Джеффри Дивер - The Final Twist

Braxton shook her head yet again.

Russell said, “The Stanford library the other day? The man with Droon? This kill order was in his pocket.”

Braxton said, “He was just a friend of Ebbitt Droon’s. He was meeting him at the library to drop something off. Whatever that’s about, the note isn’t about one of our projects.”

“He didn’t work for BlackBridge?”

Helms said, “No.”

The words — and the timbre of their voices — had moved Shaw from ten percent alert to ninety percent. He was in set mode.

Shaw asked Braxton, “Who is he?”

“Security. Works for a subsidiary of Banyan Tree.”

“Name. Give me his name.”

Russell crouched and leaned very close. His brother’s chosen method for retrieving information.

“He’s...” Braxton thought for a moment. “I think it’s Richard Hogan.”

Russell rose and said to his brother, “We got it wrong. Devereux’s the one that wants SP dead, not BlackBridge.”

“So the hit’s still on.” Shaw looked at his phone.

Three hours until the family died.

The brothers obtained Richard Hogan’s address nearly simultaneously.

Shaw had sent a request to Mack, Russell to Karin.

Shaw’s phone dinged first, but only seconds before his brother’s.

The place where the hitman had lived was a yellow Victorian-façaded townhome in the shadow of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. An upmarket neighborhood. At first Shaw found this surprising, given Hogan’s career — muscle work and kill orders — but Shaw supposed that Jonathan Stuart Devereux paid well.

Russell parallel parked on a steep incline and spun the wheel to chock the tire against the curb. Signs warned drivers to do this. Shaw supposed that the odds of a vehicle with an automatic transmission slipping out of park were minimal, but why not go the extra step? The incline had to be twenty degrees.

They climbed out of the SUV and Shaw dipped his head as two red-masked parrots zipped past. He noted several more, twitchily observing the street from the branches of a maple tree. Another pair was perched nearby too. The birds had made this neighborhood their own.

He and Russell crossed the street and approached the front door slowly, in a tactical formation, away from windows and the door itself. Hogan was no more, and Karin’s information revealed he was single, but he might have had roommates, who were fellow Devereux employees. Or a lover in the same line of murderous work that he had pursued.

It was just the two of them now. Ty and Victoria had to keep an eye on Helms, Braxton and the other ops until the agents arrived from Denver.

Shaw and his brother looked through the windows, fast and carefully. The living space appeared unoccupied.

“I can’t pick these.”

Russell too examined the two deadbolts. He tapped his own shoulder and Shaw nodded.

Stepping three feet back, the brothers paused and looked around. The street was deserted.

Russell charged forward and crashed into the wood. The heavy panel slammed inward as if the hardware were skimpy tin.

The men fanned out, guns drawn, clearing the sparse place. Lacking in furniture, that is, but there were weapons and ammunition aplenty, computers, tactical gear, phones — cellular and satellite, clothing and body armor.

Russell held up an ID badge with Hogan’s picture on it. The subsidiary he worked for within the Banyan Tree family was Sequoia Pest Removal.

The computers were passcode protected, as were the phones. Not impossible for an outfit like Russell’s group to hack, Shaw supposed, but SP’s family had only hours to live. Cracking the electronics would have taken too long.

Shaw said, “The kill order was handwritten. Let’s look for paper.”

They began rifling through stacks of documents that sat on Hogan’s kitchen table and a precarious card table that served as a makeshift desk.

Shaw’s pile was mostly receipts, maps, instruction booklets for newly purchased weapons, company memos that had nothing to do with the kill order, checkbooks and ledgers that showed transfers into banks in the Caribbean.

“Got something here,” Russell said. Shaw joined him as he spread a sheet of paper flat on the desk.

It has come to my attention that a whistleblower, SP, has discovered the purpose of our Waste Management program. Following was found on his personal computer through a deep-hack:

“Banyan Tree is enlisting a subsidiary to dredge up toxic waste. Operatives then use unmarked vehicles to transport it to a competitor’s facility, where it is dumped, as if the competitor were guilty of the pollution. This has resulted in the competitors being sued and fined, often going out of business, or losing so much money they are no longer players in the market. The plan is smart. Banyan’s subsidiary analyzes each competitor’s operation and determines what sort of dangerous materials those companies generate. Engineers then extract only those chemicals from the waste they dredge up. That is what is planted on the competitor’s property, giving credence to their ‘guilt.’”

As of now SP is still compiling information and trying to develop proof of our program. It’s anticipated that he will probably have enough facts to go public within the next few weeks.

You’ll be receiving further instructions.

“So that’s what it’s about,” Russell said.

Shaw recalled what La Fleur had told them: about the CEO of one of Devereux’s competitors committing suicide after going bankrupt — following Devereux’s reporting him to the feds. La Fleur hadn’t told them what regulations or laws had been broken, but it was now clear that they would have been environmental.

They dug through the rest of the documents and searched Hogan’s clothes, looking for anything that might give them more information about SP.

Nothing.

Shaw: “Whistleblower. Means he’s got some connection to the subsidiary, maybe he’s a contractor, maybe an employee.”

Russell went online and searched for Banyan Tree. It had been much in the news over the years and hundreds of employees were mentioned but there was no fast search filter that let him find workers with the potential victim’s initials.

And because the company was privately owned, no employee records were available.

“Karin?” Shaw proposed.

“If we had a week or two, we could probably get somebody inside. Not on this time frame.”

Shaw was musing, “Dredge. Waste.”

The thought struck him almost like a slap on the back. He barked a quick laugh.

Russell looked toward him.

Shaw said, “We got it wrong.”

Hunters Point yet again.

The vile smells, the trash, the dilapidated buildings, the lots where the skeletons of enterprises were all that remained of capitalist dreams from so many years ago. Seagulls quarreled over the slimmest remnants of garbage. Rats prowled silently but without caution.

The place was as tired as a car abandoned in the woods, not even worth scavenging for parts.

One structure here, though, shone. A white and green one-story building, recently painted. It sat on the water’s edge and was surrounded by a parking lot in which a variety of modest vehicles sat.

As the brothers sped into the lot in Russell’s SUV, Shaw could see the thirty-foot transport boats they’d seen earlier: the ones leaving the island that had been part of the Hunters Point shipyard, filled with fifty-five-gallon drums, riding low. They would slog their way to the wide pier behind the building, where workers would offload the drums and use forklifts to load them onto long flatbed trucks.