The Goodbye Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  Through the bushes he made his way to the dimly lit motel. He smelled lake and trash, scents that might or might not have been related. He came to a dilapidated fence and, when he pushed open the gate, it fell to the ground.

  The motel was composed of individual cabins for guests and Shaw now oriented himself. Keeping to the shadows, he slipped close to Number 7. The clapboard structure was one of the larger units and it featured a private path down to a dock jutting into the dark lake. He detoured briefly and looked over the pier. A covered rowboat was the only vessel along this stretch of weedy, placid shore.

  He returned to the cabin and eased into the space between the outer wall and a row of shrubbery, placing his feet carefully. At the window, which exuded soft, yellow light, he paused and looked inside. The unit was a suite, and Shaw could see into both lit bedrooms.

  Unoccupied.

  On the floor was luggage, backpacks, and cardboard cartons. The TV was on but silent. Local news.

  Let’s get to it, he told himself.

  From his pocket he extracted a tool with a flat blade. A window lock opener. Similar to the dinner knife he’d used to break into the various buildings at the Osiris Foundation, though this was made for that purpose and was therefore much more efficient. Thin and forged of titanium. In a few seconds, the lock was breached and he slid the window up. Just as at Abby’s dorm, Shaw went through the awkward maneuver of boosting himself up to the sill, sticking his head in and tumbling to the floor inside. He rose and looked around him.

  He supposed the occupants were out to dinner and would return soon.

  Shaw unfurled the grocery bag and walked around the room, filling the sack.

  Five minutes later, he paused and listened. Then walked to the front door, undid the chain and deadbolt and opened it fast, stepping outside.

  He nearly collided with the room’s two occupants, who, just like him, had parked their car some distance from the cabin and walked here.

  David Ellis—Master Eli—gasped and dropped the carry-out bag of restaurant leftovers he held.

  The man with him, Hugh Garner, didn’t waste a moment. Instinctively he went into a combat stance and launched a knuckly fist directly toward Shaw’s solar plexus.

  78.

  Shaw didn’t move, intentionally not lowering his center of gravity into a defensive posture.

  The result was that Hugh’s solid fist slammed directly into the bulletproof plate that was part of Shaw’s tactical jacket. At the thonk, the man blinked in surprise and winced in pain.

  Hugh’s hand drew back, invisibly fast, for a second blow—aimed at the head—and now Shaw prepared to fight. He flung the filled grocery bag into the weeds outside the door, far from the reach of the two men. He braced and when Hugh’s knotty fist streaked toward him again Shaw danced aside and the hand glanced off his shoulder.

  The blow didn’t hurt much and merely knocked him into the doorjamb.

  Behind Hugh, Eli had drawn a pistol. “I’ve got him . . . get back.”

  This was the opposite of what Shaw had anticipated; he’d thought Hugh would be armed and was planning on getting the gun away from him. Eli aimed, and Shaw did the only thing he could do: he dropped low and launched himself into Hugh, his shoulder connecting with the man’s belly and driving him back. He drew on his wrestling training and the grappling skills Ashton had taught the children when they were young. He gripped the man’s leg and tilted and they went down together.

  “You fucker.” Hugh grunted.

  “Get out of the way!” Eli was calling. Shaw held tight, knowing Eli wouldn’t fire as long as the two men were intertwined.

  Hugh pounded hard on Shaw’s back and shoulder and head, chopping; the blows were painful, though not debilitating. Shaw managed to land a strike of his own—a lucky one—on Hugh’s ear and the man cried out in pain.

  Shaw hoped the eardrum had ruptured but it probably hadn’t.

  They rolled into the dirt, as Eli walked close, holding the weapon unsteadily. “Move, get away!”

  “No, no shots!” Hugh whispered. “The noise.”

  Shaw took advantage of Eli’s uncertainty. He broke away, lowered his stance and held his hands out, circling. Shaw assumed some generic kung-fu position—something he’d seen in a movie. It was meaningless. Hugh recognized it as such and smiled.

  Eli said, “Hugh, let me—”

  “No. I want to take him,” the big man muttered.

  And that was undoubtedly true; Shaw had destroyed Hugh’s very lucrative and enjoyable life. But this fight would not be an opportunity for the former head of the Assistance Unit to take anything.

  Shaw feinted to the right, then veered the opposite way and sprinted fast, tackling Eli. He went down hard. The man’s eyes turned from expressions of fury to fear. Shaw realized that his thoughts earlier were right. The otherworldly color of his pupils came from contact lenses. The shade now was everyday blue.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Lose the gun. Toss it.” Hugh’s voice was thick with disgust. Maybe he was upset that Shaw wasn’t playing fair and participating in a mano-a-mano battle to the death.

  Eli tried to pitch the Glock but Shaw ripped it from his hand, and rolled away. He racked the slide, making sure a round was chambered and he aimed between the two men.

  Hugh held up his hands, palms out. “Look. We can get you a lot of money. I mean, a lot.” He nodded toward the grocery bag. “Just leave the documents, the evidence, whatever you stole. We can give you cash right now. Fifty thousand. A hundred.”

  Involuntarily, into Shaw’s mind came some images: Samuel’s face of sorrow as he threw himself off the cliff.

  Master Eli truly saved my bacon when it came to Mom and Dad . . .

  Adelle’s expression as she sat, slumped on the bench.

  I lost my baby two years ago . . .

  And he heard Victoria’s voice as she told him of Gretta’s suicide.

  The muzzle of the Glock strayed toward Eli, who cringed and held up a palm. “No, please . . . no.”

  Shaw reflected on another of his father’s rules.

  Never point a firearm at anyone unless you intend to pull the trigger.

  Colter Shaw pulled the trigger.

  79.

  As he bounded over the dirt road in his rental SUV, Colter Shaw learned a fact.

  The men had another gun.

  As they pursued him in an SUV of their own, Eli behind the wheel of the dark gray vehicle, Hugh would fire in Shaw’s direction.

  This was because of the gunshot back at the motel. As tempted as Shaw was to kill Eli on the spot, he hadn’t in fact aimed for the cult leader. Instead, he’d shot Hugh in the calf, flung the gun into the lake and, snagging the grocery bag, sprinted back to his vehicle. Eli had apparently ducked into the motel cabin and got the second gun, and together they’d sped after Shaw.

  Another crack of gunshot.

  Handguns are relatively inaccurate under the best of conditions and the combination of the unpaved surface and Shaw’s evasive driving meant that none of the slugs fired his way hit the Land Cruiser.

  As he barreled down the dark road, Shaw clocked the miles from the cabin: two, three, four . . . The vehicles were hitting sixty and seventy miles per hour, and Hugh and Eli’s—piloted by the desperate cult leader—was slowly gaining.

  A glance at the GPS map. Ahead, a mile or so, was a sharp bend in the road. He wondered at what speed he should take it.

  He ducked as, finally, a bullet hit the rear of his rental. No injury, no damage—other than a hole, of course. He began to swerve even more severely, though.

  Which is when he came to the jog.

  It was more pronounced than the Google map had suggested, and with a solid crack of something within the vehicle breaking, his SUV crashed into and through a low berm of dirt and brush and sandy mulch. It plowed into a field on th
e far side, the front wheels trapped in a bed of sand and loose earth. The airbag exploded. It was an impressive experience.

  Shaw heard Eli’s vehicle squeal to a stop and, grabbing the grocery bag, he leapt out, taking cover under a rise topped with a stand of forsythia and holly.

  “Carter . . . whatever your name is, listen to us.” Eli was standing at the roadside, while Hugh leaned against the hood, sweaty, wincing.

  “Drop the bag. We’ll let you go. Just throw it here. That’s all you need to do. It’ll all be good.”

  Shaw hefted the bag by the handle and swung it into the clearing. It flashed as it flew through the headlights of the SUV at the top of the hill.

  With the gun now in his hand, Eli made his way over the berm and down into the field, looking about carefully. Peering, of course, for his target. His intent was to murder Shaw the minute he spotted him.

  Shaw dug his phone out and sent a text.

  No more than five seconds later, the entire field lit up like a football stadium on game night.

  A voice over the loudspeaker: “David Ellis, Hugh Garner! This is the FBI. Drop any weapons, lie down on the ground! Do it now, or you will be fired upon.”

  The speaker was Special Agent Robert Slay.

  “Drop your weapons. Down! Now, now! Or we will fire.”

  Eli hesitated only a moment and dropped the gun. However, he remained standing. “You don’t have jurisdiction here! This is illegal. You can’t . . .” His voice faded, as his eyes followed Hugh’s. The security man was looking back along the road and did as ordered.

  “No,” Hugh whispered in disgust.

  Eli muttered, “Oh, Jesus Christ . . .” Shaw couldn’t help note the irony: those words came from the man who made his living selling resurrection.

  A hundred feet behind them was a small stone marker, delineating the Canada/U.S. border. Eli and Hugh had been concentrating so hard on catching Shaw that they’d failed to stop before entering the United States.

  Agents ran forward and cuffed them, easing Hugh to the ground carefully because of his gunshot.

  An ambulance sped up and the technicians tended to the wounded leg. Both men were read their rights.

  Shaw climbed to the road and, pulling off the gloves and pocketing them, joined Slay. Another law enforcer was present too: Detective Laurent Etoile from the San Francisco Police Department, the man with the resonant baritone. Shaw was surprised he hadn’t given the loudspeaker commands; maybe it was a federal vs. state jurisdiction thing.

  Eli raged, “This is entrapment!”

  Slay, searching the men’s SUV, looked up. “What?” he asked, distracted.

  “This is entrapment.”

  “No, it’s not,” the agent said, blasé, and continued with his search.

  Eli and Hugh had entered Canada illegally so they had no right to any protections in that country. Anyway, they’d recrossed the border of their own volition and were once again subject to U.S. criminal jurisdiction.

  That Shaw had shot an unarmed man in the leg added a wrinkle but he’d had no choice. He needed to get both Eli and Hugh back to the States and if he’d merely fled with the bag it might have been only Hugh who pursued him. The gunshot in the AU’s leg guaranteed that Eli himself would have to man the pursuit vehicle.

  Eli muttered, “Well, you can’t use that as evidence. It’s stolen. Illegal!”

  Shaw looked him over, thinking of a rule of his own, one hardly up to the level of Ashton, who was, after all, the King of Never. Shaw’s was:

  Never be dramatic.

  But sometimes you needed to indulge yourself. Shaw made a grand show of upending the bag and pouring the contents on the ground. In the light of the headlamps, Eli stared at the newspapers, menus and promotional flyers from the motel room: The Canadian Pacific Railway Museum. Visit the Hogworth Maple Syrup Company! The Untold Story of Moody, British Columbia.

  Not a single piece of paper that the men had carted away from the Osiris Foundation camp with them—presumably what remained of the incriminating evidence; the rest would have been dumped. It would in fact have been illegal for Shaw to steal the documents.

  “We don’t need anything more for the prosecution,” Detective Etoile said.

  From Slay: “All we needed was your asses back in the U. S. of A.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Hugh snarled.

  The case might have gone a bit easier if they had some of the evidence, but in fact the authorities had plenty to put Hugh and Eli away for a long, long time. Witnesses like Anja, betrayed Inner Circle personnel, Assistance Unit men willing to spill. Steve’s notebook was a bombshell.

  “How did you find us?” Eli asked Slay.

  The agent nodded toward Shaw. “Him.”

  Shaw shrugged, saying nothing, though thinking it really was a team effort. Shaw’s partner had, improbably, been Dalton Crowe.

  The search for Eli had started before the cult leader and Hugh had left the Osiris Foundation camp. While the men waited for their luggage in Sheriff Calhoun’s SUV, Shaw had dug into his backpack for a notebook to write his name and number on a sheet for the sheriff. But that was just a cover. What he’d actually done was find the GPS tracker that Crowe had hidden on Shaw’s Kia, during the pursuit of Erick and Adam. He’d turned it on and stuck the unit in the bottom of Eli’s go-bag, sitting in the back of the SUV.

  He’d told Slay about it, and the agent had called Crowe to find the log-in details of the unit. But the reward seeker was still pissed off about losing the Erick/Adam rewards and hung up on him. The agent tried to get a warrant to present to the tracking company but no magistrate was willing to issue one, since Crowe had no connection to Eli.

  So Shaw had texted Crowe himself and, after some negotiation, he said he’d rent out the tracker codes for ten K—his text agreeing to the final terms was the one Shaw had received while sitting beside Victoria in the Compound earlier.

  See you at dinner?

  Probably not . . .

  The big man would only do the deal, however, if Shaw showed up with the check in person. (To make sure he got the money, of course, though Shaw was sure there was that element of gloat in the demand too, about which Shaw could not have cared less.)

  The tracking app had located the men across the border in Moody, British Columbia, where they were undoubtedly staging for a more sophisticated getaway to a location both farther away and far more exotic.

  Shaw and Slay were concerned that going through the proper channels with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would have taken too long, giving the two fugitives a chance to vanish. So they’d hacked together this plan, to lure the men back across the border, as they chased Shaw.

  Shaw himself had entered Canada legally at a crossing a few miles away and a man in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection uniform now approached. “Colter Shaw?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll stamp your passport. Unless you’d want to spend the night back up at the inn in Moody. I hear it’s pretty nice.”

  “No, I’ll find someplace here.” Handing over the blue booklet to the CBP officer.

  The odds were probably ninety percent that no one had seen him shoot Hugh, though if the ten percent came to pass, the consequences would be inconvenient, if not dire. Better to stay stateside.

  Which was a shame.

  Shaw had never toured a maple syrup factory before.

  80.

  June 21

  After his improvised mining operation in Echo Ridge, Colter Shaw returned with his father’s package to the cabin.

  Accompanied by Chase only, he walked into the room that had been his father’s office, so many years ago.

  He glanced at the dozens of framed photos. A particularly good one—crisply focused and in vibrant colors—was of the three siblings, arms about one another. Dorion, Colter and Russell were all smi
ling.

  Shaw cleared a place at the desk and set down the box. He hesitated for a moment. What on earth would he find? People had died for what he was about to see. Was it really as important as the facts surrounding it suggested? Or was it nonsense, the product of his father’s dissipating mind? A collection of long-expired grocery store coupons? Or could it even be empty?

  The glue at the seams was thick and hard, unbreakable. He used his locking blade knife to cut open the top. He extracted a waterproof pouch, which he also cut open, more carefully than the exterior container.

  A large envelope was inside. He tore the top open and removed a half dozen sheets of paper filled with Ashton’s handwritten notes, printouts of articles, and a map of the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as two keys on a ring; they appeared to be for a structure, a house or office. On top was a letter, also written by his father. Shaw smoothed the crackly sheet and leaned forward.

  Hello:

  My name is Ashton Shaw, former professor, amateur historian and student of political science. Over the course of my years in academia and doing my own research and writing, I grew to distrust most large corporations, institutions and individuals, as well as many politicians and lobbyists—those who thrive in the netherworld between legality and illegality, democracy and dictatorship. I’ve published numerous articles and organized and attended protests exposing those wrongs.

  Of course I received threats from some of the organizations I challenged. For safety’s sake I moved my family from the Bay Area to a place where I could better protect them, while continuing my campaign underground. I know this was hard for them. But I saw no other choice.

  Working with a few colleagues, I like to think we made some headway in smoothing some of society’s rough edges: exposing graft and corruption in the government or corporate world.

  And then, a few years ago, I came across BlackBridge Corporate Solutions.

  While I was doing research into the dangers posed by big drug companies, I learned that the incidence of addiction in certain lower-middle-class neighborhoods that had little history of drug problems increased suddenly and dramatically, almost overnight. As a result, crime would soar, property values would plummet. The neighborhoods became unlivable.