The Last Minute

21

Claiborne Hotel, Manhattan

I awoke with a start. I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on, on the bed, exhaustion piercing past the feverish high I’d had running for hours. I hate sleeping in my clothes; it always feels like the sleep has seeped into the fabric. I heard the knock on the door again, insistent. I’d put out the Do Not Disturb sign. I reached for my gun and then remembered I didn’t have one. There was so much paperwork involved in transporting a gun; I’d get one from my bar, The Last Minute, later.

‘Sam. It’s me.’ Leonie.

I glanced at the clock. Ten in the morning. I got to my feet and opened the door.

‘I want you to order coffee and breakfast for us, to your room. I don’t want the maid to see my room right now.’

‘Why not?’

Leonie rolled her eyes. ‘Do what I tell you. Coffee, two pots, French roast. Breakfast, make it big, I don’t know when we’ll eat again. Come get me when the food is here.’ She turned and went back into her room.

I obeyed her, ordering us a spread and two pots of coffee. I showered like a man running late, pulled on jeans and a fresh shirt that I could wear untucked. I checked my personal phone, where Mila would call me. There was no message. Maybe she’d keep her distance. There was no message on the phone Anna had given me.

The food arrived: two omelets, bacon, bagels, hash browns, juice, coffee. A New York room service breakfast only costs a fraction of the national debt. I signed the check and then knocked on her door.

‘Bring it here, it’s going to be a working meal,’ she said.

She held the door for me while I carried in the big trays.

The walls were covered with white sheets of paper, big ones, as though torn from a presentation pad, and scarred with heavy marker. The laptop lay open and it looked like she was in a chat room. An ashtray, full, sat next to it.

‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ I said.

‘I’d quit. When Taylor was born. Now I’ve started again and I hate it.’

Leonie sat down and began to shovel the cheese and mushroom omelet into her mouth. ‘I hate cold food,’ she said. She ate with concentration for a long minute while I drank a cup of coffee, which I needed like oxygen. ‘Okay. First things first. Jin Ming did not exist before he arrived at Delft.’

‘False identity.’ I raised an eyebrow, reached for my own plate of food.

‘His student transcripts are almost perfect.’

‘You broke into the university’s server?’

She shrugged. ‘Universities are easy to hack; they have to maintain large networks with lots of unsophisticated users – even at a technical university. Think of a college as one giant coffee shop, everyone with a laptop. It’s not hard.’ She ate some more, so fast I thought she wasn’t tasting the food. ‘All his documentation points to him being from Hong Kong. Makes it easy then to explain his excellent English. But I dug deeper. There is a Jin Ming from Hong Kong who shares his birthday on the university records; he died at the age of five, drowned in Repulse Bay.’

‘Our target hijacked an identity.’

‘Yes. And filled in the back details. He supposedly attended Hong Kong International School there, falsified transcripts. The actual prep school has no record of him.’

‘Did you break into their computer database?’

‘Oh, no. I called, pretending to be from New York University.’

I sat down. ‘Why would Jin Ming pretend to be from China so he could go to grad school? I mean, people fake IDs so they can clean money, so they can cross borders. Who the hell steals an identity so that he can go to graduate school in Holland? And pretends to be Chinese? What if he got deported? He’d totally be screwed.’

Leonie smiled. ‘So if you see someone with a Chinese passport, you don’t entertain the notion that he’s not Chinese. He can’t be who you’re looking for.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said slowly.

‘Jin Ming means “golden name”. A legitimate name, yes, but I think there’s even a sense of purpose behind his selection. A golden name, one perfect for him to hide behind.’

I rubbed my forehead. ‘This is not an ordinary kid, is he?’ Dumb people are easy to hunt; smart people are a challenge.

‘I think he’s a fugitive.’ Leonie crossed her arms. ‘Someone who is hiding but badly wants to continue his education, and especially at a prestigious technical university. And not very many people would think to falsify Chinese documents because they’re afraid of being deported to China and then not getting out. It’s actually very smart. Right now when I see a Belgian or a Costa Rican passport I straight away start to think it’s been faked; they’re the most popular nationalities for people who want to disappear. I think he picked Hong Kong because he’d been there before, maybe he could pass as a native. But my guess is he’s American or Canadian or English or Australian.’

‘Surrendering to the CIA in New York? He must be American.’

She shrugged. ‘Don’t make assumptions. For all their faults, the CIA is still the most powerful intelligence agency in the world, and our mysterious Mr Jin may just want to deal with the biggest.’

‘For all their faults?’ I said. ‘You sound like a veteran.’

A blush spread across her cheeks, up to her auburn hair. ‘Don’t. I’m not. I don’t have anything to do with the CIA.’

‘So what now? You look for criminal computer science students of Chinese descent who have gone missing?’

‘Yes, actually, I do,’ she said. ‘But here’s the other thing, Sam. New York. If Jin Ming wants to surrender to the CIA, why isn’t he doing it in Amsterdam? There are agents there. They could easily pick him up. Why does he need to run?’

‘You ask like you know the answer.’

‘I do. Right now he’s wanted in Amsterdam.’ She pulled up a web page of the Amsterdam English language paper. ‘He left a hospital where he was a patient. A man was found dead there, beaten to death with a metal pole. The dead man has a criminal history as hired muscle.’

‘They tried to kill him once before.’

‘Yes. And the supposedly helpless hacker killed the thug.’ Leonie sounded almost proud of him. ‘The police seem to think Jin’s in danger, and running, and are trying to get him to surrender.’

‘But he could still surrender to the CIA there. In fact, he has even more reason to because he’s being hunted. But he’s not turning himself in to the closest CIA office. What’s here? What’s in New York?’ I said. I hadn’t thought of this. The kid had to have a compelling reason to take the risk to come to New York.

‘Two reasons,’ I said. ‘He knows a CIA contact here.’ August had dealt with him in Amsterdam; maybe while in their care he’d heard something that tied August to New York, and wanted to meet him specifically. I didn’t know the whole story of what had gone on between them when August grabbed Jin Ming from the coffee shop.

Leonie waited.

‘Or he’s from here, and he’s running home.’

‘Why run home?’ she asked. ‘He’s been very smart as to how he hid himself. Very. If he’s a fugitive from here, it implies he’s wanted here. Huge risk to return.’

‘Maybe he has family he wants to collect and protect. Maybe he needs to say goodbye to them if he’s going to vanish.’

‘I assume that if he was living in Holland under a false name he’s already vanished once before.’ Exhaustion crept into her voice. We couldn’t let the toxic mix of lack of sleep and emotional turmoil derail us. ‘If he was already hiding, then why does he come home? That seems to be a bigger risk than he needs to take.’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve heard of people in witness protection coming home. They just get tired of living a lie.’

‘My clients don’t do that. Once I hide them they stay hidden.’

I don’t know what possessed me. ‘Nice. I mean, you shelter people fleeing murder raps. Scum that Novem Soles needs protected. Nice.’

‘You don’t know a single thing about what I do or who I help.’

‘As if you’d tell.’ She knew more about me than I knew about her. Whose fault was that?

She raised an eyebrow at me, took a long drink of coffee to let the tension melt in the room. I felt mad at myself for provoking her. I needed her right now; moral judgments had to be saved for later. ‘If he’s from New York, then that narrows down the possibilities considerably.’

I leaned forward and looked into her computer screen, studying the chat room, with nested columns of comments to show threads of conversation. ‘What is this site?’

‘DarkHand. A hacker community.’ She started to type. ‘That’s how I found out about Jin Ming. I found hackers who had existing back doors into the systems I needed to access. By the way, you’re paying them for their time.’

‘How much?’

‘You’ll launder some money for them. Both are Chinese, they want to clean about fifty thousand bucks into US accounts. You’ll make that happen.’

‘How, exactly?’

‘Through your bar in Las Vegas.’

She knew about The Canyon Bar. Not just that it was where I’d met Anna but that I owned it. ‘Your hacker friends are not washing their dirty money through my bar.’ God only knew what the money might be. Hackers might have cracked open ATMs for cash, might have committed extortion not to bring company websites down. She was involving me in new crimes. She seemed almost amused at my outrage.

‘You can’t refuse. The deal is done. It’s for the children.’

She was, of course, absolutely right. ‘For the children’: the three most powerful words in the language. Fine, I thought. I’d deal with that problem later. ‘Don’t make any more promises you can’t keep.’

‘Do you want to find this guy or not?’ She stood up, rage bright in her eyes. ‘You’ll do what I say. No argument.’

‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘I have every right to know if you’re dragging me and my business into criminal activity.’

‘And I have every right not to care.’

I let five beats pass in peace. ‘So. Let’s operate under the proposition he has a personal tie back to New York.’

She nodded. ‘We find the tie, we find him.’ She turned back to the laptop. ‘Let me get back to work. Thanks for breakfast.’

‘And, what? I wait? No.’

‘Do you have any idea on how to be useful?’ Her voice had taken on a hard edge to it. ‘I find him, you kill him, bullet. You have the easier job.’

‘I don’t get to ask my crooked friends for help,’ I said. Which was a lie. I had resources, through the Round Table, that I had no intention of sharing with her. I gave her my cell phone number. She didn’t write it down but she repeated it back to me.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked as I headed for the door.

I didn’t answer her. She didn’t need to know. Her way was going to take too long.