by Jeff Abbott
“You are?”
“Duh. No, I’ve often wished you dead. Honestly, you are dumb as a rock.” But Ricki smiled at him. A short, sweet flick of a smile and it nearly made him cry, he was so happy to see a friendly face.
He changed clothes in the tiny bathroom of the café. He bought her a coffee to go. He wanted to put as much distance between him and the hospital as possible. He felt he’d nearly gone insane waiting for her.
The first thing he thought when he saw her apartment was blink and wonder where she actually lived, because there was hardly space for her in the rooms. When they dated, she’d never let him come to her place. She was in Amsterdam, he lived in Delft and she came to see him. The apartment was small and too warm. One entire wall was full of bookshelves, each holding at least two dozen DVD burners. On the opposite side of the wall he saw neatly packaged DVDs, mostly of films currently playing in theaters. Hundreds of them. He started doing the math in his head.
“It’s probably about fifty thousand dollars’ worth,” she said.
“Wow. And you sell these on the street?” She had not really talked much about her “work.”
“I used to. That’s how I came here from Senegal. The counterfeiters start you off selling on the streets. I sold DVDs better than anyone. I got promoted. Now I have a street team.”
“What if you get caught?”
“Not me,” she laughed.
The machines whirred, all creating illicit product. Some began to beep, completing their copying, and she started to pull the finished discs from the machines.
She tossed him a T-shirt from a freshly opened box, for a new vampire film that wasn’t out for another three months, with a still shot of the main characters at a critical moment silk-screened on its chest.
“So. You got shot and had a vacation courtesy of the police,” she said. She glanced at the raw scar on his neck. He would, Jack thought, need a scarf. The thought of wearing the vampire shirt while having a healing neck wound nearly made him laugh.
“Yes.”
“You’re a dangerous boy now, Jack.” She touched the skin below his scar. “Who shot you?” Excitement brightened her dark eyes.
“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, excuse the cliché, but in my case it’s apt.”
“Nic was shot to death,” she said. “It was in the news.”
“Yes.”
“When you were shot?”
“No. Before. He was dead before I got there.”
“Well, that wasn’t in the papers.” Her voice rose. “Why not?”
“Because it wasn’t.”
“Why?” Her voice sounded accusatory.
“Because I suppose the police were protecting me.”
“And, what, now they’re not.”
“Now they’re not.” He weighed his choices. He had few. “I killed a man there tonight, Ricki.”
She laughed. Then she didn’t. She sat and stared at him.
He fought down a surge of shivers. “Maybe some tea?” he asked.
“Yes, but decaf. You don’t need any more stimulation. You won’t sleep at all tonight.” She got up and microwaved two cups of water and stuck a decaf English Breakfast teabag in each cup. He watched the steam curl and stayed silent while he let her process his confession. She produced a bottle of brandy from her cupboard and raised eyebrows at him and he nodded. Ricki dosed both cups.
He thought she might keep quiet. She would never go to the police, not at all. But now he had to win her sympathy to earn her continued help. She came looking for you, he told himself. She must want to help you. At least, until she finds out how dangerous this could be.
“The man was sent to kill me. I have to vanish for a while. I’m not so scared of the cops but the cops can’t protect me, and I’m not going to jail. They won’t let people like you and me have a computer in jail. Ever.”
She folded her arms as though his dire prediction made her cold. She was immediately weighing her options, he could tell. She wasn’t easily given to shock.
“Will you help me?” he asked.
“Who wants you dead?”
“Nic got me involved. He did work with a group called Novem Soles. Or Nine Suns?”
She shook her head. “What, they’re Catholic computer hackers?”
“Uh, no. They’re afraid I might know more than they think I do. I’m a loose end. I’m a mouth that could talk.”
“Do you really know anything that could hurt them?”
“No,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. The notebook—Nic’s self-described nuclear weapon—there was no point in mentioning it to Ricki. The less she knew, the safer she was.
“So, what, you run for the rest of your life? This guy you killed, it was self-defense, right?” Her voice rose slightly. “You won’t be able to finish school.”
“I was kind of bored with school. You and me, we’re not suited to day jobs.”
She gave him a shy smile and sipped her tea. “So you run and to begin with I equip you.”
“Well. If you can. I’ll pay, of course.”
“What do you need?”
“A laptop. I need to be able to transfer my money to a new account. I need to get documentation so I can get out of the country under a new name. And I know somebody who might be able to hide me from these guys, and I need a way to contact him without him finding me after I give him a call. I want to see him on my own terms.”
“I can spare you a laptop, a year-old MacBook Pro with the latest operating system. I have an anonymizer program on it that can shield you from being easily traced. Is that good enough?”
“Thank you.” To hackers laptops were like racehorses; they always preferred the most muscle. A year-old computer was an antique to Jack; he routinely bought a new system every six months. But it would do.
Ricki tapped her lip. “A passport and credit cards? I know a guy in Brussels who works wonders, but he’s not cheap. He can probably have you a passport in three days, another day to overnight it.”
“All right.”
“Your money, I can ask a guy in Russia. He moves a lot of funds for me. But I can’t promise. Could you just withdraw all the cash?”
“Yes, but I’d prefer to keep it electronic, less likely to lose it.” He did not want to add that he didn’t care to keep tens of thousands of euros he’d earned hacking for Nic’s criminal ring about his person. He wanted the money moved, cleanly, hidden where he could reach it under a new name. And where he wouldn’t have to worry about customs, or the police freezing his accounts if they figured out Jin Ming was a lie. He was a potential murderer in their eyes now; everything had changed. He needed to keep as many of his secrets close to him as he could.
“Okay, this guy you need to contact. He doesn’t want to be found?”
“He is part of a bureaucracy that can hide me.”
“Government?”
“Yes.”
“Dutch?”
“No. American.”
Ricki stared. “You want me to penetrate a top-level American government network. Did you go to a smoke bar after you left the hospital?”
“No. I’ll do it. But if I run into a wall I will want your expertise.”
Flattery was the most potent currency in the hacker world. That and respect, acknowledgment of skills. She didn’t smile until she’d lifted the tea cup and she thought Jack couldn’t see her grin. “I thought you might have some programs to help me chisel my way in.”
“I might. You hungry?”
“Yes. Very.”
“I can cook some pasta, open some wine. Oh, I didn’t think about giving you more alcohol, are you on meds?”
“I would very much like a glass of wine. And, no, I have no meds.”
“Now that would be a challenge,” she said. “Get an online pharmacy to send you what you need, without placing an actual order.” She laughed and so did he, and for a moment the memory that he had killed a man, albeit an assassin, edged from the center of his thoughts.
He was always happier when he had a problem with which to play.
“Is that all you need?”
“Yes,” he said. But it was a lie. He knew where Nic lived. And now, with Nic dead by violence, the police would have examined all his computers to see if they could find a link to his killers. When they searched his apartment, would the police have found the notebook? Surely that would be news, if a murdered man’s notebook could blow open an international crime ring. But the police could keep the discovery silent, the same way they’d shielded his name and location while he recovered.
Ricki brought him wine and sat down next to him. Close to him. She smiled at him, warmly. Was surviving a shooting… was that sexy? He’d avoided most girls at Delft because he didn’t want to risk blowing his cover story. Girls always wanted to know about you, to delve into secrets. But Ricki had secrets of her own. She might not ask too many more questions.
They drank the wine and before he knew it, before he could analyze it, he’d taken her wineglass and set it on the coffee table and he was kissing her warm mouth. She kissed him back. He was alive. He’d forgotten how good it could feel. So he did all the things necessary for living: he kissed her, he laughed with her, they ate dinner, they made love. Then they lay in bed and watched a movie she’d stolen from a studio’s laptop, a film that wasn’t hitting theaters for another three weeks.
When she fell asleep and the movie was over, Jack began to think. He needed a way to figure out where Nic would hide his most potent and powerful secret of all, and he would have to start by breaking into Nic’s house in the morning.
8
Las Vegas
I HIT THE GROUND WRONG.
I rolled too sharply, and felt a pull in my shoulder. I stopped and the early morning desert sky loomed above me. Back in my London days I ran parkour—extreme running, where you vault up walls and use handholds and drop from heights without breaking bones (hopefully). It had been my release from the tension of work, exploring abandoned buildings, turning walls into roads, using precision to power through a space in a more efficient way. But I was out of practice; when your child is missing you don’t really want to take the time for exercise. I’d arrived around midnight Las Vegas time last night, and couldn’t sleep, too wound with excitement and tension. Today was a waiting game, with the rest of the day to kill before Anna Tremaine arrived for our meeting. So I’d gotten up early to try my luck against gravity. It was 5 a.m. and the quietest hour in Vegas, and no one around to see me run.
I chose a basic route: a run through an unfinished building not far from my bar. It had simple drops, vaults, and, most importantly, solitude. The last thing I needed to do before capturing Anna—and I had every intention of taking her prisoner—was to hurt myself. I needed to be at peak condition.
But the parkour helped my head. When I had to plan a run, a vault, a leap that I could barely make, only then I didn’t think of Daniel.
Then I tried not to think of Lucy. My ex-wife. My love, my liar, my beautiful traitor. She lay in a CIA hospital in Bethesda, in a coma from a bullet to the brain, waiting to either waken or die. She’d done so much that was wrong but she’d also saved my life. The Agency kept her alive in case they could ever ask her about her real employers: the Nine Suns. Or because if she lived they could put her on trial for treason. But she wasn’t ever going to wake up, I thought. Special Projects kept her alive out of caution or cruelty; I could never decide which it was.
I put my mind back to the run. Distraction is a sure way to break a leg or an arm. I got up, dusted off my butt. Looked at the wall before me, five feet high; beyond its rim was air.
I was tired of the walls around me, the false ones in the shapes of threats and violence. I wanted my son back. That was the only wall to conquer. I ran at the wall, did a saut de chat (jump of the cat). I went headfirst; my hands landed on the wall’s top surface. My legs powered past my arms as I flew from the wall. I landed fair and kept running.
I hadn’t had a clean run since the bombing, when my wife was taken from me before my eyes in a London street and I did a park-our run through a remodeled building, bomb-damaged scaffolding collapsing around me, running like I never had before to keep her in my sight, to not lose her.
But, of course, I did lose her, and in a worse way than if she had been kidnapped and killed.
I vaulted up a narrow staircase in the unfinished motel, bouncing off the walls, feeling the sweat explode from my skin. Burning off the too many drinks of the middle of the night, the worry about Daniel, the stress over whether I might be arrested or grabbed by August’s team to force me to tell them more about Mila and the Round Table.
I reached the roof and the desert early morning sun shone on me. Las Vegas, even at its edges, is never entirely hushed. I wished there were neighboring roofs. I used to run the council housing projects in London, and on a roof I felt like I had wings. I ran in a circle here, staying warm, building up my power, stopping only to study the balconies jutting off the side of the building, wondering if I could navigate the seven stories in a series of controlled jumps and drops from balcony to balcony. Who needs stairs?
Dropping from balcony to balcony might attract attention; the police are rarely parkour fans. I studied the line of movement it would take to do the balcony drops. Part of my mind said too risky, but another part wanted to feel like I’d pushed myself, like I was testing myself for the final stretch of confronting Anna Tremaine and getting my son back. I wanted to be sure I still had my nerve, my daring.
Drop, roll, vault, drop again, roll. I played the run in my head.
I dropped down to the first balcony and from the edge of my eye I saw the car on the facing road brake to a halt.
I should have checked first. I’d needed to be sure that I didn’t have a witness, someone who might call 9-1-1 on the crazy guy doing the balcony surfing. I stood up from the balcony.
The road near the unfinished motel was empty. Except for the one car, stopped at a light at a deserted intersection.
Okay, I thought, not me, it stopped for a light. But the light was green.
I could see the double glint of binoculars past the window.
I dropped back out of sight.
Waited. I heard the purr of the car’s engine moving. I glanced over the edge. I could see the driver below, a sleeve of purple jacket, a snug knit hat pulled tight over the head.
The car sped away.
Maybe he just stopped because he saw you jump. That’s it. Yes, that’s all.
But the run was ruined for me. I dropped down the rest of the balconies and ran back to my car.
Mila would be here this afternoon, and then Anna Tremaine. And, by tonight, I hoped, I would have my son back.
Also by Jeff Abbott
Sam Capra series
Adrenaline
Whit Mosley series
A Kiss Gone Bad
Black Jack Point
Cut and Run
Other fiction
Panic
Fear
Collision
Trust Me
Buy the Book
To buy The Last Minute, you can visit Jeff’s website.
Contents
Welcome
Chapter One
About the Author
A Preview of The Last Minute
Also by Jeff Abbott
Buy the Book
Copyright
Copyright
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2012 by Jeff Abbott
Excerpt from The Last Minute copyright © 2012 by Jeff Abbott.
Cover design by Flag. Copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s
intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First e-book edition: May 2012
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ISBN 978-1-4555-2529-4
