Shaw: “Are you comfortable telling us more about his death?”
She was silent for a long moment, her eyes fixed on a ceramic statue of a bird, a mourning dove on the coffee table.
“Officially it was a car crash. He went off Highway One. You know how bad that can be south of the city?”
Both men nodded, and Shaw thought of the article in Ashton’s secret room about the state assemblyman’s crash and the ensuing fire that destroyed some records he had with him.
“It was near Maverick. The beach.” The extreme surfing capital of the state.
“Only he had no reason to be driving that way. He’d left BlackBridge and was spending all his time in the city on some project of his. That was odd—why he was fifty miles south of the city. And then . . .” She took a moment to compose herself. “And then there was the mortician.”
Shaw encouraged her with a nod.
“He asked me if the police found who attacked him. I was dumbfounded. Attacked him? What did he mean? Oh, the poor man was beside himself. He thought I knew. You see, the body was badly burned but in getting it ready for the crematorium, he noticed stab wounds, deep ones. Someone had . . .” She steadied herself. A few breaths. “Someone had stabbed him and then twisted the knife. To cause more pain.”
Shaw pictured the SOG knife, recalled Droon’s gesturing with the blade yesterday morning.
Insert, twist . . .
His torture method of choice.
With her jaw tightly set, she whispered, “He said it looked like he was stabbed in the leg and the blade hit the femoral artery. That would be an accident. They wanted to keep him alive—I guess to find out where the evidence you mentioned was.”
Had they caught him at the library yesterday Shaw too would have been strapped down and the SOG knife plunged into his arm or leg.
And with each question would have come another twist of the blade.
“Did Amos leave anything here? Records, files, computers, hard drives? Maybe a briefcase? He called it a courier bag.”
She sipped from the cup and thought for a moment. “No. And near the end he didn’t come by very often. He seemed paranoid. He believed he was being watched. But he would meet a friend here. At first, I thought it was sweet. Bringing a boyfriend home to meet Mom and Stepdad. They were . . . well, it was easy to see they were close. He was a coworker at BlackBridge, though I think he’d quit by the time he came here. But they weren’t completely social get-togethers. We’d have a meal and then they’d go down to the cellar to talk. I think they wanted a place that was completely private and secure.” Her eyes darkened. “Maybe Amos and his friend thought their own houses were bugged.”
“Do you remember his friend’s name?”
“I do. Because it was one you don’t hear very much. A pretty name. La Fleur. Last name. It means ‘flower’ in French. I don’t remember his first.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Marin, I think he said at dinner. Nothing more than the county. Maybe he was paranoid too. Even here.”
“And you think La Fleur had quit BlackBridge?”
“I’m pretty sure so.” A scornful laugh. “He probably had a conscience.”
“Anyone else Amos met with from the company?”
“La Fleur’s the only one I remember.” She chuckled. “If I thought Amos was paranoid, you should have seen the friend. During dinner, he asked what kind of encryption our phones used. Mort and I laughed. Heavens! We thought it was a joke. But he was serious. When we said we didn’t have an idea Amos made us shut our phones off. We thought he was humoring his friend. I suppose not. Sometimes it’s not really paranoia at all, is it?”
Again, the brothers shared a glance.
They rose and thanked her for her time. Shaw said he’d be in touch if they learned anything else.
She walked them to the door. She looked out into the front yard, a pleasant setting. A Japanese maple dominated. Some bright flowers, purple and blue, lorded over recently mulched beds. Shaw, like all survivalists, knew some plants well—those that are edible, that are toxic, that can be used as medicines and antiseptics. Of flowers that were merely decorative he was largely ignorant.
Eleanor said, “Amos wasn’t a fool. He’d know there was a chance that he’d get found out. And that means he wouldn’t hide the evidence, this bag, so far out of sight that it couldn’t be found by somebody else after he was gone.”
Which echoed Shaw’s very thought when he was searching for the bag in the Stanford library yesterday morning.
The woman continued, “You two are that somebody else.”
She looked from one brother to the other, then tugged tight the drawstring of her frilly apron, not a stain upon it. Her placid, sitcom-grandmother face grew hard. Her eyes locked onto Shaw’s. “Find it. And take those motherfuckers down.”
34
Sausalito is a quaint bay- and cliffside suburb north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The demographics are artists and craftspeople and, given the views, the fine scone and muffin bakeries, and the high-speed ferries to downtown, well-heeled professionals.
In Russell’s SUV the brothers were presently rocking through the winding and hilly streets, which were lined with dense foliage.
The inimitable Karin had tracked down La Fleur—first name Earnest, spelled the nontraditional way—and gotten his address but, interestingly, the group’s databases offered little other information about him.
The man was off the grid. No phone, no social media. Amos Gahl’s mother had said that La Fleur had been an employee of BlackBridge but even that assertion, which Shaw had every reason to believe, was not available for confirmation. Shaw suspected his identity had been scrubbed to vapor.
Learning this about La Fleur, Shaw reflected how his father had come up with perhaps the best form of scrubbing in existence—never entrusting a single fact about himself, his work, his family, to the digital world.
“That’s it,” Russell said, nodding ahead of them to a cul-de-sac.
The narrow street, on which there were no sidewalks, was bounded by old-growth trees and interwoven tangles of foliage. In this part of town were few houses and the ones they’d passed were fronted with short picket fences through which grew thick greenery. La Fleur’s property was different. It was protected by a solid pressure-treated stockade fence, eight feet tall, aged to gray. The slats topped with strands of barbed wire.
Russell parked and they walked to the gate, which was locked.
“No intercom,” he said.
Shaw knelt and looked through a foot-round hole that had been cut in the wood for mail. All he could see was more foliage.
Russell took a small flat object from his pocket—like a black metal fingernail file—and, after examining the crack between gate and fence, slipped the latch in with a swift move and pushed the gate open. They stepped inside and looked over La Fleur’s house. The rambling residence, an architectural mess in Cape Cod gray, was on a steep hillside, with stilts holding it aloft, forty feet above the rocks below. This entire area was subject to tremors of varying magnitude and Shaw would not have lived in a stilt house here for any money, whatever the view.
On the other hand, the building was at least three-quarters of a century old and had clearly survived various past shakings, perhaps damaged but suffering no mortal injury.
The men started toward the structure down a serpentine path, which was, curiously, interrupted every ten feet or so with oil drums filled with concrete. They were a version of what you saw in front of embassies and government security agencies overseas, to prevent suicide bombers from plowing their explosive-filled Toyota pickups straight into the front door.
“Hmm,” Russell said.
As they approached the last drum, Shaw suddenly tilted his head. Russell too.
Both men dropped fast, taking cover beh
ind one barricade.
Nothing is more distinctive than the creaking sound of a homemade bow being drawn.
The arrow hissed over their heads and lodged in a tree to the left, fired by a figure standing just inside the front door of the house. They couldn’t see clearly but his garment appeared to be a variation on nighttime camo—various shades of blue and black. He wore dark brown leather gloves.
The arrow was a crude projectile, also homemade, but it still traveled at typical arrow velocity—around two hundred feet per second—and embedded itself neatly in a eucalyptus, which is not a soft wood.
“That’s a warning shot. Get the hell out of here!” The voice was raspy and manic.
“Mr. La Fleur,” Shaw called. “We just want to talk!”
“You’re trespassing!”
Russell: “You don’t have an intercom.”
Shaw said, “And you don’t have a phone either.”
“How the fuck did you know that?”
Another arrow banged into the steel drum to their right.
The men surveyed the field of fire. Shaw estimated: fifteen feet to the bottom step, then three up to the narrow porch, three more to the door.
Shaw tried to calculate the odds. A crossbow, which takes some effort and time to cock and fit with a bolt, would have been no problem. They could easily cover the ground in the time it took to reload. But a recursive bow like this? One could fire about eight arrows a minute, if the archer were aiming carefully.
A skilled archer, that is. It didn’t seem that La Fleur was. He dropped another arrow as he tried to notch it. Then he got it ready to launch. Shaw noted that his hands were trembling.
“Sir, we’re not a threat!” Russell called. “We’d just like to talk to you about—”
Clunk . . .
This arrow hit the drum they were behind.
Shaw was getting irritated. “Hey, cut it out! You could hurt bystanders doing that!”
“No, I could fucking hurt you!”
The brothers regarded each other again and nodded.
Another arrow hissed in their direction. As it flew by, Shaw and Russell were instantly on their feet, sprinting to the door. Shaw slammed into the heavy panel with his shoulder. The door in turn bowled the man to the floor.
La Fleur howled, dropped the weapon and held his hands up.
Russell pushed into the foyer just after Shaw, his pistol drawn, in case La Fleur chose to attack with a knife or, who knew, a broadsword or battle-axe.
But the skirmish was over as fast as it had begun.
He skittered over the oak to a corner, huddling and crying out, “Bastards!”
The man had wild white hair, not unlike Ashton’s toward the end, though La Fleur’s was pulled into a sloppy ponytail. He had lengthy blanched eyebrows. He was gaunt. Beneath the camo, he wore a red floral shirt and on his feet were sandals with tie-dye straps. Bronze earrings dangled. The man was a combat-ready hippie.
“Nazis! Fascists! I have rights!”
“Calm down,” Shaw said, pulling the man’s gloves off and zip-tying his hands behind him. He noted he hadn’t trimmed his nails in ages. They were yellow.
“No!”
Shaw: “I’m just doing this so everybody’s safe. We’re not going to hurt you.”
“You already did. My butt aches.”
“Calm. Down.”
The volume of the muttering diminished some and La Fleur nodded, as if he were afraid of the consequences of even speaking to the two home invaders.
Shaw re-latched the many locks.
“Anybody else in the house?”
A negative twisting of neck and head.
Guns drawn, the brothers went about clearing the place anyway. Though they hadn’t seen—let alone trained with—each other since they were children, they fell instantly into the procedure that Ashton Shaw had taught. “Door closed, left . . . Bathroom, half-open right . . . Clear. Breeze from second bedroom, window open. Barred . . . No hostiles. Clear! . . . No cellar . . . Attic sealed . . .”
They returned to the living room. Shaw looked over the place, which was perfumed with three distinctive smells: damp fireplace ash, rich pot and ocean. Two windows faced east, the direction of San Francisco Bay. These would have offered stunning views had they not been covered with thick metal shutters. Shaw knew their make and model. They were bulletproof, expensive and a favorite of cartel bosses. He knew of these qualities from a reward job a few years ago. He could also attest to the fact that when hit by automatic gunfire, the resulting bang was as loud as the muzzle burst itself.
The house could have been outfitted by a survivalist. There were stacks upon stacks of sandbags, piled halfway up the walls, enough to stop a fusillade of bullets. Ports had been cut into the wall through which he could pepper attacking hordes with his caveman arrows. La Fleur also had medical supplies aplenty, including a satchel labeled self-surgery kit.
Also fifty-gallon drums of drinking water and hundreds of pounds of MRE. Meals ready to eat were a staple for the armed services . . . and for gullible pseudo-survivalists who listened to paranoia-dishing talk radio hosts.
Ashton Shaw had taught the children that true survivalism means learning how to grow, gather and hunt for your own food.
One difference between this cliffside dwelling and the Compound: La Fleur had a computer and a TV. In the Compound there’d been no electronics whatsoever, except an emergency cell phone. It was kept charged but shut off. The only time Shaw remembered its being used was the cold October morning when he went off to look for his father on Echo Ridge, after the man had gone missing.
35
The brothers helped La Fleur into an indented armchair of faded green fabric and Shaw cut the restraint off. Now the grizzled man was trying a different tack; he was contrite. “It’s all a mistake. Me shooting at you? I thought you were burglars. Really. There’s been a string of robberies in the neighborhood. I have clippings. Do you want to see them? I would never have shot you if I’d known you weren’t burglars. Don’t hurt me!”
Russell frowned. “Burglars? Hmm.”
“Who’d you really think we were?” Shaw asked.
“From BlackBridge?” Russell asked.
The man froze and then looked down. It was as if the very word paralyzed him. He gave the faintest of nods.
“We’re not,” Shaw said.
Russell tapped the grip of his SIG Sauer. “If we were BlackBridge, you’d be dead. Right?”
La Fleur rubbed his wrists. He reached for a bong and a lighter on the chair-side table.
“No,” Russell said.
“You want some?” he offered the stained glass tube. Both men ignored him. He put it down.
“Amos Gahl’s mother told us about you.”
His face softened “Eleanor! How is she?”
“She’s fine.”
“And her husband? Mort.”
“Apparently okay,” Shaw said. “He was out. Now, Earnest. We need your help. Amos found some evidence against BlackBridge. We think it’s proof about the Urban Improvement Plan. You know about it?”
He frowned, taking this in. He remained cautious. “Who are you?”
“Our father,” Shaw said, “was killed by Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon. Ian Helms too.”
“Your father?”
“Ashton Shaw. Did you know him?”
“I don’t remember the name. But there was somebody . . . wild-eyed, like a cowboy.”
Russell displayed the picture.
“That’s him. He stopped me outside where I was living. He told me he was a professor and one of his students had been killed by BlackBridge.”
“Todd Zaleski, a city councilman.”
La Fleur squinted. “That was it, yes! Supposedly a robbery but your dad didn’t believe it. Like you guys—he was looking for w
hat Ame had taken from BlackBridge. I told him I couldn’t help him. He left and I never heard from him again.”
“You were close to Amos, his mother told us.”
A nod and his weathered lips drew taut.
“Will you help us? Whatever Amos found is in a courier bag. He hid it somewhere in the Bay Area.”
Eyes again on the floor, La Fleur mumbled, “I don’t know anything. I swear to God.”
In the rewards business, Shaw had done a fair amount of kinesics analysis—using body language to spot deception. Included in that fine art was noting verbal tics. Anyone who ends a sentence with the assurance that they’re not lying probably is, and it’s a double hit if a deity is invoked.
Shaw stared at him until La Fleur added, in a whisper, “BlackBridge is the devil—the whole company. Everybody. Not just Helms and Braxton. It’s like the buildings are evil, the walls are evil . . . It’s so dangerous. Why do you think I’m living like this?”
“Don’t you want Helms to go to prison for what they did to your friend?” Shaw asked.
The man looked away.
Shaw felt frustration. This man knew something. He said, “There’s a family that Droon and Braxton are going to kill tomorrow.”
La Fleur’s face revealed some concern at this. “Why?”
Russell: “We don’t know.”
“We find Amos’s evidence and go to the FBI. They arrest Ian Helms and Braxton and Droon. We stop the killing. Help us save them.”
Russell stirred impatiently. Shaw had refined his interviewing and interrogation skills over the years in seeking rewards. Though he could be firm, he generally used logic, empathy and humor to win over the subjects. He suspected his brother took a somewhat different approach.
Shaw persisted. “You and Amos met at Eleanor’s house a few times. You met there because she hadn’t been ‘Gahl’ for years. She’d remarried and changed her name. So Braxton and Droon wouldn’t know about her.”
Shaw studied La Fleur patiently until he decided, it seemed, it wasn’t too incriminating to answer. “That’s right.”
The Final Twist Page 15