A Game of Blackthorns
## 5: A Game of Blackthorns
Gideon’s hand moved before his mind caught up, pressing the heel of his palm against the motel room’s cheap laminate desk as if the contact could ground him in the physical. The chip in Reid’s hand pulsed with a single green LED, the only color in the room besides the flickering neon bleeding through the curtains. Six hours. Six hours of driving back roads, switching vehicles, using burn phones—all of it a straight line on someone else’s map.
Reid set the chip on the desk, careful, deliberate. “It’s a passive transmitter. Pinhead-sized. Embedded in the chassis of the sedan we’ve been driving since Ashland. The signal hits a relay tower outside of Blackthorn territory. They didn’t need to follow us. They just needed to wait for the phone in your pocket to join the network.” He pointed at Gideon’s hip. “That’s how long they’ve been one step ahead.”
Gideon pulled the phone out. A low-end prepaid, bought with cash in a gas station in Missouri. He’d been so careful. So goddamn careful. And he’d never once considered that Reid’s security detail—vetted, loyal, blood-sworn to the Crane family—might carry a compromised piece of equipment.
“How?” Gideon asked.
“Not the detail,” Reid said. “The sedan. It came from the Crane garage in Portland. Someone on the maintenance staff had access. Or someone who paid them enough.” His jaw moved, a muscle pulsing just under the ear—the first crack in his unshakeable composure. “I should have stripped it. I should have—”
“You should have been the only person I trusted, which you have been.” Gideon looked past Reid, through the gap in the curtains, at the gravel lot where the sedan sat under a flickering lamppost. The Blackthorn family had known their route, their stops, their patterns. And that meant Dorian Blackthorn had let them walk into this motel. Let them think they were safe. Let them breathe.
That was worse than being run down. That was being toyed with.
“Reid,” Gideon said, “how long would it take your team to get into position at the Blackthorn estate?”
Reid’s eyes narrowed. “You mean legally, or operationally?”
“Operationally.”
“Forty minutes from the airfield in Reno. But the estate has its own security—drones, ground sensors, a private response team that runs drills twice a month. We’d breach the perimeter, not the house. The main building is a fortress.”
Gideon turned from the window. “I don’t need you to breach the house. I need you to breach the gatehouse.” He pulled up a map on the phone—the same map, he realized, that the Blackthorns had likely been reading for hours. At the northern boundary of the estate, a service road led to a gated entrance used by ground crews. “Dorian holds his meetings in the greenhouse at the back of the property. Glass walls. Good sightlines. Minimal security presence because he wants his guests to feel like they’re having a private conversation. I’ve been there twice. I know the layout.”
Reid studied the map, then nodded. “And what are you going to do?”
Gideon picked up the chip. The heat of his grip made the plastic bend slightly under his thumb. “I’m going to knock on the front door.”
—
The Blackthorn estate sprawled across forty acres of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, a colonial-style mansion that had been in the family for three generations. The driveway alone was four hundred yards of crushed white stone, raked into perfect parallel lines by a groundskeeper who had probably never noticed that the stones he raked were the same color as the powdered remains of the family’s rivalries.
Dorian Blackthorn was waiting on the front steps when Gideon’s rental car crested the hill. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a charcoal suit that looked sewn onto his frame, his silver hair swept back from a forehead that carried the deep grooves of a man who had spent decades mastering the art of pleasant cruelty. Beside him, two security guards stood at parade rest, their hands folded over the grips of holstered sidearms.
Gideon killed the engine and stepped out. The gravel crunched beneath his shoes. He didn’t wait for an invitation, walking directly up the center of the path, the chips in his pocket—one real, one decoy—feeling like two stones on a scale.
“Gideon,” Dorian said, his voice carrying a warmth that was entirely manufactured. “I must admit, this is a surprise. After your little vacation, I expected you to keep running.”
“I’m done running.” Gideon stopped at the base of the steps, putting himself in the line of sight of the security guards, hands empty and visible at his sides. “You’ve made your point. You found me. You know where I am. That’s the kind of reach that doesn’t come from intel alone—that comes from patience. I can appreciate patience, Dorian. I just wanted to see if we could call a truce.”
Dorian’s eyebrows lifted a fraction of an inch. Not surprise—amusement. “A truce. From the man who walked into Blackthorn territory, stole five hundred thousand dollars worth of off-book investments, and then spent six months convincing my auditors to blame each other. You have nerve, Gideon. I’ve always admired that about you.”
“It was a mistake.” Gideon let the words sit, watched Dorian’s face harden just slightly at the edges. “I was angry. I thought the only way to hurt you was to take something from you. But you just proved you can take something back without lifting a finger. That’s the kind of power I underestimated.”
He pulled the decoy chip from his pocket, a cloned vault key encoded with gibberish—a castle built of sand. He held it up between two fingers, letting the setting sun catch its surface, a small theatrical gesture meant to look like surrender.
“This is the key to the Crane vault in Seattle. Everything your auditors couldn’t trace is still there: account numbers, land holdings, the evidence I gathered on your off-book partnerships. You can have it. All of it. In exchange for a cessation of hostilities. You leave my family alone. My son hasn’t been part of this, Dorian. He’s seven years old.”
Dorian’s smile never reached his eyes. He stepped down from the porch, his shoes clicking on the stone, until he stood close enough that the cologne he wore—sandalwood and something darker—washed over Gideon like an old memory.
“Your son,” Dorian said, “is the only reason you’re still breathing.”
Gideon’s blood chilled, but he held his ground. “What does that mean?”
“It means I wanted you to know what it felt like to be watched. Every mile. Every stop. Every moment you thought you had slipped away, I was there.” Dorian reached out and took the decoy key from Gideon’s hand, turning it over in his palm with the lazy attention of a man examining a souvenir. “I let you have your little flight because I wanted to see what you would do. And what you did was run. Not to your lawyer. Not to the police. Not to your family’s allies. You ran, Gideon. That told me everything I needed to know about your nerve.”
Gideon’s fists curled at his sides, but he kept his voice level. “I’m here now. That’s what matters.”
“Yes.” Dorian pocketed the key. “You are. And since you’ve been so generous, I suppose I should offer you something in return—a little clarity before we begin our new arrangement.”
He raised his hand, a gesture that barely moved more than his wrist. One of the security guards stepped forward, holding a tablet. Dorian took it and angled the screen toward Gideon.
It was a live feed. The safehouse in Boise. The one where Iris and Jace had been waiting, the location Reid had chosen because it was supposed to be off the grid. But the image was sharp, the camera clearly mounted somewhere outside—the phone tower across the street, perhaps. The feed showed the front door of the safehouse opening. Iris stepped out first, pulling Jace by the hand, her head swiveled toward the sound of an engine. Flynn Blackthorn stepped into frame from stage left, flanked by two men in tactical gear.
On the tablet, the audio was muted, but Gideon didn’t need to hear it. He saw Iris’s mouth open. He saw her pull Jace behind her body. He saw Flynn gesture, and then one of the tactical men walked forward, and Iris ran—ran straight at him, her hands outstretched, a mother’s useless fury. A camera cut to another angle, and the safehouse door flew open, and there was Jace, a small silhouette in the dim light, and the man was reaching for him, and Iris was screaming, no sound, just the tortured shape of her mouth and the spill of her tears in the pixelated haze.
Gideon’s vision tunneled to a pinprick.
“You have something I want,” Dorian said, his voice a low murmur as he watched the feed with clinical detachment. “But I’m not certain that fake key you just handed me is the real one. So I thought I’d hold onto something of yours while I have it authenticated. Call it a waiting period. Flynn will keep the boy comfortable until I give the word.”
Gideon’s throat worked. He forced himself to look away from the screen, to find Dorian’s eyes. The patriarch’s expression was calm, unhurried, the expression of a man who had all the time in the world.
“Reid’s team is already moving,” Gideon said.
Dorian blinked. “Excuse me?”
“They’re not going to the safehouse. They’re not coming for you here.” Gideon’s voice was steady, mechanical, a man operating on instinct and spite and the razor-thin edge of control. “I didn’t come here to negotiate. I came here to end this.”
Dorian’s smile flickered, the first crack in his composure. “You’re bluffing.”
The tablet in Dorian’s hand buzzed. He looked down. On the feed, the camera had shifted, suddenly showing a new angle: the greenhouse at the back of the estate, the same building where Gideon had once watched Dorian conduct business with a pair of state senators. The glass walls offered a perfect view of the interior—and the small device taped underneath one of the benches, its red LED blinking steadily.
Gideon pulled his own phone from his pocket, the screen already open to an app with a single button.
“Six hours,” Gideon said. “That’s how long your transmitter has been active. You used it to track me. But I used it to confirm exactly how far your reach extends—and now the FBI has proof of every off-book account you’ve tried to bury. The greenhouse, Dorian. You keep your ledgers in the greenhouse floor safe. I’ve seen them. And I’ve already told the FBI everything they need to get a warrant.”
Dorian’s pale eyes went flat. “You’re lying.”
“Am I?” Gideon raised the phone. “Call it. See what happens.”
Dorian’s face twisted. He turned, barking an order at one of the guards, but Gideon was already pressing the button. The barn down the hill from the greenhouse exploded in a plume of orange flame—Reid’s distraction, timed to the second, drawing the perimeter guards away from the main gate. And in the same instant, the helo carrying Reid’s extraction team thundered over the treeline, its searchlight cutting a blinding white swath across the sweep of lawn.
Dorian froze. The security guards were fumbling for their weapons, but three more specialists dropped from the helicopter’s bay, their rifles up and trained.
“At the gatehouse,” Gideon said into the phone. “You’ll find a laptop with enough evidence to put the entire Blackthorn operation under federal investigation for a decade. The contract is uploaded. The auction begins in ten minutes.”
Dorian stared at him, his composure finally shattered. A flicker of something dangerous crossed his face—fear, rage, recognition of the trap he’d walked into. “You think this changes anything? You think this saves your son?”
“Put the cuffs on him,” Gideon said, stepping aside as the agents swarmed past. And still, even as the metal closed around Dorian’s wrists, the patriarch laughed.
“Flynn planted the transmitter,” Dorian said. “Not me. I just watched. He knew you’d come here. He knew you’d bring something to bargain with.” He leaned in, close enough that his breath was warm against Gideon’s ear, his voice dropping to a whisper. “He doesn’t give a damn about the FBI. He took the boy for a reason. The only reason that matters.”
Gideon’s heart seized. He spun back to the tablet, still held in a guard’s hand, the live feed still running—and now, the picture was different. The safehouse was empty. The front door hung open on its hinges. And in the distance, the taillights of a black SUV were fading down the gravel road.
Iris was standing alone in the yard, her hands pressed against her mouth.
“Where’s my son?” Gideon demanded.
Dorian’s lips curled into a slow, satisfied smile as the agents hauled him toward the helicopter. “Where’s my son?” he repeated, mockingly. “You’re about to find out.”
The tablet buzzed again. The feed flickered, cut to a new angle: the inside of a moving car, dark and close. In the back seat, a small figure sat with his head bowed, hands folded in his lap. Jace. The boy wasn’t crying. He wasn’t struggling. He was just sitting there, staring straight ahead, his shoulders set.
Then the camera shifted, and Flynn’s face appeared, lean and sharp-eyed under a knit cap, his grin wide and wolfish as he held the phone to his own ear.
Gideon raised his phone, the line open.
Flynn’s voice crackled over a stolen phone: “You took my father. I took your future. Now we play the game by my rules—and I always win.”