The Last Minute

3

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

The woman who was not a nurse but was dressed like one entered the hospital shortly after 11 p.m. Amsterdam time, while a group met and talked in the Bahamas and Sam Capra got the best lead yet on his son. The woman had been most careful to forge her credentials with care; she had stolen a nurse’s uniform earlier in the day from the hospital laundry; she’d had to settle for buying shoes that looked good enough to pass. The real trick was getting the passcard for the secure floor where her target slept. That had taken time, to pierce the hospital’s security provider database, to imprint a card with the necessary code, to break into the police department’s voicemail system and finally find a message that told her which room held Jin Ming. But she had done it.

And when she saw him, she was going to kill him.

Jack Ming was playing the Quiet Game, the one where you tried to see how long you could go without speaking. He was going on three weeks now, three weeks of such careful, cultivated silence that he wondered if his voice would still work. He lay in the hospital bed, the sheets pulled up close to him like a damaged cocoon. His throat bore the raw scar from where a bullet had furrowed across skin and muscle, the giant bruise on his temple from where he’d fallen against a piece of machinery. The injuries had kept him in a coma for nearly two weeks. The doctors and the nurses and the police investigators all called him Jin Ming, which wasn’t his real name, and he did not correct their mistake.

Keeping quiet became an exercise – like writing a program with the least possible lines of code, or breaking into a database in the fewest, most elegant steps. How long could you play the Quiet Game? His father and mother had made him do it, when he was a child and playing loudly or asking one of his endless questions about why was the sky blue or why did they fight so much or why couldn’t he buy a toy he wanted, and they would flash angry eyes at him, his father looking up from one of the books he always was reading, his mother from her desk where she seemed to live. Be quiet, Jack. You’re bothering me. Let’s play a game. See how long you can be quiet. But it was never a game; they were never quiet. A proper Quiet Game involved a stare down. This was simply a way for his parents to put him on a shelf.

So he stayed quiet.

He had woken up, sure that he must be dead. A bullet had scored along the flesh of his throat; another centimeter and he would have bled out in moments, his carotid artery emptying on the cool concrete floor of the smugglers’ den near the Rotterdam port. But the artery went untouched. Three days after he woke up the police moved him from Rotterdam to a hospital in Amsterdam. He slept but it was strange: when he was wheeled inside they put a sheet over him. Like he was a secret they wanted to keep. He had his own room, he didn’t have to share. He wondered what this meant; he wanted to ask for a computer, but he didn’t want to speak. Not talking was, weirdly, very liberating. He didn’t have to tell the truth, he didn’t have to lie. After all these months he did not have to keep pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

At night he dreamed of the red notebook. Nic, drunk, had told him: ‘The people we work for would kill us if they knew I had all their secrets. All bound up. That’s my insurance policy. The red notebook.’

‘If it’s a secret, why tell me? You’re drunk.’ And foolish, Jack thought, but there was no point in stating the obvious.

‘Because if something happens to me, I want them to suffer,’ Nic had said in a beery slur. ‘The red notebook. You find it at my place, hidden. You’re smart enough to find it. It will bring the Nine Suns down.’

The Nine Suns. Nic invoked them like they were cartoon boogeymen. Jack didn’t do an eye roll. No one wants to kill you, Nic, Jack had said. Stop being so dramatic.

But in the machinists’ shop, with the smugglers working for Nine Suns in front of him, and the CIA behind him, he’d seen Nic lying dead on the floor, before all the gunfire erupted.

If he had to protect himself, he needed to find Nic’s red notebook. Which was slightly difficult to do from a hospital bed.

Earlier that day they’d sent a new police inspector; as if a variety of interrogators would suddenly get Jack to speak. ‘The doctor says that you should be able to talk,’ the police inspector said. His name was Van Biezen and he sat at Jack’s bedside and he watched Jack Ming watching him. He held a notebook in his lap and Jack could see the words on the paper: Jin Ming. Graduate student in computer science at Technical University of Delft. Found shot near bodies of known criminals, including hacker Nic ten Boom. Refuses to speak. No medical reason for not talking.

The writing on the inspector’s notebook looked as exact as a computer font. The precision scared him. This was a man like his own father, a man who was going to ferret out truths.

Jack stared at the policeman.

‘I understand the wound in your throat was fortunately rather shallow. Your vocal cords are not damaged, Mr Jin.’

Jack didn’t speak.

‘We need to know your connection to the dead men in the machinists’ shop. Nic ten Boom and the Pauder twins.’

Jack stayed quiet.

‘I know you’ve been told ten Boom is a known computer con artist. Did you know he was also a suspected internet pornographer?’ Van Biezen let the next two words detonate, a soft bomb in the quiet hum of the room. ‘Child pornographer.’

Bile inched into the back of Jack’s throat. This was new. He hadn’t known that about Nic. It was a most unpleasant surprise. He closed his eyes and he tried not to shiver. When he opened them Van Biezen still sat across from him.

‘He specialized in creating custom videos. You want a certain kind of child doing a certain act? He could deliver.’

Jack gritted his teeth. Closed his eyes. No, no, no. He had intended on complete silence but now a sickened moan rose in his throat, like a bubble loosened in a bottle. The first real noise he’d made in weeks.

‘Our informants say Nic ten Boom had a rather global clientele. What can you tell me about them?’

Jack wished he could die, snap his fingers, stop his heart. Every time this gets worse, he thought. I think it cannot get worse, and it does. It does. But he kept his mouth shut.

‘The Pauder twins are known freelance enforcers for a variety of criminal enterprises. Now, Mr Jin, how does a nice graduate student in computer science get caught in a shootout with such bad people?’

Jack said nothing.

‘I think your silence is to keep yourself from lying about who and what you are,’ Van Biezen said. ‘I think it’s been tolerated far too long. You won’t even write a note on a pad. But you are going to talk to me.’

Jack raised an eyebrow.

Van Biezen opened a file. ‘Let’s see what’s true today, shall we? You are Jin Ming, and you are a Chinese citizen, born in Hong Kong. You speak perfect English, according to your classmates at Delft. That’s all we know. I’m waiting for you to explain to me how you ended up in a bullet-ridden shop, full of counterfeit cigarettes and dead criminals.’

Jack had imagined how to answer this during his enforced silence. His false identity – backed by a computer record in the university’s database, and inside a distant Beijing database of all students abroad – had held up. He could survive this and vanish again. So he spoke his first words in weeks. ‘I was kidnapped.’ The words sounded scratchy, like sandpaper grating against wood.

Van Biezen raised an eyebrow at the unexpected sound of Jack’s voice. ‘He speaks. Very good.’ He cleared his own throat. ‘Kidnapped.’

‘Yes. Grabbed from an internet cafe over on Singel. The Cafe Sprong on 12 April. Ask the barista there. Three men came in and they pretended to be with the police. They pulled guns on everyone and ordered us to be still. Then they took me with them, they beat me up and they took me with them to that shop.’

‘Why would they kidnap you?’

‘I believe because they wanted my computer skills.’

‘You’re a hacker?’

‘I am the opposite.’ He injected dignity into his half-lie. ‘Check my work in grad school, speak with my adviser.’

‘We have.’

‘Then you know my thesis subject is computer security. No one knows system weaknesses better than a security expert. I specialize in RFID chip programming – you know, the chips that are placed on products to stop counterfeiting and to facilitate tracking.’ He paused. ‘May I have some water?’

Van Biezen gave him a glass with a straw sticking out of it. The water tasted like heaven to Jack. ‘Check the date. I’m sure there was a police report filed. The barista was mad.’

‘I will. And how did all these three men end up dead?’

Jack kept his gaze steady on Van Biezen. The cop had misunderstood; he thought the three dead men – Nic and the twins – were his kidnappers. Jack nearly wept with relief. If he mentioned that a team of three CIA agents, hunting one of their own named Sam Capra, had kidnapped him right now it would be unwise; he preferred to approach the CIA on his own terms.

Because he had already decided that the CIA was going to help him get out of this mess. He swallowed and continued: ‘Other men came in and shot them. I don’t know why. Except… ’

‘Well?’

‘They had crates of cigarettes. I assume they were smuggling them. If the cigarettes were stolen, then they might have wanted me to reprogram the RFID chips in the crates so they could not be tracked.’

Van Biezen said, ‘They weren’t stolen cigarettes. They were counterfeit brands.’

‘Then I guess they wanted me for some other reason.’

Van Biezen did not look impressed. He said, ‘So, when we check your phone records, we’re not going to find any calls to Nic ten Boom or the Pauder twins. They were strangers to you.’

‘Yes. Strangers to me.’ He had been careful to use only the prepaid phones given directly to him by Nic; his own phone and email records were clean.

‘I’m going to check your story. I hope for your sake it holds true.’

‘It will.’

‘So why did you not speak for so long?’

Jack said nothing. He put on his Mona Lisa smile and stared back at the detective. He’d returned to his Quiet Game.

Van Biezen left and Jack leaned back against the pillows. He considered. The CIA had killed Nic and the other men in the warehouse and left him to die. Or maybe they’d thought he was already dead. He had no idea. But… he’d been here a while. He had his own hospital room. They’d brought him here, covered, and he was under police protection.

Were the police hiding him?

They must be. Which meant maybe Nine Suns and the CIA weren’t looking for him. That was buying him time, very precious time he couldn’t waste lying in a hospital bed.

He needed that notebook.

He was not going to ask the police for help or for protection. The only protection was the notebook full of Nine Suns’ secrets and Nic had hidden it somewhere. He had to get out and he had to find it. The men who had taken him from the internet cafe would want it. The CIA, who had been hunting this group. Nine Suns must be special, international, if the CIA had an interest. They paid money for information. They protected informants. He could see his only course of action perfectly clear. He could find Nic’s notebook and sell it to August, and then could go into hiding for ever. He could not trust the police. He knew Nic had broken into the police department’s servers; even if the police hid him, Nine Suns could find him. He needed the most powerful ally he could muster. It would have to be the CIA.

Jack Ming studied the white purity of the ceiling of his hospital room. All he had to do now was to get the hell out of this hospital and find the red notebook.

The door opened. A nurse stepped inside. She was tall and black-skinned and had a strong face that wore a frown. He blinked. He wasn’t dreaming.

She closed the door and turned to him. His eyes widened in shock. A nurse’s uniform?

‘Well,’ Ricki said. She came close to the bed, leaned down to his ear. ‘You’ve been a lot of trouble to find.’

Jack decided to keep his ongoing silence, although he could not believe she stood before him.

‘Do you know how worried I’ve been? I could kill you for not letting me know you’re okay.’

Jack made a noise.

‘I’ve had to hack into you don’t want to know how many databases, looking for you.’ Ricki was originally from Senegal, in West Africa, and her accent, fueled by anger, chopped the words into shards. ‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’

He shook his head, pointed to the surgical scar on his throat. She can’t know what I’ve been doing, he thought, I can’t put her in danger.

‘Are you kidding me? I go through hell to find your hidden ass and you aren’t going to talk to me?’

His heart felt like it would burst. He let his lips form the beginning of a word: I am so glad you’re here, please get me out of this. But then he stopped. Ricki had known Nic, slightly. He couldn’t connect her to Novem Soles. He had to keep her away from these lunatics.

So he shook his head: no.

Then she fell onto him, crying softly, putting a kiss in his hair. Not on his lips. They’d broken up weeks ago. She held him and he thought he might cry, he might let out all the emotion penned up inside him out, like a long-echoing wail.

She sat next to the bed.

He pointed at her nurse’s uniform and raised his eyebrows. She shrugged. ‘I had to wait for the night shift, and if I get caught I’m arrested. I had to sneak down here and talk my way past the guard because he hadn’t seen me.’

The door opened, the guard peering in. Ricki had his wrist, as though taking his pulse. Jack gave the guard a nod. The guard shut the door.

‘The police have been hiding you.’ Ricki leaned close in her whisper.

Hiding him. And yet she’d found him. He loved how smart she was. He wanted to take her hand but they’d broken up, he reminded himself. She kept hold of his wrist.

‘Ming’ – and it shamed him she didn’t know his real first name – ‘what have you gotten involved in?’

He shook his head, pointed at the surgical scar.

‘You don’t fool me. You can talk. God knows most days you never shut up.’

He closed his eyes.

‘Don’t protect me,’ Ricki said. ‘Let me help you.’

The police officer outside opened the door and Ricki’s voice shifted into a louder tone. ‘So, everything looks okay. Sorry to have woken you.’ She stood, nodded smartly. She glanced at the police officer.

And she walked out without a backward glance.

Let me help you. No one, though, could help him. Unless he found Nic’s red notebook.