Authors: Jeff Abbott
I ran toward him and scrambled onto the neighboring building – there was no alley dividing the two – and Jack sprinted full
out, dodging between the obstacles on the roof and jumping across a narrow gap to the next building.
Most people hesitate at a jump. He didn’t. Brave. Or desperate.
His arms caught the wall. He screamed in terror, that sort of blind terror that makes your bones hurt, then he pulled himself
over to safety.
My turn. I shoved my mind into the old parkour groove. See the obstacles, find the fastest and most effective way over them,
under them, through them. I timed the jump and launched myself. I cleared the edge of the building and landed in a roll. My
muscles howled – they had missed this particular form of exercise. I spotted Ming, running full out. Looking back at me once,
terror bright in his gaze. Then he fired a shot at me and kept going.
Just chase him off the roof, I thought. If he falls he’s still dead at this height. And Daniel is safe.
I ran. I had to catch him. Daniel, the son I’d never held, crowded out every other thought but run, jump, catch. My blood
fevered, my mind went primeval. Simple. He had a head start of fifty yards on me, and I had to catch him.
Forty yards. He pulled himself up a
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banner, using the edge of it like a rope, onto the roof of a neighboring building. I arrowed straight toward him. He stumbled
again. I glanced behind me. The roof we’d exited onto was empty but it wouldn’t be for long. The police would be swarming.
What with the cycle crashing and shots fired, it would be more than a single patrol car responding.
The thoughts went scattershot through my brain in seconds. I focused on running. Jack was running very, very hard. Survival
instinct kicked into full. But I was trained in this, and I was faster.
‘Police!’ I heard a voice boom across the rooftops. ‘Stop! Lay down your weapons!’
I glanced back. Two officers, scrambling out the door where Jack nearly shot me in the head.
I put my gaze back to where Jack was running.
Gone.
I scanned the roof I was approaching. Ming had been running across it, stupidly, in a straight line, and he’d vanished onto
a lower roof when I’d glanced back at the sound of the pursuing officer. Now I’d lost him. No.
‘Halt!’ the police yelled as I topped the roof’s edge and dropped onto the next building. He’d run out of space. Chimneys,
vents, a brick shack for the doorway to the stairs into the building. There was equipment up here, the bright blue blisters
of building wrap, scaffolding climbing above the farthest edge of the roof. Renovations were underway. Maybe he’d ducked under
the wrap, which was everywhere. Maybe he’d gone through the door. If he dropped down into a building’s stairwell I could run
right past him. Panic frosted my heart. I headed for the door. I had to choose, now; the police would be broadcasting my location
and other units responding would be directed to intercept me.
I rounded the corner to the stairwell entrance and Jack swung a heavy flowerpot at me. I caught it on my arm and the bone
screamed. I fell back and he raised the gun; it clicked, empty. He moaned.
I slammed my foot into his stomach. He grunted, breathlessly, and staggered back.
‘Police! Down on the ground! Down!’ They were drawing closer. Maybe forty yards away. Two of them climbing up onto the roof.
I guess the other cops didn’t want to make the same leap Jack and I had made.
I jumped to my feet.
‘Don’t kill me, please, God, don’t kill me.’ His voice pleading. A voice ragged with tears. He yanked on the door; it was
locked from inside.
I grabbed him with my good arm.
I’d had thoughts of trying to use him against Novem Soles, build an insurance policy to get my son back, fragments of a crazy
plan that wouldn’t have worked.
But there was no time. No time for him or for me or for Daniel. My arm didn’t feel right where he’d clipped it with the heavy
pot. I could break his neck if I had a minute. But the police were closing in on us, just thirty feet away. I didn’t have
the time.
I shoved him hard toward the edge of the building. Pushing him toward the edge, keeping him off-balance, in an unyielding
grip.
‘Sorry.’ I said it so soft I didn’t think he heard me.
‘Get away from there! Get on the ground!’ one of the cops bellowed at us.
Jack fought me, screaming, begging. If I just wrap arms around him and shove, we both go over, and the cops can’t beat gravity,
I thought. Ten more feet.
‘No, no!’ Jack screamed.
‘ They’ll kill my kid if I don’t. I’m sorry,’ I yelled.
If we both went over … maybe they would give Daniel to Leonie when they give her back her daughter. She would make sure he’s
okay. I knew her well enough to know her basic decency.
He’ll be dead, it’ll be in the paper, my job would be done. My son, free.
‘No! No!’ Jack Ming screamed. My grip on his forearm closed like an iron cuff.
This is the only way
.
I threw us both off the gravel roof.
And my foot landed on … scaffolding. This side of the building was under remodeling. Jack, arm pinwheeling, screaming, grabbed
at an upright bar but I yanked him away from life, from safety. I saw his fingertips brush the metal pole and miss. The balls
of my feet hit the edge of the scaffolding and I pushed beyond, my hands gripping his arm.
Into air. Gravity slipped its fatal embrace around us. Jack Ming’s scream rose and rushed hard into my ears.
Three stories. It’s not far to fall but it’s enough. The images of the alleyway below burst through my mind, a memory that
would only imprint for a moment before death.
I can’t see the asphalt of the alleyway.
Parked in the space between the buildings are big dump trucks.
Blue canopies. More scaffolding on the sides, now behind us.
The renovation gear crowded the alleyway. We plummeted toward blue canopy, a surprising pond. Jack wrenched free from my grip.
Two more seconds and we hit, ripping the thin plastic sheet, but it slowed our fall, like rain striking a leaf before
dripping onto the mud. The canopy tore, yawned like a sleepy mouth. Metal rods snapped loose from under the canopy, cracking
like bones. Then the tearing fabric, having cocooned us, spat us both free in a slow, awkward tumble. Just below us was a
truck, its load covered in black plastic.
We tore through the plastic and hit sand. A metal rod clanged against the back panel of the truck. Pain gripped me, shook
my already hurt arm. A drift of canopy settled on me like a blanket. I realized I was still breathing. Every inch of me recategorized
pain, but I still breathed. I kicked the shredded canopy off me. Sand abraded my face.
‘What the hell!’ a guy exclaimed; he stood on scaffolding, six feet away from me and seven feet above. He hovered over me,
inspecting me as though he couldn’t believe I’d fallen out of the sky. ‘What the holy hell?’
If I’m still alive then so was …
I saw Jack, scurrying off the sand at the front of the truck, on the driver’s side of the cab. The sand had scraped his face
raw, he bled from his ears. He fared better in the fall than I did. He dropped out of sight but moments later the truck gave
a little shift, like a door had opened and slammed closed.
‘Stop,’ I said but there was hardly any breath in me. My arm – the same one Jack had nailed with the heavy ceramic pot – didn’t
feel right. ‘Stop him.’
The engine started and the truck jerked forward. Jack bulldozed the truck through the detritus of construction: the canisters
of paint, the stacked drywall, the wooden barriers erected to keep out the curious and the sticky-fingered. He blared the
horn, skidded the truck out into the Brooklyn traffic.
I gripped the edge of the truck with my good arm. Holding on for the ride.
The sand truck smashed along the cars parked on the side of the street. Metal crunched, glass shattered. I tried to get to
my knees on the sand.
And then the back of the truck’s bed fell open. I didn’t know if Jack got clever and resourceful – he was already that, he’d
thought of stealing the truck before I did – or if he just hit the wrong switch, or if the rods that hit the truck when we
fell damaged the catch that kept the hinge of the bed in place.
The sand spilled, as though from a broken hourglass, and carried me with it into a slide onto the street. Cars behind the
truck braked as the sand exploded out onto them. Which was good because I tumbled out with the sand and I landed on a heap
of it, approximately three feet in front of a honking cab. I leapt forward and the sand stopped the cab’s bumper, just short
of my shoes.
I tried to scramble to my feet.
Jack hammered that sand truck through the traffic, leaving a swath. I saw him barrel through a red light, turn, and he was
gone. I pulled myself out of the sand heap. I saw the cab that nearly hit me was empty and so I kicked the sand heap smooth.
Back toward the building where we’d fallen there were multiple police units and officers racing down the sidewalk.
I felt certain someone was going to point at me at any moment. I did not care to have a discussion with the police. So I got
into the cab. There was no one in the back seat.
‘Hi,’ I said to the cabbie. ‘Are you for hire?’
He stared at my sandy self, turned around in the seat, gaping. My once-sleek Burberry suit was a ruin; I was bloodied and
holding my arm awkwardly, and I still had that black eye.
I glanced at his name on the cab permit. Vasily Antonov.
Russian. So I said to Vasily, in Russian, ‘Can you take me where I need to go?’
Speaking Russian must have reassured him. Cars behind him were honking so he inched forward, over and through the sand. The
cops stormed past us, toward the intersection where Jack had turned. ‘Where do you need to go?’ he asked me back in Russian.
We pulled up to the intersection where Jack had turned with the truck. ‘Turn right, please.’ Still in Russian.
‘You want me to follow the sand truck?’ he answered.
‘That would be great.’
‘This man stole your truck?’
‘Yes.’ Sounded as good a reason as any.
‘You look like you put up a good fight for your truck.’
‘I tried,’ I said.
Six blocks down the truck was pulled over. The door stood open, the cab empty.
Jack Ming was gone. My arm was broken. He knew my face. He knew I was hunting him and intended to kill him. And the police
swarmed everywhere. I had to retreat. Daniel, I’m sorry. Dad is so sorry, baby, wherever you are.
‘Take me here.’ I gave him The Last Minute’s address. I had to hope Leonie had made it there as well.
‘Nice bar, yes, I’ve gotten fares there.’ He glanced at me. ‘So. Where in Russia are you from?’ I guess I had no accent he
could detect.
‘I once lived in Moscow.’ It was easier to lie than to explain my globetrotting childhood, salted with a dozen languages before
I was even sixteen.
‘Ah, I did not know a Russian speaker owned that bar. I will recommend it to the tourists.’
‘And you are always welcome to come in for a drink. When off duty.’
‘Ah, thank you.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, and leaned back against the upholstery. The cabbie slid in a tape of Russian pop music to pass the
time. Electro-style, sounded like Tatiana Bulanova. So thoughtful. It had a beat and you could dance to it.
I did my best not to pass out.
You have to look normal
. Slapping the sand off his clothes and from his hair, Jack ran down to the Marcy Avenue subway station. The luck he’d wheedled
from the world shone on him for the last time for a while: a train pulled in just as he reached the track. He didn’t care
where it was bound; he joined the press of people.
He sank down into one of the hard plastic seats. The shock of what he had survived made him shiver. No one sat next to him
and that didn’t surprise him. He was filthy from having hit the sand. His wrist hurt where Sam Capra had grabbed it when the
lunatic, the absolute fricking crazy-ass lunatic, had thrown them both off the side of the building. He leaned forward, clutched
his elbows with his palms. The gun he’d taken from his mother’s apartment was gone; dropped on the roof before the fall. The
clip was empty anyway. He should have shot the man dead when he had the chance but he didn’t know if he could fire a gun into
another human being’s face at point-blank range and he’d taken the chance to run. But that Sam Capra bastard was crazy.
He had thrown the two of them
off a building
.
The notebook. A cold terror seized him. If he’d lost that he had nothing to bargain with for his life. He felt its cool weight
in the back of his pants. The red leather had slipped further down, caught in his boxers, one strip of the tape torn loose,
the other still, thank God, in place. He pulled out the notebook, ignoring the momentary stares from the women sitting across
from him. Not much in New York rated more than a momentary stare, including producing a notebook out of your underwear. He
brushed the gritty sand away from the red leather, hugged the volume close to his chest.
He couldn’t go home. His own mother had betrayed him; the CIA had failed him; Novem Soles had sent Sam Capra and that redheaded
woman to the rendezvous point to kill him.
Novem Soles had infiltrated August’s group. They knew about the meeting.
What do I do now?
he thought.
Where do I go?
And for the first time, Jack Ming didn’t know an answer, or have an idea. He pulled up his knees and he rode the train under
the great beating heart of the city, the only way at the moment he knew how to hide.
What do I do?
The notebook’s weight in his hands, like gold. All he had. He’d lost his knapsack, his laptop.
Sam Capra’s odd words rattled in Jack’s head.
I have to. They’ll kill my kid if I don’t. I’m sorry
. What did that mean? And the redhead:
I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have to die
.