The Last Minute Read Free Page B

recognized
     by any government official, any police department, any journalist, any intelligence service. They were, for the most part,
     so ordinary. Frighteningly ordinary. The person who might sit next to you on the subway, or stand behind you in the grocery
     store line, or drop off their child at the same time you did at school. They came from around the world, yet they all seemed
     to have that same suburban sameness. It was, the Watcher thought, a superior camouflage. Yet they had come so close to delivering
     a history-changing death blow to American stability,to bringing the country to a level of chaos that promised an erosion of the rule of law and, in turn, enormous profit.
    Look how far we’ve come since the early days, the Watcher thought. A tremendous lesson could be learned from a tremendous
     failure. They were unbloodied and unbowed. ‘You will note that we lost our main CIA contact. He was killed in action by Capra.
     We have since lost two other low-level contacts I … recruited inside the CIA. They’ve been arrested. Fortunately we did not
     deal face to face with them, and they cannot betray us.’
    ‘So right now, we have no eyes inside the CIA?’ the Banker asked.
    ‘We have an eye or two that never blinks.’ He smiled. Let them know he still had information feeds inside the agency, but
     not exactly what kinds. ‘I do not know if they can see as well, or as far.’ The Watcher cleared his throat. He could have
     shared a file two inches thick on Sam Capra’s life with his compatriots, but he’d decided not to play up the man’s importance.
     ‘We do, however, have leverage over Sam Capra. We have his infant child.’
    ‘Children,’ sniffed the Banker. She was a Chinese woman, petite, thin, with a lovely face that could have sold cosmetics by
     the tonnage. She made a frown, as though the word held a sourness.
    ‘Control,’ countered the General.
    ‘Control of a puppet with no strings for us to pull. While we have control over his kid, there’s no way the CIA will let him
     close to any information that is useful to us,’ the Diplomat said. He spoke with a deep baritone, a South African accent,
     hands tented before his face. ‘I say we kill him. Show that we cannot be defied.’
    ‘Sam Capra,’ the Watcher said, ‘doesn’t know that our grouphas steered him from six years ago, that we have guided his life as surely as a hand on a rudder. We made him into what he
     is, not the CIA. The setback with his wife was … unfortunate. But he only knows us as a name that means nothing, a vague threat.
     He doesn’t know who we are, he doesn’t know how we came to be.’
    ‘He has damaged us like no one else has,’ the General said. ‘I truly prefer that he be dead.’
    ‘We should not be killing CIA agents unless absolutely necessary,’ the Historian said. He was a heavy-set Russian, head shaved
     bald, muscles thick under the black of his tailored suit. ‘It provokes attention. It is bad for business. He’s no longer with
     the CIA, he is useless to us. He cannot hurt us. He cannot find us. He dies at our hand, the CIA will be coming to investigate.’
    ‘I agree,’ several of the others murmured. The Watcher scanned their faces, taking the temperature of their reactions. The
     Banker stared at him and he nodded at her and said, ‘You have a thought to share?’
    ‘Yes. You wanted us to finance your ability to spy on very specific people. I want to know how much of that ability has been
     compromised by this failure.’
    ‘The whole reason we were able to attempt a project of this scale was because of me. Because I have made it easy for us to
     access information that is critically damaging to some of the most vitally placed people in the world and use it to force
     them to do what we need. We had a failure. It doesn’t change the fact that I – I mean we – now own several people in key positions
     in government and business around the world.’
    ‘So. You want to