Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

Ricki brought him wine and sat down next to him. Close to him. She smiled at him, warmly. Was surviving a shooting… was that sexy? He’d avoided most girls at Delft because he didn’t want to risk blowing his cover story. Girls always wanted to know about you, to delve into secrets. But Ricki had secrets of her own. She might not ask too many more questions.

They drank the wine and before he knew it, before he could analyse it, he’d taken her wine glass and set it on the coffee table and he was kissing her warm mouth. She kissed him back. He was alive. He’d forgotten how good it could feel. So he did all the things necessary for living; he kissed her, he laughed with her, they ate dinner, they made love. Then they lay in bed and watched a movie she’d stolen from a studio’s laptop, a film that wasn’t hitting theaters for another three weeks.

When she fell asleep and the movie was over, Jack began to think. He needed a way to figure out where Nic would hide his most potent and powerful secret of all, and he would have to start by breaking into Nic’s house tomorrow morning.

Las Vegas

I hit the ground wrong.

I rolled too sharply, and felt a pull in my shoulder. I stopped and the early morning desert sky loomed above me. Back in my London days I ran parkour – extreme running, where you vault up walls and use handholds and drop from heights without breaking bones (hopefully). It had been my release from the tension of work, exploring abandoned spaces, turning walls into roads, using precision to power through a space in a more efficient way. But I was out of practice; when your child is missing you don’t really want to take the time for exercise. I’d arrived around midnight Las Vegas time last night, and couldn’t sleep, too wound with excitement and tension. Today was a waiting game, with the rest of the day to kill before Anna Tremaine arrived for our meeting. So I’d gotten up early to try my luck against gravity. It was 5 a.m. and the quietest hour in Vegas, and no one around to see me run.

I’d decided to run through an unfinished building not far from my bar. The last thing I needed to do before capturing Anna – and I had every intention of taking her prisoner – was to hurt myself so I wouldn’t be at peak condition.

But the parkour helped my head. When I had to plan a run, a vault, a leap that I could barely make, only then I didn’t think of Daniel. Then I didn’t think of Lucy. Distraction is a sure way to break a leg or an arm. I got up, dusted off my butt. Looked at the wall before me, five feet high; beyond its rim was air.

I was tired of the walls around me, the false ones in the shapes of threats and violence. I wanted my son back. That was the only wall to conquer. I ran at the wall, did a saut de chat (jump of the cat). I went head first, my hands landed on the wall’s top surface. My legs powered past my arms as I flew from the wall. I landed fair and kept running.

I hadn’t had a clean run since the bombing, when my wife was taken from me before my eyes in a London street and I did a parkour run through a remodeled building, bomb-damaged scaffolding collapsing around me, running like I never had before to keep her in my sight, to not lose her.

But, of course, I did lose her, and in a worse way than if she had been kidnapped and killed.

I vaulted up a narrow staircase in the unfinished motel, bouncing off the walls, feeling the sweat explode from my skin. Burning off the too many drinks of the middle of the night, the worry about Daniel, the stress over whether I might be arrested or grabbed by August’s team to force me to tell them more about Mila and the Round Table.

I reached the roof and the desert early morning sun shone on me. Las Vegas, even at its edges, is never entirely hushed. I wished there were neighboring roofs. I used to run the council housing projects in London, and on a roof I felt like I had wings. I ran in a circle here, staying warm, building up my power, stopping only to study the balconies jutting off the side of the building, wondering if I could navigate the seven stories in a series of controlled jumps and drops from balcony to balcony. Who needs stairs?

Dropping from balcony to balcony might attract attention; the police are rarely parkour fans. I studied the line of movement it would take to do the balcony drops. Part of my mind said too risky, but another part wanted to feel like I’d pushed myself, like I was testing myself for the final stretch of confronting Anna Tremaine and getting my son back. I wanted to be sure I still had my nerve, my daring.

Drop, roll, vault, drop again, roll. I played the run in my head.

I dropped down to the first balcony and from the edge of my eye I saw the car on the facing road brake to a halt.

I should have checked first. I’d needed to be sure that I didn’t have a witness, someone who might call 9-1-1 on the crazy guy doing the balcony surfing. I stood up from the balcony.

The road near the unfinished motel was empty. Except for the one car, stopped at a light at a deserted intersection.

Okay, I thought, not me, it stopped for a light.

A green light. I could see the double glint of binoculars past the window.

I dropped back out of sight.

Waited. I heard the purr of the car’s engine moving. I glanced over the edge. I could see the driver below, a sleeve of purple jacket, a snug knit hat pulled tight over the head.

The car sped away.

Maybe he just stopped because he saw you jump. That’s it. Yes, that’s all.

But the run was ruined for me. I dropped down the rest of the balconies and ran back to my car.

Mila would be here this afternoon, and then Anna Tremaine. And, by tonight, I hoped, I would have my son back.

Amsterdam

The doorknob to Nic’s apartment turned under his hand. Unlocked. But Jack stood and knocked for the fourth time, his heart hammering in his chest. If Nic had a woman or a roommate still living here, that person was also likely connected to Novem Soles. But he had to know. And he couldn’t wait. The police were looking for him. The dead man had been discovered at the hospital. The papers carried a picture of both Jack’s face and one of the man he’d killed. The online news site had the most up-to-date information, and by noon Amsterdam time the police had released the man’s identity: a Czech immigrant named Davel, who had an arrest record a meter long, mostly as a rented enforcer for eastern Europeans who were muscling into illegal activities in the West.

A hired thug, sent to kill Jack, and he’d ruined Jack’s plan to slip out of sight.

Jack remembered Hollywood blockbusters about a man on the run. Being on the run could look like a bit of a lark. You could always outpace and outthink the pursuers. It was not fun. Jack was sick with the thought that even walking on the street he would be seen, noticed, made for the man on the front page of the paper.

He pushed the door open and called out: ‘Hello?’

No answer. The apartment was small and not tidy. Old newspapers sat stacked, unread, on a coffee table. He could smell spilled lager. A muted television played in the corner, offering news of the world, ignored.

He had the gun he’d taken from his assassin in his pocket.

He stepped down the hallway to where a door was half closed and inside the room lay an old woman. She slept, a vodka bottle clasped loosely in her hands. Her pose could have been a poster highlighting the blight of alcohol. He glanced at the label: very cheap vodka, the kind the university kids with no money drank, and the room smelled as though she didn’t invest much in soap, either. She looked like a female, fragmented version of Nic – strands of red in the graying hair, short, stocky, a fleshy mouth.