The Final Twist

by Jeffery Deaver

  To Field, Shaw said, “There’s a man who’s been looking for this: Jonathan Stuart Devereux.”

  Field’s face filled with understanding. “Devereux, of course—mastermind of multinational conglomerates and corporate acquisitions. What’s his company again? I can’t recall.”

  “Banyan Tree.”

  “That’s right, sure. So he’s the Roland C. T. Briggs of today. Of course he’d want the tally. Devereux can enter his company in any elections in the state . . . And he can bring all the company’s resources to the campaign. You can spend as much money as you want on your own election. Campaign finance limits are on third-party donations. How can anyone win against an opponent who can spend a billion dollars?”

  The professor was shaking his head. “And the language of Prop Oh-Six says ‘hold’ office, not just run in an election. The corporation could be appointed as head of the state environmental board, taxing authorities, immigration board, planning and zoning, financial regulation, sheriff, judges. My God. He could spin off subsidiaries and each one could run for office. Devereux could eventually control the legislature, judgeships, the state supreme court. And even if his companies didn’t run for office, he could threaten other candidates, get them to agree to positions he wants in exchange for not crushing them at the polls.”

  Russell said, “Afraid there’s something else.”

  Field sighed and seemed to prepare himself.

  Shaw delivered the news: “Over the last few years, Devereux has been on a buying spree. He’s acquired nearly one hundred and fifty subsidiaries in California. I’m sure they were incorporated more than twenty-one years ago—to meet the ‘age’ requirement.”

  “My God. He knows that those assemblymen and senators will be out of office. His companies’ll run for the seat and bring all of Banyan Tree’s money to the game. And of course, because of the new citizenship requirement, the politicians who’ll be ousted are minorities. Asian and Latinx. People who fought for equal rights in the state. With them gone and Devereux calling the shots . . . I can’t imagine what’ll happen. It’s like going back to the days before the Civil Rights Act.”

  It now occurred to Colter Shaw that the phrase Endgame Sanction was not a randomly picked code name at all. The first word could describe Devereux’s companies coming into political power. And sanction ironically could be read in both senses. Banyan Tree would have permission to do what it wanted . . . and the power to punish.

  “But how would it work? Who would actually sit in the assembly?”

  Field said, “There are some practical issues, yes. But that could be worked out. The CEO or shareholders could appoint a representative.”

  Shaw said, “There’ll be a court challenge.”

  Russell sat back in the chair. “Has to be struck down.”

  Field was looking out the window at some striking red flower. The Bay Area was a perpetual greenhouse. “I wish that were the case. But I wouldn’t be too sure. At one point in our history, that would have been true. The founding fathers were smart enough to draw a distinction between corporations that ran cities and performed civic duties, on the one hand, and, on the other, those that were purely for profit, which they knew could be predatory. They looked at the British East India Company and called it ‘imperium in imperio,’ an empire within an empire. They distrusted that.

  “But eventually corporations began to grow in power and the owners and their lawyers found it helpful to, quote, ‘impersonate’ humans—so they could bring lawsuits in their own names. Eventually the federal government and all of the states enacted legislation that defined ‘person’ as including corporations for all legal purposes.

  “And the expansion continues: A few years ago, we had the ‘Citizens United’ case. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations had a First Amendment right, just like humans, to make campaign contributions.

  “Some think the decision might open the door for corporations to do more than just exercise freedom of speech.” Field browsed his shelves and lifted a Supreme Court Reporter, a large hardcover bound in yellow, and thumbed through the densely packed pages. “I’m going to read you something. This is from Justice Stevens’s dissent in ‘Citizen’s United.’

  “‘Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires . . . They are not themselves members of “We the People” by whom and for whom our Constitution was established . . . At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.’”

  Field closed the book.

  Shaw said, “So, some sharp lawyer might claim that holding office is a form of expression and a First Amendment right.”

  “Oh, I could see that argument being made. There’d be others too.” He looked at Russell. “So would it be struck down? Who knows? But I guarantee that Devereux’ll throw massive amounts of money into lobbying for his side. I wouldn’t put it past him to bribe or threaten to make sure the amendment stands.”

  That would be just the job for BlackBridge.

  “And this is only the start. Devereux has to have plans to move into other states too.”

  “The man who would be king,” Shaw said. Russell caught his eye, nodding.

  Before they left the Bay Area for the media-free Compound, the young brothers had watched television. One night they’d seen an old movie, The Man Who Would Be King. Based on a Rudyard Kipling novella. It was about a couple of former British soldiers who set off to India and Afghanistan, aspiring to become just what the title suggested.

  “That’s Devereux,” Field muttered.

  Russell said, “We know what his agenda is too—his company gets elected.”

  Shaw recalled the memos in the courier bag: legislation and regulations to eliminate protections on the environment, banking, working conditions, civil rights. They hadn’t made much sense at the time. Now the purpose was terribly clear. He explained this to Field, who took the news with an expression of disgust.

  “Our country’s two hundred and fifty years old. That’s a long time by some standards. No country lasts forever, and there have been more governments overturned from within than by invasions.” A scornful look at the tally.

  Shaw slipped it into an envelope and placed that in his backpack.

  “What . . .” Field cleared his throat. “What are you going to do with it?”

  Shaw had not yet thought about this. He glanced at his brother, who shrugged.

  Field walked them to the rear door. Before he opened it, he eyed Shaw closely, then Russell. His eyes were focused. His brows furrowed. “Does Devereux know you have it?”

  “Not for certain.”

  “Then I see you have two options. One: Convince him that you never unearthed it. Hide it somewhere. Pray he gives up looking and never finds it.”

  “What’s the other option?”

  “It’s an amendment that passed, yes. But I imagine that the people wouldn’t have voted for it if they’d known the truth. So, I say: as Americans and lovers of democracy, you should light a bonfire and throw the damn thing in.”

  50

  North Beach.

  This neighborhood, the jewel in the crown above Chinatown, was one of the main Italian American portions of the city. The seashore part of the name came from one end of the district, the Barbary Coast, maybe the most notorious red-light district of any city along the Pacific coastline.

  More sustaining was the Bohemian culture that developed in the 1950s and early ’60s. North Beach was folk music at the hungry i and pot and Mad magazine wit. It was the half-century-old City Lights bookshop, owned and managed by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, making it the epicenter of the Beat movement. It
had a tastefully risqué side too. North Beach was home to the Condor Club, a gentlemen’s establishment that morphed through many iterations and was known internationally as the venue were the famed Carol Doda performed.

  Shaw paused at the crest and caught his breath. Grant was not the steepest street in hilly San Francisco but it was one of them. He turned to his right and continued several blocks until he came to a storefront, Davis & Sons Rare Books and Antiquities.

  Walking inside—his presence announced by an actual bell, mounted to the door—Shaw was greeted with a smell that took him back immediately to the wilderness cabin where he and his siblings had grown up. In the escape from the Bay Area to the Sierra Nevadas, Ashton and Mary Dove had carted with them a ton—quite literally—of books of all sorts. Hardbound mostly. That perfume of paper, cardboard, leather, glue and must was unforgettable and present in abundance here.

  He looked around the large, jam-packed store. Every shelf was filled with volumes, organized according to curious categories.

  Fiction, Scottish, 1700–1725

  Nonfiction, British Literary Criticism, 1800–1810

  Poetry, Caribbean, 1850–1875

  On and on.

  A young man behind the counter was on the phone and he smiled at Shaw and held up a just-be-a-sec finger.

  Shaw nodded and browsed. In addition to books the store also offered writing and drawing implements and supplies going back hundreds of years. He walked to a case in which were fountain pens, holders and nibs, even quills. Antique notebooks too, early-era versions of the one he’d used in his meeting with Maria Vasquez in the reward job to find Tessy.

  The man hung up and joined him.

  “Hi.”

  Shaw nodded. The shop was Dickensian, to be sure, but the clerk wasn’t Oliver or Pip. His stylish hair was moussed up, he bore an earring, and if his white shirt, floral tie and black slacks had been purchased with proceeds from the shop, then the antiquarian book business was doing exceedingly well.

  “You interested in anything in the case?” He produced a key.

  “I might be. But first, I’m interested in framing.”

  From his backpack he extracted a manila folder. Inside was a sketch he had drawn of Sierra Nevada mountain peaks as seen from Echo Ridge. He’d inherited his father’s penmanship and skills at cartography, so he was not a bad artist.

  Donning white cloth gloves, the man picked it up. “Not bad.”

  He turned it over, glancing at the typewritten words on the back.

  In the matter of the Voting Tally in the Twelfth Congressional District, regarding Proposition 06, being a referendum put before the People of the State, I, the Right Honorable Selmer P. Clarke, Superior Court, do find as a matter of fact the following:

  “Oh, that’s nothing. Some scrap paper my father found at work and did the sketch on.”

  The Maybe-Davis turned it over without finishing the earth-shattering words.

  He then took a loupe and examined the sheet. Finally he set it down. “You want it framed but also protected.”

  “Do I?”

  “Of course you do. Now, before the mid–eighteen hundreds, most paper was made from cloth, usually by mechanical means. This meant that the stock was composed of long fibers. It was strong and chemical free. After that, manufacturing shifted to chemical pulping and the use of alum-rosin sizing—that led, of course, to sulfuric acid. Then too you’ve got your nitrogen oxides, formic, acetic, lactic and oxalic acids. Generated by cellulose itself. And, heavens, we haven’t even gotten to pollutants in the air and the water in the factory.”

  Shaw took this in, nodding, having no idea what the point of the lecture might be.

  “In other words, for framing, I can do some things to protect it but your basic plastic won’t keep it from disintegrating. That would require a complete acid reduction or removal process.”

  “How long would I have?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m in a hurry, so if you just mounted it in a normal frame, how long until it disintegrated?”

  The young man’s face screwed up, as he prepared to deliver the bad news. A breath. “Your best-case scenario? I’d give it two hundred years.”

  Which, Shaw supposed, in the world of antiquarian documents, might be like a doctor looking up from an MRI scan and saying, “You’ll be dead by Tuesday.”

  “I’ll go with the plastic.”

  “Ah. Well. The customer is always right.”

  Though what he was really saying was: It’s your funeral.

  51

  At 9:15 that evening, Colter Shaw braked the Yamaha to a stop.

  He was in the heart of Haight-Ashbury. It was ironic in the extreme that the area, named after two ardent nineteenth-century capitalists, was the birthplace of the Diggers, one of the most successful socialist movements in the history of the country. It was also where hippies first appeared and was ground zero for the Summer of Love in 1967.

  A Whole Foods was not far away but the street where Shaw parked didn’t reflect such recent aesthetic and economic enlightenment. Metal shutters as thick with layers of paint as a Leonardo da Vinci canvas were ratcheted down, protecting a tattoo parlor, a nail salon, a bodega and, of all things, what seemed to be an old-fashioned cobbler. A sepia painting of a woman’s buttonhook boot was above the door.

  Shaw parked and chained. Then stood and looked up at a huge red-brick building, which was old, and at the painted metal sign on the front, which was new.

  The Steelworks

  The club was housed in a three-story former factory, constructed of smudged and soiled red brick, in whose walls were set windows that were painted over. As the name explained, it had in the early twentieth century been a steel-fabricating operation.

  The only clues as to what was occurring inside were the line of people outside waiting admittance, and the resonating bass beats that assaulted anyone within fifty feet of the building. Colter Shaw looked the place over clinically and decided: pure hell.

  In the days when he might have clubbed he was working out for the wrestling team at the University of Michigan, studying for classes, and engaging in orienteering competitions in the Upper Peninsula or camping with one of several equally outdoor-minded girlfriends.

  He zipped his leather jacket up, then walked past the crowd to the front door, where a skinny man, lanky and sporting a mop of unruly red hair, sat on a stool.

  Some in the queue of about thirty or forty also studied him, with glares. They were mostly in their twenties. The dress code was jeans or cargo pants, sweats, tank tops, faded loafers and boots. Impressive beards, though, unlike Russell’s, they were overly topiaried. Tattoo artists had made thousands of dollars inking and modifying this crowd. Shaw sensed bathing was not a priority.

  He said to the bouncer, “I need to find somebody in there.”

  “You gotta wait. We’re at capacity.”

  Shaw laughed.

  The skinny guy looked at him quizzically.

  “No. You’re over capacity. How many fire doors you have?”

  Exits are vital to survivalists, fire exits in particular. The odds of having to escape from murderers, terrorists, kidnappers or black bears were infinitely small. Fleeing a tall wave of speedy, thousand-degree flames, however, was well within the realm of possibility.

  “The hell are you?”

  “I won’t be long.” Shaw started inside. The man who was next in line for entrance shouted, “There’s a line here! No budging!” He lunged and went for Shaw’s arm. Shaw stopped and stared. The man froze.

  Shaw frowned. “Did you really say ‘budging’?” He turned to the man’s girlfriend. “Did he really say ‘budging’? Are we in the high school lunch line?”

  Blushing, the man grimaced and backed off. His girlfriend muttered to him acerbically, “Told you not to be an asshole.”
/>
  The bouncer took over the defense of the castle. “You can’t come in. I told you.” He stood up. He wore an expandable baton on his hip. Shaw had been whipped by one. They really hurt.

  He looked over the man. “I’m going inside to get my niece and then we’re going to leave. She’s sixteen.”

  The bouncer paused. His eyes swept the sidewalk. “She’s what?”

  The man, trying not to look stricken, glanced inside. Then back to Shaw. “All right. Go in. Get her. Just make it fast.”

  Shaw strode into the packed, sweaty crowd. He wasn’t exactly sure what the point of the place was. There was a disc jockey and some people were dancing, or gyrating, on a large hardwood floor. Many sat on mismatched chairs and couches or were perched on stairways or wooden crates. They were shouting and drinking and vaping and smoking pot. Some were passed out. A few had thrown up; he navigated carefully.

  No, this wasn’t just hell, Shaw thought. It was Dante’s Ninth Level—an appropriate metaphor, considering that a man named Dante Mladic was the owner of the club.

  He made a circuit of the mad place, making his way through the sweating bodies, avoiding jostling, avoiding several drunk women and one man who came on to him.

  Then, in the back, he noted two doors.

  It was the one on the right he wanted because a guard sat on the chair just beside it. He was lean and about thirty, with curly blond hair and razor-sharp features—his nose, cheekbones, his chin. He was hunched over, reading something on his phone.

  Shaw staggered up and tried the door. It was open, but instantly the man was on his feet, pushing it closed. “What’re you doing?”

  “Bathroom.” Shaw’s speech was slurred. He thought he was doing a pretty good job. The rewards business from time to time required a bit of acting.

  “S’over there.” The big man gestured with a thumb.

  “No, it’s broken. Something’s broken. A pipe.”

  “Get the fuck out of here. I’ll have you thrown out.” The Balkan accent was faint.