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

“Talk” meant torturing Ashton into giving up what he knew about Amos Gahl’s theft of company secrets and evidence.

Droon had explained, “Near as we can piece it together, your father knew Braxton’s man was on his way to your Compound. Ashton tipped to him and led him off, was going to kill him somewhere in the woods. The ambush didn’t work. They fought. Your father fell.”

But until that revelation, Shaw had indeed believed in his heart that Russell was their father’s murderer. Devastated by false accusation, even if unspoken, Russell had vanished from the family’s life. No one had heard from him since Ashton’s funeral, more than a decade ago.

Colter Shaw made his living finding people—good ones and bad, those lost because of fate and circumstance and those lost because they chose to be lost. He had devoted considerable time and money and effort to tracking down his brother. What he would say when he found him, Shaw had no idea. He’d practiced a script of one brother talking to the other, explaining, seeking forgiveness, trying to find a path out of estrangement.

But all his efforts had come to nothing. Russell Shaw had vanished, and he’d vanished very, very well.

Shaw recalled discussing this very subject with someone just last week, describing the impact.

The man had asked, “What would you say was the greatest minus regarding your brother? What hurts the most?”

Shaw had answered, “He’d been my friend. I was his. And I ruined it.”

Seeing this eagle now made him feel Russell’s absence all the more.

He set the statue on the kitchen table and returned to the stack of his father’s materials. For an hour he pored over the documents. He found two notes in his father’s fine hand. They didn’t relate to the eighteen locations, which meant he’d discovered these spots after completing the scavenger hunt of the map.

One note was about a commercial building in the Embarcadero, the district along the eastern waterfront of San Francisco: the Hayward Brothers Warehouse.

The other was an address in Burlingame, a suburb south of the city, 3884 Camino.

Shaw now texted his private eye, requesting information. Mack McKenzie soon replied that she could find little more about the warehouse beyond that it was a historic building dating to the late 1800s, was not open for business to the public, and was presently for sale. The Burlingame address was a private home, owned by a man named Morton T. Nadler.

Shaw also found a business card, which represented a third possible location as well, the Stanford Library of Business and Commerce.

The library was located not in Palo Alto, where the university was situated, but in a part of town known as South of Market. Maybe it had nothing to do with Gahl’s stolen evidence; it would be an odd place to hide a courier bag. Possibly Ashton Shaw had used it for research. He had never owned a computer, and certainly had never allowed one in any residence of his, so maybe he’d gone to the library to use one of its public workstations.

Shaw decided the library would be his first stop. It was the closest to the safe house. If that didn’t pan out he would try the house in Burlingame and then the warehouse.

First, though, some security measures.

San Francisco was BlackBridge’s turf. Odds were ninety percent that they didn’t know he was here. But that dark ten percent required some due diligence.

He called up an app on his phone.

It happened to be tracing the whereabouts of Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon at that very moment.

Just the other day—under a fake identity—Braxton had talked her way into Shaw’s camper and stolen what she thought was Ashton’s map marking the places were Gahl’s evidence was hidden and other materials.

Shaw had tipped to who she really was. What he’d intentionally left for her to steal was a map with eighteen phony locations marked and a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, filled with code-like gibberish in the margins. A GPS tracker was hidden in the book’s spine.

In the past two days the tracker had meandered over various locations he’d marked on the map and spent time in a commercial skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, on Sutter Street, probably BlackBridge’s satellite office. This was its present location.

He now shifted to Google Maps and examined the neighborhood in which the Stanford library was located. He hardly expected trouble but it was a procedure he followed with every reward job. Information was the best weapon a survivalist could have.

Which didn’t mean hardware should be neglected.

Shaw checked his gun once more.

Never assume your weapon is loaded and hasn’t been damaged or sabotaged since the last time you used it.

The .380 was indeed loaded, one in the bedroom and six in the mag. It was a good dependable pistol—as long as you held it firmly while firing. The model had a reputation for limp wrist failure to eject: spent brass hanging in the receiver. Colter Shaw had never had this problem.

He seated the gun in his gray plastic inside-the-waistband holster and made sure it was hidden. The rule was that if you’re carrying concealed, you should keep it concealed, lest a concerned citizen spot the weapon, panic and call the cops.

There was another reason too.

Never let the enemy know the strength of your defenses . . .

7

Anew threat.

As he stood beside his bike Shaw was aware that someone was watching him.

Slight build, leather jacket, baseball cap.

The giveaway was the sunglasses. Hardly necessary this morning. The day was typically foggy—sometimes the cloak burned off, sometimes it remained, sluggish and dull, like an irritating houseguest. Now the haze hung thickly in air redolent of damp pavement, exhaust, a hint of trash and the sea. In San Francisco, you were never far from water.

Shaw had examined the street subtly after leaving and locking the safe house. At first he saw no one other than the bearded man he’d spotted earlier, in the thigh-length black coat and