The Last Minute by Jeff Abbott

Author:Jeff Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780748129744
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

39

Hotel Esper, Williamsburg

We slept late, longer than we should have. Normally I can’t sleep late in New York because the rising noise of the traffic is an automatic alarm clock. When I woke up Leonie was showered and dressed and tapping at her laptop. ‘No intrusions at the building other than those at the security guard’s regularly appointed rounds.’ She looked up at me and gave me a wan smile.

What did I do? Kiss her, nuzzle her, pretend last night didn’t happen? My marriage with Lucy – full of deception and lies and my own blindness – convinced me that I suck at relationships and it wasn’t like we were going to have a long-term one. We would get our kids and part ways and never see each other again, except in our memories about the worst few days of our lives.

The newspaper websites in New York and New Jersey carried no mention of two bodies discovered at the abandoned Associated Languages School in Morris County.

‘I’ll go get us some breakfast,’ I said. Leonie made the noise one makes when one is absorbed in a computer screen. Again, like Lucy.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought about what you said last night,’ she said. ‘I’m going to find out who that driver was.’

‘He doesn’t matter any more.’

‘You’re not working alone,’ she said. ‘Why presume that he is? We don’t know how much of a head start we have on finding Jack. We may have none. And I’m not going to sit here and fret and wait and do nothing while waiting for Jack to show up.’

I walked to a diner on the corner and got breakfast for us to go: mushroom and spinach omelets, hash browns, fruit, bacon, coffee, orange juice. You eat when you can because you never know when you might get your next meal on days like today.

When I came back we ate. I tried to make conversation.

‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

She seemed to measure her answer by staring into her Styrofoam coffee cup.

‘I know your real name isn’t Leonie, that you live under a false name.’

‘Trust me, it’s better you not know much about me. I am infinitely boring.’

‘I know that’s not true,’ I said with a smile.

She smiled back, just for a moment. ‘You, where are you from?’

‘All over. My parents worked for a relief agency. My mom’s a pediatric surgeon, my dad’s an administrator. I lived in over twenty different countries before I was eighteen.’ I finished my coffee. ‘If I don’t make it, and you get my son back from Anna, you can take him to my parents. They live in New Orleans. Alexander and Simone Capra. They’re in the phone book.’

‘Are you close to them?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Why?’

‘My brother died and it ruined their hearts. They either want to take over my life entirely or shut me out completely. Him dying made them a little crazy.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He went to Afghanistan, to do relief work like they’d done for years, and he and his best friend from college, they got captured by the Taliban.

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