Behind him he heard the stairwell door open with a steely crank. As it did he stepped into another patient room, this one holding two beds, both empty. He left the lights off. An IV pole stood on duty by each bed, a drawn curtain dangling between them. He had no real place to hide. He pulled the curtain part-way between the beds, and ducked behind its cover, the IV pole clanking into the wall behind him. Next to him was one of the adjustable wheeled tables for patients to use while lying in bed.
He closed his hands around the cool steel of the pole. He heard the door open. Maybe a nurse coming to see why he was trespassing in this room. He couldn’t see through the curtain.
He heard two footsteps and then silence.
The nurse wouldn’t just stand there, right? he asked himself. He was suddenly consumed by fear and certainty that this man was here to kill him.
Jack pushed the patient table into the curtain.
The two bullets sang out, cut through the fabric, pounded into the wood. The impact was louder than the firing.
Jack moaned, in fear, without thinking that he was baiting a trap.
As the man stepped around the curtain, Jack swung the pole, like a baseball bat, and he caught the man’s face between the bushy eyebrows and the tattered mouth.
‘Uggghhhh,’ the guy grunted.
Jack rocked his feet, swung again in the same vicious arc, hit again and again and then there was an oddly wet noise that sounded… final. The guy collapsed onto the floor. Shuddered, shook, gasped. He looked at Jack with blind surprise. Then his head fell back and a sagging shift downwards trembled through his body.
The man’s nose was a splintered mess. Jack had not known he had the strength; it was as if all the energy he’d stored in the past few weeks roared out of him when he needed it. The man was very still. Jack knelt by him, dropping the pole with a clank to the tiled floor. He tested for a pulse, found nothing but a warm and sudden silence in the man’s throat.
Bone shard, Jack thought. First blow broke the nose, second sent a bullet of bone into the brain.
He clapped his hands over his face in shock. He had killed a man. Killed him.
Because he was going to kill you.
Jack picked up the gun and he stood. He footed the body under the adjustable bed. He picked up the gun and put it into the pocket of his robe.
He stepped back out into the hallway. In the next room the old woman still slept. He went through her bureau and he found ten euros and a mobile phone. He took it, feeling guilty about the theft, and he laughed because he didn’t feel guilty about killing the man. He hurried out into the hallway and back down the stairwell. In a few minutes he was in his room, sitting on the edge of the bed.
Who could he call?
Ricki. He could call her. They were still friends. He still kind of liked her even though she’d only really been his girlfriend for five whole minutes after he arrived in Holland, after he’d stepped into the secret life he’d made for himself. And clearly she cared about him, to have gone to so much trouble to find him. He cajoled her into coming and picking him up and bringing him clothes to the hospital. The police had taken the clothes in which he had been shot as evidence, and they were stained with blood anyway. Ricki agreed and said she’d be there within an hour. He told her to meet him at a coffee shop nearby that he knew well.
When he got off the phone he lifted a pair of jeans from a room down the hall where a man lay zonked out on painkillers and grabbed a rugby jersey from the man’s closet. He left, sneaking past the nurses, riding the elevator down, stepping out into the cool quiet of the night. There was an old cafe down on the corner.
He walked out into the street. They found out you’re still alive. They’re coming after you. You’ve got one weapon to fight back. If Nic was lying about that notebook, you’re a dead man.
6
Midtown Manhattan, near Bryant Park
We walked into The Last Minute, my bar near Bryant Park. The Last Minute’s a nice bar. Elegant, refined, oriented toward jazz. The bar itself is exquisite Connemara marble. The mirror behind the bar is huge and ancient, a leftover from a New York establishment from before the Civil War. We get a bit of tourist trade – any high-end bar in New York does once good reviews land on Yelp or on the guide sites – but we get a lot of Midtown office people, bored wealthies, regulars who actually know what goes into a proper Old-Fashioned or Sazerac. The post-work crowd had started to melt away. Eloise is at the piano, softly playing a Thelonious Monk arrangement. She’s older than God but the sparks of jazz in her body are apparently going to keep her alive forever. When I’d acquired the bar from Mila a few weeks ago, it had been called Bluecut, but I’d renamed it. The Last Minute was my base of operations in searching for my son, and it reflected my sense of urgency and my determination that I would never give up.
I nodded at the bartender and pointed at a stool for August. He sat. Then I went back behind the bar to make our own drinks, which is a statement in itself. I knew I had to let go of some secrets right now to protect others.
August looked like what he is, a Minnesota farm boy of Swedish and German descent. He glanced around at the beautiful people, at the elaborate decor, at the shimmer of lights. He’d met me here for a drink a few weeks before and, five minutes after he left, Mila showed up and gave me ownership of The Last Minute, and of thirty other bars in cities around the world. I hadn’t told him because so far he didn’t need to know. But as I moved to the other side of the expanse of Connemara marble, he raised an eyebrow at me. ‘You bartending now?’
I gestured, open-handed, at the charm and the glory. ‘The Last Minute is mine.’
‘The bar is yours?’
‘Yeah.’
He glanced around at the finery and absorbed the news. ‘Well. I was going to order a beer. But if you own the joint, then I’ll have a martini made with good gin.’
‘All right.’
I crafted his martini, with all the care you would take for your best friend having his first cocktail in your new bar.
I slid a Plymouth English Gin martini in front of August, two olives. Not the most expensive gin but really a strong choice for a martini. August took a sip and nodded in approval. I poured another one for myself.
‘Let’s go sit in a booth,’ he said.
Old banquette-style leather booths lined one wall; they provided a modicum of quiet. August followed me to one.
‘Why have you bought a bar?’ he asked.
‘I need a livelihood to support my search for my son,’ I said. There was a lot more to the story, but he didn’t need to know how I’d come into possession of The Last Minute and its thirty sisters around the world. Mila’s bosses – a group known as the Round Table, who claimed to be a force for good in the shadows – had offered me the bars as a cover to travel the world, to track down my son and to do the odd job for them that required my skills.
‘You could have come back to work at the Company.’
‘They don’t like to accuse you of treason and then backtrack by offering you gainful employment.’
My past with the CIA was a sore spot with him; he almost cringed as I spoke. To camouflage his embarrassment, he glanced around the bar, drinking it in as carefully as he’d sipped his martini. Some spy; he couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. ‘Really nice place, Sam.’
‘So now you know where to find me. Why are you following me?’
He twisted the toothpick holding the olives. ‘This woman. Mila. Who helped you fight Novem Soles in Amsterdam. I want to know about her.’
‘There’s nothing to know.’
‘Sam, let’s not insult each other.’
Fine, I thought. I’d play. ‘You followed us today. Mila, too.’
