The Last Minute (3 page)

The nine men and women ate and sipped wine and chatted about the world’s events: a financial crisis in South America, the
increasing violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, the latest scandal in the American Congress – and the opportunities
for expansion that all three presented.

The man with the blond mohawk accepted compliments on the food; he smiled and encouraged the quieter members of the
group – quiet, that is, in the way of cobras, observing, considering when to strike – to join the conversations. He had wanted
to arrange prostitutes for the visiting group, but had been sternly warned that, given recent events, this was no time for
debauchery. He missed sex; he was reduced to being a spectator nowadays, but even watching, a feeble substitute, was better
than nothing.

In these rooms they did not use each other’s names. They were known by their responsibilities: the Banker, the General, the
Diplomat, the Courier. Titles passed down through long years, or kept by the original members of the nine. The blond mohawk
was called the Watcher; it was a role he’d fought hard to get, and he had no intention of losing it now.

The Watcher waited for the Banker and the General to get into their usual bickering, but for once they did not. He heard English
spoken, Russian practiced, the silk of Arabic whispered. These gatherings were always a good chance for everyone to practice
their foreign language skills. But the meeting would be conducted in English, the group’s lingua franca.

After supper, the nine gathered in the large den. The Watcher stood at the head of the long table. He took a calming breath
that he camouflaged under a welcoming smile. He was the youngest.
Can’t be scared, boy. Be tough
.

‘I’m a firm believer in bad news first,’ the Watcher said. ‘As you know, our recent mass assassination plot in the United
States failed.’

Silence among the nine. It seemed like all the goodwill engendered by his fine food and wine evaporated like ice on summer
concrete.

‘A smuggling ring that we used as a cover to get experimental weapons into the United States was destroyed. The ring was
infiltrated by a former CIA operative named Sam Capra. He should have died in our bombing of a clandestine CIA office in London
dedicated to stopping illicit transnational activities. His office was part of the Special Projects branch – which, as you
know, does the work that even the CIA is not supposed to discuss.’ The mention of Special Projects caused a bit of a stir
in the room: glances exchanged, water sipped, eyebrows raised. ‘These days Special Projects is specifically interested in
any criminal, non-terrorist activities that can affect American national security.’

He paused; they stared. Waiting. He tapped on the laptop button and a picture of Sam Capra appeared on the screen. Brownish-blond-haired,
green-eyed, the lean face of a runner, mid-twenties, boyish. ‘Capra survived only because he walked out of the office before
it was bombed, however, and was regarded by the CIA as a likely traitor due to financial irregularities committed by his wife,
and the inconvenient fact that his pregnant wife had told him to leave the office right before it was destroyed. Capra escaped
from the CIA’s custody, went searching for his wife, infiltrated our group in Amsterdam and disrupted the assassination plots.’

The nine waited while the Watcher took a long drink of water. He studied their faces. Most of them would not have been recognized
by any government official, any police department, any journalist, any intelligence service. They were, for the most part,
so ordinary. Frighteningly ordinary. The person who might sit next to you on the subway, or stand behind you in the grocery
store line, or drop off their child at the same time you did at school. They came from around the world, yet they all seemed
to have that same suburban sameness. It was, the Watcher thought, a superior camouflage. Yet they had come so close to delivering
a history-changing death blow to American stability,
to bringing the country to a level of chaos that promised an erosion of the rule of law and, in turn, enormous profit.

Look how far we’ve come since the early days, the Watcher thought. A tremendous lesson could be learned from a tremendous
failure. They were unbloodied and unbowed. ‘You will note that we lost our main CIA contact. He was killed in action by Capra.
We have since lost two other low-level contacts I … recruited inside the CIA. They’ve been arrested. Fortunately we did not
deal face to face with them, and they cannot betray us.’

‘So right now, we have no eyes inside the CIA?’ the Banker asked.

‘We have an eye or two that never blinks.’ He smiled. Let them know he still had information feeds inside the agency, but
not exactly what kinds. ‘I do not know if they can see as well, or as far.’ The Watcher cleared his throat. He could have
shared a file two inches thick on Sam Capra’s life with his compatriots, but he’d decided not to play up the man’s importance.
‘We do, however, have leverage over Sam Capra. We have his infant child.’

‘Children,’ sniffed the Banker. She was a Chinese woman, petite, thin, with a lovely face that could have sold cosmetics by
the tonnage. She made a frown, as though the word held a sourness.

‘Control,’ countered the General.

‘Control of a puppet with no strings for us to pull. While we have control over his kid, there’s no way the CIA will let him
close to any information that is useful to us,’ the Diplomat said. He spoke with a deep baritone, a South African accent,
hands tented before his face. ‘I say we kill him. Show that we cannot be defied.’

‘Sam Capra,’ the Watcher said, ‘doesn’t know that our group
has steered him from six years ago, that we have guided his life as surely as a hand on a rudder. We made him into what he
is, not the CIA. The setback with his wife was … unfortunate. But he only knows us as a name that means nothing, a vague threat.
He doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know how we came to be.’

‘He has damaged us like no one else has,’ the General said. ‘I truly prefer that he be dead.’

‘We should not be killing CIA agents unless absolutely necessary,’ the Historian said. He was a heavy-set Russian, head shaved
bald, muscles thick under the black of his tailored suit. ‘It provokes attention. It is bad for business. He’s no longer with
the CIA, he is useless to us. He cannot hurt us. He cannot find us. He dies at our hand, the CIA will be coming to investigate.’

‘I agree,’ several of the others murmured. The Watcher scanned their faces, taking the temperature of their reactions. The
Banker stared at him and he nodded at her and said, ‘You have a thought to share?’

‘Yes. You wanted us to finance your ability to spy on very specific people. I want to know how much of that ability has been
compromised by this failure.’

‘The whole reason we were able to attempt a project of this scale was because of me. Because I have made it easy for us to
access information that is critically damaging to some of the most vitally placed people in the world and use it to force
them to do what we need. We had a failure. It doesn’t change the fact that I – I mean we – now own several people in key positions
in government and business around the world.’

‘So. You want to mount another project, using your resources.’ The Banker’s tone mocked him. In another time he would have
slapped her across the face, torn her silk suit from her body,
taught her who was master. His jaw quavered. Those days were done. Instead he nodded gravely. ‘Yes. But first I want to clean
up the mess that Sam Capra made for us, but I want you to understand why it’s a risk.’

The Banker nodded.

‘We had an asset in Amsterdam, a computer hacker who had helped me with infiltrating the laptops of our targets so that we
had a free view of the classified information that came into their systems. Nic ten Boom. He’s dead, killed by Capra. There
is a loose end there that we have only now discovered.’

‘What? Who?’ the General asked.

‘A young Chinese graduate student, a computer hacker named Jin Ming, was present at a shootout in a Rotterdam machinists’
shop that was owned by the smuggling ring we used in Amsterdam. He was Nic ten Boom’s hacking assistant, if you will. Ming
is in the hospital, recovering from his wounds.’

‘The assistant may know nothing.’

‘He may not. I would very much like to know if he is going to be a problem. We know that Nic ten Boom was most ambitious.’
He had to be careful here. ‘In checking my own computer’s logs, I found out that ten Boom was trying to learn more about us,
and about our organization when he died. We hired him to spy
for
us, but he was starting to spy
on
us.’

‘Then I’m glad he’s dead, and you should hire with a more careful eye,’ the Banker said.

‘Nic was attracted by success. He wanted to move up the ladder.’ The Watcher shrugged. ‘He didn’t seem to realize we require
success before promotion.’

‘Kids today are lazy,’ the General said.

‘Everyone else involved in the Amsterdam operation is dead, either killed by Capra or by one of our people, Edward, who
sought to minimize our risks by eliminating those who could identify him. Edward is dead.’

There was no sentimentality about the death of a hireling.

‘I did not know until now that this young man, Ming, was alive. He was grabbed by the CIA from an internet café, then we assume
Ming gave them the Rotterdam address. They took him in when they raided our smuggling operation and Ming was shot. Apparently
both our side and the CIA left him for dead. He is in an Amsterdam hospital, under police guard.’

‘So have him killed.’ The Banker gave a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘I can assure you, if there is a surfeit of anything
in the world, it’s Chinese grad students.’

‘I will. But why I’ve told you all this is because it’s all part of a bigger picture. We have shaped Sam Capra, over the years,
like he was made of clay. And I don’t intend to let that wheel stop spinning until he is molded in just the way we need. The
time has come. I have thought of a way in which Mr Capra can be invaluable to us.’

‘Because we have his child,’ the Banker said. ‘You just got a new pawn on your chessboard, darling.’ She actually smiled at
him.

He did not like her changing his metaphor. ‘You have to seize what advantages you can,’ the Watcher said. He felt the tension
in his chest begin to loosen. At any moment any of the others would have been in their rights to call a vote on his life.
They hadn’t.

‘The CIA will never trust him while we have his child. Ever,’ the General said.

‘Oh, I know. I intend to take full advantage of that. It’s not like there’s a surplus of highly trained CIA operatives on
the market. And most of them would never consider working for us.’

‘But he will,’ the Banker said.

The Watcher nodded. ‘Yes. He will.’ He was going to get to live another day, he decided.

The woman who was not a nurse but was dressed like one entered the hospital shortly after 11 p.m. Amsterdam time, while a
group met and talked in the Bahamas and Sam Capra got the best lead yet on his son. The woman had been most careful to forge
her credentials with care; she had stolen a nurse’s uniform earlier in the day from the hospital laundry; she’d had to settle
for buying shoes that looked good enough to pass. The real trick was getting the passcard for the secure floor where her target
slept. That had taken time, to pierce the hospital’s security provider database, to imprint a card with the necessary code,
to break into the police department’s voicemail system and finally find a message that told her which room held Jin Ming.
But she had done it.

And when she saw him, she was going to kill him.

Jack Ming was playing the Quiet Game, the one where you tried to see how long you could go without speaking. He was going
on three weeks now, three weeks of such careful, cultivated silence that he wondered if his voice would still work. He lay
in the hospital bed, the sheets pulled up close to him like a damaged cocoon. His throat bore the raw scar from where a bullet
had furrowed across skin and muscle, the giant bruise on his temple from where he’d fallen against a piece of machinery. The
injuries had kept him in a coma for nearly two weeks. The doctors and the nurses and the police investigators all called him
Jin Ming, which wasn’t his real name, and he did not correct their mistake.

Keeping quiet became an exercise – like writing a program with the least possible lines of code, or breaking into a database
in the fewest, most elegant steps. How long could you play the Quiet Game? His father and mother had made him do it, when
he was a child and playing loudly or asking one of his endless questions about why was the sky blue or why did they fight
so much or why couldn’t he buy a toy he wanted, and they would flash angry eyes at him, his father looking up from one of
the books he always was reading, his mother from her desk where she seemed to live. Be quiet, Jack. You’re bothering me. Let’s
play a game. See how long you can be quiet. But it was never a game;
they
were never quiet. A proper Quiet Game involved a stare down. This was simply a way for his parents to put him on a shelf.

So he stayed quiet.

He had woken up, sure that he must be dead. A bullet had scored along the flesh of his throat; another centimeter and he would
have bled out in moments, his carotid artery emptying on the cool concrete floor of the smugglers’ den near the Rotterdam
port. But the artery went untouched. Three days after he woke up the police moved him from Rotterdam to a hospital in Amsterdam.
He slept but it was strange: when he was wheeled inside they put a sheet over him. Like he was a secret they wanted to keep.
He had his own room, he didn’t have to share. He wondered what this meant; he wanted to ask for a computer, but he
didn’t want to speak. Not talking was, weirdly, very liberating. He didn’t have to tell the truth, he didn’t have to lie.
After all these months he did not have to keep pretending to be someone he wasn’t.