The Final Twist

by Jeffery Deaver

  The brothers walked to the pale blue safe house on Alvarez and into the entry hall, where the FBI’s Denver contingent was standing. Shaw nodded and introduced himself. Russell did too.

  Shaw then walked into the living room and up to the four people sitting stiffly on the couch. He said to the four members of the Sam Prescott family, “We were wrong. There weren’t any shooters. It was a firebomb. Your house is gone, your car, everything. I’m sorry.”

  75

  Their failure was that they’d missed the chance to apprehend a single member of a dynamic entry team—someone who might be willing to testify against Devereux.

  There was, of course, never any question about the family’s going home from the airport; Russell, Shaw and Ty had transported them directly to the Alvarez safe house and then sped to Forest Hill to set up the bait and arrange the takedown of the assault team.

  Russell had driven the Prescotts’ sedan from the airport and had parked it in the garage so spotters would think the family was home. Ty, in his own car, parked behind the property. The men had checked the house for IEDs. When they were finished, they turned the TV and lights on to simulate occupancy, then left via the back door to wait for the attack.

  A house destroyed and not a single suspect who might be willing to testify against Jonathan Stuart Devereux.

  What a loss . . .

  Shaw and Russell had done all they could do and now the case was in the hands of the FBI. The scrubbed, somber agent from the Denver office was named Darrel Gardiner. He and his team would be temporary; the agents would review BlackBridge’s records and interrogate suspects to find out if any San Francisco FBI personnel had been compromised. If not, Gardiner would hand over the case to the field office here.

  With Victoria Lesston at his side, Shaw sat at the kitchen table in the safe house, as the FBI agent finished his interview with him. The agent had already spoken to Victoria, Russell and Ty.

  Karin, it seemed, was the invisible woman. Her name never came up, and Shaw wasn’t going to volunteer anything about her.

  Looking over his notes, Special Agent Gardiner shook his head, topped with a blond businessman’s severe trim. “Extortion, murder, attempted murder and conspiracy, burglary, hacking, eavesdropping . . . Well.”

  Shaw got the impression there was a stronger word he wished to use but couldn’t bring himself to. Religious maybe. Or just the rigorous standards of the profession.

  “Urban Improvement Plan?” A shake of his head. “They must’ve dumped thousands of kilos of drugs over the years.”

  Shaw said, “Tip of the iceberg. BlackBridge’s got clients all over the world and the UIP was just one of their tactics.”

  The company was being shut down, and all the facilities were being seized and searched presently. Other warrants would follow. A U.S. congressman and a congresswoman from California were already looking into voting fraud allegations because of the UIP-manipulated congressional districts in the state. The woman legislator issued a statement condemning the gerrymandering and was calling for an investigation of the politicians who had benefited from the redistricting.

  One problem remained, however, a serious one. All of the offenses that Gardiner had just recited had been committed by Helms, Braxton and the BlackBridge crew. Not a bit of evidence could be laid at the feet of Jonathan Stuart Devereux or Banyan Tree Holdings.

  “The best insulation I’ve ever seen,” Gardiner told Shaw and Victoria. “It’s early, I understand, but so far Banyan Tree is driven snow.”

  Shaw asked the special agent about BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions, whose offices were presently being searched too. “Their execs and staff’ll go down, but there’s no evidence that the parent company or Devereux himself even knew anything about dumping toxic waste on competitors’ land. No emails, no memos. We have phone records, but that’s just who called who and when. We don’t know the content.”

  “Devereux was the one who ordered it, right?” Victoria asked, her lips tight in anger.

  Gardiner answered, “Of course. But the head of Enviro’s taking the fall for the whole thing. Claims his boss was in the dark.”

  Gardiner closed his notebook and shut off the recorder. He slipped them away and handed both Shaw and Victoria his business card.

  Other agents—a woman and a man, Latinx—were helping the Prescott family gather their luggage. They would be taken to a federal safe house, where they’d stay during the course of the BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions investigation. Shaw wondered if they’d go into witness protection. If Devereux remained free, they would have to.

  The family still seemed dazed by what had hit them.

  Sam Prescott said, “I don’t know what to say, Mr. Shaw. We’re alive because of you. And what they did, with that bomb in the house . . . Lord. I can’t imagine being in there when the thing went off.”

  Shaw responded with, “Good luck.” The gratitude matter again.

  “Thank your brother too.”

  Russell was in the safe house, but not present with the family. He was assembling the surveillance gear he’d planted upon his return.

  “I’ll do that,” Shaw said.

  Prescott and his family then followed the watchful agents out the door.

  Ty stepped inside. “Have to leave, Colter. Got a little bit of paperwork to take care of. Oh, I got a call from SFPD. They responded to a complaint in Hunters Point. Man said an Amish Muslim and his buddy threatened to shoot him and then zip-tied him to a radiator in an old warehouse. He said he’s whaled on pirates and if he gets a chance he’s going to punch those guys out too. Just a heads-up.”

  “I’ll keep my eye out,” Shaw said with a smile.

  “You two make a good team. You brothers. You work together in the past?”

  “Trained, ages ago. Never worked.”

  “Looks like it all came back to you. Russ was saying you climb mountains?”

  “I do.”

  “For the fun of it?”

  “You should try it some time.”

  “Jesus.” Ty shook his hand.

  “Oh. And one thing?” Shaw said, reflecting on meeting Ty for the first time in front of the safe house.

  The squat man lifted a gear bag that had to weigh fifty pounds as if it contained pillows, and glanced Shaw’s way.

  “Be careful with those box cutters.”

  PART FOUR

  JUNE 27

  FLAME

  76

  It’s safe.”

  “You say that. It’s easy to say it’s safe. Anybody can say it’s safe. It’s easy for me to say I can soar like a seagull but I can’t.”

  Colter Shaw stood at the base of the porch and continued speaking to the shadows on the other side of the half-open door of Earnest La Fleur’s Sausalito home.

  No arrows had been launched, though the man might have gotten a piece of Shaw if he’d been inclined. He’d moved the oil-drum barricades, as Russell had suggested.

  Shaw said, “Droon’s dead. Braxton and Ian Helms’re in jail, and the FBI and state police have locked down all the BlackBridge offices. ATF and SEC’re after them too, I heard.”

  “Okay, okay, given that’s true, which I still have to confirm,” La Fleur offered by way of meager rebuttal, “what about the chief boilermaker, Devereux?”

  Shaw’s brow creased. “Nothing to nail him on yet.”

  “Told you. Man’s elusive as a drop of mercury and just as toxic.”

  “Earnest,” Shaw stretched out his unusual name. “Let me in. And could you point the arrow elsewhere?”

  “How’d you know I was locked and loaded?”

  Shaw exhaled loudly, not bothering to explain that he’d heard the creak of the bow once again—and not troubling either to correct the man, as he had others, by telling him that the “lock and load” phrase applied only to the M1 Garand rifle. And until yo
u unlocked the weapon—which slipped a round into the chamber—it was only as dangerous as a baseball bat.

  “All right. Come on in.”

  Shaw stepped into the man’s cluttered house, still redolent of ocean and pot.

  The scrawny hermit, gripping the bow and a de-notched arrow, pushed past Shaw and strode into the yard. There he stood for a moment and then disappeared into the complicated growth of plants most of whose genus and species Shaw did not know. Beyond them, however, was a landscape of plants featuring rich green leaves pointing outward like splayed fingers. Shaw knew what this crop was.

  Returning, La Fleur said, “You might’ve been followed. It looked clear. But, listen to me: never assume you’re safe.”

  Shaw nearly smiled. That was the last line of the letter his father had left in Echo Ridge.

  La Fleur re-latched the door. There was a chain—that most insubstantial of protective devices. But it wasn’t alone. The other security mechanisms were a knob lock, a massive deadbolt, a crossbar like you’d see in a Middle Ages castle and an iron rod tilting upward at a forty-five-degree angle from floor to door. Shaw wondered if he had a rope ladder somewhere in the place for a fast emergency descent down the cliffside. As a matter of fact, he did: a glance toward the windows revealed a coil of rope, one end of which was tied to a radiator.

  “You want coffee, anything?” He was sipping from a chipped mug, as bulletproof as those in the diner where Shaw and his brother dissected the courier bag containing the mixtape and the ancient document that could change the face of American politics forever.

  Shaw declined. “Brought you a present.” He handed over one of the envelopes he and Russell had taken from the BNG gangbangers at the site of the Urban Improvement Plan meeting in the Tenderloin. “Ten K. Laundered and unmarked. Amos Gahl’s mother got one too.”

  He peered inside and pulled the money out. “Okay, okay. Can’t say I can’t use it.” He walked to a painting of an old-time sailing ship and lifted it down, revealing a wall safe. After turning his back so Shaw couldn’t see the combination, he opened the door and slipped the cash inside. Upon closing it, he spun the dial a number of times and reseated the painting.

  “Well, thankee.” His face grew troubled. “So that son of a bitch Devereux still got what he wanted. Corporations running for office? What does he want more power for, more money? He’s got a company worth a couple trillion dollars.”

  “Just one point two.”

  “This ain’t funny, Shaw. That’s bigger than Spain’s gross domestic product. Banyan Tree’s going to run for office, and then the world goes to shit with his new policies you were telling me about: fucking the environment, civil rights, immigration. Jesus my Lord, just occurred to me: Devereux could start his own schools. They can teach what they want. Indoctrinate the youth. Hitler did that. ‘The Future Belongs to Me.’”

  “The man who would be king.”

  La Fleur tilted his head slightly. “That was quite a flick. There was justice in the movie. You remember how it ended? But not here. Devereux? Hell, if he gets enough power he could change the U.S. Constitution and a company could become president of the United States.”

  “You think it’d come to that?”

  A smile, both coy and troubled, spread over La Fleur’s face. “But you don’t have to look back too far into U.S. politics to see that pretty damn weird things can happen.” He opened one of the metal blinds and looked out. The view of the city was indeed spectacular. And dominating the skyline was the massive office building that housed Banyan Tree. “It’s like the missiles have been launched. I’m enjoying the last view of the country before the nukes hit.” He gazed back to find Shaw looking at the same scene.

  La Fleur was sizing him up. “You seem . . . what’sa word I’m looking for here, Shaw? Detached. Like you don’t care about the cataclysm.” The man squinted. “Yep, I’m sure of it. De-tached. How come’s that? Don’t you care?”

  “Let’s put on the TV. Something you might want to see.”

  La Fleur nodded toward the ancient set. “This one’s safe, terrestrial. The only kind I’d ever have. You can’t work for BlackBridge and not get this sense of how efficiently electrons can fuck you.”

  This was a man Ashton Shaw would’ve counted as a friend.

  Shaw clicked the unit on. It had to warm up before the picture crisped into view.

  The crawl at the bottom of the screen said breaking news . . .

  A brunette anchorwoman in a bright red dress was looking out at her invisible audience.

  “Repeating this afternoon’s top story, three independent forensic examiners have concluded that a recently discovered California Constitution amendment, to allow corporations to hold office in the state, is a forgery. The tally was dated April seventeenth, nineteen oh-six, but all three examiners found that the paper and ink dated to the nineteen twenties.

  “Professor Anthony Rice of the University of California had this to say earlier . . .”

  The scene cut to a recorded in-office interview. One shot revealed a large, pale man in a navy suit and a white shirt. His graying hair was thinning and curly.

  “Hello, Professor Rice.”

  He tapped his round glasses higher on a lengthy nose and nodded to the camera.

  “Afternoon.”

  “Tell us about this voting tally.”

  Rice repeated the story about the implications of Proposition 06 and then added:

  “Over the years the voting tally became a kind of Holy Grail for big corporations, which would love nothing more than to hold office in the state.”

  “But the experts are saying it isn’t real.”

  “I believe what happened is that a businessman in the nineteen twenties hired someone to forge it and hide it in government archives with other documents from around nineteen oh-six. His plan was probably to quote ‘miraculously’ discover it. Why didn’t he? One reason might be the timing. Maybe he went bust in the Depression and his corporation went bankrupt. He faded off into obscurity.”

  “Do you think there really is a legitimate copy of the voting tally somewhere?”

  “No, no. I’m sure there isn’t. The tally was just a legal legend. It would be impossible for one to exist. The recount was a long time ago but it was in the twentieth century. As soon as the judge signed it, word would have spread . . . There were telephones, telegraphs, daily press and as many reporters per capita as we have nowadays. If a recount meant the proposition passed, that would have been front-page news. No, Prop Oh-Six was defeated by the people.”

  “Professor, has a corporation ever run for office?”

  “A few have tried, as public relations stunts, but they never got very far. All legal scholars and political historians I know think it would be disastrous for democracy.”

  “Thank you, Professor. In other news—”

  Shaw shut the TV off. It crackled to darkness.

  “Well,” La Fleur said. “That’s one kettle of fish . . . You think it’s for real? About the thing being forged?”

  “It’s real.”

  “You say that like a man who knows.”

  “I do. Because I was the forger.”

  77

  So, I say: as Americans and lovers of democracy you should light a bonfire and throw the damn thing in . . .

  Just after Shaw and Russell had left Professor Steven Field’s house in Berkeley, with an understanding of just what Proposition 06 meant, Shaw had made a decision.

  He’d considered the academic’s advice—either hide or destroy the tally.

  But Shaw had concluded that neither of those would work. BlackBridge, on Devereux’s orders, would continue to search and would undoubtedly rack up more dead bodies in the scavenger hunt. The businessman had been searching for the tally certificate for years. Why would he stop now? But if it appeared that the tally never existed in the
first place—that the rumors were based on a forgery—then he might lick his wounds and forget the matter.

  Shaw would create a forgery himself. He would make sure Braxton and Droon stole it from the Pacific Heights safe house. Devereux would then send it to Sacramento to present to the state assembly, where forensic experts would determine it was a fake.

  Shaw was confident he could pull it off. He had on occasion in the course of his business needed to track down documents for which people had offered rewards. Usually these were last wills and testaments, corporate purchase documents, adoption papers. Those jobs would occasionally land him square in the esoteric world of document examination and forgery.

  He needed help, though, to make sure it was a solid job. And he knew whom to call. An expert skilled at detecting forgeries would also have to be an expert on how to create them. He called a friend. Parker Kincaid was a former FBI forensic document examiner. Based outside of Washington, D.C., he was now a consultant.

  “Parker.”

  “Colt. How’s it going?”

  They caught up with small talk. Kincaid’s son, Robby, was now an accomplished martial artist and he’d just won a big competition.

  “Congratulations.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Let’s say I was tracking down some materials someone might use to create a forged document. I’m talking San Francisco.”

  “Okay.”

  Ah, the cop word again. Kincaid, after all, had been one.

  “I’m speaking hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically.”

  Shaw was amused. Kincaid’s repetition suggested suspicion. On the other hand, he knew all about Shaw’s rewards business and the number of people he’d rescued and the number of perps he’d collared. If Shaw was being coy, it was for a legitimate reason. Still, Parker had to ask, “I assume my former employer in Washington, D.C., would not have any reason to be concerned by someone’s document?”