ALSO BY JEFFERY DEAVER NOVELS The Colter Shaw Series The Goodbye Man The Never Game The Lincoln Rhyme Series The Cutting Edge The Burial Hour The Steel Kiss The Skin Collector The Kill Room The Burning Wire The Broken Window The Cold Moon The Twelfth Card The Vanished Man The Stone Monkey The Empty Chair The Coffin Dancer The Bone Collector The Kathryn Dance Series Solitude Creek XO Roadside Crosses The Sleeping Doll The Rune Series Hard News Death of a Blue Movie Star Manhattan Is My Beat The John Pellam Series Hell’s Kitchen Bloody River Blues Shallow Graves Stand-Alones The October List No Rest for the Dead (Contributor) Carte Blanche (A James Bond Novel) Watchlist (Contributor) Edge The Bodies Left Behind Garden of Beasts The Blue Nowhere Speaking in Tongues The Devil’s Teardrop A Maiden’s Grave Praying for Sleep The Lesson of Her Death Mistress of Justice Short Fiction COLLECTIONS Trouble in Mind More Twisted Twisted ANTHOLOGIES Nothing Good Happens After Midnight (Editor and Contributor) A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime (Editor and Contributor) Ice Cold (Editor and Contributor) Books to Die For (Contributor) The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Editor) STORIES Forgotten Turning Point Verona The Debriefing The Second Hostage Ninth and Nowhere Captivated The Victims’ Club Surprise Ending Double Cross The Deliveryman A Textbook Case G. P. Putnam’s Sons Publishers Since 1838 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC Penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2021 by Gunner Publications, LLC Excerpt from The Midnight Lock copyright © 2021 by Gunner Publications, LLC Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Hardcover ISBN: 9780525539131 Ebook ISBN: 9780525539155 Book design by Laura K. Corless, adapted for ebook by Maggie Hunt This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Cover design: Tal Goretsky Cover image: Jonathan Arias / iStock / Getty Images Plus pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0 To the Sunday Afternoon Crew: Joan, Cleve, Kay, Ralph, Gail Contents Cover Also by Jeffery Deaver Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph The Steelworks Part One: June 24 | The Mission Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 The Steelworks Part Two: June 25 | The Great Earthquake Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Part Three: June 26 | The Man Who Would Be King Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Chapter 59 Chapter 60 Chapter 61 Chapter 62 Chapter 63 Chapter 64 Chapter 65 Chapter 66 Chapter 67 Chapter 68 Chapter 69 Chapter 70 Chapter 71 Chapter 72 Chapter 73 Chapter 74 Chapter 75 Part Four: June 27 | Flame Chapter 76 Chapter 77 Chapter 78 Chapter 79 Chapter 80 Chapter 81 Part Five: July 3 | Ash Chapter 82 Acknowledgments Excerpt from The Midnight Lock About the Author For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit. —Noam Chomsky THE STEELWORKS Colter Shaw draws his gun. He starts silently down the stairs, descending into the old building’s massive, pungent basement, redolent of mold and heating oil. Basement, he reflects. Recalling the last time he was in one. And what happened to him there. Above him, music pounds, feet dance. The bass is a runner’s heartbeat. But up there and down here are separate universes. At the foot of the stairs he studies where he is. Orientation . . . Always, orientation. The basement is half built out. To the right of the stairs is a large empty space. To the left are rooms off a long corridor—fifty feet or so in length. Scanning the empty space to the right, he sees no threat nor anything that would help him. He turns left and navigates toward the corridor past the boilers and stores of supplies: large packs of toilet paper, cans of Hormel chili, plastic water bottles, paper towels, Dixie paper plates, plastic utensils. A brick of nine-millimeter ammunition. Shaw moves slowly into the corridor. The first room on the right, the door open, is illuminated by cold overhead light and warmer flickering light. Remaining in shadows, he peers in quickly. An office. File cabinets, computers, a printer. Two bulky men sit at a table, watching a baseball game on a monitor. One leans back and takes the last beer from the six-pack sitting on a third chair. Shaw knows they’re armed because he knows their profession, and such men are always armed. Shaw is not invisible but the basement is dark, no overheads, and he’s in a black jacket, jeans and—since he’s been motorcycling—boots. They’re not as quiet as the Eccos he usually wears but the beat bleeding from the dance floor overhead dampens his footsteps. He supposes it would even drown out gunshots. The men watch the game and talk and joke. There are five empty bottles. This might be helpful: the alcohol consumed. The reaction-time issue. The accuracy issue. If it comes to that. He thinks: Disarm them now? No. It could go bad. Seventy-five percent chance of success, at best. He hears his father’s voice: Never be blunt when subtle will do. Besides, he isn’t sure what he’ll find here. If nothing, he’ll slip out the way he came, with them none the wiser. He eases past the doorway, unseen, then pauses to give his eyes, momentarily dulled by the office lights, a chance to acclimate to the darkness. Then he moves on, checking each room. Most of the doors are open; most of the rooms are dark. The music, the pounding of the dancing feet are a two-edged sword. No one can hear him approach, but he’s just as deaf. Someone could be in an empty room, having spotted him, waiting with a weapon. Thirty feet, forty. Empty room, empty room. He’s approaching the end, where a second hallway jogs right. There’ll be other rooms to search. How many more? The last room. This door is closed. Locked. He withdraws his locking-blade knife and uses the edge near the tip to ease the deadbolt back into the tumbler. He pulls on the
