Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Nothing he did is your fault,’ Jack said. ‘Trust me on this one.’

She heaved a deep sigh and it seemed to take an effort to tear the words out of her chest. ‘I can take you there.’ She got up and went to the kitchen drawer. She pulled it free and turned it over. Under it was a key, taped into place. ‘This is it,’ she said. ‘This is the only one we’ve got.’

Jack was afraid to take the bus or the train with his face in the day’s papers so he’d borrowed Ricki’s little car.

‘He was such a smart boy. Like his father. Nic was always good at math, I was terrible at numbers. He got fired from his computer jobs, though. He was smarter than his bosses, they didn’t like him.’

Jack didn’t respond to this hollow praise. He turned into a parking lot down from a series of apartment complexes. The neighborhood was bad, and graffiti in a half-dozen languages marred the walls. Jack felt sick. Nic traded filth. Jack didn’t want to be here. If he’d known this about Nic he never would have worked with him. But what was done was done, and so now he had to see this through.

The address was an apartment in a section of De Pijp that retained the original gritty feel of the neighborhood, untouched by the gentrification that had pervaded this part of Amsterdam in recent years. The halls were clean, but they smelled of cigarette smoke and a heavy, delicious scent of Turkish food cooking. Jack and Mrs ten Boom walked up the stairs and found the door. Jack slid the key in and unlocked it and stepped inside, Mrs ten Boom following him, a slight humming noise coming from her throat.

She was afraid of what they might see here.

Jack did a quick survey of the small, cluttered apartment. In the kitchen were bottles of whisky. And cans of soda and bags of candy. Lures? Or bribes? The apartment made his skin itch with distaste.

He poured Mrs ten Boom a generous shot of whisky and turned on the TV to distract her. It was hooked up to a DVD player, and a children’s show was already loaded, bright colored dancing flowers and music. Jack thought he would vomit. He quickly switched the television to a news network.

‘Here, Mrs ten Boom, have a seat.’ Best if he searched alone, he thought.

Jack began a methodical search of the apartment. He started in the bedroom, going through every lining of clothing, every container in the closet, every box under the bed. Nic had weapons hidden in this place: a 9mm Glock, a Beretta pistol, a hunting knife with a wicked looking edge. Jack put those in a separate box.

He tore apart the mattress, dismantled the bed, pulled the headboard free. In the bedroom closet was a set of expensive camera gear. He searched through the equipment bags. Nothing. He tore up the carpet. Nothing.

A bubble of panic rose in his chest.

He finished in the bedroom. He went into the bathroom, searched every inch. He found a thousand euros hidden in a large plastic aspirin bottle. He went and pushed the cash into Mrs ten Boom’s hands; she stared at it in surprise, then put it in her pocket.

He went into the kitchen. There wasn’t much food inside the refrigerator: bottles of beer, sandwich meat, cheese furred with mold, jar of mustard. He closed the door on the rising smell. Then he pulled the refrigerator out from the wall. A layer of dust and grit lay on the floor. He began to search the cabinets and the drawers, removing dish towels, boxes of sugary cereal, bottles of hard liquor. Nothing. He pulled up the tatty lining paper to see if anything was hidden underneath. Zero luck. When the cabinets were empty he inspected them, tapping on them.

The top cabinet sounded different.

He tapped again. Then he stepped down and found a knife and worked it against the corner of the wood.

It gave slightly. He stuck the knife in and the wood folded back; there was a hidden hinge.

Wedged in the space was a red book, large, with a moleskin cover and an elastic band to keep it closed.

He pulled the red notebook free. He sat down on the kitchen floor and flipped through the pages. In the den he could hear Mrs ten Boom dribbling more whisky into her glass, moaning, a soft keening of grief.

The first few pages were numbers. Just numbers, in two columns. Maybe a code? Or maybe passwords? Or maybe account numbers. They were written in a neat, spare hand, as though they had been carefully copied.

He flipped to where the columns of numbers stopped.

Next page was a photo. A lean whippet of a man he’d never seen before, older, Caucasian, in a gray suit, walking with another man and a woman. The woman was Asian, striking, in her twenties. The other man was tall, heavy-set, black, also in a fine looking suit, scowling. Behind them was a rather grand house, with a huge porch and columns, with a curving driveway in its front.

He had no idea who these people were. Were these three of the Nine Suns? He realized he didn’t know if Nine Suns referred to nine specific people, or if it were simply a dumb code name. Written below the picture, in the same precise handwriting, First Day at The Nursery, 2001.

The Nursery. But there were no children in the picture.

He flipped through the rest of the book. It seemed that Nic had printed out an image from the computer screen capture and just taped it into the book. The red notebook was fat with paper. He studied. Photos of people: sometimes what appeared to be family photos, or people in meetings, talking together, in a range of settings: street plazas, sidewalks, office buildings. He did not recognize any of the faces.

Next were printouts of what appeared to be emails and transcriptions of phone conversations: ones where secret, illegal deals were struck between competitive companies, where bribes were subtly offered, where threats were made. The email addresses included government offices in the US, across Europe, and in Japan and Brazil, across Africa. And some of the world’s most powerful corporations. It was like a jigsaw of high-powered, white-collar crime: many pieces, and Jack couldn’t see how they all fit together.

Then a series of photos that looked like passport pictures, a dozen people, and in the top left of each photo a small notation: eliminated, and a date.

People that Novem Soles had killed? He flipped through the photos: he didn’t know who any of the people were. There were no identifiers.

Spreadsheets, partial, with items bought and prices paid: office rental in London, purchase of C-4 for London bomb, bribes to police inspector in Oslo. Jack’s stomach churned.

This is what his hidden programs had plucked for Nic: financial information that could gut or elevate markets, corporate secrets, a money trail of death, leverage for blackmail. If this was how Novem Soles was going to control people in key positions, and these were the people they used as levers, then one could deduce what their intentions and their targets were, and what their next major plot would be.

He read through the mass of stolen gems but no pattern formed. Maybe this was simply a way to control people in powerful positions who had troublesome secrets and could be manipulated. Other pages were filled with code, with more numbers that meant nothing to him.

But here was his shield; here was his sword. If he could not make full sense of it then he knew who could.

He found a landline phone in the apartment. He picked it up and was relieved to hear a dial tone. It hadn’t yet been disconnected. He unplugged the phone and plugged its cord into the MacBook Pro that Ricki had loaned him. He activated a cheap, throwaway dial-up account. Getting through to the CIA would not be easy. He would have to write a vivid note that would seize their attention, past all the cranks and weirdos who saw a conspiracy in every shadow and emailed their theories to the Agency. He needed to jump to the front of the line of incoming emails. On the CIA’s website he found a standard email form for people to share information or comments with the Agency.