Джеффри Дивер - The Goodbye Man

“I get it now. It was you.”

“Me?” Shaw asked.

“You fucking drugged me to keep me out of the Study Room. To save my honor. Jesus Christ, where are we? Back in the 1950s?” Her voice was a furious rasp.

He looked around. “Not here. We’re too exposed.”

She calmed enough to consider his words. She asked, “Dormitories?”

“Could be bugged.”

“The cliff where you were stalking me,” she said pointedly.

Ten minutes later they had hiked up the hill to the bench overlooking the vast panorama and the mountains in the distance. One peak was particularly noble in the glass-clear air. No one else was present on the bluff.

“What was it?” Victoria asked.

“The drug? Verbena.”

“I thought I tasted something. Damn it. I’ve used pokeweed berries for the same thing. They have a better flavor but—”

“They’re deep purple. Telltale.”

How did she know this? The number of people in the country who needed to use emetic herbs in the field was extremely limited, Shaw assumed.

“I think we’ve established you’re not a librarian.”

Victoria dismissed his flippant comment with a wave of her hand. “I do security consulting. And something tells me you know what a security consultant does.”

“The blade. You honed it on a rock, not a whetstone. Where’d you learn that, the Army?”

“YouTube.” Her voice was mocking.

“And you kept calling Eli ‘sir.’”

She shrugged in concession. “True. Screwed up there.”

Victoria’s eyes were scanning for threats around them, head tilting slightly at sounds, dismissing them as natural and nonthreatening. This woman knew her skills.

Shaw supposed he’d had a clue that Victoria wasn’t quite who she seemed to be. After she’d been sick in the dining hall, he’d noted the wave of fury that appeared briefly on her face. Suggesting she was someone a bit different from the vulnerable, submissive woman she’d been presenting to the world.

“So. What’re you doing here?” Shaw lifted his palms.

Her internal debate concluded. “Somebody I was close to, she graduated from this bullshit place. She took the ‘goodbye until tomorrow’ thing seriously.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dismissed the sentiment with a scoff. “She was at a low time. She would’ve come out of it. Just a little more work, a little more help. But she chose different. So I signed on, got myself a blue uniform and started looking for the chance to kill him.” Her voice was ice. “I needed to get him alone, away from his guards and that little hobbit, Steve.”

“The Study Room. Just you and your knife.”

“No knife there. I can use my hands. It just takes a little longer.” Her shrewd gray eyes swiveled his way. “Not necessarily a bad thing.”

“You’re taking a big risk for revenge.”

“You can minimize risk by planning ahead.”

That, he agreed with.

“Okay,” she said, “that’s my story. What’s yours?”

Shaw had to laugh. “I came here to save you .”

Shaw told her he had been on the cliff when Adam Harper had killed himself.

Victoria was nodding. “I told you I didn’t know him. That was true, though I knew about him. He was coming back for one of those rejuvenation sessions. And bringing a recruit. I went along to pick them up. It was a cover to help me figure out an escape route after I killed Eli. I hadn’t planned on giving up car keys and cell phone when I checked in.”

“I saw you and Hugh. Bullying you. Little free with the hands too. I heard about his demerit system.”

“He’s a pig. Adam had just died and he wanted me to go down on him when we got back to camp, you can believe it. He gave me five demerits when I said no. Took all my willpower to keep from crushing his windpipe or throwing him over the cliff myself.”

She then frowned. “But we only saw Adam, or his body. What happened to the person with him?”

“I took him back to Tacoma.”

“So who am I to you?”

“Somebody who shouldn’t be mixed up in something like this. Or so I thought. Adam died. From what I learned about cults, I thought maybe he’d been brainwashed or bullied. I didn’t want anybody else to end up like him. Then the more I learned, the more I decided Eli had to go.” He explained about the horrific murder of John.

“Jesus, burned to death.”

He also described Hugh’s beating of the reporter and the murder of the journalist in San Francisco. “The helicopter? It was SFPD. But guess you didn’t see it. You were busy.”

Honing her murder weapon, prepping a diversionary fire.

“They’ve reopened the investigation into the reporter’s murder in San Francisco. Eli and his crew have been meeting about something. I’m worried that evidence’ll start to disappear. Witnesses too. I want to get into the residence and find something I can hand over to the FBI.”

“So we ruined each other’s plans.” She gave a cool laugh. “You want to bring down Eli too... Just for the record, my way’s faster.”

“Your way comes with a lethal injection.”

She snickered, meaning: if they catch you. “You mentioned the Bureau.”

“I have contacts there.”

The woman scanned the surroundings once more, head cocked, listening for approaching threats.

Never lose situational awareness.

He supposed Victoria had a set of her own Never rules.

“You’re not Carter?”

“No. Colter.”

She frowned. “I’ll tell you about it later. You?”

“Victoria. No need for you to know the last. Where do we go from here?”

“We’ve got at least one other person on our side.”

He told her about his ally, Frederick.

She nodded. “He was in the van with us, at Adam’s death. After Hugh read me the riot act, he was good. Trying to make me feel better about Adam and Hugh’s behavior.”

“I’m going to try to break into the residence,” Shaw told her. “Frederick’s looking for a phone. Can you help him? He’s in the parking lot.”

“Why would he believe me?”

“Tell him I told you I got Walter, Sally and Abby out. He’ll know we talked.”

“The older couple and that girl, right?”

“She’s sixteen.”

Her face revealed her disgust. “And Eli took her to the Study Room?”

Shaw nodded. “That’s why they killed John. He knew about it.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Meet behind Building C in forty-five minutes.”

Victoria’s eyes had gone into hunt mode, scanning the grounds, the woods around them. She reached around to her back to make sure the knife was secure.

Shaw said, “You’re not going to...”

“Kill him?” Victoria asked. “Not at this point in time.” She wasn’t smiling when she said the words.

Wouldn’t you know it? The only obvious video camera Shaw had seen in the entire camp sat directly above the one door he now needed to get through. The residence’s back entrance.

Next steps?

Growing up in the wilderness, Shaw and his siblings rarely watched films, and they saw virtually no TV shows.

Ashton and Mary Dove didn’t object to watching big screens or small per se; it was simply a pain to have to trek thirty miles to the nearest theater to see an action-adventure or romantic comedy — literary cinema not being an option at that particular theater.

As for TV, Ashton’s thinking was that a device that beamed information into your home could also beam information out.

In recognizing this the man was ahead of his time.

Shaw did recall that several years ago, he and Margot had seen a caper movie. He’d been amused at the elaborate means the hero used to defeat the security camera: the guy built a set that looked just like the back of the bad guy’s building. He recorded the empty alleyway, then hacked into the power grid, creating a ten second blackout in the neighborhood, during which he set up a miniature projection screen in front of the security cam and began playing the tape of the empty “alleyway.”