The Last Minute

59

Special Projects headquarters, Manhattan

‘Do you know what they called me in the old days, August?’ Ricardo Braun asked.

‘No, sir.’ August could hardly get the words out.

‘Mr Ideas. I was the one with the fresh ideas, I was willing to try what was never tried before inside the Company. Do you know how hard it is to innovate inside a large bureaucracy?’

‘It’s difficult.’ He wondered where this was leading.

‘Special Projects was my idea. I tested many ideas for ways for the Company to fulfill its duty, do its work, the most important work in this nation.’ Braun paused. ‘Not every idea is a success, of course, but you must have a willingness to try, to fail, and to learn from that failure.’

Maybe, August thought, this was a talk about redemption.

‘I failed today, sir,’ August said.

‘You did. And I’ve been trying to come up with an idea or an innovation that will save you, Mr Holdwine, and I am failing.’ Braun cleared his throat. ‘I want to be sure I understand the unfolding of events. You came into a rendezvous site to meet possibly the most important informant we could get on Novem Soles and you failed to secure it. You saw a former officer on the site, one who you knew could be under the control of a hostile group, and you did not secure him.’

‘He appeared to be unarmed, sir. He had clearly been in a fight.’

‘Appeared. He beat you up and then he nearly killed your informant. I’ve just spent the past hour on the phone to Langley, trying to explain how we failed to capture a computer geek and how that resulted in open warfare on the streets of Brooklyn.’ Braun crossed his arms. ‘You understand, we’re not supposed to be operating on American soil. We are breaking laws here, August, for the common good. We all take that risk that it could come back and bite us. And here your team is, screwing up, and putting our entire branch at risk.’

‘Sam Capra killed those two women who apparently wanted to kill Ming. It could be argued he saved Ming’s life.’

‘Because he wanted to kill him himself.’ Braun shook his head.

‘These people have his child. They’re using Daniel Capra for their own ends. Forcing him to act. He told me himself.’

‘I am not unsympathetic to his motivations, August. On the contrary, it breaks my heart. But we can’t have him interfering in our work. I cannot have it. Sympathy doesn’t play beyond a certain point. Sam could tell them anything about our operations against criminal networks.’

‘Our operations have completely retooled since Sam Capra left Special Projects,’ August said. ‘They’re not mining him for information. They’re converting him into a weapon.’

‘Capra could have come to you, August. He could have said, “they have my kid and they want me to grab their traitor for them”. He could have worked with us.’

‘If they were holding a gun to my baby’s head,’ August said quietly, ‘I believe I’d do whatever they say.’

‘I think I would first remember my duty,’ Braun said.

‘You certainly enjoy using that word,’ August said. Anger rose in him. ‘You don’t think Sam has a duty to his family?’

‘The Company is family, too, August, and you should remember that.’

August was silent. He wished Braun had stayed in his glorious retirement.

‘Now. These two women in the building,’ Braun said.

‘We’re working on getting an ID on them. They drove a car registered to a Beth Marley, who works for Ming Properties. We sent someone to the office, they found her handcuffed in her kitchen. She’s being questioned by our people, but she doesn’t know anything.’

‘Interesting,’ Braun said. ‘Novem Soles has Capra hunting Ming, but who is hunting Capra?’

‘Someone else who wants Ming. Who wants what he has.’

Braun turned to him from the window. ‘So how do you intend to get both Ming and Capra?’

‘I’m not worrying about Sam. I sent a man to his bar, they haven’t seen him. He may be more of an absentee owner since he’s searching for his son. From what the witnesses said, he’s hurt. We’ll monitor the emergency rooms, but I’d rather put the people we have on finding Ming, not Sam.’

‘Ming can’t expose us. Sam can. We are not going to be exposed. Ever. We are not going to be embarrassed.’

‘So, I’m chasing him or I’m chasing Jack Ming. Which is it?’

‘I’m simply being practical. I’m thinking like the bad guys.’ He smiled, tapped his temple, and August thought: it’s not about innovation, it’s about your ego. ‘They’re playing on Sam’s emotional vulnerability as far as his child is concerned. We can’t fall into the same trap. I swear to you, we’ll take Capra alive if possible and if we find where his son is, we will move heaven and earth to bring that baby home.’

The line was drawn in the imaginary sand on Braun’s desk, drawn with those many ifs. He was putting catching Sam, for having defied them, ahead of catching Jack Ming.

‘If you don’t,’ August said, ‘I’ll make sure the whole Company knows that we didn’t go after an employee’s captive child.’

‘Sam Capra is not an employee.’

‘He was. Didn’t you just say we were all family, Ricardo? Or is that only when you make a point.’

‘You wouldn’t expose Special Projects work.’ Braun’s voice went icy.

‘I would. How much loyalty would employees give the Company if they knew we hadn’t already moved heaven and earth, as you like to say, to get back the Capra baby? If that baby isn’t safe, none of our loved ones are, Braun. I’m tired of this bullshit attitude of ours. We should have fixed this months ago, we should have found and rescued that child. You talk about duty. What about our duty to Sam?’

‘I advise you to be careful about what you say next. You messed up today, August, you don’t have a great deal of wriggle room with me. Worry about your own duty.’

‘Duty. Innovation. They have to be more than buzzwords, Ricardo.’ August couldn’t keep the disgust out of his voice. ‘We’ve kept everything about the Capras quiet. What Lucy did, what we did to Sam. We control hundreds of intel assets in the world, and none of them knew to look out for leads that could have given us Daniel Capra. We turned our backs on Sam and we helped create this situation. That gets out, there’ll be investigations, there’ll be cuts in funding, there’ll be resignations.’

‘The Capras were an anomaly. Not standard operating procedure and Lucy Capra was a confirmed traitor.’ Braun nearly spit as he said traitor. ‘People will not see themselves as the Capras, it won’t happen.’ He steeled his voice. ‘I gave up my retirement to come back here, after more years of service than you’ll ever see. Don’t you dare to suggest that duty is simply a buzzword to me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ August said. ‘But there is a disconnect between what you say and what you’re proposing.’

‘I think you have too much emotional involvement, August. You were his friend. You’re relieved. I’m not going to keep taking bullets for an ingrate who can’t do his job.’

‘What does that mean, I’m fired?’

‘Of course not. But turn in your gear, your keys, your access codes. Take a week off to think about what you want to do because you’ll never be doing field work again. Then crawl back to Langley and you can beg them to keep you. I think you’ll be very good at pushing paper and,’ Braun put disgust into his voice, ‘writing long emails full of bullet points.’

‘I am going to write a long email. Mostly about you.’ August placed his phone, his gun, his passkeys on the desk, got up and left.

Braun watched him go. Then he let out a long, ragged breath. Worse and worse. Desperate times, extraordinary measures. August walked like a man who had no idea how close he’d come to dying. And he’d no doubt August would identify the sisters, if not the truth about them. And he’d already identified the redhead; every data search August made displayed on Braun’s own computer.

God only knew what was in that damned notebook.

And exposure just couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t happen. He had to shut this down, now. If Ming and Capra were dead that was the end of it.

Like most jobs, Braun thought, if you wanted it done right you had to do it yourself. He might need to return to a more private retirement, and that million dollars for Mila would be a good cushion for a new life.

He got up and left.

Sam Capra owned a bar, so August had said, and Ricardo Braun felt like a drink.

Twenty minutes later, when a pack of information arrived at Special Projects’ network via Langley, a confirmation message echoed back to Langley’s computers. Hiding inside that message was another one, and that hitchhiking bit of data dropped off along the way and snaked to its natural home. The tiny bit of computer code that allowed this action was very much like what Jack Ming had written for Nic, to spy on people. A Special Projects computer had been infected weeks ago, via a spreadsheet sent to it by one of the people in the Company later exposed as a Nine Suns operative.

The Watcher’s phone beeped with a new text message.