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

“Give me your number. Your real one. And keep the phone alive. I may need to be in touch with you. If it goes out of service, a friend of mine comes to pay a visit at Eight Five Four Sumner Street. Or wherever you’ve moved. I will find you. You’re in our system now.”

Which meant nothing but sounded good, and certainly unnerved her.

“Jesus.”

Shaw raised an eyebrow.

A tight-lipped nod, still looking victimized. She recited her cell number and Shaw memorized it.

“How much was the necklace?”

A shrug. “Fifty-nine ninety-nine. It’s not a real diamond.”

She looked at the pepper spray.

Shaw laughed and ushered her out the door.

63

The Alvarez Street safe house once again.

Karin and Ty were handling cleanup. The Filipino BNGs’ pickup truck and the weapons were gone. The injured men, now practicing vows of silence, were in the hospital. Adelle was on her way to Vegas. And somewhere in Oakland a perfectly fine Chevrolet Impala, if somewhat bloodstained, was soon to become a two-ton block of scrap.

He wondered if Karin was having any luck finding the identity of Blond, with the task force in San Leandro.

Once they knew who he was, they could deep-background him and, ideally, find out where he’d been recently, whom he associated with, where he lived, what division of BlackBridge he worked for, which gang in Hunters Point he had a connection to.

And who SP was, and why he or she had been targeted for death.

Once those unknowns were brought to light, they would have a chance to save the family.

The time was 1:10 p.m. The kill order would go into effect in less than six hours.

His phone hummed with a text from Professor Steven Field.

It’s on the news.

He flipped to a live TV streaming app on his phone and turned the unit horizontal.

The woman newscaster looked calm and in control and did a fine job reading the words that scrolled up on the teleprompter, but Shaw could see that she was having a bit of trouble understanding the concept. Then again, who wouldn’t?

“. . . government document from more than a hundred years ago has been discovered in San Francisco. It’s a voting tally of a recount in a statewide referendum in nineteen oh-six where the citizens of the state voted to allow . . .” A dramatic pause. “. . . corporations to run for public office. Officials say that the tally was lost among hundreds of thousands of documents that went missing after the earthquake that year, which destroyed three-quarters of the city. It’s believed that the judge certifying the recount was killed in the disaster, which is why no one learned of it at the time.”

Well. That didn’t take long. Shaw supposed this was no surprise. Devereux had waited years to find his magic document. He’d move as quickly as possible to use his ring of power.

“Joining us now is University of Utah business law professor, C. Edward Hobbs. Welcome, Dr. Hobbs. Explain how this amendment could become law after more than a hundred years.”

“Hello. Thank you for having me. There’s no time limit on amendments going into effect once they’ve been approved. No statute of limitations, you might say. A proposition for an amendment doesn’t need to be signed by the governor; it’s not like a bill. Once a majority of the people have voted in favor, it becomes law.”

“So it’s true then. This amendment will allow corporations to run for office?”

“Yes. And, we should say, not just run in an election. A corporation could be appointed to a position too. Judges, sheriffs, regulatory board presidents.”

“Will it be challenged?”

“No doubt it will. The tally itself will have to be authenticated. I’m sure there are experts doing that right now. But we have to remember there’s been a groundswell of support lately to expand the rights of corporations. Look at ‘Citizens United’—the 2010 case that extended the First Amendment right of free speech to corporations.

“The majority of Americans support that. And many professors and politicians I’ve spoken with consider the movement a good one—good for the country, good for democracy. If a corporation holds office, the authority is decentralized. There’ll be an automatic system of checks and balances with the shareholders, the board and the CEO. Remember that the greatest innovations in the past century have come from corporate research. Corporations represent the best brain trusts in the world.”

The shill—on Devereux’s payroll, of course—gave no mention of the man’s troubling policies described in the documents that Shaw and Russell had found in the courier bag, undermining human rights.

“So Facebook or Apple or Amazon could one day be governor of California.”

“In theory, yes.”

“But a corporation couldn’t run for president of the United States?”

“No, the U.S. Constitution is clear on that. The amendment doesn’t apply to federal elections or appointments either. Only state and local. But this is an important precedent. In law, we say, as California goes, so goes the nation . . .”

Shaw shut the broadcast off. He glanced around the safe house. In a windowless corner sat a brown Naugahyde armchair facing the bay window that overlooked the street. This would have been where his father sat—his back was never exposed to door or window. Beside the chair was a scuffed and unsteady side table. Shaw walked to the chair and sat in it. He ran his hand over the arms, torn and scuffed. His father had been in San Francisco, just before he returned to the Compound, and not long after that he’d died. Maybe it was here that he’d sat as he assembled the clues that would lead someone—his son, as it turned out—to continue the quest to bring down BlackBridge Corporate Solutions, if he couldn’t finish the job.

Maybe it was in this chair that he’d written the letter and circled the eighteen magic locations on the map that he’d hidden on Echo Ridge.

It was then that his phone hummed with a text from Russell.

Karin: Negative on San Leandro lead to Blond identity. If we don’t find something