The Final Twist

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.

He and his colleagues looked for evidence against the company, hoping to build a case for authorities. Nearly all BlackBridge workers refused to talk to them but he managed to learn of an employee who felt the UIP had crossed a line. A researcher for BlackBridge, Amos Gahl, found some evidence and smuggled it out of the company. The man hid what he’d stolen somewhere in the San Francisco area. But before he could contact Ashton or the authorities, he too was dead — the victim of a suspicious car crash.

Ashton had written in his letter: It became my obsession to find what Gahl had hidden.

Then BlackBridge learned of Ashton and those who shared his obsession. Several died in mysterious accidents, and the others dropped out of the mission, fearful for their lives. Soon, Ashton was alone in his quest to bring down the company that had killed his student and so many others in the City by the Bay — and, likely, untold other cities.

Then on a cold October night, Colter Shaw, sixteen years old, discovered his father’s body in desolate Echo Ridge.

Since then, he’d become well aware of the shady figures he was up against:

Ian Helms, founder and CEO of BlackBridge. Now in his mid-fifties and movie-star handsome, he had had some national defense or intelligence jobs in the past and had worked in politics and lobbying.

Ebbitt Droon, a “facilitator” for the company, which is to say a hitman, was wiry with rat-like features. After several personal run-ins with the man, including one that featured a Molotov cocktail hurled in Shaw’s direction, he was sure that Droon was a certifiable sadist.

Irena Braxton, BlackBridge operative in charge of stopping Ashton — and now stopping his son. Of her Ashton had written:

She was an external relations supervisor, a euphemistic job description if ever there was one.

Ashton had concluded his letter with this:

4

This was Colter Shaw’s mission. To check out each of the locations on his father’s map — there were eighteen of them — and find the evidence Amos Gahl had hidden.

As he now looked over the documents in the secret room of the safe house’s basement, he realized they had nothing to do with BlackBridge. They had to do with engineering projects and shipping. Some in English, some in Russian or perhaps another language using Cyrillic characters. Other printouts were in Spanish, a language that he could speak, and they related to shipping and transportation too. There were a number in Chinese as well.

Someone was using the secret room as a base of operations. One of the original members of his father’s circle? Or, like Shaw, second generation? A man or a woman? Young? Middle-aged? Some of these materials were dated recently. He turned to the duffel bag on the floor and — after an examination for a tripwire — unzipped it.

Inside was the answer to the question of gender. The clothing was a man’s, of larger-than-average physique. T-shirts, work shirts, cargo pants, jeans, sweaters, wool socks, baseball caps, gloves, casual jackets. Everything was black, charcoal gray or dark green.

Then he saw in the shadows against the back wall another stack of papers. Ah, here was his father’s material. It was Ashton from whom Shaw had learned the art of calligraphy, and the man wrote in a script even more elegant — and smaller — than Shaw’s.

His heart beat just a bit faster, seeing these.

Shaw carried the stack upstairs and set the papers on the rickety kitchen table. He sat down in an equally uncertain chair and began to read. There were more details about the UIP, and references to other schemes the company engaged in: dodgy earthquake inspections of high-rises (some located on the San Andreas Fault, no less), government contract kickbacks, land-use and zoning ploys, stock market manipulations, money laundering.

There was a clipping about the death of a California state assemblyman, with two question marks beside the victim’s picture. The man had died in a car crash on the way to meet with a state attorney general. The resulting fire had destroyed his auto and boxes of records he had with him. The crash was curious but no criminal investigation was begun.

He found as well articles about Todd Zaleski, his father’s former student turned city councilman whom Ashton believed was murdered by BlackBridge.

Everything he found hinted at the company’s guilt. But this wasn’t evidence — at least not enough for a prosecutor. Shaw had some experience on the topic of criminal law. After college he’d worked in a law firm, while deciding whether to take the LSATs and apply to law school. He’d been particularly inspired to study the subject by one Professor Sharphorn at the University of Michigan and thought he might take up the profession. In the end, his restless nature put the kibosh on a desk job, but an interest in the law stayed with him and he often read up on the subject; it was also helpful in his reward-seeking job.

No, nothing his father had found would interest the D.A.’s office.

Shaw then found a note, presumably from a colleague of Amos Gahl, intended for Ashton. It was a small sheet of paper folded many times. This no doubt meant it would have been left in a dead-drop, a spy technique of hiding communiqués under park benches or cracks in walls, avoiding the risk of electronic intercepts.

So “it” — the evidence — was in a company bag hidden in one of the eighteen locations Ashton had identified as a likely spot. An arduous task, but there was no way around it. He’d have to start with the first and keep going until he found the courier bag — or give up after none of them panned out.

But he soon learned he wouldn’t have to investigate eighteen locations. In fact, he didn’t need to check out any.

He discovered in the stack a map identical to the one he’d found in Echo Ridge — well, identical except for one difference. All eighteen of the locations were crossed off with bold red Xs.

After leaving the map at the Compound, Ashton, as he’d written, had returned here and searched the sites himself, eliminating them all.

Shaw sighed. This meant that the evidence that would destroy BlackBridge could be squirreled away anywhere within the entire San Francisco Bay Area, which had to embrace thousands of square miles.

Maybe Ashton had discovered other possible sites. Shaw returned to the material to look for more clues, but his search was interrupted at that moment.

From Alvarez Street, out in front of the safe house, a woman called out. “Please!” she cried. “Somebody! Help me!”

5

Shaw looked out the bay window to see two people struggling in front of the chain-link gate that opened onto a scruffy lot containing the remnants of a building that had been partly burned years ago.

The dark-haired woman was in her thirties, he guessed. Dressed in faded jeans, a T-shirt, a scuffed dark blue leather jacket, running shoes. A white earbud cord dangled. She was looking around frantically as a squat man, dressed in a dusty, tattered combat jacket and baggy pants, gripped her forearm. The man was white and had a grimy look about him. Homeless, Shaw guessed, and, like many, possibly schizophrenic or a borderline personality. The man held a box cutter and was pulling the woman toward the gate. He seemed strong, which wasn’t unusual; life on the street was physically arduous; to get by you needed to practice a version of survivalism. Even from this distance, Shaw could see veins rising high on the man’s hands and forehead.

Through the front door and down the concrete steps fast, then approaching the two of them. Her face desperate, eyes wide, the woman looked toward him. “Please! He’s hurting me!”

The attacker’s eyes cut to Shaw. At first there was a mad defiance on the man’s face, which struck Shaw as impish. With his short height and broad chest, he might be cast as a creature in a fantasy or mythological movie. His hands indeed looked strong.

“Oh, yeah, skinny boy, you want some of this? Fuck off.”

Shaw kept coming.

The man waved the weapon dramatically. “You think I’m kidding?”

Shaw kept coming.

You’d think the guy wouldn’t be in a carnal mood any longer, given the third-party presence. But he gripped the woman just as insistently as a moment ago, as if she were a home-run ball he’d caught in the stadium and wasn’t going to give up to another fan. Without loosening his hold he stepped closer toward Shaw.

Who kept coming.

“Jesus! You deaf, asshole?”

In the Shaw family’s Sierra Nevada enclave, where he had taught his children survival skills, Ashton had spent much time on firearms, those confounding inventions that are both blessings and curses. One of his father’s rules was borrowed — straight from Shooting Practices 101.

Never draw a gun unless you intend to use it.

Shaw drew the Glock and pointed it at the attacker’s head.

The man froze.

Shaw was taking his father’s rule to heart, as he usually did with the man’s lengthy list of don’ts. He believed, however, that the definition of use was open to interpretation. His was somewhat broader than Ashton’s. In this case it meant not pulling the trigger but instead scaring the shit out of someone.

It was working.

“Oh... No, man... no, don’t! Please! I didn’t mean anything. I was just standing here. Asked her for some money. I ain’t ate in a week. Then she starts coming on to me.”

Shaw didn’t say anything. He wasn’t someone who negotiated or bantered. He kept the gun steady as he gazed coolly at the puckish face, which was encircled with damp, swept-back hair in a style that, Shaw believed, mercifully ceased to exist around 1975.

After a brief moment, the attacker released the woman. She stepped away, leaning against a segment of chain-link fence, breathing hard. Eyes were wide in her stricken face.

The building must have burned five years ago but, with the weighty moisture in the air, you could still detect burnt wood.

The man retracted the blade on the box cutter and started to put it away.

“No. Drop it.”

“I—”

“Drop. It.”

The gray tool clattered onto the gravelly sidewalk.

“Out of here now.”

The man held up both his hands and backed away. Then he paused. He cocked his head and, with narrowed eyes and a hint of hope in his face, he asked, “Any chance you can spare a twenty?”

Shaw grimaced. The man ambled up the street.

Shaw holstered the gun and scanned the area. Only one other person was on the street — a bearded man in a thigh-length black coat and dark slacks, a stocking cap and an Oakland A’s backpack. He wasn’t nearby and was facing away. If he’d seen the incident, he had no interest in the participants or what had happened. The man stepped into an independent coffee shop. San Francisco, with its Italian roots, had many of these.

“My God,” the woman whispered. “Thank you!” She was a little shorter than Shaw’s six feet even, but not much, with an athletic build, toned legs and thighs under her tight-fitting distressed jeans. She had slim hips and lengthy arms. The veins were prominent in the backs of her hands too, just like her attacker’s. Her brown hair was loose. She wore no makeup on her face, which seemed weather-toughened. A scar started near her temple and disappeared into her hairline.

“I don’t know what to say. Are you, umm, police?” She glanced toward the weapon on his right hip and then perused him. She was wary.

With his short blond hair, muscular build and taciturn manner, Colter Shaw could easily be mistaken for law enforcement, a fed or a detective running complex homicides — the stuff of anti-terror cases. Today, she’d think, he was undercover, as he’d ridden here on the Yamaha in his biker gear: the jacket, navy-blue shirt under a black sweater to conceal his weapon, blue jeans and black Nocona boots.

“Kind of a private eye.”

“I’m Tricia,” she said.

He didn’t give his, either real or a cover.

She shook her head, apparently at her own behavior. “Stupid, stupid...”

Shaw said, “Find a better quality of dealer. Or don’t use at all.” But he shrugged. “Easy for me to say.”

Her lips tightened; she looked down. “I know. I try. This program, that program. Maybe this’s a wake-up call.” She offered him a wan smile. “Thank you, really.”

And, in the opposite direction of the creature from Middle-earth, she walked off.

6

Shaw returned to the safe house, headed for the kitchen and the documents, but he got no farther than the living room.

He stopped, staring at a shelf on which sat a six-inch statuette, a bronze bald eagle. Wings spread, talons out, predator’s eyes focused downward.

Shaw picked it up and turned it over in his hand, righted it once more.

To the casual observer, what he was holding looked to be a competently sculpted souvenir from a wildlife preserve gift shop, one of the more expensive behind-the-counter items.

But it was significantly more than that to Colter Shaw.

He had last seen it on a shelf in his bedroom in the Compound many years ago. Before it went missing. He had from time to time wondered where it had ended up. Had he stored it away himself when he’d cleaned his room to make space for gear or weapons he’d made or discoveries from his endless hikes through the mountains surrounding the Compound: rocks, pinecones, arrowheads, bones?

Finding it here gave him considerable pleasure, at last understanding the artwork’s fate. His father must have brought it with him here as a reminder of his middle child. Shaw was thankful too it was not lost forever; how he’d come into possession of the sculpture was an important aspect of his childhood, a memento of an incident that had undoubtedly launched him into his present career and lifestyle.

The Restless Man...

But this icon of a bird in muscular flight brought sorrow too. It resurrected other memories of his childhood: specifically of his older brother, Russell.

Years ago, during a bad spell, Ashton Shaw had insisted that Dorion, then thirteen, make a one-hundred-foot free-climb up a sheer rock face in the middle of the night. This was a test. All of his children had to make the ascent when they became teenagers.

Russell and Colter already had done so. But had come to believe that the rite of passage was pointless, especially for their sister. Dorie was as talented athletically as her brothers with chalk and rope, and more so than Ashton himself. She’d already proved her ascent skills, including night climbs.

With a mind of her own even then, Dorion had simply decided she didn’t need to... or want to. “Ash. No.” The girl never shied.

But her father wouldn’t let it go. He grew more and more riled and persistent.

The older brother intervened. Russell also said no.

The confrontation turned ugly. A knife was involved — on Ashton’s part. And Russell, using skills his father himself had taught, prepared to defend his sister and take the weapon away from the wild-eyed man.

Mary Dove, her husband’s psychiatrist and med-dispenser in chief — had been away on a family emergency, so there was no adult present to defuse the situation.

After a boilingly tense moment their father backed down and retreated to his bedroom, muttering to himself.

Not long after, Ashton had died in a fall from Echo Ridge.

The circumstances were suspicious, and more troubling, Shaw learned that his brother had lied about his whereabouts at the time of Ashton’s death. He was, in fact, not far from Echo Ridge. Shaw believed that Russell had murdered the man. He was sure it had been agonizing, an impossible decision on his brother’s part. But he guessed that at some point Russell had come to believe it was Dorie’s life or Ashton’s, and Russell made his choice. By then Ashton Shaw had become someone very different from the kind and witty man and teacher the children had known growing up.

Shaw had made his own impossible decision: accepting that his brother was guilty of patricide. The thought tore at him for years, and tore him and Russell apart.

Then, just weeks ago, the truth: Russell had had nothing to do with Ashton’s death. It was a BlackBridge operative responsible, trailing their father to Echo Ridge on that cold, cold night in October.

Ebbitt Droon himself had told Shaw the story. “Your father... Braxton wanted him dead — but not yet, not till she had what she wanted. She sent somebody to, well, talk to him about the documents.”

“Talk” meant torturing Ashton into giving up what he knew about Amos Gahl’s theft of company secrets and evidence.

Droon had explained, “Near as we can piece it together, your father knew Braxton’s man was on his way to your Compound. Ashton tipped to him and led him off, was going to kill him somewhere in the woods. The ambush didn’t work. They fought. Your father fell.”

But until that revelation, Shaw had indeed believed in his heart that Russell was their father’s murderer. Devastated by false accusation, even if unspoken, Russell had vanished from the family’s life. No one had heard from him since Ashton’s funeral, more than a decade ago.

Colter Shaw made his living finding people — good ones and bad, those lost because of fate and circumstance and those lost because they chose to be lost. He had devoted considerable time and money and effort to tracking down his brother. What he would say when he found him, Shaw had no idea. He’d practiced a script of one brother talking to the other, explaining, seeking forgiveness, trying to find a path out of estrangement.

But all his efforts had come to nothing. Russell Shaw had vanished, and he’d vanished very, very well.

Shaw recalled discussing this very subject with someone just last week, describing the impact.

The man had asked, “What would you say was the greatest minus regarding your brother? What hurts the most?”

Shaw had answered, “He’d been my friend. I was his. And I ruined it.”

Seeing this eagle now made him feel Russell’s absence all the more.

He set the statue on the kitchen table and returned to the stack of his father’s materials. For an hour he pored over the documents. He found two notes in his father’s fine hand. They didn’t relate to the eighteen locations, which meant he’d discovered these spots after completing the scavenger hunt of the map.

One note was about a commercial building in the Embarcadero, the district along the eastern waterfront of San Francisco: the Hayward Brothers Warehouse.

The other was an address in Burlingame, a suburb south of the city, 3884 Camino.

Shaw now texted his private eye, requesting information. Mack McKenzie soon replied that she could find little more about the warehouse beyond that it was a historic building dating to the late 1800s, was not open for business to the public, and was presently for sale. The Burlingame address was a private home, owned by a man named Morton T. Nadler.

Shaw also found a business card, which represented a third possible location as well, the Stanford Library of Business and Commerce.

The library was located not in Palo Alto, where the university was situated, but in a part of town known as South of Market. Maybe it had nothing to do with Gahl’s stolen evidence; it would be an odd place to hide a courier bag. Possibly Ashton Shaw had used it for research. He had never owned a computer, and certainly had never allowed one in any residence of his, so maybe he’d gone to the library to use one of its public workstations.

Shaw decided the library would be his first stop. It was the closest to the safe house. If that didn’t pan out he would try the house in Burlingame and then the warehouse.

First, though, some security measures.

San Francisco was BlackBridge’s turf. Odds were ninety percent that they didn’t know he was here. But that dark ten percent required some due diligence.

He called up an app on his phone.

It happened to be tracing the whereabouts of Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon at that very moment.

Just the other day — under a fake identity — Braxton had talked her way into Shaw’s camper and stolen what she thought was Ashton’s map marking the places were Gahl’s evidence was hidden and other materials.

Shaw had tipped to who she really was. What he’d intentionally left for her to steal was a map with eighteen phony locations marked and a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, filled with code-like gibberish in the margins. A GPS tracker was hidden in the book’s spine.

In the past two days the tracker had meandered over various locations he’d marked on the map and spent time in a commercial skyscraper in downtown San Francisco, on Sutter Street, probably BlackBridge’s satellite office. This was its present location.

He now shifted to Google Maps and examined the neighborhood in which the Stanford library was located. He hardly expected trouble but it was a procedure he followed with every reward job. Information was the best weapon a survivalist could have.

Which didn’t mean hardware should be neglected.

Shaw checked his gun once more.

Never assume your weapon is loaded and hasn’t been damaged or sabotaged since the last time you used it.

The .380 was indeed loaded, one in the bedroom and six in the mag. It was a good dependable pistol — as long as you held it firmly while firing. The model had a reputation for limp wrist failure to eject: spent brass hanging in the receiver. Colter Shaw had never had this problem.

He seated the gun in his gray plastic inside-the-waistband holster and made sure it was hidden. The rule was that if you’re carrying concealed, you should keep it concealed, lest a concerned citizen spot the weapon, panic and call the cops.

There was another reason too.

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

7

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.

The Mission was the epicenter of the punk music scene in the city, and of the gay, lesbian and trans communities as well.

Shaw had learned too, in his search for the Benson twins, that one of the more interesting aspects of the district was the number of inhabitants whose families came from the Yucatan. In the portion of the Mission he was driving through now, the Mayan language — expressive and complex — was the main tongue of many residents. He sped past grassy In Chan Kaajal Park, which in Mayan means “My Little Town.”

As he traveled north he left the Mission behind and cruised into SoMa, the silly urbanized abbreviation of “South of Market.” It was also known — mostly among the old-timers — by the more interesting nic “South of the Slots,” after a now-defunct cable car that had run along Market. Like the Mission, SoMa had a colorful history but now that color was giving way to enterprise. This was home to scores of corporate headquarters, museums, galleries and traditional performing venues. What would the punksters have said?

Shaw soon arrived at the library, which was located on the north border of SoMa, the more affluent portion of the neighborhood. This portion of SoMa was close to the financial district and the legal firms and corporations that would use the services of a university business library.

Shaw pulled to the curb and idled his bike across the street from the library, which was a functional two-story structure constructed of glass and aluminum framing. Architecturally, the place didn’t approach interesting. But Shaw observed it closely. He saw people were coming and going, dressed in conservative business attire for the most part. Some messengers, a few delivery people.

He pretended to make a phone call as he observed the entry procedures.

There was one entrance into a large lobby and inside were two doorways. One, to the left facing the guard station, was for visitors. The other, to the right, was members only. Visitors to the public side had to walk through a metal detector and dump pocket litter into a basket for examination. You also needed to display an ID, and your name was jotted down on a clipboard sheet, but there was no confirmation of your identity.

He dropped the bike into gear and drove up the block to a space reserved for cycles and scooters. He locked the Yamaha to a post with a snaky cable. He affixed his helmet too. Looking around, he slipped the holstered gun and blade into a locked compartment, under the seat, he’d built for this purpose. He’d made sure the hidden GPS transmit system, like a LoJack, was active — even a double-chained motorcycle can be stolen by a determined thief.

Colter Shaw didn’t like leaving the weapons but there was no option. Then he reminded himself not to let his father’s paranoia enwrap him entirely. After all, how much trouble could he possibly get himself into in a library?

8

He had his story ready.

Legal associate Carter Skye, of the law firm Dorion & Dove, had been sent by his firm to look up an insurance law issue. This cover was not made up entirely out of whole cloth. When he was a legal assistant years ago, he’d had to do some research on the topic for one of the partners. It was a tricky question of subrogation — when an insurance company pays off a claim and then earns the right to sue in the insured’s name.

The pleasant Latino guard, however, had no interest in what Skye/Shaw’s purpose might be, and Shaw had been undercover enough times to know never to make an otherwise innocent story seem suspicious by volunteering information.

“There a charge?” he asked.

The man explained that if you weren’t affiliated with a school, entrance was ten dollars, which Shaw handed over in cash. Then, on request, he displayed his ID, which happened to feature his picture, height, weight and eye color, but the name, Skye, was his cover from his most recent undercover role. Mack was an expert at ginning up new identities. (This was completely legal as long as you didn’t try to trick the law or scam someone.)

A machine hummed and out eased a sticky-backed badge with his picture on it. He plastered it onto his chest.

Shaw debated about showing the picture of Amos Gahl — he’d taken a shot with his phone from the article about the man’s death — and asking if the guard remembered his being in here. The man, though, was young and if Gahl had used the library it would have been years ago.

“What’s over there?” Shaw pointed to the double doors to the right.

“Historical documents mostly.”

“Legal?”

“Some. And planning and zoning, real estate, government filings.”

“That right? My partners’re handling a case with some issues going back thirty, forty years. I’m looking for some old housing rulings that city hall doesn’t have. Is there any way I can get in?”

He hoped a senior librarian wouldn’t pop out and ask what, specifically, he wanted.

“You gotta make an appointment. Call this number.” The man handed Shaw a card, which vanished into his jeans pocket. It was more likely that his father or Gahl had used the public side of the place. If he found nothing there, maybe he’d bone up on old California real estate law and try to get inside the private portion.

Shaw thanked the man and then walked through the unresponsive metal detector into the spacious and well-lit open-to-the-public portion of the library.

Now, where to go from here?

It was an upscale facility, as you might expect, being attached to one of the best endowed universities in the country. In the center was a librarian’s station, circular. A Black man of about thirty-five in a beige suit sat there, focused on his computer monitor.

Radiating outward from the center were rows of tables and spacious computer workstations with large monitors. The screen saver — a moving block of the name of the library — ricocheted in a leisurely fashion around each monitor. The desks and cubicles offered office supplies: pens, pads of paper, Post-it notes and paper clips. Ringing this open space were the stacks, containing books and periodicals. There were floor-to-ceiling windows in the front and on the side. Against the back wall were what seemed to be a dozen offices or conference rooms. Circling the second-floor balcony was a series of stacks and rooms, just as down here.

There weren’t many patrons in this portion of the first floor. Two older businessmen who’d doffed their suit jackets pored over old books. A young woman in a plaid dress and a slim man in a dark suit and white shirt — both looked to be mid-thirties — were on computers.

Instinctively Shaw examined the library for escape routes. He sensed no threat, of course, but scanning for exits was a survival thing. He did it everywhere he went, automatically.

Never lose your orientation...

There was the front door, of course, and a stairway that led to the second floor. An elevator. A glass door in the back of the stacks led to the members-only side of the library. It opened onto a conference room, which might lead to other exits in the back of the structure, though it was presently occupied; a middle-aged businesswoman in a suit and a lean man in dark casual jacket sat with their backs to the glass door. A somber-faced man with bright blond hair sat across the table from them. The door had a latch but Shaw had no way of knowing whether or not it was now locked.

The left-side floor-to-ceiling windows featured a fire door, fitted with an alarm. It exited onto a side street. There were men’s and women’s restrooms, and a door on which was a sign: supplies.

He tucked this information away and got to work. Assuming that his father had identified the library as a place where Gahl might have hidden the evidence, where would the man have concealed it?

Shaw guessed that he probably had not stashed the entire courier bag, which he guessed from the name was not a slim piece of luggage; it would be conspicuous. He would probably have emptied it and put the contents — copies of incriminating emails, correspondence, spreadsheets, computer drives or disks, whatever it might be — in an out-of-the-way place. Maybe in the pages of a book or journal, maybe in the shadowy areas behind the volumes in the stacks or on top of the racks, maybe in the spaces beneath drawers in a workstation.

He strolled through the stacks, filled with such titles as Liability in Maritime Collision Claims: Bays and Harbors; Piercing the Corporate Veil; Incorporation Guide for Nonprofits. Easily four or five thousand books. He noted that many were outdated, like Who’s Who of San Francisco Commerce: 1948. What better hiding place for documents or a CD or thumb drive than a book of that sort? In plain sight, yet inside a volume that no one would possibly need to refer to.

Yet Shaw calculated it would take a month to go through all the volumes. And it would be impossible to do that without arousing suspicion... No, Gahl was not a stupid man. He hid the evidence because he knew there was a chance he would be killed. It would be hidden in a place that somebody, a colleague, the police, could deduce.

Shaw noticed the librarian was looking his way.

He nodded a friendly greeting to the man, walked to one of the workstations and sat down. A swipe of the mouse revealed the main screen to be an internal database of the library’s contents. Just what he wanted. He typed in Gahl, Amos. Nothing. Then Shaw, Ashton. Negative on that too.

But with BlackBridge, he had a hit.

The reference was to a book titled California Corporate Licenses, Volume I.

Had Gahl reasoned that Ashton Shaw or someone would do this very thing, run a computer search for the company, and accordingly hidden the evidence in the book?

An elegant and simple clue.

The listing sent Shaw to a stack near the librarian station. Yes, there was the book: thick and bound in dark red faux leather. He lifted the tome off the shelf and set it on the floor. Then he removed the adjoining volumes and examined the space behind them. Seeing nothing, he reached in and felt along the cool metal. Nothing. He returned the other books and took Corporate Licenses back to the workstation.

He began his examination, first opening up the book to see if Gahl had hollowed out a portion and slipped a thumb drive or chip inside. No, he hadn’t. Nor were there any folded documents or notes between pages. The book was simply a listing of corporations with licenses to do business in the state. Shaw turned next to the BlackBridge entry, thinking that would be a logical place to hide something or to leave a message about where the material was. Nothing. Shaw read the listing. The company was merely mentioned by name, without any other information. The headquarters was given as being in Los Angeles, which Shaw already knew, with offices in San Francisco and other cities.

He examined the hefty volume page by page. No evidence, no notes, no margin jottings. He probed into the spine too.

Nothing.

Hell. He re-shelved it and returned once more to the computer.

More searches. The councilman who’d been killed by BlackBridge: Zaleski, Todd. No hits there. Had Gahl been clever with anagrams or other subtle clues? He typed in variations on the search terms.

He tried UIP and Urban Improvement Plan.

Without success.

He deleted his search history then swiped the computer to sleep, deciding that it was likely the library wasn’t a possible hiding space for Gahl’s materials after all. Maybe Shaw’s other theory was correct. His father simply had used the library’s computers to do online searches.

So, a waste of time.

Colter Shaw, however, corrected himself. No, that wasn’t true; eliminating a possible lead is never a waste; the visit had gotten him one step closer to his goal. He’d learned to embrace this attitude in the reward-seeking business. Step by step by step.

It was time to get to the warehouse in the Embarcadero and the home in Burlingame, the last best chances for finding the evidence.

Before he left, though, he pulled out his phone and called up the tracking app, receiving data from the device he’d hidden in the copy of Walden, which Braxton and Droon presumably still had with them.

He was disappointed to see that the tracker was malfunctioning. The map that popped up showed Shaw’s, not the book’s, location. Well, he hadn’t believed the device would last forever. He then frowned and noticed that the pinging circle indicating the whereabouts of the tracker was coming not exactly from where Shaw sat but about thirty or so feet away.

A refresh of the system. The ping remained in the exact position it had been a moment ago.

No, impossible...

His breathing coming quickly, pulse tapping hard, he sent a text to Mack, including the code they used for immediate attention, asking her about the library.

In sixty seconds — the woman seemed always to be on duty — her response was:

He texted:

Two seconds later his phone hummed with her reply.

This was a variation on the emergency plan all survivalists have, to escape when an enemy is coming for you. The more common, and less coarse, version is: Get the Hell Out.

9

The library was a cover.

It was the members-only portion of the building and not the high-rise on Sutter Street downtown that was BlackBridge’s base of operation in San Francisco.

Shaw gazed in the direction where the tracker indicated the book was, and he realized that Irena Braxton and Ebbitt Droon were the very people whose backs he’d noted through the glass door that opened onto the other side of the building.

He glanced once more that way and saw a fourth man in the conference room. He was pacing, arms crossed, as he appeared to be debating something. He posed a question, it seemed — his hands were raised and his face appeared irritated. Then, when someone must have answered, he nodded and he paced some more, gazing absently into the public side of the library.

It was the CEO, Ian Helms. The athletic, handsome man wore a well-tailored suit and a Rolex on one wrist, a bracelet on the other, both gold.

This was the first time Colter Shaw had glimpsed the man responsible for his father’s death.

Helms would probably have no idea what Shaw looked like but it was not the time to take any chances. He slipped from the workstation and disappeared into the far reaches of the stacks.

GTFO...

He started to circle around the perimeter of the library to the front door. He kept his head down, moving steadily but not too fast through the stacks.

Only twenty feet later he stopped.

He’d been busted.

From the shadows of the rows of books, Shaw saw a large security guard in a dark suit enter the public side of the building from the lobby. The well-tanned man’s head was cocked and he appeared to be listening to the Secret Service — type earpiece with a curly wire that disappeared into his jacket. He walked to the librarian at the central station. They shared some words, both of them looking around. The guard’s jacket parted and the grip of a pistol showed. A second guard joined them. He was slimmer and more pale than the first, but tall too. Also armed. Shaw noted his hand was near his own pistol.

How would they have learned about him?

Then he got his answer:

The taller guard, more a bouncer than your average rent-a-cop, strode forward to the terminal where Shaw had sat and gazed about. The slimmer one joined him.

Shaw had just typed in a smorgasbord of words that would turn the bots within the system into frenzied hounds.

Shaw... Gahl... BlackBridge.

Some software had been programmed to report in when keywords were searched. The computer had dimed him out.

And it got even better, Shaw thought sardonically. Peering through the stacks, he noted that right above the volume in which he’d found BlackBridge’s name was a security camera. The book might’ve been placed there for that very reason: to get a picture of anyone with an interest in the company. The bigger guard was now looking at a monitor at the librarian’s station. Both security people turned to the spot where the volume had been shelved.

Okay, escape plans.

Toss a book in the opposite direction and when the guards moved toward it, just sprint out the front?

No, that wouldn’t work. Droon, Braxton and the BlackBridge op with the bleached blond hair had now joined in. They were in the lobby and headed for the public section of the library. Alarm showed in Braxton’s face. Droon and Blond were as focused as hunters closing in on an elk. They were accompanied by Ian Helms.

Shaw slipped toward the back wall, hidden by the rows upon rows of books. As he moved to the rear of the facility he noted that many of the titles were duplicated. Two, three, a dozen times. This added to the supposition that while one might do some legitimate research in this portion of the library it was also a trap.

BlackBridge security people would have come up with the tactic. Anyone with an interest in the company — investigators, competitors, those with a grudge or out for revenge — might find clues that led to the library. There would be minimal security to get inside. Then the interloper would ask some questions of the librarian or, like Shaw, type in a computer search, and he’d get tagged as a threat.

They would then use sophisticated facial recognition and other techniques to identify the person and decide what kind of risk they were, or — depending on what they browsed — that they were no threat at all. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find that BlackBridge had some DNA scanner on doorknobs and computer keypads. Certainly devices would be capturing fingerprints and retinal patterns.

The offenders would then leave, having conveniently deposited their names in the database that BlackBridge was sure to maintain.

Or, perhaps, the inquisitive customers would not leave at all.

Maybe Ashton had suspected this was a BlackBridge facility and was going to check it out but was killed before he had a chance. That might have been how his father came by the business card Shaw had found in the secret room on Alvarez Street.

The bigger guard was glancing back at Irena Braxton and pointing his finger directly at the chair in front of the computer where Shaw had been sitting a few minutes ago.

Shaw evaluated the enemy. Ian Helms appeared fit enough, but Shaw assessed that there was less than a twenty percent chance he’d want to get his hands dirty, especially with armed minders present. Braxton was a stocky, middle-aged woman. She might be ruthless but she wasn’t much of a physical threat unless she had a weapon in her many-hued shoulder bag.

In addition to the security guards, the other two threats were Ebbitt Droon and the bright-haired, sullen-faced minder, Blond. Droon, though of small stature, was wiry and strong and was likely carrying the same .40 pistol he’d threatened Shaw with previously. It was probably silenced so that the cries resulting from the bone-shattering impact would be louder than the report of the weapon itself.

Blond looked to be pure muscle and would likely also be armed.

On the other hand, Shaw had the benefit of witnesses: the four patrons, the three men and the woman. He doubted they were involved. This meant BlackBridge probably couldn’t take Shaw down the easy way — with a gunshot.

If he could dodge the hostiles and work his way to the front, as they sought him in the stacks, maybe he could make the sprint after all.

But then Shaw’s safety net vanished. The librarian approached the four potential witnesses and apparently asked them to leave, and to leave quickly. Which they did, concern on their faces. They had probably been told that there was some security issue. In this day and age, a brief warning was all the information people needed to evacuate. Thinking: terrorists, a crazy man with a gun, a bomb.

Eyes still on the front door, Shaw noted Ian Helms walk quickly outside; he wouldn’t want to be connected to whatever was going to happen.

Braxton stationed herself at the front door, while rodent-faced Droon spoke urgently to the two security men, who towered over him. They hurried to the central station where the librarian pointed to a large monitor, which was probably now in security camera mode. They’d be scanning the vids recorded in the past half hour and would soon know that he was still on the main floor.

Shaw noted that the elevator light went out. It had been shut down.

And what about a run to the stairs and then out the upper floor windows?

Shaw dismissed it as having only a twenty percent chance of success, at best. A leap from a second story isn’t impossible, given a landing zone of grass or trash, but Shaw had observed that the surfaces on all four sides of the building were sidewalk, asphalt or cobblestones. That would have meant a likely sprained ankle. The resulting pain wasn’t the problem — he’d suffered worse — but that injury would have limited his ability to flee and left him a sitting target for Droon and the others. And you had to land perfectly to avoid a broken bone, and that pain was debilitating. Besides, the windows were probably sealed, as they were on this floor.

A jump from the roof was not an option at all.

Keeping in the shadows against the back wall, he considered the front door once more. Five to ten percent. To reach it he’d have to go past Droon, Blond and the two armed guards. Maybe the librarian was armed too. And he supposed that that exit was now locked down.

The windows? He gave that escape route ten percent tops. The glass was thick, intruder-proof. A chair would take multiple blows and Droon and the others would be on him well before the pane shattered.

A 911 call?

Ashton certainly was unreasonably paranoid about many things, but Shaw recalled the note the man had left in the safe house:

Besides, even if the police officers who showed up were legit, Shaw would have to explain what his suspicions about the company were, and at this point he wasn’t able to expose BlackBridge — not without Gahl’s hard evidence.

He’d also have to answer for making an emergency call when there was no apparent threat of violence, and Braxton would deny everything. She’d report him as a dangerous trespasser.

He’d put a call to police/fire down as a last resort and try some other way to get out.

He decided that he would get to the fire exit. He put this at a seventy percent chance of success. Since the door opened onto that side street, he couldn’t run directly to his cycle; that would mean crossing in front of the library. The hostiles would see and simply hurry from the front door to intercept him.

No, once on the side street he would turn right, away from his Yamaha. A half block away he’d turn right again onto another narrow street he recalled from the map he’d studied earlier. He’d continue on this for three or four blocks, where he’d come to a park surrounded by businesses and restaurants. There he could vanish into crowds and continue north, then cut east and finally south and get to the motorbike without approaching the library.

Shaw was a good runner. Ashton had trained the children in the art of both sprinting and long-distance running, using as models the famed tribal runners, the Tarahumara in Mexico and the Sierra Madres.

He was sure he could out-sprint scrawny Droon and the musclebound Blond.

The other guards? The tall one couldn’t be a runner; he was too stocky. The slighter one? Maybe he was fast.

Shaw couldn’t dodge their bullets of course, and the big unknown factor was: Would they risk drawing and using their weapons in public? Probably.

Which is why the fire door escape offered only a seventy percent chance of success.

He looked through a gap in a row of insurance industry books. Braxton stood at the door to the lobby, scanning the first floor, arms crossed. Droon and Blond started walking toward the stacks on Shaw’s left, as he faced them. The security guards remained together and began the right-side flanking movement.

Shaw slipped to the fire door.

Shaw hoped it wasn’t like the emergency exits at airports; with those, pushing the bar resulted in a blaring alarm, but the lock didn’t unlatch for fifteen seconds — to give security a chance to approach and see who wanted to get out onto the tarmac.

He took a deep breath, readying himself for the sprint.

A firm push on the bar of the fire door.

The bar traveled all the way to the base of the device, without resistance. Nothing happened. There was no alarm, and the lock didn’t disengage.

The mechanism had been disabled.

Shaw fished the safe house keys from his pocket and tried to jimmy the lock. It didn’t work. He tried the slimmer motorcycle key. Nothing.

He slipped into a workstation and looked out from underneath. The net was closing. He could see legs and shoes. The four hunters would converge on him in minutes.

Time for the last resort. He glanced at a nearby wall and, in a crouch, hurried to it and knelt, directly underneath the fire alarm box.

His right hand snaked upward aiming for the alarm.

“Now, lookee here.” The voice behind him was singsongy, eerie because of its phony cheer. Ebbitt Droon continued, “We shut that little old alarm thing down too, don’tcha know? All in honor of you, Mr. Colter Shaw.”

10

Droon and Blond were now joined by the two security men.

Rising, Shaw looked over Blond, whose cold eyes were the shade of ebony, suggesting that the shocking yellow of his hair came not from genes but a bottle. Shaw had seen eyes like that before: he’d earned a reward of twenty thousand dollars by tracking down an escaped serial killer near Tulsa. Once in handcuffs the man had stared at Shaw with a look that said: If I ever escape again, you’re next on my list. Blond’s gaze was of the same species.

Droon said, “So here you are, Mr. Didn’t Listen to What I Told Him. And not more than a couple of weeks ago, wasn’t it? Heavens. You are something else.”

Shaw fired a focused gaze at Droon. The scrawny man — the gangs would describe him as a skel — wasn’t the one who had grappled with his father on Echo Ridge, combat that resulted in Ashton’s death, but he worked for the organization that was responsible and this made him as guilty as the killer, in Shaw’s mind.

Droon squinted back and his haughty impishness vanished. He looked away.

Shaw surveyed the area, checking left then right. His eyes made a leisurely circuit. Sizing up the guards and Blond.

Droon’s confidence returned. He repeated, “Coupla weeks. During which you had plentya time to muse over what I said, about you keeping out of our matters here. But didn’t take, looks like. How come?”

The upper Midwest patois was pronounced and what he brought to the sound was the tone of the unstable.

“Who’s getting into whose space, Droon? Answer me this. You were in Tacoma just a few days ago, setting fire to somebody’s perfectly nice SUV, just so your boss could rob me.”

The fire, which had engulfed a Nissan Pathfinder, had been initiated to distract Shaw, so that Irena Braxton could steal the phony map and the GPS-rigged copy of Walden. Shaw now feigned irritation. He needed to keep on life support the façade that the map and book weren’t a setup.

Droon said, “Oh, think I’ll plead my Fifth Amendment right on that one, son, don’tcha know?” He looked Shaw up and down. “Do say I’m sorry we didn’t get to go one-on-one. That would be a most enjoyable five minutes.” He glanced at Blond with a wink. The big man beside him said nothing, those dark marbles of eyes peering at Shaw. His arms, and they were substantial, dangled.

The two security guards remained back five or six feet.

Droon said to Blond, “The one I was telling you about. Doesn’t look so balls-out, does he? Told you.” A laugh. His bravado was fully recovered. Another sweep over Shaw. “Now. Listen here. I see what you’re up to, the way you’re calculating, looking ’round. Well, no cavalry’s riding out of the hills to save you. You’re solo, and there it is.

“Now, without givin’ too much away — always a good rule in this life, don’tcha know? Without givin’ too much away, we’re looking for a certain... thing, let’s call it. A thing that your daddy was looking for too. And before he went to meet his sweet Maker I think he found out where it was. Since you’re here, we’re suspecting you’ve got some sound thoughts on where it is.”

Irena Braxton approached them, slipping away her phone. He wondered whom she’d rung up so urgently — and triumphantly — about his capture.

Droon nodded to her and continued, “We’ve been visiting all sorts of fun and exciting places on Daddy’s map but we’re not finding a single pearl in the oyster. So we need some help-out, you know what I’m saying?”

Shaw frowned. “What exactly is it you’re looking for, Droon? Tell me and maybe I can help.”

Droon clicked his tongue. “For me to know and you to find out. Just fill in the details. Is there another map? Did Daddy find something else?”

“How can I tell you anything about the map since you stole it?”

“You made a copy, didn’t you? Sure you did, a buttoned-up boy like you. You’re on the treasure hunt too!”

He looked around the library. “You really think people don’t know I’m here?”

Irena Braxton joined in. “No,” she said. “Nobody knows you’re here. Now, Colter.” She was condescending in both tone of voice and her use of his given name, assuming the role of a mother or schoolteacher none too pleased with a youngster’s behavior. “Stop the nonsense. Of course you made a copy. And we have your history.” A nod at the computer terminal. “You searched Amos Gahl. So, no more games. We both know what’s going on here. You’ve got some other leads. A man like you, a professional tracker after all. What do you people say? ‘Hot on the scent.’ So, tell me about those notes in your father’s book. They’re codes. We know they are.”

Actually they were gibberish. But Shaw said, “The book you stole.” Summoning faux indignity.

She offered a perplexed frown. “We can’t make heads or tails of it. We need you to decipher them. Your father writes in riddles.”

“He’s not writing anything now,” Shaw said evenly.

Irritated, Braxton said, “As you’ve been informed, his death wasn’t our intent. And the person responsible is no longer of this earth.” She crossed her arms over her broad chest.

“That doesn’t bring him back.”

“This won’t do, Colter. We’ve still got a half-dozen locations on the map to check out and you’re going to help us. Amos Gahl stole something, and we have a right to it. He was our employee. You’re aiding and abetting that crime.”

“You got me. I confess.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Let’s call nine-one-one. I’ll give myself up.”

The headmistress smiled kindly. “Once we have it, all the rough stuff goes away. And we’re out of your life forever.”

Shaw was eyeing his opponents even more closely than the matronly Braxton was studying him.

Droon displayed the want-to-smack-it-off grin. Blond was expressionless. He had a habit of flexing his fists. He’d been a boxer. But then, noting scars, Shaw decided that since boxing wasn’t chic anymore, he’d probably be into bare-knuckle boxing or mixed martial arts. And when he killed — there was no doubt in Shaw’s mind that he was a murderer — he did so without conversation. It was a job to complete; he’d kill, collect his check and get home, turning the pits of his eyes to TV or computer porn.

The other two, the guards in the suits, were uneasy. They didn’t smack of military and had probably never seen combat. They were a threat, certainly, given their weapons, but they would be second-tier risks.

Braxton, as he’d decided before, was probably not a danger — unless that colorful purse of hers, macramé, of all things, held a Glock or Smith & Wesson.

The woman said to Droon, “We have that meeting tomorrow. I want to tell him something. Something concrete.” She nodded to Shaw.

The petite, wiry man said, “Oh, I’ll get something. He may not be in a talkative mood now. But that’s gonna change. I guarantee it.”

Braxton looked over Shaw. “Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going down to the basement and...”

Her voice faded as Shaw rubbed his eyes, shook his head slowly. He winced.

She gazed at him with curiosity, frowning.

“Not feeling all that great.”

Droon muttered, “Why’s that our concern, son, what you’re feeling, what you aren’t?”

Shaw closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.

“What’s he doing?” one of the security men asked, the bigger one.

“Watch him,” Braxton said.

“Let’s get him downstairs,” Droon said. He looked around. “This’s gone on for too long.” A glance at Blond. “You want a piece of him?”

The man with the bleached hair and the inky eyes said nothing but gave a brief nod.

Droon said to Braxton, “My man here gets good results.”

She said to the security guards, “We’ll be down there for an hour or two. No disturbances. Open the library back up. If anyone asks what happened, tell them it was a medical emergency. Nothing more than that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the bigger one. “We’ll make sure.”

Staring at Shaw, Droon asked no one, “The hell is he about?”

Shaw said, “Just... light... headed. Not feeling too well.” He sagged and rubbed his eyes again.

“Jesus,” Braxton said, angry. “Is he sick?”

“What’re you doing?” Droon snapped. “What’s he doing?”

“I’m dizzy.”

Which wasn’t an answer to the question. The true response was that Colter Shaw was engaging in the art of misdirection: keeping everyone’s attention focused on his eyes, shoulders, torso, arms.

Not on his left foot.

Which was presently easing up the wall to the electrical outlet near the floor.

A paper clip protruded from one slot in the outlet, another from the second slot, millimeters apart. He had taken them from the cubicle where he’d been just before he’d run to the wall. He had no intention of pulling the alarm, which he’d figured had been disabled too. What he wanted was to get to the wall and stick the paper clips, which he’d unfolded to triple their length, into the outlet.

Droon started toward him.

Still leaning against the wall, Shaw held up his hand. “Just give me a minute...”

Frowning, Droon paused.

Shaw pressed one paper clip into the other with the upper part of his left shoe.

The resulting spark and staccato bang, impressive, were like a firecracker detonating. Instantly the library went dark.

11

Droon and the security guards dropped into a crouch, looking around, not understanding what had happened.

“Shots!” the skinny man cried and ducked.

Shaw, protected from the current by his rubber soles, sprinted to the fire door.

“Wasn’t a shot, you idiot,” Braxton raged.

Shaw had taken a gamble — that the system overriding the latching mechanism of the emergency door would deactivate when power was lost.

Before Droon and the others could recover and pursue, Shaw grabbed a chair and then slammed into the exit bar with his hip. The door crashed open. He shoved it closed and wedged the chair back against the door handle, bracing it.

A shout. Shaw believed it was “Stop him!” He knew for sure it was Braxton’s voice.

Shaw was tempted to run straight to his cycle but he kept to his original plan, turning to the right, away from the Yamaha, and sprinted full-out for the cross street. He heard a crash. It would be the fire exit door being muscled open and the chair that barred it flying into the street.

“Shaw!” Droon was shouting.

Shaw sprinted harder. At the side street, Morrison Lane, he turned to the right again.

And learned he’d made a mistake. Morrison did end at a park, but it was filled with people, who’d be in the direct path of any shots.

Then Shaw noted ahead of him an alley, on his left. He knew from the map that it would lead him to several parking garages, which he could weave through, giving him the chance to shake Droon and Blond. Shaw could then emerge and circle around to his bike — and his weapon.

Thirty yards until the alley.

Twenty, fifteen...

A glance back. No pursuers in sight yet.

Ten.

Five.

Before he got to the alley, he stopped and ducked behind a dumpster. He looked back at Droon and Blond moving in his direction. They were alone. The black-suited security people would have continued along the street on which the library was located.

Okay, into the alley...

He sprinted around the corner.

And stopped fast.

A dead end.

The alley was completely blocked by a construction site wall, ten feet high, plywood. The paint job — dark blue — was relatively new; only a few graffitied obscenities and gang tags marred the surface. This explained why the barricade had not been depicted on the map he’d examined in the safe house.

Shaw didn’t bother to look for alternative forms of escape. The alley was doorless and windowless and though his father had taught him how to ascend walls of various heights and configurations, the technique for surmounting a ten-foot sheer surface was not part of the repertoire, not without rope or timber.

He’d no more than turned around when Droon and Blond stepped into the mouth of the alleyway.

Both were breathing hard and Blond winced with an apparent stitch in his side. He wasn’t happy for the exercise.

Droon might have had a pain somewhere but he was also smiling broadly, as if Shaw’s irritating attempt to escape had given the crazy man license to be particularly hearty — and creative — when it came to the torture that would follow.

12

Noting the absence of doors and windows opening onto the alley, Droon returned to the mouth and peered out. He looked up and down the street. His face revealed a hint of satisfaction, which meant no traffic, no pedestrians.

No witnesses.

He joined Blond once more. The two stood about twenty feet from Shaw. Neither was holding a weapon. They knew Shaw wasn’t armed; he’d been through the metal detector. Blond now drew a silenced pistol. The SIG Sauer — a big, expensive and accurate gun — was pointed at the ground.

Blond: “We need a car.”

Droon: “I’ll text the Men in Black. They’ll get one.”

“Soon. Out in the open here. Don’t like it.”

Droon sent the message. He was grinning. “But maybe he’ll cooperate ’fore they get here. And we’ll just leave him be.” He gestured toward Blond. They rolled the dumpster into the mouth of the alley, largely protecting them from view. Blond used only his left hand and kept the gun trained near Shaw. The safety was off, the finger outside the trigger guard. He knew what he was doing.

Shaw’s impression was that neither man reported to the other. Blond, a facilitator like Droon, would also work for Braxton.

“Now, son, let’s have ourselves a confab, don’tcha know?” He reached under his jacket and withdrew a knife from a camo scabbard. Shaw recognized it. Long, serrated. It was a SOG SEAL Team Elite fixed blade.

Looking around, Shaw judged angles and distances.

No good defensive solution presented itself, let alone an offensive one.

“Number one, that manuscript of your daddy’s you so kindly let me have down in Silicon Valley coupla weeks ago, that was just a waste of good tree, wasn’t it?”

Not for Colter Shaw, it wasn’t. The four-hundred-some-odd-page stack of notes, maps, drawings and articles that Ashton had assembled was ninety-nine percent misdirection. But it contained the code that had directed Shaw to Echo Ridge, where he found the map and the letter that led to the Alvarez Street safe house and started Shaw on his mission here.

“I wouldn’t know. You stole that from me too, didn’t you? I never had a chance to read it. Did it have anything interesting in it?”

Shaw wondered if a passerby, someone in a window or on a rooftop, seeing a man with a gun, would call the police.

Droon was pointing the wicked blade Shaw’s way. “How’d you find our library? Your daddy knew about it, did he?”

“Think he mentioned it.”

“And you remembered that? From all those years ago?”

Blond said nothing. He was a block of wood, if wood could be attentive, suspicious and deadly.

Shaw told Droon, “I have a good memory. I’m lucky that way.”

“Naw, naw. There’s someplace here. Your daddy’d have a buddy in town you’re staying with.” He looked him over closely. “Or maybe a safe house all his own. Yep, betcha.”

Somebody must have seen the pursuit and called 911.

But not a siren to be heard.

Not a ripple of flashing light to be seen.

Shaw was watching Blond. The big man’s face was completely placid, as if were he to have any emotion that might distract him, that would lower his defenses. The eyes scanned constantly, the coal-black dots complementing the swarthy face, jarring with the sunburst of yellow hair.

Droon was a wild card. Blond was a pro.

Blond asked, “Where should we take him? The basement?”

“Library’s compromised. I’d say the Tannery.”

Not, of course, a place where you morphed into a beach bum under UV rays.

Droon sent another text and read the reply. He told Blond: “Irena’ll meet us.”

Shaw leaned toward the scrawny man. “Will Helms be there too? I hope so.”

Droon was silent for a moment, unmoving, as if trying to process Shaw’s interest and intent. “He went back to the hotel.”

Not getting his hands dirty in sports like torture.

“But Irena’s lookin’ forward to our chat. As much as I am. Probably more. I do assure you, friend, that you will not like what’s going to happen.” He mimicked stabbing and twisting motions with the blade.

Shaw shrugged.

Droon thumbed the steel. “Everybody breaks, don’tcha know? Tell us what you’ve found out about Gahl and what he stole from us. You do that, and you’re free to go. Get yourself a gelato.”

“I don’t like it,” Blond said.

The rattish man glanced not toward his companion but toward Shaw.

“His eyes. He’s working something. Doesn’t look that bothered.”

Droon said, “Checking stuff out, is all. He does that. The first time we met... Remember that, Shaw? I was having a laugh with a harmless little firebomb and you were sizing me up — and down and sideways. Every whichaway.”

Blond muttered: “He’s planning a move.” He removed something from his inside jacket pocket. It appeared to be a thick rod of black metal, about a foot long. He said, “I cover him. You break something. Take him out of commission.” He offered the bludgeon to Droon.

The man took it and slipped the knife back in its sheath. He nodded to the gun that Blond was holding. “Why not?”

“You need him alive. Don’t want to risk a bleeder.”

A pro’s pro...

Droon seemed to agree. He hefted the rod and his expression reported that he liked the idea of breaking bones.

“Shaw, sorry t’have to do this. But, fact is, you just don’t look desperate. You know what I’m saying? My word, you are the least desperate-looking person I have ever seen on this earth. You’re not wasting time on worry; you’re running through a big list. What can I do with this, what can I do with that?”

Pretty much.

There’s not a lot an unarmed man can do in combat against two opponents when one of them is holding a gun and the other a bone-breaking rod with a knife on his belt.

With some cheer, Droon said, “Man up. Hold your hand out and let’s do this fast...” He cocked his head and gave an odd grin, which pinched his face. “Or, better idea, you can tell us what you know. And waltz around an icky bout of pain now followed by the main course — a trip to the Tannery with my knife.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Okay, hand out.”

Shaw held his right arm out.

“Nup. Other one. You may need to write down your ABCs for us, draw a pretty map, or some such.”

Shaw did as instructed.

He now incrementally shifted his balance, so that most of his weight was on his right leg. When Droon swung the bar, Shaw’s right hand would move in an arc and clamp down on the man’s wrist. The mass of the heavy rod meant the slim man’s arm would be driven toward the ground and he’d be off-kilter. Shaw would then spin him sideways, turning him into a shield against Blond’s weapon and executing a choke hold, rendering Droon largely nonresponsive.

Shaw’s right hand would dip into the jacket for the pistol he hoped the man still had on him and draw. He wouldn’t threaten Blond, tell him to drop the SIG. He’d just fire away. He’d aim for the gun arm and hand. He recalled where the safety was located on Droon’s Beretta.

If Droon didn’t have the gun, or if Shaw couldn’t get to it instantly, he’d rip the bar from Droon’s hand and fling it toward Blond’s face, then break a wrist and pull the knife.

He and his siblings had been taught the art of knife throwing by Ashton. It was hard to hit your target with the point, but you could count on your enemy to be distracted by a spiraling razor-sharp blade. Shaw would charge Blond when he ducked and try to wrestle the SIG from his hand.

If not, as a last resort, he’d vault the dumpster. The other men didn’t look like they could follow him in a leap. It would take some seconds to push the unit out of the way. He would turn back toward the library — the direction they would least expect him to run, and the one with the fewest innocents on the street.

Shaw plastered an expression of dread on his face as Droon stepped forward, hefting the metal. The facilitator’s gaze was one of pleasant anticipation.

Four feet away, three feet...

Playacting again, Shaw said, “Look, let’s work this out, can’t we? Money. You want money?”

Droon was drawing back with the bar.

“Wait.”

Droon was beaming. “Don’t you go whining, there, boy.”

Shaw was perfectly balanced, ready to move, awash with the exhilaration that comes just before combat. Irrational, mad, intoxicating.

Which is when Blond said, “Stop.”

Pausing, Droon turned.

“Get back. He’s going to move on you. We’ll do it this way.” He looked down at his pistol.

13

Droon frowned. He clearly didn’t see what Blond saw. “He’d take you,” the big man offered.

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, my friend.” But Droon stepped away from Shaw.

Blond said, “I’d risk a bullet. Top of the foot shouldn’t be much bleeding.”

Shaw sighed.

Droon walked back to Blond, who lifted the gun and pointed it at Shaw’s foot. Now, he really meant it when he said, “We can work something out. You want information. I’ll get you information.”

Blond aimed carefully.

Even if he survived the Tannery, what would a bullet wound do to his foot? Shattering the complex bones of the appendage would render the Restless Man disabled for a very long time.

Silencers do not, in fact, make a weapon completely mute. There’s a distinctive phhhht, followed by the click of the gun’s slide snapping back and then returning into position. Often you can hear the ring of the spent shell jittering on the floor or concrete or cobblestone, like what the men were standing on now.

Colter Shaw heard the first two of these, the muted gunshot and the click of the pistol as the gun reloaded for a second shot. He did not hear the dancing of the spent brass.

He did, however, hear another sound. The wet, smacking snap of a bullet hitting Blond’s forehead. The big man gave no facial reaction to the impact. He simply dropped.

Shaw crouched. The gunshot had come from above and behind him — the shooter was in the air, maybe on some scaffolding on the other side of the wooden construction fence.

Droon’s sense of survival kicked in. Not waiting to parse the situation he tore back to the street — and proving Shaw wrong — easily vaulted the dumpster. He landed and rolled, then righted himself and sprinted back toward the library.

Shaw immediately thought of the green Honda Accord, his shadow. Had the driver followed him here and been aiming at Shaw, but hit Blond by mistake? He leapt forward and rolled through the grimy alley, snatching up Blond’s SIG Sauer pistol.

Rising, in a crouch, Shaw glanced at Blond — he was dead — and drew back the slide of the SIG a quarter inch to make sure a round was chambered, something you always did with a weapon not your own.

He went prone behind the man’s body — the only cover in the alley — and trained the weapon on the plywood construction site wall.

A man’s voice called, “I’m not a hostile.” Then to Shaw’s surprise, the caller added, “Colter, I’m coming over the fence. Don’t shoot.”

He knows my name?

Something fell to the ground with a thud. It was a backpack, Oakland A’s.

This would have to be the man he’d seen at the coffee shop up the street from the safe house on Alvarez — the bearded man in the thigh-length black coat and stocking cap. He climbed over the fence and landed lithely on the cobblestones, his low combat boots dampening the force.

Colter Shaw gasped. Which was something he had not done for years — since a piton gave way and he dropped twenty feet on a half-mile-high rock face before the safety rope arrested the fall.

He was not sure which shocked him the most at the moment: That he’d been saved from the fate of being shot with only seconds to spare.

Or that the man who’d done the saving was his long-lost brother, Russell.

14

Russell said, “I understand. You have questions. I do too. Later. First, this.”

He was then on his phone, speaking in modulated yet commanding tones.

His brother was nearly identical in appearance to the man Shaw had last seen years ago at their father’s funeral. He’d had a beard then, though it was shorter than this, as was his hair. These were two reasons Shaw hadn’t recognized him near the safe house. Also, who the hell would expect the Reclusive One to be in San Francisco at the same time Shaw was?

The skin around the eyes was more weathered and ruddier. The beard was a uniform brown, without a touch of white or gray. The same was true for the tufts of straight hair protruding from the stocking cap.

One other difference between then and now: his eyes were presently cold, utterly inexpressive about the fact he’d just killed someone. Remorse, or even concern, let alone guilt, did not register.

“Help me here,” Russell said, nodding toward the dumpster. Shaw noted his brother’s voice was reminiscent of their father’s. He was startled by the near mimicry, though he supposed he shouldn’t be.

Shaw kept the muzzle of the SIG pointed away as he clicked the safety on and slipped the gun into his waistband — Russell glancing at him as he did so, apparently taking note that his younger brother had not forgotten their father’s endless lessons and drills about weapons.

They pushed the dumpster out of the mouth of the alley.

Shaw was wondering why his brother had wanted to move the big contraption; doing so would expose Blond’s body for any passerby to see. But the minute the dumpster was pushed aside and the alley was clear, a white van skidded to a stop in front of them and the side door slid open quickly.

Growing cautious, Shaw lifted the gun.

“They’re mine,” Russell said.

Three people climbed out.

Had the moment been less fraught — and confusing — Shaw might’ve smiled. He’d seen two of the trio earlier. One was Tricia, the woman in the street in front of the Alvarez Street safe house, and the man who’d attacked her — a verb Shaw put into mental quotation marks, since there’d been no assault at all, he now understood. Her screams for help had been merely a strategy to force Shaw outside and learn if he were a threat or not.

The broad-chested man had cleaned up considerably from his role as Homeless Man One. Russell introduced him as Ty. He glanced at Shaw without comment or other acknowledgment.

The third, whose name was Matt, was a slim, somber man of mixed race, with dark hair. His eyes scanned the alley and the street where the van was parked.

All three wore dark green jogging outfits and blue latex gloves.

A driver, whom Shaw could see only in silhouette, remained behind the wheel.

As Russell and Matt kept an eye on the side street, hands near their hips, Ty and Tricia — introduced now as Karin — stepped quickly to Blond’s corpse.

Shaw said, “There’re two other security people from the library. White. One heavy, one thin. Both armed. In dark suits, and—”

Karin said, “We know. They’re in the parking garage on Harrison, picking up wheels. We have two minutes before they’re here.”

The phony attacker unfurled a body bag and he and Karin got to work with Blond. Soon the body was inside, zipped up tight.

“One, two... lift,” the man said. The pair grunted simultaneously and hefted the weighty bag by the handles and began shuffling back to the van. Shaw thought about asking if they needed help but they didn’t seem to. They were both quite strong, and — it appeared — had done this before. They got the bag to the van and muscled it inside.

Matt reached into the van and removed a broom and a spray bottle. He returned to the site of the shooting and spritzed liquid onto the bloodstain. The bullet would have been a hollow point, designed to expand in the brain, causing instantaneous lethal damage but remaining within the skull. Exit wounds created the biggest leaks.

He slipped the bottle into his slacks pocket and swept dirt and gravel over where the body had lain. This had some sort of procedural precision to it and was done to confound a crime scene crew, though Shaw doubted any police would ever investigate. Certainly Droon and Braxton would not be calling 911 to report that the BlackBridge employee had met his end.

“Give her the SIG.”

Shaw withdrew the weapon and handed it to Karin grip first. She removed the magazine and the round in the chamber. She locked the slide back and then deposited the gun, the mag and the solo slug in a thick plastic bag. She put what seemed to be a damp cloth inside and sealed it up.

“My prints are on it,” Shaw told her.

A faint, amused squint. Meaning: They won’t be for long. Shaw wondered what the magic material was.

Broad Ty said, “Behind us. Hostiles.”

An SUV was speeding toward them. Shaw could not see through the glary windshield but he supposed that Droon had been picked up by the two black-suited security guards earlier than he’d originally anticipated. The vehicle skidded to a stop and all three got out. They were trotting forward, cautiously, hands inside their jackets.

Russell nodded to Matt, who replaced the broom with an H&K submachine gun, mounted with a silencer. The man pulled the slide to chamber a round. He aimed toward Droon, who, with the others, fanned out, seeking cover behind trashcans.

Russell said, “No personnel. Vehicle only.”

A muted chain saw of firing, and the slugs shredded the vehicle’s grill. He’d been careful to group the rounds so that they didn’t spill past the car and endanger anyone in the park.

Matt then joined the others, who were already in the van. Shaw slid the side door shut. He noted that it was particularly heavy and wondered if the panel was bulletproof. The vehicle’s tires squealed loudly as the male driver, lean and dark-complected, steered, skidding, into the side street, away from the alley and the smoking SUV, and accelerated fast. Shaw held on tight. Russell made his way to the front passenger seat. Shaw and those in the back were benched against the wall. Matt was looking over a tablet. “No activity. We’re good.”

Russell said, “First his bike. Then the safe house on Alvarez.”

I understand. You have questions...

An understatement, if ever there was one.

15

“How’d you place me at the library? From the air?”

There were so many questions to ask. Shaw wondered why he led with one of the least significant.

The two of them were alone in the safe house’s dining room, illuminated with an ethereal glow from the windows, as the sunlight knuckled away the pale pastel fog. They sat at a maple table, dinged and scraped, a wedge under one leg for stability.

Reading a text or email on his phone, Russell said absently, “Use drones some. Not in cities usually. FAA and Homeland Security’re problems.”

“That right?”

His older brother seemed to be debating what to say and what he shouldn’t. “Mostly, we had you on traffic and security cams. Algorithms. Handoffs.” A shrug. Meaning he didn’t want to — or legally couldn’t — be more specific.

Russell finished sending a message and rose and looked out the bay window in the front of the living room. Then he moved to the side windows and examined the view from there. It was limited. They admitted light only, as they faced a solid brick wall about ten feet away. Russell made a circuit to the back, where another bay overlooked the small garden, the alley and, beyond, an apartment that resembled Soviet-era housing. Shaw realized that there were no windows in any adjoining buildings — front, side or back — that faced the safe house. This would be one of the reasons why their father had selected it.

Shaw walked to the front window and peered outside. He could see quiet Alvarez Street and the burnt-down building across the way, the site of Tricia’s, well, Karin’s, supposed attack. He reflected that it was surprising no one had bought the lot and constructed residential property. The Mission was vastly popular and developers could make a killing. Then again, could was the operative word; San Francisco was a pressure cooker of a real estate market. You could go bust as fast as you could make ten-figure profits.

Shaw’s eyes moved from the building to the streets nearby. He was scanning both for BlackBridge ops, despite Russell’s associate’s reassurance they were clear, and for the Honda, his tail.

His brother returned to the table. The stocking cap was off and his dark hair wasn’t longish; it was long, period.

“Does one of your people drive a dark green Honda Accord?” Shaw asked.

“No. Why?”

“Somebody was tailing me. They placed me here.”

“No, not us, not part of my operation. You get the tag?”

“No.”

Silence descended and now it was time for explanations.

Russell said, “Back there. Why were you targeted?”

“They weren’t trying to kill me. They needed me alive. For the time being.”

“Could see that. Angle of his aim. Still.”

“They wanted information. I’ll show you.”

Shaw rose and from the kitchen gathered the material Ashton had left in the basement.

“This was in the secure room.”

“Did you know about it before?”

“The room? No. All I had was the address.” A glance around the living room. “But I knew what to look for. Remember, Ash taught us how to build one, make it blend in and dim the outside lights. He called it ‘the camo of murk.’”

Russell’s eyes narrowed, as a recollection arose — probably of the time Ashton had taught the three Shaw children how to build a disguised door for a hiding spot in the shed behind the cabin. He had told them, “Anybody can hide hinges and latches. The most important thing in fooling intruders is the dust. Dusty walls don’t move.” He taught them how to use rubber cement spray on the disguised door and surrounding panels and then shake a feather duster over the adhesive. Six-year-old Dorion had done the best job.

Russell said, “You missed the flash-bang. I got an alert.”

“Careless. But at that point I didn’t know anybody else had been here, and Ashton wasn’t the IED sort.”

“No. He wasn’t.”

“You know, some people use Ring or Nest for home security — not explosives.”

Unsmiling, Russell shrugged, then nodded to the material on the table. “Saw that when I was here back a couple of years. Didn’t mean anything to me. Assumed it was Ash’s but you know... his rambling, the paranoia.”

“Wouldn’t mean anything without this.” Shaw dug into his backpack and retrieved the letter their father had written about BlackBridge.

Russell read. “So BlackBridge’s a dirty-tricks outfit. Never come across them before.” Spoken in a tone that suggested he was more than familiar with such operations. “Where did this come from?” A nod at the letter.

Shaw hesitated. “He hid it on Echo Ridge.”

The location where Shaw had convinced himself Russell had murdered their father.

His brother gave no reaction. “In the alley, they were all BlackBridge?”

“Right. The library was a front.”

“I know that. When you went inside, I checked. Found out it wasn’t connected to the university. And offshores don’t own libraries. Not legitimate ones.”

His resources were probably as good as Mack’s. Most likely considerably better.

Russell looked over the letter once more. “Half of Ashton’s worries were smoke.”

“At least.”

“Not this.”

“No.”

Shaw handed him the dead-drop note, written to their father by a sympathetic employee of BlackBridge.

“‘It’? The evidence Ashton was talking about.”

“That’s right.” Shaw waved at the rest of the material he’d brought up from the basement. “Not like this, not supposition and suggestion. Whatever Gahl found is enough to get indictments.”

“Ash told us ‘Never go to Echo Ridge. Terrain’s not so kind.’ But it wasn’t any worse than anywhere else in the high country. Maybe he didn’t want us going there because it was a dead-drop for him and his circle.” Russell glanced at Shaw, who nodded his understanding of the spy term. His brother continued, “The letter was meant for one of his colleagues. How’d you find it?”

“Long story. Came across some clues that led me there.”

“Any of the friends still around?”

“Maybe, but most are dead or in hiding. BlackBridge is good at arranging accidents.”

Shaw didn’t tell his brother that he believed the letter had been left not for a colleague but for him. It was he who had been given, and who deciphered, the clues that led to Echo Ridge — and ultimately to the safe house. It wouldn’t have been impossible for a colleague of Ashton’s to deduce where the letter and map had been hidden. But why situate a dead-drop three hundred miles from San Francisco, where most of their father’s associates were?

“And BlackBridge, they’re behind Ash’s death?” Russell eyed Shaw closely. “At the funeral, the word was ‘accident.’ But back then I got the feeling you didn’t think so.”

Was there something in his brother’s tone? Did he or did he not know Shaw had silently accused him of murdering their father?

A chill flowed through him. “No, I didn’t.” He hesitated. “Some things didn’t add up. His shotgun, the Benelli, was nowhere near where he fell. And did you ever know him to lose his footing on rock, ice, snow, sand, gravel?” He was speaking quickly. Did he sound defensive as he threw out some of the reasons why he’d formulated the theory of patricide?

He felt Russell’s eyes on him still, and he chose to meet the man’s gaze. Shaw said, “A couple of weeks ago I learned for sure it was BlackBridge.” He explained what Ebbitt Droon had told him about the company’s operative coming to the Compound to “talk” with their father. “That is, torture him and get him to tell them where the evidence was hidden. Ashton tipped to the op and ambushed him. But he was no match for the BlackBridge man.”

“Hmm.”

Shaw wanted so badly to grab his brother by the shoulders and shout: I was young, you were secretive. I saw the fight you and Ash had. And you were evasive about where you were on the night he was killed. I was wrong. But was what I did reason enough for you to vanish from the family altogether? Do you know what that did to our mother, our sister?

To me...

But of course, Colter Shaw couldn’t ask that question because the answer might very well be what he feared: Because I can’t forgive you.

Before he could stop himself he said, “The Reclusive One.” Was it a subconscious jab at his brother’s disappearance?

“What?”

“Looks like your profession, whatever it is, it’s kept you true to your name.”

Russell squinted. “The nicknames. When we were kids. Reclusive. You were restless. Dorie was clever.”

“You’re using the house for some kind of operation. How did you know about it?”

“I was in San Francisco for some training, long time ago, and Ash said there was a house he used when he was in town. We met here. He gave me a key. My group has operations here from time to time, so I use it as a command post.”

“Group?”

Russell said nothing.

It would handle government security of some kind, he guessed. But out of the mainstream. The FBI, CIA, DoD, NSA and most of the rest of the alphabet soup of government entities couldn’t get away with shooting someone with a silenced pistol and making the body and accessories go away as if you were cleaning up a broken jar of pickles dropped on a kitchen tile floor.

Shaw said, “I looked at the paperwork in the secure room. It’s classified?”

“Not anymore, I guess.”

“That a problem?”

A pause. “Not really.”

“You speak Chinese, Russian?”

He didn’t answer, but obviously he did. Russell had had years to learn quite a few skills since Shaw had seen him last.

“We have a full security setup when we’re active but we closed the file on that op early this morning. All the cameras and mics were packed up and gone.”

Shaw could only laugh. “That was smooth. The assault outside. Karin and Ty.”

“When the device went off I got a message. The secure room was compromised. And we had to find out who.”

“You, Karin and Ty, you put the whole set together in minutes? The costumes, makeup.”

Russell lifted an eyebrow. “What we do. We train for things like that. Improvise. And they were nearby. She was wearing a body cam. She started to run your picture through our facial recognition database, but...” He shrugged. “I saw the image. After, I put together a surveillance package on you.”

Why? Shaw wondered.

A moment later, Russell asked, “So you’re here because of Ashton and BlackBridge? There’s no reward?”

Shaw must’ve reacted.

“You’re in the news some.”

So he was curious about me. But not curious enough to pick up the phone and give me or our mother a call.

“No reward. It’s all about BlackBridge.”

Russell’s look conveyed a question: But why?

Shaw: “I know what Ashton said. ‘Never pursue revenge. It goes against the grain of survivalism.’”

“Was thinking that, yes.”

“Well, this isn’t revenge. It’s finishing what he started. His mission.”

There was really nothing more to add.

16

Russell sent a text on his elaborate phone. It was a brand that Shaw had never seen before.

He regarded his brother’s luxurious beard. You’d think it would be a problem in clandestine work, if that’s what Russell engaged in. He’d be instantly recognizable. Maybe he was famous in his field, though, and he sported the facial hair as a trademark.

His brother’s phone hummed.

“Nothing in our system about Urban Improvement Plan or Amos Gahl,” said Russell. He put the phone away. “Basic information about BlackBridge but they’re not flagged with any red notices.”

Shaw imagined his brother had access to a database that was exceedingly robust.

“Appreciate you checking. This group of yours... can you tell me?”

“No.”

“Just ‘group’ with a lowercase ‘g.’”

“What we go by.” After a pause Russell asked, “You always use the Yamaha in your work?”

Shaw explained about living in the Winnebago but renting cars on his jobs to stay unobtrusive. Much of the rewards business is surveillance and questioning witnesses, and nothing blended better than a black Avis or Hertz (he picked that color because it gave the impression he was law enforcement, though he never said he was). “Still might rent a car here. Depends on the weather.”

Russell took a call. He listened for a moment. He said, “That’s right. Tell them it’s closed permanently.” He disconnected.

Silence drifted between them.

Shaw asked, “You have a family? Anyone in your life?”

“No. You?”

He thought of Victoria. “No.”

“I heard you were married.”

He thought of Margot. “No.”

Roiling silence. Russell checked his phone once more.

“Dorion’s good,” Shaw told him.

“I know. I saw her and the girls last month.”

“Saw them?” Shaw couldn’t keep the surprise from his voice.

“I saw them. They didn’t see me.”

“Last I heard, at the funeral, you were in L.A.”

“Based there. Near there.”

The chitchat depressed Shaw and appeared to bore Russell.

All these years they hadn’t seen each other, and this was the best they could do?

“Another question,” Shaw asked.

Russell lifted his eyebrow.

“Why the hell the Oakland A’s?” Shaw glanced at his brother’s backpack.

No response to the levity.

The children had laughed a lot growing up. With very few other friends their age, they relied on one another for amusement and diversion.

Another blister of silence, then Russell said, “Need to get my team out of here.”

“So you’re leaving.” Shaw had tried to keep his expression neutral. He wasn’t sure he was successful.

“Assignments we’re scheduled for. It’s a busy time.”

Spoken like a department store buyer planning for Christmas shopping season.

“Sure.”

Russell walked down to the cellar and returned a moment later with the duffel bag. The sun had burned away the last tatters of fog by now and the water bottles bent the light, pasting fracturing shapes of brilliant white on the plaster walls.

His silent message resonated like a siren through the pleasant, yellow room: Your fight with BlackBridge isn’t my fight, even if the company killed our father.

Shaw tipped his head. “Don’t need to say I appreciate you showing up when you did.”

Russell reciprocated the nod.

Shaw tried: “You want to give me a phone number?”

“We get randomly generated ones once a month.”

Shaw wrote down his number in one of his notebooks. He didn’t tear off the page and hand it to his brother. He held it up.

Russell looked for about ten seconds. He nodded.

Was it memorized, or discarded?

Shaw thought once more: Confess now. Tell him that I was wrong to accuse him of murder...

But no. This connection with his sibling might grow into something in the future — maybe Russell had indeed tucked the phone number away. But right here, right now, it was so very fragile. Gram for gram, the strands of a spider’s web are stronger than steel. But it takes no more than a gust of wind, not even one so fierce, or the transit of a broom in the hands of a busy housekeeper to bring the creature’s home, world and perhaps life to an abrupt end.

Shaw said, “It’s good to see you’re okay. I’ll tell Mary Dove.”

“Do that.” His brother walked to the door and let himself out.

17

Shaw fished in his backpack. He left his personal iPhone there and pulled out a burner. If he was concerned that his calls might be monitored, he used this one — an Android with some Linux kernel modifications for added encryption and security.

The call he was making now had nothing to do with BlackBridge or the UIP or Amos Gahl. Still, under the circumstances he wanted all the security he could get.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

“Colt.” The woman’s voice was, as always, low, steady. “You’re at the house?”

“That’s right. It’s a safe house. Ash had a hidey-hole in the basement. I found more relevant material. Haven’t made too much headway yet.”

There was a pause. His mother was in effect saying: What else? Because there was obviously something else.

“I wanted to let you know. I saw him today. Russell.”

“My God...” Mary Dove’s whisper tapered to silence. She was a woman to whom the word surprised could rarely be applied. “He’s all right?”

“Yes.” Shaw was sipping coffee, tamed with milk, slowly. It was very hot.

“That answers the big question. He’s alive.”

All these years the family had not known whether Russell was still of this earth.

“How’d that come about?”

He explained that his older brother too had known about the house on Alvarez and used it occasionally.

“Yes, that’s right. Ash mentioned he’d seen Russell in San Francisco once or twice.”

“He’s with the government, it looks like. CIA sort of operation, though not them.”

“What does he do for them?”

“Intelligence of some sort.”

He did not tell his mother about Blond’s fate.

Her lack of response might have been a hum of skepticism about his answer.

“It’s called the group. Not a formal name.” Silence again. Then: “He seemed... okay. Good at his job.”

“And he’s—”

“Gone. An assignment. Couldn’t tell me what.”

A very rare sigh. “That boy... I never knew exactly what was going on in his mind. Remember? He’d spend days in the woods? And not part of Ash’s training. I’d wake up, get the coffee and biscuits going and find that he’d left before first light, with rations and his weapon.”

Her resonant voice was painted with discontent and for a moment Shaw regretted telling her about crossing paths with his brother. Maybe her hopes had been up momentarily that he’d return for a visit. “Well. He’s who he is. But... did he say why he vanished, all these years?”

In honesty Colter Shaw could tell his mother, “No, he didn’t.” Because Russell had not spoken of his profound disappointment that the younger brother had silently accused the older of murder.

“It’s going well, the search?”

“Good.”

“A mother’s got to say, ‘Be careful.’”

Shaw chuckled.

Then Mary Dove said, “Glad you told me about your brother. Imagine you were debating letting me know. But it was the right thing.” Then her tone changed and she said, “Anybody else you want to say hey to?”

“Matter of fact...”

“Hold on.”

18

“Hi.” Victoria Lesston’s voice was also low, and there was a particular tone about it. Shaw tried to think of what the analogy to describe it might be. Then it occurred to him: a musical instrument. In particular, he refined: a cello, rich and resonant. In the middle strings range only.

“Tacoma was interesting. Got robbed and I’m responsible for a Nissan Pathfinder burning down to the rims. No injuries.”

“Never dull with you, is it, Colt? What’d they get?”

“I’ll go into it later. In person.”

She laughed airily. “Sooner, not later, I hope.”

Shaw pictured her deep-gray eyes and her ringlets of hair, which morphed from pale brunette to dark blond according to the whim of the sun or moon.

“The big news: my brother surfaced.”

“Really? You said you weren’t even sure he was alive.”

“He’s doing some kind of clandestine work. Think he needed to stay undercover.”

“Like those KGB agents.”

“Maybe something like that.”

“When you’re finished, will he come down here with you to see your mother?”

Thinking no, he said, “Maybe.”

Her voice lowered. “How are you dealing with it?”

Not a question he was prepared to respond to. “Still surprised.” He asked how she was feeling.

The beat told him she recognized, and respected, the deflection. “All good here. Your mother is pretty much amazing.”

He had met Victoria a week ago, on a mission he’d had to the wilds of Washington State. The incident had started as a reward assignment but had soon turned into an undercover operation, which he’d undertaken, in part, to save Victoria from an enigmatic organization that might or might not have been a dangerous cult.

She’d been injured in a fall from a cliff’s edge into a lake. A former Delta Force officer, Victoria was in fit shape and while the fall might have killed another person, she survived with only minor harm. Shaw had suggested she might want to return to the Compound where his mother, a general practitioner MD, as well as a psychiatrist, could help her with physical therapy.

Shaw had another reason to ask her to the homestead, and she apparently had a similar motive in accepting his invitation; he remembered their lengthy kiss outside her bedroom the night before he left on the drive that ultimately led him here to the safe house.

“Where are you?”

“The Western Hemisphere. Maybe.”

Even with the encryption, he was reluctant to be too specific.

Never assume your conversations are private...

“You’re a stitch, Colter. Your mother sometimes calls you ‘Colt.’ Which do you like?”

Their courtship, if you could call it that, had been intense (a knife fight — between them — had figured) but they really hadn’t known each other all that long.

“Either’s good.”

“Any excitement yet?”

“Not so much.”

“Keep me posted on that.”

“Most definitely.”

“How do you like your pheasant?” Victoria asked.

“Never been asked that before.” This was true. He considered. “Probably rarer than weller.”

“I agree. Mary Dove and I’re cooking tonight. A bird she got last season.”

“You hunt?”

“I have but the last time I got pheasant was a couple years ago.”

“What’s your scattergun?” He was thinking of his father’s wonderful Benelli Pacific Flyway, with a chrome receiver. An elegant weapon.

“I don’t have one.”

“What’d you borrow?”

“I didn’t use a shotgun,” she said.

“I don’t think you can legally use a rifle on birds. Not in California.”

“It wasn’t in California and I didn’t use a rifle.”

“You didn’t use a rifle?”

“Colter, how many times are you going to keep asking me questions I’ve already answered.”

“Well, what did you use?”

“My Glock. The seventeen.”

“In the air?”

“Of course, you can’t shoot a bird on the ground. And it wasn’t quick-draw Annie Oakley or anything like that. I was already holding the weapon.”

“How many...” His voice faded.

“Rounds did I use, you were going to ask?”

He’d stifled the insulting question, but yes, that was what he was going to ask. Her Glock would hold seventeen rounds and you could probably get off three a second, aiming carefully.

Then he noticed she was silent once again.

Finally Victoria said, “It was one.”

He reminded himself not to ask: A single shot?

Shaw was talented with sidearms but he didn’t think he could hit a flying bird with either of his pistols and never with one shot.

“I mean, I aimed. I wasn’t firing from the hip. Anyway, I agree: rare is best. Pheasant’s lean. Dries out when you cook it too long. When are you back?”

“Hope it’s not more than a couple of days.”

“You need any help, I’m feeling better.”

Victoria ran her own security consulting firm, based out of Southern California.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You know, Colt, there are two kinds of people in the world.”

Living/dead. Blond/brunette. Short/tall. Liberal/Conservative. Sexy/not so much. He did not, of course, say this, but replied with: “Okay?”

“Those who keep something in mind when they say they’re going to keep something in mind. And those who have no intention of keeping something in mind when they say they’re keeping something in mind.”

“I’m the first type.”

“I had a feeling you were. But I liked hearing you say so.”

They made conversation for ten minutes or so, then he was eager to get on the trail of the BlackBridge evidence. He told her he’d better go. “I’ll call you soon.”

“You know, Colt, there are two types of people in the world...”

He laughed and said goodbye and they disconnected.

The two of them were similar in many ways. She was nearly as itinerant as he was, and as much of a calculated risk-taker. They shared a wry humor and an intolerance for bullying and stupidity. They’d certainly developed a rapport in Washington State and it didn’t hurt that not only had he saved her life, but that she’d saved his.

And that kiss...

The relationship had a way to progress on that slippery, serpentine road on which matters of the heart pace before certain things could be said and asked.

This was fine with him. He was in no hurry. Velocity in love, like velocity on the motocross course, had in the past occasionally gotten Colter Shaw into trouble.

Best for restless men to take things slowly.

19

Shaw told himself: assess.

He was in the kitchen of the safe house. He’d supplemented Mack’s research on the two leads as to where Amos Gahl might have hidden the BlackBridge evidence. Morton Nadler, who owned the house in Burlingame that his father had been interested in, was retired. He had spent most of his working life as a management-level employee at San Francisco airport. What was his connection to Gahl? Would he have left Nadler the evidence to keep safe? Or was Nadler the source for incriminating information about BlackBridge, maybe because of his connection to the airlines and private aircraft?

The other spot, the Haywood Brothers Warehouse in the Embarcadero, had survived the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. It had not been a functioning warehouse for some years, which did not bode well for Shaw’s mission. Probably the building had been emptied out and if Gahl had hidden anything there the evidence would likely be in some other facility or, more likely, a landfill. Because the building was for sale, there was a representative on-site, from whom Shaw might learn something.

His Android hummed. He pressed answer and before he could say a word there came: “You into coincidences, Colt?”

The voice was a grumbling baritone. Caller ID told Shaw who the person on the other end was but even if it hadn’t he would’ve known with the first syllable. Teddy Bruin was a former Marine who — along with his wife, former soldier Velma — ran the business side of Shaw’s reward operation. They lived beside Shaw’s property in Florida, though he’d seen them just the other day; they were on a road trip out West and had spent a few days at the Compound with Shaw, Victoria and Mary Dove.

A call from the Bruins meant one of two things: He had failed to collect a reward check, which usually happened because the offeror turned out to be on hard times.

Or they’d just learned of an offer.

“Coincidences?” Shaw queried.

“Three weeks ago, give or take, that offer in Silicon Valley, that girl? Father worried about her?”

“Right.”

The reward that sent him deep into the world of the video gaming industry. A missing student had been kidnapped, it appeared, by a perp who was acting out a violent video game in real life.

“Well, we got a replay.” Teddy chuckled. A joke on the game motif, Shaw noted. Teddy looked and sounded scary but he had quite the sense of humor.

“Hi, Colter.” A woman’s voice, as melodious as her husband’s was raw.

“Velma. Where are you two?”

“Reno. I have a roll of quarters and I’m not coming home until I win back all the gas we spent on the drive here.”

The couple owned a Winnebago that was the size of Shaw’s — a thirty-footer. It would take a string of jackpots to make that miracle happen.

“She’s convinced that the odds’re better with the slots in Reno than Vegas. You know, to attract tourists. Second-city kinda thing.”

Shaw wouldn’t know. He didn’t gamble.

His eyes on his father’s documents, he said, “Replay?”

Teddy: “Single mom this time, not dad. But another missing daughter. Mother’s a widow. And the girl’s older than the one a couple weeks ago. Twenty-two or — three.”

Not only did the Bruins themselves scan social media and law enforcement posts for announcements of rewards, but they supervised a software program that sniffed out offers too. Velma had named it Algo after algorithm. “Where?”

“Why we’re a-calling. San Francisco.”

“Got a lot on the platter here.”

“I know, Colt,” Teddy said. “But a couple things. I’ll just throw ’em out there. The reward? It’s for seventeen fifty.”

“You mean seventeen thousand, five hundred.”

“No, I mean seventeen hundred and fifty buckaroos.”

Very low for a missing child. And the low sum meant the mother had scraped together every penny she could.

“The other thing?”

“The offer,” Velma told him. “Listen to what she posted online. I’m quoting: ‘Please, please, please help!!!’ A bunch of exclamations here. ‘Tessy, love of my life, has gone missing in San Francisco. I’m sick with worry over her. I’m offering a Reward. I’ve started a GoFundMe page to raise more. Please.’ More exclamation points. Then a picture of her. Sweet kid.”

Shaw’s experience was that parents rarely posted a shot of demonic-looking children. “That kind of money, nobody’ll go to the trouble to look for her.”

“Exactly.”

Shaw looked at his father’s map with the eighteen red Xs on it.

“When was it posted?”

“Couple days ago.”

Before BlackBridge knew he was in town, so it wouldn’t be a trap.

He looked at the notes in such delicate and perfect script:

After a moment he said, “Send me the offer.”

They said goodbyes and a few seconds later his phone dinged with Maria Vasquez’s reward notice. He read through it once. Shaw started to read it once more and put the mobile down. He thought: Why bother? Either you’re going to do it or you’re not.

Followed by a bunch of exclamation points.

20

One question was answered.

Maria Vasquez, mother of the missing woman, lived in the heart of the TL.

This explained the low sum she was offering for information about her daughter. Very few residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin would be able to come up with a big enough reward to snag anyone’s attention.

The neighborhood, in the central part of the city, was infamous. Seedy, dilapidated, graffitied, marred by trash-filled streets and sidewalks, the TL was home to street people, those working in the sex trade — traffickers among them — gangs and those involved in all phases of drug enterprises: manufacturers, transporters, sellers and, of course, consumers. The SFPD has defined more than six hundred “plots,” small geographic areas of the city, for the purpose of analyzing crime stats. Seven of the ten most dangerous plots in San Francisco were in the TL.

Shaw hadn’t been here for years. Back then the place was filled with single-room occupancy hotels and small shabby apartments, adult bookshops, massage parlors, bodegas, Asian and Filipino grocery stores, tobacco/vaping places, cell phone card and wig shops and nail salons.

Much of that atmosphere persisted to this day but Shaw now saw a few nods toward improvement. Outreach programs operated out of storefronts, helping runaways, trafficking victims, addicts. There was even some gentrification, albeit modest. Across the street from Maria Vasquez’s walk-up was a ten-story apartment building that offered studio and one-bedroom units, which the poster described, with an inexplicable hyphen, as de-luxe. There was a Starbucks wannabe on the ground floor, along with an art gallery and a wine bar. Changing... but not changed: the windows on the first two floors of most buildings along this block were covered with thick iron security bars.

He chained his bike and helmet to a lamppost then walked to the door of the apartment building. He pressed the intercom and, when a woman answered, he said, “I called earlier. About the reward you posted.”

“You’re—”

“Colter.”

The door buzzer sounded and he stepped inside and climbed to the third floor, smelling fresh paint, garlic and pot. He knocked on the door of 3C. He heard the creak of footsteps and she answered.

Maria Vasquez looked him over cautiously, eyeing the leather jacket and jeans and boots.

In most assignments, when meeting with offerors he wanted them to see him as a professional — part lawyer, part detective, part psychologist. His garb would be sport coat, laundered jeans, polished shoes, dress shirt in dark shades. Not an option now, not with the Yamaha.

She’d have to deal with the reward-seeker as biker.

Something about his face, perhaps, put her at ease, though. “Come in. Please, come in.”

Vasquez, in her forties, was about five eight or nine, a pretty face and trim figure. Her dark features suggested blood from Mexico.

The one-bedroom apartment was nicer than he’d expected. The furniture was cheap but the walls had been painted recently — and were hung with bold floral posters and a half-dozen fine-arts photographs, reminiscent of the work of the famous West Coast photographers of the mid-twentieth century: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham.

She asked if he wanted anything to drink and he declined. They sat and the woman held her hands to her face. “Oh, it has been a terrible year. Such a terrible year. My husband, he died without insurance, and I lost my job. I was a receptionist at a tech company.” A cynical grimace. “Big start-up! Oh, we were going to all be millionaires. They promised everything. Stock bonuses. All that. It went under. I’ve been doing that since then.” She waved toward a pink waitress’s uniform. “We lost our house. And the bank owns it and still they’re suing us! I never wanted a big house in the first place. But Eduardo...” She shook her head, as if exhausted at replaying the car crash of her last twelve months. “And now this.”

Tears formed, and she found a tissue in a battered, cracked beige purse with an old-style clasp on top. She blotted her eyes.

From a pocket in his leather jacket, Shaw extracted one of the 5-by-7-inch notebooks in which he jotted information during interviews like this. His handwriting, like his father’s, was extremely small and precise. The notebooks were not ruled but each line of his script was perfectly horizontal.

He used a Delta Titanio Galassia fountain pen. The barrel was black and it featured three orange rings toward the nib. Occasionally an offeror or a witness might glance at the pen, which was not inexpensive, as if using it were pretentious or showy. But this wasn’t the case. The pen was largely practical; filling page after page of notes in Shaw’s minuscule script was tough on the hand and the gold-tipped fountain pen eased words onto the paper smoothly and with less effort than the best ballpoint. It was also a pleasure to use the fine device.

Someone once asked him why he didn’t just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

Shaw said, “Let me tell you who I am and what I do. You can look at me like a private investigator that you don’t pay until I’m successful. I’ll try to find your daughter. If I do that, you pay me your reward. You don’t have to pay for any expenses.”

A reward is, under the law, a unilateral contract. The offer is made but there is no enforceable bargain until one party — the reward-seeker — successfully completes the job. Then an enforceable contract comes into existence.

Vasquez nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Two days ago Tessy was gone when I got home from my shift. She was supposed to be at work at six but she didn’t show up. Her phone doesn’t ring. It just goes to voice mail. She didn’t show up for work that night. I called her friends... Nobody’s heard from her.”

“Was she going someplace before work?”

“I don’t know. She played guitar with friends some.”

He asked if she’d talked to the police.

At this she grew silent for a moment. “Not yet. I heard with someone who’s older, the police won’t be interested for a few days.”

They might be interested. But what she was really saying was: mother and daughter were undocumented and the cops might report them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That was a big concern he’d found in the immigrant community; while some police departments might not report them, by federal law they were required to.

“Did you have a fight? Did she run off?” The most common cause of missing youngsters.

“Oh, no, no. We are very close. We never fight. She’s the love of my life!”

Parental kidnappings were the most common form of abduction. Even with children above the age of majority, like Tessy, a mother or father might coerce the youngster to come live with him or her. More and more were living at home until later in life nowadays. Vasquez was a widow but the general principle could apply.

“Have you had a partner or someone you’re seeing who might’ve had an interest in her?”

She gave a laugh. “I work twelve-hour days, two shifts. That is the last thing on my mind.”

“So you think someone forced her to come with them.”

She sat forward, her hands shredding the tissue. “Here’s what I’m worried about, sir. Tessy had some drug problems a few years ago. She fought it and won. She goes to meetings. She’s a good girl. But there was this man, older. They dated. Mostly she went out with him because he supplied her. After she got sober, her sponsor told her she couldn’t see him anymore. She broke up with him. He got furious. He stalked her.”

“When?”

“Six months ago.”

“What’s his name?”

“All I know is Roman. I think it’s a nickname.”

“Address?”

Vasquez shook her head.

“Arrests?”

“Probably. I think so.”

“Describe him.”

“He’s about thirty, no, probably more. Not tall, slim. Has a shaved head. Or he did. He’s white but has a darker skin. There’s a tattoo of a cross on his neck. An old-fashioned cross. Like the ancient times.”

Shaw took a few moments to jot these notes. Then he asked, “Where does she work?”

“In a folk music club, in North Beach.”

Shaw got the name.

“Every time I look at those, I want to cry.” She waved at the photographs on the wall.

“She took those? She’s talented.”

A nod. “She studied, art school. And she can sing too. She has a nice voice.”

She looked out the window. Her jaw was tight. “I wasn’t there for her like I should have been. So expensive here... Working two jobs, both Eduardo and me. We weren’t there... She got into trouble.” She touched a finger to a lower lid and examined it — for running mascara. Of which there were some streaks. She grimaced and, taking a compact mirror from her purse, examined the damage and blotted some of the stain away.

Her hands were delicate, her skin smooth. She must have been in her early twenties when the girl was born.

Shaw asked questions he’d developed over the years in cases involving missing young people and jotted down her answers in his distinctive handwriting.

Friends’ names and numbers. There was no find-my-phone app on her mobile. The phone was in her name, so her mother couldn’t have the phone company ping it; only the police could and even then only with a warrant. Tessy had one of her mother’s credit cards, but she hadn’t used it.

“When was your last contact?”

“A phone call. She left a message. I couldn’t pick up.” Her lip trembled. She’d be thinking that maybe it was the last chance she would have had to speak to her daughter.

“Play it.”

She did. They heard a light, cheerful voice chatting briefly and saying she’d call later. She was outdoors, on a noisy street.

Shaw asked, “Can you send it to me?”

She didn’t understand. “Send...?”

He explained, “You can save a voice mail as a WAV file.”

“A wave?”

“W-A-V. It’s a sound-recording format. You can save it on your phone. Google it. It’s easy to do. Then email the recording to me.” He gave her his address: ColterShawReward@gmail.com.

She said she would.

“I’d like to see her room.”

“She doesn’t have one. She sleeps here — on the pullout.”

“Any personal effects? Papers, computer?”

She waved around the sparsely furnished place. “Most everything of ours is in storage in Mountain View. Where we had the house that was foreclosed.”

“I think I have enough to get started. I’ll need a photo. A better one than you posted online.”

She didn’t have any hard copies but she uploaded one to his phone.

The young woman, with long dark hair, was striking. High cheekbones, broad lips and big eyes, deep brown.

“Has anyone else called about the reward?”

“A couple of people.” Her voice lowered. “They were just assholes. They didn’t know anything. Just making stuff up about her being here or there so they could get the money.”

“That happens. All right. I have other projects going on. But I’ll do what I can.”

She shook his hand warmly. “Thank you, Mr. Shaw.”

“Colter.”

“Thank you. Bless you.” She touched the silver crucifix at her throat. Then said brightly, “It’s more now.”

“More?”

“What I can offer. I looked at the GoFundMe page an hour ago. People’ve contributed another $234. And I’m praying that there’ll be more.”

Shaw said, “Let’s find her first. We’ll worry about that later.”

21

Never be blunt when subtle will do...

Colter Shaw was adept at guile. He liked outthinking the criminals he was pursuing, liked strategizing against the geography, the elements, the forces that conspired to keep him from finding a missing person.

But sometimes you just had to throw clever to the wind and go for it.

Blunt...

When he stepped out onto the pungent street in front of Maria Vasquez’s apartment he caught a glimpse of the green Honda.

In one sense, there was some subtlety involved, in spotting the car. The driver had not parked directly on Vasquez’s street, but around the corner. As he scanned around him he saw the Honda in a reflection — a newly washed plate-glass window was at the apex of a triangle, which also included Shaw and the green car.

Since there was no direct view of Shaw’s bike from the car, that meant that the driver wasn’t now in the vehicle but was one of dozens of people on the street, lying low and surveilling him. That population included shoppers, folks delivering packages and envelopes and restaurant provisions, shopkeepers hard at work in the never-ending job of scrubbing the sidewalks, some women and men who were probably sex workers, a few pushers hawking their wares, and their consumers, those just standing around, talking to others in person or on cell phones and a few talking exclusively, and with animation, to themselves.

Only one way to find out who.

Shaw made sure his holster was snug and turned in the direction of the cross street walking quickly toward the side street where the green Honda was parked.

He flushed the spy in one second.

Dressed in black jeans and a gray windbreaker, head covered with a black baseball cap, the spy — about two hundred feet from Shaw — turned instantly and ran back toward the car. It began as a fast gait, then a sprint, though he paused briefly to speak to two large workers, in T-shirts, one with a shock of curly red hair, the other with a black, unwashed ponytail. Colleagues? Shaw didn’t see how. They were unloading supplies from a battered cab truck, double-parked at the intersection around the corner of which sat the green Honda.

The driver continued sprinting, Shaw was closing in. He’d catch up before the man could leap into the car and speed off.

Or that would have happened, if not for one problem.

As he approached the delivery truck, the two men stepped directly into his path and held out hands. Curly growled, “Not so fucking fast, asshole.”

Shaw tried to dodge but Ponytail jogged in front and grabbed him by the arm.

“Out of my way.” Shaw lowered his center of gravity and got ready to grapple him to the ground.

Curly took the other arm and they pushed Shaw up against the truck. He was pinned.

“Going to break more bones? Lemme ask. That make you feel like a man?”

Ponytail, who bathed as infrequently as he shampooed, growled, “Me and him oughta break a few of yours. See how you like it.”

“Okay. Take it easy.” Since Shaw had no idea what was going on, he only offered those generic words. He relaxed a bit and when Ponytail did too, Shaw yanked his right arm free and got the man’s meaty wrist in a come-along grip, dropping him to his knees.

“Fuck no.” Curly casually slugged Shaw in the belly, and he too went down.

Shaw caught his breath, slowly rose and backed away.

He heard, from around the corner, a car start and tires cry.

Hell...

The men started toward him. Shaw backed up farther and lifted his left hand toward them, palm up, and with his right, pulled his jacket open and sweater up, revealing the gun.

“Fuck, you a cop?”

“Look, man... We didn’t know.”

The nausea faded. He snapped, “What’d he say to you?”

“Who?”

“The man I was chasing.”

The workers regarded each other.

“You got it wrong, mister,” Curly said.

“Wasn’t no man. Was a girl.”

“And hot, you ask me.”

He spent several hours in his search for Tessy Vasquez.

The music club where she worked didn’t serve lunch but Shaw was able to talk to the manager, a skinny young man in clothes two sizes too big and with a droopy Vietnam War — era mustache. He wore a stocking cap not unlike Russell’s, but in green. He couldn’t provide any helpful information and had never seen anyone fitting Roman’s description interacting with Tessy, who was a waitress and occasional performer at the club.

“I’ve asked the staff if they know anything about where she is,” the guy said, “and nobody does. She just didn’t show up for work. That’s when I called her mother.”

Outside the place, Shaw called the friends whose names Maria Vasquez had given him — at least those whose numbers he could find. Three answered but no one had any knowledge of where Tessy might be. One young woman, though, did tell him that Tessy was really into busking — street singing — lately. She’d mentioned she’d worried about some of the “pervs” in the parks and the squares she sang in, but she could provide nothing specific.

Shaw biked back to the safe house.

The place, which had seemed alive thanks to Russell’s presence, was now stark. A newly formed fog didn’t help much.

June gloom...

Shaw hung his leather jacket on a rack near the front door and tugged off his sweater, draping it on the rack too. The house was warm. He walked into the kitchen and pulled out a bag of ground Honduran coffee from the cupboard. He brewed a pot through a filter and poured a cup for himself. He hadn’t brought the milk from the Winnebago, but he found some powdered Carnation in the refrigerator. Apparently his brother liked coffee the same way he did.

And where was the man now?

On a private jet to Singapore?

In a bunker in Utah?

Tracking down a terrorist in Houston?

The survivalist skills that Ashton had taught the family were a double-edged weapon. They could keep you safe from intrusion. But they could also be used to get close to your enemies, eliminate them and then evade detection as you escaped.

He recalled the matter-of-fact expression in his brother’s eyes after he’d killed Blond in the alley. The only concerns were practical — getting his team there efficiently and quickly for the cleanup and getting away.

He sat on the couch and stretched back, boots out in front of him.

Thinking of the driver of the green Honda.

A girl...

And hot...

But who the hell was she? What was her mission?

One thing about her was clear. She was smart about keeping him from catching her: pitching the nails into his path. Smart too in using the two Neanderthals on the street in the TL. They’d said she’d been panicked and begged them to help; the man chasing her was an abusive ex, who’d put her in the hospital a dozen times. He’d broken her arm twice.

“You believed her?” Shaw had muttered.

Curly had shrugged. “’Course. She was like, yeah, you know, beautiful.”

Ah, beauty. A lie detector that Shaw had heard of before.

They knew nothing else and had not seen the Honda’s tag, so he’d left them to their labors. He’d made a brief canvass of the street where she’d parked the Honda. No one had noticed the woman or the car — at least that was everyone’s story.

He wondered how her presence here would play out.

In the absence of fact, any theories were speculation, and trying to formulate any deductions was a waste of time.

His eyes strayed to something on the shelf nearby: the dark statuette of the eagle he’d seen earlier.

Colt, no. Don’t! It’s not our job...

22

“Are they crazy? They’re going to die.”

Russell is peering up the side of a steep snow-covered mountain, as he speaks these words to his younger brother. Colter is fourteen, his brother twenty. Russell is visiting his family in the Compound over semester break.

They are in snowshoes and dressed for the January cold, which is cold indeed at this elevation. They’ve been looking, unsuccessfully, for bighorn sheep, whose season is the latest of any game in the state. You can hunt them well into February.

Colter follows his brother’s gaze to watch two people snowshoeing across a steep slope. One is in navy-blue overalls and stocking cap, the other wears lavender with a white head covering. The build of the latter tells Colter it is a woman. They are hiking from one side of the angular hillside to the other, about a hundred yards below the crest.

The land here is Shaw property but this particular location is about three miles from a public preserve. Ashton posted much of the land but generally doesn’t make an issue out of trespassing unless there are firearms involved, which might include hunters or — as Colter learned just last year in an armed standoff — an ominous intruder, overly interested in Ashton Shaw and his property.

His concern at the moment is not their legal right to be here, though. It’s that the couple — apparently on a photographic safari — are at serious risk.

The pair is trudging through the heart of an avalanche field. They’ve come from Fresno or Bakersfield or Sacramento to record in pixels the soaring whitewashed mountains after several days of impressive blizzarding.

“City slickers,” Russell mutters, using a term Colter understands though he’s never heard it. Russell has spent two years away from the monastery of the Compound and has been exposed to many, many things that Colter cannot even imagine, new words and expressions among them.

“Don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Got to warn them.”

A hissing wind lifts powder from the crest and continues down the slope. Upwind, the couple couldn’t hear them from where they stood.

“We have to go up, get closer.”

Russell nods. “But stay out of that field. It’s a land mine.”

In his survivalist training sessions, Ashton spent hours lecturing the children about avalanches. And Colter sees instantly how dangerous these conditions are. Snow is at its least stable immediately after a storm, as now. And it’s particularly erratic on north faces, like this. The south sides of mountains get more sun, which melts and packs the fall. North side snow is hoar, as in hoarfrost, unpacked, loose and slippery as grains of sugar. Another factor: any incline above thirty degrees makes a mountain avalanche prone, and this slope is easily that.

Colter and Russell trek as quickly as one can on snowshoes and burdened by their rifles and backpacks.

The couple pauses, balancing on the tricky angle, and shoots some pictures that are surely magnificent and that also might represent their last view of this planet.

Of fatalities in avalanches, seventy percent are due to suffocation, thirty to blunt trauma. Few snowslides are exclusively of fine powder; most torrents are filled with sharp slabs of gray dirty pack and crushing ice like blocks of concrete.

The boys are about a hundred yards below and twenty behind the couple. They are breathless from the altitude and from the effort of climbing quickly uphill.

Finally Russell gestures his younger brother back and continues forward about ten feet, stopping on a high drift. He’s right on the edge of the field, though how safe he and Colter truly are is unknown. Snow travels in any direction snow wants to travel. It can even go uphill.

Cupping his hands to his mouth, Russell shouts, “Hikers! It’s dangerous! Avalanche!”

The wind — which happens to be another risk factor — whips his words back behind him; they didn’t hear.

Both boys are now shouting.

No response. The man points into the distance and they take more pictures.

Russell starts uphill once more and edges into the field, telling his younger brother, “Stay back.”

He stops and calls again, “It’s dangerous! Get back! The way you came!”

A high rocky path led the couple to the mountainside. Once on it again they’d be safe.

Colter notices tiny white rivulets rolling down the hill from where the trespassers stand. Like white-furred animals scurrying from danger. The bundles travel fast and they travel far.

He wonders about using his rifle to fire into a tree and get their attention. Ashton lectured that most experts don’t believe that sounds, even a big-caliber rifle shot, will start an avalanche, but he isn’t going to take the chance. Also, indicating your location by firing a weapon is usually useless, thanks to echoing.

Russell moves closer yet to the couple. “It’s dangerous!”

“Avalanche!” Colter shouts and waves his arms.

Finally the two look down and wave. “What?” The man’s shout carries easily on the wind.

“Avalanche. You’re in an avalanche field!”

The man and woman look at each other. He lifts his arms and shakes his head broadly. Meaning he doesn’t hear. They plod along the difficult slope in the ungainly shoes.

Russell hurries back to his brother and they climb onto a rocky ledge on the border of the field. “We’ll go up through the trees.”

Just as the brothers start uphill, Colter hears a faint scream. The woman has lost her balance. Her legs go out from under her and she begins sliding on her back, arms splaying to stop the descent. There’s a technique to slow yourself using snowshoes but she doesn’t know it or, in panic, has forgotten.

Here it comes, Colter thinks.

But there is no avalanche.

The woman slides downward amid a cloud of powder and comes to a stop about even with the brothers, thirty, forty feet away from them. She struggles upright in the thigh-high powder, anchored by her wide mesh shoes. She checks her camera and other gear. She touches her pocket, shouting uphill. “Phone’s okay!” She actually laughs.

Her friend gives a thumbs-up.

The woman is now in hearing range and Russell explains the danger. “You have to get out of there now! Both of you! It’s an avalanche field. Dangerous!”

“Avalanche?”

“Now!” Colter calls. He thought her tumble would start one. People are the number-one cause of avalanches: skiers, snowmobilers and snowshoers, who go carelessly where they should not. But so far the massive ledge holds.

Russell says, “Get over here, off the slope! Unhook the snowshoes and pull them out. And your friend, he needs to go back to the trees, the path you were on. He needs to turn around!”

She looks up and waves to him and then points to his left, meaning to return to the path. He gives yet another raised arm of incomprehension.

She pulls her gloves off and digs out her phone. She makes a call. Colter sees him answer.

“Brad, honey, these boys say it’s an avalanche area. Go back to the trees. That path we were on before we started across the hill.”

Russell says, “Tell him to move very slowly. Really.”

She relays this information, puts the phone away and bends down to unhook her shoes. She gets one undone and, after a struggle, yanks it out.

Can’t she go any faster?

Uphill, Colter sees, the man starts toward the safety of the path.

He glances down and sees the trickles of snow accelerating away from beneath his feet.

More and more of them.

He panics and charges forward, slamming the oval snowshoes hard on the surface.

“No!” Colter and his brother shout simultaneously.

Just as the man scrambles out of the field, literally diving to safety, a shelf of snow breaks away and cascades downward. It is only ten feet wide or so and shallow but avalanches are a chain reaction. Colter knows this will trigger a much bigger fall.

The woman evidently hears the whoosh too and looks up at the wall sliding toward her. A brief scream. She is still forty feet from the safety of the high ground where the boys are. She’s trapped in place by the remaining snowshoe. She bends down into the froth and frantically tries to undo the strap.

Colter assesses:

Odds that the whole field will give way? Eighty percent.

Survival of somebody who has no deep-snow training? Five percent.

Somebody who had some training? Unknown but better than that.

He drops his backpack and discards his weapons.

Russell is staring at his younger brother.

“Colt, no. Don’t! It’s not our job.”

No time for discussion. Colter leaps off the ridge and runs quickly across the field, in the ungainly lope of a snowshoe jogger.

Just as he reaches her, the rest of the mountain cuts loose, a vast swath of snow, fifty or sixty yards wide, dropping, tumbling, picking up speed. Tides like this can easily exceed a hundred miles an hour.

As he pops the quick release of his shoes and steps out of them he sees her panicked face, tears streaming. She has large dark eyes, an upturned nose and lipstick, or sunscreen, that matches her violet snowsuit.

“Your other shoe?”

“What’s going to happen?” she cries.

“Shoe?” he snaps.

“Undone.” She straightens up and tries to pull it out. She blinks as she looks him over, maybe realizing for the first time how young he is.

“Leave the shoe!” Colter orders.

He lifts her camera off and tosses it away. In the turbulence of an avalanche, solid objects, even small ones, can maim and kill.

A glance crestward. They have thirty seconds.

“Listen to me. When it hits, don’t fight it. Pretend you’re swimming, kick with your arms and legs. Swim with it, like you’re in the surf. Got that?”

No answer.

“Have you got it?” he insists.

“Yes, swimming.”

Twenty seconds till the tide slams into them.

“When you feel yourself slowing, curl up and take a deep breath, as deep as you can. And with one hand clear a space around your mouth for air. Lift the other arm up as high as you can, so the searchers know where you are. Make a big space around your mouth. There’ll be enough air for a half hour.”

“I’m scared!”

Ten seconds. The wave is six feet high, now seven, now eight and accelerating. It’s trailed by dust swirling and thick as forest fire smoke.

“You’ll do fine. Swim, hand to mouth, arm up.”

It’s a slough avalanche — more loose snow than slabs. If they died it would be by suffocation, not a blow to the head. Colter doesn’t know which is worse. Suffocation probably.

She stares at the wave. Colter turns her around so that she’s facing downhill.

Five seconds.

Colter shuffles away so their bodies don’t become bludgeons.

“Swim!”

She does. He does too and takes a deep breath.

In the time it takes to fill his lungs, the world turns black.

23

Mary Dove finishes tending to the wounds on her fourteen-year-old son’s neck and cheek.

While most of the avalanche was slough — granular hoar snow — Colter didn’t escape a chunk of sharp ice. Or possibly a rock.

The damage isn’t severe.

They are in her office, which is a typical physician’s, except for the walls, which are — as everything in the cabin — made of hand-hewn logs.

“Anywhere else?” she asks.

“No,” Colter says. “Just a little sore.”

“How far did it sweep you?”

“Football field,” Colter says, though he doesn’t have much frame of reference, only pictures in newspapers or magazines. He’s never seen a game. In a home with no TV and no internet, one doesn’t have a chance to view broadcast spectator sports, and the nearest teams are those of the colleges and high schools around Fresno. When the family went there, they always had errands to run or acquaintances and family to see. None of the children had much inclination anyway. If parents aren’t excited about sports, their youngsters probably won’t be either.

Mary Dove executes some range-of-motion tests, arms and legs, which her son seems to pass. More or less.

He goes into his bathroom and takes a very hot shower, minding the rule to keep the bandages dry. He towels off, dresses and lies down on his blanket, which is brown and woven in a Native American design.

He closes his eyes briefly, picturing the torrent of snow enwrapping him.

He followed the same advice he’d given the woman.

When he slowed, though, he realized that extending his arm to signal his whereabouts would do no good. He was too far under the surface, so he’d pulled his arm back, and taken another deep breath and, using both hands, cleared a large air reservoir in front of his face.

Finally he stopped sliding and he wasted no time in attempting to free himself, kneeing and punching and elbowing. The space he opened up before him was completely black, and he was disoriented as to where the surface might be. He recalled his father’s lesson and made small snowballs and dropped them near his face and hands to see where they landed, so he could tell which way was down.

Never question gravity...

Then came the digging — scooping the snow down, packing it and then pushing upward with his feet and arms. Inches at a time.

Finally there was slight illumination over his head and he broke through, sucking in the air, which as in all snowfields gave off a sweet electrical scent.

He climbed out and rolled onto the snow surface, catching his breath. He called to his brother, who was probing the field nearby with a long branch. He dropped it and ran to Colter to help him up.

“The woman?” Colter asked. “She all right?”

His brother pointed.

The man who’d been with her, Brad, was digging her out of a deep pile of snow near the avalanche’s toe — the end. She’d been swept much farther than he’d been. Colter saw that she had survived and was helping to dig herself out. She was unhurt.

Colter struggled to his feet, with Russell helping. His brother looked up the mountain and said, “The whole pack didn’t come down. There’s more that’s unstable, a lot more. We should get them out and into the trees.”

They walked to the couple.

“We spotted her arm,” Russell said. “That’s how we found where she was. You told her that.”

Shaw nodded, and the foursome made their way to safety.

Now, in the Compound’s rustic cabin, Colter is finally warm once more, inner core warm, and in only slight pain. He rises from his bed and walks into the living room where Russell and Dorion are sitting near a soothing dance of flames in the stacked-stone fireplace. They are both reading. When Colter enters the room, Dorion, eleven, leaps up and hugs him. He tells himself to give no reaction to the pain and he doesn’t. She regards the bandage with still eyes, which means she’s troubled.

“It’s all right. A scratch.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Hey,” Russell says and goes back to his book.

“Hey.”

Dorion sits once more. “You know what the biggest one in the world was?”

She’d be talking about old-time locomotives, which, for some reason, she is passionate about.

“No clue.”

“Union Pacific’s Big Boy. Come on, Colter, look!” She shows him the book. According to the caption, the engine depicted was Locomotive Number 4014, and was an impressive piece of machinery. It had a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement, which, she explained to him a few years ago, was the number of locomotive wheels from front to back; it’s how the machines are classified.

“Biggest expansion engine there ever was. It weighed more than a million pounds. It’s in a museum in Los Angeles. I want to see it someday.”

“We’ll make sure that happens.”

“You’ll come too, Russell?” she asks.

“Sure.” The older brother doesn’t look up from his book. Colter wonders what he’s reading. Russell has been into spy thrillers lately.

Mary Dove is in the kitchen, preparing dinner, while Ashton is in his study, the door closed, where he disappeared an hour ago after learning that his sons were all right.

Colter stretches and happens to glance to the mantel, where he sees a trio of framed pictures — two artist renderings and one photograph. The picture to the left is a sketch of a woman who has some Native American features. A handsome face, black hair parted severely in the middle, the sides dangling to her shoulders. She is Marie Aioe Dorion, the nation’s first mountain woman. She was of Métis heritage, indigenous people in the central part of the United States and southern Canada. Widowed early, Dorion survived in the wilderness for months with two small children, in hostile territory.

The center picture is a reproduction of a painting of a handsome, rugged man wearing leather and a raccoon hat that encompasses much of his head. He is John Colter, an explorer with the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The photograph on the right is of Osborne Russell, the explorer, politician and judge, who was in part responsible for founding the Oregon Territory. He is the most recent of the three, surviving into the late 1800s; hence the photographic image.

These three individuals were the sources for the Shaw children’s names.

The study door opens and Ashton walks into the living room. He has changed a lot, Colter thinks, in the years since the family left the Bay Area for the Compound — to escape some threats that troubled him greatly but that he hasn’t discussed much with the children, other than to warn them to be on the lookout for strangers on the Compound. His hair has gone mostly white and is often, like now, mussed. He wears jeans, a white shirt with pearl buttons — Mary Dove made it — and a leather vest. On his feet, tactical boots, the sort a soldier might wear.

He is carrying a cardboard box.

“Everyone,” he says.

The three children look up. Mary Dove remains in the kitchen. The word was uttered in his speaking-to-the-children tone.

When they settle he looks at them one by one. Finally he says, “Never deny the power of ritual. Do you know what I mean?”

“Like in Harry Potter? The ceremonies at Hogwarts?” Dorie is a fan, to put it mildly.

“Exactly, Button.”

Colter is thinking of the Lord of the Rings trilogy but he doesn’t say anything.

Russell seems to be thinking of nothing in response. He just watches his father and the box he is holding.

“A general rule of survivalism is: ‘Never risk yourself for a stranger.’ But that’s not what I believe. What’s the good of learning our skills if we can’t put them to use and help somebody else?”

The three of them — his children, his students — sit motionless on couch or chair, looking up at the intense eyes of their father.

“Colter saved somebody’s life today. And I thought we should have a ritual.”

The boy’s face burns and he’s sure it turns red. Dorion’s, on the other hand, blossoms with happiness as she looks Colter’s way. He gives her a smile. Russell now gazes at the fireplace, where the flames had turned from energetic blue to subdued orange.

Ashton reaches into the box and extracts a small statuette of an eagle in flight. He hands it to Colter, who takes it. It’s heavy, metal. He’s worried that his father will expect him to make a speech. At fourteen he has rappelled down hundred-foot cliffs and borrowed a motorcycle from a friend in White Sulfur Springs, the nearest town, and hit ninety miles an hour on a road of imperfect asphalt. He has also pulled a pistol on an intruder in the Compound — that incident last year — and sent him on his way.

He would do any of those again rather than make a speech, even to this small audience.

“But he couldn’t have done that without the love and support of his brother and sister. So our ritual includes both of you too.” Ashton reaches into the box once more and takes out a statuette of a fox and hands it to Dorion. Her eyes ignite with pleasure. The only thing she likes more than locomotives is animals.

“And here’s yours.” He hands Russell a bear statuette. His brother says nothing but stares at the bronze, weighs it in his hand.

Shaw suddenly has a snap of understanding. The statues echo the nicknames of the children. Dorie is the clever one. Russell the reclusive one. And Colter the restless one.

Then the ritual is over — no speeches required — and Mary Dove announces that it’s time to eat.

After dinner — which would have been bighorn sheep but is now elk — Colter takes the statuette into his bedroom and sets it on a shelf beside his copies of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Ray Bradbury’s short stories and a half-dozen law books, which for some reason he enjoys reading.

Now, years later, in the kitchen of the Alvarez Street safe house, Colter Shaw was looking at the same statue as intently as he was the night of the avalanche.

He recalled that when he left home to attend the University of Michigan and was packing his duffel bag for the trip he had noticed that the eagle statue was nowhere in his room.

Yet here it was now.

There was only one possible explanation for its appearance. His father had taken it with him when he’d come to the safe house. It was, maybe, a sentimental reminder of his son, something that Ash wanted to have with him. To make him feel close to home.

A perfectly reasonable, heartwarming explanation.

But Shaw believed there was another reason, a more important one, that Ashton had brought the eagle to San Francisco. It was the clearest message yet that Father wanted Colter, of all his children, to carry on his mission.

24

Shaw’s phone pinged with the sound of an incoming text. It was from his private investigator, in Washington, D.C., to whom he’d sent an encrypted email before his bike ride from the Tenderloin back here.

Charlotte “Mack” McKenzie might have been a model. With steely gray eyes, she was an even six feet tall, her complexion pale and her brown hair long. This was a problem for her in street work. Like a spy, PIs benefit from being inconspicuous. And no one could ever say that of Mack McKenzie. Her days of tailing people, though, were long past. She had put together a security and investigative operation that hummed, and she had a talented crew of staff and contractors to do the sweat labor.

Mack was a woman after Shaw’s own heart. In keeping with Shaw’s approach to life, little was ever zero percent or one hundred percent with her, even if she wasn’t quite as quick to assign a precise number as he was.

She finished with:

He replied, thanking her, and looked over the notes he’d taken at Maria Vasquez’s apartment, a decent place in a modest building surrounded by the complex ’hood of the TL. He was concerned about the young woman, the talented singer and photographer.

For-profit kidnapping? Near zero percent.

The odds she’d been murdered and the body disposed of? Not great. Ten percent. That wasn’t as common as cable TV would have us believe.

And what about her being in a meth house somewhere, strung out, after having relapsed? Thirty percent. She seemed to be making good on a fresh start. But add Roman into this equation and that boosted the number to sixty percent.

He suddenly saw his BlackBridge mission as a distraction from the reward job, which was, after all, his main profession. But he’d make it work. He’d do whatever was necessary to find the girl, or at least get some answer for her mother.

It just then happened that his phone hummed, and he took a call from one of Tessy’s friends. The young woman couldn’t provide any information about the missing girl. But in response to his question about Roman said, “Is he involved? Shit.”

“I don’t know. Her mother thinks it’s possible.”

“He’s trouble. I think he’s crazy. I mean, really, like a psychopath.”

Shaw asked if she had any specific information on him.

“No, I never really knew him. He didn’t want Tessy hanging with us. He wanted her all to himself. He’s dangerous, mister. He hangs with some really bad people. You know, gangs, that kind of thing. I heard he killed somebody. Jesus, I hope she didn’t go back to him.”

He tried the people he’d called earlier and, when none of them answered, left new messages. This was all he could do on the reward assignment for the time being, until Mack got back to him with his earlier request.

Back to the scavenger hunt of Amos Gahl’s stolen evidence.

Glancing at his phone, he checked the tracker app. The chipped copy of Walden was still at the library.

He wondered what Helms, Braxton and Droon would be thinking about Blond’s death. Was the mysterious bearded shooter a friend of Shaw’s or was the incident merely a coincidence? Had Blond, who reeked of hired killer, been gunned down in retaliation for some earlier offense?

Shaw sat back, stared at the ceiling and silently asked Amos Gahl: What did you find?

And where is your courier bag hidden?

It was time to look at the two leads that might hold the answers to those questions: the house on Camino in Burlingame and the warehouse in the Embarcadero.

The coffee cup froze halfway to Shaw’s mouth when he heard the doorbell ring.

He turned fast, hand near his pistol. He stood.

A voice called, “Me. I’m coming in.”

The front door opened and Russell stepped inside. Still in the black hat, still in the dark, thigh-length coat, the tactical boots.

He walked into the kitchen.

“There’s an issue.” He took off his coat, revealing a green T-shirt. The muscles of his arms were pronounced. His jeans were held up by dark red suspenders. He sat. “Man in the alley?”

“Droon or the other one?”

“The dead one. Karin was handling disposal. She found a note, handwritten. In his pocket.”

His brother displayed a photo on his phone.

Russell remained stone-faced as his brother looked over the screen, then sat back.

Shaw said, “Does the ‘All’ and the arrow mean what I think it does?”

A nod. “It’s a kill order. A hit on someone with the initials SP and his family. Or her family.”

Shaw noticed that it had been folded many times, like the notes Amos Gahl’s colleague had left for their father.

“Dead-drop,” Shaw said.

“Some messages you don’t send electronically no matter how good the encryption. We do it too.”

Used dead-drops?

Or issued kill orders?

“Did Karin find his ID? Anything else?”

“Not yet. Running prints and DNA and facial recognition. May get it right away, may take a while. May never find out. People in this line of work do a lot of track covering.”

Shaw asked, “With Blond gone, will they still go ahead with the hit?”

“Who?”

“The guy in the alley. My nic for him.”

“Have to assume it’s still a go. Handwritten KO, dead-drop, the arrow on the whole family. They’ll assume that Blond got disappeared for some reason unrelated to this. That woman Braxton’ll just find another triggerman.”

“Thanks for telling me. But I can’t go to the police. Ashton didn’t trust them.”

“Wouldn’t want them anyway.”

Of course. The note would be accompanied by a question: How did Shaw come by it? And the disquieting answer to that inquiry was: because his brother had shot someone in the head.

Russell looked at his watch; it was an analog model, brushed steel or titanium. “Two days until they die. We need to figure out a plan.”

Had Shaw heard right? “‘We’? You don’t want to get involved in this, Russell.”

His older brother clearly wasn’t happy. “I do not, that’s true. But what this’s become, it isn’t your thing. It’s not a reward job, Colt. You can’t do it on your own.” He stalked up the stairs. “I’ve got reports to file. We’ll talk strategy in the morning.”