Brooklyn
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.
Why the hell were Novem Soles flunkies apologizing to him? It made no sense.
But he was willing to die to kill you. He apologized for having to kill you. That’s not the act of a hired killer. That’s not the action of a CIA agent gone bad.
That’s the act of a truly desperate man.
They’ll kill my kid.
Jack ran his fingers along the edge of the notebook.
Well, I’m sorry for that, Sam Capra, he thought, but I’m not dying for your kid. Sorry.
His first impulse was to run and keep running, maybe until he hit the Pacific Ocean, or the Andes. Sounded like a masterful plan. But you can’t run forever. Running is what they expect you to do. You have to stop them or you’ll never breathe free. Look where running has gotten you. Nowhere, nearly dead, alone. Fight back, do what they don’t expect. Which means using the two weapons you have. Your brain, and this notebook.
Not weapons. Bait. Bait to lure them in at the time and place of his choosing.
He started to think about a plan. And he wondered that if someone would be nice enough to turn on his lost laptop, he could remotely access it and he could set his burgeoning plan into motion.