The Last Minute sc-2

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘Really?’ she panted. He had a rage, she remembered. Make it work for her. ‘Does the thought of hurting me make you hard? I mean, what’s left of it?’

  He swung the ax, viciously, in an arcing trace. He missed her by inches. Then swung it back, the blunt edge catching her hand when she made the mistake of a panicked slash. The heel blade flew out into the gravel.

  ‘I don’t even know what I’ll do first to you,’ he said. ‘I made a list once. It ran to three pages.’

  ‘Go get your list, raggedy man. I’ll wait.’

  At her words he stopped swinging wildly at her. His grin was inhuman, the stuff of a leering boogeyman. He steadied the ax, and they did a little dance on the gravel, back and forth. She badly wanted to run. But her shoes were awkward without the heels and he could throw the ax into her back. Better to keep her face to him.

  This went on for thirty long seconds. He wouldn’t quite commit. She realized, even as he choked with rage and spite, that he was afraid of her.

  ‘Wow, raggedy man. Wielding an ax against an unarmed woman. And still you won’t fight.’

  He snarled and chopped at her. Missed. She’d had an idea and she circled back toward the van. He stepped in too close and she got a grip on the handle, trying to pry it from his fist. He shoved her against the side of the van, and powered a mighty blow.

  The ax slammed into the steel side of the van, perforating the metal. It missed her head only because she fell, her heelless boots slipping and skidding out on the gravel.

  He grunted as he tried to pry the ax out. It was stuck.

  She would not get another chance. She pivoted out from under the handle, turned and pulled the watch’s face free. The garrote’s wire glinted in the fading, dusky light. She looped the wire over his throat and threw herself onto his back. Then she pulled.

  Yaakov Zviman tried to pry fingers under the wire but she tightened it too fast. He tried to throw her free; she wrapped her strong, lithe legs around him, ankles crossed above his ruined crotch. She thought of his wicked, smiling face, looking back over his pimpled shoulder while he raped her sister. She thought of Ivan, teaching her in the dusty, broken light of the winery how to fight, how to kill. She thought of Nelly, lying in surprised blood, the last of her life pulsing out of her.

  And she pulled tighter.

  He made noises no human should make. He threw himself against the van, trying to scrape her off.

  ‘ Tu mori,’ she gasped, ‘ tu mori.’

  He fell, face down into the gravel. She felt the wire slice her own flesh on her fingers, the side of her hand. She drove her knees into his back.

  The handle on the fake face of the watch broke. She felt it give. The garrote would not work.

  She didn’t look to see if he was even still breathing through the compressed wreckage of his throat. With a shuddering moan she kicked against the van, levered the ax out of its torn side with a rush of strength, and she avenged her sister with a final downward blow.

  90

  Where it all began

  I took the gun and inched toward the mezzanine’s railing.

  ‘Sam?’

  A voice calling to me. I didn’t know it. So I didn’t answer.

  ‘Sam, I’ve brought your friend Mila.’

  I stopped. I thought he was in the foyer, walking along the hardwoods in the entrance.

  ‘Now if you don’t come out, she’s going to get hurt.’

  If that was true, Mila was going to get hurt anyway with Zviman around. His threat wasn’t going to flush me out.

  ‘You’re not being a gentleman,’ he said with disapproval in his tone.

  I got still. I listened. And then, muffled, I heard Daniel begin to cry.

  ‘That’s the future crying,’ he said. He started coming up the stairs. I heard the creak of the wood against his heels. Outside I heard – noises of struggle, a fight. Zviman might be functional. And he was out there, with Mila as a prisoner.

  Oh hell.

  Now he walked into sight. We kept guns raised at each other. The man who had sat in the corner of the bar, nursing his pints. Ray Brewster.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said.

  ‘That must be why your limo driver and your psychotic sister act tried to kill me, Mr Brewster.’

  ‘Ray Brewster was just an alias. My name is Ricardo Braun.’

  Braun. August’s boss. The un-retired head of Special Projects.

  Braun shrugged. ‘Kill Jack Ming, that was fine. I didn’t need him exposing the truth. You, Sam, you were different. You were the bridge.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At this distance we couldn’t miss each other. He kept heading toward the top of the stairs, I kept moving toward where stairs met mezzanine.

  ‘You’re the bridge between Special Projects and our biggest mistakes. You being that bridge, well, I could let you and your child live.’

  ‘Mistakes… ’ I fell silent. ‘Nine Suns. Nine Suns was started by Special Projects.’

  ‘Yes, years ago. May I explain?’

  ‘Why? So I’ll pretend to listen and you’ll get a chance to shoot me?’

  ‘No. Because you have a role to play, Sam, if you dare.’

  I was silent.

  He cleared his throat. ‘The CIA had a long history of dealing with questionable sources. People who were criminals. Often they were heads of state. You develop a high tolerance for holding your nose. But we thought – I thought, it was my idea – what if criminals, carefully selected, could be put to use by the CIA. They know about dark corners of the world. They could help us insert people into situations where we never could have access. They could give us information and people we could never find on our own.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘We would protect them and their interests. Really, no different than propping up a brutal but pro-Western government in the old days. So we researched them, people in positions of power in criminal rings from around the world, and we brought nine of them here. Here, to this house. The language schools are an old Special Projects front.’ He laughed. ‘You know how the CIA is, once they buy property they never want to sell it. They’re always afraid some secret has been left behind, hidden in the woodwork.’

  ‘They came willingly?’

  ‘Not exactly. Kidnapped them. But treated them with dignity once they were here, in the lovely Catskills. I explained to them the… opportunity. They embraced it. What we couldn’t have foreseen was – they bonded. As a group. I didn’t anticipate they would think if they didn’t cooperate, they would lose a competitive advantage. They understood each other. They respected each other and since all nine were scattered about the world, they weren’t, well, natural enemies. These were men and women on the edge of the powerful rings, ambitious and looking for a way to the top.’

  ‘Like Zviman out there.’

  ‘Yes. I recruited his father, he stepped in after his dad died. They went from being whoremasters – who are a very useful source of information – to smugglers to a supreme extor tionist and spymaster.’ He flexed a smile, almost of pride. ‘I chose well with my recruits. The Suns, they took what I taught them about tradecraft and stealing secrets and they, well, formed a gang beyond a gang. A meta-gang. To grow their own power and profit. With an eye, I think, on becoming the most powerful criminal syndicate in the world. They stopped doing exactly what the CIA asked for. It was harder for me to shield them. I retired. They broke away; but kept their own alliance.’

  ‘Nine Suns.’

  ‘There were leftovers, of course. People I recruited who were criminals but not parts of rings. Individuals working alone for Special Projects.’

  ‘Such as the limo driver. The sisters. The people that Leonie hid for you.’

  ‘Yes. Odd, that the psychos were more loyal than the sane criminals for me. But the psychos prefer the attention and support.’

  ‘Your group inside the CIA gave birth to the most powerful and ambitious criminal ring in history,’ I said. ‘
One that just tried to commit a mass assassination against our government.’

  ‘You don’t want to see those words in a news report,’ Braun said. ‘It would have been devastating. CIA in bed with renegade Russian Mafiosi and Japanese Yakuza and Israeli racketeers.’ He flexed a smile; he held up the red notebook. ‘There’s a picture of me, in here, with two of the Suns. Two of the ringleaders. I can’t have that. I can’t have what they’ve done tied to the CIA. I can’t be disloyal to the Company that way.’ He pointed down to the foyer. ‘Right here’s where they got their name. There was a tapestry, hanging in the library here, a Chinese tapestry that showed the legend of the Nine Suns. I think an agent had been given it as a gift from someone we’d smuggled out of mainland China. One of the criminals noticed there were nine suns, and nine of them. They picked the name, almost as a joke, while they sipped cocktails and I explained how the CIA could protect them if they helped us. I got them to use the Latin form because I thought it would sound like a religious order. I was worried someone in the Company would hear of them and see the tapestry. The Company uses this facility, still, now and then.’

  ‘So. You came back to Special Projects after Nine Suns tried their assassination plot to clean up the mess.’

  ‘I can’t destroy them. But I can keep the Company’s role in creating them from being exposed. That’s all I can do. Oh, I’ll kill Zviman, and any other Nine Suns bastard I find because it tells the others to remain silent. I don’t mind waging a private war, that’s what Special Projects is going to have to do now. That’s why I wanted you.’

  ‘Me.’ Maybe now I’d know why he told me all this instead of just shooting at me.

  ‘I tried to cover all my bases.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Criminals to give me information. Corporations to give me information. Just as I found criminals who were too ambitious for their own rings, I found… certain people, successful people, who were idealistic and had money to burn and were willing to… back another idea of mine. A way to fight back against the Suns.’ He flicked another smile.

  I felt the world drop out from under me. ‘The Round Table. You started them, too.’

  ‘They didn’t gel quite as fast as Nine Suns did, but they provided a lot of good information. But these were either people who had inherited vast sums, or made vast sums at young ages. They didn’t relish taking orders from me. They don’t like or trust bureaucracy. So. They split off. There wasn’t anything we could do to stop them. They weren’t going to be an embarrassment the way Nine Suns would be. But still. We created two sides and then we left them to fight it out.’

  ‘Because they began to encroach on each other.’

  ‘After 9/11, no one cared what Nine Suns was doing. Punkass criminals with delusions of grandeur? Please. But now. They’re a serious threat; they’ve realized that an undermined social order, a chaos, is where they can consolidate power and profit. Look at the areas of the world that are ruled by criminals: parts of Latin America, Moldova, parts of Africa, and those are the testing grounds for Nine Suns’ vision of the world. Which is why I want to talk to you. I can offer you amnesty, Sam. That’s why I told Zviman to bring you here. I’d worked out a deal with him. Mila for you. He wouldn’t kill you if I brought him Mila.’

  I shot him. I was tired of him and his excuses. The bullet hit him in the shoulder, in the gun arm, and he staggered and screamed and clutched at the wall. His gun clattered down the stairs.

  What did Mila say? The unpredictable is what killls you. Well, that cut both ways. I was done with Braun.

  ‘You… goddamn it, let me finish! Come back and work here. You can tear them both down. Nine Suns and Round Table.’

  ‘Project A and Project B. I’m not interested in being the consultant who fixes your mistakes.’

  ‘You… do you think they’ll let you out of prison? You killed the guy Special Projects wanted. You attacked a CIA team and nearly exposed them. I’m your only choice, Sam. I’m the only way to keep your freedom and have your son.’

  Braun sagged on the wall.

  ‘I am done,’ I said.

  ‘Your brother. In Afghanistan. Wasn’t a bunch of Taliban hash smugglers that killed him. It was a Nine Suns job. Initiation… ’

  His gasp echoed in the foyer. ‘Now you’re just desperate. Desperate.’ I shook my head. ‘I’m not getting played by a loser like you.’

  ‘Your brother’s execution wasn’t what it seemed.’ He laughed. ‘Do you think it’s just coincidence that Lucy betrayed you? They aimed her at you. They’ve watched you ever since you went into the CIA. They’ve wanted to bring you to them. Both sides.’ He stuck fingers along his bloodied shoulder. ‘Christ. I need a doctor.’

  ‘Did you know, as a CIA officer, that my son was being held here?’

  His mouth moved.

  ‘You’ve run and profited from your own little fiefdom.’

  ‘Yes. But I’m retiring. I want you to have it. You to take it over. At least I did before you shot me.’ He spat at me.

  ‘And Leonie?’

  ‘Lindsay. Ah. Don’t trust her. She’ll leave you.’ He coughed blood.

  The father of Nine Suns, and the father of the Round Table, sitting before me, giving me the perfect excuse to go back to the CIA and get my old life back, with a new mission. What was I going to do with him?

  The front door clanged. Mila walked in, dragging a bloodied ax. Always a good sign.

  ‘You okay?’ I called down to her.

  ‘Yes. Is Daniel here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked up the stairs at Braun and pointed. ‘This man is crazy. He thinks he is my father. I assure you my mother had much better taste.’

  ‘He invented Nine Suns. And the Round Table.’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘Both.’

  Mila stared at him. For one second, ax in hand, she started to step up the stairs. Then she stopped. ‘You should have picked a side.’ She dropped the ax. She picked up a bloodied, slightly mangled notebook that he had dropped when I shot him.

  I could hear the hiss of Braun’s breath. He wanted it. Whatever Jack Ming had found, it had to contain threads that led back to the CIA. Otherwise he wouldn’t have cared; he’d not chased after his Frankenstein monster before. Nine Suns wanted Ming dead because they didn’t want to be exposed; Braun wanted Ming dead because he didn’t want the CIA exposed.

  So drag his ass out into the light.

  ‘Good luck, Braun. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to let you sit and bleed on those stairs, in the place where you had so many clever ideas that have come back and bit you in the ass, and I’m leaving. If I ever see you again… ’

  ‘Sam. You said you wanted your old life back. It’s been your mantra, from what I understand. I am offering you your old life. All you have to do to get back into the CIA is help me clean up this mess. You get what you want and so do I.’

  ‘I’m not giving the CIA my friends in the Round Table. I’m not giving you Mila. And I’m not helping you.’

  ‘Your old life,’ he said again. ‘Yours. They will give you no peace. All I’m offering you is your only chance to regain what you lost. Your child, your career.’

  ‘My wife?’

  Braun swallowed. ‘I can give you back what can be given. What sort of life will you have with your son now? Do you think Nine Suns will give you peace? My offer is the only one that makes sense for you.’

  ‘All you are offering me is a chance to be you. Which is less than nothing.’

  ‘This is a very good offer I am making!’

  ‘… if I ever see you again, or you come near Mila, or Leonie, or my son, I will kill you. If you ever try to harm August, I will kill you.’ I almost mentioned Jack Ming but perhaps better if he thought Jack Ming was dead. ‘If I think you’re thinking about me, I will kill you. Go retire. Just… go away.’

  ‘I’m not lying. About your brother. Lucy always said that was why you joined, to
get your revenge… ’

  ‘And that’s why you’d lie,’ I said. ‘Think about it. You’re bragging you founded the group that killed my brother? I really would shut up now.’

  I turned and went back down the hallway. I found Leonie and Daniel hiding in a closet.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re all leaving. Together.’

  She clutched Daniel close. She had held him for several minutes, and her closeness calmed him. He looked up at me. Blinked, disinterested. Then looked at me again, one little fist raised toward me.

  I took him from Leonie; I did not ask. She did not fight me. He was hers in a way but he was mine. I tucked his little head under my arm, like I’d seen the fathers on television do, and I could smell his warm milky breath. The soft weight of him. The miracle of him.

  He raised his little fist again, and I kissed it.

  91

  The Bahamas

  Daniel was afraid of the water.

  I held him close to me. I found it hard to let him go at times, it was almost as if I needed to drink in his touch. He had grown used to me, in the past several weeks, and I liked to tell myself that my absence in the first months of his life was not impossible to overcome. That being apart from me for so long at his life’s beginning wouldn’t scar him. I read obsessively about the topic of parental separation on Google. It didn’t matter what the experts said.

  I would make it right.

  We walked in the surge of the tide and he stared down at the waves eddying around my calves. I timed it carefully with the surf and after a healthy wave passed I dipped his feet in the cool. He giggled. As the next wave surged forward I hoisted him high out of its path and he loved being raised toward the sky. We played the game, him laughing, until I miscued and the top of a foaming wave crept up past his swimsuit to splash his chest. Then he howled in dismay. Daniel, I had learned, liked his comforts.

  Leonie had taken good care of him.

  With my fussy boy fussing, I walked back up to the beach cottage. I thought Leonie would be inside, fixing lunch, but instead Mila sat at the table.