His brother shook his head.
Shaw saw one of the attackers standing at the open tailgate of an SUV. The men looked up and down the street. He then pulled something from the vehicle, turned and eyed the front of the safe house. He squinted directly toward Shaw. Then raised to his shoulder what looked like a large shotgun with a blunt object protruding from the muzzle. He pulled the trigger.
“Grenade!” Shaw shouted.
The brothers dove to the floor.
42
Irena Braxton, wearing a staid gray suit, stood with her arms crossed over her chest, surveying the interior of the safe house, as if she were waiting for her grown son and daughter-in-law and the brood of grandchildren to arrive for Sunday supper.
Other BlackBridge workers—a lean, unsmiling blond woman in a black tac outfit and a solidly built Latino—were tossing the living and dining rooms. Tossing. That was the technical term for searching a home or office, though there was in fact nothing sloppy about the process. They were meticulous and careful and breaking or destroying nothing. Drawers were opened, cabinets, the refrigerator and freezer, the microwave, the closets, the spaces under cushions, under couches, under chairs.
Another man from the team was examining the empty BlackBridge courier bag. He was the one who’d fired the grenade launcher. He had set down the weapon but like the others—aside from Braxton—he wore a sidearm, another expensive SIG Sauer.
One of the ops, a tall brunette woman, was in the living room. Hands on hips, she called, “Nothing. The Sanction’s not here.”
“What?” Braxton snapped, turning on her. “Is your search finished? How can you say it’s not here if you’re not finished?”
“Yes, ma’am. The case was empty, I assumed they took it with them.”
“Oh, they didn’t hide it here maybe? Do you think that’s a possibility?”
The woman scurried back to work.
The others kept quiet and continued their tasks.
Ebbitt Droon came down from upstairs. “Didn’t get out that way. Windows locked from the inside. Clothes, ammunition. Nothing helpful.”
This scene was unfolding on Russell’s laptop, four split screens. And remotely. The brothers were a block away—in the coffee shop where Shaw had first seen the man with the thigh-length coat, stocking cap and the A’s backpack, the texting customer who had turned out to be his brother.
The grenade had not been a deadly fragmentation model, just a large flash-bang to stun and deafen, similar to the one Russell had used as an alarm on the door to the secure room in the cellar. The projectile had been fired accurately. But what the BlackBridge assault team didn’t know—nor did Russell or Colter Shaw—was that in fitting out the safe house years ago Ashton had installed bullet-deflecting windows. The grenade would have hit the plexiglass at about four hundred feet per second, slow enough so that the device merely bounced off. This bought the brothers a little time, since the tables were turned and the device flashed and banged outside.
Upon learning they were under attack, the Shaw brothers knew they weren’t in any position to engage four heavily armed tac ops. They chose to escape. Shaw shoveled the contents of the courier bag into his backpack, as Russell grabbed their computers.
“Basement,” Russell said, at the same time as Shaw said, “Cellar.”
So his brother had seen the coal bin too. Shaw had recognized right away that it was fake; the house wasn’t more than fifty years old. No urban dwelling of that age had ever used coal for heat.
Ever the survivalist, weren’t you, Ashton?
As they heard footsteps above them, they’d pulled the bin away and slipped into the four-foot-wide tunnel, then pulled the bin back in place behind them.
Never use a safe house that doesn’t have a trapdoor . . .
A moment later they’d heard: “Cellar clear” and the thud of footsteps up the stairs.
The brothers had continued through the tunnel for about thirty feet and come to another wooden panel. They’d muscled it aside and, guns ready, stepped into the basement of the Soviet-bloc apartment building across the alley from the safe house. The large, mold-scented room was empty. They left via the service entrance and five minutes later were in the coffee shop, more unwanted food and drink at hand, just any other customers, watching Braxton, Droon and the others.
When Russell had returned to the safe house with the news about the text ordering the hit on the SP family, he’d brought with him surveillance equipment. The four cameras, fitted with sensitive microphones, were in household objects—lamps, a clock, a picture frame. They were wireless but transmitted on the same frequency as Russell’s internet router in the closet in the front hall—so anyone scanning the house for surveillance, as Droon had done, would see only the server transmissions, not the spy cams.
Shaw said he was impressed, and Russell said his group had some people who came up with “clever ideas.”
On the computer screen it was easy to see that Braxton was growing angrier. “We had eyes on them. They were here. How’d they get out?”
“Back window?” one of the male operatives said.
“And then why weren’t any of you in the back?”
No one had an answer for that, and the searching continued.
“Look,” Shaw said.
He was referring to Droon, who was only marginally interested in the cassette player. He punched a button, listened to a few seconds of a tune, then fast-forwarded and did the same several more times. He shut the unit off, shrugged toward Braxton and continued searching the room, leaving the device on the table.
Shaw continued, “They’d have to have audio engineers too, like your group. It means the Sanction’s not electronic.”
“Hmm.”
Droon then took over examining the courier bag. He did so as closely as Shaw and Russell had done. He could see that the lining was cut but he was taking no chances. Maybe he was searching this carefully because it was his nature. Maybe it was self-preservation, so desperate were the minions to please Devereux.
Russell said, “Be helpful if they said what they’re looking for. Help us narrow it down.”
If anyone from BlackBridge mentioned a keyword, it might be possible for the brothers to identify the Endgame Sanction in the stack of material sitting in Shaw’s backpack.
Russell typed. A camera scanned to the left, taking in the blond woman operative. Then to the right.
Shaw then said, “Notice a pattern?”
Russell nodded. “All they want is paperwork. That’s why they don’t care about the cassette. It’s definitely paper, and probably—the way they’re fanning pages—a single sheet.”
After five minutes Droon muttered, “Bastards took it with ’em, don’tcha know?”
Braxton now seemed to accept this possibility. She nodded. “We found it once. We’ll find it again. Devereux brings in ten million a year. And you know what the bonus’ll be when we get it.”
Braxton’s attention turned to the window. The doorbell buzzed and one of the ops walked into the front alcove.
Then, just barely audible through the microphone, came the sounds of a creaking floor as a large man in a black suit stepped into sight. Shaw recognized him. He was Devereux’s Asian American bodyguard and driver. Shaw recalled him from the construction site in the Tenderloin, where the BNG gangbangers had gotten their Johnny Appleseed bags of drugs to plant around the community as part of the UIP program.
The man looked around and, apparently after verifying that it was safe, he eased back into the alcove.
Jonathan Stuart Devereux stepped into the living room.
“You all right?” he asked in his cheery prime minister accent.
Braxton nodded in return.
Devereux sighed. “Your look, I can see your look. Your face. Don’t faces tell us everything? We don’t need words. Words lie, people
lie. Faces don’t. It’s not here, is it?”
“We’re on course. We’re moving in.” Braxton added, “We found the courier bag Gahl stole.”
“All those many years ago.”
“It had that tape recorder inside.” She nodded toward the unit.
“But I’m not so very interested in a tape recorder, am I?”
Devereux examined the courier bag, peering inside, pulling it open wide. He paced through the house, gazing around him. Not looking for the Sanction, it seemed, just assessing what kind of lair his enemies had. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator, plucked out a bottle of water and drank down half of it. He strolled back to the living room, picked up some of the items that the ops had searched. He studied magazines that had been here since Ashton’s time. “My. Look, a cover story about that young, fresh unknown Taylor Swift.” He dropped it. “And Prince Charles.” Then he said, a hint of mocking in his voice, “But you’re on course, you’re moving in.”
Braxton cast a taut glance to Droon.
A red-haired woman, twenty years younger and six inches taller than Devereux, stepped into the front hallway. Was it the same one as in the Rolls earlier? Her skirt and shoes were different. She was in a clinging white dress, hem high, top low. It clearly wasn’t his fifty-six-year-old wife.
Braxton’s glance toward her gave away nothing, but she couldn’t be happy that he’d brought the woman to a professional endeavor. Devereux looked back at her with a grimace and he shooed her off with a wave of his hardworking fingers. She vanished.
The CEO of Banyan Tree walked in a slow circle. At a shelf he picked up some figures and examined them one by one. “This is cute, isn’t it? A cat. Is it a cat? Bit dodgy. Maybe a dog with unfortunate ears. Yes, I think that’s it.”
He set it down and his hands went back to being energetic.
The grenade shooter continued his search, looking up under the furniture, until Braxton waved at him to stop.
“Was there anything else in the bag?”
“It was empty when we got inside.”
“And they were here when you came knock, knock, knocking on the door?”
“We saw them, yes.”
“And the sentence that would accompany that one is: But we don’t know how they got out.”
“That’s right.”
“With my prize, my prize . . . What’s on the recorder? My, it’s quite the old one, isn’t it? Don’t see those outside of movies.”
“Just music.”
“Was Gahl a music lover?”
“Apparently so,” Braxton said.
“And you’ve explored every place that he had a connection with, everywhere he could have hidden it?”
“Yes.”
His expression perplexed, Devereux said in a snide voice, “Oh, but wait. Wait. That can’t be right.”
She looked at him, lips tight.
“It appears you didn’t explore one place. The one where Mr. Colter Shaw found it and you did not.” He looked at the woman, eye to eye. They were the same height. “Do you suppose he gamed you, Irena? That map you stole? Do you think it was fake?”
Her face went still. She didn’t answer.
“What is our only priority? Mine and yours and Ian’s?”
“The Endgame Sanction.”
“Ex-actly,” purred the man.
“We’ll find it, Mr. Devereux.”
He could see it pained her to use his last name. He’d probably done some whip-cracking about protocols when he signed on as a client of BlackBridge. He’d want to be worshipped. He was the heir to sloppily beheaded royalty. His company was in better economic shape than Spain. And as his minions had not delivered the precious Sanction, he could snap a vicious whip whenever he wanted.
She offered, “It’s a minor setback. Shaw did most of the work for us. He found the courier bag. Now we just have to get the Sanction from him.”
A hurry-up gesture of Devereux’s hands. “But he got away from you here.”
“He did. But I’m sure he doesn’t even know what it is. He’d never recognize it.”
Shaw shook his head. He’d hoped they would say something more about it, so they could identify it in the contents of the courier bag—or know for certain that it wasn’t there and begin a new search.
Devereux glanced back toward the street, where the woman in the white dress would be waiting for him. Then his eyes took in the blond BlackBridge op, looking her up and down. The gaze was the same as that in the faces of Shaw’s nieces when they were about to devour ice cream sundaes.
“Who’s the other one? The one with the beard?”
“We don’t know. Maybe the son of another one of Ashton’s colleagues.”
Devereux examined another ceramic figurine. “How do you propose to find him?”
“Oh. He’ll come to us.”
His flitty British accent seemed more exaggerated than earlier as he asked, “And that will happen how?”
The woman pulled a piece of lint off her sweater and let it spiral to the floor. She didn’t answer Devereux but said to Droon, “Get some people to Bethesda. And find somebody in Fresno. Somebody good.”
“I’ll do it now.”
His heart pounding, Shaw looked at Russell, whose face had gone cold.
Their sister, Dorion, lived in Bethesda, Maryland.
And Fresno was the closest large city to the Compound, where their mother, Mary Dove Shaw, was at that very moment.
43
Hello?” the woman on the other end of the phone line asked. Her voice was melodious.
Colter Shaw said, “The roses arrived. They look good.”
There was silence, as he knew there would be. Dorion Shaw was processing the words.
“Anything I should know about them?”
“No details at this time.”
“Thanks. Good talking to you.” Dorion hung up.
Those words put in motion Escape Plan B. This involved the recipient’s dropping everything and leaving the premises instantly—along with other family members. In Dorion’s case that would include her husband and the ice-cream-loving daughters.
Before Dorion married, she’d told her fiancé about certain irregularities of her life growing up, and that there might be the occasional threat, some worse than others. Plan B meant that they were in imminent danger. It was one of Ashton Shaw’s two most serious alerts, and one that nobody in the family ever questioned.
The sturdy woman in her late twenties would by now already be marshalling children and spouse and grabbing GTFO bags from the cellar and heading, via a circuitous route and a cutout car or two to a “vacation house,” which is what the girls would think of it as. They were out of school and they might feel some pique that they had to miss photo camp or soccer practice. But they too would have received some lessons in what life might be like if you were a Shaw.
His next call was to his mother. His message to Mary Dove was different. He said, “Dinner will be late tonight.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“But the guests’ll be arriving soon.”
“I’ll look forward to seeing them.”
Both hung up simultaneously.
This message invoked Plan A. It did not signal escape, but defense. Dorion lived in a vulnerable suburban setting, while Mary Dove was on the Compound, a place she would never be forced from—especially in the case of invaders responsible for her husband’s death. The whole point of Ashton’s survivalism was to prepare for threats like this. His mother was the best shot in the family, and she had a go bag ready in case she needed a temporary retreat into the wilderness—and pity any BlackBridge op who followed her there.
But against this crew it would be wise for her to have allies. Hence, the soon-to-arrive “guests.” Of course, she had one ally in Victoria Lesston, the decorated
former Delta Force officer who could bring down a game bird with a single shot from a handgun. But Shaw wanted more, so he called Tom Pepper and told the former FBI agent specifically what the concern was. He said he’d have two armed former special services ops at the Compound in a half hour.
“Would Mary Dove mind a helicopter landing in her backyard?” Pepper asked.
Shaw considered this. “Just tell them not to use the garden as a landing zone if they can avoid it. She just planted the root vegetables and she’s especially partial to them.”
44
The Embarcadero.
This was the name of both a lengthy road that runs along the northeast waterfront of San Francisco and the district for which that highway is a spine.
The two-mile-long strip was for years associated with transportation: the roadway itself, of course; a Belt Railroad, lugging products and produce north and south; an impressive pedestrian footbridge; and a second subterranean road.
It was, however, vessels that defined the Embarcadero. Liners, cargo, ferries. The ships operating out of Piers 1, 1½, 3 and 5, in the central Embarcadero, would transport thousands of passengers and untold tons of freight daily to ports foreign and domestic, including the picturesque waterway up to Sacramento. During the Second World War, the Bayfront became a de facto naval base.
Then came the Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco to Oakland.
And almost immediately the Embarcadero began to die. Not helping the vitality of the neighborhood was the transition from the old-style break-bulk vessels to enormous container ships, which needed massive piers and cranes and warehouses for which only Oakland had the space—and aesthetic tolerance.
The dilapidation of the Embarcadero lasted only so long, however. Given that much of the neighborhood was flanked by upscale Telegraph Hill to the north and the spreading financial district to the west, it was only a matter of time until the neighborhood began to recuperate. It was now largely gentrified and farmers-marketed, though its original blunt scruffiness could still be found in the southern regions.
The Final Twist Page 18