by Steven Gore
“It’s a new world,” the man finally said. “The public is sick of lawyers skating in these fraud cases, and the White House is listening. Somebody like Burch—I’m not saying Burch—but somebody like him is the perfect guy to hang a noose around. He’s at the top, he’s made a bundle, and he’s an immigrant—the politically correct guy to take the fall for the crooked lawyers behind all of the other scams. He’s the ideal target.” The man chuckled. “Sort of a sacrificial kangaroo.”
“You’re leaving me no choice but to—”
“You helping Burch is like a surgeon operating on his own brother. Not a smart move. Good intentions in the wrong place gets people into trouble. It’s already gonna be a huge indictment and I’d hate to see your name add to it, charged with obstruction. If I was you, I’d fold my hands in my lap, sit quietly, and wait for the show to start.”
“Look, he’s had a tough—”
“And I feel bad for him, and his wife. But this happened long before he was shot. If he was part of it, he was part of it. If he wasn’t, he wasn’t. You start tearing into this thing yourself, Graham, and you’re the one who’s going to get torn apart.”
CHAPTER 15
Was Fitzhugh a competent guy?” Zink asked Matson as he bent a pizza box and stuffed it into a trash can in the windowless, timeless debriefing room. Zink had learned over the years that pizza to a snitch was like a warm bottle to a baby.
“When I first met him,” Matson said, “I thought he was just a pipsqueak. But I found out real fast that he sure knew his business. Like perfection in motion. A guy like that could make a fortune in the States. Not like Burch, but still a lot of money. Say you want to set up a corporation in California. You know what you have to go through? How much you got to spend on lawyers and accountants? Sure, you could buy one of those do-it-yourself kits. But you know you’re gonna get sued. Everybody gets sued. You think the one-size-fits-all is gonna protect you?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Damn right. So you gotta start with a slick lawyer like Burch. A guy that creates the strategy. And he’s gonna charge a bundle. You know what his hourly rate is? You got any idea? Eight hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. You know what that is a minute?”
“No.”
“I figured it out. Fourteen dollars and fifty-eight cents. One minute. But you’re not paying for a couple of minutes. You’re paying for hours and hours and hours. Burch’s like a quarterback who calls his own plays and can throw the long bomb. The guy you pay to see. Fitzhugh? He’s more like a small running back that eats up the field, two, three yards at a time. Bang, bang, bang.”
Matson took a last bite of pizza, then leaned back in his chair. His eyes glazed over for a few moments, then he shook his head and blinked hard. “The whole thing was such an adrenaline rush, I sometimes wonder if I really got into it for the money in the first place.
“We flew on a turbo-prop to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The whole thing was right out of a movie. Pin-striped suits and black briefcases; even the women. As we circled over the English Channel to land you could see the coast of France. Like a knife edge.
“The island’s outlying areas were as open and green as fairways, but St. Peter Port was all granite buildings and narrow cobblestone streets. Little wind tunnels. Right in the middle and sitting high up like a fortress was the Old Government House Hotel where we stayed.
“After we checked in, Fitzhugh took me to a firm of solicitors and introduced me to a partner, Charles LaFleur. Looked like Fitzhugh’s twin, but twenty years older.
“LaFleur had three binders lying on his desk. The incorporation papers for companies he’d already set up. Azul Limited in Panama, Blau Anstalt in Liechtenstein, and Cobalt Partners in Guernsey. They were just empty shells waiting to be filled.
“Each one was already staffed with fake directors. They call them nominees. For Cobalt Partners, they were bartenders on Sark, another one of the islands. The nominees don’t make any decisions, they just sign papers that LaFleur puts in front of them. No questions asked. Open bank accounts. Transfer money. They don’t know why they’re signing or who the real owners are.
“It’s all a game of just pretend. But if you don’t play it, you can’t operate out there.
“LaFleur said that for extra insulation—that’s exactly what he called it, insulation—he wanted to put Fitzhugh down as the real owner.
“Right away my antennae went up and locked on. Fitzhugh had said that the offshore world was about trust, and I didn’t know these guys from Adam.
“I realized right then that I needed to control at least part of it myself. I knew it was a risk to have my name on anything, but I told them I wanted Cobalt Partners for my own.
“Fitzhugh jerked back and looked at me like I just put a gun to my head. But we both knew he had no choice but to go along. After all, he’s the one who said I was the pope.
“But from the moment we walked out of there, and as much as I refused to think about it, I knew I was eventually going to get scalded.”
Zink rose from behind the desk and walked to a file cabinet. He returned with a stack of bank account records. He laid them out in front of Matson.
“Whose idea was it to set up the Cobalt bank account at Barclays in London?”
“Mine. I like the city and I was thinking I might want to…” Matson’s face reddened as his voice faded.
“Hook up with a woman there?”
Matson drew back. “How the devil did you know about her?”
“I asked you a yes or no question about whether you met anyone else in London”—Zink smiled—“and you answered with ‘not really.’”
“She was a helluva lot more than just a hookup. She’s the most amazing woman I ever met. I really wanted to get back there to see her again before Granger needed me in the States, but we got stuck overnight in Guernsey because LaFleur had to redo the Cobalt Partners paperwork and get the nominees to sign off.
“Fitzhugh took me to dinner at this little restaurant called The Best End, right on the bay at the northern edge of St. Peter Port.
“After two glasses of wine, I loosen up a little and I put it to Fitzhugh straight: ‘What’s your angle?’
“He just deflected the question back. ‘I assume it’s the same as yours.’
“I pushed a little harder and said, ‘But you don’t look like a guy who’s doing what you’re doing.’
“Then he sat up and took on a tone like he was on the witness stand. ‘I do nothing other than establish and manage companies and bank accounts. I’ve done my due diligence. I have no reason to believe that the underlying SatTek transactions don’t serve legitimate business purposes. And, more importantly, neither does anyone at the Southeastern Fraud Squad or Scotland Yard.’
“I sort of raised my eyebrows and asked, ‘Aren’t you supposed to wink now?’
“Then he smiled his first smile in the two days I’d been with him, and said. ‘You just missed it.’
“‘Did I miss LaFleur’s wink, too?’
“And he deadpanned back, ‘Apparently.’
“That little back-and-forth changed our whole relationship. From then on, we were like partners.
“After dinner, he led me through the center of town past international banks like Barclays, HSBC, and UBS, and past law firms like LaFleur’s that handle the offshore tax-dodging of companies like ExxonMobil and Halliburton.
“But he didn’t do it to impress me or prove to me that I was in good company. It was more like he had turned into my tutor and wanted me to understand how things really worked out there, and why they worked that way.
“He stopped at the front steps when we got back to the Old Government House, and then turned toward me. I could tell that this was what he’d been leading up to. His voice got real intense.
“‘Not a hundred million dollars,’ he said, ‘but a hundred billion dollars have collected on an island the size of a ten pence. And it’s all because people here know how not to as
k one too many questions. What you call deniability in the States has been perfected into an art on Guernsey. While American students are taught the Bill of Rights and the Constitution—the fixed law—here they absorb the science of legal relativity. Illegal? Says who? By whose rules? By what right?’
“Then he smiled again. ‘And everyone learns to wink before they can even say mama.’”
CHAPTER 16
I thought your pal in Washington told you to fold your hands and sit patiently on the sidelines,” Hector “Viz” McBride spoke into his two-way outside of Matson’s forested Saratoga home just before daybreak.
Hector McBride was ready to jump on Matson’s tail. McBride was a big man. The biggest man nobody ever saw. Around Gage’s office he was simply referred to as Viz, short for the Invisible Man.
“He knew that wouldn’t happen,” Gage answered from where he was parked a half mile away.
Viz laughed. “Didn’t we all.”
Alex Z was sitting in the passenger seat next to Gage. He’d come along to talk about the case in a world where, as Viz always told him with a grin, “the rubber meets the road, kid.” Alex Z never knew what he meant, but it always made him nervous.
Gage heard Viz’s engine turn over.
“Time to go to work, boss. Scooby Doo’s just pulling out. He’s in a silver BMW, four-door, 760Li. Heading southeast toward Big Basin.”
Viz reported in five minutes later. “He’s not on his way to his office. Not even toward San Jose. He just turned north on the Saratoga-Sunnyvale Road, toward the 85.”
“I’ll swing around.”
Matson indeed took the 85. He drove north until he hit the 280, then the 101 along the bay toward San Francisco.
“He must be going downtown,” Viz said.
Gage and Viz traded places, then followed in silence until Matson approached the financial district.
“Looks like he’s aiming toward Van Ness Avenue,” Gage said.
Matson turned east from Van Ness just after passing the gold-domed City Hall, then swung around the Federal Building and parked in the lot across the street.
“Viz, I don’t want him seeing me yet and I want you out here snapping pictures. I’m sending in Alex Z.”
“What? Me?” Alex Z recoiled toward the passenger window. “You said I could just come along for the ride.”
The man who spent his nights performing onstage before crowds of adoring women was panicking in the wings.
Gage grinned. “It’ll be something you can tell your children about.”
Alex Z shook his head. “Did I tell you I don’t want kids?”
“Too late, hop to it.”
“What do I say if—”
“Say you got busted in an ecstasy case.”
“But I don’t use ecstasy.”
Alex Z’s eyes tracked Gage’s as he scanned his earrings, tattoos, and unkempt hair.
“But everyone will think you do.”
Heart pounding, Alex Z climbed out of the car and followed Matson through the security checkpoint and into the elevator. Matson pressed 11, then glanced over at Alex Z.
“Thanks, I’m going there, too,” Alex Z squeaked out.
Matson stepped out of the elevator on the eleventh floor. Alex Z followed him down the hall into the lobby of the Office of the United States Attorney.
Alex Z took a seat, then waved a clammy hand toward the receptionist behind the bulletproof glass, mouthing the words, “I’m waiting for my lawyer.”
Matson walked up to the counter.
“I’m here to see Mr. Peterson.”
Two minutes later, after the receptionist handed Matson a stick-on security badge and buzzed him in, Alex Z slipped back to the elevator.
“He went into the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Alex Z told Gage when he got back into the car. “He asked for someone named Peterson.”
“Damn.”
Gage noticed Alex Z’s hands shaking. “It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, but good job getting it.”
He radioed Viz. “The little punk is setting up Jack in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Go down to SatTek. The workers still there are either unemployable elsewhere or real tight with Matson. Try to figure out who’s who, but be careful. We’re going to have to stay in the shadows until we can shine a little light on the inner workings of this scam.”
CHAPTER 17
Zink looked over his notes from the previous day, wondering how much Matson was holding back. He didn’t glance up, but sensed Matson inspecting his thinning hair.
He knew more was churning in Matson’s mind than was coming out of his mouth. Fifteen years in law enforcement taught him that’s the way crooks were, even when they were telling the whole so-called truth.
Matson studied Zink’s lowered head, wondering how Zink became an FBI agent. Hackett told him that Zink’s career stalled out six years earlier, something to do with a sexual harassment complaint by one of the secretaries. He didn’t even put in his name for promotions anymore. Now just a day laborer, counting the months and years until his retirement, which Matson could see was still a long way away.
Matson decided that thinking of Zink as a rodent was probably a little unfair. Zink didn’t choose his scrawny features; they were a result of his parents unwisely choosing each other. He could only be held blameworthy for failing to mitigate his physical disadvantages. Plastic surgery might’ve helped, Matson thought, but he knew of no operation that could enlarge Zink’s minuscule ears. Matson figured he’d ask his wife. She had personal experience bumping up against the limits of plastic surgery.
Actually, Matson thought, Zink’s not a bad guy. Just doing his job. I can work with him, but he’s hard to read.
Zink felt Matson trying to gauge how he was doing. He knew snitches always did that. Are they pleasing their masters or not? Are they saying too much or too little? They’re always wondering where’s the finish line. Of course, there wasn’t one. It took most crooks a long time to figure that out, and Matson hadn’t even started.
He stepped to a chalkboard, then charted out the companies Fitzhugh set up in Guernsey.
“Now tell me about the bank accounts,” Zink said, turning around, and wondering how much of the truth he would get.
Matson got up and walked to the map on the wall. He pointed at a city next to a lake in Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.
“I didn’t even know where Lugano was until the day before we flew in.” He faced Zink. “Ever been to one of those Swiss banks?”
Zink shook his head.
“If it weren’t for the brass plate mounted outside that said ‘Banca Rober,’ I’d never have known what it was. No teller window. No signs advertising mortgage rates. Just security like the CIA and a bunch of little offices.”
Matson sat back down. “You know why Fitzhugh chose Lugano?” He laughed. “A woman. Isabella. This pipsqueak set up the Azul Limited and Blau Anstalt accounts there just so he could get laid.”
“Just like you.”
Matson blushed, then flared. “I’m not the one who chose to run this thing out of London. She just happened to be there.”
“Sorry,” Zink said. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”
“Hell, not only did I not know why he chose London, I didn’t even know how the scam was going to fit together. All Granger had said up to that point was that he wanted to put a structure in place. I didn’t even realize that when I told Burch we needed a flexible structure, I was telling the truth. And at that point, it was all form and no substance.”
“Did the banker know that?”
“Of course he did, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him. He was about as expressive as a dead carp. He had the account opening forms filled out even before we walked into his office. Fitzhugh introduced me, then threw out the phrase, ‘strategic partnerships,’ and the guy slid the papers across the table for him to sign. Like some choreographed dance. I’m laughing as we’re driving away because the banker di
dn’t even ask what the companies did.
“I elbowed Fitzhugh and told him that I must’ve missed the wink again. He just grinned and said, ‘No wonder, in Switzerland it’s the nod.’ Then he pointed toward a mountain across the lake, punched the gas, and said, ‘Let’s go see Isabella.’”
Zink’s ringing cell phone interrupted the story. He gestured at Matson to stay put, then answered the call and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
Just like you.
Matson felt a surge of anger as Zink’s accusation came back to him.
Alla wasn’t about getting laid, he thought, but punks like Zink wouldn’t understand that.
He had met thousands of Zinks at sales conventions all over the country. He had once been one of them himself, and even had still been one when he arrived in Lugano. But that changed a half hour after leaving Banca Rober.
Fitzhugh had wound through town, then along the northern edge of Lake Lugano and up the switch-backs etched into the side of Monte Bre. Just below the summit, he pulled to a stop in front of a tan stucco house. Matson paused to look down at the city lights, then followed Fitzhugh inside and into the kitchen where Isabella was waiting. Tall, slim, shoulder-length black hair, spaghetti-strapped red dress covered by a knee-length white apron. She turned as their footsteps sounded on the marble floor.
Stunning. Heart-wrenchingly stunning.
As he stood there looking at her, Matson remembered a line of German poetry that a girl he dated in college liked to quote. It had stuck with him over the years even though its meaning had always been obscure: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.”
Right then he understood why he had ended up with a Madge, instead of an Isabella or an Alla.
Matson accepted a glass of wine from her and then followed Fitzhugh into the dining room, the table set with English bone china and the candles already lit.
Throughout dinner Matson watched the playfulness, the intimacy, and an acceptance of each other that made what he’d been taught were the institutional bedrocks of society, like marriage, like his own twenty-year marriage, seem hollow. And the hours would’ve been entirely joyful, even blissful, were he not haunted by the suspicion that he’d wasted his entire life.
