The Goodbye Man

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve been a witness to several crimes on the premises here and I’d—”

  “‘Premises here.’ Hey, you sound like a lawyer. Are you a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Hey, gotta say, you got yourself some pretty fancy souvenirs.” A nod at the war clubs. “Sell them at the general store downtown. Fetch a pretty penny.”

  Victoria said, “We’d like to make statements.”

  The sheriff looked over Shaw’s bloody uniform shirt. “You sure you’re not hurt, sir?”

  “No, I was saving the woman who was just wheeled out. The one that Eli ordered murdered.”

  Eli, your friend. Or benefactor, at least.

  Without reaction, the sheriff fished keys from his pocket and loped toward the SUV. He made a call on his radio. “Tony, you got the rest of Mr. Ellis’s stuff?”

  “On its way, Sheriff.”

  “’K. We gotta leave.” He walked to the driver’s side door.

  “Sheriff,” Shaw called.

  The man lifted an eyebrow. His expression was one of boredom.

  “Statements? We’re ready to make them.”

  “You’re quite the cooperative pair, aren’t you, now? The prosecutor’ll be in touch.”

  “You don’t have our names.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Calhoun dropped into the seat and fired up the engine.

  Shaw crouched and opened up his backpack. He dug inside. A moment later he was jotting something on a page in one of his notebooks. He tore it out and walked to Calhoun, handed it to him.

  “My name and number. Just to make it easy for the prosecutor.”

  “Thank you now. World needs more concerned citizens like yourself, sir.”

  Shaw returned to Victoria and they watched the deputies load the last of Eli’s baggage into the back of the 4Runner. One of them closed the liftgate and tapped the side of the vehicle twice.

  Calhoun accelerated fast through the YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW gate and into the gravel parking lot, leaving a trail of gray haze behind. Accompanying it was the SUV they’d seen earlier, the one filled with files and computers and hard drives.

  Victoria tapped Shaw’s shoulder and pointed. On the ground near where the SUV had been was a small white object. It was the sheet of paper, now wadded into a ball, containing his name and number, which he’d handed to the sheriff not two minutes before.

  70.

  Finally, the feds arrived.

  Frederick’s call to Tom Pepper had worked.

  Special Agent Robert Slay from the Tacoma field office of the FBI had been accompanied by two dozen tactical, forensic and hostage negotiation agents.

  “You’re Shaw?” The strongly built, handsome man, wearing a navy blue windbreaker with the letters of his employer on the back, extended his hand and they shook. His hair was jet black.

  “This is Victoria . . .” Shaw lifted an eyebrow her way.

  She said, “Lesston.” Her eyes swung to Shaw; apparently they were on a last-name basis now.

  Hands on hips, Slay looked over the camp, the clusters of people in the Foundation uniforms. He said nothing but his eyes were taking in the Assistance Unit and the security men in the gray tunics. Most, Shaw observed, had changed to street clothes.

  Slay took a call, listened. His expression was grave. “’K. Keep me posted.” He signed off and turned his attention back to Shaw and Victoria. “Appreciate your thoughts on tracking ’em down, Mr. Shaw. I’ve got people on it. But”—he nodded toward the phone—“nothing yet.”

  As soon as Shaw had retrieved his phone, he’d called Tom Pepper, who gave him Slay’s number. They’d spoken, as the agent and his teams sped to the camp. Shaw had warned that Sheriff Calhoun was almost certainly going to let Eli and Hugh go. He’d shared with the agent some thoughts on finding the two men. It had been unsuccessful so far—as he’d just learned from Slay.

  Shaw asked, “How’d Calhoun do it? An escape?”

  “Just let ’em go. Said there was no probable cause. Released all the evidence too.”

  Victoria scoffed.

  Shaw pointed into the woods, east, near Great Bear Notch. “There’re four perps tied up there. They’ll need some medical attention.”

  Victoria: “Oh. Forgot about them.”

  “They might stonewall but they’re not members of the cult. They’re hired help. I think they’ll turn, you give ’em the right deal.”

  “Charges?”

  “Assault. Attempted murder.”

  “Who’s the victim?”

  “I’m the complaining witness.”

  Slay frowned at this. “And you took down four of them?”

  Shaw said, “Had some help.”

  “What the hell is this place? David Ellis isn’t in ViCAP or any of our files. Neither’s the Osiris Foundation.”

  Shaw explained briefly.

  “Immortality,” the agent mused. Once again he scanned the Companions, most of whom were standing about aimlessly, wrestling with the death of the dream of living forever. And with the idea that they’d just been swindled. Slay said, “I guess if you’re going to do stupid, why not do stupid big?”

  Slay pulled out a digital recorder and pen and pad. He lifted a you ready? eyebrow.

  Shaw and Victoria gave nods.

  They got down to the debriefing. Both gave detailed explanations of their experiences. While not as long as a bloated nineteenth-century novel, their words contained plenty of information to form the basis of multiple counts to lodge against Eli and other Companions—sex trafficking, underage sexual assault, insider trading, possible money laundering, assault, battery, murder, kidnapping.

  “How many people you think’ve gone through here?” Slay asked.

  “Been going on for four years,” Shaw told him. “There’ll be a lot of members. Eli got away with plenty of files but there might be a list in Administration. Or in Eli’s residence.”

  “We’ll check them out. Some of them must’ve seen something indictable.”

  Shaw told him too about the Selects.

  At this news Slay paused. “They’re like suicide bombers. We’ll have to track them down too. After this”—waving his hand, meaning the destruction of the Foundation—“they might be, I don’t know, programmed to eliminate witnesses.”

  “And we have this.” Shaw handed over the video camera that they’d hidden in Building 14, when he and Victoria broke in to swap out the poison for sugar. Shaw had lifted it from the office beside the Study Room. It caught AUs doctoring the wine.

  One of them was Hugh. On the tape he could be heard barking to a colleague, “Fuck, get the mask on. This shit’ll kill you.”

  “It’s poison. It’s supposed to.”

  “Looks like sugar to me.”

  “Try some. Let me know how sweet it is.”

  Slay called over an evidence technician, who bagged the camera and took Shaw’s name for the chain of custody documents.

  The agent slipped away his digital recorder. “Just curious, what the hell’re you two doing here? You don’t seem like cult fodder to me.”

  Shaw said, “Just something . . .”

  Victoria finished it: “Personal.”

  “Well, there’s a story behind that,” Slay said, in a tone that meant he didn’t really need to hear it.

  Steve approached. He had scrubbed most of the blood off his hands, though the shirt was ruined. Shaw noted that the red of the blood and the blue of the cloth combined to make purple.

  “Anja?” Shaw asked.

  “They can’t say.”

  Shaw introduced the assistant to the agent. The young man, eyes red and swollen from recent tears, explained his job. Shaw told Slay about the notebook, which contained all things Eli.

  “I hid it behind the resid
ence. I’ll get it for you.”

  Shaw had told Slay that SFPD Detective Etoile had reopened the investigation into Yang’s death, which had undoubtedly been ordered by Eli because the reporter was looking into improprieties at the Foundation.

  The agent now asked, “That notebook? Is there anything in it about a meeting between Eli and Edwards?”

  “Yessir. He wanted me to arrange it.”

  Shaw asked, “When?”

  “About two months ago.”

  Shaw told the agent, “Right around the time Edwards killed Yang.”

  Steve sighed. “Master Eli.” He was staring out over the camp. There seemed to be no words he could find to express what he was feeling. “I did everything for him. Anything he needed. Anytime. Ever.” Staring at his cuticles, still stained black from Anja’s blood, he licked the corner of his mouth and said, “I’ll get that notebook for you, Agent Slay.” He walked toward the residence.

  A stocky woman in a skirt and bulky sweater approached Shaw. She was in her fifties, maybe, her gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Like a number of the Companions, she’d discarded her uniform. She still wore her amulet. It was red.

  “I’m Sue Bascomb.”

  Not “Apprentice Bascomb.” The spell had been broken.

  Shaw and Victoria introduced themselves.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, frowning.

  The blood.

  “I’m good.”

  “I wanted to say thank you. I was having doubts after the first few days but I couldn’t quite figure out what didn’t seem right. You in law enforcement, either of you?”

  They told her no.

  “Well, he would’ve gotten away with it if you hadn’t stepped up. Those people on stage would’ve died.” Bascomb shook her head. “I thought I was pretty savvy. But when I lost Peter, I went a bit crazy.” She glanced around the camp. “I said, just give it a shot. See what this place can do. Stupid of me. Should’ve just muscled through the grief with friends and family. You lose someone, there’s no easy fix. Anyway, appreciate what you did.”

  A nod. Colter Shaw did not wear gratitude well.

  “I want to propose something to you,” the woman said. “I was thinking about writing about my experience, about the Foundation and Master Eli . . . I mean about David Ellis, the con man. If I did, could I interview you?”

  “Unnamed source, sure.”

  Her eyes on the residence, Bascomb said, “Preying on the lonely, the depressed . . . I think the world needs to know about Eli.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you. I don’t want this to happen to anybody else.”

  Bascomb walked off, removing her amulet and tossing it into the wastebasket by the Assistance Unit. Shaw watched her pause and jot a few words in her notebook—using it now to record the story of her life in a cult, not nonsense about past-life memories.

  Looking away from Bascomb, Shaw happened to notice another woman, sitting on the bench outside the Administration building.

  It was Journeyman Adelle, his Intake specialist. She was slumped and her palms were placed flat beside her. Her eyeliner had run from tears. She’d be confronting what Shaw had told the Companions. She didn’t want to believe him, though she was surely realizing that it was true: the Process was a sham. Her baby was gone. There would be no reuniting in the Tomorrow. It was hard to see her like this.

  He turned to Victoria and waved toward his Foundation uniform. “I’m losing the costume too.”

  71.

  Both wearing blue jeans and shirts—his gray, hers black—Shaw and Victoria sat on the bench where they’d met the day of Eli’s Discourses.

  She had kept the blue quilted vest provided by the Foundation. Shaw’s jacket remained in the gym bag. He didn’t mind the fractional chill in the pungent air. His Eccos were on his feet; his soles still ached from the sprint to try to save John, while wearing those flimsy slippers, and he decided against the boots he’d worn here. Victoria, however, was in boots, stylish, low-topped, brown, with two-inch wooden heels.

  They were subdued. The view was stunning but, after all that had happened, Shaw wasn’t able at the moment to appreciate the aesthetics. They had both gotten their phones from the AU unit and Shaw now called the local hospital. He got through to a doctor in the emergency room and asked about Anja’s condition.

  “She’s stable. She’ll survive. Your relationship, sir?”

  “An acquaintance.”

  “There’s no next of kin in her personal belongings.”

  “I can’t help you there.” Then Shaw had a thought. He gave the doctor Steve’s name and told him that he’d have the man call. “They work together.”

  He relayed this news of her condition to Victoria. Then: “I don’t know legally how involved she was in his scams,” he continued. “She knew a fair amount about the operation. Didn’t report it. That won’t go well for her.” His head swiveled slowly. “I should have made sure she stayed in the residence. After she helped me break into the computer I should’ve known that he’d turn on her like that.”

  “If she wasn’t onstage, it might’ve looked suspicious. Eli could have guessed something was going on.”

  Still, Shaw said, “She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

  Victoria was quiet: she disagreed, he could tell. She would be a woman to whom very little happened if she didn’t want it to happen.

  She asked, “Do you think . . . when she thought she was dying, do you think she believed she was going to advance to the Tomorrow?”

  “Maybe.” It was possible. Though Shaw was also thinking: whatever comfort would be vastly overshadowed by the agony she felt realizing that the man she loved had just ordered her death.

  “Oh, look.” Victoria touched his arm. Her eyes were skyward.

  A golden eagle soared. Most likely it was the same one he’d seen earlier. They were territorial animals; they ruled over an area that might extend to sixty or seventy square miles, and woe to any plumed creatures that encroached. Golden eagles are the second fastest bird on earth, diving on prey at two hundred miles an hour. Only the peregrine falcon is faster.

  This one, however, was in leisurely transit through the clear azure sky.

  After a moment Victoria said, “Not revenge.”

  “Hmm?”

  Scooting slightly away, she turned to him. “You said I was taking a big risk for revenge, coming here to kill Eli. It wasn’t that. It was public service.”

  Shaw waited.

  “I was stationed overseas. I had a mentor there. You ever serve?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know. There’re two enemies. There’s the enemy enemy, and then there’s the one you work with—and for. I’m not going to go where some women do and say that because you’re a man you don’t get it. There are lots of reasons people don’t get things and being a man might or might not be one of them. I don’t know. I’ll just tell you: we have to fight on both fronts. Women do. Gretta was my protector and friend. We took on the Taliban, and we took on Staff Sergeant George Watts and Chief Petty Officer Wayne DeVonne and Lieutenant Colonel Bradley J. Gibbons, who’d have a tantrum if you didn’t include the ‘J’ in his name when you introduced him.

  “It wasn’t every day and it wasn’t full-on. Never attempted rape. It was flirting. Brushing up against you. Put-downs and bullying. It kept up until they felt you finally had the balls to do the job. Funny, that’s how everybody put it. Male genitalia. Women and men. Nobody ever said, you have the ovaries to do the job.”

  She offered a mild smile. Shaw too.

  “Gretta taught me to stand up . . . no, I should say, she taught me how to stand up. When to say, yes, sir, or ma’am. When to say no. When to ask why. When to call bullshit. When to know that you’re going to put up with bullshit because bullshit’s part of everybody’s
job. This’s all pretty damn abstract, isn’t it?”

  “I get it.”

  She eyed him carefully.

  “Then, yeah, the IED. That’s a—”

  His nod told her he was familiar with the unfortunately sanitized name for bomb. Improvised explosive device. In fact one of his reward assignments had been to find one that had gone missing.

  “What’s the difference between a cannon in World War One and a B-17 dropping a five-hundred-pound bomb in Germany? Probably none. But an IED? No cannon you hear on the horizon lobbing things at you. No air raid sirens. Just a stretch of asphalt, a trashcan, a phone card kiosk, children playing, goats. Those fucking IEDs could be anywhere. A baby buggy missing a wheel. That’s what got Gretta and her team. Three dead. She survived. She said it was like God punched her. Everything moved, the whole world moved. I’m getting boring now.”

  “No.”

  “Gretta came back. VA, private docs, therapy. The treatment did what it could. One of the things she tried was the Foundation. I was discharged and moved to where she was living.

  “I had dinner with her maybe two months ago. She was in a great mood. She said everything was going to be fine. She’d be forgiven for fucking up, or getting careless, or whatever the hell she thought she’d done over there. Maybe looked away, missed the buggy, maybe texting. Who knows? I guarantee there’s nothing to be forgiven for. There’s no fucking handbook. There is only how to kill and not get killed, how to get intel, how to refuel vehicles, how to boil drinking water. But not on how to live that kind of life.

  “At the end of the dinner, she hugged me and said, ‘Goodbye, until tomorrow’ and did that salute.”

  Victoria’s eyes swung slowly from Shaw to the sky. Maybe looking for the eagle.

  “She went home and shot herself. So happy, so content one minute. Then dead an hour later. I had to figure out what’d happened.” She looked his way. “Like you had to with Adam.”

  She continued, “I helped her brother clean out her apartment and I found her notebooks from the Foundation. All her writing about the Minuses, Pluses. The regrets. The notes about how in the next life she’d be fine. She’d ‘advance.’ She’d be with her buddies who’d died. Her mother, her nephew. And me.”