Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Yes.’

She opened up her laptop. ‘And now what? We sit here and wait for him to show up and’ – she lowered her voice – ‘you shoot him dead in the street?’

‘No.’ I swallowed the last bit of sushi on my plate. It offered only sustenance, not pleasure. Waiting to kill someone makes you feel dead inside.

‘We’re only supposed to do what Anna told us,’ she said and I wondered what she would do if I picked up the chopstick, oiled with soy sauce and wasabi, and shoved it into her ear.

‘I have done both my job and a key part of your job so far,’ I said. ‘You are rapidly losing your right to a vote in this.’

‘Sam. Okay. You had resources I didn’t. But I found out about Jack Ming, something you didn’t know.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think he will come to see his mother.’

‘Why not?’

‘She blames him for his father’s death.’

I glanced at her. ‘How would you know?’

‘I built a network of names around Jack Ming,’ she said. ‘Yes, he went to NYU, so I did searches on people that were in his Facebook account before he canceled it. I wanted to expand our search, see how many links I could find, people where he might hide.’

I didn’t ask how she’d gotten this information; she’d worked her stealthy, smoky fingers into the right database or paid off the people who could. ‘And?’

‘And one of his friends wrote a blog post about Jack’s situation. Apparently his father died of a heart attack when he found out that Jack was wanted by the FBI for questioning for hacking copiers and stealing proprietary information from a number of law firms and software companies. He died… here. At Jack’s feet.’

‘His friend wrote about this?’ Honestly. People will say things on the internet now that they might once not have told their parents. A little secrecy is not a bad thing. I will confess I don’t get the whole need to Twitter and Facebook and share my every reaction to a TV show or to bad service at lunch or to post every news article I find remotely interesting. I’d spent five minutes looking at Twitter once and felt I’d wandered into a poker game where everyone immediately displayed their hands against the cool green of the felt. I suppose an ex-spy cannot get over his or her innate quiet, the need to keep thoughts and secrets close. But Jack Ming was a kid, and he’d left electronic breadcrumbs at the feet of his friends.

There is always a trace, she’d said, and now she’d found it.

‘His friend wrote about Jack’s mother.’ She opened the laptop, turned it toward me so I could read: I understand grief, I think, because my grandparents died when I was young, and my dog died last year. Death is part of life. But what I do not understand is blame. My friend Jack’s father died because he got a shock over something Jack is accused of doing, not anything proven. And even if Jack did do this, to blame him for killing his father? What kind of mother says that to her son? I am thankful for my mom right now.

Good Lord, I thought. What did we do before blogs? Would anyone have written this up and sent it into the newspaper’s letters’ section or stood on a tottery soapbox at the corner of the park and brayed out their thoughts about a private family matter while still somehow making it all about themselves? Jack must’ve confided in the friend after his father’s death.

I turned my gaze back onto Mrs Ming’s building doorway. The doorman stood there, watching the rain. ‘So our Jack and Mama Ming are not close.’

‘But he’s desperate. Truly desperate. And… ’

‘And what?’

‘If he’s turning himself into the CIA, then he’s planning to vanish. Maybe he wants his mother to go with him. Or maybe he’s coming here to say goodbye to her. A final goodbye.’

‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t want to know this about Jack Ming. I didn’t want to know him as, you know, a person. I wanted to know where he stood at a certain moment and where I could kill him without getting caught. I closed my eyes. Novem Soles was going to form me into a monster, sure as Dr Frankenstein stitching together the quilt of corpses’ castoffs and blasting wasted vein and muscle with electricity. I didn’t know what I would be when I arose from the laboratory table, except I hoped I’d be a father with his child back.

But I didn’t want to know about Jack Ming’s… problems. His problems were all going to go away very soon.

Jack Ming’s dad dying at his feet. It made me think of Danny. My brother, not my son.

My brother. He’d died in an awful, humiliating way, gone to Afghanistan as part of a relief team. He’d pushed past the boundaries of common sense in his drive to help people, ventured with a college friend into the scrubby hills beyond Kandahar, gotten grabbed. No one heard from him for three weeks and then the video flickered into monstrous life, viraled by YouTube: Danny my brother kneeling on a dried mud floor, surrounded by balaclaved thugs who made him spout nonsense in a voice so quavering it was hardly his own, then spoke their own sacrificial junk, then cut off his head while the camera ticked off every final second. Then they cut his friend’s throat.

You think murder splinters a family or brings it closer together? I don’t know; depends on how thick the glue has already been laid. But execution is a different kind of murder. When your brother is decapitated with an arm-sized knife because he went to help people, and anyone in the free world can see his final moments courtesy of the unthinking, unblinking internet, then it is your family’s worst nightmare made public, made entertainment, made eternal. You can never block the memory of it; the horror is just a few clicks away.

Would you believe people emailed me the link to the video? They did. I don’t know why they would, what kink of cruelty drove them, but they did.

‘Do you think he could turn to one of these old friends?’ I asked.

‘He’s still wanted for questioning by the FBI. So, he might not get a warm reception from a friend who doesn’t want to be made an accessory.’

‘Those charges will go away if he gets his meet with the CIA,’ I said. ‘It’ll be part of the surrender deal, guaranteed.’

‘But surely his own mother would be the least likely person to turn him in.’

‘True. She’s a career diplomat. She has a lot to lose if he resurfaces; he could be an embarrassment.’

‘So what? We sit here and wait and scarf California rolls all day like private eyes on surveillance? He could have already been here and gone.’ The desperation painted her voice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We go in and, if he’s there, well, that’s done, and if he’s not, we find out where he is.’

A limo slid up to the curb. A uniformed man with a strong build got out, spoke to the doorman.

A few moments later, Sandra Ming stepped outside.

‘Where’s the rental car?’ I said.

‘Around the corner, in a garage.’

‘I want you to follow that limo, I want to know where she’s going.’

Leonie slammed the laptop shut. Mrs Ming spoke with the driver; he appeared to be showing her some sort of ID. The doorman had taken a careful step back toward his usual perch. ‘It’ll be gone before I can catch up,’ Leonie said.

‘Just go, wheel around, she’ll still be here. I’ll make sure.’

‘I don’t know how to tail a car.’

‘Follow where it goes and don’t get caught. It’s for the children.’

‘Thanks.’ Leonie sprinted out of the sushi bar, the angry chef glaring at her like she was dodging the bill. I threw ample dollars at the wasabi bowl.

As I came out onto 59th, into the humid curtain of the day, the limo driver closed the rear passenger door behind Mrs Ming and ducked back behind the wheel. I had to time this as carefully as a shot. Get across the street without being hit by either a cab or a bicycle or another car; time it so I got a word with that driver.