The Last Minute (20 page)

He blinked. ‘I don’t blame you at all, Mom.’

‘Of course you do. You blame me for being a bad mother. You think I’m a bad mother.’

‘No. I don’t.’ He couldn’t look at her face.

She mercifully changed the subject. ‘Why exactly are these people after you?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’m going to cancel my appointments this afternoon,’ she said. ‘We’ll plan out a strategy. Just you and me. They want you
dead because you know something?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘What?’

‘Well, I don’t know anything. But they think I do.’ Telling her the truth was only putting her in danger. He couldn’t do that.
He’d lost his father to his mistakes; he was not going to lose his mother.

‘All right. But you have information you can give the police. We need to be able to make a deal, Jack. That’s what I’m asking.
What’s your leverage?’

Always the diplomat, always the deal maker. He wanted to turn around and leave. Just walk out the door. Would she call the
police on him before he reached the elevator? Or would she let her only son simply vanish again, because in the end it would
be less trouble for her?

‘I can give them some names. Guys in Amsterdam and New York.’

‘Well, then. That’s a start. But surely if they want you dead, you know more than that.’

‘Not really.’

‘Why don’t … I know you’re exhausted. Why don’t you go get showered? Your clothes – they should still fit, I kept them all.’

‘Mom.’

‘I knew you’d come home.’

You have more faith than I did, Jack thought. Suddenly the idea of his old room felt like heaven. A cocoon to transform himself,
where he could be the old harmless Jack Ming again, not be the kid being chased by the bad guys, not be the guy sneaking into
his own country under a false name, not be the disappointing son coming and confessing his sins to his mother. ‘I don’t want
to talk to the lawyer until tomorrow, though, Mom. Okay? We’ll call him in the morning.’ He would get what he needed here,
for the meeting with the CIA, and then he would vanish. This was the goodbye to his mother, every moment of it.

She poured him a cup of coffee and he drank it down in silence. It was delicious. His mother always made good coffee, and
he thought it funny that this was the comfort food he remembered of her: not peanut butter sandwiches or handmade ice cream
or wonton noodles, but coffee. She’d let him start drinking it too young. Never objecting when he’d dump a dollop from the
coffee pot into his milk. Just to see what she would do.

‘Are you hungry?’ she asked him. Now she sounded like a mom.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, why don’t you go shower and get into some fresh clothes, and I’ll make us lunch. Then we can talk.’

‘All right.’

She went to the refrigerator and opened it, peering inside, clearly hopeful that appropriate ingredients would be present.
He went into his room. It seemed to be an echo of his old life: the
framed certificate of achievements from his school in math, the worn paperbacks he’d plowed through as a kid, a neat stack
of video games of which he’d explored every detail of every level. A row of CDs he’d forgotten he’d owned, bands that screeched
about suburban angst. He thought he’d known then what feeling trapped was like, and, oh, was he wrong.

He turned on the shower, waited, flicked fingers beneath the water. Cold. He wanted it as hot as possible, to rinse the dirt
of Amsterdam off himself. He hated to stand by a shower to wait for it to warm. He could go get what he needed while the shower
heated; his mother was busy in the kitchen.

He ducked out of his room, padded down the hallway to his father’s study. Weird to think of Mom living here in an apartment
that seemed more dedicated to men who had left her than to her own life. He ducked into the office. He stepped quickly around
the desk – his dad’s heart had stuttered and failed, standing in front of that desk, and he didn’t like to let his gaze linger
on the spot; it creeped him out: he could still hear the thud of the body striking the floor.

He opened the desk drawer. The keys to all seven buildings his father owned in the New York area remained in their places.
Mother hadn’t sold them, thank God, and he knew better than to ask. He sat at the computer and brought up the Ming Properties
website. The Williamsburg, Brooklyn, property was still empty. His father had not been willing to make the investment to renovate
it alone and he’d died before he found a partner. Mom hadn’t done anything about it, either, and thank God. He took the one
set of keys and tucked them into his pocket. She wouldn’t think to miss them, not with his surrender – his disappearance –
on her mind.

Next to the keys: his father’s gun. He’d gotten it when he used to own buildings in neighborhoods that weren’t quite gentrified
yet. Jack lifted the gun and studied it. He inspected the clip: three shots in it. He double-checked on the safety and he
stuck it into his pocket. It felt awkward. He would put it in his knapsack.

He went back toward the shower – it should be nice and steamy now – and it was then that he heard the quiet of her voice.
She must have thought he was still in the shower.

She stood, her back to him, speaking softly, over the hiss of boiling water. ‘Yes. He’s here. Where do you want me to bring
him?’

He stood back from the door, the notebook itching in the small of his back.

‘No. I won’t do that. But I want to make a deal for him.’

Shock reached inside him and wrenched his stomach. She had lied. Who the hell was she calling? A lawyer.

‘So where do you want me to bring him?’

Bring him
. You promised, Mom. He listened to his mother, sewing up his betrayal.

‘Send a car for us. He might … resist.’ She dumped noodles into the pot. She stirred in chopped vegetables. He took a step
backward. ‘Not sure I can get him out of the apartment without help.’

Resist? A chill flicked along his spine.

‘No. No one else saw him. He wants to hunker down here today.’ Silence. ‘I am so glad you called me about him. Thank you.’

Jack Ming stepped slowly back from the kitchen. He tiptoed back to his room, back to the hissing steam of the shower. He grabbed
his backpack. He left the shower jetting against the
porcelain, the steam curling from the bathroom like fingers raised in farewell. He spared his childhood room a final, bitter
glance. And then he hurried toward the door.

‘Jack?’ his mother’s voice sliced across the room.

He glanced back at her.

‘Goodbye, Mom,’ he said.

‘You lied to me!’ she said. And he knew she meant the shower, that she was the one outraged that he had not done what he said.

‘Goodbye. Forever. I still love you.’

‘Jack, wait!
Wait!
They can make all the charges go away. They called me, all right, they called me first … ’

She knew I was coming? Panic flushed through him. He ran, not wanting to wait for the elevator, feet hammering down the stairs.

He bolted into the lobby and out onto the street. He ran the whole way to the 59th Street subway station. He got onto the
first train that arrived. He sat huddled on the cold plastic bench, holding the backpack close to him.

Send someone. He might resist
. Who the hell had she been talking to? Who would call her before he arrived?

This can’t be. Not my mom.

He rode down to Union Square and then he changed trains and rode the L train into Brooklyn, getting off at Bedford Avenue
station in Williamsburg. Trust no one, he thought. So much for help and shelter from his mother.

He exited onto Driggs Avenue and crossed the street and watched the faces of those who’d left the train with him. Could his
mother have called someone? Could he have been followed? Her betrayal cut him to the point he could not breathe.

They can make all the charges go away
. Then who the hell were they?

He was going to have to be very careful. A plan began to form in his mind.

On my walk to the subway I texted Leonie, told her that Jin Ming was really a guy named Jack Ming and to drive our rental
car and meet me at the East 59th Street address. We were so close now.

If I didn’t find Daniel – well, that was an option I couldn’t face. Anna’s grim words
I won’t sell him to nice people
shivered in my blood, like a plucked wire. Daniel, with my eyes and his mother’s mouth, handed over to someone who would
abuse him, use him, eventually kill him when his usefulness reached its end. Or, if he lived, would the horror he survived
shape him into a person bent, wrong, broken. I had never held Daniel, never seen him with my own eyes, but I could never abandon
him to such a fate. Never.

It was strange to ride the subway, knowing I was heading to kill someone. A guy who smelled of mints stood too close to me,
a girl with purplish, lanky hair stared at my shoes and through her earphones, just once, I could hear distant strains of
Mozart, wandering into the train like a lost tourist. Two people across from me chatted in Portuguese and I eavesdropped on
their gossip. You spend your childhood traveling the world, you pick up a little of a lot of languages. They were talking
about a boyfriend, his pros and cons, his smile, his cheapness in picking
restaurants, normal everyday talk, and I was sitting there thinking about how to kill a young man in cold blood.

Across from Sandra Ming’s apartment tower stood a sushi bar. It was decorated in a spare, minimalist style and in the background
regrettable Japanese pop played, but at least at a whisper. The chef seemed very angry; he scowled as he chopped at the ahi,
the sea urchin, the inoffensive salmon. He muttered in Japanese and I nearly told him in his own language that he might consider
anger management classes. I could tell from his face that he liked chopping flesh apart. It was good that a man like him had
a creative outlet.

I got my lunch and sat watching in the window. The fish, the rice, the wasabi, all had no flavor to me. Rain, heavier in the
morning, had lightened. Now the day was gray, the wind carrying the scent of the unfallen storm. I had not seen any sign of
Mrs Ming or her son arriving at or leaving the building. I didn’t want to think of him as a Jack. Jack Ming sounded like the
name of some kid I could have known in any of the American or Anglican schools I’d attended in fourteen different countries
in my misspent youth, hauled around the globe by my parents, who worked for a relief agency. They were good people, but more
concerned with fixing the world than paying more than five minutes’ attention to their own children. I loved them and they
appeared to love me, and not much more else to say on that front. I’m sure the armchair psychologists would have a field day
dissecting my youth and how it related to my stolen child. But it’s not like I could let any child be taken this way. My son
or not. There are standards. You have to fight back.

Leonie slid onto the stool next to me. ‘You found him.’

‘I did.’

‘Without a database.’ She made it sound like I had somehow cheated.

‘Yes.’

She opened up her laptop. ‘And now what? We sit here and wait for him to show up and’ – she lowered her voice – ‘you shoot
him dead in the street?’

‘No.’ I swallowed the last bit of sushi on my plate. It offered only sustenance, not pleasure. Waiting to kill someone makes
you feel dead inside.

‘We’re only supposed to do what Anna told us,’ she said and I wondered what she would do if I picked up the chopstick, oiled
with soy sauce and wasabi, and shoved it into her ear.

‘I have done both my job and a key part of your job so far,’ I said. ‘You are rapidly losing your right to a vote in this.’

‘Sam. Okay. You had resources I didn’t. But I found out about Jack Ming, something you didn’t know.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think he will come to see his mother.’

‘Why not?’

‘She blames him for his father’s death.’

I glanced at her. ‘How would you know?’

‘I built a network of names around Jack Ming,’ she said. ‘Yes, he went to NYU, so I did searches on people that were in his
Facebook account before he canceled it. I wanted to expand our search, see how many links I could find, people where he might
hide.’

I didn’t ask how she’d gotten this information; she’d worked her stealthy, smoky fingers into the right database or paid off
the people who could. ‘And?’

‘And one of his friends wrote a blog post about Jack’s situation. Apparently his father died of a heart attack when he found
out that Jack was wanted by the FBI for questioning for hacking copiers and stealing proprietary information from a number
of law firms and software companies. He died … here. At Jack’s feet.’

‘His friend wrote about this?’ Honestly. People will say things on the internet now that they might once not have told their
parents. A little secrecy is not a bad thing. I will confess I don’t get the whole need to Twitter and Facebook and share
my every reaction to a TV show or to bad service at lunch or to post every news article I find remotely interesting. I’d spent
five minutes looking at Twitter once and felt I’d wandered into a poker game where everyone immediately displayed their hands
against the cool green of the felt. I suppose an ex-spy cannot get over his or her innate quiet, the need to keep thoughts
and secrets close. But Jack Ming was a kid, and he’d left electronic breadcrumbs at the feet of his friends.

There is always a trace, she’d said, and now she’d found it.

‘His friend wrote about Jack’s mother.’ She opened the laptop, turned it toward me so I could read:

I understand grief, I think, because my grandparents died when I was young, and my dog died last year. Death is part of life.
But what I do not understand is blame. My friend Jack’s father died because he got a shock over something Jack is accused
of doing, not anything proven. And even if Jack did do this, to blame him for killing his father? What kind of mother says
that to her son?

I am thankful for my mom right now.