The Final Twist
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NOVELS
The Colter Shaw Series
The Goodbye Man
The Never Game
The Lincoln Rhyme Series
The Cutting Edge
The Burial Hour
The Steel Kiss
The Skin Collector
The Kill Room
The Burning Wire
The Broken Window
The Cold Moon
The Twelfth Card
The Vanished Man
The Stone Monkey
The Empty Chair
The Coffin Dancer
The Bone Collector
The Kathryn Dance Series
Solitude Creek
XO
Roadside Crosses
The Sleeping Doll
The Rune Series
Hard News
Death of a Blue Movie Star
Manhattan Is My Beat
The John Pellam Series
Hell’s Kitchen
Bloody River Blues
Shallow Graves
Stand-Alones
The October List
No Rest for the Dead (Contributor)
Carte Blanche (A James Bond Novel)
Watchlist (Contributor)
Edge
The Bodies Left Behind
Garden of Beasts
The Blue Nowhere
Speaking in Tongues
The Devil’s Teardrop
A Maiden’s Grave
Praying for Sleep
The Lesson of Her Death
Mistress of Justice
Short Fiction
COLLECTIONS
Trouble in Mind
More Twisted
Twisted
ANTHOLOGIES
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight (Editor and Contributor)
A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor and Contributor)
Ice Cold (Editor and Contributor)
Books to Die For (Contributor)
The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor)
STORIES
Forgotten
Turning Point
Verona
The Debriefing
The Second Hostage
Ninth and Nowhere
Captivated
The Victims’ Club
Surprise Ending
Double Cross
The Deliveryman
A Textbook Case
THE FINAL TWIST
Jeffery Deaver
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
First published in the US in 2021 by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Copyright © Gunner Publications, LLC 2021
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover photographs © Mark Owen / Trevillion Images (main image), © Shutterstock.com (bridge)
Jeffery Deaver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008462864
Ebook Edition © May 2021 ISBN: 9780008462888
Version: 2021-04-12
Dedication
To the Sunday Afternoon Crew:
Joan, Cleve, Kay, Ralph, Gail
Epigraph
For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.
—NOAM CHOMSKY
Contents
Cover
Also by Jeffery Deaver
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Steelworks
Part One: June 24 – The Mission
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Steelworks
Part Two: June 25 – The Great Earthquake
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Part Three: June 26 – The Man Who Would be King
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Part Four: June 27 – Flame
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Part Five: July 3 – Ash
Chapter 82
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
About the Publisher
THE STEELWORKS
Colter Shaw draws his gun. He starts silently down the stairs, descending into the old building’s massive, pungent basement, redolent of mold and heating oil.
Basement, he reflects. Recalling the last time he was in one. And what happened to him there.
Above him, music pounds, feet dance. The bass is a runner’s heartbeat. But up there and down here are separate universes.
At the foot of the stairs he studies where he is. Orientation … Always, orientation. The basement is half built out. To the right of the stairs is a large empty space. To the left are rooms off a long corridor—fifty feet or so in length.
Scanning the empty space to the right, he sees no threat nor anything that would help him. He turns left and navigates toward the corridor past the boilers and stores of supplies: large packs of toilet paper, cans of Hormel chili, plastic water bottles, paper towels, Dixie paper plates, plastic utensils. A brick of nine-millimeter ammunition.
Shaw moves slowly into the corridor. The first room on the right, the door open, is illuminated by cold overhead light and warmer flickering light. Remaining in shadows, he peers in quickly. An office. File cabinets, computers, a printer.
Two bulky men sit at a table, watching a baseball game on a monitor. One leans back and takes the last beer from the six-pack sitting on a third chair. Shaw knows they’re armed because he knows their profession, and such men are always armed.
Shaw is not invisible but the basement is dark, no overheads, and he’s in a black jacket, jeans and—since he’s been motorcycling—boots. They’re not as quiet as the Eccos he usually wears but the beat bleeding from the dance floor overhead dampens his footsteps. He supposes it would even drown out gunshots.
The men watch the game and talk and joke. There are five empty bottles. This might be helpful: the alcohol consumed. The reaction-time issue. The accuracy issue.
If it comes to that.
He thinks: Disarm them now?
No. It could go bad. Seventy-five percent chance of success, at best.
He hears his father’s voice: Never be blunt when subtle will do.
Besides, he isn’t sure what he’ll find here. If nothing, he’ll slip out the way he came, with them none the wiser.
He eases past the doorway, unseen, then pauses to give his eyes, momentarily dulled by the office lights, a chance to acclimate to the darkness.
Then he moves on, checking each room. Most of the doors are open; most of the rooms are dark.
The music, the pounding of the dancing feet are a two-edged sword. No one can hear him approach, but he’s just as deaf. Someone could be in an empty room, having spotted him, waiting with a weapon.
Thirty feet, forty.
Empty room, empty room. He’s approaching the end, where a second hallway jogs right. There’ll be other rooms to search. How many more?
The last room. This door is closed. Locked.
He withdraws his locking-blade knife and uses the edge near the tip to ease the deadbolt back into the tumbler. He pulls on the door to keep the bolt from snapping back into place as he gets a new grip with the blade. After repeating a dozen times, the door is free. Knife away, gun drawn and raised, finger off the trigger.
Inside.
The woman is Black, in her early twenties, hair in a complicated braid. She wears jeans and a dusty gray sweatshirt. She sees the gun and inhales to scream. He holds up a hand and instantly holsters the weapon. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. I’m getting you out of here. What’s your name?”
She doesn’t speak for a moment. Then: “Nita.”
“I’m Colter. You’ll be all right.”
The place is filthy. Uneaten chili sits in a flat pool on a paper plate. A bottle of water is half drunk. There’s a bucket for a toilet. She’s not bound but she is restrained: a bicycle cable is looped around a water or sewage pipe and her ankle is zip-tied to the cable. Shaw shuts the light off. There’s enough illumination to see by.
Shaw looks back into the corridor. The flicker from the screen continues as the ball game continues. What inning is it? Would be important to know.
“Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head.
He takes his knife out and opens it with a click. He saws through the plastic tie and helps her to her feet. She’s unsteady.
“Can you walk?”
A nod. She’s shivering and crying. “I want to go home.”
Shaw recalls thinking of the game Rock, Paper, Scissors just ten minutes ago. He wishes he’d played harder, much harder.
They step into the corridor. And just then, Shaw thinks:
The third chair.
Oh, hell.
The six-pack didn’t need its own seat. Someone else was in the office watching the game.
And at that moment the third man comes down the stairs with another pack of Budweiser. Just as he sets foot on the concrete floor he glances up the corridor and sees Shaw and Nita. The six-pack drops to the ground. At least one bottle shatters. He calls, “Hey!” And reaches for his hip.
In the baseball room, the flickering stops.
PART ONE
JUNE 24
THE MISSION
Time until the family dies: fifty-two hours.
1
The safe house.
At last.
Colter Shaw’s journey to this cornflower-blue Victorian on scruffy Alvarez Street in the Mission District of San Francisco had taken him weeks. From Silicon Valley to the Sierra Nevadas in eastern California to Washington State. Or, as he sat on his Yamaha motorcycle, looking up at the structure, he reflected: in a way, it had taken him most of his life.
As often is the case when one arrives at a long-anticipated destination, the structure seemed modest, ordinary, unimposing. Though if it contained what Shaw hoped, it would prove to be just the opposite: a mine of information that could save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives.
But as the son of a survivalist, Shaw had a preliminary question: Just how safe a safe house was it?
From this angle, it appeared deserted, dark. He dropped the transmission in gear and drove to the alley that ran behind the house, where he paused again, in front of an overgrown garden, encircled by a gothic wrought-iron fence. From here, still no lights, no signs of habitation, no motion. He gunned the engine and returned to the front. He skidded to a stop and low-gear muscled the bike onto the sidewalk.
He snagged his heavy backpack, chained up the bike and helmet, then pushed through the three-foot-deep planting bed that bordered the front. Behind a boxwood he found the circuit breakers for the main line. If there were an unlikely bomb inside it would probably be hardwired; whether it was phones or computers or improvised explosive devices, it was always tricky to depend on batteries.
Using the keys he’d been bequeathed, he unlocked and pushed open the door, hand near his weapon. He was greeted only with white noise and the scent of lavender air freshener.
Before he searched for the documents he hoped his father had left, he needed to clear the place.
No evidence of threat isn’t synonymous with no threat.
He scanned the ground floor. Beyond the living room was a parlor, from which a stairway led upstairs. Past that room was a dining room and, in the back, a kitchen, whose door, reinforced and windowless, led onto the alleyway. Another door in the kitchen led to the cellar, an unusual feature in much of California. The few pieces of furniture were functional and mismatched. The walls were the color of old bone, curtains sun-bleached to inadvertent tie-dye patterns.
He took his time examining every room on this floor and on the second and third stories. No sign of current residents, but he did find bed linens neatly folded on a mattress on the second floor.
Last, the basement.
He clicked on his tactical halogen flashlight, with its piercing beam, and descended to see that the room was largely empty. A few old cans of paint, a broken table. At the far end was a coal bin, in which a small pile of glistening black lumps sat. Shaw smiled to himself.
Ever the survivalist, weren’t you, Ashton?
As he stared into the murk, he noted three wires dangling from the rafters. One, near the stairs, ended in a fixture and a small bulb. The wires in the middle and far end had been cut and the ends were wrapped with electrician’s tape.
Shaw knew why the two had been operated on: to keep someone from getting a good view of the end of the cellar.
Shining the beam over the back wall, he stepped close.
Got it, Ash.
As with the rest of the basement, this wall was constructed of four-by-eight plywood sheets nailed to studs, floor to ceiling, painted flat black. But an examination of the seams of one panel revealed a difference. It was a hidden door, opening onto a secure room. He took the locking-blade knife from his pocket and flicked it open. After scanning the surface a moment longer, he located a slit near the bottom. He pushed the blade inside and heard a click. The door sprung outward an inch. Replacing the knife and drawing his gun, he crouched, shining the beam inside, holding the flashlight high and to the left to draw fire, if an enemy were present and armed.
He reached inside and felt for tripwires. None.
He slowly drew the door toward him with his foot.
It had moved no more than eighteen inches when the bomb exploded with a searing flash and a stunning roar and a piece of shrapnel took him in the chest.
2
The risk in detonations is usually not death.
Most victims of an IED are blinded, deafened and/or mutilated. Modern bomb materials move at more than thirty thousand feet per second; the shock wave could travel from sea level to the top of Mount Everest in the time it takes to clear your throat.
Shaw lay on the floor, unable to see, unable to hear, coughing, in pain. He touched the spot where the shrapnel had slammed into him. Sore. But no broken-skin wound. For some reason the skin hadn’t broken. He did a fast inventory of the rest of his body. His arms, hands and legs still functioned.
Now: find his weapon. A bomb is often a prelude to an attack.
He could see nothing but, on his knees, he patted the damp concrete in a circular pattern until he located the gun.
Squinting, but still seeing nothing. You can’t will your vision to work.
No time for panic, no time for thinking of the consequences to his lifestyle if he’d been permanently blinded or deafened. Rock climbing, motorbiking, traveling the country—all endangered, but not something to worry about right now.
But how could he tell where the assault was coming from? In a crouch he moved to where he thought the coal bin was. It would at least provide some cover. He tried to listen but all he could hear was a tinnitus-like ringing in his ears.
After five desperate minutes he was aware of a faint glow coalescing at the far end of the cellar. Light from the kitchen above.
So his vision wasn’t gone completely. He’d been temporarily blinded by the brilliance of the explosion. Finally he could make out the beam of his tac light. It was ten feet away. He collected it and shone the bright light throughout the basement and into the room on the other side of the hidden door.
No attackers.
He holstered his weapon and snapped his fingers beside each ear. His hearing was returning too.
Then he assessed.
What had just happened?
If the bomber had wanted an intruder dead, that could’ve easily been arranged. Shaw shone his light on the frame of the hidden door and found the smoking device, gray metal. It was a large flash-bang—designed with combustible materials that, when detonated, emitted blinding light and a stunning sound but didn’t fling deadly projectiles; its purpose was to serve as a warning.
He looked carefully to see why he’d missed it. Well, interesting. The device was a projectile. It had been launched from a shelf near the hidden door, rigged to explode after a half second or so. This is what had hit him in the chest. The trigger would be a motion or proximity detector. Shaw had never heard of a mechanism like this.
He carefully scanned the room for more traps. He found none.
Who had set it? His father and his colleagues had likely made the secret room, but they probably would not have left the grenade. Ashton Shaw never worked with explosives. Possessing them without a license was illegal, and, for all his father’s serious devotion to survivalism and distrust of authority, he didn’t break the law.
Never give the authorities that kind of control over you.
Then Shaw confirmed his father could not have created the trap. When he examined the device more closely under the searing white beam, he noted that it was military-issue and bore a date stamp of last year.
Shaw flicked on an overhead light and tucked his flashlight away. He saw a battered utility table in the center of the twenty-by-twenty space, an old wooden chair, shelves that were largely bare but held some papers and clothes. Other stacks of documents sat against the wall. A large olive-drab duffel bag was in the corner.
On the table were scores of papers.
Was this it? The hidden treasure that others—his father among them—had died for?
He walked around the table, so he was facing the doorway to the secret room, and bent forward to find out.
3
Colter Shaw was here because of a discovery he’d made on his family’s Compound in the soaring peaks of eastern California.
There, on high and austere Echo Ridge, where his father had died, Shaw had found a letter the man had written and hidden years ago.
A letter that would change Shaw’s life.
Ashton began the missive by saying that over his years as a professor and amateur historian and political scientist, he’d come to distrust the power of large corporations, institutions, politicians and wealthy individuals “who thrive in the netherworld between legality and illegality, democracy and dictatorship.” He formed a circle of friends and fellow professors to take on and expose their corruption.
The company that they first set their sights on was BlackBridge Corporate Solutions, a firm known for its work in the shadowy field of corporate espionage. The outfit was behind many questionable practices, but the one that Ashton and his colleagues found the most reprehensible was their “Urban Improvement Plan,” or “UIP.” On the surface it appeared to help developers locate real estate. But BlackBridge took the brokerage role one step further. Working with local gangs, BlackBridge operatives flooded targeted neighborhoods with free and cheap opioids, fentanyl and meth. Addiction soared. As the neighborhoods became unlivable, developers swooped in to buy them up for next to nothing.
This same tactic won results for political clients: PACs, lobbyists and candidates themselves. The infestation of illegal drugs would cause a shift in population as residents moved out, affecting congressional districting. The UIP was, in effect, gerrymandering by narcotics.
BlackBridge’s schemes became personal for Ashton Shaw when a friend and former student of his—then a San Francisco city councilman—began looking into the UIP operation. Todd Zaleski and his wife were found murdered, a close-range gunshot for each of them. It appeared to be a robbery gone bad, but Ashton knew better.