Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Okay. Part of the info you can turn over to me: does any of it include anything on his kid?’

A long hesitation. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’ His voice went to a low whisper. ‘How do I know you’re not the one compromising me, selling me out?’

‘Well, you don’t. You called me.’

Silence again. ‘Sam Capra said my mom’s dead.’

August digested this. ‘Then it’s true. He wouldn’t lie about it. I’m sorry, Jack.’

‘He said her body could be found at the only house on River Run Road in Morris County. Will you go get my mom’s body, please?’ Jagged breathing now.

‘Yes, of course,’ August said. ‘You come in, now, though, let us protect you.’

‘If he’s telling me the truth about my mom, maybe I’ll tell him what this notebook says about his kid, once you have him in custody. I’ll call you back later.’

Jack Ming hung up.

August checked the address, in rural New Jersey, on a satellite map program. A large house, on acreage, with a good-sized pond. He scoured the database for an owner.

Associated Languages School.

He stood. He should tell Braun, pull Griffith down, get a team together.

You’ve been compromised.

But someone in this office was a leak. Maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone. He sat down, though, and entered in a report on what he had found so far. He passworded it and secured it on the private Special Projects network.

Then he looked up. Braun stood in his doorway. Not holding his collection of cell phones, not pleading Special Projects’ case.

‘We need to talk. My office. Now.’

Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan

‘Do you know what they called me in the old days, August?’ Ricardo Braun asked.

‘No, sir.’ August could hardly get the words out.

‘Mr Ideas. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was willing to try what was never tried before inside the Company. Do you know how hard it is to innovate inside a large bureaucracy?’

‘It’s difficult.’ He wondered where this was leading.

‘Special Projects was my idea. I tested many ideas for ways for the Company to fulfill its duty, do its work, the most important work in this nation.’ Braun paused. ‘Not every idea is a success, of course, but you must have a willingness to try, to fail, and to learn from that failure.’

Maybe, August thought, this was a talk about redemption.

‘I failed today, sir,’ August said.

‘You did. And I’ve been trying to come up with an idea or an innovation that will save you, Mr Holdwine, and I am failing.’ Braun cleared his throat. ‘I want to be sure I understand the unfolding of events. You came into a rendezvous site to meet possibly the most important informant we could get on Novem Soles and you failed to secure it. You saw a former officer on the site, one who you knew could be under the control of a hostile group, and you did not secure him.’

‘He appeared to be unarmed, sir. He had clearly been in a fight.’

‘Appeared. He beat you up and then he nearly killed your informant. I’ve just spent the past hour on the phone to Langley, trying to explain how we failed to capture a computer geek and how that resulted in open warfare on the streets of Brooklyn.’ Braun crossed his arms. ‘You understand, we’re not supposed to be operating on American soil. We are breaking laws here, August, for the common good. We all take that risk that it could come back and bite us. And here your team is, screwing up, and putting our entire branch at risk.’

‘Sam Capra killed those two women who apparently wanted to kill Ming. It could be argued he saved Ming’s life.’

‘Because he wanted to kill him himself.’ Braun shook his head.

‘These people have his child. They’re using Daniel Capra for their own ends. Forcing him to act. He told me himself.’

‘I am not unsympathetic to his motivations, August. On the contrary, it breaks my heart. But we can’t have him interfering in our work. I cannot have it. Sympathy doesn’t play beyond a certain point. Sam could tell them anything about our operations against criminal networks.’

‘Our operations have completely retooled since Sam Capra left Special Projects,’ August said. ‘They’re not mining him for information. They’re converting him into a weapon.’

‘Capra could have come to you, August. He could have said, “they have my kid and they want me to grab their traitor for them”. He could have worked with us.’

‘If they were holding a gun to my baby’s head,’ August said quietly, ‘I believe I’d do whatever they say.’

‘I think I would first remember my duty,’ Braun said.

‘You certainly enjoy using that word,’ August said. Anger rose in him. ‘You don’t think Sam has a duty to his family?’

‘The Company is family, too, August, and you should remember that.’

August was silent. He wished Braun had stayed in his glorious retirement.

‘Now. These two women in the building,’ Braun said.

‘We’re working on getting an ID on them. They drove a car registered to a Beth Marley, who works for Ming Properties. We sent someone to the office, they found her handcuffed in her kitchen. She’s being questioned by our people, but she doesn’t know anything.’

‘Interesting,’ Braun said. ‘Novem Soles has Capra hunting Ming, but who is hunting Capra?’

‘Someone else who wants Ming. Who wants what he has.’

Braun turned to him from the window. ‘So how do you intend to get both Ming and Capra?’

‘I’m not worrying about Sam. I sent a man to his bar, they haven’t seen him. He may be more of an absentee owner since he’s searching for his son. From what the witnesses said, he’s hurt. We’ll monitor the emergency rooms, but I’d rather put the people we have on finding Ming, not Sam.’

‘Ming can’t expose us. Sam can. We are not going to be exposed. Ever. We are not going to be embarrassed.’

‘So, I’m chasing him or I’m chasing Jack Ming. Which is it?’

‘I’m simply being practical. I’m thinking like the bad guys.’ He smiled, tapped his temple, and August thought: it’s not about innovation, it’s about your ego. ‘They’re playing on Sam’s emotional vulnerability as far as his child is concerned. We can’t fall into the same trap. I swear to you, we’ll take Capra alive if possible and if we find where his son is, we will move heaven and earth to bring that baby home.’

The line was drawn in the imaginary sand on Braun’s desk, drawn with those many ifs. He was putting catching Sam, for having defied them, ahead of catching Jack Ming.

‘If you don’t,’ August said, ‘I’ll make sure the whole Company knows that we didn’t go after an employee’s captive child.’

‘Sam Capra is not an employee.’

‘He was. Didn’t you just say we were all family, Ricardo? Or is that only when you make a point.’

‘You wouldn’t expose Special Projects work.’ Braun’s voice went icy.

‘I would. How much loyalty would employees give the Company if they knew we hadn’t already moved heaven and earth, as you like to say, to get back the Capra baby? If that baby isn’t safe, none of our loved ones are, Braun. I’m tired of this bullshit attitude of ours. We should have fixed this months ago, we should have found and rescued that child. You talk about duty. What about our duty to Sam?’

‘I advise you to be careful about what you say next. You messed up today, August, you don’t have a great deal of wriggle room with me. Worry about your own duty.’

‘Duty. Innovation. They have to be more than buzzwords, Ricardo.’ August couldn’t keep the disgust out of his voice. ‘We’ve kept everything about the Capras quiet. What Lucy did, what we did to Sam. We control hundreds of intel assets in the world, and none of them knew to look out for leads that could have given us Daniel Capra. We turned our backs on Sam and we helped create this situation. That gets out, there’ll be investigations, there’ll be cuts in funding, there’ll be resignations.’