Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

There was another reason too.

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

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 stocking cap, Oakland A’s backpack at his feet. He was at a table outside the coffee shop, sipping from a cup and texting. Then Shaw glanced into the Yamaha motorbike’s rearview mirror and spotted the spy, a block and a half away.

Odds he was mistaken? Fifty percent.

He casually turned, checking out the rear tire of the Yamaha and looking back while not exactly looking.

The man disappeared behind the corner of the building where he’d been standing.

Bringing the answer to the surveillance question to nearly one hundred percent.

Who could it have been?

He was built like Droon — but if it were anyone from BlackBridge, how could they have learned about the safe house? Besides, in that case, they would have been on him the instant he stepped outside. A team would have forced him back into the safe house to have a “discussion” about what he was doing here in the city and where he believed Gahl’s evidence was hidden.

Instead, he suspected it was the Russian- and Chinese-speaking inhabitant of the safe house, the man who was so adept at loud and blinding booby traps. Make that sixty percent.

And the odds that the man wasn’t happy Shaw was now in residence and had likely examined charts and graphs he’d gone to great lengths to keep secret? An easy ninety-nine percent on that one.

Was it one of his father’s colleagues? Or a successor in interest, like Shaw himself?

Possibly. No way to estimate the odds without any more information.

Dalton Crowe? The lug of a bounty hunter had crossed paths and traded blows with Shaw over the years. He was presently under the erroneous impression that Shaw had cheated him out of tens of thousands of dollars of reward money. Crowe didn’t live anywhere near here but the man was a bully bordering on psychopathy. A drive of a thousand miles or so to collect a debt, even mistakenly, was well within his wheelhouse.

True, Crowe sported a refrigerator’s physique, twice the size of the spy. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t recruited an underling. When you believe in your heart a man owes you $50K, you’ll spend some capital to get it back.

Someone from a past job out for revenge? Absolutely a possibility. Just a few weeks ago, Shaw had made some enemies in Silicon Valley when a simple reward job turned into something considerably darker. The foes he’d made in the tech world of video gaming were particularly resourceful and, he had to assume, vindictive.

He thought of the squat, broad-chested man he’d confronted earlier, Tricia’s attacker. Unlikely he’d return but people bested in a fight had been known to come back with superior firepower for a touch of revenge. It would be stupid and pointless, but those two words described more than a little slice of decisions made by the general population. He dismissed this, though, on the basis of the difference in physique.

He turned back to the front of the bike and unhooked it from the lamppost, stowing the impressive chain and lock. As he did, he took another glance in the rearview mirror and noted that his shadow had eased back into observing position.

Shaw tugged on his helmet and black leather gloves.

He unzipped his jacket and lifted the sweater for easy access to his weapon. Then, in an instant, the engine clattered to life and Shaw’s boot tip tapped into first gear. He twisted the throttle hard. The rear tire swirled and smoked and he spun the bike one hundred and eighty degrees, launching into the street.

The figure vanished.

Shaw hit forty. As he neared the intersection where he’d turn to the right to confront the spy, he downshifted and eased off the gas, skidding to a fast stop. Shaw had to assume that the watcher was armed and targeting where he would spin around the corner, so without presenting himself as a target, he leaned the bike to the right and used the rearview mirror to view the cross street.

There was no threat but, damn it, he could see a car speeding away.

He gunned the engine again and pursued.

For about thirty feet.

Oh hell...

He slammed the rear brake hard, then gripped the front, the trickier of the two, the one that could send you over the handlebars. He managed to control the skid and bring the bike to stop just in time, before he ran through the bed of nails that the spy apparently had tossed onto the cobblestones before climbing into his car and speeding away. It was a clever trick, an improvised version of the nail strip that the police use to end high-speed chases. If the watcher had more in mind than just spying, he’d return with a weapon the minute Shaw set the bike down.

He caught a glimpse of the vehicle — a dark green Honda Accord with California plates. He couldn’t make out the number. It vanished to the left, speeding toward the entrance ramp to the freeway.

Now that the spy had been made, would that be the end of him?

Shaw thought: ninety-nine-point-five percent no. But he had no facts for this number, just intuition.

He dismounted, found a piece of cardboard and swept the nails into a storm drain — concerned for fellow bikers’ safety, of course, but also because, if there was an accident, he wouldn’t want emergency vehicles in the area, their lights and sirens attracting attention and the police might go door by door to ask for witnesses.

He couldn’t go on to the library just yet. Somebody — clearly a hostile — now knew about the safe house. He climbed onto the bike and sped back to the safe house. There he photographed every one of his father’s documents and encrypted and uploaded them to his secure cloud storage system, copying Mack.

Returning then to the Yamaha, he fired the bike up once more and sped into the street, accelerating hard, as he headed for the main road that would take him to the Stanford library.

Suddenly, thoughts about the spy’s identity and purpose were gone. It took only a few yards for the exhilaration to wrap its arms around him. Rock climbing was a complex, intellectual joy. Low-gear, high-throttle racing around corners on slidey tires, powering up and over hills... well, that was a pure, raw high.

Shaw had seen the police thriller Bullitt , from the ’60s, in which the actor Steve McQueen — to whom, Shaw was regularly reminded, bore more than a passing resemblance — had muscled his Ford Mustang through the winding and hilly streets of San Francisco in pursuit of two hitmen in a Dodge Charger — the best car-chase scene ever filmed. When in town here, on his bike, Shaw never missed the chance to exploit the tricky and exhilarating geography of the city just like Detective Frank Bullitt, occasionally going airborne and enjoying lavish skids.

He now plowed through the neighborhood the safe house was located in: the Mission.

Shaw had some affection for the area, where he’d spent weeks on a reward job a few years back. The district had been sparsely populated until the infamous 1906 earthquake, which destroyed much of San Francisco. Because there was more open land and therefore less quake and fire damage in the Mission, residents began to move here to start life anew. These newcomers were Anglo — largely Polish and German — as well as Chicano and Latino. In the early to mid-twentieth century, the neighborhood was tawdry and rough-and-tumble and more than a little lawless. So it remained until the ’70s, when counterculture hit.