Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘We’ll get her back. We’ll get them both back.’

‘Anna must get both kids to New York.’ Her voice was just a whisper. ‘If she sticks by the agreement. I’m wondering how she’s doing that so quickly with mine.’

‘Because they’re lying to us,’ I said quietly.

Her gaze snapped to mine.

‘They might give us our kids back, but they’re not going to want us anywhere close by after we… deal with the target,’ I said. ‘This phone call, this church pickup – it has to be a lie, Leonie. They don’t want us getting caught. You don’t linger in the area after a job. You create distance.’

She was silent. She tensed when I said the word ‘job’, as though the drowsing businesspeople and hung-over Vegas escapees around us would translate ‘job’ into ‘hit’.

‘You’re not used to violence,’ I said.

She didn’t look at me. ‘No.’ She rubbed at her face. She leaned close to me. I could smell breath mints on her mouth. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like much of a killer.’

I had killed. Never before my wife had been taken. But I had killed, multiple times, to save myself or save others since my life had been derailed by Novem Soles. I would like to say it weighed on me heavily, this human cost, but that would be a lie. They’d taken my wife, my child. They’d gotten in the way of me getting them back. They’d tried to kill me. Why should I feel guilty? The deaths were nothing I savored, and I never wanted to kill again. I dreamed about it sometimes, and I didn’t want to think that the experiences were rewiring my brain, like a soldier who sees the worst horrors in battle.

But this kid, this Jin Ming. He’d been grabbed by the CIA, clearly, in Amsterdam, forced to give them access to the machinists’ shop where the gunfight erupted. And now he was turning against Novem Soles. I ought to be applauding him, protecting him, picking his brain. Putting him into my own witness protection plan so he could tell me what lovely, dirty secrets he knew and then I could start slicing the core out of the so-called Nine Suns.

He and I could have talks. The Best. Talks. Ever.

Instead, I was going to kill him. I closed my eyes. He was, what, twenty-two, twenty-three? At the beginning of his years. The thought that someone barely out of his teens could be a mortal threat to an international criminal syndicate (that was my theory as to what Novem Soles was, fancy-ass Latin name aside – maybe one of them had read a branding book and wanted to sound more gothic, ancient or mysterious) interested me.

I didn’t need to think about him. Just kill him. Be a weapon. I could do that and I’d worry about the mental cost later. Or, maybe, not worry about it at all. But if I did that, what sort of father would I be for my son?

‘I’m not much of a killer,’ I said to Leonie. ‘But I will be.’

Flight 902, Las Vegas to New York

In first class we got a decent dinner: shrimp salad and steak medallions, a potato galette and a wannabe creme brulee.

‘So. It’s up to you to find our guy. Where do you start, beyond knowing he’s in New York City?’

‘If you don’t mind, I’ll keep some secrets to myself.’

‘I think we need to discuss our options if they betray us.’

‘If I lose Taylor, it’s over for me anyway. I’m not continuing to breathe, Sam. I’m not existing then.’

There was nothing more to say; the flight attendant stopped and asked us if we wanted coffee. We both declined. Leonie announced she would sleep the rest of the flight. I closed my eyes and thought about a plan of action.

One thing I did do: I surreptitiously snapped a picture of Leonie while she dozed. I thought, for some reason, that it might be valuable to have a photo of her. She was a woman with a lot of secrets, and I might need to know more about who she was.

We landed at LaGuardia late, delayed by dodging a goliath of an early summer storm raging over Kentucky and Ohio. We rented a car – no way I was trusting cabs and the subway during a man-hunt – and drove to a midtown Manhattan hotel, the Claiborne, where Leonie had already booked us rooms across the hall from each other. The rest of the hotel seemed ready to rouse, the city stirring awake, but I was already dead on my feet. My energy was gone because we had no clue where Jin Ming was.

‘Go sleep,’ Leonie said at our doors.

‘I can’t.’

‘I can’t have you hovering over me.’

‘How are you going to find him?’

She patted the laptop, raised the cell phone. ‘It’s what I do, bullet.’ She tried a smile but it was an awful, desperate thing and she knew it. ‘Sorry. Just trying to stay sane.’

‘Jin Ming vanished from Holland, no trace.’

‘There is always a trace,’ she said. ‘Always.’

New York City

Jack had a window seat on the flight from Brussels; no way he was going to fly from Amsterdam – Novem Soles would be watching, he thought, the train stations and the airports. Ricki drove him to Brussels and left him at the airport. He went into a bathroom stall and shut the door. Then he oiled and combed down his hair to look like his new passport picture. He stuck a thin, bulbous piece of plastic in each cheek, to subtly change the shape of his face. He put in the false teeth; they slid over his own teeth. This meant he could not eat during the flight but he didn’t care. He put on a pair of slightly tinted glasses. They were not to change his eye color but Ricki said that every bit that made him look less like himself, or hid him, helped. She’d almost cried as she slipped the glasses on his face.

He exited the stall and gave himself a short, quick glance in the mirror. He couldn’t stand and preen or adjust the implants. He still looked like Jack Ming but not exactly, and with any of the biometric scans at customs in the United States, if he was on a watch list, perhaps this would give him a cushion. He wore a white shirt and jeans and sneakers and looked anonymous.

He had no trouble in the Brussels airport. He tried not to watch everyone, for fear of looking paranoid, but he kept scanning faces, looking for another face looking back at him. He took his seat. An older lady sat next to him, immediately produced a thick novel with a swordsman and a dragon on the cover and opened it at the first page, almost defying him to try and make conversation with her. He sighed in relief. He cocooned himself with his iPod and wrapped himself in Beatles music. He closed his eyes then woke up with a start, one of the cheek implants almost half out of his mouth. I could have swallowed this. Not awesome if he choked on his own disguise in the middle of a transatlantic flight. He tongued the implant back into place and glanced at his traveling companion. She was lost in her own world, paying him no heed.

New York, shrouded in cloud, opened up beneath him and he stared down. Home. Never thought he’d see it again. Never thought he’d come back. But what choice did he have?

He walked through customs, the new burgundy passport identifying him as Philippe Lin, a Belgian national, remembered to breathe while the customs agent inspected it, scanned it, asked him his business in the country. He was here to visit family. She asked for the address where he would be staying; he gave her one provided by Ricki’s friend. She asked if he was traveling anywhere else other than New York. He said he was only visiting New York because no other city could compare. She looked hard at him, as though his affable tone were an affront to the seriousness of the moment. He thought: what the hell are you doing, trying to make a joke? His stomach twisted, dropped. She was a big-built, older lady who did not seem at all bored by her work. She glanced at her computer screen, glanced at him. He willed himself toward calm.