Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Leonie, it’s okay.’ I had killed and I was a father. What she was talking about wasn’t the same. Or was it? Yeah, I was going to be a cold-blooded killer by tomorrow. All so I could be a father. What a screwed-up world.

She moved a lock of her auburn hair out of her face. She came to the bed. She put her fingertips on the side of my face and inspected the bruising. ‘You have little cuts here from the rock.’

‘They’ll heal.’

She didn’t take her hands from my face.

‘You have to kill Jack, Sam. You can’t feel sorry for him. You can’t feel emotion for him. You just have to kill him. It will be… easy.’

Easy because she didn’t have to claim a human life. I closed my eyes. Jack, in the pictures of him in his room. Arms around his thin shoulders, his protective college buddies looking out for the likable geek. The books he’d loved, the gap-toothed child smiling from the photos.

I needed him to be a faceless stranger but his mother had died holding my hand.

‘I’m full of crap,’ Leonie said. ‘It’s never easy, is it?’

She moved her hand from my cheek to my forehead, caught her fingers in my hair.

What? I thought. I’m just so clever.

‘You must have really loved your wife.’

It was a strange observation to make. I opened my eyes. ‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

‘Anna told me that you tried to find your wife… her way of saying you were a decent man. Anna didn’t want me to be scared of working with you.’

Scared? I was supposed to be the good guy. Raised by globetrotting Christian relief agency do-gooders, the nice boy who went to Harvard and stayed on track, the smart brother who didn’t go to Afghanistan and get himself and his best friend killed, the boy who became a man in the CIA, fueled by revenge but tempered (I hoped) by fairness. And now what was I? Someone who’d been accused of being a traitor because I’d married the wrong woman (an actual, technical traitor) and had dodged the CIA and now was in an awful limbo of untrustworthiness as far as that fine agency was concerned.

Death is a weird thing. The death for the driver was egregiously bad: being impaled is never anyone’s exit of choice. And for Mrs Ming, she had died with an awful uncertainty clouding her mind and corroding her last moments. Leonie and I had nearly died tonight. Death makes us thirst for life and all its basics: a comforting meal, the breeze of our own breath in our lungs, the warm press of human flesh.

Leonie leaned down and she kissed my bruised lips.

No woman had kissed me since Lucy. I froze for a moment. This was crossing a line I’d seen from the corner of my eye, this was knowing Lucy was gone and was never, ever coming back and even if she did come back that I wouldn’t want her back. I felt myself… unfreeze.

My whole face hurt but I pressed my lips to hers in response. The kiss didn’t accelerate, it grew slower. More thoughtful. She nibbled at my lower lip.

‘Sam,’ she said very quietly.

‘Yes.’

‘Afterwards, will we be cool?’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t exactly know what cool meant but I wasn’t going to say no.

She started to kiss me again. With heat. It didn’t matter that my face ached. I wanted her with a sudden, fierce certainty. I had not been with many women before Lucy. The idea that every spy is a womanizer is a patent falsehood. You are usually keeping people at arm’s length. I never had time and I didn’t now but that did not seem to matter. Her kisses were quick and darting and urgent. Her tongue, her fingertips were everywhere. I’m not even sure we got all our clothes off and then I joined to her, Leonie groaning against me, a low, throaty growl, her face close to mine.

After a delicious while, she shuddered, her breath warm against my bruised eye, looking deep into my face as though surveying curious terrain. Then she laid her face on my chest. I gasped in release a minute or two later, her urging me on with cooing sounds. Her body felt lush and warm and smooth.

It was good but it was more comfort than passion. We stripped off the rest of our clothes and clutched at each other. Neither of us wanted to talk. We just wanted to be.

‘Promise me,’ she said, lying curled next to me. ‘Promise me we’ll get our kids back.’

‘I promise,’ I said. What else could I say?

I just had to make it true. That promise bound us together. That promise would change everything.

Hotel Esper, Williamsburg

We slept late, longer than we should have. Normally I can’t sleep late in New York because the rising noise of the traffic is an automatic alarm clock. When I woke up Leonie was showered and dressed and tapping at her laptop. ‘No intrusions at the building other than those at the security guard’s regularly appointed rounds.’ She looked up at me and gave me a wan smile.

What did I do? Kiss her, nuzzle her, pretend last night didn’t happen? My marriage with Lucy – full of deception and lies and my own blindness – convinced me that I suck at relationships and it wasn’t like we were going to have a long-term one. We would get our kids and part ways and never see each other again, except in our memories about the worst few days of our lives.

The newspaper websites in New York and New Jersey carried no mention of two bodies discovered at the abandoned Associated Languages School in Morris County.

‘I’ll go get us some breakfast,’ I said. Leonie made the noise one makes when one is absorbed in a computer screen. Again, like Lucy.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought about what you said last night,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find out who that driver was.’

‘He doesn’t matter any more.’

‘You’re not working alone,’ she said. ‘Why presume that he is? We don’t know how much of a head start we have on finding Jack. We may have none. And I’m not going to sit here and fret and wait and do nothing while waiting for Jack to show up.’

I walked to a diner on the corner and got breakfast for us to go: mushroom and spinach omelets, hash browns, fruit, bacon, coffee, orange juice. You eat when you can because you never know when you might get your next meal on days like today.

When I came back we ate. I tried to make conversation.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

She seemed to measure her answer by staring into her Styrofoam coffee cup.

‘I know your real name isn’t Leonie, that you live under a false name.’

‘Trust me, it’s better you not know much about me. I am infinitely boring.’

‘I know that’s not true,’ I said with a smile.

She smiled back, just for a moment. ‘You, where are you from?’

‘All over. My parents worked for a relief agency. My mom’s a pediatric surgeon, my dad’s an administrator. I lived in over twenty different countries before I was eighteen.’ I finished my coffee. ‘If I don’t make it, and you get my son back from Anna, you can take him to my parents. They live in New Orleans. Alexander and Simone Capra. They’re in the phone book.’

‘Are you close to them?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Why?’

‘My brother died and it ruined their hearts. They either want to take over my life entirely or shut me out completely. Him dying made them a little crazy.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He went to Afghanistan, to do relief work like they’d done for years, and he and his best friend from college, they got captured by the Taliban. Their throats were cut in a propaganda video.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Leonie said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ It was about the best thing she could say. Really, it’s so horrible, it shocks people. You cannot imagine what it is like to see your brother die, helplessly. To see his friend die. Then to see them discussed on every news channel, as though they are just names to learn, Danny Capra, Zalmay Qureshi, not people, just distant unfortunates, just names. ‘That was when I joined the CIA.’