The Last Minute

57

Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan

Ricardo Braun held three different cell phones; what he was not holding was his temper. ‘Go find out who we’re dealing with beyond Capra,’ he said to August, ‘while I do my damnedest to help you keep your job.’ His normally cordial, calm voice trembled with barely contained anger.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘You should be,’ he snapped. ‘Do as I told you and when you’ve got some information, come see me. I have to be on the phone with the gods in Langley, explaining how our inability to secure our informant caused a gunfight in the streets of Brooklyn and ended up on the national news.’

August tried to swallow and couldn’t. He turned. ‘August. There’s a shoot-on-sight order on Capra. You should know. No one is expecting you to shoot your friend. But he attacked you and two other officers and nearly killed Ming. We’re not chit-chatting with him again. He’s going down, dead or alive. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

August went back to the conference room next to his office, where the team, restless and angry, waited.

August still commanded the Novem Soles task force. So he put all remaining six agents in the Manhattan Special Projects office on the search for Ming and Capra. Agents headed for the Ming apartment; the Ming Properties building; and one for The Last Minute, where he had an unproductive talk with Bertrand. Another agent monitored all incoming traffic on the emergency rooms in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Just as Jack Ming tapped the cameras of a toy store and a traffic light, Special Projects had a bird’s-eye into the emergency room entrances, feeding off security cameras. Monitoring software scanned flight reservations and train ticket purchases.

The shoot order meant August knew he had to find Sam before any of the other agents in Special Projects did.

Okay, first figure out who these women were – the dead and the living. The redhead with the gun who was intent on grabbing Ming’s gear. Who was she? Who were the dead pair in the building? Special Projects was not exactly equipped to work a crime scene; they had possession of the building (thanks to Beth Marley, who cancelled the security service after being assured her family would be protected) and the bodies; a forensic team, and backup agents who were willing to overlook the fact that the CIA is not supposed to operate on American soil, were flying from Langley to work the scene.

But he couldn’t wait on them. If Sam was the pawn of Novem Soles, so, perhaps, was the redhead. As for the two dead women, if they’d been there to kill Sam, then the women must be an enemy of Novem Soles. Drones for a third player. The thought deeply unsettled him.

August got pizza and a big soda and he sat down in front of a secured workstation at the back of the New York office. His jaw ached from where Sam had hit him but pizza was all that sounded good to his empty stomach. He kept his phone’s earbud in place so he could get updates from the field teams scouring the city for Ming and Sam.

The Company owned, along with the National Security Agency, the most advanced photo recognition software available. He used a software program to assemble a face matching that of the woman he’d seen. Reddish hair, hazel eyes, a small nose, high cheekbones, a constellation of freckles. Her ears stuck out slightly; it made her look younger. He closed his eyes repeatedly, pictured her, tried to cement the memory in his head. Her chin was a bit pointed. Throat narrow. He guessed her height at close to 5 feet 5, weight maybe 110 pounds. When he finished the composite he considered: where to look?

He loaded the reconstructed face into a search database for CIA personnel. He got back eighty-nine matches. He scanned through the faces. None were the woman.

He loaded the face into a search database for known British intelligence agents. Sam had spent most of his career working out of London. A dozen matches. None were exact.

He accessed a database of retired CIA personnel. Again, a scattering of matches but not his woman.

Special Projects, whose purview was where criminality intersected with national security, had its own set of databases. He accessed them.

He pulled up a list of known computer hackers. Ming was a hacker and the redhead coming back to grab his knapsack seemed odd. While the number of female hackers was growing, it was still a male-dominated field. If she’d been arrested in the United States or by a Western ally for hacking, her smiling face should be in this database.

It wasn’t.

He got up, began to pace the floor. He ate the pizza, chewing on the discs of pepperoni until his jaw hurt, settling the hunger in his stomach. He studied her face. He changed the hair, made it longer. He put glasses on her.

He opened another database of CIA informants. People who had traded information to the Company, people who ranged from foreign dignitaries to common criminals. The list numbered in the thousands. He entered the woman’s face into the search parameters.

Three matches.

There she was. Her name on the file was Lindsay Partridge.

Lindsay Partridge had vanished from New York two years ago on 17 April. August rubbed his eyes. ‘Hello, there,’ he said.

She had provided the Company with information on a forgery ring, creating both counterfeit cash and passports. No charges filed against her, her name never given to the police. She dropped out of the ring and vanished, and the authorities arrested the remaining forgers. He opened her file. No other information. She had not done any other work for the Company. He entered in a special password that would open any encrypted parts of her file, which were for Special Projects eyes only.

The file was locked. That couldn’t be. He couldn’t be locked out.

He phoned Fagin.

‘What?’ Fagin sounded tired and stressed.

‘Why would I be locked out of an SP file? I have a master access code.’

‘I don’t know. The stars didn’t align. Someone doesn’t want you to see it. The operation was mothballed. Or it’s embarrassing. Or maybe it’s gruesome and your delicate little eyes can’t handle it, August.’

‘I need that file cracked.’

‘Well, get in line, we’re really busy.’ Fagin could sound as irritable as any corporate IT help desk. ‘Fill out a ticket… ’

‘Now, Fagin. This is highest priority.’ He gave Fagin the file details. ‘I want to know what’s inside there. Get your smartest Twist on it. Now or-’

‘Or what? Damn, every one is quick with a threat this week. Really.’ Fagin hung up.

What did that mean? He’d ask Fagin when he heard back from him.

Via tunnels carved out by Fagin and the Twists, Special Projects could dive into all sorts of databases – even illegally – to provide a path of footprints to follow. August scanned her trail. There were no recorded activities on Lindsay Partridge’s charge accounts past that final April date. Her email and social networking accounts had been abandoned. She’d dropped out of the graduate program in design at NYU. A CIA informant and art student, maybe that was a first, or she had design talents to be put to legitimate use. She had not paid her taxes for the past two years and she had not reported any income. Here one day, gone the next. No one seemed to miss her. This didn’t feel like foul play. This looked like someone rolling up the loose threads of her life, tying them into a tidy knot. Walking away.

Lindsay Partridge wanted to vanish. Had the CIA looked for her? Just to keep a tab on her?

August opened his phone and started to make calls. He gathered the threads of her vanishing: Lindsay Partridge handed her landlady a check for the rest of the year’s rent, said she had to go home to Miami for a while, but never came back. The landlady received a letter that followed two months later, giving notice on the lease. He got a copy of her transcript, faxed over from NYU, and called her academic adviser. She’d told her instructors at NYU she was withdrawing due to a family emergency, returning to Miami.

And now she was just a locked file.

It was like she and Sam were both dirty secrets, ignored and forgotten by the Company.

He entered in the scant information they had on the sisters. He fed the photos of their faces, taken at the Ming building, into the facial recognition system to let it work its magic. One had a New York driver’s license in the name of Amy Bolton and a Brooklyn address. The other lacked an ID on her.

He checked the databases: Amy Bolton had a credit history, a mortgage. She worked for a company called Associated Languages School. He checked the company’s website. Very bare bones, and pages where there should have been more detail were ‘under construction’. But they offered instruction in a wide range of languages and translation services. But no photos of the staff, no outlining of classes or programs, no listing of upcoming schedules.

Business must not be good.

August tapped at his lip, then went to Google and entered the following: foreign language schools Brooklyn. He got back a few results, with locations highlighted on the Google map of the borough.

No Associated Languages School.

Now, he wondered. A modern business, especially a service business, needs to come up on search engines these days to thrive. And here was one that didn’t appear in the search results at all. Almost as if it were hiding.

He pulled up the address for Associated Languages School on Google StreetView. The building was under renovation, being converted into condos.

So much for Associated Languages School. It was a sham.

The computer kept checking its digital rogues’ gallery for a facial match on the two women.

He grabbed a soda from the refrigerator and returned to his office. And he activated the camera.

Lucy Capra lay in her bed, the wires and the feeds branching about her. She rested on her side; the nurses must have come in and moved her, regular as clockwork. He could see the savage scar along her skull, the mark where the bullet had left its fragments, her ticket to this long limbo of sleep. It had torn her soul and mind away, if not her body. The monitoring camera was fixed in place. He looked in on her once a day, sometimes more. He wondered why he did. It was a thing he would not have told Sam.

He didn’t love Lucy. He had toyed with loving her once, but then she and Sam got involved and he’d taken what he’d felt for her and put it away, like a gift you can’t use gets put on a shelf. And in his moments of shame he thought: thank God she didn’t pick me. How different his life would have been; he might have been the one caught in this awful limbo instead of Sam.

But he could not understand why she had done what she did, why she had betrayed everything. Sam told him she claimed it was money. Money; it boggled August. She was lost in a shadow world, a nothingness where he suspected not even dreams intruded. But he knew that if she could have risen from the bed in pursuit of her child she would have.

He turned off the camera to see what the facial software kicked back to him, to see what news the field reports held.

And then his phone rang.