Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

Shaw stared at him until La Fleur added, in a whisper, “BlackBridge is the devil — the whole company. Everybody. Not just Helms and Braxton. It’s like the buildings are evil, the walls are evil... It’s so dangerous. Why do you think I’m living like this?”

“Don’t you want Helms to go to prison for what they did to your friend?” Shaw asked.

The man looked away.

Shaw felt frustration. This man knew something. He said, “There’s a family that Droon and Braxton are going to kill tomorrow.”

La Fleur’s face revealed some concern at this. “Why?”

Russell: “We don’t know.”

“We find Amos’s evidence and go to the FBI. They arrest Ian Helms and Braxton and Droon. We stop the killing. Help us save them.”

Russell stirred impatiently. Shaw had refined his interviewing and interrogation skills over the years in seeking rewards. Though he could be firm, he generally used logic, empathy and humor to win over the subjects. He suspected his brother took a somewhat different approach.

Shaw persisted. “You and Amos met at Eleanor’s house a few times. You met there because she hadn’t been ‘Gahl’ for years. She’d remarried and changed her name. So Braxton and Droon wouldn’t know about her.”

Shaw studied La Fleur patiently until he decided, it seemed, it wasn’t too incriminating to answer. “That’s right.”

“What did Amos tell you when you were over at his mother’s, the last time you met?”

He fidgeted, played with the bong. “Nothing. Really! We just chatted. Chewed the fat.” His evasive face gave a smile. “My grandmother used to say that. When I was a kid I never knew what it meant. I still—”

Russell snapped, “What did Amos tell you?”

Shaw said patiently, yet in a firm voice, “They’re going to murder a family . There was a note we found, a kill order. It didn’t say ‘target’ singular or ‘couple.’ Husband and wife. It said ‘family.’ That means children. We have no idea who they are and we’ve only got twenty-four hours to find out and save them.”

Russell said nothing more. With dark, threatening eyes he stared at the man.

Good cop, bad cop.

“The evidence,” Shaw said. “Amos was going to hide it. I think you know where.”

La Fleur shook his head vehemently. “No, no, no! We didn’t talk about anything like that. We talked about plants, fertilizer.”

“At midnight?”

“How did you know that’s when we met?” The man’s eyes grew alarmed.

Shaw hadn’t, but it was logical.

“I’m a gardener. Look outside!” He uttered a forced laugh. “My last name, you know. ‘Flower’ in French. Amos was into plants too. We had some wine and talked about gardening.” The sadness returned.

Russell shot a glance to his younger brother, who handed off the interview to him, easing back and falling silent.

As Russell leaned close, La Fleur shied, kneading his hands into fists then opening his fingers. Over and over. “I’ll send an anonymous text to BlackBridge, attention Braxton and Droon. It’ll have two items in it. One, your name. Two, your address.”

“What?” A horrified whisper.

“When they come at you with their M4 assault rifles, your arrows aren’t going to do anything but piss them off.”

Bad cop had become worse cop.

His shoulders slumped. He sighed. “I’m probably screwed anyway. They tracked you on your phones.”

“We have shielded and encrypted burners,” Shaw said.

He didn’t seem to believe them. “Oh yeah? What’s your algorithm?”

“AES, Twofish and Scorpion.”

With a glance toward Shaw, Russell said, “That’s mine too.” Curiously the brothers had, on their own, picked the same encryption package.

La Fleur snapped, “Let me see.”

Russell offered his phone. La Fleur grabbed and studied it, then for some reason shook the mobile as if to see what kind of data would rattle out. He examined the screen once more. He handed it back. He seemed marginally relieved and didn’t bother with Shaw’s unit.

The man’s zipping eyes settled on the knotty-pine floor. He rose and walked to a shuttered window. He opened the metal slat a few inches, ducking — as if to slip out of a sniper’s crosshairs. After a moment he stood, crouching, and looked out.

Apparently satisfied there were no surveillance devices, or rifles, trained his way, he closed and re-latched the shutter. Walking to a far corner of the room, he turned on an elaborate LP record player and, pulling on latex gloves, removed an old-time album from its sleeve. He set the black disk gingerly on the turntable and, with infinite care, set the needle in the groove of the first track.

Music pounded into the room, some rock group. Anyone trying to listen in would hear only raging guitar and fierce drums.

La Fleur removed the gloves and replaced them in the box. He looked his intruders over. “You two really have no clue what’s going on.”

And with a defiant look at Russell, he grabbed the bong, lit up and inhaled long.

The smoke spiraled upward, dissolving at its leisure.

Never into recreational drugs, Shaw nonetheless found the rich smell of pot pleasant. He waited until La Fleur exhaled and sat back. A twitching tilt of his head like a squirrel assessing a tree. The man put the blue tube down.

“Oh, yes, Amos found something, and he hid it. But it had nothing to do with the Urban Improvement Plan. I have no idea why you’re harping on that. Your father was wrong: there is no evidence against the company. If there were, Ame would have found it. He searched and searched. But there wasn’t and there’ll never be any evidence. Helms and his people’re too smart to leave anything incriminating. They used cutout after cutout, encoding, anonymous servers, shell companies, encryption. The CIA should be as good as BlackBridge.”

“Facts,” Russell said. “Not drama.”

La Fleur shot him a look that managed to be simultaneously hurt and defiant.

“My poor Ame... He got himself in over his head, didn’t he? He took it upon himself to end the UIP. Helms had something his main client wanted desperately. It was code-named the Endgame Sanction. Braxton and some thug had found it in the Embarcadero. Maybe Droon. Looks like a rat, doesn’t he?”

Shaw said, “The Hayward Brothers Warehouse?”

“I don’t know. But she found it and it was like... the ring of power. The client had wanted it forever, was paying a retainer of millions to track it down.” A faint chuckle. “And you’ll never guess what Ame did. He heard Helms talking about it, about how it was the end-all and be-all... and when the big boss stepped out of his office, my Ame simply waltzed in and nicked it! Dropped it in his courier bag and walked out the front door with a nighty-night to the guards.”

“Why?”

“He was going to use it as leverage, get the company to shut down the UIP program. Or maybe stealing it, he thought the client would fire Helms, and then BlackBridge’d go out of business. I don’t think he had a plan. He was just sick of working for such a vile bunch of men and women.”

“What was this thing?”

“He never had a chance to tell me.” His voice went soft. “He stole it about five p.m. He hid it about an hour later. Then at ten that night he called me. I’d never heard him so panicked. He said he’d done some research and found out what the Sanction was, and it needed to be destroyed. It was devastating. The client could never get it, no one could. He was going to destroy it himself but he couldn’t get back to where he’d hidden it. He knew BlackBridge ops were searching for him. If anything happened to him, I was supposed to find it and get rid of it.”