The Last Minute

74

Manhattan

The Watcher stood surveying the Manhattan skyline. He had spent the past twenty hours trying to suck every bit of information he could out of the extortion network. Before Jack Ming shut it down.

If they were unable to kill Ming and retrieve his evidence he wanted to sell to the CIA, then the Watcher was going to lose his entire power base among the Nine, and he would have to rebuild. It would be all right. He had rebuilt before after Mila stole most of his money. He’d fought and scrabbled his way back. But to lose the information feeds that had given him gold from Wall Street firms, from the White House, from Congress, from the British Parliament, from a good percentage of the Fortune 500, that would be devastating. The fearsome crime rings of the twentieth century – the Mafia, the Yakuza, the Colombian drug lords, the Mexican cartels – had never had their own spies, their own conduits to the highest powers in the land. This information had been oxygen to the blood of Nine Suns, knowledge that let them smuggle with impunity, keep the police at bay in a dozen countries, sell secrets to government and competitors and in turn own those buyers by virtue of their crimes. The extortion network that Jack Ming’s software made possible had netted them tens of millions of dollars’ worth of information in a matter of months.

And the Watcher needed to find something to replace that power base, and he had an idea.

His phone rang, and he answered.

‘This is Jack Ming,’ the voice said.

‘My favorite person,’ the Watcher replied.

‘I want to make a deal with you.’

‘With me? I doubt that.’

‘No, I do. You wanted the notebook, I’ll give you the notebook. I’ll sell it to you.’

‘I do not believe you.’

‘I can’t sell it to anyone else. Here’s what we do. You deposit ten million in an account I provide. When I have the money, I will call you and tell you where to find the notebook.’

‘How can I trust you?’

‘Conduct a poll. I’m pretty sure I’ll be seen as more trustworthy than you. Look, this is the deal, if you don’t want it… ’

‘Why would you deal with us when we tried to kill you? Not to be overly blunt.’

‘I will keep a few choice pages for insurance. If anything happens to me, they come to immediate light.’

‘You could blackmail me again.’

‘You could kill me again.’

‘That’s true. I thought you preferred to deal with the authorities.’

‘They lost my trust.’

‘Trust, so fleeting. All right, Jack. Where would you like to meet?’

Jack hesitated. ‘We’ll do it all by phone.’

‘Are you going to fax me the notebook, Jack?’

‘No.’

‘Then we will have to meet.’

‘And have your bitch Sam Capra show up and throw me off a building? No thanks.’

‘Aren’t you a smart lad?’

‘And aren’t you a right bastard, using his baby? Seriously.’

‘Had a chat with him, did you?’

‘I figure out things on my own, asshole. The notebook tells me a lot.’

‘Oh, Jack,’ the Watcher said. ‘I look at you and I realize I mishandled the entire situation. I shouldn’t have tried to get rid of you. I should have offered you a job. You’re a smart, smart kid.’

‘I’m smart enough to know I’ve got your golden goose here. I get my money, you get your notebook, and then we walk away.’

‘You could have copied it.’

‘And if anything happens to me, a nice copy of it will show up in the CIA’s mailbox, along with a letter of explanation. So. You leave me alone and you have nothing to worry about.’

‘So where shall we meet?’

‘In Central Park. In the Ramble, north of the Bow Bridge. Tomorrow at three. When I’ve confirmed the money is safe in my account then I’ll give you the notebook.’

‘A lot of faith for me.’

‘You want your notebook, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do, Jack. Give me the bank account.’

Jack gave him the account for a Swiss bank. The Watcher wrote it on the palm of his hand.

‘If you’re one minute late, or I don’t like the look of anything there, I’m gone and I’ll just drive by Langley and toss the notebook on their front porch.’ He hung up.

The Watcher clicked off his phone. Most interesting, that. Unexpected. Either Jack Ming had decided to bait a trap with himself or he’d decided that his need for money so he could vanish trumped all.

So. Should he have Sam Capra there to kill him? If Capra knew that someone from Nine Suns was meeting Jack Ming, he might try to seize him as a hostage to guarantee his son’s release. But he wouldn’t take the risk. That was the beauty of owning a child this way. The parent would never be able to cut the strings.

*

Jack Ming clicked off the phone. He sat on the edge of his bed back in his mother’s apartment. It was the last place, he thought, that anyone would look for him. His mother was dead and his father was gone, and now he was truly alone in the world.

He walked to his mother’s room. It was so spare, so absent of her, to be the place where she spent so much time. He had wept for his father for days, for weeks, but he could summon nothing for his mother except a promise: I’m sorry I got you killed. I’m going to kill them for you, Mom.

It would be so unexpected, he thought. Hackers hid in the shadows. They did not face threats in person; they lurked, they moved the intangible data, they did not cause bloodshed. Well, he was done with hacking. Tomorrow he would either die or he would kill. He didn’t much care if he never saw a computer again. He had an identity and he could get a new one, Ricki could help him again, she had the contacts.

He wanted to cry for his mother, but he couldn’t. Maybe later.

He picked up his cell phone and he dialed Amsterdam. It was very late there, actually early the next morning.

‘ Ja? ’ She sounded sleepy.

‘Ricki. It’s Jack.’

‘Oh, my God, where are you?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I just want you to know that… I want to thank you. For helping me.’ What was he going to say to her? My mom died, and, well, you’re the only friend I have left. There wasn’t much to say about him and his mom.

Ricki started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘They came… after you were gone. They came and they made me tell them where you went and they wanted to know what you knew about them. I’m sorry. They said they would kill me if I didn’t talk.’

‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Are you all right?’

‘Not really. They… they took over my business. I have to work for them now or they’ll kill me. They’re taking all the money.’

‘Oh, Ricki. Oh, God. I’m so sorry.’

She sounded as though she might cry but she didn’t. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘Listen. Tomorrow, I will either be dead or I’ll have the money to vanish forever. Do you want to vanish with me?’

‘What, go off with you? It… that is just stupid and crazy.’

‘I like you that much,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sorry I waited until now to tell you.’

Ricki gave what sounded like a half-sob, half-laugh. ‘Why would you trust me not to tell them? They own me now.’

‘Because, well, I don’t know. I do trust you. Do you want to come with me?’

‘I would have to walk away from everything,’ she said.

‘It’s not yours any more.’

She sniffed. ‘True. Yes, Jack, I think I would like a new start.’

‘Okay. I kind of love you a little.’

‘I know. I’ve known for a while. I love you a little, too.’

His chest made a slight lurch. ‘Okay, that’s good then.’

‘Well, don’t die now,’ she said. She started crying again.

‘I won’t. I won’t. I’ll call you back when I have the money and I’ll tell you where to go. If I don’t call, you figure out some way to get out from under these people. Just walk away if you have to, Ricki. You don’t want any part of them.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m going to mail you a key to a locker. It has a copy of the notebook. If I die then it’s yours, and you can do with it what you want. If you’re too afraid of Nine Suns, then give them the key and they’ll burn it, and I’ll already be dead so I won’t care. Or come to New York and get it yourself and give it to the police or to the FBI or sell it to the Brits or the French. I wouldn’t deal with the CIA.’

‘But if you’re okay, then I’ll be gone when the key gets here.’

‘It won’t matter. If I’m okay, I’ll have the copy with me. You just be ready to get on a plane.’

‘Okay. I wish I was there with you.’

‘I do, too. I’ll call you tomorrow night.’

‘I’m going to be an optimist and pack my bag.’

‘All right. I love you.’ The three hardest, the three easiest, words to say.

‘I love you, too.’

He hung up. If Ricki had kept her mouth shut his mother might be alive. But Ricki would be dead. He couldn’t know how it would have turned out, and he couldn’t hold it against her. If someone had said in his senior year of college he would get caught hacking, cause his father to have a heart attack, dodge arrest, hide out in Holland and fall for a Senegalese movie pirate, well, it wouldn’t have ranked very likely in his mind.

Welcome to life. Life, something so sweet, something worth fighting for.

He had to get ready for tomorrow. He didn’t have his gun any more. And he didn’t know where he could get another one. You had to get close to hand over a notebook. A hand had to reach out to you.

His mother wasn’t a great cook, but she’d loved having a gourmet kitchen.

In a drawer he found a pearl-handled chopping cleaver. He liked the unexpected.