Final Target

by Steven Gore

  Spike fell silent, then shook his head. “I don’t know how you did it. If I’d tried to do it your way all these years, I’d have blown my brains out by now.”

  CHAPTER 13

  That wasn’t so bad, was it, Scoob?” Zink asked as he walked Matson toward the elevator from the Magistrate’s Court on the sixteenth floor of the Federal Building. U.S. Marshals guarded the door while Matson uttered the single word that ratified his transformation from citizen into convict. The only witnesses were Peterson, Zink, Hackett, the magistrate, the clerk, and the stenographer. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the hearing never happened.

  For Matson, it really was bad. So bad Matson felt himself splitting in two. Or maybe three or four. He remembered looking around the courtroom, his eyes flinching at the light, his stomach turning. At the same time, he felt a nauseating hollowness, as if his mind was a shriveled nut inside a shell bouncing down a hillside.

  Walking away, rerunning the scene in his mind, it hit him. It was just a goddamn play. Everybody knew their parts, played them like they’d read the same lines a thousand times before. There was Peterson. Huge, dominating. Zink. A rodent waiting to gather up the scraps. The magistrate. Just a judge’s helper. A guy who wasn’t smart enough or didn’t kiss enough political ass to get appointed district court judge. The magistrate would do what Peterson told him to do. And Matson would do what Hackett told him to do.

  Hackett. How much money did I pay that shyster? Matson asked himself as Zink led him down the hallway. Whose side was he really on? What did he tell me?

  “When the magistrate asks whether you were threatened into entering the plea, answer no, got it?”

  “But they were gonna throw away the fucking key if I didn’t.”

  “So what? If you say yes, there’s no deal.”

  What’s all this about the truth? It’s all about lying at the right time, just like business. These people are hypocrites.

  Matson noticed that he was now in the elevator, descending, just him and Zink. Hackett had abandoned him at the courtroom door.

  Matson knew it was his voice that answered, “Guilty,” but his mind, cowering in an internal crevice, hadn’t pushed the word out. Hackett simply trained him to say, “Guilty, Your Honor,” and he did.

  How did I get into this mess? Matson asked himself as he and Zink got off the elevator on the thirteenth floor. I shouldn’t have listened to Hackett. He’s a punk. Fucking snitch lawyer. I could’ve beat this case. What’ve they really got? Nothing. That’s what Granger said.

  Zink stuck a security badge on Matson’s suit jacket, then walked him through the armored entrance into the FBI office. A few steps inside, Matson saw a wooden door, a sign taped to it bearing the single word “SatTek.”

  “This is where we’ll be working,” Zink said, directing Matson inside.

  Matson took a step across the threshold. Instantly all of his parts snapped together.

  To his left was a poster board covered with photos. His. Burch’s. Granger’s. Fitzhugh’s. They know about Fitzhugh. Next to that a world map. Red-headed pins impaling San Francisco, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Guernsey. They know about Guernsey. To his right were flowcharts taped to the wall. Money. Accounts. Companies. Straight ahead were file boxes. SEC. SatTek. The China company. The Vietnam company. Cobalt Partners. Damn, they know about Cobalt, too.

  Matson felt an itchiness, like there was a gun barrel pointed at that edgy little spot between his eyes. He finally understood Hackett’s phrase, “a slam-dunk case.”

  He dropped into a blue cloth-covered chair, hands clammy, as if watching the dentist’s drill approaching before the Novocain kicked in.

  Zink sat down behind the desk, then withdrew a white legal pad from a drawer.

  Matson studied Zink’s face, sickened by his willful failure to suppress his self-satisfaction, his pride of ownership.

  Matson couldn’t say Granger hadn’t warned him. “If you cooperate, they’ll own you. You’ll think you’re gonna get over on ’em, but you won’t. Nobody does.”

  And Matson had promised him, “I’m not makin’ no deal. No way. Fuck ’em. I’m not sayin’ shit.”

  But that was before Hackett told Matson how much time he could do and before he decided that there was no fucking way he was going to do it—not if he was going to have a life after SatTek.

  Hackett had also told him something else, maybe the most important thing. As long as he kept setting up other targets, the prosecutor would stop aiming at him, and that would give him time to feather his nest for a soft landing. And Matson knew that unless he did a little more feathering, he’d crash real hard.

  “Let’s start with Fitzhugh,” Zink said, his pen poised. “How much did he know?”

  “I flew to London and checked into the Park Lane Hilton by Hyde Park. At 6 P.M., I went down to the lobby bar to meet him. He looked up soon as I hit the door and caught my eye. I’m jet-lagged as hell, so I order some coffee before I sit down. I don’t want to miss a word of what he has to say.

  “Helluva name. Morely Alden Fitzhugh IV. But it fit with him being an accountant. Thin, pale face. Conservative black suit. The only thing that didn’t match the profile were his Bono-type eyeglasses and a gold Patek Philippe chronograph. I later saw a watch just like it at Tiffany’s. It cost about thirty grand.

  “We talked a little bit, and once he felt comfortable with me, he went into his spiel.

  “‘Mr. Granger told me that SatTek is on the verge of greatness, and that you’re the right man at the right time.’ Then he leaned over the table and lowered his voice. ‘I know you trust Mr. Granger and Mr. Granger trusts me. And you know the offshore world is about trust. We’re not gangsters and there aren’t any courts with real substance that can deal with even minor disputes. So it’s up to the parties to work together, fairly. Everything aboveboard.’

  “That shook me up a little. There was no reason to bring up gangsters. We were just doing business. But I wasn’t there to argue, so I let it go.

  “Fitzhugh paused for a few moments, then he adopted a sort of effeminate pose and said, ‘Mr. Granger has, as I understand it, assumed the role of, shall we say, adviser. What’s it called at the Vatican? Consigliere.’ Then he punches the air with his forefinger, like in punctuation. ‘That’s it, consigliere.’

  “I’m not the pope, and I told him that.

  “‘But every enterprise needs a principal. That’s you. My function is solely as a fiduciary, someone to advise you on financial matters and to whom you may issue instructions in complete confidence that they will be faithfully executed.’

  “There was only one problem with that: Granger told me that I was supposed to be following his orders; not him following mine.”

  Matson watched Zink finish writing down the last sentence on his legal pad, then said he needed to use the bathroom.

  Zink escorted him down the hallway and pointed to the men’s room door. Matson entered and stepped into a stall, but just stood there. He didn’t need to pee, he needed to think. Something else had happened in the Park Lane Hilton lounge that evening, and Zink had no right to pry into it.

  As the waitress approached with his coffee, he had noticed a woman sitting alone at the bar behind her, twenty-five feet across the room. The contrasts among her black chemise dress, pale skin, Asiatic eyes, and Slavic cheekbones had unnerved him. She seemed foreign in a more profound way than any woman he’d ever seen.

  His eyes followed hers as they swept along the row of bottled whiskeys doubled by the bar mirror behind them. Their eyes met in reflection. He looked away, but was drawn back. And as he gazed into the dark pupils looking back, he felt a depth and solidity in himself that he hadn’t experienced before, and realized that somehow, in a way he didn’t yet understand, the world that Granger had invited him into was making him into a new man.

  “Did you meet anyone else in London?” Zink asked Matson as they walked from the bathroom into the FBI’s kitchen to fetch cof
fee.

  Matson hesitated for a moment, then answered, “No. Not really. Granger told me to keep a low profile. Just slip in and slip out. So that’s what I did.”

  Matson leaned back against the counter, hands crimped over the edge.

  “There’s a whole world out there I didn’t know even existed,” Matson said. “All these people doing international business. It’s hard to explain. Everybody’s in their own heads.”

  Zink filled a cup and handed it to Matson.

  “People meet. All they have in common is the deal, whatever the deal is. Always on the move, like they’re never really anyplace. They just take the deal from one airport to another, one hotel to another.”

  Zink smiled to himself as he walked Matson back to the SatTek room. Matson wasn’t an idiot. He had avoided answering the question. Zink knew he’d answer it eventually, once he realized that the government wouldn’t let him keep any secrets. Matson would be dotting i’s and crossing t’s until he developed carpal tunnel of the brain. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Zink knew how to work informants, and decided that it was too soon to push Matson. He made an excuse to go back to his own office to give Matson time to adjust to the idea that eventually he’d have to give it all up.

  He left Matson sitting, arms folded, staring up at the ceiling.

  Matson had returned to the hotel after dining with Fitzhugh. He had glanced into the lounge on his way toward the elevator and spotted the woman still sitting at the bar. He stopped in the doorway. A man stood to the left of her, his hand gripping her elbow. She jerked her arm away and rotated her stool away from him.

  Matson found himself walking toward them. He heard the man say in a slurred American accent, “Just one drink, honey. Come on, just one drink.”

  Before the woman could answer, Matson stepped up next to him and said, “Let it go.”

  The man turned toward him. Red-faced. Fists clenched. “Mind your own business.”

  Matson held up his hands. “Take it easy.” He made a show of scanning the others drinking in the lounge. “Whose side do you think these folks will take?”

  The scraping of chair legs on tile broke the silence. The man glanced back over his shoulder at two men who were now standing and glaring at him. He swayed as he turned back toward Matson, then shrugged and walked away.

  She turned toward him. “Thank you.” She spoke in what Matson took to be a Russian accent.

  “He just had too much to drink,” Matson said, then noticed that her hands were shaking. “Would you like me to sit with you?”

  “Very much.”

  Matson climbed onto the bar stool next to her. “Can I get you something?”

  “Please. Whatever you are having.”

  Matson looked down the bar and spotted tall glasses of Guinness before a young couple sitting at the end, and ordered two pints.

  “I’m Alla,” she said. “I saw you here earlier.”

  Matson blushed, then glanced away as if checking the bartender’s progress on their order. “I’m Stuart, and I saw you, too.”

  “I was so relieved when you walked up.” She smiled. “I thought you were about to tackle that man.”

  “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure what I would do. We have an expression in the States. It’s called playing it—”

  “—by ear.”

  He drew back and looked over at her. “You know that one?”

  “I love language, especially American expressions. Out in left field. The wrong side of the tracks. Between a rock and a hard place.” She tapped her chin with her forefinger. “Let me see…how about, Hey bud, what line are you in?”

  Matson didn’t respond.

  Alla grinned. “That was a real question.”

  “Oh.” He blushed again. “I’m the president of a company in California. London is the base of our international operations.”

  The bartender set two pints on cardboard Guinness coasters.

  Matson wasn’t sure what to say next, so he escaped into watching the bubbles rise to form a soft, rich head.

  Alla pointed at the glass. “Sometimes the bubbles go down.”

  Matson shook his head. “They can’t. It’s air.”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem. Watch closely.”

  She leaned down toward the glass, eyes focused on the body of the beer. Matson’s head followed as if magnetized. He found himself lost in the swirling of her perfume.

  “Pick a bubble. A little one.”

  Matson focused on one caught on the glass. It broke free and swept downward.

  “Son of a gun.” He leaned back and looked at her. “How’d you know?”

  “I studied engineering in college in Ukraine. In Dnepropetrovsk.”

  “In what?”

  “Ne-pro-petrovsk. Just say Neper. I’m from a village nearby.”

  “You mean a village, village?”

  “Yes.” Alla laughed, her eyes twinkling in the candle flame. “A village, village. Thatched roofs, cow in the backyard, chickens trying to sneak into the house.”

  “And from there to a college where they let you study beer?”

  “It was sort of political.”

  “Come on…” Matson said, unable to suppress his incredulity.

  “It’s true. Students had so much hope after the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to see gangster capitalism take its place. We all found ways to express the horror we felt. My way was fluid mechanics. The outside world only saw the large bubbles rising in the center. The elites. But that created a vortex that forced nearly all of the small bubbles downward. The middle class became impoverished and the lower class became destitute. And when their standard of living rose, it was paid for with the suppression of the freedom they had earned. My experiment was a metaphor.”

  Matson studied her face. “And what kind of bubble are you?”

  “One that escaped.”

  He raised his glass. She clinked hers lightly against his, then each took a sip.

  “Why here?” he asked.

  “For Americans, London is merely a charming place to visit. For me, for all Central Europeans, it’s…I don’t know how to capture it in English…I guess you could say that London is our Ellis Island.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how can a village girl afford to live here? This is an expensive town.”

  “I saved a little money and I live simply.” She shrugged, and the light went out of her eyes. “Eventually I’ll have to go back to Ukraine. I dread it. It’s suffocating. It’s what we call peregruzhennost. I don’t think there is an English word…Maybe you would say…overburdening. That’s it. Overburdening. Eventually it will break me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Hey, Graham. There’s a rumor going around that the attorney general is looking for a new poster boy for corporate crime.” The voice, high-pitched against the low chatter of a busy pressroom, belonged to Kenny Leals, a New York Times reporter, and the only journalist who had Gage’s cell phone number. “The Enrons and Global Crossings and Arthur Andersens just ain’t cutting it anymore. The way I hear it, they’ve decided that it’s time for lawyers to take a hit—and they’re hard on the prowl for a guy to take the first swing at.”

  Gage sat forward in his desk chair, but kept his tone casual. “Have they put a name on it?”

  “Not yet, but I was shooting the breeze about SatTek with an old-timer at the Chronicle and she said you and Jack Burch were pals, so I figured I’d give you a buzz. Rumor is that he’s somehow connected to the company. But I can’t confirm it.”

  Leal let the words linger, as if anticipating an easy confirmation, but Gage wasn’t about to become a second source.

  “What do you have so far?” Gage asked.

  “For one thing, a memo that went out to the local U.S. Attorney’s Offices a few months ago.” Leals chuckled. “It reads like one of those sales incentive deals. You know, the guy who sells the most refrigerators wins a cruise on the Love Boat. And there’s a lot of buzz
in the Justice Department about the SatTek collapse.”

  “There are lots of fraud cases around—”

  “But this one has resonance, maybe because it’s a defense contractor. In any case, it’s the kind that gets stronger and stronger as the clock ticks down. And trust me, you can hear the tick, tick, tick all around Washington.” Leals hesitated, then said, “How about a call if Burch is the fridge that wins somebody the vacation? I promise the Times will give him a fair shake. I’ve never let you down before.”

  “You’ve got to give me something,” Gage demanded of the man on the other end of the line a minute later. “You run the division. You know what’s going on.”

  “No can do.” The voice was gravelly from too many cigars over too many years. “I can’t even tell you the name of the Assistant U.S. Attorney who’s handling it. They don’t want any bits of the investigation dribbling out. They want an explosion heard around the world.”

  “How about a heads-up if Jack’s a target?”

  “And find mine on the block? No way, Graham. No fucking way. If there are any leaks in this case, the attorney general will start dusting off polygraph machines.”

  Gage glanced toward a refrigerator-sized safe anchored to the concrete floor in the far corner of his office and filled with documents that could end careers.

  “Seems to me you’ve got a short memory,” Gage said. “It wasn’t that long ago that you were riding a log toward a political buzz saw—”

  “I know. I still owe you, but this isn’t the time. All the decisions in this case are coming from the top—they’re bypassing the Criminal Division altogether. It’s in the hands of this new Corporate Fraud Task Force. That means the attorney general and the FBI director. I’ve got no say about whether Burch gets indicted.”

  The man paused. Gage imagined him gazing out of his Justice Department office window toward Pennsylvania Avenue.