Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

She collapsed on me when we were both spent and her body was warm and wonderful and rich, lying against mine. Silence, only broken by breathing. I nuzzled her hair.

‘That was good,’ she breathed.

‘Yes. Very for me,’ I said.

‘And very for me.’ She cupped my face in her hands. ‘We have to get them back, Sam. We can’t fail.’

‘I know. I know. We will.’

‘Tell me what you’re planning.’

‘No. I can’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if I do, you’ll say no.’

‘Don’t… don’t you trust me?’ Her breath seeped against my throat, her nails traveled my chest.

‘Yes.’

‘So tell me.’

‘Tomorrow Jack Ming goes down and our kids are going to be okay. All right?’

She lay next to me, not cuddling, but lying there. Present, our breath close together. I suspected she wanted to beat me to a pulp in her trembling anger, but she needed me functioning. So she let me keep my secrets.

While she kept all her own.

I got up while she slept, put on my clothes despite my exhaustion, and slipped out into the night.

The Last Minute Bar, Manhattan, upstairs

Sam’s phone, buzzing, woke Leonie. She groped across the empty bed for him; he was gone.

She sat up and grabbed for the phone.

‘Yes?’

‘Leonie. Let me speak to Sam.’ She didn’t know this voice. It was the phone Anna Tremaine gave them as the lifeline to Nine Suns, to get their instructions, but it was not Anna on the phone. A man’s voice, crisp and precise and cold.

‘He’s… he’s not here.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know. I was asleep. Who is this?’

‘This is the man who can have your kid killed with one phone call.’

‘Please. Please don’t.’

‘I presume you are capable of taking a message?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell Sam I will call back in one hour. I am not happy that he is not near this phone. What if I was calling him to tell him that I knew where Jack Ming was?’

‘Then I’d go kill Ming,’ she said. ‘We already know where he’s going to be tomorrow. Central Park.’

‘Central Park doesn’t quite narrow it down, does it?’

‘We’re finding out where, I promise… ’

‘Yes, I believe you would. You’re an excellent mother. You just saved your child from unnecessary suffering.’

A flash of horror danced through her.

‘I’ll call back in an hour, and Sam better have a good reason for his absence.’ The phone went off with a click.

Ming apartment, East 59th Street

The flame burst up from the pile of garbage bags across the street, drawing the night doorman out onto the sidewalk and hurrying over to the sudden, sputtering fire. He did not see me slip inside the lobby while his back was turned, while he had a cell phone pressed to his ear to summon the fire department. I spent six months of naughty teen years in Jakarta; kids there used to burn trash for fun, and they were most clever about how to torch with efficiency.

I took the stairs up to the Mings’ apartment floor. I picked the lock to the apartment.

It was still and dark and airless but I could smell the odor of antiseptic cream and muscle rub. I turned on a light and Jack Ming lay huddled on the couch, curled up into a fetal position. I thought he would have been in the bedroom.

‘Jack,’ I said quietly. I moved toward him.

His eyelids snapped open – no one sleeps that great when they’re on the run, trust me, I know – and a scream formed on his mouth.

He bolted from me, grabbed a ceramic tray off the coffee table, threw it at me. I dodged it.

‘I’m not here to hurt you,’ I said, calmly.

From under the couch cushion he pulled out a pearl-handled cleaver.

‘I’m not armed,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to you.’

He charged at me and he swung it at me. Twice. The blade made a sharp hiss in the air. Desperation and fear colored his face; he had no skill. I wasn’t really comfortable fighting him with an edged weapon one-handed. So I kicked him, hard against the wall, and then slammed my foot against the wrist holding the cleaver, pinning his hand to the wall.

‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I would have kicked you in the throat just now and broken your windpipe,’ I said. I pressed harder with my foot. He winced and the cleaver clattered to the floor.

‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you,’ I said again. ‘I’m going to let you go now, so we can talk like adults. I have a proposition for you.’ And I released his wrist. As a precaution I put my heel on the cleaver’s blade.

He smacked a punch against my arm’s cast and, yes, that did indeed hurt a lot.

I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Jack. Please.’ I was careful not to hurt him.

He grew still.

‘May we talk?’

After a long moment he nodded.

‘Can we go sit down in there and talk like two adults?’

He couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. He sat on the couch; I sat on the leather ottoman next to it. I left the cleaver on the floor, but I was between it and him.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘You don’t appear to be killing me. Yet.’

‘I have decided that even though I’ve been told to kill you, that is not how I am going to get my son back.’

He stared at me, his mouth working.

‘Jack. Breathe. It’s okay.’

‘How… how did you find me?’

‘I got hurt in the fall, I figured you did, too. And you lost your knapsack. You were back accessing your computer very quickly using remote software. Hard to download and install that on a coffee shop or library computer – and if I was hurt, I’d run home. No one would think you would come back here. But you could mend here, and have a computer, and call people who might help you and have a nice private conversation, and probably have an easier time accessing your mother’s bank accounts and such. It was worth a try.’

Jack said nothing.

‘I’m sorry… about today,’ I said. ‘I know I… scared you.’

‘I do not accept your apology.’

‘All right. I am very mindful that you could have shot me in that hallway rather than shooting the lock on the door.’

He rubbed his palms on his knees.

‘The only way Nine Suns is going to leave you alone is if we convince them that you are dead. They have to believe you’re gone for good for you to have a life. And for me to get my son back. Now. If we can make them think you’re dead, then we both have a chance.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Do you believe they have my kid?’

‘Yes.’

‘You said that there’s something in the notebook about my son.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it, please?’

‘Where he was born. How much the doctor was paid, how much the forged documents cost to get him an American birth certificate. Who has him now: someone with the initials AT.’

Anna Tremaine. ‘Anything else?’

He bit his lip for a moment, considering. ‘No.’

‘Where is the notebook?’

‘In a safe place, and I don’t care if we’re new best friends now, I’m not telling you.’

‘I want you to go to your computer’s browser and enter in a web address.’

He didn’t move.

‘Go ahead. I want to show you something.’

Slowly he got up and went into his father’s study. He sat at the computer; I gave him the URL; the prompt then asked for a password. He looked at me and I gave it to him.

He typed.

The webcam’s screen opened. Lucy lay in her eternal bed, hooked to wires and tubes and a computer whose uncaring graphs and bars showed her lungs still breathed, her heart still pumped.