Jeff Abbott: The Last Minute

She let herself out of the van through the driver’s door and dropped to the ground. She looked under the van to see if she could spot who was lying by the BMW. She saw legs, but they were upright now. Gray pants, nice shoes.

She heard a trunk open. She peered around the van.

The blond mohawk. Yaakov Zviman. He looked up toward the house and she saw a rising bruise on the side of his face. Sam hit him, she thought.

Zviman hoisted an ax out of the BMW. He took two steps toward the house.

Then he stopped.

She ducked back around the van, cursing the gravel. It made a whispery noise that was unavoidable. She froze.

He couldn’t resist. Surely Braun had told Zviman his prize was in the van and he, instead of going inside to help Braun, he was coming here to gloat. To make sure it was her.

Because it would only take a second, he must have thought, and he was a weak man. And she knew he thought it would strike blind terror into her heart to see his face, her being bound and helpless. And it would have. She knew what kind of revenge he would take on her for her maiming of him. The cruelty of it would be all but unimaginable.

‘Oh, baby,’ he called to the closed rear door of the van. ‘I don’t have the hours it will take to do you properly, not right now, but in a few minutes. I’m going to slice you up good in front of your friends and if you scream I cut a piece off them. Then I’m going to kill them in front of you-’ and he swung open the van door and it was empty. Just the sliced ropes and the unlocked cuffs. She could hear his suck of surprised breath.

Let him be scared for one second, she thought.

She rounded the van’s back door and she aimed a hard punch at the side of his neck with the blade extending from her fist. She wanted an artery. She missed as he jerked back but the knife scored north of his jaw, a hard puncture into cheek. The blood welled up; she aimed again at his eye.

He ducked, she missed, and, grunting with pain, he swung the ax. But he was off balance and no muscle behind the swing, and the edge bounced off the van’s door, four inches from her head. He nearly dropped the ax.

She swung her fist again, looking to slice his throat, but he kicked her midsection. She stumbled back and now he had both hands on the ax, and momentum and balance. Her blade was a sting, his ax a missile.

‘Oh, bitch, dream come true,’ he said. ‘I’ve waited for this. I’ve so waited to feel you die.’

‘Really?’ she panted. He had a rage, she remembered. Make it work for her. ‘Does the thought of hurting me make you hard? I mean, what’s left of it?’

He swung the ax, viciously, in an arcing trace. He missed her by inches. Then swung it back, the blunt edge catching her hand when she made the mistake of a panicked slash. The heel blade flew out into the gravel.

‘I don’t even know what I’ll do first to you,’ he said. ‘I made a list once. It ran to three pages.’

‘Go get your list, raggedy man. I’ll wait.’

At her words he stopped swinging wildly at her. His grin was inhuman, the stuff of a leering boogeyman. He steadied the ax, and they did a little dance on the gravel, back and forth. She badly wanted to run. But her shoes were awkward without the heels and he could throw the ax into her back. Better to keep her face to him.

This went on for thirty long seconds. He wouldn’t quite commit. She realized, even as he choked with rage and spite, that he was afraid of her.

‘Wow, raggedy man. Wielding an ax against an unarmed woman. And still you won’t fight.’

He snarled and chopped at her. Missed. She’d had an idea and she circled back toward the van. He stepped in too close and she got a grip on the handle, trying to pry it from his fist. He shoved her against the side of the van, and powered a mighty blow.

The ax slammed into the steel side of the van, perforating the metal. It missed her head only because she fell, her heelless boots slipping and skidding out on the gravel.

He grunted as he tried to pry the ax out. It was stuck.

She would not get another chance. She pivoted out from under the handle, turned and pulled the watch’s face free. The garrote’s wire glinted in the fading, dusky light. She looped the wire over his throat and threw herself onto his back. Then she pulled.

Yaakov Zviman tried to pry fingers under the wire but she tightened it too fast. He tried to throw her free; she wrapped her strong, lithe legs around him, ankles crossed above his ruined crotch. She thought of his wicked, smiling face, looking back over his pimpled shoulder while he raped her sister. She thought of Ivan, teaching her in the dusty, broken light of the winery how to fight, how to kill. She thought of Nelly, lying in surprised blood, the last of her life pulsing out of her.

And she pulled tighter.

He made noises no human should make. He threw himself against the van, trying to scrape her off.

‘ Tu mori,’ she gasped, ‘ tu mori.’

He fell, face down into the gravel. She felt the wire slice her own flesh on her fingers, the side of her hand. She drove her knees into his back.

The handle on the fake face of the watch broke. She felt it give. The garrote would not work.

She didn’t look to see if he was even still breathing through the compressed wreckage of his throat. With a shuddering moan she kicked against the van, levered the ax out of its torn side with a rush of strength, and she avenged her sister with a final downward blow.

Where it all began

I took the gun and inched toward the mezzanine’s railing.

‘Sam?’

A voice calling to me. I didn’t know it. So I didn’t answer.

‘Sam, I’ve brought your friend Mila.’

I stopped. I thought he was in the foyer, walking along the hardwoods in the entrance.

‘Now if you don’t come out, she’s going to get hurt.’

If that was true, Mila was going to get hurt anyway with Zviman around. His threat wasn’t going to flush me out.

‘You’re not being a gentleman,’ he said with disapproval in his tone.

I got still. I listened. And then, muffled, I heard Daniel begin to cry.

‘That’s the future crying,’ he said. He started coming up the stairs. I heard the creak of the wood against his heels. Outside I heard – noises of struggle, a fight. Zviman might be functional. And he was out there, with Mila as a prisoner.

Oh hell.

Now he walked into sight. We kept guns raised at each other. The man who had sat in the corner of the bar, nursing his pints. Ray Brewster.

‘I don’t want to hurt you,’ he said.

‘That must be why your limo driver and your psychotic sister act tried to kill me, Mr Brewster.’

‘Ray Brewster was just an alias. My name is Ricardo Braun.’

Braun. August’s boss. The un-retired head of Special Projects.

Braun shrugged. ‘Kill Jack Ming, that was fine. I didn’t need him exposing the truth. You, Sam, you were different. You were the bridge.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At this distance we couldn’t miss each other. He kept heading toward the top of the stairs, I kept moving toward where stairs met mezzanine.

‘You’re the bridge between Special Projects and our biggest mistakes. You being that bridge, well, I could let you and your child live.’

‘Mistakes… ’ I fell silent. ‘Nine Suns. Nine Suns was started by Special Projects.’

‘Yes, years ago. May I explain?’

‘Why? So I’ll pretend to listen and you’ll get a chance to shoot me?’

‘No. Because you have a role to play, Sam, if you dare.’

I was silent.

He cleared his throat. ‘The CIA had a long history of dealing with questionable sources. People who were criminals. Often they were heads of state. You develop a high tolerance for holding your nose. But we thought – I thought, it was my idea – what if criminals, carefully selected, could be put to use by the CIA. They know about dark corners of the world. They could help us insert people into situations where we never could have access. They could give us information and people we could never find on our own.’