Harper was walking up to him. “Maybe I’ll hold on to that. Just . . . Well, maybe I will.”
Shaw handed the envelope to him.
Harper took it and returned to his pickup, fishing keys from his pocket.
84.
The Winnebago was parked in a Walmart lot near Tacoma.
Wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, Shaw was at the dinette, on which sat a thick file folder he’d labeled Ashton Shaw Material. The map of the San Francisco Bay Area that sat on the top was wrinkled and stained. Shaw was looking over the eighteen X’s, most of them in the north—Marin County and on up into wine country. Napa, Sonoma.
The map included here indicates the locations in the city that might contain—or lead to—the evidence Gahl hid.
He was sipping a fine Honduran coffee, which was laced with just the right amount of milk. That was always a question: too little was fixable, too much not.
There was a rapping on the door.
“Mr. Shaw? It’s Sue Bascomb.”
Shaw slipped the map into the file and opened the door. The camper sagged slightly as she climbed in. The stocky woman was wearing a dark green, long-sleeved dress and black cardigan sweater.
He offered her coffee, which she declined, and they sat at the small table. She asked questions she’d prepared. He answered into a recording app on her phone, and she took notes as well. Shaw declined to give any personal information and, of course, said nothing about Victoria.
He did report in detail on the beating of the reporter Klein and the horrific murder of John. He said nothing specific about Abby, though he described sexual assaults in general. These details seemed to interest her the most.
After a half hour, she said, “That’s very good, Mr. Shaw.”
“‘Colter’ is fine.”
“Helpful. Quite helpful.” She then flipped through her notes and seemed about to ask another question, a follow-up perhaps, when they heard a shout from the parking lot.
They both rose to their feet quickly. “There’s a fire, a car,” she said, peering through the shade. Shaw grabbed one of the extinguishers he kept near the driver’s seat and pushed outside.
An SUV nearby was engulfed in flames, smoke spiraling skyward like a black tornado. It took him back immediately to John’s horrific death, which he’d just been recounting.
People were running from the store and their own cars to see what was happening.
“There’s somebody inside! Look!”
“Call nine-one-one.”
“Stand back! It could blow up!”
Shaw hurried to the vehicle and let fly a stream of extinguisher foam. It didn’t do much, though it did suppress a portion of the flames long enough to make it clear that the SUV was unoccupied. What someone had taken for a human was just a stack of packages.
There were several loud pops.
“Those’re bullets!” a man cried, and people fled.
Shaw didn’t bother to tell them that, no, that’s not what burning bullets sound like. What they’d heard was probably food jars exploding.
In the distance he heard sirens.
He set the spent canister in the grassy divider and returned to the camper. Stepping inside, he climbed to the floor and stopped. The woman had left.
She wasn’t the only thing that was gone.
The file labeled Ashton Shaw Material was missing too.
85.
Outside the camper, there was no sign of the car she’d arrived in.
He might have caught a glimpse but her associate had ignited a vehicle that was upwind of the Winnebago, so that the choking smoke obscured the view of the getaway.
Smart.
Shaw returned inside and did a fast inventory. The bedroom was still locked and she wouldn’t have had time to pick the elaborate locks. Still, he needed to check.
Yes, everything was accounted for. His own go-bag (called by survivalists GTHO, as in “Get the Hell Out,” or in an R-rated version, GTFO). Then weapons: for handguns the .357 Colt Python and a .40 Glock. His favorite long gun too, a Lee Enfield No. 4 Mk2. The British bolt-action rifle was sixty years old and battered and scuffed but reliable as an iron-block V-8 and devilishly accurate. There was plenty of ammunition too, cleaning gear and his best Nikon telescopic sight.
Would he need the firepower? No idea.
Yet he recalled his father’s letter.
Never assume you’re safe . . .
His phone hummed with a text. It was from Victoria.
A rare smile crossed his lips as he read.
He thought for a moment and then sent a reply.
Then, time for work.
He texted Mack McKenzie, who was ready and waiting in Washington, D.C.
Sending picture via email.
Her reply:
K.
Shaw then went to the kitchen counter and lifted the Sony digital camera from where he’d hidden it behind a stack of coffee bags and cups. He removed the SD card and, on his computer, found a good, full-face image of the woman who had been sitting eight feet from the camera ten minutes ago.
This he sent in an encrypted email to Mack.
A moment later his phone dinged.
Searching now.
Mack’s internet expert would use facial recognition to find matches everywhere it could online and begin assembling a dossier on Shaw’s visitor.
Who was not Sue Bascomb, an Apprentice at the Osiris Foundation camp—that name was just a cover. Shaw was sure that the woman was Irena Braxton, the BlackBridge operative who had devoted years to finding the damning evidence that Ashton and his colleagues were looking for—and eliminating them in the process.
He had not originally suspected her. When she’d come up to him at the camp, proposing a book about Eli and the dangers of the Foundation, he’d believed she was legitimate.
But during her phone call to him later she’d alluded to the fact she was a journalist. That certainly would have been a good cover to get close to Shaw. Except for one detail she didn’t know: Eli would never let a reporter into the camp as a Companion. She was lying.
He recalled too what his father had written about Braxton:
She may look like somebody’s grandmother but she’s utterly ruthless . . .
Shaw tried to figure out how they’d orchestrated the theft.
He supposed Braxton and Droon—who was probably the SUV arsonist—could have followed Shaw to the camp or intercepted his phone calls and texts and learned what he had planned. He changed phones frequently and used burners but as his FBI friend, Tom Pepper, said, “If they wanta listen to you they’re gonna listen.”
From the hills above the camp, the two could have observed what the Foundation was about. After Shaw’s speech exposing Eli, which they would have heard, Braxton saw an opportunity to get close to him. When the authorities arrived, she could have just strolled into the chaotic camp, put a discarded amulet around her neck and walked up to Shaw with the story about writing of her experience.
Her goal, of course, was to find out whatever information he had about Ashton’s search for Amos Gahl’s evidence.
Shaw had to plan countermeasures carefully. At the meeting with her this afternoon, they might try to strong-arm and torture him. He was prepared for that; he now wore body armor under the sweats, and his .380 Glock was in his back waistband. Also, he had an open phone line with Mack, throughout the conversation with “Bascomb.” The PI would call the local police if it turned violent.
But why not avoid a fight? Shaw made it easy for them: He left out, in plain sight, the A.S. file
Which was, of course, fake.
Shaw had photographed the real file and uploaded the material, encrypted, to both his and Mack’s secure servers, then hidden it in a secret compartment in the floorboards of the Winnebago.
On the map in the fak
e file, Shaw had marked areas of the San Francisco region that were in the opposite direction of those of the actual map, which were places where Amos Gahl had hidden the evidence that could bring down BlackBridge and its clients.
The rest of the material in the mock file was meaningless—and misleading—downloads from years ago, at the time when Ashton and his colleagues were actively looking for the incriminating evidence.
The file Braxton had stolen would lead them in dizzying circles.
Shaw fired up the camper’s engine, dropped the transmission into gear and pulled out of the parking lot, now filled with rescue vehicles, smoke and excited shoppers taking selfies with the smoldering SUV.
He steered south. In seven or eight hours he’d be at his destination: San Francisco, his specific journey’s end. Ashton’s safe house on Alvarez Street.
As he piloted the comfortable—and comforting—vehicle along the smooth highways, Colter Shaw was thinking this: it was a possibility, of course, that Ashton had hidden the package for the benefit of his colleagues, who’d decided to forgo the safety of anonymity and take on BlackBridge once again.
But if so, why hide the material on Echo Ridge? He could easily have picked a place in the Bay Area.
No, the more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that the letter was directed not to any colleagues, but to one of his children. They alone would know how his mind worked—the scent tracking, for instance—and could find the document, when no one else could.
They alone had the wherewithal to confront the risks posed by BlackBridge. Ashton had, of course, trained them so rigorously throughout their young lives in the fine art of survival.
But which of the siblings did Ashton intend the letter to be read by?
He had an inkling that it was he, Colter the Restless One, who’d been in his father’s thoughts when he set down his plea for help in the letter, jotting in such fine penmanship, better even than Shaw’s.
The odds that this was Ashton’s intent? Impossible to say. Maybe ninety percent, maybe ten.
In the end, it didn’t matter. Colter Shaw had made his decision. The father’s quest was now the son’s.
Author’s Note
Cults and cult-like organizations—of which there are presently tens of thousands active in America—have been the subject of voluminous books, articles and documentaries over the years. Here are a sampling of titles from some of the sources I found helpful in researching The Goodbye Man, if you’re interested in further reading:
American Messiahs by Adam Morris;
Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain;
Born into the Children of God: My Life in a Religious Sex Cult and My Struggle for Survival on the Outside by Natacha Tormey;
Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult by Jayanti Tamm;
Daughter of the Saints: Growing Up in Polygamy by Dorothy Allred Solomon;
Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future by Elizabeth Esther;
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright;
Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion by Benjamin E. Zeller;
In the Shadow of the Moons: My Life in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Family by Nansook Hong;
A Journey to Waco: Autobiography of a Branch Davidian by Clive Doyle, with Catherine Wessinger and Matthew D. Wittmer;
Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn;
Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints by Sam Brower;
Radical: My Journey out of Islamic Extremism by Maajid Nawaz;
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guinn;
Ruthless: Scientology, My Son David Miscavige, and Me by Ron Miscavige;
Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the People’s Temple by Deborah Layton;
Shattered Dreams: My Life as a Polygamist’s Wife by Irene Spencer;
The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Wariner;
Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up In a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs by Elissa Wall with Lisa Pulitzer;
Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski;
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown by Julia Scheeres;
Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology by Leah Remini;
Massacre at Waco: The Shocking True Story of Cult Leader David Koresh and the Branch Davidians by Clifford L. Linedecker;
The Unbreakable Miss Lovely: How the Church of Scientology Tried to Destroy Paulette Cooper by Tony Ortega;
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer;
Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami;
The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult by Jerald Walker.
Acknowledgments
Writing a novel is, for me at least, never a one-person operation. I’d like to thank the following for their vital assistance in shaping this book into what you have just read: Mark Tavani, Madeline Hopkins, Danielle Dieterich, Julie Reece Deaver, Jane Davis, Francesca Cinelli, Seba Pezzani, Jennifer Dolan and Madelyn Warcholik; and, on the other side of the pond, Julia Wisdom, Finn Cotton, Felicity Blunt and Anne O’Brien. And my deepest gratitude, as always, to the incomparable Deborah Schneider.
About the Author
Jeffery Deaver is the #1 international bestselling and award-winning author of more than forty novels, three collections of short stories, and a nonfiction law book. His books are sold in 150 countries and translated into twenty-five languages. A former journalist, folksinger, and attorney, he was born outside of Chicago and has a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University.
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