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

“Hmm.”

Droon then took over examining the courier bag. He did so as closely as Shaw and Russell had done. He could see that the lining was cut but he was taking no chances. Maybe he was searching this carefully because it was his nature. Maybe it was self-preservation, so desperate were the minions to please Devereux.

Russell said, “Be helpful if they said what they’re looking for. Help us narrow it down.”

If anyone from BlackBridge mentioned a keyword, it might be possible for the brothers to identify the Endgame Sanction in the stack of material sitting in Shaw’s backpack.

Russell typed. A camera scanned to the left, taking in the blond woman operative. Then to the right.

Shaw then said, “Notice a pattern?”

Russell nodded. “All they want is paperwork. That’s why they don’t care about the cassette. It’s definitely paper, and probably—the way they’re fanning pages—a single sheet.”

After five minutes Droon muttered, “Bastards took it with ’em, don’tcha know?”

Braxton now seemed to accept this possibility. She nodded. “We found it once. We’ll find it again. Devereux brings in ten million a year. And you know what the bonus’ll be when we get it.”

Braxton’s attention turned to the window. The doorbell buzzed and one of the ops walked into the front alcove.

Then, just barely audible through the microphone, came the sounds of a creaking floor as a large man in a black suit stepped into sight. Shaw recognized him. He was Devereux’s Asian American bodyguard and driver. Shaw recalled him from the construction site in the Tenderloin, where the BNG gangbangers had gotten their Johnny Appleseed bags of drugs to plant around the community as part of the UIP program.

The man looked around and, apparently after verifying that it was safe, he eased back into the alcove.

Jonathan Stuart Devereux stepped into the living room.

“You all right?” he asked in his cheery prime minister accent.

Braxton nodded in return.

Devereux sighed. “Your look, I can see your look. Your face. Don’t faces tell us everything? We don’t need words. Words lie, people lie. Faces don’t. It’s not here, is it?”

“We’re on course. We’re moving in.” Braxton added, “We found the courier bag Gahl stole.”

“All those many years ago.”

“It had that tape recorder inside.” She nodded toward the unit.

“But I’m not so very interested in a tape recorder, am I?”

Devereux examined the courier bag, peering inside, pulling it open wide. He paced through the house, gazing around him. Not looking for the Sanction, it seemed, just assessing what kind of lair his enemies had. In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator, plucked out a bottle of water and drank down half of it. He strolled back to the living room, picked up some of the items that the ops had searched. He studied magazines that had been here since Ashton’s time. “My. Look, a cover story about that young, fresh unknown Taylor Swift.” He dropped it. “And Prince Charles.” Then he said, a hint of mocking in his voice, “But you’re on course, you’re moving in.”

Braxton cast a taut glance to Droon.

A red-haired woman, twenty years younger and six inches taller than Devereux, stepped into the front hallway. Was it the same one as in the Rolls earlier? Her skirt and shoes were different. She was in a clinging white dress, hem high, top low. It clearly wasn’t his fifty-six-year-old wife.

Braxton’s glance toward her gave away nothing, but she couldn’t be happy that he’d brought the woman to a professional endeavor. Devereux looked back at her with a grimace and he shooed her off with a wave of his hardworking fingers. She vanished.

The CEO of Banyan Tree walked in a slow circle. At a shelf he picked up some figures and examined them one by one. “This is cute, isn’t it? A cat. Is it a cat? Bit dodgy. Maybe a dog with unfortunate ears. Yes, I think that’s it.”

He set it down and his hands went back to being energetic.

The grenade shooter continued his search, looking up under the furniture, until Braxton waved at him to stop.

“Was there anything else in the bag?”

“It was empty when we got inside.”

“And they were here when you came knock, knock, knocking on the door?”

“We saw them, yes.”

“And the sentence that would accompany that one is: But we don’t know how they got out.”

“That’s right.”

“With my prize, my prize . . . What’s on the recorder? My, it’s quite the old one, isn’t it? Don’t see those outside of movies.”

“Just music.”

“Was Gahl a music lover?”

“Apparently so,” Braxton said.

“And you’ve explored every place that he had a connection with, everywhere he could have hidden it?”

“Yes.”

His expression perplexed, Devereux said in a snide voice, “Oh, but wait. Wait. That can’t be right.”

She looked at him, lips tight.

“It appears you didn’t explore one place. The one where Mr. Colter Shaw found it and you did not.” He looked at the woman, eye to eye. They were the same height. “Do you suppose he gamed you, Irena? That map you stole? Do you think it was fake?”

Her face went still. She didn’t answer.

“What is our only priority? Mine and yours and Ian’s?”

“The Endgame Sanction.”

“Ex-actly,” purred the man.

“We’ll find it, Mr. Devereux.”

He could see it pained her to use his last name. He’d probably done some whip-cracking about protocols when he signed on as a client of BlackBridge. He’d want to be worshipped. He was the heir to sloppily beheaded royalty. His company was in better economic shape than Spain. And as his minions had not delivered the precious Sanction, he could snap a vicious whip whenever he wanted.

She offered, “It’s a minor setback. Shaw did most of the work for us. He found the courier bag. Now we just have to get the Sanction from him.”

A hurry-up gesture of Devereux’s hands. “But he got away from you here.”

“He did. But I’m sure he doesn’t even know what it is. He’d never recognize it.”

Shaw shook his head. He’d hoped they would say something more about it, so they could identify it