Jeff Abbott: The Last Minute

‘So have him killed.’ The Banker gave a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘I can assure you, if there is a surfeit of anything in the world, it’s Chinese grad students.’

‘I will. But why I’ve told you all this is because it’s all part of a bigger picture. We have shaped Sam Capra, over the years, like he was made of clay. And I don’t intend to let that wheel stop spinning until he is molded in just the way we need. The time has come. I have thought of a way in which Mr Capra can be invaluable to us.’

‘Because we have his child,’ the Banker said. ‘You just got a new pawn on your chessboard, darling.’ She actually smiled at him.

He did not like her changing his metaphor. ‘You have to seize what advantages you can,’ the Watcher said. He felt the tension in his chest begin to loosen. At any moment any of the others would have been in their rights to call a vote on his life. They hadn’t.

‘The CIA will never trust him while we have his child. Ever,’ the General said.

‘Oh, I know. I intend to take full advantage of that. It’s not like there’s a surplus of highly trained CIA operatives on the market. And most of them would never consider working for us.’

‘But he will,’ the Banker said.

The Watcher nodded. ‘Yes. He will.’ He was going to get to live another day, he decided.

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The woman who was not a nurse but was dressed like one entered the hospital shortly after 11 p.m. Amsterdam time, while a group met and talked in the Bahamas and Sam Capra got the best lead yet on his son. The woman had been most careful to forge her credentials with care; she had stolen a nurse’s uniform earlier in the day from the hospital laundry; she’d had to settle for buying shoes that looked good enough to pass. The real trick was getting the passcard for the secure floor where her target slept. That had taken time, to pierce the hospital’s security provider database, to imprint a card with the necessary code, to break into the police department’s voicemail system and finally find a message that told her which room held Jin Ming. But she had done it.

And when she saw him, she was going to kill him.

Jack Ming was playing the Quiet Game, the one where you tried to see how long you could go without speaking. He was going on three weeks now, three weeks of such careful, cultivated silence that he wondered if his voice would still work. He lay in the hospital bed, the sheets pulled up close to him like a damaged cocoon. His throat bore the raw scar from where a bullet had furrowed across skin and muscle, the giant bruise on his temple from where he’d fallen against a piece of machinery. The injuries had kept him in a coma for nearly two weeks. The doctors and the nurses and the police investigators all called him Jin Ming, which wasn’t his real name, and he did not correct their mistake.

Keeping quiet became an exercise – like writing a program with the least possible lines of code, or breaking into a database in the fewest, most elegant steps. How long could you play the Quiet Game? His father and mother had made him do it, when he was a child and playing loudly or asking one of his endless questions about why was the sky blue or why did they fight so much or why couldn’t he buy a toy he wanted, and they would flash angry eyes at him, his father looking up from one of the books he always was reading, his mother from her desk where she seemed to live. Be quiet, Jack. You’re bothering me. Let’s play a game. See how long you can be quiet. But it was never a game; they were never quiet. A proper Quiet Game involved a stare down. This was simply a way for his parents to put him on a shelf.

So he stayed quiet.

He had woken up, sure that he must be dead. A bullet had scored along the flesh of his throat; another centimeter and he would have bled out in moments, his carotid artery emptying on the cool concrete floor of the smugglers’ den near the Rotterdam port. But the artery went untouched. Three days after he woke up the police moved him from Rotterdam to a hospital in Amsterdam. He slept but it was strange: when he was wheeled inside they put a sheet over him. Like he was a secret they wanted to keep. He had his own room, he didn’t have to share. He wondered what this meant; he wanted to ask for a computer, but he didn’t want to speak. Not talking was, weirdly, very liberating. He didn’t have to tell the truth, he didn’t have to lie. After all these months he did not have to keep pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

At night he dreamed of the red notebook. Nic, drunk, had told him: ‘The people we work for would kill us if they knew I had all their secrets. All bound up. That’s my insurance policy. The red notebook.’

‘If it’s a secret, why tell me? You’re drunk.’ And foolish, Jack thought, but there was no point in stating the obvious.

‘Because if something happens to me, I want them to suffer,’ Nic had said in a beery slur. ‘The red notebook. You find it at my place, hidden. You’re smart enough to find it. It will bring the Nine Suns down.’

The Nine Suns. Nic invoked them like they were cartoon boogeymen. Jack didn’t do an eye roll. No one wants to kill you, Nic, Jack had said. Stop being so dramatic.

But in the machinists’ shop, with the smugglers working for Nine Suns in front of him, and the CIA behind him, he’d seen Nic lying dead on the floor, before all the gunfire erupted.

If he had to protect himself, he needed to find Nic’s red notebook. Which was slightly difficult to do from a hospital bed.

Earlier that day they’d sent a new police inspector; as if a variety of interrogators would suddenly get Jack to speak. ‘The doctor says that you should be able to talk,’ the police inspector said. His name was Van Biezen and he sat at Jack’s bedside and he watched Jack Ming watching him. He held a notebook in his lap and Jack could see the words on the paper: Jin Ming. Graduate student in computer science at Technical University of Delft. Found shot near bodies of known criminals, including hacker Nic ten Boom. Refuses to speak. No medical reason for not talking.

The writing on the inspector’s notebook looked as exact as a computer font. The precision scared him. This was a man like his own father, a man who was going to ferret out truths.

Jack stared at the policeman.

‘I understand the wound in your throat was fortunately rather shallow. Your vocal cords are not damaged, Mr Jin.’

Jack didn’t speak.

‘We need to know your connection to the dead men in the machinists’ shop. Nic ten Boom and the Pauder twins.’

Jack stayed quiet.

‘I know you’ve been told ten Boom is a known computer con artist. Did you know he was also a suspected internet pornographer?’ Van Biezen let the next two words detonate, a soft bomb in the quiet hum of the room. ‘Child pornographer.’

Bile inched into the back of Jack’s throat. This was new. He hadn’t known that about Nic. It was a most unpleasant surprise. He closed his eyes and he tried not to shiver. When he opened them Van Biezen still sat across from him.

‘He specialized in creating custom videos. You want a certain kind of child doing a certain act? He could deliver.’

Jack gritted his teeth. Closed his eyes. No, no, no. He had intended on complete silence but now a sickened moan rose in his throat, like a bubble loosened in a bottle. The first real noise he’d made in weeks.

‘Our informants say Nic ten Boom had a rather global clientele. What can you tell me about them?’