by Steven Gore
Gage knew his friend’s morning route, knew the intersection. Animated stick figures reenacted the shooting in his mind as if in a virtual re-creation. He fought off the image of an early morning downpour washing Jack Burch’s blood into a leaf-clogged gutter.
“Anybody ID the shooter?” Gage asked.
“Nobody we’ve talked to yet, but chances are slim. The commute hadn’t started and there weren’t many runners and dog walkers out because of the weather.”
“And the car?”
“Generic every which way, and nobody caught the plate.”
Spike’s radio crackled in the background. Gage heard him double-click the handset to confirm receipt of the message.
“What’s that?” Gage asked.
“They asked me for his next of kin.”
Gage froze at the top of the stairs, then caught his breath, steeling himself for the answer before he asked the question. “Did he…”
“No. Sorry, man. It’s not that. They just wanted contact info.”
Gage exhaled. “Put me down until his wife gets there.”
“Where is she?”
“With Faith up at the cabin. I’ll call her on the way.”
In his bedroom, Gage slipped on a pair of Levi’s, then reached for a gray hooded sweatshirt, and slid it over his body like armor.
CHAPTER 2
The city began to emerge as Gage drove down the pine-and oak-treed canyon toward the Bay Bridge. The clouds had lifted enough to expose a pattern of lights hinting at the shapes of buildings spread around the San Francisco financial district. His mind’s eye perceived what he still couldn’t quite make out: the top three floors of a steel and glass Montgomery Street office tower, home to Jack Burch’s international law firm. His thoughts then drifted up toward Pacific Heights, still masked in gray, now and forever stained in his sight. He then imagined a faceless driver in an anonymous car disappearing into the mazelike city spreading out before him.
Gage glanced at his dashboard clock as he crested the cantilever section of the bridge, beginning the decline toward the waterfront: 5:59. He punched on the radio, already tuned to the local CBS News affiliate. He didn’t know how long it would be until some nurse or clerk or paramedic leaked Burch’s shooting to the press—but he knew how long it would remain there: weeks, maybe months. It wasn’t imaginable that the man who charted the courses by which half of the Fortune Global 500 navigated the world’s turbulent markets had been randomly shot down in the street. The cable news channels would demand a Greater Meaning, perhaps even a Conspiracy. Day after day. Night after night.
The 6 A.M. national feed began with the collapse of Silicon Valley’s Surveillance and Targeting Technologies and the outbursts of betrayal from its devastated shareholders. Networks had hovered over the SatTek story for days like news helicopters at a crime scene, the downdraft creating a turbulence of uninformed speculation that seemed to feed less on new facts than on itself. The disintegration of a key manufacturer of components for anti-terror and missile guidance systems had left the cottage industry of analysts at a loss for explanations, though not for words, and a new surge had been triggered by the arrival of U.S. Marshals to secure the chaotic SatTek facility.
Through a breach in the veil of drizzling fog, Gage caught a glimpse of Mount Sutro rising two thousand feet above sea level. The radio and television tower stood poised like a monstrous, three-pronged gigging spear, clouds masking its barbs. Anger surged when he realized that the news channels would soon abandon SatTek to obsess over Burch’s shooting, and through that obsession lay waste to Burch and his wife’s intimate lives. He took in a breath, then gripped the steering wheel as his body warmed from within. He exhaled when he recognized the source: how much easier it was to rage at the media than at a faceless and anonymous—what? Thug? Lunatic? Assassin?
Gage jabbed the off button, then stared at the pavement ahead and at the lane lines bracketing him: a familiar path now leading him into the unknown. He drove the rest of the way listening only to his racing thoughts against the background of the gusting wind, the raindrops tapping his windshield, and the rhythmic sweep of his wipers.
Gage spotted Lieutenant Humberto “Spike” Pacheco at the end of a wide hallway, leaning against the wall outside the packed emergency waiting room. Thick arms crossed above his belly flared out the front panels of his navy sports jacket. It revealed a middle-aged paunch that belied the childhood nickname he carried with him when he had joined Gage at SFPD thirty years earlier.
“Any word from the doctors?” Gage asked softly, a step away.
Spike shook his head as he looked up. His dark face and bloodhound eyes revealed nothing. He wasn’t about to give passersby fodder for speculation, later to be whispered to tabloid reporters as fact: Then this private eye came up. Tall. Solid-looking. About fifty. Not a snap-your-neck-tough-guy type, but you could tell he works out. First I thought he was like a college professor or something. Now I’m thinking that he looked a helluva lot more like a cop than the short, fat detective—that guy couldn’t run nobody down. Somebody told me the PI said he was going to…
“What about the shooter?”
“Not a damn thing.” Spike’s tone was low, grim.
Murmuring flowed from the waiting room. Gage glanced inside at the families of the night’s wounded huddled together in plastic chairs under brutal fluorescent lights. The air was heavy, almost sweating, reeking of unwashed bodies ripped from sleep by sickness or violence.
Gage and Spike turned as one as Dr. Ajita Kishore approached. She acknowledged Spike with a quick nod. They didn’t need an introduction. The trauma surgeon had sought him out a hundred times before on that same square of speckled tan linoleum, more often than not to report that a shooting or stabbing or beating had become a homicide.
Kishore looked up at Gage, her deep-set South Asian eyes expressing a compassionate familiarity, even an affection, that he hadn’t expected.
“You must be Graham,” she said. Her accent was Indianized British. Formal, but not distant.
Gage nodded, his jaw set tight for the worst, his eyes riveted on her.
She held his gaze. “Mr. Burch raised his hand and mumbled, ‘Graham, tell Graham’ just before we put him under. Something in his voice told me you’d be here when I finished. He must trust you very much.”
“How is he?” Gage asked.
“Alive.” Kishore pressed her fingertips against the green surgical scrubs covering her breastbone. “It’s not just damage from the slugs, the CAT scan shows his brain absorbed a tremendous shock when he fell. Unfortunately, he’s now slipped into a coma.”
Gage smothered the urge to ask the questions to which he knew Kishore couldn’t have answers: How long would it last, and how would it end.
Kishore looked at him apologetically. “We put him on a ventilator. We couldn’t count on his brain functioning well enough to maintain his breathing.”
A timer started counting down in Gage’s mind. The science hadn’t changed that much in the quarter century since he’d left SFPD Homicide. Given his age and the severity of his injuries, three weeks was all Burch had to fight his way out of the coma and avert a descent into a lethal vegetative state—if he survived the next few hours.
Kishore cast an expectant look toward the emergency entrance. “Has his wife been called?”
Gage nodded, finishing her sentence in his head: In case he doesn’t make it.
“She’ll be here by ten o’clock. She and my wife—”
A glimmer of a question caught him short. He fought his way back from an uncertain future to the image of Burch raising his hand—and to his own past as a young detective: riding in ambulances, then following gurneys to operating room thresholds, pursuing facts binding a victim to a shooter, or a dying declaration linking a wounded killer to his crime.
“Do you know what he was trying to say?” he asked Kishore.
The doctor shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s all there was.”
&n
bsp; They stood silently for a moment, then Kishore furrowed her brows as if she’d taken a wrong turn in a familiar city. “I assumed you’d be Australian, too.” She inspected Gage’s graying brown hair. “Maybe his older brother.”
Gage’s mind leaped back a half a life. Looking down from a dusty one-lane bridge, spotting a ruddy fisherman waist-deep in the Smith River, wading boots losing traction on the descending tail of a submerged sandbar with boulder-strewn rapids gapping and foaming below. Then Gage racing downstream, sliding down the hillside, crawling out on a fallen log above the rapids…reaching…reaching…reaching toward the young man flailing in the torrent, the crush of water filling his waders—
Gage blinked, then refocused on Kishore, his answer unspoken: Brothers are bestowed by chance and nature; friends you love by choice.
Kishore squeezed Gage’s upper arm, then turned toward Spike. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Lieutenant?”
Gage watched them walk down the hallway, hoping to read more of Burch’s future in her manner and gestures. Kishore stopped fifty feet away and rotated her hand in front of her chest, then dug into her pocket and handed Spike a small plastic bag bearing a white label. Gage knew what it contained: two mangled slugs caked with Burch’s blood, now seeming less like evidence and more like sacred artifacts. Spike cradled them in his hand and looked back down the hallway at Gage. He nodded in silent comprehension, then slipped them into his breast pocket.
Gage turned away and reached for his cell phone to call Faith. She answered on the first ring. He heard her all-terrain tires rumbling on the pavement. She and Courtney Burch were just south of Mount Lassen in Northern California, entering the desolate expanse of the Central Valley. Gage told her the truth, counting on her to mold it into softer words to pass on.
He found himself staring at the screen after he disconnected, imagining Burch’s playful face, hearing his accented voice during the calls and messages that marked the turning points in their lives. “Graham, it’s Jack, guess what, best man? Courtney said yes…I just got the bar results. If that bloody champagne hasn’t become vinegar…We’re on our way to the hospital. I can’t believe it, in a few hours I’ll be a father. Me. A father…It’s about my mother. I’m flying home to Sydney…We just got Courtney’s MRI. It’s spread to her lymph nodes…call as soon as you can.”
Gage looked up and spotted Spike striding toward him, followed by two uniformed officers. Spike directed the pair toward the ICU, then said to Gage, “Let’s go outside.”
As they walked from the emergency entrance into the parking lot, Gage found that the rain had stopped. The cloud-filtered light falling on the blacktop seemed vague and directionless; even the shallow puddles rippling in the breeze reflected nothing but gray.
Spike stopped next to his police-issued Mercury Marquis, then looked up at Gage.
“I’ve ordered round-the-clock security.”
“You really think the shooter’s coming after him?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Kishore said.” Spike formed his small hands into a tight circle like a bull’s-eye. “It was like Jack was wearing a target and the shooter scored two tens. Side-by-sides into his breastbone.” Spike widened his hands, as if framing Burch’s heart and lungs. “If he scored two fives, Jack would be dead. That’s damn accurate shooting for a maniac who’s pissed off and on the move.”
Spike opened his car door, withdrew a black leather folder, then flipped it open. “Even though the witnesses are describing road rage, I have to ask, has Jack complained to you about anybody threatening him?”
Gage shook his head.
“You know what he was working on?”
“The usual. He was in Geneva for a few days, then in Moscow.”
Gage had answered mechanically, then felt a wrenching expansion of the world as Russia, which had faded into an icy stillness since his return two weeks earlier, now came monstrously alive: a hydra head of criminal and political threats feeding off the corpse of the former Soviet Union—and willing to destroy those, like Jack Burch, who had interfered with their feast.
Spike peered up at Gage. “Weren’t you just in Moscow?”
Gage nodded slowly as a slide show of Slavic mug shots flashed through his mind.
“Did it have anything to do with Jack?”
Gage trusted Spike as a man, but if a gangster had reached across the Atlantic to assassinate Burch, no local cop could help Gage punch back.
“Not directly.”
“What about indirect—” Gage’s opaque eyes and tone of irrevocability strangled the word in Spike’s throat. He reddened. “Don’t stonewall me on this thing, Graham.”
“It’s not my decision. As long as there’s a chance he’ll survive, it’s up to him what gets revealed about what he did over there. I’m not taking that away from him.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Gage fixed his eyes on Spike. “Then I’ll decide.”
“Come on, man,” Spike’s voice turned pleading. “For all we know the guy who did this is boarding a flight back to Moscow right now.”
“Then it’s already too late.”
They stood silently at the impasse until Gage found a middle ground that he knew would leave Spike stranded.
“I’ll tell you what’s been in the European press and you can take it as far as you want.”
Spike nodded.
Gage paused, trying both to tear his mind from the image of the bullet holes in Burch’s chest and to find a way to make a complicated story short, simple, and vague enough that Spike couldn’t extract any leads from it.
“This was the issue,” Gage finally said. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, crime bosses and politicians in Russia and Ukraine began using the natural gas trade as their private piggy bank. Billions of dollars were extorted by the maffiya to fund arms-and sex-trafficking schemes. Billions more were siphoned off by Russian and Ukrainian presidents to finance their political campaigns.
“The gas is Russian, but the pipeline that carries it to Western Europe is Ukrainian. And last year Ukraine tried to force Russia to give them a bigger cut of the profits by shutting off the flow. The EU went ballistic. Forty percent of what they consume comes through Ukraine. They threatened to build a line of their own through Turkey from gas fields in Central Asia.”
“But that would just put them at the mercy of a different set of crooks.”
“Exactly. That’s why the EU chose the known over the unknown and brought Jack in to restructure the market. He realized that the key was to eliminate all of the intermediaries used to skim money and replace them with a single transparent authority, a kind of joint venture run out of a third country that would have its books open to the world.”
They ceased speaking as an elderly doctor parked his car in the next space.
Spike waited until he had walked toward the hospital and out of earshot, then said, “I can understand why the Russian and Ukrainian governments might cave in; for them it’s a foreign policy issue. But not the gangsters. I just don’t see them backing off.”
“Let’s just say that they came to understand that all of Western Europe would be inspecting this thing with a microscope, and decided to show restraint.”
Spike raised his eyebrows in a knowing look that assumed what he was trying to discover: that Gage had been Burch’s emissary. “They decided on their own, or were persuaded?”
Gage cast Spike a reproachful look. “I don’t know. Maybe one led to the other.”
From the moment Burch asked Gage to join him in Moscow, he had understood that a public disclosure that they’d approached the underworld would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the plan, for everyone watching would assume that there had been a secret quid pro quo.
Spike shrugged. “If you say so.” He jerked his thumb toward the Richmond District north of Golden Gate Park, now a Little Russia. “But persuasion isn’t exactly the weapon of choice around here these days.”
A month earlier he’d complaine
d to Gage that the mayor had summoned him to City Hall, less concerned about the slug-ridden corpses of what the newspapers were calling “Russian businessmen” than about stray bullets and November elections. Spike had called Gage as he drove away from that dressing-down, infuriated not only by the pressure, but by his own helplessness in solving murders ordered by gangsters overseas whose identities and motives he had no way of ascertaining.
“Are you sure they didn’t change their minds?” Spike asked. “Hitting Jack would send a message that it’s going to be business as usual.”
Gage wasn’t at all sure, but the answer wasn’t one Spike could help him get, so he fixed his eyes on his friend and answered, “Yes.”
Spike held his gaze for a moment, then conceded by drawing a line across his pad.
“What else was Jack up to?”
“IPOs. Bank mergers. Nothing anybody goes to war over.”
Gage glanced down the long hospital driveway toward the street. Commuter traffic inched by. Overfilled trolleys crawled along the wet pavement. Another ambulance rolled up to the emergency entrance followed by a patrol car, lights flashing, arriving with the last of the night’s victims.
Spike followed Gage’s eyes, then pointed at the windows lining the ICU and sighed. “I always figured it would be you or me lying in there.”
“Until two years ago, I had no doubt it would be Jack.” Gage made a steep gliding motion with his arm. “The way he used to rocket down the ski slopes like some oblivious teenager. But that all changed when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. First he flared up the way he always would, ready to take on the forces of nature. But two weeks in, he realized it was all about chemistry and physiology, not force of will. Courtney’s or his. It crushed him, really crushed him.”
“Tough for a guy like that to feel helpless.”
