The Last Minute (33 page)

Just one perfect shot and my son would be safe.

Training dictated that I eliminate the bigger threat: the other Special Projects agent. He could kill me before I got to Jack.
And although I was willing to kill Jack I wasn’t eager to kill an innocent man.

The Navigator skidded into a parked car, on the passenger side.

I slid off the roof onto the trunk, on my knees, gun drawn. I emptied the clip into the windshield. The reinforced glass pocked
but didn’t surrender to the bullets. I placed my shots hard and neat where Jack Ming sat and I swear above the roar of traffic
and horns and the gun blasts I could hear Jack Ming screaming.

But the glass held. Through the blizzard of fractures in the windshield I could see Jack scrambling toward the back of the
Navigator, squeezing between the driver and passenger seats. Wriggling toward the rear exit. Panicking.

The agent was brave. He was going to cover Jack Ming’s escape. Good guy, doing his job. My throat thickened at the thought
of what I would have to do. He jacked down his window and he snaked an arm around the windshield to fire at me.

I dropped off the trunk, heard the first bullet kiss the paint. I was trapped in a narrow wedge between the parked car and
the Navigator. The pavement was warm. The tire slanted toward me and I barely had room to curve and wriggle between the cars
to get under the Navigator.

I started snaking toward the back. The car’s heat radiated against me.

To my left the driver’s door opened and I saw a foot hit the ground.

I shot the agent in the fleshy part of the calf. He howled and the leg withdrew into the car.

Ahead of me I saw red Converse sneakers hit the asphalt. Running. I writhed out from under the car, dodging through stalled
and slowing traffic. The sidewalks had cleared at the first sound of the shots. Thank you, considerate, frightened pedestrians.
But I had to dodge cars and Jack, fresh and unbeaten, bolted at full speed on the fast emptying sidewalks.

He rounded a corner and vanished.

I chased him. He glanced back, fear on his face. An ache tore through my ribs, in my chest, where August had dealt me a beating.
Where I’d thrown myself against the bus. Trying to sneak up on them had hurt me.

A cheap street market loomed up ahead, one of those full of stuff like prepaid cell phones and knockoff purses and anything
from lingerie to DVD players still in original packing, but not sold at original prices. People thronged between the booths,
along the edges. Old folks, kids, babies in strollers, scatterings of families.

I couldn’t risk a shot at him. Not there. Too many people.

Jack dodged between the tables and the booths. Loud Chinese pop and a competing undercurrent of reggae thrummed the air. I
risked a backward glance and saw Leonie, a few blocks back, weaving toward us. She’d had the presence of mind to hide the
gun. I didn’t see either August or his men. But they would either be coming, very soon, or calling in reinforcements.

I tailed Jack Ming into the marketplace. He glanced back every ten seconds to see if I was following. We were blocks from
where we’d started and this crowd was calm, and he wasn’t eager to panic them. He wanted them between me and him. He wasn’t
screaming for help. Or for the police. He was determined to run. And he was determined to stay in a crowd.

The fear in his face tore at me. I didn’t
want
to kill this man.

August opened his eyes. His face hurt. Everything hurt. Blood on the back of his head, sticky. He got to his feet.

He heard the whine of the metal door opening, footsteps pounding the concrete floor. He groped for his gun. Gone. His head
felt broken and dreamy and misty. Concussion, probably.

A woman. Petite, red hair pulled back into a ponytail, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She stared at him and raised the gun in
her hand.

‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘Stay right there.’

He stayed right there.

He saw her gaze dart about the room. She ran to Jack Ming’s knapsack, lifted it almost gently. Before she picked it up he
could see in its unzippered opening a small laptop. She grabbed the knapsack, put it over her shoulder. She kept the gun leveled
at August.

‘Just stay there,’ she ordered him.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

Of course she didn’t answer. She kept her gaze on him, tightened her grip on the gun.

She vanished back out into the alley.

August staggered to the door. Who the hell was she? Was she in league with Ming or with Sam?

He came out into the alley and she shot at him. Not close enough to hit but, you know, a bullet in your general direction
is enough to make you retreat.

‘I told you to stay!’ she screamed at him.

One of the backups, Griffith, was lying in the alley, groaning,
pawing at his ribs. No sign of the Navigator. He counted to twenty and risked coming out the door again. The redhead was gone.

He keyed his earphone. ‘Two, this is One, report?’

‘I’m getting the informant away, we’re being pursued, an armed male, he knew your name, he said you were shot—’

And then chaos. The distant thrum of metal against metal crashing, the drum-drum-drum of gunshots hitting bulletproof glass.
Grimes cussing, screaming at someone to get down and stay down, Jack Ming’s voice answering
I am getting the fuck out of here
.

‘The hostile is trying to kill the kid,’ Grimes said and then more shots. Grimes howled and cussed again. August ran now.
‘Where are you?’

The hostile. Sam Capra. His best friend – who should have wanted nothing more than an informant from Novem Soles coming forward
– was trying to kill their best hope of unveiling the ring’s every secret.

August ran.

I ran.

Ahead of me, Jack Ming dodged a booth full of DVDs from Bollywood and Hong Kong, leaping over the stacked tables, scattering
packaging and earning a scream of annoyance and rage from the elderly vendor. The man hollered at him in a quilted howl of
obscene English and Mandarin. Ming stumbled and his
T-shirt hiked up his back. He reached for something in the small of his back and I thought it was a gun and I couldn’t let
him shoot the old man but it was a swath of red leather. Like a book or a journal, firmly lodged in the back of his pants.
He yanked his shirt back over it.

He was making sure it was still there.

The notebook. The secrets of Novem Soles.

I hollered in Mandarin: ‘He stole my wallet!’ There are decided advantages to having parents who give you a nomadic, worldwide
existence as a kid. I can produce a large selection of random utterances in two dozen languages. I knew that phrase because
I’d had it yelled at me, more than once, in Beijing when I was fifteen. I got bored easily.

The vendor grabbed at Jack, who screamed: ‘He’s lying, he’s trying to kill me!’

Which story is more likely to be believed in New York?

The vendor closed his hold on Jack, who kicked away from him, landing an awkward punch on the man’s face. The old man fell
back onto a stack of Bollywood epics that now spread on the asphalt like a fallen house of cards.

I was jumping over the table when Jack proved himself.

Next vendor over was a stir-fry stand and Jack seized the searing hot pot and flung it at me.

I twisted and ducked and the scalding grease and shreds of meat landed against my jacket, in my hair. Real, honest pain. I
dusted the meaty napalm free from my head and shoulders and singed my palms and fingers in the process. Glops of grease bubbled
the plastic cases of the DVDs. The vendor caught a small splatter of it on his arm and cried out in pain.

I gritted my teeth, finally free of the searing mess, and ran out the booth.

Jack was gone.

Fifteen seconds is a lifetime in an urban chase; that was about what I had lost. Run. Catch him. How hard could it be to kill
a computer geek?

I saw him skid into a cross-street and grab a cab. He piled in the back and the cab roared forward. I reached the intersection,
hurrying to its middle, trying to see the cab name and a number. A guy in a Ducati motorcycle nearly ran over me, yelling
at me in furious Spanish as he barreled past. He called out unkind words about my mother.

I ran after him. The Ducati slowed for braking traffic; the cab was several cars ahead. I stayed three steps behind Mr Ducati,
just past the corner of his eye, and as he came to a stop I introduced an elbow to his throat, between the shielding of the
helmet he wore and his jacket.

When I hit, I don’t tickle. I hit hard. It’s a lot harder blow than I look like I can deliver. The guy was blocky and squat
and he perched on the Ducati like it was a mobile throne. He’d mouthed off at me, the fool in the intersection, and then forgotten
about me, his eyes looking ahead for the next obstacle.

I slammed him off the bike. He didn’t yell, he just went over and he made a choking noise. I knew he’d recover; I’d pulled
the punch.

‘Manners,’ I said in Spanish. And I roared onto the sidewalk.

People screamed and parted out of my way. I could see the cab, four or five cars ahead of me, to the right. I was surrounded
by witnesses but he was here. He was here and I had to make this work. The gun felt heavy at the back of my ruined suit jacket.
I left it there.

I veered the Ducati hard, past a parked truck between me and his cab.

And saw the cab’s back door open, swinging as the cab braked. Jack had jumped somewhere along the street. He’d seen me pursuing
him.

I scanned the crowd. Alleyways, streets, doors.

Then I saw him. Stumbling, running in the distance.

I powered the Ducati, cutting across the traffic.

He ran up the stairs in front of a hipsterish, modern-architecture brownstone that was all glass and cube. And I saw him pull
a small gun awkwardly from his pocket.

The door opened and a young woman exited. Jack waved the gun in her face and she screamed and crouched, obeying his order.
Then Jack vanished inside. The cowering woman kept the door propped open, frozen in fear.

I roared the bike up the stairs after him, through the open door. I wanted him scared. I wanted him panicked. I wanted him
not stopping to aim at me.

He ran up the apartments’ stairs as I vroomed across the tile floor of the lobby. Eyes forward, intent on fleeing. Only glancing
at me.

I braked with a foot, wheeled the Ducati in a circle with a deafening screech, and powered the bike up the sleek steel stairs,
the motorcycle jittered and roared, not built for this punishment, but I rocketed it. The roar of the bike made him run and
he was about to run out of road, so to speak. I spun on the landing, zoomed up the next flight. My spine felt like it was
about to separate from my body.

He ran up the final flight. I followed, the engine huffing its protestations. He glanced back at me once, but because I hunkered
down on the bike, when he shot, the bullet zoomed well past me. He was unnerved.

I needed him to stay that way if this was going to work.

I reached the landing and Jack ran hard down the hallway, in the direction of the street, toward a window-covered dead end.

Fear is a weird mistress. She can stop you dead and cripple you, or she can harden your heart with courage.

Jack Ming’s heart hardened in those last few seconds.

He spun and he fired, the blasts from the gun bright and heat-dizzying in the dim of the hallway.

I fell back off the bike and it roared forward the remaining few feet, straight toward him. He threw himself out of the way.
The bike rocketed past him, smashing through the glass wall. It tipped out into the sudden glare of the day, and I distantly
heard it crash three stories down onto the pavement.

For a second, lying on my side, time froze. Jack leveled the gun at me, face wrenched with shock and horror – I had nearly
run him down with the motorcycle, and the gust of wind from the window ruffled his hair.

Now I could see every detail of his face. He was barely past being a kid. He fumbled at a door lock, the door marked with
a red Exit sign. The knob wouldn’t move.

I groped at my back, my fingers searching, my ragged voice saying, ‘I’m sorry.’

But my gun was gone from my holster.

He stared at me as he worked the knob.

Oh, God, I must have lost it, either in the jump to the car or along the hallway when I skidded.

Then he fired the gun. But not at me. He shifted its aim, sent a bullet into the lock of the door marked
STAIRS
. The lock
broke. He shoved the door open and he ran.

I lurched to my feet as he bolted through the door.

I followed. He hurried up a short stairway and then through a rooftop door he opened and then slammed shut.

On a rooftop I could be king, and Jack Ming had no chance.

I grabbed the doorknob as he tried to shut it. The door froze in our tug of war. Then the little gun appeared in the gap,
close by my head.

I ducked. He fired. I let go.

The door slammed shut.

I counted to ten. Fifteen. The moment I opened the door he could shoot me in the head.

Twenty. I yanked open the door, just a bit.

I could hear, in the open air, the approaching whine of a police siren. This building would soon be swarming with New York’s
finest and, if they caught me before I could reach Jack Ming, my son was dead.

I eased out onto the roof. I didn’t see him. Lots of places for him to hide: water tanks; AC units; vents. All he had to do
was wait until the police showed. Maybe he’d surrender to them and they’d ferry him to August or Special Projects. Compared
with the option of dying at my hands, he’d prefer the police.

The roof was quiet. The neighboring roofs were both a half-story higher; but I didn’t think he’d have had time to clamber
up them. Then I saw him. Running. He had scrambled onto the roof next door, hunkered down for a moment, but I could see
the top of his head, ducking back down. He’d risked a look. It was a bad risk.