The Final Twist

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Got something here,” Russell said. Shaw joined him as he spread a sheet of paper flat on the desk.

  It has come to my attention that a whistleblower, SP, has discovered the purpose of our Waste Management program. Following was found on his personal computer through a deep-hack:

  “Banyan Tree is enlisting a subsidiary to dredge up toxic waste. Operatives then use unmarked vehicles to transport it to a competitor’s facility, where it is dumped, as if the competitor were guilty of the pollution. This has resulted in the competitors being sued and fined, often going out of business, or losing so much money they are no longer players in the market. The plan is smart. Banyan’s subsidiary analyzes each competitor’s operation and determines what sort of dangerous materials those companies generate. Engineers then extract only those chemicals from the waste they dredge up. That is what is planted on the competitor’s property, giving credence to their ‘guilt.’”

  As of now SP is still compiling information and trying to develop proof of our program. It’s anticipated that he will probably have enough facts to go public within the next few weeks.

  You’ll be receiving further instructions.

  “So that’s what it’s about,” Russell said.

  Shaw recalled what La Fleur had told them: about the CEO of one of Devereux’s competitors committing suicide after going bankrupt—following Devereux’s reporting him to the feds. La Fleur hadn’t told them what regulations or laws had been broken, but it was now clear that they would have been environmental.

  They dug through the rest of the documents and searched Hogan’s clothes, looking for anything that might give them more information about SP.

  Nothing.

  Shaw: “Whistleblower. Means he’s got some connection to the subsidiary, maybe he’s a contractor, maybe an employee.”

  Russell went online and searched for Banyan Tree. It had been much in the news over the years and hundreds of employees were mentioned but there was no fast search filter that let him find workers with the potential victim’s initials.

  And because the company was privately owned, no employee records were available.

  “Karin?” Shaw proposed.

  “If we had a week or two, we could probably get somebody inside. Not on this time frame.”

  Shaw was musing, “Dredge. Waste.”

  The thought struck him almost like a slap on the back. He barked a quick laugh.

  Russell looked toward him.

  Shaw said, “We got it wrong.”

  72

  Hunters Point yet again.

  The vile smells, the trash, the dilapidated buildings, the lots where the skeletons of enterprises were all that remained of capitalist dreams from so many years ago. Seagulls quarreled over the slimmest remnants of garbage. Rats prowled silently but without caution.

  The place was as tired as a car abandoned in the woods, not even worth scavenging for parts.

  One structure here, though, shone. A white and green one-story building, recently painted. It sat on the water’s edge and was surrounded by a parking lot in which a variety of modest vehicles sat.

  BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions, Inc.

  A Banyan Tree Company

  As the brothers sped into the lot in Russell’s SUV, Shaw could see the thirty-foot transport boats they’d seen earlier: the ones leaving the island that had been part of the Hunters Point shipyard, filled with fifty-five-gallon drums, riding low. They would slog their way to the wide pier behind the building, where workers would offload the drums and use forklifts to load them onto long flatbed trucks.

  The empty boats, with high drafts, would then return to the dismantled ship works for another load. Shaw wondered where the waste he was looking at was bound for: What competitor did Devereux have in his sights? How many employees and residents living nearby would be poisoned? How many animals? How much land would be tainted for decades to come? He wondered too if the idea of using waste as a weapon had come from the CEO of Banyan Tree himself? Or, like the Urban Improvement Plan, had it been the brainchild of Ian Helms?

  Russell braked to a stop near the office and the men climbed out.

  They had come back to the waterfront because of Shaw’s thought after reading about “dredging” up waste, which is usually performed by a boat. That meant that the word crew in the text authorizing the killing of SP probably did not mean crew as in gang, despite the fact that there were plenty of those in Hunters Point. The word was meant in its original sense: those operating vessels.

  Confirmation from Hunters Point crew.

  6/26, 7:00 p.m. SP and family. All ↓

  They walked over the parking lot of inky, newly laid asphalt to the office. Shaw noted on the side of one of the trucks was the name of the company, along with the tagline:

  Making the World a Better Place to Be . . .

  Shaw wondered about the ellipses at the end. That form of punctuation sometimes was meant to suggest forward motion: Now get out there and live that clean life! But ellipses also were used to indicate that something had been omitted from the sentence. Like: “Making the world a better place to be . . . for our company, our shareholders and our illustrious CEO.”

  They looked through the window into the office, where a woman sat at a desk and several men in gray uniforms and orange vests stood in a cluster, sipping from coffee cups. The pier itself held a dozen workers.

  “There,” Russell said. He was glancing toward a man in a navy-blue windbreaker, matching slacks with a stripe up the side and headgear you rarely saw: a real captain’s hat, the sort sometimes sitting atop lean and fake-tanned women in short blue skirts and tight white blouses, on the arms of rich businessmen.

  The man was out of sight of the office and the pier, on the other side of a large rust-scarred fuel tank, where four empty flatbeds sat. He was scanning their license plates with a tablet, then tapping in notes. On his chest was a BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions ID badge.

  They bypassed the office and, when no one was looking their way, stepped over a gray-painted chain and walked along the stone wall at waterside toward the man. The smell was of white gas—kerosene—and diesel fumes, generic ocean, and some truly foul chemical. The rocking water beside the dock was coated in concentric blue and purple and red circles of oil.

  The grizzled man in the captain’s hat made a call on his walkie-talkie, then strolled to another truck. He glanced back, seeing the brothers. He looked them up and down. “This’s private property.” The voice was a growl.

  Shaw and Russell continued forward and stopped when they were about fifteen feet away.

  His weathered face soured. “I said, case you didn’t hear, private property. You get the fuck out of here.”

  Russell said, “We have some questions.”

  “Leave! Or you don’t know the kind of hurt you’ll have. I’ve whipped Somalian pirates, I’ve put down mutinies. I whaled on a carjacker so bad he needed his jaw rebuilt. Now!” The head, beneath its jaunty hat, turned toward the exit.

  Russell said, “There’s an employee—”

  “What’s with that beard? Are you some kind of Amish person?” His face grew even more fierce. “Or a Muslim?”

  Shaw: “An employee at BayPoint Enviro-Sure. His—”

  “I’m not telling you again.” His cheeks reddened; his temperature must have risen a few degrees. Soon the shade was actually livid.

  “—initials are S.P. He has some connection with this facility. We need his name and address. It’s important. We’ll pay you. A thousand.”

  “Why would I care what you need and don’t need? Fuck-fancy. Get off this property now.”

  Fuck-fancy. Not a phrase Shaw was familiar with. He kind of liked it.

  He continued, “I’m a spit away from calling security.”

  The expressions got better and better.

 
“All right. That’s it.” Up came the radio. Apparently the old salt hadn’t whipped those pirates without backup.

  But before the call went out, Russell smoothly drew his silenced pistol and blew a nearby rat to eternity.

  Not the approach Colter Shaw would have taken.

  Then again, as he’d learned very well over the past few days, it wasn’t unusual for two siblings to solve a problem in significantly different ways.

  73

  At 6:45, fifteen minutes before the family was to die, Colter Shaw was sitting, alone, in the front seat of Russell’s Lincoln Navigator. He was looking over the house of Samuel Prescott, the BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions whistleblower. Shaw watched the garage door rolling down, hiding from view the family’s sedan, a red Volvo.

  Trevor Little—the belligerent pseudo captain on the Hunters Point dock—had glanced in horror at Russell’s gun and quickly told the brothers Prescott’s name. It seemed the employee and his family had been out of town at a funeral but were due back today.

  This would be the reason for the specific time and date of the hit in the kill order; the murderer would have to wait until the family returned to their home from the airport. Karin had checked passenger manifests and flight schedules. The Prescotts were due back at about 4:30 and would be home about fifty minutes later—the time it would take them to collect luggage and travel from San Francisco International Airport to their home in Forest Hill, a suburb of San Francisco.

  Shaw, Russell and Ty had met the family’s flight.

  A scheduler at BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions, Prescott was in his forties, stocky and tanned, with sandy-colored hair. His wife, Bette, was blond and willowy. Their son and daughter were twins and had their mother’s pallor and hair, freckled both. They were twelve.

  At SFO, Ty had displayed an ID card, which Shaw caught a fast glimpse of. He saw the initials U.S. and a round emblem similar to, but not the same as, the Justice Department’s. Shaw wondered if it was real. In any case, it took no convincing for Prescott to believe that he and his family were in danger.

  Prescott had been surprised Devereux had learned of his espionage. He’d taken care to hide the fruits of his spying on his computer with sophisticated encryption.

  He was not, however, surprised that the CEO had issued an order to have him killed. “He’s murdering people with toxic waste. Why not kill somebody with a bullet?”

  Explaining to the brothers how he’d discovered Devereux’s toxic waste scheme, Prescott said, “The numbers, always the numbers. They never lie. I’m a scheduler, right? I keep an eye on transport down to the hour, the minute. I noticed that the timing of some of our trucks was off. When they went out and when they came back wasn’t right. I knew how far they had to travel to the sites—the legitimate ones—and they were coming back to the dock too soon.

  “Not a huge time difference, but it was suspicious. I called in sick one day and followed one of the trucks. It didn’t go to the site it was supposed to. It went to a vacant lot in Oakland. The waste was pumped into an unmarked tanker. I followed it to a factory owned by one of Devereux’s competitors. These men got out—like special forces, all in black. They dumped the waste into a creek downstream from the factory. I got pictures and samples. I was going to the EPA and the U.S. attorney this week. I just wanted to find a few more target locations.”

  Shaw looked over the street the family lived on. It was a quiet avenue in Forest Hill, with houses set back behind small front yards of grass or gardens. It was one of the least densely populated parts of the city and, as the name suggested, more arboreal than most. Their house was modest. Prescott made good money at his job and Bette was the senior bookkeeper for a chain of urgent-care clinics. But even with double incomes, this was all they could afford. Home prices in the Bay were crushing.

  Though the blinds were drawn, Shaw noted the flickering light from the TV in the living room.

  He scanned the street again and saw no threat. He also was watching the rooftops to the east, looking for rifle muzzles or scope flares.

  Russell and Ty were in the latter’s car, behind the house, scanning Hawk Hill Park, which is where a sniper targeting the Prescott house from the west would be. Those two had already swept the home for IEDs and found no traces of explosives. Drive-bys wouldn’t be the order of the day either. To kill the family the team needed to get inside. The two pros in the business, Russell and Ty, believed the attack would be a dynamic entry, two or three ops kicking in the door and charging through the house. They would likely be supported by a sniper.

  Why did the kill order include the entire family? he wondered.

  Maybe just being meticulous. Maybe Devereux was worried that Prescott had explained what he’d found to his wife, and the children might have overheard.

  Maybe to send a message to the rest of the thousands of employees at BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions and Banyan Tree, reminding them of where their loyalty should be.

  5:56.

  He called his brother and asked in a soft voice, “Zero here. Anything in the back?”

  “Thought I saw a hostile. Just a jogger. No threat.”

  “’K.” They disconnected.

  Would the ops come in an SUV, a couple of jeeps? He doubted a helicopter but supposed with Devereux’s money that wasn’t impossible.

  Shaw was armed with both his Glock and his Colt Python, and, in the backseat, his Enfield .303—the World War One British infantry rifle, old and battered but perfectly accurate. He really hoped he didn’t need to fire any weapons; he’d already been present at a fair number of incidents here. At some point the cops would have to get involved and, even if the firefight was justified, he wouldn’t want that hassle.

  Besides, he needed a shooter alive. He wanted witnesses to testify against Devereux. Sam Prescott had proof that would bring down BayPoint Enviro-Sure Solutions and its executives, but the parent company—and Devereux himself—would be insulated from liability. A hired killer, even working for one of Devereux’s subsidiaries, might have evidence leading directly to the arrogant CEO himself.

  A motor scooter went by, a young Asian man on the saddle. It vanished around the corner at the end of the block. An SUV, driven by a middle-aged woman, cruised up the hill, and likewise disappeared. A woman bicyclist, in a bold, floral athletic outfit, pedaled past and started up the steep hill, her feet moving rapidly, the gears in low.

  At 7:10 his phone hummed.

  Shaw answered and told his brother, “They’re late.” He said he’d seen a few vehicles. Nobody suspicious and none of the drivers—or the cyclist—had been interested in the Prescott house. “Sniper action? There’s nothing in the front.”

  “No one presenting in the back, and any sniper and his spotter’d need time to set up, adjust for wind, humidity. We would’ve seen them by now.”

  “Are they just in good camo?”

  “No. Got eyes on every usable nest. Couple of them’re perfect . . . Hmm. They would’ve known the Prescotts landed an hour and a half ago.”

  Shaw said, “With Hogan disappearing, they’re being cautious maybe.”

  “Think they called it off?”

  “Ten percent chance of that. Tops.”

  “Agree.”

  They disconnected.

  7:15.

  Shaw noted the light from the Prescotts’ living room change as a commercial came on the TV.

  He was checking his phone for the time—it was 7:19—when the gut-punching explosion rocked the SUV. He looked up at the Prescott house to see flame boiling from each shattered window. Shaw climbed from the vehicle and ran toward the structure. He could get no closer than forty or fifty feet. Already the entire home was ablaze.

  The device—whatever it was—had been perfectly designed. Not a soul could have gotten out of a trap like that alive.

  74

  They drove back in silence to the s
afe house, Colter Shaw and his brother.

  Both men were stung by their failure.

  “Goddamn it.” Shaw’s voice was bitter.

  What a loss . . .

  They had expected an assault. They had expected a C-4 or another nitrate-based bomb.

  They weren’t prepared for a very different improvised explosive device—and a particularly clever one. Devereux’s new kill team had run a gas line disguised as a water pipe into the house and starting about 7:00 or so the timed system had begun filling the place with natural gas—but it was the original substance, before the foul rotten egg smell odorant, to warn of leaks, was added. No one could have detected it.

  After a half hour, some type of timed igniter clicked to life. The resulting explosion had destroyed the house.

  If no one had known the family was targeted for death, the incident would have been reported as an accident. The intense heat and flames would melt most of the parts of the device. Investigators would assume the real public utility pipe—now destroyed too—had cracked or suffered from a leak. The igniter would be vaporized as well.

  Shaw and his brother, though, explained to the fire marshal that the explosion was meant to murder a whistleblower and his family.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell anybody?” the marshal had demanded.

  Because it never occurred to them that Devereux’s men would try something like this.

  And also because Shaw and Russell had inherited enough of their father’s paranoia to not trust your average civic official—at least not in the case of BlackBridge.

  They now arrived at the safe house and Russell parked. He had a good touch behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. All the children did. Homeschooling didn’t provide the chance for official driver’s ed classes, but Ashton had taught Russell, Colter and Dorion the skills needed to pilot vehicles from cycles to sedans to trucks from age twelve or so. It was curious that Russell drove so conservatively. In his work for the group, he was the blunter of the two brothers; Shaw, whose Yamaha occasionally went airborne vertical and returned to earth horizontal, had an approach to his own profession that was far more cerebral.