Authors: Jeff Abbott
We sat together in first class. Most of the cabin, weary from partying in the desert and not looking forward to a work day
tomorrow in New York, slept. I watched an old movie,
Aliens
, on my personal viewer in the chair back and thought, now there’s a movie about how you save a kid. I had seen the film a
dozen times before and I could watch it without thinking, without having to follow the story. Leonie’s eyes were closed. She
had spoken so few words to me on the flight I felt sure no one believed we were traveling together. I got up to splash cold
water on my face in the lavatory. Most of the other passengers were locked in their own digital cocoons, watching movies on
their personal movie screens or hooked into their iPods or iPads. Technology has made it easy for us to be totally alone in
a crowded room. I envied those who slept. I needed sleep, badly, but I couldn’t settle my mind. I’ve never been good at sleeping
on planes.
I sat back down and Leonie opened her eyes. She stared at me, blinking, as though unsure where she was wakening. I was surprised
she’d managed to doze off. The adrenaline shock from her daughter’s kidnapping was fading, the inevitable exhaustion settling
into her. She looked guilty at having done anything as weak and self-indulgent as sleep, when I knew it was the body’s natural
response to cope with crippling stress.
‘You okay? You want something to drink?’ It’s the bar owner in me. I always want to offer a drink. The flight attendants should
just let me man the beverage cart. They could go watch the movie.
She shook her head. The silence hung, like smoke ruining the air.
I started to put my earphones into place. No point in talking with her.
She put a hand on my arm. ‘Your son, he was given that name. If you got to name him, what would it be?’
‘Daniel. My ex did get to name him. For my late brother.’
Her mouth pursed, like she was tasting the name. ‘When did Daniel … vanish?’
‘Right after he was born. I’ve only seen a picture that Anna gave me.’
‘And you’re sure she gave you a photo of your kid.’
‘I am.’
‘Show him to me.’
I showed her the picture of Daniel that Anna had given me. She studied it, then looked at my face. ‘He’s a handsome boy.’
‘He’s never been held by either of his parents,’ I said. ‘But there he’s smiling. How does that affect a kid – to not have
been held except by people who want to use you?’ The words spilled, unexpected. I didn’t talk about Daniel. Who was I going
to talk about him with? My crazy Moldovan boss with the million-dollar price on her head? My old friends in the CIA who weren’t
my friends any more? My customers at the bar? No. Every flick of pain I felt about Daniel coalesced in my chest. I shut my
mouth. I didn’t want to talk about him.
‘When you get him back, then don’t ever let him go.’ She handed me the photo. ‘How did you and your wife ever cross Anna’s
path?’
‘My wife got bought by Novem Soles. She was a CIA officer. She was a traitor.’ It was a strange thing to say in the hush of
a
first class cabin. I glanced up from the photo. The flight attendants congregated in the galley ahead of us, people either
slept or sat earplugged into oblivion. Yes, let me talk about my wife. The love of my life, the woman I gave my life to, the
woman who betrayed both me and country and then tried to save me. Let me talk about the most incomprehensible person I ever
knew and how machines keep her breathing and digesting and living like a ghost bound in flesh.
‘I’m sorry, that sucks.’ I was figuring Leonie was a master of understatement now.
‘It does.’
Leonie pulled a photo from her purse. It was worn, dog-eared from too much handling, as though it had lived a hard life inside
her wallet. ‘This is Taylor.’ She was a bigger baby than Daniel, a few months older, rounder-cheeked, with darker hair and
soft, sweet, brown eyes.
‘She’s a cute girl.’
‘Yes. Very.’
‘So never a husband?’
‘We’re not involved any more. I prefer to deal only with actual human beings these days.’
‘Not an amicable parting.’
She took Taylor’s photo from me and carefully fitted it into a back slot in her wallet, away from the credit cards. I could
see a smear of ink drawn on the back as she worked the photo into the slot. She dumped the wallet in her purse. ‘No.’
‘How will you explain to him that Taylor’s gone?’
‘He is utterly indifferent to her. He couldn’t care less. He’s seen her once and made it clear he didn’t care to see her again.’
‘How old is Taylor now?’
‘Almost a year.’ She took a heavy, restoring breath. ‘So, Taylor is my life, Sam. Everything.’
‘We’ll get her back. We’ll get them both back.’
‘Anna must get both kids to New York.’ Her voice was just a whisper. ‘If she sticks by the agreement. I’m wondering how she’s
doing that so quickly with mine.’
‘Because they’re lying to us,’ I said quietly.
Her gaze snapped to mine.
‘They might give us our kids back, but they’re not going to want us anywhere close by after we … deal with the target,’ I
said. ‘This phone call, this church pickup – it has to be a lie, Leonie. They don’t want us getting caught. You don’t linger
in the area after a job. You create distance.’
She was silent. She tensed when I said the word ‘job’, as though the drowsing businesspeople and hung-over Vegas escapees
around us would translate ‘job’ into ‘hit’.
‘You’re not used to violence,’ I said.
She didn’t look at me. ‘No.’ She rubbed at her face. She leaned close to me. I could smell breath mints on her mouth. ‘Don’t
take this the wrong way, but you don’t look like much of a killer.’
I had killed. Never before my wife had been taken. But I had killed, multiple times, to save myself or save others since my
life had been derailed by Novem Soles. I would like to say it weighed on me heavily, this human cost, but that would be a
lie. They’d taken my wife, my child. They’d gotten in the way of me getting them back. They’d tried to kill me. Why should
I feel guilty? The deaths were nothing I savored, and I never wanted to kill again. I dreamed about it sometimes, and I didn’t
want to think that the experiences were rewiring my brain, like a soldier who sees the worst horrors in battle.
But this kid, this Jin Ming. He’d been grabbed by the CIA,
clearly, in Amsterdam, forced to give them access to the machinists’ shop where the gunfight erupted. And now he was turning
against Novem Soles. I ought to be applauding him, protecting him, picking his brain. Putting him into my own witness protection
plan so he could tell me what lovely, dirty secrets he knew and then I could start slicing the core out of the so-called Nine
Suns.
He and I could have talks. The Best. Talks. Ever.
Instead, I was going to kill him. I closed my eyes. He was, what, twenty-two, twenty-three? At the beginning of his years.
The thought that someone barely out of his teens could be a mortal threat to an international criminal syndicate (that was
my theory as to what Novem Soles was, fancy-ass Latin name aside – maybe one of them had read a branding book and wanted to
sound more gothic, ancient or mysterious) interested me.
I didn’t need to think about him. Just kill him. Be a weapon. I could do that and I’d worry about the mental cost later. Or,
maybe, not worry about it at all. But if I did that, what sort of father would I be for my son?
‘I’m not much of a killer,’ I said to Leonie. ‘But I will be.’
In first class we got a decent dinner: shrimp salad and steak medallions, a potato galette and a wannabe crème brûlée.
‘So. It’s up to you to find our guy. Where do you start, beyond knowing he’s in New York City?’
‘If you don’t mind, I’ll keep some secrets to myself.’
‘I think we need to discuss our options if they betray us.’
‘If I lose Taylor, it’s over for me anyway. I’m not continuing to breathe, Sam. I’m not existing then.’
There was nothing more to say; the flight attendant stopped and asked us if we wanted coffee. We both declined. Leonie announced
she would sleep the rest of the flight. I closed my eyes and thought about a plan of action.
One thing I did do: I surreptitiously snapped a picture of Leonie while she dozed. I thought, for some reason, that it might
be valuable to have a photo of her. She was a woman with a lot of secrets, and I might need to know more about who she was.
We landed at LaGuardia late, delayed by dodging a goliath of an early summer storm raging over Kentucky and Ohio. We rented
a car – no way I was trusting cabs and the subway during a man-hunt – and drove to a midtown Manhattan hotel, the Claiborne,
where Leonie had already booked us rooms across the hall from each other. The rest of the hotel seemed ready to rouse, the
city stirring awake, but I was already dead on my feet. My energy was gone because we had no clue where Jin Ming was.
‘Go sleep,’ Leonie said at our doors.
‘I can’t.’
‘I can’t have you hovering over me.’
‘How are you going to find him?’
She patted the laptop, raised the cell phone. ‘It’s what I do, bullet.’ She tried a smile but it was an awful, desperate thing
and she knew it. ‘Sorry. Just trying to stay sane.’
‘Jin Ming vanished from Holland, no trace.’
‘There is always a trace,’ she said. ‘Always.’
Jack had a window seat on the flight from Brussels; no way he was going to fly from Amsterdam – Novem Soles would be watching,
he thought, the train stations and the airports. Ricki drove him to Brussels and left him at the airport. He went into a bathroom
stall and shut the door. Then he oiled and combed down his hair to look like his new passport picture. He stuck a thin, bulbous
piece of plastic in each cheek, to subtly change the shape of his face. He put in the false teeth; they slid over his own
teeth. This meant he could not eat during the flight but he didn’t care. He put on a pair of slightly tinted glasses. They
were not to change his eye color but Ricki said that every bit that made him look less like himself, or hid him, helped. She’d
almost cried as she slipped the glasses on his face.
He exited the stall and gave himself a short, quick glance in the mirror. He couldn’t stand and preen or adjust the implants.
He still looked like Jack Ming but not exactly, and with any of the biometric scans at customs in the United States, if he
was on a watch list, perhaps this would give him a cushion. He wore a white shirt and jeans and sneakers and looked anonymous.
He had no trouble in the Brussels airport. He tried not to watch everyone, for fear of looking paranoid, but he kept scanning
faces, looking for another face looking back at him. He took his seat. An older lady sat next to him, immediately produced
a thick novel with a swordsman and a dragon on the cover and opened it at the first page, almost defying him to try and make
conversation with her. He sighed in relief. He cocooned himself with his iPod and wrapped himself in Beatles music. He
closed his eyes then woke up with a start, one of the cheek implants almost half out of his mouth.
I could have swallowed this
. Not awesome if he choked on his own disguise in the middle of a transatlantic flight. He tongued the implant back into place
and glanced at his traveling companion. She was lost in her own world, paying him no heed.
New York, shrouded in cloud, opened up beneath him and he stared down. Home. Never thought he’d see it again. Never thought
he’d come back. But what choice did he have?
He walked through customs, the new burgundy passport identifying him as Philippe Lin, a Belgian national, remembered to breathe
while the customs agent inspected it, scanned it, asked him his business in the country. He was here to visit family. She
asked for the address where he would be staying; he gave her one provided by Ricki’s friend. She asked if he was traveling
anywhere else other than New York. He said he was only visiting New York because no other city could compare. She looked hard
at him, as though his affable tone were an affront to the seriousness of the moment. He thought:
what the hell are you doing, trying to make a joke?
His stomach twisted, dropped. She was a big-built, older lady who did not seem at all bored by her work. She glanced at her
computer screen, glanced at him. He willed himself toward calm.
In Amsterdam, Ricki sat with her hands on the keyboard. She had pierced the main database for Belgian passport information,
kept in the Federal Public Service Foreign Affairs department in Brussels. The database was accessed if there was a question
about any Belgian passport from a friendly nation. The imprinted number could be scanned via a watermark or entered into the
host country’s passport inquiry database. The confirmation was
sent, a returning ping of approval coming back to the country’s host system.
She had made a few phone calls past midnight, and found a hacker in Antwerp who was willing to help her.
‘All I need,’ she said, ‘is for you to trick the system into approving every Belgian passport in a time window.’
‘I can do thirty minutes. I don’t want to leave an open feed into the system longer than that, and I don’t want to leave code
behind,’ the hacker said.
‘Thirty minutes.’ And if it took Jin Ming longer than thirty minutes to get through customs …
‘Now,’ she said into the phone.
The hacker pressed the button.
According to the airline’s website, the flight from Brussels had landed. Don’t be in the back of the line, she thought.
Ricki heard a knock on her door. She stood up. Then she leaned down, typed a code into the program. The system logged out,
encrypting itself to await further instructions.
Ricki put her eye up to the keyhole to see who was there, and the door smashed inward.
The customs agent glanced back toward her terminal screen.
Oh dear God, Jack thought. I’m sunk. The irony that he was an American trying to get into America under a false name and flag
hit him hard. My face. How much is my face like what might be in their database? What if Ricki’s scheme hadn’t worked? And
if he was arrested, what deal could he cut? I’m here to give the CIA proof that they need to bust a crime ring. Yes, you’re
welcome, let me go now.