The Last Minute (26 page)

‘Zviman?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why does he want you dead?’

‘It will be easier for you to read than for me to tell you. I have told my story only to one other person. I don’t normally
talk about it.’ Mila’s voice went quiet.

‘Don’t joke.’

‘I hurt his pride.’ Mila smiled. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Let me do this. If I can find where Zviman is from Jack, I will.’

‘That’s a sweet lie, Sam.’ She held the whisky glass. ‘Do you want me to tend to your eye?’

‘No.’

‘Good luck then.’ And then Mila did something she had never done before. She embraced me. I was holding the clothes bag and
a backpack with the guns. Not really in hugging mode. Her hands ran down my back, then she patted the front of my shirt. ‘Be
careful. I hope you get your son back.’

‘Thank you.’ I smiled. ‘Why are you in New York?’

‘Shoes,’ she said.

‘Ah. Don’t get killed, Mila. I would miss you.’

‘Do not get killed, Sam. I would miss
you
.’

I left without another word. My insides felt knotted. I went out into the cloud-smeared, starless night.

I was going to get my son back, and nobody, nobody, was going to kill Mila.

High expectations.

I patted my shirt pocket. She’d slid in a small chip, thin as paper, when she gave me my hug. I held it up to the streetlight.
Tracker, like a modified phone SIM card. She wished me well but she wanted to know where I was going. To help me or to fight
her own battle? I didn’t know. I tried not to care.

Two customers were leaving the bar and I thoughtfully hailed them a cab. A bit bleary from The Last Minute’s excellent
martinis, they thanked me and as I opened the door for them I flicked Mila’s tracker onto the cab floor.

Let it take her where it would, out of the battle, into safety, perhaps.

I headed back to Leonie, and the long night of waiting.

It is a very small world, and getting smaller, he thought.

Ricardo Braun stood above the speared body of the limo driver. He muttered a curse under his breath. He took his gun and with
care shot off the man’s face. He had to do this by flashlight, with the moonless sky, and he was careful to avoid getting
any blood or tissue on his shoes or his jeans. He reloaded and then blasted off the ten fingertips. This would buy him at
most a few days if the body was found, but even a narrow margin of time had saved him in the past. Then he removed the limo’s
plates and stripped out the forged registration and insurance papers. Its vehicle identification number had long ago been
filed off. He dumped the corpse in the trunk, then put in Sandra Ming’s body.

There was a large pond on the property. He found a rock and put it on the accelerator and watched as the water settled over
the limo. It took surprisingly little time for the car to sink. He waited until the water was still, the last ripple smooth.

Then he got into his Mercedes and he drove back to his apartment in Greenwich Village. It was very late now and he sat and
drank coffee and watched the stars and wondered how much
in danger he was. If anyone knew what he was doing, and why.

Sam Capra. He could have stopped him, if he had not had to meet with the assholes from Langley who’d insisted on a quick report.
Special Projects was a beehive; and only he and August knew about the Jack Ming affair. Well, and now Fagin, but Fagin would
never speak. Eliminating Fagin would create far too many questions; he was golden, untouchable. But a healthy deposit in Fagin’s
account would ensure silence, and, hell, most of the Company had no idea Sam Capra had saved the CIA inconceivable humiliation
in the Yankee Stadium incident. Most of them, if they knew who he was at all, thought he was still a suspect character, untrustworthy.

He felt a slight rage that he had allowed this to spin out of control. Right now he sat at his laptop and accessed a private
website, within the Special Projects computer network, and clicked on an icon that read
BANISH
. That was the code word August
had set up for the Jack Ming case. The only two people who could access this folder were August and Braun.

He read:
heard from target via phone call, he will call me again at 12 ET tomorrow with instructions for meet

Tomorrow, then, this would all be settled. If Ming wasn’t dead before tomorrow’s meeting, then he would take custody of Jack
Ming, tell him that his mother was already secure in a Special Projects safe house, seize whatever evidence he had, and he
would make Jack disappear forever. The only way to be safe, the only way to be sure.

August might be a problem but a quick reassignment to another division would solve that dilemma. He was a good soldier; he’d
take his orders. In a few months Braun would go out and visit him, treat him to a steak dinner, and tell him Novem Soles had
been wrapped up, neat as a napkin.

And no one would ever know.

Ricardo Braun considered the one hint that he had for his other agenda: Mila. Sam had told the driver, who had relayed it
to him, that she sometimes met Sam Capra at a bar. Not exactly actionable information to find Mila.

Unless Sam Capra wanted to be followed, wanted to see who it flushed out into the open.

It wouldn’t matter, though, would it, if Sam Capra was dead by tomorrow?

The whole incident was a shame. He had studied the Capra file. The world still did not know that the bombing of a London office
was an attack against a Special Projects team; did not know that a CIA officer, pregnant by another officer, committed a grievous
treason; did not know that more than one traitor, bought not by ideology or disaffection but by cold cash, had been flushed
out of the Company. Did not know that a man scorned by the Company as a traitor had been its savior. Capra had done his duty.

Duty. It was the red in Braun’s blood, the oxygen that he breathed. Duty was all. Duty was what forced you to push boundaries,
take chances, give your life to something and still have the bravery to reap the rewards from it.

Once Braun had written essays and poems on duty in his journal, to try to understand his own feelings about it, but finally
he had burned them all.

If Capra had come back to Special Projects when the job was offered – if he had stuck to his duty – then this would not have
to happen. It was a shame. He didn’t want Capra dead. At the least he wouldn’t be an enemy, but a sacrifice. That was somehow
nobler, Braun thought.

With Andris the limo driver dead and floating in eternal
company with Mrs Ming, he was going to need someone else to handle Capra and Jack Ming. The best thing about Special Projects
was that, since it was supposed to be separate and deniable from the Company, he was allowed, when needed, to use non-Company
personnel. And keep them out of the record. Like Andris and his limo company, funded by Company dollars that had been washed
by Special Projects.

Or the sisters. Yes, the sisters would be a good choice for tomorrow. They always brightened his day.

Jack Ming sat in a movie theater. He was on his fourth feature film of the day. The theaters were nice, dark and quiet and
he could think. Right now a romantic comedy, indifferently written and acted, played in front of him. He didn’t really want
to see or hear anything violent or twisted. He didn’t like movies with gunfire, not since Rotterdam. Right now the movie’s
hero thought his girlfriend’s mom had the hots for him, which wasn’t true, but, you know, was just hilarious. Not. His dinner
had been a hot dog and a soda he bought at the theater and he rattled the ice in a jumbo cup.

His mother’s betrayal had stopped itching at him. He could not be surprised. She would never let him do as he wanted; the
only freedom he’d had in his life was when he had run away and worn another name, in another country.

The notebook sat in a square, taped to his back. Earlier, in a
Starbucks, he’d sat down in a lonely corner and paged through its mysteries again. Account numbers, pictures, email addresses.
He studied the photo of the three people that had the words
The Nursery
written underneath. The word
Nursery
was suggestive: a place where something was born, or something was protected and grown. Just a photo of three people. But
clearly three people who, by virtue of being together, revealed a secret about themselves. If Nine Suns meant nine people,
then this was a third of them, and if you could take down a third, perhaps you could find out who the other six were. Perhaps
you could cripple them.

He thought about trying to contact any of the people being blackmailed, but he decided against it. If he frightened them,
they might vanish, and what would make the notebook valuable was if the people corrupted were still in place. If they took
off running or hiding, then they would not be useful. On one page he’d found a single phone number. He was so tempted to call
it, and fear and curiosity played over his heart.

More than ever, the notebook was his ticket.

But. He wondered why, if his mother had called the CIA, they weren’t already there when he arrived. Why not snatch him up
at home? Had they just figured out it was him? If they waited for him to show up, and lounge around at home, they could take
him with less fuss, perhaps.

He didn’t know what to believe.

He needed a place to sleep. Hostels were out of the question; he didn’t know who his mother would have looking for him, much
less Novem Soles. If homeless people could sleep on the streets, he could as well. Just for one night.

He left the movie theater and ducked into another coffee shop. Lots of people his age, on laptops, chatting, pretending to
write the next great American novel while they idled away their
creative time on social networking sites. He got a decaf and sat in the corner and opened up the notebook, staring at the
one phone number on the last page.

Mila ordered another Glenfiddich from Bertrand and a bacon sandwich from The Last Minute’s small kitchen. She put aside her
confessions for Sam; the story of herself that she had only told one person before – and she opened up the tracking software
on the laptop, which would tell her where Sam was going.

She studied the route. From The Last Minute to a hotel in Greenwich Village to a nightclub to another hotel. She didn’t believe
he was nightclubbing. And she didn’t believe whoever he was tracking was out nightclubbing either. He’d found the tracker
she’d planted on him and put it in a cab. She smiled. Sam was no fool. And now he knew she’d tricked him. For a moment she
considered deleting the confession; she was mad at him, unreasonably, she knew, but mad all the same. She was alive and she
felt sure his baby was probably dead or lost forever to him, no matter what promises Anna made. Novem Soles had no honor,
no sense of justice, no kindness. They would never give him his child back and she knew it and she wished he could know it
as well. She could not make him understand; she could not force him to abandon hope.

She could not do to him what had been done to her.

She took a long sip of the whisky and put her fingertips back to the keyboard, the letters on the electronic screen hanging
like small, curved ghosts before her eyes.

The Watcher stepped off the plane. His mouth tasted sour from his in-flight doze. His suit wasn’t as clean as he’d like for
it to be. He waited for the press of folks off first class to pass (to his great annoyance he couldn’t get a first class seat)
and then he obediently followed the rest of the coach passengers off the jet. The flight attendants gave him robotic nods
and thanks.

He waited in the queue at Customs for non-US citizens and finally presented his Dutch passport. It passed muster without a
hesitation, and he even managed a smile for the customs clerk who wished him a pleasant stay in the United States.

He stepped out into the city – one of the greatest dining cities in the world, he dreamed of a vacation where he did nothing
but eat and talk with chefs here, but he could not think of food now. Novem Soles had found the record of Jack’s alias taking
a flight out of Brussels; Ricki had lied to him. She would pay when he had time to focus on her. Jack Ming was in this city
now, with his book of secrets. Sam Capra and Leonie Jones were going to kill Jack Ming and then they would die. It would close
a book on the CIA’s own investigation of Novem Soles, once a former CIA agent had been identified as Jack Ming’s
murderer. And then the circle would be closed, and the circle would be safe.

His phone rang. ‘Yes?’

Silence on the other end.

‘Yes?’ the Watcher said impatiently. ‘Yes, hello,’ a voice said, and it was one he’d listened to in the recording of the CIA
conversation before, a voice he knew by heart. Jack Ming.

‘Hello,’ Jack Ming said into the sudden silence.

The Watcher froze. ‘Who is this?’

‘You don’t know me,’ Jack Ming said, ‘but your phone number is in a book I found. May I ask who this is?’

‘Well, no, because I don’t know who you are,’ the Watcher said.

‘I think you are being blackmailed,’ Jack said. ‘Are you? Because if you are, maybe I can help stop the people who are hurting
you.’

‘You … you.’ The Watcher said. ‘Who are you?’

‘Since you didn’t say no, I’ll assume you’re being blackmailed.’

The Watcher’s mind spun. What exactly was in this notebook? A cold chill inched up his spine. ‘Listen. Okay. I don’t know
who you are, this could be a trick to get me to say something I shouldn’t.’ Play the victim, draw him close. ‘Tell me exactly
how you got my number.’

‘A friend gave me a book. It has numbers – bank account numbers – and emails and photos in it. I think it’s a book used to
extort people all over the world, people in positions of business and government.’ Silence. ‘Do you fit those criteria?’