I took the stairs up to the Mings’ apartment floor. I picked the lock to the apartment.
It was still and dark and airless but I could smell the odor of antiseptic cream and muscle rub. I turned on a light and Jack Ming lay huddled on the couch, curled up into a fetal position. I thought he would have been in the bedroom.
‘Jack,’ I said quietly. I moved toward him.
His eyelids snapped open – no one sleeps that great when they’re on the run, trust me, I know – and a scream formed on his mouth.
He bolted from me, grabbed a ceramic tray off the coffee table, threw it at me. I dodged it.
‘I’m not here to hurt you,’ I said, calmly.
From under the couch cushion he pulled out a pearl-handled cleaver.
‘I’m not armed,’ I said. ‘I just want to talk to you.’
He charged at me and he swung it at me. Twice. The blade made a sharp hiss in the air. Desperation and fear colored his face; he had no skill. I wasn’t really comfortable fighting him with an edged weapon one-handed. So I kicked him, hard against the wall, and then slammed my foot against the wrist holding the cleaver, pinning his hand to the wall.
‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I would have kicked you in the throat just now and broken your windpipe,’ I said. I pressed harder with my foot. He winced and the cleaver clattered to the floor.
‘I am not here to hurt you. I am here to talk to you,’ I said again. ‘I’m going to let you go now, so we can talk like adults. I have a proposition for you.’ And I released his wrist. As a precaution I put my heel on the cleaver’s blade.
He smacked a punch against my arm’s cast and, yes, that did indeed hurt a lot.
I grabbed him by the neck. ‘Jack. Please.’ I was careful not to hurt him.
He grew still.
‘May we talk?’
After a long moment he nodded.
‘Can we go sit down in there and talk like two adults?’
He couldn’t keep the surprise off his face. He sat on the couch; I sat on the leather ottoman next to it. I left the cleaver on the floor, but I was between it and him.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘You don’t appear to be killing me. Yet.’
‘I have decided that even though I’ve been told to kill you, that is not how I am going to get my son back.’
He stared at me, his mouth working.
‘Jack. Breathe. It’s okay.’
‘How… how did you find me?’
‘I got hurt in the fall, I figured you did, too. And you lost your knapsack. You were back accessing your computer very quickly using remote software. Hard to download and install that on a coffee shop or library computer – and if I was hurt, I’d run home. No one would think you would come back here. But you could mend here, and have a computer, and call people who might help you and have a nice private conversation, and probably have an easier time accessing your mother’s bank accounts and such. It was worth a try.’
Jack said nothing.
‘I’m sorry… about today,’ I said. ‘I know I… scared you.’
‘I do not accept your apology.’
‘All right. I am very mindful that you could have shot me in that hallway rather than shooting the lock on the door.’
He rubbed his palms on his knees.
‘The only way Nine Suns is going to leave you alone is if we convince them that you are dead. They have to believe you’re gone for good for you to have a life. And for me to get my son back. Now. If we can make them think you’re dead, then we both have a chance.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Do you believe they have my kid?’
‘Yes.’
‘You said that there’s something in the notebook about my son.’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it, please?’
‘Where he was born. How much the doctor was paid, how much the forged documents cost to get him an American birth certificate. Who has him now: someone with the initials AT.’
Anna Tremaine. ‘Anything else?’
He bit his lip for a moment, considering. ‘No.’
‘Where is the notebook?’
‘In a safe place, and I don’t care if we’re new best friends now, I’m not telling you.’
‘I want you to go to your computer’s browser and enter in a web address.’
He didn’t move.
‘Go ahead. I want to show you something.’
Slowly he got up and went into his father’s study. He sat at the computer; I gave him the URL; the prompt then asked for a password. He looked at me and I gave it to him.
He typed.
The webcam’s screen opened. Lucy lay in her eternal bed, hooked to wires and tubes and a computer whose uncaring graphs and bars showed her lungs still breathed, her heart still pumped.
‘You and I have nothing in common,’ I said, ‘except Nine Suns has destroyed our families. That is my wife. They took her and they made her into a person I never knew and then they put a bullet in her brain. Now they have my son. He is only a few months old. I have never seen him in person, never held him.’ I pulled the photo from my wallet and I handed it to Jack. He looked at it wordlessly.
Then he gave it back to me.
‘Your mother was killed by a stray bullet when I fought the guy who kidnapped her. If I could have saved her I would have… ’
‘Only to get her to help you find me.’
‘No. Did I kill the men from the CIA who were supposed to protect you? I knocked them out of the fight but I didn’t kill them. Did I shoot down anyone who got in my way while I was chasing you?’
‘And, what, you want a good citizen medal?’
‘I held your mother’s hand while she died, Jack. She asked me to help you. I had to lie to her then and say I would help you. I don’t want it to be a lie.’
Jack closed the browser window; Lucy vanished. ‘Why would you risk your baby’s life to protect me?’
‘Because I no longer believe they’re just going to hand me my child. I know too much, I’m too big a threat to them. They have to be destroyed and you’re the guy who can bring them down.’
‘The notebook doesn’t contain the names and addresses of Nine Suns. It gave me one phone number for one of them, the person who set up this extortion network. It mostly just names people that they’re using.’
‘People they’ve spied on using your software.’
‘Yes.’
‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could turn that around on them?’
Jack said, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Do to them what they did to these people. Spy on them, using your code.’
Jack Ming got up from the desk. I followed him into the living room. He picked up the cleaver off the floor, and I tensed. But he went into the kitchen and he set it on the granite counter top.
‘And who gets the information? You?’
‘When I get my son back, I’m done. If I don’t, then I send them to hell, however long it takes.’ I crossed my arms. ‘I know you must think August Holdwine is a screw-up, but he’s not. You can trust him. And he’s being moved back to Langley, out of the group that was supposed to protect you. They’ve been dirtied. But he’s clean.’
Jack Ming blinked at me, and I didn’t blame him not trusting me. So cards on the table, so to speak.
‘I know you called Ricki Diagne in Amsterdam. Maybe for help, maybe because she’s someone special to you. If you don’t trust the CIA, there is another group of people who could hide you. Think of them as the flip side of Nine Suns. My friend Mila works for them and I think they could hide you and Ricki, too, if you want, just about anywhere in the world. Especially if you could help them spy on Nine Suns.’
‘Your friends are the Round Table.’
‘Yes. Are they in the notebook?’
‘There’s reference to them.’
That made me uneasy. It could mean someone inside the Round Table had been compromised, maybe into giving up secrets.