The Final Twist

by Jeffery Deaver

  “What did Amos tell you when you were over at his mother’s, the last time you met?”

  He fidgeted, played with the bong. “Nothing. Really! We just chatted. Chewed the fat.” His evasive face gave a smile. “My grandmother used to say that. When I was a kid I never knew what it meant. I still—”

  Russell snapped, “What did Amos tell you?”

  Shaw said patiently, yet in a firm voice, “They’re going to murder a family. There was a note we found, a kill order. It didn’t say ‘target’ singular or ‘couple.’ Husband and wife. It said ‘family.’ That means children. We have no idea who they are and we’ve only got twenty-four hours to find out and save them.”

  Russell said nothing more. With dark, threatening eyes he stared at the man.

  Good cop, bad cop.

  “The evidence,” Shaw said. “Amos was going to hide it. I think you know where.”

  La Fleur shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no! We didn’t talk about anything like that. We talked about plants, fertilizer.”

  “At midnight?”

  “How did you know that’s when we met?” The man’s eyes grew alarmed.

  Shaw hadn’t, but it was logical.

  “I’m a gardener. Look outside!” He uttered a forced laugh. “My last name, you know. ‘Flower’ in French. Amos was into plants too. We had some wine and talked about gardening.” The sadness returned.

  Russell shot a glance to his younger brother, who handed off the interview to him, easing back and falling silent.

  As Russell leaned close, La Fleur shied, kneading his hands into fists then opening his fingers. Over and over. “I’ll send an anonymous text to BlackBridge, attention Braxton and Droon. It’ll have two items in it. One, your name. Two, your address.”

  “What?” A horrified whisper.

  “When they come at you with their M4 assault rifles, your arrows aren’t going to do anything but piss them off.”

  Bad cop had become worse cop.

  His shoulders slumped. He sighed. “I’m probably screwed anyway. They tracked you on your phones.”

  “We have shielded and encrypted burners,” Shaw said.

  He didn’t seem to believe them. “Oh yeah? What’s your algorithm?”

  “AES, Twofish and Scorpion.”

  With a glance toward Shaw, Russell said, “That’s mine too.” Curiously the brothers had, on their own, picked the same encryption package.

  La Fleur snapped, “Let me see.”

  Russell offered his phone. La Fleur grabbed and studied it, then for some reason shook the mobile as if to see what kind of data would rattle out. He examined the screen once more. He handed it back. He seemed marginally relieved and didn’t bother with Shaw’s unit.

  The man’s zipping eyes settled on the knotty-pine floor. He rose and walked to a shuttered window. He opened the metal slat a few inches, ducking—as if to slip out of a sniper’s crosshairs. After a moment he stood, crouching, and looked out.

  Apparently satisfied there were no surveillance devices, or rifles, trained his way, he closed and re-latched the shutter. Walking to a far corner of the room, he turned on an elaborate LP record player and, pulling on latex gloves, removed an old-time album from its sleeve. He set the black disk gingerly on the turntable and, with infinite care, set the needle in the groove of the first track.

  Music pounded into the room, some rock group. Anyone trying to listen in would hear only raging guitar and fierce drums.

  La Fleur removed the gloves and replaced them in the box. He looked his intruders over. “You two really have no clue what’s going on.”

  And with a defiant look at Russell, he grabbed the bong, lit up and inhaled long.

  36

  The smoke spiraled upward, dissolving at its leisure.

  Never into recreational drugs, Shaw nonetheless found the rich smell of pot pleasant. He waited until La Fleur exhaled and sat back. A twitching tilt of his head like a squirrel assessing a tree. The man put the blue tube down.

  “Oh, yes, Amos found something, and he hid it. But it had nothing to do with the Urban Improvement Plan. I have no idea why you’re harping on that. Your father was wrong: there is no evidence against the company. If there were, Ame would have found it. He searched and searched. But there wasn’t and there’ll never be any evidence. Helms and his people’re too smart to leave anything incriminating. They used cutout after cutout, encoding, anonymous servers, shell companies, encryption. The CIA should be as good as BlackBridge.”

  “Facts,” Russell said. “Not drama.”

  La Fleur shot him a look that managed to be simultaneously hurt and defiant.

  “My poor Ame . . . He got himself in over his head, didn’t he? He took it upon himself to end the UIP. Helms had something his main client wanted desperately. It was code-named the Endgame Sanction. Braxton and some thug had found it in the Embarcadero. Maybe Droon. Looks like a rat, doesn’t he?”

  Shaw said, “The Hayward Brothers Warehouse?”

  “I don’t know. But she found it and it was like . . . the ring of power. The client had wanted it forever, was paying a retainer of millions to track it down.” A faint chuckle. “And you’ll never guess what Ame did. He heard Helms talking about it, about how it was the end-all and be-all . . . and when the big boss stepped out of his office, my Ame simply waltzed in and nicked it! Dropped it in his courier bag and walked out the front door with a nighty-night to the guards.”

  “Why?”

  “He was going to use it as leverage, get the company to shut down the UIP program. Or maybe stealing it, he thought the client would fire Helms, and then BlackBridge’d go out of business. I don’t think he had a plan. He was just sick of working for such a vile bunch of men and women.”

  “What was this thing?”

  “He never had a chance to tell me.” His voice went soft. “He stole it about five p.m. He hid it about an hour later. Then at ten that night he called me. I’d never heard him so panicked. He said he’d done some research and found out what the Sanction was, and it needed to be destroyed. It was devastating. The client could never get it, no one could. He was going to destroy it himself but he couldn’t get back to where he’d hidden it. He knew BlackBridge ops were searching for him. If anything happened to him, I was supposed to find it and get rid of it.”

  Shaw looked toward his brother, who frowned. What on earth was it?

  “And he died while they were torturing him to find out where it was?” Shaw asked.

  “That’s right, I’m sure.”

  A new track came on, louder. The men had to huddle close to hear and be heard.

  Russell asked, “Where did he hide it?”

  “He was afraid of the phone lines, so he gave me two clues. One was the ‘dog park.’ He meant Quigley Square. A friend of ours lived there and we’d walk her dog if she was traveling.”

  Shaw knew the place, a transitional neighborhood in the city.

  “The other clue was ‘It’s hidden underground, someplace you’d be expecting.’”

  Great, thought Shaw. More scavenger hunt.

  Another hit of the weed. “Then I heard a shout. It sounded like he dropped the phone. Then it seemed like there was a scuffle.” He grew silent for a moment. “That was the last time I heard his voice.”

  “Any guesses where he meant?”

  “No.”

  Russell: “You ever think about going to Quigley Square and doing what he wanted to? Destroying it?”

  His eyes, more tearful, looked down at the dimpled wood floor. “I thought, yes, but I didn’t. I’m a coward! Helms and Irena and Droon . . . they didn’t know I existed anymore. I erased myself. I thought about it, finding whatever it was, doing what Amos wanted. But in the end, I balked. They’re so powerful, so dangerous. They’ve got all the power of the police and the CIA!” His eyes grew
wild—the way their father’s occasionally had. “You just don’t know . . . Besides, he died before he told them, so hidden it was and hidden it would remain. Forever. It was like being destroyed.”

  “Except,” Shaw said, “they’re still after it. And we have to get to it first.”

  “To save that family.” La Fleur’s voice was low.

  “That’s right.” Russell called up a map of San Francisco on his phone. He focused in on Quigley Square. There were dozens of buildings bordering the park. Presumably they’d all have undergrounds—cellars or maybe tunnels.

  Shaw asked, “Would it be in the friend’s house? The dog friend?”

  “Amos would never endanger anyone. In any case, she moved years ago.”

  Shaw wondered aloud: “Sewers? Transit system?”

  “No BART station there,” Russell noted. “Where would we expect it to be hidden, when we don’t know what it is?” he muttered.

  Shaw offered, “Maybe he hides it in a book and puts it in a cellar of a library or bookstore. He’s got a CD or tape, he hides it in a music store basement. It’s a computer disk, so it’s in the basement of a school with a computer science lab.” He shook his head. “We can’t keep throwing out ideas. ‘Never speculate.’”

  Russell finished their father’s rule: “‘Make decisions from facts.’”

  Shaw asked, “Who’s the client that wanted the Sanction?”

  La Fleur said, “Banyan Tree Inc. It’s a big conglomerate. International. Into healthcare, medical equipment, transportation, communications, environmental work, real estate—”

  “Real estate,” Shaw said. “UIP.”

  Russell nodded.

  Shaw asked where Banyan’s headquarters was.

  “In the city here. It’s a skyscraper downtown.”

  “Four hundred block of Sutter?”

  “Could be, yeah. That sounds right.”

  He said to Russell, “The tracker I tagged Braxton with placed her there.”

  Shaw had a thought. “Who’s the head of Banyan Tree?”

  “Jonathan Stuart Devereux.”

  Russell fished out his phone and displayed the picture he’d shot of the round bald man with the busy hands and the fancy British car at the site of the drug handover in the Tenderloin.

  La Fleur examined the screen. “That’s Devereux, yeah. Oh, he’s a son of a bitch. Ruthless. He just drove a competitor into bankruptcy. Devereux’s industrial spies—BlackBridge probably—found out they were breaking some laws or regulations and turned them in to the feds. It broke them. The CEO committed suicide.”

  La Fleur angrily exhaled a wad of smoke. “You know what a banyan tree is?”

  Shaw said, “It’s a fig. It strangles any tree competing with it for light.”

  La Fleur nodded. “And it’s got the longest root spread of any tree on earth. Any doubt why Devereux picked the name?”

  Russell said, “Endgame Sanction . . . Wonder in what sense.”

  Sanction was one of those odd words that had contradictory meanings: it could be either permission—as in you’re sanctioned to attack—or punishment, as in imposing sanctions.

  La Fleur said, “Or it might mean nothing. BlackBridge uses code names a lot.” He grew thoughtful. And tugged at his ponytail, then picked up the bong and lighter once again.

  Shaw wanted to get to Quigley Square and get started on the search. He rose. Russell too.

  La Fleur inhaled deep, let the smoke amble from his mouth. Then he rose, shut the music off, and walked to the door with the brothers. He began to unhitch the various latches and locks. “I gave Amos some advice. It’s one of those old clichés, but it’s true. When you aim for an emperor, you better not miss. He aimed and he missed. I guess the same happened to your father. You two? You can still walk away.”

  He cracked the door, looked out and then pulled it fully open.

  Russell eyed him sternly. “La Fleur, let me give you some advice.” The man eased back, his face revealing alarm at the brother’s fierce, dark eyes.

  “First, never provide your enemy with cover.” He nodded at the drums sitting staggered along the path to the street. “Get rid of them or move them. Second, never use inferior materials in your weapons. Make a new bow. Use locust, lemonwood or yew. It should be a foot longer. And fletch your arrows with short, parabolic feathers. You don’t need accuracy at distance on a shooting zone this short. You need velocity. And order some parachute cord for the string. You got that?”

  “Yessir,” La Fleur whispered. “I’ll get right on it.”

  37

  Endgame Sanction. The hell you think it is?” Russell was piloting the SUV through the roller-coaster streets of San Francisco, on their way to Quigley Square.

  Shaw only shook his head. He received an email from Mack McKenzie. He’d requested a profile of Devereux and Banyan Tree.

  Shaw read her response aloud to his brother:

  “Jonathan Stuart Devereux. Estimated worth, $1.4 billion. CEO and majority shareholder of Banyan Tree Inc. BT is solely a holding company. Devereux is known in the business world as the king of subsidiaries, which run all of the company’s business. This is done to protect Banyan Tree and Devereux from liability. One reporter said, ‘Nobody hides behind the corporate veil better than Jonathan Devereux.’”

  Shaw looked at his brother. “She gives a list of everything he’s into, which La Fleur told us. But there are some others. Data collection, information processing, media.”

  He returned to the email. “Recent incidents that have made the news: A subsidiary in the UK, Southampton Analytics, is being investigated by MI5, the domestic criminal investigation division, for hacking and interference with elections in the UK, France, Germany and the U.S. One of the board members is a Russian national who had been a military intelligence officer. There was no evidence that Banyan Tree was directly involved. Devereux either.

  “Another one: Police in New Delhi arrested the managers of a huge call center after a fire killed twenty-four workers, on the grounds of failing to maintain a safe workplace. The company was owned by layers of shell corporations, set up by Banyan Tree. But, again, Devereux and the company weren’t implicated.

  “I found at least six similar incidents. Let me know if you want details.

  “Banyan Tree has been in the news in California. The Pacific Business Review reported that over the past few years it’s acquired one hundred and forty-seven small companies in the state. He’s fired all the employees and’s keeping them as shells. In the filings the stated purpose of them is to quote ‘engage in various services for the public.’”

  The king of subsidiaries . . .

  “Mack has some things on Devereux’s personal life. Born in England, U.S. citizen now. He’s fifty-one. Married. His wife’s fifty-six. I have a feeling she was not the miniskirted one in the Rolls at the UIP drop.”

  “Hmm.”

  Shaw summarized: Devereux had two teenage sons. His homes were in San Francisco, L.A., Miami Beach, London, Nice and Singapore. He was described as tireless, obsessed, always in motion.

  Shaw remembered the constantly moving hands when the brothers had spied on him at the drug exchange.

  Russell asked, “Anything about a relationship with BlackBridge?”

  “No.”

  Shaw continued to read. “It’s disputed by genealogists, but Devereux claims he’s descended from Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex. It was during Elizabeth the First’s reign, the fifteen hundreds. He was a favorite. And then he led a coup against the throne.”

  “Assume that was a bad idea.”

  “Beheaded in the Tower of London. The executioner wasn’t exactly a pro. Took him three swings to get the job done.”

  38

  Underground, where you’d be expecting.

  Not much in the clue department.

 
“Think,” Russell said. He brushed his beard absently.

  The brothers looked around modest Quigley Square, at the center of which was a pleasant urban park—half concrete walks and benches and half trim lawns, bushes and trees. The surrounding streets echoed the San Francisco of the 1960s and ’70s. Head shops and stores offering LP albums, souvenir tie-dye shirts and windup cable cars. You could even buy cassettes of classic thirty-five-millimeter adult films from that era.

  Shaw looked over his phone. “The tracker’s dead.”

  “In the Walden book?”

  He nodded. “To fit in the spine, it was a small battery. Lasted longer than I thought. Or they might’ve found it.”

  Russell said, “So, we’re black on hostiles. Act accordingly.”

  Shaw slipped the unit away and turned his attention back to the neighborhood.

  Trying to guess Amos Gahl’s clue—“underground, where you’d be expecting”—the brothers noted the retail shops, as well as an old red-brick hospital, a classic diner, bodegas, a sushi restaurant that Shaw would avoid at all costs, dilapidated industrial buildings, car repair shops.

  “Where would we expect something to be hidden?”

  “And underground.” Shaw pointed to a small regional bank. “Safe deposit box? A downstairs vault?”

  “Need a key and ID.”

  They walked half a block to a warehouse. The building was huge and, they could see through the barred doors and windows, filled with construction equipment. If Amos Gahl had hidden the Endgame Sanction in the basement, it would take eons to find it.

  Besides, why would they expect it to be hidden there?

  “Underground,” Shaw repeated absently, eyes on a sign in the concrete at his feet.

  No Dumping

  Flows to Bay

  The words were stenciled beside a storm drain grate. There were dozens of them. But nothing could have survived after all these years down there. You heard much about California’s droughts and Shaw recalled the lessons his father gave the children in distilling salt water to make it drinkable. But the winter season here could still be counted on to dump a billion gallons on the city. Anything in the drains would have disintegrated and slushed into the Bay years ago. How did one get into a storm drain anyway?