The Last Minute (51 page)

We headed north and east, leaving the city well behind, cutting up past Irvington, heading on 87 North. I wondered where we
were headed. Peekskill? Albany? The Catskills? A silence filled the car because Zviman said, ‘No talking.’ Zviman put on the
satellite radio and tuned it to the alternative classics of the eighties. He even sang, very softly, under his breath, barely
audible. The Cars, Elvis Costello, and, God help us, Katrina and the Waves.

I did not trust this man in a good mood.

No one spoke for an hour at least, and, as we passed Newburgh I couldn’t contain myself further. ‘Where are our kids?’ I said.

‘At a safe place,’ Zviman said. ‘I’ll take you there and then you may have this car to go where you please. Considering you
killed a man in the park I wouldn’t return to New York for a while. I’m
sure Ms Jones would like to get home to Las Vegas.’ He sounded so calm, so reasonable. I felt like I was going to jump out
of my skin.

‘You’re probably thinking, Sam, that you’re surprised we struck you a deal.’

‘Very.’ I wasn’t thinking he wanted to let me out alive. Now I was going to have to fight my way out, I felt sure, and I didn’t
know how I was going to do that while holding a baby. The obvious answer was Leonie. Have her run to safety with the kids,
if at all possible, and leave me to deal with Zviman.

‘I don’t think the CIA will be offering you a job again,’ Zviman said. ‘Now that you killed their prize asset. Of course,
they didn’t see you kill him, but you’ll be the prime suspect. Unless you could convince them that you weren’t trying to kill
him but protect him from a danger within the CIA.’

‘I should update my resume,’ I said. ‘And I’m not that good an actor to pull off that lie.’

‘In fact, with Jack Ming dead, they’ll be hunting for you. If you gave them someone else as Ming’s killer, well, you might
be in the clear with them. Nice for you, that would be, for you and your son.’ His voice was like a knife.

‘Why are you so concerned about what happens to me?’

‘We made a deal and I intend to stick to it. What, you think I’m going to kill you?’

‘I think you’re going to try.’

‘That would undo all that’s been done.’

‘Done?’

‘To make you who you are, Sam,’ Zviman said. ‘You’ve been a long-term project for us. You could still be of value to us. We’ve
watched you for years now. We’ve been interested in you for a long time.’

I stared at him. He didn’t look at me. He almost smiled as he drove. How could I have been a long-term project for a bunch
of criminals? ‘That … that doesn’t even make sense,’ I said.

‘Of course it does,’ he said. ‘We think long term. You’ve been thinking in terms of hours, days, weeks: how do I find my wife,
how do I get my son back? Small problems. We think in terms of years. You have gone from being a problem for us to becoming
useful to us. We were willing to sacrifice your usefulness because you could kill Ming for us, and he was a tremendous threat.
But no one can
prove
that you killed him. You could still serve a purpose.’

I had a sudden, weird sense that I was a piece on a chess board, not the king, and some giant hand had flicked me around the
squares. ‘I have no interest in being useful to you. I want nothing to do with you. I am getting my child and then we are
done.’

‘I never had the pleasure of meeting your wife,’ he said. ‘But I think we all felt her loss.’

This is to make you snap, I thought. He wants to worm under your skin, get you off your game. Nothing but lies and distraction.
‘I’m not discussing my wife with you.’

‘You’re ready to quit the battlefield.’

I stared straight ahead.

‘You said, more than once, I think, when the Company kept you in their private prison and you slept on stone floors, and that
the world believed that you were guilty, that all you wanted was your old life back.’

‘My old life is gone.’

‘No it’s not. Not exactly,’ he said. ‘Now be quiet. We’ll have plenty to say when we get where we’re going.’

Leonie had wedged the cell phone in the calf-high boot she wore. She kept her eyes ahead, occasionally glancing out the window,
trying not to appear as though she were listening to the awkward conversation.

To Ray Brewster she texted: north on 87, past Kingston 5 min ago.

She turned off the phone and she slid it into her boot.

The two men in the front seat, locked in their discussion, locked into their anger and mistrust, did not notice.

Braun drove aggressively and fast, and closed the distance between himself and Zviman’s car to ten miles. He glanced at the
text message.

He was entirely sure of their destination. All stories, he thought, come back to their beginning, all circles must close.

Zviman opened his phone, as he had done every thirty minutes for the past two hours. He pressed a number. When Anna answered
he said, ‘Pericles. Yes, all is well.’ He clicked shut the phone.

My fist slammed against him hard, then I grabbed his head and pounded it against the steering wheel.

Leonie screamed, ‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’

The BMW veered across its lanes, narrowly missing a semi that laid on its horn like a stuttering war cry. It is very hard
to fight a man one-handed.

‘I know where we’re going,’ I yelled at her. ‘He can be our hostage to get the kids.’

Then she understood. Leonie snaked her arm around Zviman’s throat and levered back. He gagged and spat, arching in the seat.
I hit the brake with my foot and levered up the parking brake. The BMW howled and bucked but we stopped. I took my good hand
and pounded five blows into his sorry face. It felt good. He finally sagged, beaten, out.

‘Oh, God, oh, God,’ Leonie said. Panic jagged her voice.

‘Listen to me. I know where we’re going now. The company that was a front for the sisters, for the house in New Jersey. I
looked them up. They owned another retreat off this highway, about five more miles up. That’s where we’re going. And now we
can trade the kids for him.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ Leonie said. ‘Oh, God. What if you’re wrong?’

I hauled the unconscious Zviman into the back seat. ‘Drive,’ I told Leonie. I accessed the Associated Languages School website.
‘North about four miles, then turn onto Mountain Bridge Road.’

‘If we drive up into a bunch of execs learning Spanish, I’m going to kill you, Sam.’ Her voice was a ragged, broken shock.

‘I’ll kill myself,’ I said.

The building was a long, low affair, hidden in the dense growth of red cedars and sugar maples, with a curving gravel driveway
before it. It looked like a grand mansion, one perhaps left over from the Catskills’ Borscht Belt days, a shrunken resort.
A toy, ignored and misplaced in the heavy forest. The windows were boarded. The grass around the building needed cutting.
Abandoned, like the house in New Jersey. Or, if not abandoned, then not in use to help tourists conjugate their French verbs
or contract out to business employees who needed to master Spanish or Farsi in between shuffleboard and trout fishing.

‘What do we do?’ Leonie said as she pulled up to the shuttered house.

‘We trade him for the kids and we get the hell out of here.’

‘Sam … ’

‘We did what they wanted but we’re done playing by their rules,’ I said.

‘What about what he said … about you being some kind of project … ?’

‘Ignore him,’ I said.

No one emerged onto the porch.

I opened the car door, got out. Put both hands on Zviman’s head, one along the jaw, the other on the throat. ‘Honk the horn.’

Leonie hammered twice on the horn. It sliced through the hush of the woods.

A moment later the door opened. Anna Tremaine stepped out onto the porch. She wore a cream-colored T-shirt and green cargo
pants. She was pale and did not look quite so confident as she had a million years ago in Las Vegas.

She held a gun in her hand.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘We’re here to pick up our kids.’ My voice rose. I didn’t sound quite human.

‘So I see.’

‘Who else is inside, Anna?’

There were no other cars parked in the lot. She just stared at me.

I held Zviman up. ‘Answer me, or I break his neck.’

‘Let him go.’ Now she raised the gun. Toward Leonie.

‘No.’

‘I’ll shoot her.’

‘And I’ll snap his neck. Answer me. Who’s inside.’

‘No one.’ She could be lying. It’s what I would have said, if there was a full house of guards.

‘Okay, drop the gun.’

‘I don’t believe you can break his neck,’ she said. ‘With your arm in a cast.’

‘It’s all in the fingers and the biceps, baby, and those are working just fine.’ I strangled Zviman more than a little. He
obligingly purpled and gagged for me. I thought about what he’d tried to do to Mila, and what he’d done to Nelly, and it took
control not to crush the life out of him.

‘Okay, Sam, let’s talk.’

‘My friend already maimed the son of a bitch. I will be happy to finish him off.’

‘Please, Sam, let him go,’ Anna said. ‘Let’s all calm down and … ’

‘I am done negotiating with you!’ I screamed at her. I’m not sure I’d ever quite heard my voice sound this way. ‘This is what
is happening. Either you drop that gun right now, or the next sound you hear is his vertebrae snapping. This! Is the extent.
Of. Our. Talking!’

Then silence, the wind crying in the trees.

Anna’s gaze went to Zviman’s purpling face, and she dropped the gun. I doubted he would have done the same for her.

‘Leonie, go get it,’ I said.

Leonie hurried up to the porch. She took the gun, eased it away from Anna.

‘Okay, stay calm.’ Anna tried to smile at Leonie. ‘Leonie, I want you to know, I’ve taken good care of—’ and Leonie shot her,
in the heart. A curl of smoke, a flower of blood on Anna’s T-shirt, and then she fell wordlessly.

Leonie ran inside the house.

Damn it. I hammered a fist into Zviman’s face and dropped him to the gravel. I tore into the house after her. The house was
old, perhaps a grand country estate built back in the early 1900s. The entranceway was hardwoods, with a large staircase leading
up to a mezzanine on the second floor. Sheets covered most but not all of the furniture. Leonie ran, searching, through the
adjoining rooms: study, library, dining room, kitchen.

‘Leonie, come back here,’ I yelled at her. Hell, if Anna was lying, we could be gunned down. And she had the gun, not me.

‘Taylor!’ she screamed.

I lost her, then heard footsteps caroming up a flight of stairs I couldn’t see. I followed the noise through the kitchen.
A bottle was warming on a stove. I saw a formula box on the kitchen
island, the remains of a grown-up’s meal of steak, salad and French fries.

A couple of soiled bibs. A noise between grief and joy surged in my throat.

Beyond the main room of the kitchen was a servants’ staircase. She had already run up to the second floor.

‘Daniel!’ I screamed. Like he was going to answer. But my mind was shuttered or sharpened, I’m not sure which. On the second
floor I saw a hallway of rooms, one of them open.

I ran into the doorway. Leonie, standing at a crib, picking up a baby, holding the child close to her shoulder in a mother’s
embrace, nearly weeping in relief. I looked around the room.

There was only the one crib.

I bolted down the rest of the hallway, opening every door. Next was an empty bedroom, a woman’s clothes tossed on the foot
of the bed. No crib. Anna’s room.

The next was another room, men’s clothes littering the floor. Where Zviman had stayed.

The other rooms were empty.

‘No, no!’ I screamed. ‘Daniel!’

I ran back to the first room. Leonie stood there, holding the baby, cradling its blond hair against her shirt.

Blond hair. I remembered the weathered picture, handled with love. The smiling dark-haired girl. Taylor was a bigger baby,
and brown-haired.

‘Sam,’ Leonie said, and her voice turned into a broken sob. ‘Sam. I’m sorry.’

And she pointed the gun at me.

This was how Mila thought it might end: bound and handcuffed, riding in a bounty hunter’s car, to be delivered to her fate,
because Zviman wanted her alive.

Six had tried in the past three years, and six had died. Two had come closest, handcuffing her (which she respected: it was
much quicker than tying her with rope or even plastic cuffs) and binding her feet. The first of the two were ex-IRA, seized
her outside The Adrenaline Bar, the Round Table-owned drinking spot in London, in the hipster Hoxton neighborhood. Kenneth,
the manager of (now) Sam’s bar in London saw her grabbed, injected in the neck with a sedative, and forced into an Audi’s
trunk. Kenneth had caught up the kidnappers on the A5 and shot the driver through the car window. The car crashed and Kenneth
shot the other kidnapper, then politely carried Mila out of the trunk. She was grateful, of course, but humiliated to be saved.

The second time was barely three weeks ago, two Filipinos trying their luck. They had gotten her handcuffed in her apartment
but before they bound her feet she had, to put it bluntly, kicked and stomped the two of them to death. The unpleasantness
made for a gruesome evening, when all she’d been in the mood for was a nice Thai green curry for dinner, a cold bottle of
lager and watching
Emmerdale
on TV. But both times she’d had to have Kenneth slice the cuffs off her. Then, of course, she had to vanish and get an entirely
new apartment, under a different name, on the other side of London. Very inconvenient. It made her think.

Those were the last two attempts: word had spread among the shadowy vines that connected hired killers that she was very dangerous.
Kill four people who come after you and everyone recalculates the value of hunting you down.