The Never Game

In the years he’d worked with her Mack had registered not a single breath of surprise at anything he asked her to do.

“That’s it.” He thought back to the note that Eugene Young had written to his father:

Braxton is alive!

“May have been an attempted hit on her fifteen years ago.”

This introduced the unsettling thought that his father was a member of a murderous conspiracy too.

“Anything else?”

He thought about asking for the address of one Maddie Poole, a grinder girl who lived somewhere in or around Los Angeles.

“No. That’ll do it.”

Click, click, click. Then silence and a different tap — that of a computer keyboard.

“Got him on facial recognition.”

“Go ahead.”

“Ebbitt Droon.” She spelled it for him.

Shaw said, “That’s a name, for you.”

“I’m sending you a picture.”

Shaw reviewed the image on his screen. A twenty-something version of Rodent.

“That’s him.”

Droon?

“His story?”

Mack said, “Virtually no internet presence but enough fragments that tell me he — or, more likely, some IT security pro — scrubs his identity off the ’net regularly. He missed a pic I found in an old magazine article about vets. It was a JPEG of the page, not digitized, so a bot would miss it. Boyhood in upper Midwest, military — Army Rangers — then discharged. Honorable. Vanished from public records. I sent the one-twenty to someone. They’ll keep looking.”

An enhanced facial recognition search — based on one hundred and twenty facial points, double the usual. That “someone” would probably mean a security agency of some sort.

Mack said, “Now. Second question. Braxton, female. Nothing. That wasn’t much to go on. I can keep searching. I’ll need people.”

“Do it. Take what you need from the business account.”

“’K.”

They disconnected.

Colter Shaw stretched back on the banquette. Another sip of Sapporo.

What’s this all about?

From a stack of old bills — in which he kept his important documents — he extracted the note Professor Eugene Young had sent his father. He’d hidden it in a resealed power company envelope.

Ash:

I’m afraid I have to tell you Braxton is alive! Maybe headed north. Be CAREFUL. I’ve explained to everybody that inside the envelope is the key to where you’ve hidden everything.

I put it in 22-R, 3rd Floor.

We’ll make this work, Ash. God bless.

— Eugene

The two Cal professors, his father and Eugene Young, were involved in something obviously dangerous, along with “everybody,” whoever they might be. Rodent’s side wanted Ashton alive; Braxton’s people wanted him — presumably the others too — dead. But only after finding the envelope.

The stack of pages was the key to something that his father had hidden somewhere. He went back to his notebook and skimmed through the pages he’d jotted at the Salvadoran café. Precious little. He found only a notation of the pages whose corners had been turned down.

37, 63, 118 and 255.

He hadn’t bothered at that time to jot their contents. He tried to recall: an article from the Times, one of his father’s incoherent essays... Wasn’t one a map?

Staring at the numbers, trying to recall.

Then it struck him. There was something familiar about the numbers. What was it?

Colter Shaw sat upright. Was it possible?

37, 63, 118 and 255...

He rose and found his map of the Compound, the one LaDonna Standish had been looking over, on which he’d pointed out the climb he had planned when he visited his mother.

Spreading the unfolded chart in front of him, he ran his finger down the left side, then along the top. Longitude and latitude.

The coordinates, 37.63N and 118.255W, were smack on the middle of the Compound.

In fact they delineated a portion of the caves and forest on Echo Ridge.

The man of few smiles smiled now.

His father had hidden something there, obviously something important — worth dying for. And he’d left the envelope as a key to its whereabouts. The caves of Echo Ridge.

Bears in the big ones, snakes in the smaller...

The coordinates didn’t pinpoint a very specific place; without other degrees in the numbers, they defined an area about the size of a suburban neighborhood. Even if Rodent and his crew made the deduction as to what the numbers represented — quite unlikely — they would never find what Ashton had hidden. Shaw could. He’d know the man’s habits, his trails. His cleverness.

On his burner, he took a picture of the coordinates, encrypted the image, sent Mack and his former FBI agent friend, Tom Pepper, a copy, telling each to keep it safe.

Then he ripped the sheet from his notebook and soaked it in the sink until it turned to pulp.

What did you hide, Ashton? What is this all about?