Jeff Abbott: The Last Minute

‘No one.’ She could be lying. It’s what I would have said, if there was a full house of guards.

‘Okay, drop the gun.’

‘I don’t believe you can break his neck,’ she said. ‘With your arm in a cast.’

‘It’s all in the fingers and the biceps, baby, and those are working just fine.’ I strangled Zviman more than a little. He obligingly purpled and gagged for me. I thought about what he’d tried to do to Mila, and what he’d done to Nelly, and it took control not to crush the life out of him.

‘Okay, Sam, let’s talk.’

‘My friend already maimed the son of a bitch. I will be happy to finish him off.’

‘Please, Sam, let him go,’ Anna said. ‘Let’s all calm down and… ’

‘I am done negotiating with you!’ I screamed at her. I’m not sure I’d ever quite heard my voice sound this way. ‘This is what is happening. Either you drop that gun right now, or the next sound you hear is his vertebrae snapping. This! Is the extent. Of. Our. Talking!’

Then silence, the wind crying in the trees.

Anna’s gaze went to Zviman’s purpling face, and she dropped the gun. I doubted he would have done the same for her.

‘Leonie, go get it,’ I said.

Leonie hurried up to the porch. She took the gun, eased it away from Anna.

‘Okay, stay calm.’ Anna tried to smile at Leonie. ‘Leonie, I want you to know, I’ve taken good care of-’ and Leonie shot her, in the heart. A curl of smoke, a flower of blood on Anna’s T-shirt, and then she fell wordlessly.

Leonie ran inside the house.

Damn it. I hammered a fist into Zviman’s face and dropped him to the gravel. I tore into the house after her. The house was old, perhaps a grand country estate built back in the early 1900s. The entranceway was hardwoods, with a large staircase leading up to a mezzanine on the second floor. Sheets covered most but not all of the furniture. Leonie ran, searching, through the adjoining rooms: study, library, dining room, kitchen.

‘Leonie, come back here,’ I yelled at her. Hell, if Anna was lying, we could be gunned down. And she had the gun, not me.

‘Taylor!’ she screamed.

I lost her, then heard footsteps caroming up a flight of stairs I couldn’t see. I followed the noise through the kitchen. A bottle was warming on a stove. I saw a formula box on the kitchen island, the remains of a grown-up’s meal of steak, salad and French fries.

A couple of soiled bibs. A noise between grief and joy surged in my throat.

Beyond the main room of the kitchen was a servants’ staircase. She had already run up to the second floor.

‘Daniel!’ I screamed. Like he was going to answer. But my mind was shuttered or sharpened, I’m not sure which. On the second floor I saw a hallway of rooms, one of them open.

I ran into the doorway. Leonie, standing at a crib, picking up a baby, holding the child close to her shoulder in a mother’s embrace, nearly weeping in relief. I looked around the room.

There was only the one crib.

I bolted down the rest of the hallway, opening every door. Next was an empty bedroom, a woman’s clothes tossed on the foot of the bed. No crib. Anna’s room.

The next was another room, men’s clothes littering the floor. Where Zviman had stayed.

The other rooms were empty.

‘No, no!’ I screamed. ‘Daniel!’

I ran back to the first room. Leonie stood there, holding the baby, cradling its blond hair against her shirt.

Blond hair. I remembered the weathered picture, handled with love. The smiling dark-haired girl. Taylor was a bigger baby, and brown-haired.

‘Sam,’ Leonie said, and her voice turned into a broken sob. ‘Sam. I’m sorry.’

And she pointed the gun at me.

In the back of a van

This was how Mila thought it might end: bound and handcuffed, riding in a bounty hunter’s car, to be delivered to her fate, because Zviman wanted her alive.

Six had tried in the past three years, and six had died. Two had come closest, handcuffing her (which she respected: it was much quicker than tying her with rope or even plastic cuffs) and binding her feet. The first of the two were ex-IRA, seized her outside The Adrenaline Bar, the Round Table-owned drinking spot in London, in the hipster Hoxton neighborhood. Kenneth, the manager of (now) Sam’s bar in London saw her grabbed, injected in the neck with a sedative, and forced into an Audi’s trunk. Kenneth had caught up the kidnappers on the A5 and shot the driver through the car window. The car crashed and Kenneth shot the other kidnapper, then politely carried Mila out of the trunk. She was grateful, of course, but humiliated to be saved.

The second time was barely three weeks ago, two Filipinos trying their luck. They had gotten her handcuffed in her apartment but before they bound her feet she had, to put it bluntly, kicked and stomped the two of them to death. The unpleasantness made for a gruesome evening, when all she’d been in the mood for was a nice Thai green curry for dinner, a cold bottle of lager and watching Emmerdale on TV. But both times she’d had to have Kenneth slice the cuffs off her. Then, of course, she had to vanish and get an entirely new apartment, under a different name, on the other side of London. Very inconvenient. It made her think.

Those were the last two attempts: word had spread among the shadowy vines that connected hired killers that she was very dangerous. Kill four people who come after you and everyone recalculates the value of hunting you down.

She blinked back slowly from the chloroformed unconsciousness. Her nose ached and her lips were thick where he’d hit her. She could see, on the van floor, splinters from the boxes where she and Bertrand had loaded in the dead guards she and Sam had killed when they got the best lead on Anna Tremaine and Daniel. She should have swept it more thoroughly.

Why are you in New York? Sam had asked her when he’d come to The Last Minute after leaving Las Vegas, and she answered, with a smile: shoes. He thought she was being Mila, joking, parrying his question. But what Sam had not quite learned was that she spoke the truth more often than not.

She had indeed gotten shoes in New York. Custom-made boots. She eased the back of her heels closer to her hands. On the left boot she maneuvered her fingertips into place and gave the heel a slight twist and push all at once, like on a medicine bottle. The right heel popped off. Embedded in it was a handcuff key. A universal key, especially made for her by a master locksmith who had once been the KGB’s finest lock designer. She freed the key from the heel with a finger flick, and then repositioned herself gently, trying to ease the key into the lock.

‘I can hear you, you know,’ the man driving the van said. ‘Nice sleep?’

‘I had bad dreams.’

‘Baby, you’re about to have much worse. But then your dreams will end.’

‘You have a poetic soul.’

‘I have received many compliments in my life but that is a first. Thank you, Mila.’

‘What is your name?’

‘Oh, I should keep some secrets. I’m just a nobody.’

‘I have seen your face on a camera. A picture I think Sam will send to the CIA.’

Silence.

‘Ah. You do not like that,’ Mila said. ‘You are a nobody they will know, yes?’

‘My name is Braun.’ He said it with pride. ‘I want you to know who’s beaten you after others have failed.’

‘Well, Mr Braun, I will pay you more than a million dollars to let me go.’

‘Tempting. But this isn’t about money. It’s about cleaning house. Setting a mistake to right. I understand that’s how you got your start, setting a mistake to right.’

‘It’s hard to be the star of your own legend.’