The Final Twist

34

Sausalito is a quaint bay- and cliffside suburb north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The demographics are artists and craftspeople and, given the views, the fine scone and muffin bakeries, and the high-speed ferries to downtown, well-heeled professionals.

In Russell’s SUV the brothers were presently rocking through the winding and hilly streets, which were lined with dense foliage.

The inimitable Karin had tracked down La Fleur — first name Earnest, spelled the nontraditional way — and gotten his address but, interestingly, the group’s databases offered little other information about him.

The man was off the grid. No phone, no social media. Amos Gahl’s mother had said that La Fleur had been an employee of BlackBridge but even that assertion, which Shaw had every reason to believe, was not available for confirmation. Shaw suspected his identity had been scrubbed to vapor.

Learning this about La Fleur, Shaw reflected how his father had come up with perhaps the best form of scrubbing in existence — never entrusting a single fact about himself, his work, his family, to the digital world.

“That’s it,” Russell said, nodding ahead of them to a cul-de-sac.

The narrow street, on which there were no sidewalks, was bounded by old-growth trees and interwoven tangles of foliage. In this part of town were few houses and the ones they’d passed were fronted with short picket fences through which grew thick greenery. La Fleur’s property was different. It was protected by a solid pressure-treated stockade fence, eight feet tall, aged to gray. The slats topped with strands of barbed wire.

Russell parked and they walked to the gate, which was locked.

“No intercom,” he said.

Shaw knelt and looked through a foot-round hole that had been cut in the wood for mail. All he could see was more foliage.

Russell took a small flat object from his pocket — like a black metal fingernail file — and, after examining the crack between gate and fence, slipped the latch in with a swift move and pushed the gate open. They stepped inside and looked over La Fleur’s house. The rambling residence, an architectural mess in Cape Cod gray, was on a steep hillside, with stilts holding it aloft, forty feet above the rocks below. This entire area was subject to tremors of varying magnitude and Shaw would not have lived in a stilt house here for any money, whatever the view.

On the other hand, the building was at least three-quarters of a century old and had clearly survived various past shakings, perhaps damaged but suffering no mortal injury.

The men started toward the structure down a serpentine path, which was, curiously, interrupted every ten feet or so with oil drums filled with concrete. They were a version of what you saw in front of embassies and government security agencies overseas, to prevent suicide bombers from plowing their explosive-filled Toyota pickups straight into the front door.

“Hmm,” Russell said.

As they approached the last drum, Shaw suddenly tilted his head. Russell too.

Both men dropped fast, taking cover behind one barricade.

Nothing is more distinctive than the creaking sound of a homemade bow being drawn.

The arrow hissed over their heads and lodged in a tree to the left, fired by a figure standing just inside the front door of the house. They couldn’t see clearly but his garment appeared to be a variation on nighttime camo — various shades of blue and black. He wore dark brown leather gloves.

The arrow was a crude projectile, also homemade, but it still traveled at typical arrow velocity — around two hundred feet per second — and embedded itself neatly in a eucalyptus, which is not a soft wood.

“That’s a warning shot. Get the hell out of here!” The voice was raspy and manic.

“Mr. La Fleur,” Shaw called. “We just want to talk!”

“You’re trespassing!”

Russelclass="underline" “You don’t have an intercom.”

Shaw said, “And you don’t have a phone either.”

“How the fuck did you know that?”

Another arrow banged into the steel drum to their right.

The men surveyed the field of fire. Shaw estimated: fifteen feet to the bottom step, then three up to the narrow porch, three more to the door.

Shaw tried to calculate the odds. A crossbow, which takes some effort and time to cock and fit with a bolt, would have been no problem. They could easily cover the ground in the time it took to reload. But a recursive bow like this? One could fire about eight arrows a minute, if the archer were aiming carefully.

A skilled archer, that is. It didn’t seem that La Fleur was. He dropped another arrow as he tried to notch it. Then he got it ready to launch. Shaw noted that his hands were trembling.

“Sir, we’re not a threat!” Russell called. “We’d just like to talk to you about—”

Clunk...