Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

She paused. ‘He… He… ’

‘What?’

She trembled. ‘He left today. Before he left, he got dressed… and when he was putting on his shirt I saw he had an envelope taped to his back. He lied and said it was a bandage but I could see it wasn’t.’

‘How big?’

She made a rectangle with her hands. Maybe a bit smaller than a sheet of paper.

‘What was inside the envelope?’

She bit her lip. It made her look gentle, pretty. Oh, he thought. The hunger, it never went away. Ever.

‘Ricki. I’ll make sure your business is safe if you tell me. I’ll give you the equipment to grow it, young lady. Or I’ll destroy it. Your choice.’ He could tell by her hesitation that she knew. She knew. Maybe she’d looked at it when Jin Ming was in the shower, or while he slept.

‘It was a notebook,’ she said. ‘Like a journal. A red moleskin cover.’

‘And what was in this notebook?’

‘Photos. Emails. Screen captures. Spreadsheets. Printed out and pasted in. But I didn’t understand any of it, I didn’t. He said it was stuff Nic had stolen from people you were blackmailing.’

The Watcher’s mouth twitched. ‘Did he digitize the notebook?’

‘Not here. It would have taken a while.’

Her equipment would have to be taken or kept, analysed, checked to see what actions had been performed. Jin Ming might have left a trace to follow. The Watcher decided he had to get to New York, now.

‘Excuse me, please, Ricki.’ He opened up his phone, ordered the person who answered to come around to Ricki’s address. He said, ‘Hold on one moment’, cupped his hand over the receiver, and said, ‘Here’s what I can offer you, Ricki, and I’m sorry it’s not a better deal for you. My group is taking over your business. You will continue to run it, but we will take fifty per cent of your profits. Do well and we’ll help you take over other operations in Brussels, Antwerp, and you can run them. I’m going to have some people in here soon to go through your computers to make sure you’re telling me the truth. Then we’ll leave you alone.’

‘You can’t,’ she said, shock in her tone.

‘I certainly can. Now, if you decline or you betray us, what we’ll do is I’ll have one of my employees load you up with heroin, hand you over to a dealer in whores who will rape you and sell you, probably to a brothel in Nigeria or Morocco or South East Asia. You might have an easier time of it in Asia; a girl from Senegal would be considered more exotic, and would be treated better.’

She stared at him, speechless, jaw quivering.

He gestured to the phone. ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Get the hell out of here.’

He stood up and he slapped her, hard. She fell across a stack of counterfeit SpongeBob DVDs, scattering them to the floor.

‘Hostile takeover or heroin and whoring, bitch, decide. I don’t have all day.’

She looked up at him, her mouth trembling. ‘Hostile takeover.’

‘That’s the right decision. You’ll see I treat my employees very well. Unless you betray me. If that happens you’ll be dreaming up chances of suicide, because you’ll see death as the least of all evils.’

He opened his phone, made another call.

‘Bring someone who knows computers. I want to know what photos have been scanned here, what emails sent, even if they’ve deleted the photos or the emails. Keep Ricki off the systems.’ He listened. ‘No, man, you don’t get to rape her when you’re done. Behave, all right?’ He winked at Ricki. ‘She’s one of us now.’

He clicked off the phone. ‘I think Jin Ming will know when we find him that you must have squealed on him. Let him think you cared about him, until then. He calls you, you say nothing. You warn him, our deal changes.’ He patted the top of her head; she flinched.

He headed for Schipol airport to catch the next flight to New York.

A notebook. Of all the things to be afraid of. Of all the things that could destroy him.

Claiborne Hotel, Manhattan

I awoke with a start. I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on, on the bed, exhaustion piercing past the feverish high I’d had running for hours. I hate sleeping in my clothes; it always feels like the sleep has seeped into the fabric. I heard the knock on the door again, insistent. I’d put out the Do Not Disturb sign. I reached for my gun and then remembered I didn’t have one. There was so much paperwork involved in transporting a gun; I’d get one from my bar, The Last Minute, later.

‘Sam. It’s me.’ Leonie.

I glanced at the clock. Ten in the morning. I got to my feet and opened the door.

‘I want you to order coffee and breakfast for us, to your room. I don’t want the maid to see my room right now.’

‘Why not?’

Leonie rolled her eyes. ‘Do what I tell you. Coffee, two pots, French roast. Breakfast, make it big, I don’t know when we’ll eat again. Come get me when the food is here.’ She turned and went back into her room.

I obeyed her, ordering us a spread and two pots of coffee. I showered like a man running late, pulled on jeans and a fresh shirt that I could wear untucked. I checked my personal phone, where Mila would call me. There was no message. Maybe she’d keep her distance. There was no message on the phone Anna had given me.

The food arrived: two omelets, bacon, bagels, hash browns, juice, coffee. A New York room service breakfast only costs a fraction of the national debt. I signed the check and then knocked on her door.

‘Bring it here, it’s going to be a working meal,’ she said.

She held the door for me while I carried in the big trays.

The walls were covered with white sheets of paper, big ones, as though torn from a presentation pad, and scarred with heavy marker. The laptop lay open and it looked like she was in a chat room. An ashtray, full, sat next to it.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

‘I’d quit. When Taylor was born. Now I’ve started again and I hate it.’

Leonie sat down and began to shovel the cheese and mushroom omelet into her mouth. ‘I hate cold food,’ she said. She ate with concentration for a long minute while I drank a cup of coffee, which I needed like oxygen. ‘Okay. First things first. Jin Ming did not exist before he arrived at Delft.’

‘False identity.’ I raised an eyebrow, reached for my own plate of food.

‘His student transcripts are almost perfect.’

‘You broke into the university’s server?’

She shrugged. ‘Universities are easy to hack; they have to maintain large networks with lots of unsophisticated users – even at a technical university. Think of a college as one giant coffee shop, everyone with a laptop. It’s not hard.’ She ate some more, so fast I thought she wasn’t tasting the food. ‘All his documentation points to him being from Hong Kong. Makes it easy then to explain his excellent English. But I dug deeper. There is a Jin Ming from Hong Kong who shares his birthday on the university records; he died at the age of five, drowned in Repulse Bay.’

‘Our target hijacked an identity.’

‘Yes. And filled in the back details. He supposedly attended Hong Kong International School there, falsified transcripts. The actual prep school has no record of him.’

‘Did you break into their computer database?’

‘Oh, no. I called, pretending to be from New York University.’

I sat down. ‘Why would Jin Ming pretend to be from China so he could go to grad school? I mean, people fake IDs so they can clean money, so they can cross borders. Who the hell steals an identity so that he can go to graduate school in Holland? And pretends to be Chinese? What if he got deported? He’d totally be screwed.’

Leonie smiled. ‘So if you see someone with a Chinese passport, you don’t entertain the notion that he’s not Chinese. He can’t be who you’re looking for.’