The Last Minute (9 page)

‘Well, I do. Do you remember him having a notebook, maybe one that he would have hidden?’

She blinked, considered, drank more of the vodka. These seemed new questions to her, Jack thought, ones the police hadn’t
asked.

He poured another few fingers of vodka into the glass. ‘This notebook will protect you and it will protect me. Think.’

‘But you know him and his computers. He did everything on them.’ She blinked again, slurped more of her poison. ‘But he asked
me to go to the store, just this once, and buy a red notebook and tape, something he needed for writing and photos. We didn’t
have any photo albums. Not after Nic’s father left. I don’t like them.’

A few photos still dotted Nic’s room but Jack noticed he hadn’t seen any in this room, or the outer room. A lot of painful
history in this apartment, he thought. That he understood. ‘So Nic asked you to buy a notebook for him.’

‘Yes, a big one, and it was red.’

‘Can you tell me where it is?’

‘No.’

Jack thought his patience would explode and scatter his brains around the bedroom. He took a calming breath. She was old,
drunk, grieving, and she was his only hope.

‘Did the police search the entire apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they give you a list of what they took?’

She considered this. ‘Yes. They did.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know’, and then a rare neuron fired. ‘I signed it on the kitchen table.’

Jack got up and shuffled among the debris on the table. Found it: a list from the Amsterdam Police Department, offering an
inventory of what they had seized. Four laptops, two desktop computers, financial files, cell phones. Jack wondered if any
record there would lead back to him. It made him feel as though time were moving faster. He felt feverish. But there was no
mention of a notebook. The police hadn’t taken it.

‘I have to know where that notebook is.’ He tried to keep the panic out of his voice.

She had followed him out of the bedroom. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t have any money, do you? Or income, now that Nic is dead.’ It was a brutal truth.

She didn’t look at him. ‘Nic made so much I didn’t have to work.’

Because corporate espionage, spamming and porn paid so well. Jack pitied her. If he sold the notebook, he would have to make
sure she got some of the money. ‘Think. Where would Nic have hidden the thing that mattered to him most? Did he have a storage
unit? Another apartment? Anywhere?’

‘No, no.’

‘They said he did videos.’ Jack had to tear the words out of his mouth. ‘Um, illegal ones. Did he have a place where he might
have filmed them?’

She bit her lip and he could see that if she’d known about her son’s horrible activities she’d chosen to ignore them. She
sat down.

‘Mrs ten Boom. Please.’

‘He told me … he had stopped doing that.’ Her lips tightened into a line. ‘He promised me.’

‘Where?’

‘He had an apartment … he paid cash for it. I think under a different name.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Well, he never took me there,’ she said with some indignation. ‘But once … long ago, I followed him. He told me he’d quit,
I wanted to be sure. It was like an addiction, you see.’

The irony seemed lost on her. ‘So I followed him and I saw another man bring three teenage girls to his door … ’ She blinked.
‘I came home and I had a drink and … ’ She left the sentence unfinished. But he could guess that painful moment would have
been when her drinking started in earnest.

He said nothing for a long minute. He’d thought this woman a stupid old drunk and now he had an idea of what the knowledge
of her son’s crimes had done to her.

‘He was my baby. Every person who does wrong in this world, they were once someone’s baby. Full of hope and promise. He was
so smart. Where did I go wrong? Where did I bend him the wrong way?’

‘Nothing he did is your fault,’ Jack said. ‘Trust me on this one.’

She heaved a deep sigh and it seemed to take an effort to tear the words out of her chest. ‘I can take you there.’ She got
up and went to the kitchen drawer. She pulled it free and turned it over. Under it was a key, taped into place. ‘This is it,’
she said. ‘This is the only one we’ve got.’

Jack was afraid to take the bus or the train with his face in the day’s papers so he’d borrowed Ricki’s little car.

‘He was such a smart boy. Like his father. Nic was always good at math, I was terrible at numbers. He got fired from his computer
jobs, though. He was smarter than his bosses, they didn’t like him.’

Jack didn’t respond to this hollow praise. He turned into a parking lot down from a series of apartment complexes. The neighborhood
was bad, and graffiti in a half-dozen languages marred the walls. Jack felt sick. Nic traded filth. Jack didn’t want to be
here. If he’d known this about Nic he never would have worked with him. But what was done was done, and so now he had to see
this through.

The address was an apartment in a section of De Pijp that retained the original gritty feel of the neighborhood, untouched
by the gentrification that had pervaded this part of Amsterdam in recent years. The halls were clean, but they smelled of
cigarette smoke and a heavy, delicious scent of Turkish food cooking. Jack and Mrs ten Boom walked up the stairs and found
the door. Jack slid the key in and unlocked it and stepped inside, Mrs ten Boom following him, a slight humming noise coming
from her throat.

She was afraid of what they might see here.

Jack did a quick survey of the small, cluttered apartment. In the kitchen were bottles of whisky. And cans of soda and bags
of candy. Lures? Or bribes? The apartment made his skin itch with distaste.

He poured Mrs ten Boom a generous shot of whisky and turned on the TV to distract her. It was hooked up to a DVD player, and
a children’s show was already loaded, bright colored dancing flowers and music. Jack thought he would vomit. He quickly switched
the television to a news network.

‘Here, Mrs ten Boom, have a seat.’ Best if he searched alone, he thought.

Jack began a methodical search of the apartment. He started in the bedroom, going through every lining of clothing, every
container in the closet, every box under the bed. Nic had weapons hidden in this place: a 9mm Glock, a Beretta pistol, a hunting
knife with a wicked looking edge. Jack put those in a separate box.

He tore apart the mattress, dismantled the bed, pulled the headboard free. In the bedroom closet was a set of expensive camera
gear. He searched through the equipment bags. Nothing. He tore up the carpet. Nothing.

A bubble of panic rose in his chest.

He finished in the bedroom. He went into the bathroom, searched every inch. He found a thousand euros hidden in a large plastic
aspirin bottle. He went and pushed the cash into Mrs ten Boom’s hands; she stared at it in surprise, then put it in her pocket.

He went into the kitchen. There wasn’t much food inside the refrigerator: bottles of beer, sandwich meat, cheese furred with
mold, jar of mustard. He closed the door on the rising smell. Then he pulled the refrigerator out from the wall. A layer of
dust and grit lay on the floor. He began to search the cabinets and the drawers, removing dish towels, boxes of sugary cereal,
bottles of hard liquor. Nothing. He pulled up the tatty lining paper to see if anything was hidden underneath. Zero luck.
When the cabinets were empty he inspected them, tapping on them.

The top cabinet sounded different.

He tapped again. Then he stepped down and found a knife and worked it against the corner of the wood.

It gave slightly. He stuck the knife in and the wood folded back; there was a hidden hinge.

Wedged in the space was a red book, large, with a moleskin cover and an elastic band to keep it closed.

He pulled the red notebook free. He sat down on the kitchen floor and flipped through the pages. In the den he could hear
Mrs ten Boom dribbling more whisky into her glass, moaning, a soft keening of grief.

The first few pages were numbers. Just numbers, in two columns. Maybe a code? Or maybe passwords? Or maybe account numbers.
They were written in a neat, spare hand, as though they had been carefully copied.

He flipped to where the columns of numbers stopped.

Next page was a photo. A lean whippet of a man he’d never seen before, older, Caucasian, in a gray suit, walking with another
man and a woman. The woman was Asian, striking, in her twenties. The other man was tall, heavy-set, black, also in a fine
looking suit, scowling. Behind them was a rather grand house, with a huge porch and columns, with a curving driveway in its
front.

He had no idea who these people were. Were these three of the Nine Suns? He realized he didn’t know if Nine Suns referred
to nine specific people, or if it were simply a dumb code name. Written below the picture, in the same precise handwriting,
First Day at The Nursery, 2001.

The Nursery. But there were no children in the picture.

He flipped through the rest of the book. It seemed that Nic had printed out an image from the computer screen capture and
just taped it into the book. The red notebook was fat with paper. He studied. Photos of people: sometimes what appeared to
be family photos, or people in meetings, talking together, in a range of settings: street plazas, sidewalks, office buildings.
He did not recognize any of the faces.

Next were printouts of what appeared to be emails and transcriptions of phone conversations: ones where secret, illegal deals
were struck between competitive companies, where bribes were subtly offered, where threats were made. The email addresses
included government offices in the US, across Europe, and in Japan and Brazil, across Africa. And some of the world’s most
powerful corporations. It was like a jigsaw of high-powered, white-collar crime: many pieces, and Jack couldn’t see how they
all fit together.

Then a series of photos that looked like passport pictures, a dozen people, and in the top left of each photo a small notation:
eliminated, and a date.

People that Novem Soles had killed? He flipped through the photos: he didn’t know who any of the people were. There were no
identifiers.

Spreadsheets, partial, with items bought and prices paid:
office rental in London
,
purchase of C-4 for London bomb
,
bribes to police inspector in Oslo
. Jack’s stomach churned.

This is what his hidden programs had plucked for Nic: financial information that could gut or elevate markets, corporate secrets,
a money trail of death, leverage for blackmail. If this was how Novem Soles was going to control people in key positions,
and these were the people they used as levers, then one could deduce what their intentions and their targets were, and what
their next major plot would be.

He read through the mass of stolen gems but no pattern formed. Maybe this was simply a way to control people in powerful positions
who had troublesome secrets and could be manipulated. Other pages were filled with code, with more numbers that meant nothing
to him.

But here was his shield; here was his sword. If he could not make full sense of it then he knew who could.

He found a landline phone in the apartment. He picked it up
and was relieved to hear a dial tone. It hadn’t yet been disconnected. He unplugged the phone and plugged its cord into the
MacBook Pro that Ricki had loaned him. He activated a cheap, throwaway dial-up account. Getting through to the CIA would not
be easy. He would have to write a vivid note that would seize their attention, past all the cranks and weirdos who saw a conspiracy
in every shadow and emailed their theories to the Agency. He needed to jump to the front of the line of incoming emails. On
the CIA’s website he found a standard email form for people to share information or comments with the Agency.

He typed in the message page:

I have critical information for a CIA officer named August who was in Amsterdam several weeks ago. I offer serious, actionable
dirt on the group called Novem Soles. This offer is only good for three days.

He entered in a prepaid cell phone number he’d bought after leaving Ricki’s apartment. He did not sign his name.

He reread the message. If he got too specific August might figure out who he was. This was tantalizing enough, he decided.
He would talk to August and only August. August had kept him from being hurt worse; August had argued to leave him in the
van, safe from danger.

He pressed Send. He stood, closed the laptop.

‘Mrs ten Boom, we should go.’

‘No. Nic will be here soon, won’t he?’ She was drunk again, a crooked smile back on her face. She’d refilled from one of the
whisky bottles. ‘Nic will be here soon.’

Oh, God, Jack thought, he couldn’t leave her. But now that he’d contacted the CIA, he had to move quickly. He couldn’t be
anchored with the old drunk woman. But he couldn’t leave her here either, in the horrible place of her son’s worst crimes.

‘Let’s go back to your place, Mrs ten Boom.’

She hit on the whisky bottle again and she lay down on the couch. ‘I want to stay here. Please.’

He stood watching her, and then he said, ‘Goodbye. Thanks for your help.’

She was asleep, holding onto the last shred of her son.

Jack Ming stumbled down the darkened stairs, clutching the most important book in the world to his chest.

August Holdwine took the subway to NoLita, the neighborhood North of Little Italy. He walked under the bright morning sky.
The safe house sat above a clothing boutique off Mott Street. He went inside and in the kitchen he found his trackers waiting
for him. The guy who Sam had manhandled sat at the wooden table, sourly drinking a caffe latte, ignoring Cuban pastries they’d
picked up from August’s favorite neighborhood café. Instead of eating he pecked on a laptop keyboard.

‘Writing up a report on how you got played last night?’ August asked.

‘A complaint against you for not taking Sam Capra into custody after he attacked me.’