The Final Twist by Jeffery Deaver (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

door to keep the bolt from snapping back into place as he gets a new grip with the blade. After repeating a dozen times, the door is free. Knife away, gun drawn and raised, finger off the trigger.

Inside.

The woman is Black, in her early twenties, hair in a complicated braid. She wears jeans and a dusty gray sweatshirt. She sees the gun and inhales to scream. He holds up a hand and instantly holsters the weapon. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m getting you out of here. What’s your name?”

She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Nita.”

“I’m Colter. You’ll be all right.”

The place is filthy. Uneaten chili sits in a flat pool on a paper plate. A bottle of water is half drunk. There’s a bucket for a toilet. She’s not bound but she is restrained: a bicycle cable is looped around a water or sewage pipe and her ankle is zip-tied to the cable. Shaw shuts the light off. There’s enough illumination to see by.

Shaw looks back into the corridor. The flicker from the screen continues as the ball game continues. What inning is it? Would be important to know.

“Are you hurt?”

She shakes her head.

He takes his knife out and opens it with a click. He saws through the plastic tie and helps her to her feet. She’s unsteady.

“Can you walk?”

A nod. She’s shivering and crying. “I want to go home.”

Shaw recalls thinking of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors just ten minutes ago. He wishes he’d played harder, much harder.

They step into the corridor. And just then, Shaw thinks:

The third chair.

Oh, hell.

The six-pack didn’t need its own seat. Someone else was in the office watching the game.

And at that moment the third man comes down the stairs with another pack of Budweiser. Just as he sets foot on the concrete floor he glances up the corridor and sees Shaw and Nita. The six-pack drops to the ground. At least one bottle shatters. He calls, “Hey!” And reaches for his hip.

In the baseball room, the flickering stops.

PART ONE

JUNE 24 THE MISSION

Time until the family dies: fifty-two hours.

1

The safe house.

At last.

Colter Shaw’s journey to this cornflower-blue Victorian on scruffy Alvarez Street in the Mission District of San Francisco had taken him weeks. From Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevadas in eastern California to Washington State. Or, as he sat on his Yamaha motorcycle, looking up at the structure, he reflected: in a way, it had taken him most of his life.

As often is the case when one arrives at a long-anticipated destination, the structure seemed modest, ordinary, unimposing. Though if it contained what Shaw hoped, it would prove to be just the opposite: a mine of information that could save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.

But as the son of a survivalist, Shaw had a preliminary question: Just how safe a safe house was it?

From this angle, it appeared deserted, dark. He dropped the transmission in gear and drove to the alley that ran behind the house, where he paused again, in front of an overgrown garden, encircled by a gothic wrought-iron fence. From here, still no lights, no signs of habitation, no motion. He gunned the engine and returned to the front. He skidded to a stop and low-gear muscled the bike onto the sidewalk.

He snagged his heavy backpack, chained up the bike and helmet, then pushed through the three-foot-deep planting bed that bordered the front. Behind a boxwood he found the circuit breakers for the main line. If there were an unlikely bomb inside it would probably be hardwired; whether it was phones or computers or improvised explosive devices, it was always tricky to depend on batteries.

Using the keys he’d been bequeathed, he unlocked and pushed open the door, hand near his weapon. He was greeted only with white noise and the scent of lavender air freshener.

Before he searched for the documents he hoped his father had left, he needed to clear the place.

No evidence of threat isn’t synonymous with no threat.

He scanned the ground floor. Beyond the living room was a parlor, from which a stairway led upstairs. Past that room was a dining room and, in the back, a kitchen, whose door, reinforced and windowless, led onto the alleyway. Another door in the kitchen led to the cellar, an unusual feature in much of California. The few pieces of furniture were functional and mismatched. The walls were the color of old bone, curtains sun-bleached to inadvertent tie-dye patterns.

He took his time examining every room on this floor and on the second and third stories. No sign of current residents, but he did find bed linens neatly folded on a mattress on the second floor.

Last, the basement.

He clicked on his tactical halogen flashlight, with its piercing beam, and descended to see that the room was largely empty. A few old cans of paint, a broken table. At the far end was a coal bin, in which a small pile of glistening black lumps sat. Shaw smiled to himself.

Ever the survivalist, weren’t you, Ashton?

As he stared into the murk, he noted three wires dangling from the rafters. One, near the stairs, ended in a fixture and a small bulb. The wires in the middle and far end had been cut and the ends were wrapped with electrician’s tape.

Shaw knew why the two had been operated on: to keep someone from getting a good view of the end of the cellar.

Shining the beam over the back wall, he stepped close.

Got it, Ash.

As with the rest of the basement, this wall was constructed of four-by-eight plywood sheets nailed to studs, floor to ceiling, painted flat black. But an examination of the seams of one panel revealed a difference. It was a hidden door, opening onto a secure room. He took the locking-blade knife from his pocket and flicked it open. After scanning the surface a moment longer, he located a slit near the bottom.