Final Target

by Steven Gore

  The words reminded Gage of his throbbing shoulder, as if the connection between the two was visceral. But he knew that the web of relationships that formed Jack’s world wasn’t that simple.

  “Until we know a lot more we’re going to have to treat it as a coincidence,” Gage said, “just like the natural gas deal. It’s merely a blip on the screen over here, but it’s front page news in Europe.” He thought of the message slip in his pocket. “Over there, everyone is assuming that Jack was shot to prevent it from going through.”

  “So, for the Europeans, SatTek is like a tree falling in a forest.”

  Gage nodded. “But not for us.” He again reached for the telephone. “Let’s get to work finding out who’s hiding in the trees.”

  Alex Z pointed at a sealed file box stamped with Burch’s firm name sitting on Gage’s credenza. “What about that?”

  “It’s something Jack and I worked on in Afghanistan. I figured I better keep it locked up over here. We did a few things that might be misunderstood in light of SatTek.”

  Gage punched the radio button preset to NPR while driving back to his office from the meeting with Burch’s doctors, whose vague answers and shrugs revealed nothing more than the limits of their science. He caught the closing segment of Marketplace, the afternoon business report, devoted solely to SatTek.

  A Brookings Institution Fellow asked, “Where was the Securities and Exchange Commission during the last two years?”

  A Harvard Law professor demanded, “Where was the Justice Department?”

  It seemed to Gage that neither had answers that even satisfied themselves, much less their listeners.

  The host concluded the program as Gage turned off Market Street onto the Embarcadero and drove along the pier-studded bay: “Where, exactly, do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars go when a company collapses? When a stock descends? When monitors silently flicker in empty cubicles and customers’ e-mails go unanswered? Where, exactly, is Nowhere?”

  “Looks like Matson and Granger hired Mr. Burch to set up SatTek’s international operation,” Alex Z said, sitting down next to Gage in the third floor conference room and flipping open a binder. “It was run out of a holding company in London. The managing director is a chartered accountant named Morely Alden Fitzhugh IV.”

  “Sounds like the name of a kid who got beat up a lot,” Gage glanced over at Alex Z. “Old money?”

  “Once. His family was the last of the line to join the middle class. Now everybody works for a living. His little enterprise is called Fitzhugh Associates.”

  “Which means there aren’t any.”

  “You guessed it. A one-man show.”

  Gage gestured toward Alex Z’s binder. “Does he have a Web site?”

  “Nope.” Alex Z turned a few pages. “But here’s a screen shot of the one from the London holding company. It’s as polished as they come. They sure wanted to make the thing look legit.” He pointed at a photo. “That’s him.”

  A bookish man in his early forties, with dark hair and rimless glasses, looked up from the page. Gage recognized what he was trying to project: didn’t cheat at bridge, lunched on the same thing at the same restaurant at the same time every day, except Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, he got his hair cut. A well-chosen image for an accountant, Gage thought, perhaps too well chosen.

  “How about the Asian companies?” Gage asked.

  Alex Z opened a second binder. “No Web sites, but here’s an old PR packet from Mr. Burch’s file.”

  It showed the directors of the Chinese and Vietnamese companies to be cookie-cutter Asian managers. Both were engineers with prior experience in electronics, though not in the precise field of sound and video amplifiers. Each stared uncomfortably at the camera, hair not quite combed, cowlicks springing upward, heavy black-rimmed glasses resting on flattish noses and set off by well-fed pudgy cheeks.

  Gage looked back and forth between the faces, then back and forth between the photos of the companies’ headquarters.

  “I better send someone over to take a look,” Gage finally said.

  His eyes came to rest on Hawei Electronics located in Southern China, and wondered if it was what the NPR commentator had been searching for: the outer edge of Nowhere.

  CHAPTER 9

  You ain’t paying me enough to become a floater in the South China Sea,” Brian Early whined from Hong Kong as Gage sat down behind his desk the following morning.

  Gage shook off the image of the pale and comatose Jack Burch that he’d carried away from his and Faith’s 8 A.M. visit. He glanced at Burch’s SatTek file and Alex Z’s research binders that he’d worked through the night before, then looked at his watch. It was after midnight in China, which meant that Early had gotten the job done in less than twelve hours, or at least had tried.

  “What are you talking about?” Gage asked.

  “I went to that address in Guangzhou you gave me.”

  Early was the entirety of Pacific Rim International Investigations Limited. Ex–U.S. Customs agent stationed in Hong Kong for the last five years of his twenty-seven-year career. Married his Filipina maid and stayed. She really loved him. He loved himself, and talking.

  “I haven’t gotten that chilly a reception since we did that software piracy case in Beijing.” Early laughed. “But at least this time the folks didn’t have guns.”

  “I just told you to look, Brian, not touch.”

  “Well, it was like this—”

  “Whenever you begin like that, I start to feel a little queasy. What did you do? And skip the detours.”

  Gage grabbed a legal pad from the top of the credenza behind him.

  “Okay. You know that old Gertrude Stein line about Oakland? ‘There’s no there, there.’ Well, there was almost no there, there.”

  Gage looked up at the ceiling and exhaled loudly enough for Early to hear. “Brian?”

  “What?”

  “You’re already on a detour.”

  “Okay, okay. Gotcha. I hopped a train across the border to Guangzhou and took a taxi to the building. The office number you gave me was on the seventh floor. No elevator. I hiked up and peeked in. A picayune office. A couple of middle-aged women pushing papers. I just said the company name, Hawei, and got the big chill. Then one of them starts chanting, ‘Bu zai zhe li, bu zai zhe li.’ Not here, not here.”

  “Was it once?”

  “It was there all right. Two guys were waiting for me when I got back down to the street. Wanzi and Panzi or maybe it was Kung Fu and Dung Fu. Anyway, Wanzi gets in my face and says, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘No thanks.’ And he says, ‘It’s not here.’ So I say, ‘I just figured that out, pal.’ And then Panzi puts his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘So you won’t be coming back?’ and I say, ‘Nope, no need to.’ I kinda pawed the sidewalk for a few seconds with my knockoff Nikes, then skedaddled out of there.”

  “Come on, Brian, that hardly qualifies you for hazard pay.”

  “That’s not the end of the story.”

  “You went back?”

  “Couldn’t help myself. Last night. Late. Real late. The building is in a district of the city that the Great Leap Forward leaped over and where nobody, at least on the legit side, ever made any real dough after China joined the capitalist road. The whole area is deserted at night except for a noodle place on the first floor and a karaoke bar down the block. Just the bouncer and a couple of hookers poking their heads out. So I go around the back. The noodle shop’s door is propped open for ventilation. I figure I’ll have a little look-see. Maybe I can work my way into the rest of the building. But once I get inside, the only door goes to the basement. What the hell? I go down there—smelled like rotted pig guts.

  “Looks like everybody in the building uses it for storage. Bunch of caged-in compartments, heavy chicken wire. Dried noodles, office supplies, old files, that kind of stuff. One of ’em got a big, industrial-strength canvas tarp over everything inside. So I grab a broom and get down on my knees.
I jam the handle under the edge of the tarp. Weighed a ton. No leverage. But I got the corner up, and guess what?”

  Gage felt his body stiffen even before he said the word. “SatTek.”

  “Damn right. Must be seven, eight hundred devices. Millions of dollars’ worth. Millions. Made in the good old USA. They were marked LNA. That stands for ‘low noise amplifier.’ I looked it up on the Net. I found something about China using nonmilitary-grade detectors like these in a new flood warning system. They pick up vibrations from older dams that may be starting to weaken.”

  “Could you tell when they were shipped over?”

  “Nope. Could’ve been anytime up to when SatTek collapsed—maybe a last shipment Hawei hadn’t paid for yet.”

  “That can’t be right. These are made to spec. Hawei wouldn’t have ordered the devices unless it already had a contract to resell them.” Gage paused, wondering what SatTek had tossed into the Chinese black hole. “You get a sample?”

  “Nope. But I was thinkin’ I should try, when this greasy T-shirt comes in waving a cleaver at the end of his string-bean arm. He’s yelling, ‘Zie! Zie! Zie! ’ You know, ‘Thief. Thief. Thief.’ I’m still on my knees, thinkin’ he’s gonna chop my head off. So I grab my stomach and I kinda slur out, ‘Wo he zui le’ like I’m drunk and gonna puke. He points the cleaver at the door, then back at me like, What’re you doing in here? I reach in my pocket and he raises the cleaver again. I pull out my hand, real slow, empty, no money, like I’ve been robbed. I say, ‘Ji nu,’ you know, ‘Hooker,’ like she came down there to do me and robbed me instead. And the guy starts laughing and points me toward the door.”

  “Can you get back in?”

  “No way. Right after I grabbed a taxi to scoot to the train station, I looked back and saw Wanzi screeching up in a Mercedes G55. It’s like a Land Rover, but costs twice—”

  “Brian?”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry. Once greasy T-shirt told ’em what I looked like I’ll bet they moved the boxes out of there, pronto. In fact, I’ll bet Wanzi or Panzi is sittin’ down there right now with an AK-47 waiting to blow my head off.”

  “What about flying over to Ho Chi Minh City to look at the other one?”

  “It’s your money, but I think whatever was there is gone, too.”

  “Just to cover the bases. You know any Vietnamese?”

  “Sure Con d cuóp tôi.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It sorta means, ‘The hooker robbed me.’”

  CHAPTER 10

  It never crossed my mind that your two bookends would be brought together like this,” Faith said, standing in their granite-countered kitchen.

  Gage took in a long breath, then exhaled. “Neither did I.”

  Faith always referred to Spike and Burch as a slightly mismatched set. Immigrants from different worlds. Spike, as a five-year-old carried on his farmworker father’s shoulders wading the Rio Grande. Burch, an Oxford-trained barrister flying in on British Airways, first to add a law degree at Berkeley, then to storm the U.S. legal profession.

  Now one was investigating the attempted murder of the other.

  A break in the rain had allowed Gage to uncover the barbecue on the redwood deck and cook salmon steaks while Faith made rice and fixed a salad. They carried their plates to the dining room, where windows framed San Francisco against the backdrop of offshore cumulus clouds and a variegated pink, yellow, and red sunset.

  Gage propped his forearms on the table and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers as he stared out at the bay.

  Faith reached over and rested her hand on his shoulder. “He may make it. The doctors are telling Courtney it’s going to be a long haul.”

  “Come on. I was there. That wasn’t a prognosis, it was just a way to muzzle her and keep her from demanding answers they don’t have.”

  He filled Faith’s wineglass, then outlined what he’d learned about Burch’s role in SatTek.

  “I love Jack as much as you,” Faith said, “but I’ve got to ask. Why are you so sure he wasn’t at least partly responsible? Maybe the lesson he learned from Courtney’s illness was that the world’s not a fair place, so there’s no reason not to grab what you can.”

  Gage shook his head. “Not Jack. He never believed money was a substitute for immortality.”

  “Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first to express rage against the world as greed.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to see it.”

  Gage pulled back and looked at Faith out of the corner of his eye. “Ouch.”

  “When it comes to Jack, you have a way of overlooking how impulsive he can be. It’s been that way since we were in graduate school. You, the philosopher forgiving human folly, and him, the reckless daredevil.”

  “He’s just a little adventurous.”

  Faith threw up her hands. “See?”

  Gage smiled. “Touché.”

  “And there’s something else.” She reached over and took his hand. “Loyalty sometimes comes at a price that’s too high to pay.”

  “You don’t mean bailing out—”

  “No. Just be careful. That burglar at Jack’s office could just as well have shot his way out.” She pointed at Gage’s bruised shoulder. “You can pretend that doesn’t hurt, but I wince every time you take your shirt off.”

  They sat quietly, watching the horizon drain of color. Fog wormed its way through the Golden Gate, led in by three oil tankers making for the Chevron Refinery along the north bay.

  Faith spooned salad on each of their plates, then broke the silence. “Anyway, isn’t it possible that somebody in the natural gas deal was behind Jack’s shooting?”

  “Others are asking the same question,” Gage said. “I returned a call to Ambassador Pougachev yesterday morning. State Security reported to him that I’d been seen with Jack in Moscow—”

  “State Security?”

  Gage waved off the implication. “Since the cold war ended, they have a lot of time on their hands.”

  “Graham…”

  “Nothing to worry about. All Pougachev wanted to know is whether Jack brought me in to fix something that was broken. He was preparing for interviews with Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel. They weren’t satisfied with the Russian president’s answers at the press conference about whether Jack’s shooting would interfere with completing the joint venture. Winter is coming and houses need to be heated.”

  “Does he think there’s a connection?”

  “I don’t know. Pougachev is less interested in the causes than the effects.”

  Gage cringed as the world narrowed to twin images of Burch lying helpless in the hospital and of a self-satisfied Pougachev sitting across from them in a Washington, D.C. restaurant a few months earlier, sucking on crab legs.

  “Jack’s being gunned down means nothing to him,” Gage said.

  “But after that dinner you two had with him, Jack said—”

  “He’s never been able to understand that for the Russian elite, people are nothing more than a means to an end. He actually believed those bureaucrats from the finance and energy ministries when they expressed sympathy for Courtney and all she went through. They were really just probing for weaknesses. It was painful to watch, but I couldn’t take it away from him.”

  He pointed at Faith’s plate, wanting to lighten the moment. Nothing he could say now could reverse what happened back then.

  “You should have a little more salmon,” he said. “I’d hate to think this poor fish gave his life in vain.”

  Faith ate a small piece, then pushed on. “Does Pougachev know that you met with organized crime bosses?”

  “That’s another bit of information he got from State Security.”

  “Did he ask if Jack brought you into this?”

  “I told him Jack didn’t bring me into anything.”

  “Did you tell him you volunteered?”

  “He wasn’t perceptive enough to ask.” Gage sm
iled. “He doesn’t have your skills in cross-examination.” He watched Faith blush. “In any case, he knows he can’t get heavy-handed. I know too much. He tried to pursue it gently with a ‘We have our ways’ in a German accent, but ended up sounding like a cartoon character, so he had to let it go.”

  “Jack’ll get a kick out of…” Faith’s voice trailed off. An image of Burch struggling for life entered both of their minds.

  Gage quickly filled the silence. “We’ll tell him.”

  Faith returned to her probing. “But how can you be sure those gangsters didn’t change their minds and demand a cut? Shooting Jack might buy them some time.”

  “I’m not sure they’d want to raise the stakes that high. Interfering with the flow of natural gas into Western Europe right now would be seen as much as an act of terrorism as blowing up a power plant—and it would mean destroying the wall between domestic law enforcement and international intelligence they’ve always taken refuge behind.”

  Faith pushed her plate away. “I don’t know, they’re unpredictable people.”

  Although she was an anthropologist, she wasn’t offering a description, but a warning.

  “I’ll be careful,” Gage said, reaching over and squeezing her hand. “But I’m not going to figure out who shot Jack until I figure out why. And that means retracing Jack’s steps and trying to spot whatever came out of the shadows to blindside him. If it was road rage, then the trail will end where he fell. If not…”

  Gage ended the sentence with a slow shake of his head. They both knew there was no way to finish the thought, so they sat in silence, the weight of inevitability pressing down on them.

  Faith picked up her wineglass again and stared into it before speaking. “In some ways I have a hard time fixing Jack in my mind anymore. He’s changed so much. Like the Afghan Medical Relief dinner last fall. Accepting an award for charity work was out of character for him. It was almost like grandstanding.”

  “I asked him about it on the flight back from Moscow. Turns out he saw something Courtney wrote for her cancer support group, a phrase about invisibility being oblivion. He wanted an excuse to put her on a podium; talk about her in front of all of their friends. In retrospect, it was a very dangerous thing to do.”