The Last Minute (6 page)

Behind him he heard the stairwell door open with a steely crank. As it did he stepped into another patient room, this one
holding two beds, both empty. He left the lights off. An IV pole stood on duty by each bed, a drawn curtain dangling between
them. He had no real place to hide. He pulled the curtain part-way between the beds, and ducked behind its cover, the IV pole
clanking into the wall behind him. Next to him was one of the adjustable wheeled tables for patients to use while lying in
bed.

He closed his hands around the cool steel of the pole. He heard the door open. Maybe a nurse coming to see why he was
trespassing in this room. He couldn’t see through the curtain.

He heard two footsteps and then silence.

The nurse wouldn’t just stand there, right? he asked himself. He was suddenly consumed by fear and certainty that this man
was here to kill him.

Jack pushed the patient table into the curtain.

The two bullets sang out, cut through the fabric, pounded into the wood. The impact was louder than the firing.

Jack moaned, in fear, without thinking that he was baiting a trap.

As the man stepped around the curtain, Jack swung the pole, like a baseball bat, and he caught the man’s face between the
bushy eyebrows and the tattered mouth.

‘Uggghhhh,’ the guy grunted.

Jack rocked his feet, swung again in the same vicious arc, hit again and again and then there was an oddly wet noise that
sounded … final. The guy collapsed onto the floor. Shuddered, shook, gasped. He looked at Jack with blind surprise. Then his
head fell back and a sagging shift downwards trembled through his body.

The man’s nose was a splintered mess. Jack had not known he had the strength; it was as if all the energy he’d stored in the
past few weeks roared out of him when he needed it. The man was very still. Jack knelt by him, dropping the pole with a clank
to the tiled floor. He tested for a pulse, found nothing but a warm and sudden silence in the man’s throat.

Bone shard, Jack thought. First blow broke the nose, second sent a bullet of bone into the brain.

He clapped his hands over his face in shock. He had killed a man. Killed him.

Because he was going to kill you
.

Jack picked up the gun and he stood. He footed the body under the adjustable bed. He picked up the gun and put it into the
pocket of his robe.

He stepped back out into the hallway. In the next room the old woman still slept. He went through her bureau and he found
ten euros and a mobile phone. He took it, feeling guilty about the theft, and he laughed because he didn’t feel guilty about
killing the man. He hurried out into the hallway and back down the stairwell. In a few minutes he was in his room, sitting
on the edge of the bed.

Who could he call?

Ricki. He could call her. They were still friends. He still kind of liked her even though she’d only really been his girlfriend
for five whole minutes after he arrived in Holland, after he’d stepped into the secret life he’d made for himself. And clearly
she cared about him, to have gone to so much trouble to find him. He cajoled her into coming and picking him up and bringing
him clothes to the hospital. The police had taken the clothes in which he had been shot as evidence, and they were stained
with blood anyway. Ricki agreed and said she’d be there within an hour. He told her to meet him at a coffee shop nearby that
he knew well.

When he got off the phone he lifted a pair of jeans from a room down the hall where a man lay zonked out on painkillers and
grabbed a rugby jersey from the man’s closet. He left, sneaking past the nurses, riding the elevator down, stepping out into
the cool quiet of the night. There was an old café down on the corner.

He walked out into the street.
They found out you’re still alive. They’re coming after you. You’ve got one weapon to fight back. If Nic was lying about that
notebook, you’re a dead man
.

We walked into The Last Minute, my bar near Bryant Park. The Last Minute’s a nice bar. Elegant, refined, oriented toward jazz.
The bar itself is exquisite Connemara marble. The mirror behind the bar is huge and ancient, a leftover from a New York establishment
from before the Civil War. We get a bit of tourist trade – any high-end bar in New York does once good reviews land on Yelp
or on the guide sites – but we get a lot of Midtown office people, bored wealthies, regulars who actually know what goes into
a proper Old-Fashioned or Sazerac. The post-work crowd had started to melt away. Eloise is at the piano, softly playing a
Thelonious Monk arrangement. She’s older than God but the sparks of jazz in her body are apparently going to keep her alive
forever. When I’d acquired the bar from Mila a few weeks ago, it had been called Bluecut, but I’d renamed it. The Last Minute
was my base of operations in searching for my son, and it reflected my sense of urgency and my determination that I would
never give up.

I nodded at the bartender and pointed at a stool for August. He sat. Then I went back behind the bar to make our own drinks,
which is a statement in itself. I knew I had to let go of some secrets right now to protect others.

August looked like what he is, a Minnesota farm boy of Swedish and German descent. He glanced around at the beautiful people,
at the elaborate décor, at the shimmer of lights. He’d met me here for a drink a few weeks before and, five minutes after
he left, Mila showed up and gave me ownership of The Last Minute, and of thirty other bars in cities around the world. I
hadn’t told him because so far he didn’t need to know. But as I moved to the other side of the expanse of Connemara marble,
he raised an eyebrow at me. ‘You bartending now?’

I gestured, open-handed, at the charm and the glory. ‘The Last Minute is mine.’

‘The bar is yours?’

‘Yeah.’

He glanced around at the finery and absorbed the news. ‘Well. I was going to order a beer. But if you own the joint, then
I’ll have a martini made with good gin.’

‘All right.’

I crafted his martini, with all the care you would take for your best friend having his first cocktail in your new bar.

I slid a Plymouth English Gin martini in front of August, two olives. Not the most expensive gin but really a strong choice
for a martini. August took a sip and nodded in approval. I poured another one for myself.

‘Let’s go sit in a booth,’ he said.

Old banquette-style leather booths lined one wall; they provided a modicum of quiet. August followed me to one.

‘Why have you bought a bar?’ he asked.

‘I need a livelihood to support my search for my son,’ I said. There was a lot more to the story, but he didn’t need to know
how I’d come into possession of The Last Minute and its thirty sisters around the world. Mila’s bosses – a group known as
the Round Table, who claimed to be a force for good in the shadows – had offered me the bars as a cover to travel the world,
to track down my son and to do the odd job for them that required my skills.

‘You could have come back to work at the Company.’

‘They don’t like to accuse you of treason and then backtrack by offering you gainful employment.’

My past with the CIA was a sore spot with him; he almost cringed as I spoke. To camouflage his embarrassment, he glanced around
the bar, drinking it in as carefully as he’d sipped his martini. Some spy; he couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. ‘Really
nice place, Sam.’

‘So now you know where to find me. Why are you following me?’

He twisted the toothpick holding the olives. ‘This woman. Mila. Who helped you fight Novem Soles in Amsterdam. I want to know
about her.’

‘There’s nothing to know.’

‘Sam, let’s not insult each other.’

Fine, I thought. I’d play. ‘You followed us today. Mila, too.’

‘Yes.’

I had had an early dinner in a favorite old haunt of mine; that must have been where August’s watchers had picked me up. Then
Mila and I had met in Central Park, then gone to the apartment address Bell gave us. She hadn’t been here at The Last Minute
in weeks. And she’d left with Bertrand. And with her cap and sunglasses and moving van uniform the followers must not have
spotted her leaving, else they would have followed her, not me.

‘Why?’

‘I want to know who she is.’

‘Stop following her and ask her.’

‘I’m not going to kidnap her off the street.’

‘Because the CIA isn’t supposed to operate on American soil. And yet here you are, tailing people. I guess I should be grateful
you haven’t set the FBI on me.’

August took an appreciative sip of the martini.

‘I don’t need to kidnap her when I think you’ll tell me what I want to know.’

I slid the olives off the stick with my mouth and dropped the toothpick next to my glass. ‘Mouth full,’ I said. ‘Can’t talk.’

‘You’ve really picked your side, haven’t you, Sam? You’ve picked this Mila.’

‘I can rely on her.’

‘I told you we would help you find your kid.’

‘I told you I would handle it myself.’

‘Because you think you still have enemies in the Special Projects branch.’

‘Yes. Who would use my kid against me.’

‘You’re paranoid.’

‘You get to be after you get framed for treason, August.’

He took another sip of his drink. ‘You’re trying to find the woman who took Daniel.’

‘No luck yet.’

‘I’m betting you’re close.’

‘August. Go home. Let me get my kid back.’

‘Have you made progress? Can we help you?’

‘I trust you. But if you tracked my kid and there’s another traitor inside the Company working for Novem Soles, then, well,
maybe my kid is dead. Right now they don’t know what I’m doing and I have to keep it that way. I get him back, that’s all
I care about. I’m not in the revenge business.’

‘We don’t even know what Novem Soles is,’ he said. ‘Some of the thinkers at the CIA are arguing that Novem Soles actually
stands for “nothing special”. They could just have been a few guys who decided to make some cash committing corporate espionage
and smuggling weapons. They got a gang of low-level thugs to tattoo themselves and talk like they were part of a big deal
and maybe it’s all just a grand illusion.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I think they’re big.’

‘I think you’re right. My hope is that Mila could tell me exactly what and who they are.’

‘If she knew that they’d all be dead.’

‘I’m glad Mila and I are on the same page, then. What were the two of you doing today up on the Upper West Side?’

‘Meals on Wheels.’

August tapped a finger against the base of the martini glass. ‘Look, I want Daniel back for you. More than anything, Sam.
But you can’t grab him back and just let these people roll on.’

‘I am going to do what’s best for my kid and me.’ I gestured toward his martini. ‘I want out, August. I want a normal life
again. They took it from me and I’m going to get it back.’

‘And, what, run a bar?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sam. You did us, and the nation, a good turn here in New York.’

‘You sound like an award plaque.’

He ignored my sarcasm. ‘I won’t ever forget it. But I’ve had to argue, repeatedly, not to pull you back in. I’ve protected
you because we’re friends. I did it because I know you want it this way. But Novem Soles is much, much bigger than you. I’m
running a task force in Special Projects on finding information about this network, what they want, who they are.’ He turned
the martini glass. ‘They’re something new. Different. I would expect a terrorist group to try to do a mass assassination.
But not a criminal group. What’s the profit in it for them? Who are they? Why are they doing what they’re doing? It makes
no obvious sense.’

‘Good luck.’

‘So. Let me help you. We’ll find them together.’

I let the piano music wash over me for a moment. ‘A few weeks ago I saw a redacted document from a Company file. It
claimed that I could be controlled through my son. Inside the Company, August, on your side of the fence. I’m not exactly
looking for help.’

He said, ‘Where did you get this document?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Well, I’ve certainly never seen it, Sam, and documents can be forged.’

‘This wasn’t. Because it’s true. I
can
be controlled through my son. Which is why I and I alone am going to get him back.’

‘You’re not alone. There is Mila. There’s no record of her in any government database we can find. Her name
is
Mila, right?’

‘So the only reason you are following me is to find her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re wasting your time. I don’t know where she is now or where she lives. I’m sorry. Would you like another martini
before you go?’

‘No, thank you. I saw her, I think, in the internet café in Amsterdam, when we grabbed that Chinese hacker that was tied to
Novem Soles. I showed her picture to some people in Europe who provide us with information now and then, at a cost.’

‘Well, if I wasn’t with her, I couldn’t say if you saw her or not.’ I risked a smile.

The scene was vivid in my head. I’d tried to infiltrate a criminal ring in Amsterdam, and the Chinese hacker was some poor
college kid they’d used to research my forged Canadian identity and had gotten caught by August. The hacker had died in a
shootout later that day where most of the ring died as well, and I’d barely escaped with my own life. Mila had been watching
me from the same internet café across the canal.

‘You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel,’ August said. ‘She does not have a nice reputation.’

I said nothing.

‘There’s a price on her head. Did you know that?’ August delivered this with the kind tone of a friend breaking bad news.
‘A cool million dollars for your Mila, preferably alive.’

The words hung in the air. I distantly heard the trill of piano jazz, the clink of the crystal, a drunken bray of laughter
from a guy who’d had a pint too many.

‘I mean, you can have someone killed rather cheaply these days – under ten thousand. There’s been a price deflation on hits,
what with the economic downturns. But a million on her head, Sam.’ August gave out an amused whistle. ‘That’s trouble. Some
very bad people are looking for her to collect that payday. I wonder what she did that’s worth a million dollars.’