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

The building was three stories high and represented classic 1960s architectural style, no frills, functional, uninspired.

The suite featured three escape routes—front stairs, back stairs and windows overlooking the roof of the one-story bicycle shop next door. Neither Shaw nor his brother had studied parkour—the leaping, sprinting and diving art of urban gymnastics—but they practiced tumbling and how to land safely when jumping from heights. Shaw was inspecting this particular exit now: out the open window he could look down and see tarred roof about eight feet below.

The safe house complied with Ashton’s rule: Never be without an escape plan. (The accompanying dictum, Never be without access to a weapon, was taken care of, given the firepower the brothers carried.)

“Here,” Shaw said, handing his brother a box of nine-millimeter ammunition.

Russell glanced down.

They were safety slugs, specially made to penetrate flesh but not exit and continue their path, injuring bystanders. The bullets would go through a piece of Sheetrock, if you missed your human target, but they lost deadly muzzle velocity soon after. In a setting like this new structure, where innocents might be just feet away behind walls and doors, they were a necessity.

Russell, though, looked at the ammo with a frown. Maybe he was thinking he was a good enough shot that he wouldn’t miss and endanger anyone else. Maybe he found it helpful to shoot through walls and doors sometimes, in spite of Ashton’s proscription:

Never fire a weapon when you don’t have clear sight of your target . . .

“We have to,” Shaw said.

“Not a firing solution I’m comfortable with. That’s not standard procedure.”

And his brother did not reload.

“Up to you.” Shaw himself ejected the rounds and replaced them with the blue-tipped bullets. He was thinking: The brothers had worked well together on the investigation so far—especially their choreographed performances at the warehouse. Now tension seemed to have returned.

You don’t want to be doing this, do you?

Just, we should get it done . . .

Shaw wondered if the resentment about Shaw’s tacit accusation regarding Russell’s role in Ashton’s death was surfacing.

And, if so, where would it lead?

Shaw opened his backpack and emptied the BlackBridge courier bag’s contents onto the table. Once again he and Russell divided it up and flipped through the documents, now knowing that the Endgame Sanction was judicial in nature and from 1906.

“Got it,” Shaw said. “I saw it before but didn’t think anything of it.”

He set the aging sheet of paper on the table.

So here it was: the Endgame Sanction.

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:

The initial ballot results as reported were in error. The correct vote tally was 1,244 in favor of the Proposition, 1,043 against.

Accordingly, I order that the Vote Tally as amended to reflect the yea and nay ballots set forth herein, be entered into the record in the State Assembly and Senate, effective as of this date, April 17, 1906.

An elaborate signature was beneath the text.

Russell picked up the sheet and turned it over. The back was empty. He then held it up to the light to look for hidden, or obscured, messages.

“Nothing.” Russell rubbed the back. “It’s an original, not a copy.” A typewriter had been used to produce the document and you could just feel indentations from the keys.

Shaw read it once more. “I don’t see how ‘sanction’ fits.”

“La Fleur said it might be just a code. Maybe Helms and Devereux didn’t want anyone to use the words ‘tally’ or ‘ruling’ in public. They wanted to keep this secret.”

Shaw shook his head. “Devereux is desperate to find it.” He recalled that La Fleur said if the Sanction were found the consequences would be disastrous.

Russell asked, “What’s Proposition Oh-Six?”

Shaw booted up his computer and logged on through an encrypted server. He Googled the question. There was nothing in Wikipedia but he found a reference in an archive of California State constitutional and legislative measures. “It was a referendum in nineteen oh-six to amend the state constitution.” He turned the Dell so both he and Russell could read. They scrolled through paragraph after paragraph of legalese, having to do with taxation, immigration and trade mostly.

Why was Gahl as desperate to destroy this document as Devereux was to get his hands on it?

Then an idea occurred to Shaw. He pulled out his Android and placed a call to her equally shielded burner phone.

Mary Dove answered on the second ring.

“How is it there?”

“We’re good. Tom Pepper’s men are here. They’ve set up a perimeter. Electronic warning. And, Colt, they have a machine gun. I mean, a big one, on a bipod. Can you imagine?”

“Good. I don’t think it’ll come to that.”

“Hope not. We don’t want to disturb the bears. We’re right in the heart of mating season. Are you all right?”

“We’re both good, Russell and I.”

“Russell?”

“He came back to help me on Ashton’s job.”

“Well.”

“I just have a minute. But I’ve got a question. And you’re the only one who can answer it.”

47

After a complicated drive, to make sure no one was following—and a scan for drones in the area by the resourceful Karin—they arrived in Berkeley, across the Bay, north of Oakland.

They were on their way to meet one of Ashton Shaw’s academic colleagues, who lived near campus: Steven Field. He was a semi-retired professor of political history. When Shaw had called his mother a half hour ago, he’d asked if she knew of any of Ashton’s associates who had this specialty. Mary Dove immediately mentioned Field.

Shaw had a vague recollection of seeing the man several times years back. Field had come to visit at the Compound. Those were the days when Ashton was at his peak. Oh, Shaw could remember a few bouts of bizarre behavior but Mary Dove would put on her psychiatrist’s hat