Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

“I found at least six similar incidents. Let me know if you want details.

“Banyan Tree has been in the news in California. The Pacific Business Review reported that over the past few years it’s acquired one hundred and forty-seven small companies in the state. He’s fired all the employees and’s keeping them as shells. In the filings the stated purpose of them is to quote ‘engage in various services for the public.’”

The king of subsidiaries...

“Mack has some things on Devereux’s personal life. Born in England, U.S. citizen now. He’s fifty-one. Married. His wife’s fifty-six. I have a feeling she was not the miniskirted one in the Rolls at the UIP drop.”

“Hmm.”

Shaw summarized: Devereux had two teenage sons. His homes were in San Francisco, L.A., Miami Beach, London, Nice and Singapore. He was described as tireless, obsessed, always in motion.

Shaw remembered the constantly moving hands when the brothers had spied on him at the drug exchange.

Russell asked, “Anything about a relationship with BlackBridge?”

“No.”

Shaw continued to read. “It’s disputed by genealogists, but Devereux claims he’s descended from Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex. It was during Elizabeth the First’s reign, the fifteen hundreds. He was a favorite. And then he led a coup against the throne.”

“Assume that was a bad idea.”

“Beheaded in the Tower of London. The executioner wasn’t exactly a pro. Took him three swings to get the job done.”

Underground, where you’d be expecting.

Not much in the clue department.

“Think,” Russell said. He brushed his beard absently.

The brothers looked around modest Quigley Square, at the center of which was a pleasant urban park — half concrete walks and benches and half trim lawns, bushes and trees. The surrounding streets echoed the San Francisco of the 1960s and ’70s. Head shops and stores offering LP albums, souvenir tie-dye shirts and windup cable cars. You could even buy cassettes of classic thirty-five-millimeter adult films from that era.

Shaw looked over his phone. “The tracker’s dead.”

“In the Walden book?”

He nodded. “To fit in the spine, it was a small battery. Lasted longer than I thought. Or they might’ve found it.”

Russell said, “So, we’re black on hostiles. Act accordingly.”

Shaw slipped the unit away and turned his attention back to the neighborhood.

Trying to guess Amos Gahl’s clue — “underground, where you’d be expecting” — the brothers noted the retail shops, as well as an old red-brick hospital, a classic diner, bodegas, a sushi restaurant that Shaw would avoid at all costs, dilapidated industrial buildings, car repair shops.

“Where would we expect something to be hidden?”

“And underground.” Shaw pointed to a small regional bank. “Safe deposit box? A downstairs vault?”

“Need a key and ID.”

They walked half a block to a warehouse. The building was huge and, they could see through the barred doors and windows, filled with construction equipment. If Amos Gahl had hidden the Endgame Sanction in the basement, it would take eons to find it.

Besides, why would they expect it to be hidden there?

“Underground,” Shaw repeated absently, eyes on a sign in the concrete at his feet.

The words were stenciled beside a storm drain grate. There were dozens of them. But nothing could have survived after all these years down there. You heard much about California’s droughts and Shaw recalled the lessons his father gave the children in distilling salt water to make it drinkable. But the winter season here could still be counted on to dump a billion gallons on the city. Anything in the drains would have disintegrated and slushed into the Bay years ago. How did one get into a storm drain anyway?

“Where you’d be expecting...”

Shaw and Russell walked around the square, side by side. Homeless, always the homeless in San Francisco. Shaw could hardly blame them. Why live on the street in Minnesota or Anchorage? He would have come to San Francisco, the home of a warmer clime and wealthy executives, ready to toss a coin or bill into an inverted baseball cap.

He observed that none of these street people seemed strung out, unlike those he and Russell had seen that morning in the TL. Apparently, BlackBridge hadn’t targeted Quigley Square for the Urban Improvement Plan. At least, not yet. But he could see it coming: two blocks away was a long expanse of glittery, glass-fronted high-rises. A developer standing on the soaring roof might look down at Quigley Square and think, “That’s my next conquest. Get the BNG to work.”

More scanning.

Then Shaw stopped fast, looking up.

No, couldn’t be.

A glance to his right. He wasn’t surprised to see that Russell was looking at exactly the same thing he was.

“It possible?” Russell said.

Where you’d be expecting...

They were looking at the hospital.

There was no doubt a good portion of the patients inside would certainly be expecting .

“Hmm.” Again Russell almost smiled. He pulled out his phone and sent a text as they walked to the looming structure.

At the receptionist’s station in the lobby, Russell slipped his phone away and stepped in front of Shaw and said, “We’re here to visit a patient. Abigail Hanson. She had a C-section.”

A computer screen was consulted. “Room seven-forty-two,” she told them.

“Thanks,” Shaw said.

So that was the text Russell had sent. As they walked to the elevators, Shaw asked, “Karin?”

“Hmm.”

She was good.

In the basement Shaw had expected locked doors or gates. But no. The cellar was an easily accessed storage area. Lights were, however, a problem. Only two of the twenty overhead bulbs were functional. Shaw had not brought his tac flashlight. After a search for more switches, Russell cocked his head, looking up, and gripped one of the darkened spheres in his substantial fingers and twisted. It came to life. Maintenance staff had apparently been ordered to partly unscrew the bulbs to keep utility costs down.

The men executed the same maneuver a dozen or so times and the place was soon awash in glare.

Shaw noted that the diminutive size of the room did not mean their task would be an easy one. It was packed with cabinets, cartons, wooden boxes, cases of what seemed to be antiquated medical instruments — even, he was amused to see, the same fifty-gallon drums of civil defense water they’d found at La Fleur’s sanctuary. Shelves were filled to overflowing with books, files and — eerily — organ and tissue samples in jars of what was probably formalin. Hearts and kidneys were especially popular.

The brothers paused. Footsteps sounded not too far away. A creak too, like a janitor’s cart whose wheels needed oiling. It faded.

They resumed their search.

Where would Amos Gahl have hidden his courier bag?

While Russell began with filing cabinets — easily picking the simple locks — Shaw stepped back against the wall and gazed over the room.

The trick to finding something that’s been hidden in plain sight is to look for what’s just a bit out of order. Like those puzzles in the magazines he and his siblings would read when they were children: Spotting what was the difference between two adjacent cartoons or drawings. What’s wrong with this picture?

What was out of place in this chamber of outmoded instruments, cold soggy organs and dusty faded treatises on medical practices and procedures that had most likely become outmoded a year after they were published?