The Last Minute (47 page)

Leonie was silent for ten long seconds. ‘He’s not a fool and I’m not taking advantage of him.’

‘I am sorry for what you are suffering. Your child being taken. I would not be myself.’

The sympathy seemed to take Leonie aback. ‘I understand you want to help us, Mila. Thank you. I’m not exactly myself at the
moment and maybe we’d get along fine under other circumstances. But Sam and I have to do what we’re told and you will forgive
me if the involvement of others makes me nervous.’

Mila’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She gave Leonie a searching glance and then she answered her phone. She listened. ‘This
is a private call, sorry, do you mind?’

Leonie got up from the monitor. ‘I need a cigarette anyway.’ She retrieved her pack from the desk. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

Leonie walked downstairs. The bar was full, people milling about drinking, the music stopped. She stepped into the warm damp
of the humid evening and lit her cigarette. The first two drags calmed her nerves. The man who’d sat in the corner of the
bar now stood on the corner of the street. Watching her.

Did Mila have a camera on the front of the bar? She assumed there must be one. These people – whatever Mila and Sam were –
were as organized as Nine Suns. She made a show of her pack being empty, shrugged in annoyance, and then she turned and walked
in the opposite direction from the man.

She turned left at the light and walked down to the next corner. She stopped inside a store and bought a fresh pack of cigarettes.
Then she stepped outside and fished one out and made a show of patting her pocket.

The man she knew as Ray Brewster stepped forward, offered her a light.

She glanced behind her, scared to see if Mila was following her.

He said: ‘You look well, Lindsay. I’d like to say I’ve missed you but I don’t care to start a chat with a lie. Not when we
need each other.’

‘Why are you here?’ She managed to keep her voice steady.

‘Two reasons.’

She waited.

‘First. When you and your boyfriend kill Jack Ming, I want whatever evidence Ming has on the Nine Suns.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘You make it possible.’

‘I can’t steal it; I need it to ransom my child.’

‘Then you are going to tell me where the exchange happens with Nine Suns. I want to know.’

‘Why do you want it?’ She drew hard on the cigarette. ‘Have you switched sides?’

‘No, sweetheart. I have just the one side, mine, as always.’

‘I can’t.’

‘No, Lindsay, you will.’

She looked down the sidewalk again. No sign of Mila.

‘And the other reason?’

‘Have you seen a woman named Mila? She’s connected to Capra.’

‘Why?’

‘I want her.’

Leonie drew on her cigarette.
One problem I can make go away
, she thought. Two words –
she’s upstairs –
and Mila would cease to be trouble. She knew Ray Brewster well enough. That smarmy bitch would be as good as taken or dead
as soon as she stepped outside The Last Minute.

But she knew she didn’t want to be that person. She didn’t want to be a traitor to Sam, no matter the acid dislike she felt
for Mila. It gave her a momentary pleasure to deny him. ‘I don’t know any Mila.’

‘Any woman who Capra works with? She’s Moldovan, so she’d speak with an eastern European accent. She’s petite, pretty, vicious.’

‘No. He’s not brought his friends around me. I have to go now.’

‘This is my phone number.’ He recited a number and she repeated it back to him. ‘You get me that evidence and you give me
Mila if she shows up, you and your child, if you get Taylor back, will be safe. From every threat.’

Her skin went cold. ‘You know about Taylor?’

‘Did you think you could hide from me? Really? That’s awfully self-confident.’

‘Why did you leave me alone, then, the last two years?’

‘I didn’t need you, Lindsay. Now I do. And if you don’t do what I say, exactly, then I will make Taylor go away, and Leonie
Jones will never see her child again.’

She wished she could stub the lit cigarette into his eye. ‘And the line to blackmail me forms here. You’re such an asshole.
Can’t you just leave me alone?’

‘After what you did? No, sweetheart. I wanted you to feel nice and happy and secure until I could take it away from you. Nine
Suns just beat me to the punch.’

She blew smoke into his face.

‘You still forging? Identities, passports? Caring relationships?’ He laughed. ‘Really, the last is what you’re best at faking.’

‘That’s a compliment from the biggest fraud of all.’

‘You can’t wound me. You already cut out my heart, Lindsay, and now I’ve got the knife at yours.’

She smoked in silence.

He tipped her chin toward him. ‘What they know, I know. You really should give up smoking, sweetheart. When this is all done,
you’ll be the last one standing, alongside me. And then you can go take your fake self and live your fake life.’

He turned and he walked away from her.

She finished her cigarette. Horrible habit. She’d stopped now, twice before, and the thought brought her to tears.
Get a grip
, she told herself. She went back into the store, bought some chocolate M&Ms, and walked back to the bar.

Mila was off the phone and on the computer. ‘Where did you go?’

‘I was out of smokes.’ She held up the candy from the store. ‘And I thought I’d make a peace offering. Isn’t chocolate the
universal language?’

‘Yes,’ Mila said, ‘I believe it is.’

The Watcher stood surveying the Manhattan skyline. He had spent the past twenty hours trying to suck every bit of
information he could out of the extortion network. Before Jack Ming shut it down.

If they were unable to kill Ming and retrieve his evidence he wanted to sell to the CIA, then the Watcher was going to lose
his entire power base among the Nine, and he would have to rebuild. It would be all right. He had rebuilt before after Mila
stole most of his money. He’d fought and scrabbled his way back. But to lose the information feeds that had given him gold
from Wall Street firms, from the White House, from Congress, from the British Parliament, from a good percentage of the Fortune
500, that would be devastating. The fearsome crime rings of the twentieth century – the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Colombian drug
lords, the Mexican cartels – had never had their own spies, their own conduits to the highest powers in the land. This information
had been oxygen to the blood of Nine Suns, knowledge that let them smuggle with impunity, keep the police at bay in a dozen
countries, sell secrets to government and competitors and in turn own those buyers by virtue of their crimes. The extortion
network that Jack Ming’s software made possible had netted them tens of millions of dollars’ worth of information in a matter
of months.

And the Watcher needed to find something to replace that power base, and he had an idea.

His phone rang, and he answered.

‘This is Jack Ming,’ the voice said.

‘My favorite person,’ the Watcher replied.

‘I want to make a deal with you.’

‘With me? I doubt that.’

‘No, I do. You wanted the notebook, I’ll give you the notebook. I’ll sell it to you.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘I can’t sell it to anyone else. Here’s what we do. You deposit ten million in an account I provide. When I have the money,
I will call you and tell you where to find the notebook.’

‘How can I trust you?’

‘Conduct a poll. I’m pretty sure I’ll be seen as more trustworthy than you. Look, this is the deal, if you don’t want it …
’

‘Why would you deal with us when we tried to kill you? Not to be overly blunt.’

‘I will keep a few choice pages for insurance. If anything happens to me, they come to immediate light.’

‘You could blackmail me again.’

‘You could kill me again.’

‘That’s true. I thought you preferred to deal with the authorities.’

‘They lost my trust.’

‘Trust, so fleeting. All right, Jack. Where would you like to meet?’

Jack hesitated. ‘We’ll do it all by phone.’

‘Are you going to fax me the notebook, Jack?’

‘No.’

‘Then we will have to meet.’

‘And have your bitch Sam Capra show up and throw me off a building? No thanks.’

‘Aren’t you a smart lad?’

‘And aren’t you a right bastard, using his baby? Seriously.’

‘Had a chat with him, did you?’

‘I figure out things on my own, asshole. The notebook tells me a lot.’

‘Oh, Jack,’ the Watcher said. ‘I look at you and I realize I mishandled the entire situation. I shouldn’t have tried to get
rid
of you. I should have offered you a job. You’re a smart, smart kid.’

‘I’m smart enough to know I’ve got your golden goose here. I get my money, you get your notebook, and then we walk away.’

‘You could have copied it.’

‘And if anything happens to me, a nice copy of it will show up in the CIA’s mailbox, along with a letter of explanation. So.
You leave me alone and you have nothing to worry about.’

‘So where shall we meet?’

‘In Central Park. In the Ramble, north of the Bow Bridge. Tomorrow at three. When I’ve confirmed the money is safe in my account
then I’ll give you the notebook.’

‘A lot of faith for me.’

‘You want your notebook, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do, Jack. Give me the bank account.’

Jack gave him the account for a Swiss bank. The Watcher wrote it on the palm of his hand.

‘If you’re one minute late, or I don’t like the look of anything there, I’m gone and I’ll just drive by Langley and toss the
notebook on their front porch.’ He hung up.

The Watcher clicked off his phone. Most interesting, that. Unexpected. Either Jack Ming had decided to bait a trap with himself
or he’d decided that his need for money so he could vanish trumped all.

So. Should he have Sam Capra there to kill him? If Capra knew that someone from Nine Suns was meeting Jack Ming, he might
try to seize him as a hostage to guarantee his son’s release. But he wouldn’t take the risk. That was the beauty of owning
a child this way. The parent would never be able to cut the strings.

*

Jack Ming clicked off the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed back in his mother’s apartment. It was the last place, he thought,
that anyone would look for him. His mother was dead and his father was gone, and now he was truly alone in the world.

He walked to his mother’s room. It was so spare, so absent of her, to be the place where she spent so much time. He had wept
for his father for days, for weeks, but he could summon nothing for his mother except a promise:
I’m sorry I got you killed. I’m going to kill them for you, Mom
.

It would be so unexpected, he thought. Hackers hid in the shadows. They did not face threats in person; they lurked, they
moved the intangible data, they did not cause bloodshed. Well, he was done with hacking. Tomorrow he would either die or he
would kill. He didn’t much care if he never saw a computer again. He had an identity and he could get a new one, Ricki could
help him again, she had the contacts.

He wanted to cry for his mother, but he couldn’t. Maybe later.

He picked up his cell phone and he dialed Amsterdam. It was very late there, actually early the next morning.

‘
Ja?
’ She sounded sleepy.

‘Ricki. It’s Jack.’

‘Oh, my God, where are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just want you to know that … I want to thank you. For helping me.’ What was he going to say to her?
My mom died, and, well, you’re the only friend I have left. There wasn’t much to say about him and his mom.

Ricki started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘They came … after you were gone. They came and they made me tell them where you went and they wanted to know
what you knew about them. I’m sorry. They said they would kill me if I didn’t talk.’

‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Are you all right?’

‘Not really. They … they took over my business. I have to work for them now or they’ll kill me. They’re taking all the money.’

‘Oh, Ricki. Oh, God. I’m so sorry.’

She sounded as though she might cry but she didn’t. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Listen. Tomorrow, I will either be dead or I’ll have the money to vanish forever. Do you want to vanish with me?’

‘What, go off with you? It … that is just stupid and crazy.’

‘I like you that much,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sorry I waited until now to tell you.’

Ricki gave what sounded like a half-sob, half-laugh. ‘Why would you trust me not to tell them? They own me now.’

‘Because, well, I don’t know. I do trust you. Do you want to come with me?’

‘I would have to walk away from everything,’ she said.

‘It’s not yours any more.’

She sniffed. ‘True. Yes, Jack, I think I would like a new start.’

‘Okay. I kind of love you a little.’

‘I know. I’ve known for a while. I love you a little, too.’

His chest made a slight lurch. ‘Okay, that’s good then.’

‘Well, don’t die now,’ she said. She started crying again.

‘I won’t. I won’t. I’ll call you back when I have the money and I’ll tell you where to go. If I don’t call, you figure out
some way to get out from under these people. Just walk away if you have to, Ricki. You don’t want any part of them.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m going to mail you a key to a locker. It has a copy of the notebook. If I die then it’s yours, and you can do with it
what
you want. If you’re too afraid of Nine Suns, then give them the key and they’ll burn it, and I’ll already be dead so I won’t
care. Or come to New York and get it yourself and give it to the police or to the FBI or sell it to the Brits or the French.
I wouldn’t deal with the CIA.’

‘But if you’re okay, then I’ll be gone when the key gets here.’

‘It won’t matter. If I’m okay, I’ll have the copy with me. You just be ready to get on a plane.’

‘Okay. I wish I was there with you.’