Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

‘Revenge isn’t a reason to live.’

‘Mila once told me revenge is underrated. She might be right.’

‘I don’t think I could kill someone unless it was for Taylor.’ Leonie stayed on the edge of the bed, I lay on my back.

‘Well, if someone’s about to kill me and you can stop it, feel free.’

She laughed. Not really a laugh, but a cross between a sigh and a smile. ‘All right. Deal.’

‘Even if Jack Ming is operating under a different name, he needs help. Resources. He can’t access money in his name or his mother’s right now. I’m sure August froze those accounts. So. Who are his friends? Who will he turn to? That’s where we need to go.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So I checked his Facebook page. Not as Jack Ming, but back in Holland as Jin Ming. He only had ten friends on it. I imagine, posing as a Chinese student, he decided to keep a very low profile.’

‘Ten is a nice workable number.’

‘Now, in Holland, he’s wanted for questioning about the death of that man in the hospital. So. It would have to be a good friend.’

I waited.

‘So I got into his university records again. He had a majority of his classes with two of his friends. A Dutch kid and a Chinese kid. I checked their university email accounts and there was no sign that Jack has contacted them. But I found a photo of Jack with one of them on Facebook, and so I looked at all the photos of Jack on Facebook. The majority of the photos where he is tagged on Facebook belong to a girl named Frederique Diagne, called Ricki for short. She’s from Senegal but lives in Amsterdam. He is tagged in fourteen of her photos. Not in any others.’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Hard to say. The most recent photo is from five months ago. They might have had a falling out. I asked around my hacker network and two of the guys told me there’s a prominent female copyright pirate in Amsterdam. From Senegal. Her hacker code name is RT-Tavi.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. It’s a Kipling story about a mongoose that kills cobras.’

I remembered it now. ‘You think this Ricki is RT-Tavi.’

‘Yes. So I paid a guy to get into her phone log. She got a call about an hour ago from New York.’

‘Jack.’

‘It seems a distinct possibility. So I checked the line that called her. It has only called four numbers.’ She showed them to me, written large on a legal pad with a black marker.

‘One of those is August’s cell phone.’

‘And this is the main number for Central Park Conservancy.’

‘The other two?’

‘Ricki’s phone in Amsterdam. And an unknown.’

‘You can’t trace it?’

‘No. The last number is Israeli. I haven’t been able to access a call log for it.’

Israel. Zviman was from Israel. But why would Jack Ming be calling the people who got his mother killed?

Because he wanted to find them and kill them himself.

‘Do you want to call Ming?’ she asked me.

‘And what? Apologize?’ I stared at the Israeli phone number.

Well, I could think of one good reason. But it was suicide for him, alone, to try and take them on.

‘It fascinates me that he’s calling Central Park. Why do you call an info line?’

‘Maybe to get their hours, or to find out if there are events going in a certain section of the park.’

‘You think he’s meeting someone there.’

‘Yes. It’s open, it’s crowded, he might feel comfortable meeting there.’

‘To do what?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know what he’s actually going to do tomorrow. He doesn’t know it yet. But I do.’

I took a screen capture from the security monitor tape of the man in the corner. August didn’t have a phone of his own; in Special Projects you are only allowed to have a phone that can be monitored by the group and he’d said he’d surrendered his to Braun. Unfair maybe but you give up a certain expectation of privacy when you do this work. If he had his own phone then I could send this to him. Tomorrow he’d get one. I’d send it then.

I stood and I winced. My body hurt. And I didn’t want Leonie thinking much more about this phone number.

‘Your arm is hurting. Let me get you a pain pill.’

‘I can’t be fuzzy. I have to be ready.’

‘It won’t make you fuzzy for tonight. Here.’

I grudgingly took the pill, swallowed it with cold water.

‘You rest.’

I stripped out of my clothes, put on pajama pants I dug from a bureau, lay on the bed. I closed my eyes. I thought she would show more reaction when I knew her real name. But what, really, did it matter, when our children were in danger? I looked through the bedroom door and she sat at the computer desk. Looking at her picture of Taylor. The worn-with-love picture.

I closed my eyes again. Darkness fell on me.

Leonie awoke me when she slid into bed next to me. I raised my head up with a start.

‘Is this okay?’ she asked. ‘I can sleep on the couch.’

‘No, it’s fine.’

I lay back down.

‘Sam?’

‘What?’ I opened my eyes. I must have bruises going to the bone. I thought granules of sand had been driven past my clothes into my skin.

Leonie’s face was close to mine. I blinked, hazy with sleep. The pain wasn’t so bad; the pill must have taken off the edge.

‘I feel sorry for you,’ she said softly.

I don’t do pity. I hate it. I got it from every kid who felt bad for me, always being the new kid in school, the new American who couldn’t decipher the slurs or the name-calling in the native tongue. ‘Well, don’t.’

‘You haven’t even gotten to hold your child.’

I stared past her into the darkness. My skin itched under the cast, probably along the stretch of arm where Daniel should rest when I did get to hold him.

‘Time will come,’ I said.

‘Yes. I want that for you, more than anything. It is the best feeling ever. Nothing matches it for love, for terror, for hope.’

‘That sounds like a slogan for parenting.’

‘And you and I can be the poster children for single parents.’

In the dim light from the street’s glow I smiled. ‘I shouldn’t be on anyone’s poster.’

She lay close, but not pressing against me. For a minute the only sound was our breath in the room, the soft grind of the air conditioner, the distant murmur of the city.

I turned my head to say something – I don’t remember what – and she kissed me, softly, then more insistently, her mouth hungry, nipping at my lips. The kiss grew, deepened, her tongue tracing a delicious path.

The first time was from fear and stress. What was this? I was half dead but I felt my blood stir.

I tasted salt: the sting of her tears.

‘I didn’t mean to make you cry,’ I said. I could smell toothpaste on her breath; she’d brushed her teeth before she came to me.

‘You didn’t.’

‘Why are you alone, with a child?’

‘I wanted to be alone.’

‘I never believe that. No one wants to be alone like that.’

Her hands had moved to my chest; her fingernails moved along my skin and my breath nearly left me.

‘You don’t have to use your arm, you know. I’ll do the work.’ She kissed me again. ‘How sore are you?’

The correct answer was very, but I said, ‘Not a bit.’

Probably people whose kids are in mortal danger shouldn’t be having sex together. We’re wrecks. It’s not like this moment could bring intimacy or grace.

But there was none of that. Only an exhausting, fierce rawness of energy and anger and fury. At one point, her atop me and deep in her pleasure, she hammered at my shoulders, forgetting in the dark that I was a bruised beast. It was pain and glory all at once. That or she decided to fake an orgasm and beat the snot out of me at the same time.