Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

But she knew she didn’t want to be that person. She didn’t want to be a traitor to Sam, no matter the acid dislike she felt for Mila. It gave her a momentary pleasure to deny him. ‘I don’t know any Mila.’

‘Any woman who Capra works with? She’s Moldovan, so she’d speak with an eastern European accent. She’s petite, pretty, vicious.’

‘No. He’s not brought his friends around me. I have to go now.’

‘This is my phone number.’ He recited a number and she repeated it back to him. ‘You get me that evidence and you give me Mila if she shows up, you and your child, if you get Taylor back, will be safe. From every threat.’

Her skin went cold. ‘You know about Taylor?’

‘Did you think you could hide from me? Really? That’s awfully self-confident.’

‘Why did you leave me alone, then, the last two years?’

‘I didn’t need you, Lindsay. Now I do. And if you don’t do what I say, exactly, then I will make Taylor go away, and Leonie Jones will never see her child again.’

She wished she could stub the lit cigarette into his eye. ‘And the line to blackmail me forms here. You’re such an asshole. Can’t you just leave me alone?’

‘After what you did? No, sweetheart. I wanted you to feel nice and happy and secure until I could take it away from you. Nine Suns just beat me to the punch.’

She blew smoke into his face.

‘You still forging? Identities, passports? Caring relationships?’ He laughed. ‘Really, the last is what you’re best at faking.’

‘That’s a compliment from the biggest fraud of all.’

‘You can’t wound me. You already cut out my heart, Lindsay, and now I’ve got the knife at yours.’

She smoked in silence.

He tipped her chin toward him. ‘What they know, I know. You really should give up smoking, sweetheart. When this is all done, you’ll be the last one standing, alongside me. And then you can go take your fake self and live your fake life.’

He turned and he walked away from her.

She finished her cigarette. Horrible habit. She’d stopped now, twice before, and the thought brought her to tears. Get a grip, she told herself. She went back into the store, bought some chocolate M amp;Ms, and walked back to the bar.

Mila was off the phone and on the computer. ‘Where did you go?’

‘I was out of smokes.’ She held up the candy from the store. ‘And I thought I’d make a peace offering. Isn’t chocolate the universal language?’

‘Yes,’ Mila said, ‘I believe it is.’

Manhattan

The Watcher stood surveying the Manhattan skyline. He had spent the past twenty hours trying to suck every bit of information he could out of the extortion network. Before Jack Ming shut it down.

If they were unable to kill Ming and retrieve his evidence he wanted to sell to the CIA, then the Watcher was going to lose his entire power base among the Nine, and he would have to rebuild. It would be all right. He had rebuilt before after Mila stole most of his money. He’d fought and scrabbled his way back. But to lose the information feeds that had given him gold from Wall Street firms, from the White House, from Congress, from the British Parliament, from a good percentage of the Fortune 500, that would be devastating. The fearsome crime rings of the twentieth century – the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Colombian drug lords, the Mexican cartels – had never had their own spies, their own conduits to the highest powers in the land. This information had been oxygen to the blood of Nine Suns, knowledge that let them smuggle with impunity, keep the police at bay in a dozen countries, sell secrets to government and competitors and in turn own those buyers by virtue of their crimes. The extortion network that Jack Ming’s software made possible had netted them tens of millions of dollars’ worth of information in a matter of months.

And the Watcher needed to find something to replace that power base, and he had an idea.

His phone rang, and he answered.

‘This is Jack Ming,’ the voice said.

‘My favorite person,’ the Watcher replied.

‘I want to make a deal with you.’

‘With me? I doubt that.’

‘No, I do. You wanted the notebook, I’ll give you the notebook. I’ll sell it to you.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘I can’t sell it to anyone else. Here’s what we do. You deposit ten million in an account I provide. When I have the money, I will call you and tell you where to find the notebook.’

‘How can I trust you?’

‘Conduct a poll. I’m pretty sure I’ll be seen as more trustworthy than you. Look, this is the deal, if you don’t want it… ’

‘Why would you deal with us when we tried to kill you? Not to be overly blunt.’

‘I will keep a few choice pages for insurance. If anything happens to me, they come to immediate light.’

‘You could blackmail me again.’

‘You could kill me again.’

‘That’s true. I thought you preferred to deal with the authorities.’

‘They lost my trust.’

‘Trust, so fleeting. All right, Jack. Where would you like to meet?’

Jack hesitated. ‘We’ll do it all by phone.’

‘Are you going to fax me the notebook, Jack?’

‘No.’

‘Then we will have to meet.’

‘And have your bitch Sam Capra show up and throw me off a building? No thanks.’

‘Aren’t you a smart lad?’

‘And aren’t you a right bastard, using his baby? Seriously.’

‘Had a chat with him, did you?’

‘I figure out things on my own, asshole. The notebook tells me a lot.’

‘Oh, Jack,’ the Watcher said. ‘I look at you and I realize I mishandled the entire situation. I shouldn’t have tried to get rid of you. I should have offered you a job. You’re a smart, smart kid.’

‘I’m smart enough to know I’ve got your golden goose here. I get my money, you get your notebook, and then we walk away.’

‘You could have copied it.’

‘And if anything happens to me, a nice copy of it will show up in the CIA’s mailbox, along with a letter of explanation. So. You leave me alone and you have nothing to worry about.’

‘So where shall we meet?’

‘In Central Park. In the Ramble, north of the Bow Bridge. Tomorrow at three. When I’ve confirmed the money is safe in my account then I’ll give you the notebook.’

‘A lot of faith for me.’

‘You want your notebook, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do, Jack. Give me the bank account.’

Jack gave him the account for a Swiss bank. The Watcher wrote it on the palm of his hand.

‘If you’re one minute late, or I don’t like the look of anything there, I’m gone and I’ll just drive by Langley and toss the notebook on their front porch.’ He hung up.

The Watcher clicked off his phone. Most interesting, that. Unexpected. Either Jack Ming had decided to bait a trap with himself or he’d decided that his need for money so he could vanish trumped all.

So. Should he have Sam Capra there to kill him? If Capra knew that someone from Nine Suns was meeting Jack Ming, he might try to seize him as a hostage to guarantee his son’s release. But he wouldn’t take the risk. That was the beauty of owning a child this way. The parent would never be able to cut the strings.

*

Jack Ming clicked off the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed back in his mother’s apartment. It was the last place, he thought, that anyone would look for him. His mother was dead and his father was gone, and now he was truly alone in the world.

He walked to his mother’s room. It was so spare, so absent of her, to be the place where she spent so much time. He had wept for his father for days, for weeks, but he could summon nothing for his mother except a promise: I’m sorry I got you killed. I’m going to kill them for you, Mom.