The Final Twist
- Автор: Дивер Джеффри
- Серия: Colter Shaw #3
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: G.P. Putnam's Sons
- ISBN: 978-0-525-53913-1
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Final Twist». Краткое содержание книги:
Following the enigmatic clues his father left behind, Shaw plays cat and mouse with the company’s sadistic enforcers, as he speeds from one gritty neighborhood in the City by the Bay to another. Suddenly, the job takes on a frightening urgency: Only by finding the courier bag can he expose the company and stop the murder of an entire family — slated to die in forty-eight hours.
With the help of an unexpected figure from his past, and with the enforcers closing the net, Shaw narrows in on the truth — and learns that the courier bag contains something unexpected: a secret that could only be described as catastrophic.
“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.