done. If I don’t, then I send them to hell, however long it takes.’ I crossed my arms. ‘I know you must think August Holdwine is a screw-up, but he’s not. You can trust him. And he’s being moved back to Langley, out of the group that was supposed to protect you. They’ve been dirtied. But he’s clean.’

  Jack Ming blinked at me, and I didn’t blame him not trusting me. So cards on the table, so to speak.

  ‘I know you called Ricki Diagne in Amsterdam. Maybe for help, maybe because she’s someone special to you. If you don’t trust the CIA, there is another group of people who could hide you. Think of them as the flip side of Nine Suns. My friend Mila works for them and I think they could hide you and Ricki, too, if you want, just about anywhere in the world. Especially if you could help them spy on Nine Suns.’

  ‘Your friends are the Round Table.’

  ‘Yes. Are they in the notebook?’

  ‘There’s reference to them.’

  That made me uneasy. It could mean someone inside the Round Table had been compromised, maybe into giving up secrets.

  He shook his head. ‘Round Table. Nine Suns. Who the hell comes up with these names?’

  ‘Every group needs a mythology. The Round Table was full of knights who wanted to do good. Nine Suns is from an old Chinese legend about the near destruction of the world. The names say a lot about each side.’ I tried again: ‘Can I please see the notebook?’

  ‘No. You can’t. I think you can understand that I need to keep a trump card
to myself.’

  The urge to ransack the apartment and find it was strong, but he needed to trust me, so I nodded.

  The cell phone in my pocket rang. I answered it.

  Leonie. ‘Sam, Nine Suns just called on the iPhone Anna gave you. They want to talk to you and they want to know where you are.’

  ‘All right, I’m on my way back.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I needed some air.’

  ‘Sorry you couldn’t get that here with me.’ Just a dash of bitter.

  ‘I’m on my way.’ I turned off the phone. ‘They’re calling me with instructions on your meeting, I suspect. So I can ambush you.’

  Jack’s throat worked. ‘So. How do we do this?’

  ‘You’re in?’

  ‘You made your point. Plus, what if I say no? You kill me then, right. You have no choice.’

  ‘I always have a choice. So do you.’

  ‘I want them taken down. I can’t do it alone, I know that.’

  ‘Will you trust August?’

  I could tell it wasn’t an easy decision. But after thirty seconds Jack said: ‘All right.’

  ‘Fine. Sit down. Here’s what we do.’

  78

  The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan

  ‘You’re going to kill Jack Ming.’ The man’s voice was slightly accented. Israeli. I felt sure this was Zviman, the man who’d nearly killed Mila, who she had emasculated and enraged, the man responsible for the horror that Mila’s sister endured, the man ultimately responsible for Nelly’s death. ‘At Central Park, in the Ramble. It’s heavily wooded, not one of the busiest sections. This afternoon, a bit before three.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘He and I are going to meet north of Bow Bridge. It will be crowded. He won’t be willing to step into any more private areas of the park. So he has to go down without drawing attention.’

  ‘You’re not from here, are you? I can’t kill a guy by Bow Bridge and not have it go noticed. Look, you’ve drawn him to the park. You get whatever you’re buying from him and then he’s my problem.’

  ‘I’m not funneling him money. He’s dead before then and then I get what he’s carrying.’

  Which meant he would want to see the notebook.

  ‘Kill him quietly. Break his neck or use a knife,’ the man I believed to be Zviman said. ‘Don’t think for a second you can skimp on the job.’

  ‘I don’t ever think for a second,’ I said.

  I clicked off the phone. Leonie lay on the bed.

  ‘Did he tell you what to do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’re working a scam. Don’t bother to lie.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and I could hear the tone of surrender in her voice. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  79

  The Ramble, Central Park, Manhattan

  A guy with a broken arm in a fiberglass cast just doesn’t look threatening. Ted Bundy and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs used arm casts as camouflage to lure in women to help them so they could commit abduction. Then they turned the casts into weapons. Of course, they didn’t actually have broken arms. I did.

  It’s hard enough to kill someone when you’ve got two good hands. I was only going to get one chance.

  I sat on a bench north of the beautiful iron-built Bow Bridge, a book in hand, a Yankees cap pulled low over my head. Waiting. I was on the edge of the Ramble, a dense, wooded area planted by hand well over a century ago, now mature woodland, with a maze of walkways cut through its growth. I saw at least four different passersby with binoculars and field guides: this was a prime birding spot. I also saw teenagers who looked like they might savor a bit of privacy. But this stretch of park, at least this afternoon, wasn’t quite as busy as the Zoo or the playgrounds or the Mall. Now and then a family milled by, joggers jogged, a pair of lovers leaned into each other, walking hand in hand. I still don’t like to see couples. Nothing against them. I’m all for love and commitment. It just reminds me of what I thought I had, and never truly did, with Lucy. I thought we would grow old together. I thought we would be grandparents together, Daniel bringing us his own children to spoil and love. We should have had years to spend in parks, tossing crumbs, hearing the lull of the breeze in the trees, watching the sunlight shift its mosaic on the grass.

  Now I sat alone on a park bench waiting to murder someone.

  My orders were explicit. When the Nine Suns contact – I knew it was probably Zviman but I wasn’t going to admit to him I knew who he was – walked away from Jack Ming, I would intercept and kill Ming. I didn’t believe for a second that Ming’s bank account would go unhacked; Nine Suns wasn’t going to give him ten million dollars.

  The day was grayish, clouds grappling with sun for a momentary dominance. I sat, with my sunglasses and my book. I checked my watch. Time. On the under side of the bench I groped and my fingers found tape. I pulled the tape free. In my hand was an earpiece. I thumbed it into place.

  ‘Hello, Sam,’ the voice slipped into my ear.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  ‘No. I just have nothing to say to you.’ I put my gaze back to my book.

  ‘I have taken precautions. If I do not call in to a number and give a correct passcode, your son dies. Don’t decide you can kill both Ming and me, or take me hostage for your son.’

  ‘I can follow orders.’

  ‘I played with your son the other day,’ Zviman said.

  My blood went cold.

  ‘He’s very responsive for a child. I don’t know a lot about babies, but your little lad looks you in the eye. I enjoyed getting to hold him.’

  Wordless rage.

  ‘I know you’ll do a first-rate job. Then you’ll get to see your son. I hope I don’t cry. Family reunions make me tearful.’

  I saw a man move from the walkway to a dense copse of black locust trees, a good thirty feet off the path. He stood in their shade, and produced a smartphone from his pocket. The blond mohawk was a trimmed, ghostly strip of hair. I knew his face from Mila’s description. It was Zviman. He didn’t walk funny, though. I didn’t look at him but I felt quite sure he looked at me. I kept scanning the approaches.

  Then I saw Jack Ming. Dressed in jeans, and a Giants windbreaker, and a Giants baseball cap.

  He was holding the red notebook in his left hand, and had his right hand in his pocket.

  The stiletto I had hidden in my cast felt heavy. The handle of the blade I’d cut down to conceal it rubbed against my wrist. Bertrand has an interesting collection of knives at The Last Minute.

  ‘Here he comes,’ I said.

  ‘I see him,’ Zviman said. ‘Look at him, he thinks he’s tough. I wonder how he thinks he got tough sitting at a keyboard all day.’ The hatred in his voice was thick.

  I glanced around. Two people, binoculars up, looking the opposite way, focused on their birding. A couple and a single man heading toward Bow Bridge. A young woman, iPodded, lost in her music rather than birdsong and park noise.

  Ming had his back to me.

  Jack Ming stopped and glanced around. Then he looked right at Zviman. And he walked to the tree.

  I waited.

  80

  The Ramble, Central Park, Manhattan

  Courtesy of Zviman’s earpiece I could hear the conversation.

  ‘Hello, Jack.’

  ‘Let’s set the conditions. If I don’t come back from this meeting, a friend calls the police and gives them your description. He already took your photo with a telescopic lens.’ Jack’s voice was steady. ‘I think you’d have to shave off that Velcro strip on your head and wear a wig to make it out of the city.’

  ‘Jack, please don’t insult me.’ Zviman’s voice was kind. ‘I’m a businessman. I’m here to make a trade. We both end up happy.’ He shrugged. ‘Look, I’m not unmindful you wrote the code that let us steal the secrets. I respect that what you’re getting could be considered a
fair cut.’

  ‘Move the money.’

  Zviman held up his smartphone so Jack could see its screen. He keyed in the account transfer code and kept the phone raised so Jack could see the blue progress bar fill as the dollars and cents jumped from an account in the Caymans into a Swiss account. Silence between them.

  ‘Done. Check it for yourself if you like,’ Zviman said.

  At the word done I stood. Jack Ming still had his back to me. I moved forward, silently across the grass, weaving in between the trees, my hand on the hidden stiletto handle in the cast.

  Jack brought a cell phone up from under the red notebook. He kept his right hand in his pocket. No one watching would like that. He’d apparently preset the phone’s browser to his bank account and he hit a refresh button.

  I kept approaching, keeping the center of his shoulders as my axis of approach. I moved quickly and quietly across the damp grass.

  ‘The page isn’t loading,’ Jack said, a tinge of nervous frustration in his voice.

  ‘The internet. So unreliable.’

  He thumbed a button again. ‘Still locked up. I’m not giving you the notebook until the money’s in my balance.’

  Zviman smiled with infinite patience. ‘That’s fair.’

  I was twenty seconds away.

  ‘You’re trying to cheat me,’ Jack said. And he pulled the gun from the pocket of the windbreaker.

  I was still ten feet behind him but now running at full force, no attempt at stealth. Jack jabbed the gun toward Zviman, as though counting on his target’s own flesh to muffle the sound of the shot. Zviman jumped back, wrenching Jack’s arm up, and by then I slammed my cast into the side of Jack’s neck. He staggered and I yanked him backward, away from Zviman, and he tried to aim the gun at me. I folded his elbow back toward him and he made a little mewling protest as the gun’s barrel touched his stomach. He bent and I got a hand on the trigger and the shot wasn’t as loud as it could have been. I moved the gun to the chest and pulled the trigger again and he fell to his side, two small, bright blossoms of blood on his shirt. He gave a hard, wet cough of red and then he lay still among the trees.