The Last Minute

39

Hotel Esper, Williamsburg

We slept late, longer than we should have. Normally I can’t sleep late in New York because the rising noise of the traffic is an automatic alarm clock. When I woke up Leonie was showered and dressed and tapping at her laptop. ‘No intrusions at the building other than those at the security guard’s regularly appointed rounds.’ She looked up at me and gave me a wan smile.

What did I do? Kiss her, nuzzle her, pretend last night didn’t happen? My marriage with Lucy – full of deception and lies and my own blindness – convinced me that I suck at relationships and it wasn’t like we were going to have a long-term one. We would get our kids and part ways and never see each other again, except in our memories about the worst few days of our lives.

The newspaper websites in New York and New Jersey carried no mention of two bodies discovered at the abandoned Associated Languages School in Morris County.

‘I’ll go get us some breakfast,’ I said. Leonie made the noise one makes when one is absorbed in a computer screen. Again, like Lucy.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought about what you said last night,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find out who that driver was.’

‘He doesn’t matter any more.’

‘You’re not working alone,’ she said. ‘Why presume that he is? We don’t know how much of a head start we have on finding Jack. We may have none. And I’m not going to sit here and fret and wait and do nothing while waiting for Jack to show up.’

I walked to a diner on the corner and got breakfast for us to go: mushroom and spinach omelets, hash browns, fruit, bacon, coffee, orange juice. You eat when you can because you never know when you might get your next meal on days like today.

When I came back we ate. I tried to make conversation.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

She seemed to measure her answer by staring into her Styrofoam coffee cup.

‘I know your real name isn’t Leonie, that you live under a false name.’

‘Trust me, it’s better you not know much about me. I am infinitely boring.’

‘I know that’s not true,’ I said with a smile.

She smiled back, just for a moment. ‘You, where are you from?’

‘All over. My parents worked for a relief agency. My mom’s a pediatric surgeon, my dad’s an administrator. I lived in over twenty different countries before I was eighteen.’ I finished my coffee. ‘If I don’t make it, and you get my son back from Anna, you can take him to my parents. They live in New Orleans. Alexander and Simone Capra. They’re in the phone book.’

‘Are you close to them?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Why?’

‘My brother died and it ruined their hearts. They either want to take over my life entirely or shut me out completely. Him dying made them a little crazy.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He went to Afghanistan, to do relief work like they’d done for years, and he and his best friend from college, they got captured by the Taliban. Their throats were cut in a propaganda video.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Leonie said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ It was about the best thing she could say. Really, it’s so horrible, it shocks people. You cannot imagine what it is like to see your brother die, helplessly. To see his friend die. Then to see them discussed on every news channel, as though they are just names to learn, Danny Capra, Zalmay Qureshi, not people, just distant unfortunates, just names. ‘That was when I joined the CIA.’

‘But you’re not with them any more.’

‘When your wife betrays the CIA, it kind of destroys your career path.’

‘I would think.’

‘A constant cloud of suspicion.’ I stood up and shoved my Styrofoam food holder in the trash. ‘So we parted ways.’

‘And she had this baby while you were apart?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was she like? Your wife?’

‘Why do you care?’

‘I’m just curious. You seem too smart a guy to be easily fooled.’

‘We all have our blind spots. She was one as large as the Sahara to me.’

‘Sometimes we don’t pick wisely.’

‘No. And the price we pay is very heavy.’

Leonie turned back to her computer. ‘Any luck with tracing the driver?’

‘No,’ she said. Not looking at me.

‘Really? No track on his driver’s license or his limo plates?’ She had memorized the plates during the long haul out of Manhattan and New Jersey, following him.

‘Stolen, I guess,’ she said. Still not looking at me.

I stood up and watched the Ming building with my binoculars. Two o’clock couldn’t come soon enough for me. I needed inside that building now, in between the last pass of the security guard and Jack’s (presumed) meeting with August.

And then I thought of a way.