Final Target

by Steven Gore

  CHAPTER 18

  How’s Matson doing?” Peterson asked, walking into the SatTek room where Zink was typing up his notes during a break in the debriefing.

  “Not bad.” Zink looked up from his keyboard. “Interesting thing, though. At the beginning of this scam he was kind of a doofus; Granger needing to hold his hand all the time. But by the middle of it he was a helluva operator all on his own. It was like…What do you call those graphs with the bump in the middle they use in statistics?”

  “Bell curve.”

  “That’s it. Strong in the middle and weak at the ends.” Zink shook his head. “And cheating on his wife seemed to make a real man out of him, for a while.”

  Peterson paused for a moment, for the first time wondering what a jury would think of Matson’s adultery. “Have you talked to his wife?”

  “I’ve been putting it off. Madge doesn’t have a clue how bad this will be. She still thinks the whole thing is about disgruntled shareholders.” Zink frowned. “And Matson’s too much of a coward to tell her the truth. He wants me to take the brunt of it and then try to make her think he’s some kind of victim in this thing.”

  “You ever meet a snitch who didn’t think he was really the victim?”

  “You got that right. The weird thing is I don’t think he minds bringing her down with him. Like he blames her for his own greed.”

  “I think I better sit down with both of them,” Peterson said. “Like it or not, she’s gonna have to stand by her man, at least through trial. It’ll make him look less like a snake if the jury thinks she’s forgiven him for the affair.”

  Peterson nodded toward Matson’s empty chair. “Where’s our little hero now?”

  “He went for a walk. Said he wanted to clear his head. I may have been a little tough on him about Ms. Love-at-First-Sight.”

  “Push him as much as you can. I need to know everything about her so we don’t get surprised when the defense cross-examines him at trial. We’ve got to know what they know before they know it.” Peterson thought for a moment, trying to work a bad fact into a good trial strategy. “I’ve got it. We’ll make him admit cheating on his wife during direct, right from the get-go, try to defuse the thing. Just make sure you don’t let him hold anything else back that’ll bite us in the ass.”

  “Speaking of biting us in the ass, agents in the San Jose office are picking up drumbeats that Graham Gage’s people have been sniffing around. Just asking a few offhand questions to witnesses in a couple of fraud cases they’re investigating. You want to scare him off?”

  “We’d have better luck trying to scare off a hyena.”

  “Hyena? I thought you and him got along.”

  “Only when he’s on our side.” Peterson pointed at Zink. “The FBI tried to recruit Gage out of SFPD. Put a lot of time into it but he wouldn’t sign on—you ever meet the guy?”

  “No.”

  “He has a kind of presence even though he never acts like he’s more important than whatever he’s working on.”

  Peterson thought of all the lawyers and cops and PIs around the country conniving to get themselves on television. Yet he’d never seen Gage interviewed, never saw him quoted anywhere, except in bits of testimony reporters snagged during trials.

  “Helluva investigator,” Peterson finally said. “There’s nobody out there like him.”

  Zink reddened as if Peterson was making a comparison, not merely a statement. Peterson ignored it.

  “Doesn’t this guy have any weaknesses?” Zink asked.

  “You mean besides being loyal to a crooked lawyer?”

  “Yeah, besides that.”

  Peterson hesitated. There’d always been something that bothered him about Gage, but he’d never before had the need to articulate it. He struggled until he found the words. “He doesn’t go to Giants games.”

  Zink squinted up at Peterson. “I don’t get it.”

  “Gage misses out on some of the best things in life. It’s like they’re invisible to him.”

  The blank look on Zink’s face told Peterson that he didn’t understand.

  “Put it this way. Gage’s got two close friends: Burch and a homicide cop over at SFPD he grew up with in Arizona. Neither one would invite him to a ball game. Not that they’re not close, they are; like brothers. Not that they wouldn’t want him to come, they would. But they know Gage couldn’t do high fives when there’s a home run or do the wave with everybody else. I guess you could say he’s kind of trapped inside himself.”

  “Some of the best times I’ve had were at games with my buddies, hooting it up.”

  “Me too. Toward the end of my career with the Raiders I sometimes wished I was up in the stands instead of down on the field. Playing hurt is lonely. You can’t immerse yourself in the game and give in to the blind instinct that great plays are made from. In fact, I can’t imagine Gage playing football or baseball or basketball. I’m kind of surprised he was ever a cop—it’s the ultimate team sport.”

  Peterson folded his arms across his chest and stared down at the linoleum floor, trying to puzzle out why.

  “And I think I know the reason,” he finally said, pointing toward the courtroom floors above and looking back at Zink. “It’s something Judge Conrad said. She worked for Gage while she was in law school after she quit the FBI. She told me that he’s always aware of what he’s thinking. It’s like he never lets his mind wander unobserved the way people do when they’re cheering or fishing or just watching a sunset.”

  “Is that a strength or a weakness?”

  Peterson took in a slow breath and exhaled, almost as a sigh. “I don’t know, but it must be a burden sometimes.”

  “What do you want me to do about him?”

  Peterson didn’t respond, momentarily confused by a feeling of envy. He shook it off and answered, “Nothing. He won’t find out anything. Burch can’t talk, and Matson and Granger are the only ones who know everything that happened. And only one of them is talking—and just to us.” Peterson glanced at the SatTek sign on the door, then back at Zink. “Don’t have Matson come to the Federal Building anymore. Gage may put a tail on him. I don’t want him to figure out that Matson is cooperating.”

  Zink grinned. “Until he reads the indictment?”

  “Yeah. Until he reads the indictment.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Zink telephoned Matson, directing him to an FBI safe house in Palo Alto and telling him only that they needed to have a heart-to-heart. He cringed during the entire drive down. He dreaded having this conversation with Matson, this touchy-feely crap. He almost gagged when he spotted Matson and his lovelorn little face waiting on the doorstep.

  “Her name is Alla Tarasova. I didn’t even learn her last name until after we’d slept together when I got back from Lugano.

  “She was pretty much on her own. Divorced. Her mother is dead. Never close to her father. He moved out of Ukraine when she was a kid and set up a business in Budapest. She hasn’t talked to him in years. Hates him so much that she resents the way Russians and Ukrainians have to take their middle name from their father’s first name. Hers is Petrovna. Alla Petrovna. It was like a burden to her, so she refuses to use it, even when she introduces herself to Russians and Ukrainians.

  “We lay there in bed the next morning, looking out over London.

  “Sure, it had crossed my mind that her aim was to use me to get a green card, so I decided to test her a little and asked her what she wanted out of life.

  “She’s really into language, so she told me this word, uyutnost. It means ‘coziness.’ Then she said, ‘If there is love and intimacy, even the poor can have uyutnost.’

  “After she said that, I knew she wasn’t after money.

  “It almost made me cry.

  “Then she told me intimacy was something she never got from her ex-husband, and that Ukrainian men are horrified by it. She explained it by giving me another word, trast, and said that for women it means ‘passion,’ but for men it means ‘t
error.’

  “It’s ironic when you think about it. The first words people usually learn in another language are ‘hello,’ ‘good-bye,’ and ‘thank you.’ And there I was learning ‘coziness’ and ‘passion.’

  “I asked her straight out whether that’s why she slept with me, just because I wasn’t him and I wasn’t Ukrainian.

  “And here’s where she could’ve looked up at me with baby-girl eyes and told me what I wanted to hear, but she didn’t.

  “‘Who knows why,’ she says. ‘Because it happened, today happened. Isn’t that enough reason?’

  “Sure as hell was.”

  “Pathetic,” Zink said, as he dropped into a chair in Peterson’s office at the end of the day. “Fucking pathetic. Can’t I get back to some real investigation?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Fitzhugh.”

  “What’s Matson say?”

  “That he’s as dirty as they come. Knew everything. Been running these kinds of scams for years.”

  Peterson thought for a moment. “I wish I knew what was going to happen with Burch, so I could decide who to make deals with.”

  “What are you hearing?”

  “There seems to have been some improvement. He’s moved his hands—but not like he’s actually responding to anything.” Peterson jerked his arm. “That kind of thing.”

  Peterson tapped his forefinger on the edge of his desk. “It’ll look bad if the press thinks we’re singling out a road-rage victim—especially a guy like Burch. They’ve been making him into some kind of hero. The U.S. Attorney won’t like it. He likes press coverage, needs it for his campaign for governor, but not that kind.”

  Peterson gazed out of his window toward the tree-covered Presidio and the Pacific Ocean beyond. “Let’s make the case look real international.” He looked back toward Zink. “How many countries so far?”

  “Switzerland, United Kingdom, Panama, Liechtenstein, China, Vietnam.”

  “That’s the way we’ll play it. Let’s indict Burch as soon as he’s conscious—”

  “You mean if.”

  “Yeah, if…along with Fitzhugh, Granger, the stockbrokers, and maybe some bankers in London and Switzerland. They all knew the whole thing was bogus.” Peterson grinned. “We’ll call ’em fugitives. International fugitives. The boss loves feeding that shit to the press. And Burch won’t look so much like a victim, even if they have to roll him into court in a wheelchair.”

  Peterson glanced at his wall calendar. “You better break off what you’re doing with Matson and scoot over to London before Fitzhugh goes underground. He’s got to be hearing drumbeats by now.”

  “I’ll call the guy in the Serious Fraud Office who got us the Barclays Bank records.”

  “Tell him we’ll send a Mutual Legal Assistance Request as soon as we get Washington’s approval. In the meantime, maybe he can start checking out Fitzhugh—but carefully.”

  Zink rose to leave.

  “We don’t want this guy spooked,” Peterson said. “So make sure they don’t haul him in until we’re ready.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Whoever dumped Fitzhugh’s body into the Thames on the day Chief Inspector Devlin and Agent Zink were to knock on his door wasn’t a fisherman, a meteorologist, or a sailor. Instead of drifting out to the North Sea, Fitzhugh’s remains rode a tidal surge upstream, driven by winds blowing in from the east. Fishermen dropping lines off Victoria Embankment, where he was found wedged between a skiff and a piling, considered and debated the matter for weeks. The consensus, ultimately, was that Fitzhugh must’ve been dropped into the river at St. Katharine’s Docks, perhaps even dragged down Alderman’s Stairs. In any case, certainly no nearer than the Tower Bridge. After all, the paper said Fitzhugh hadn’t been dead all that long when the young solicitor walking in the darkness along the river toward his office in Blackfriars vomited at the sight of Fitzhugh’s headless and limbless torso floating by.

  Chief Inspector Eamonn Devlin was disappointed. While some officers viewed the murder of a criminal as just deserts, Devlin figured it was no more or less than a timely escape from justice. He often fantasized about becoming the Lord High Executioner, thinking it a shame that the position no longer existed.

  Devlin wasn’t personally certain Fitzhugh was a crook, but when the FBI rings up and asks you to perform discreet inquiries, and when an agent arrives bearing a most solicitous letter from Washington, it wasn’t much of a leap.

  By the time he’d noticed the homicide entry on the morning bulletin, Fitzhugh’s two arms and one leg had been recovered. By noon, when Zink arrived at Devlin’s office, Fitzhugh’s head, which had been bobbing along and unnerving tourists near the Houses of Parliament, had been netted by a passing tour boat captain.

  Just before 2 P.M., Devlin received word that Fitzhugh had been provisionally identified based on a missing person’s report filed by his wife when he hadn’t returned home the previous evening.

  Devlin walked Zink down the hallway in the City of Westminster’s Agar Street Station to meet with Inspector Rees of homicide, who’d been assigned the Fitzhugh case, unofficially categorized as a Humpty-Dumpty.

  “What’s your interest in Fitzhugh?” Rees asked, as they stood in his small office.

  “Securities fraud,” Zink said. “We were going to indict him in a few weeks.”

  Rees grinned. “Instead, he’ll be reassembled.”

  Devlin frowned.

  “Sorry, Chief Inspector. Sometimes we…I…”

  “I don’t think our guest appreciates your attempt at levity.”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector.”

  “It’s okay,” Zink said. “I’m used to it. I started out as a street cop.”

  “What was the cause of death?” Devlin asked.

  “A slim sharp object entered his thoracic cavity from the rear and came to an abrupt stop in his right ventricle.”

  “Any similars?”

  “By victim? Chartered accountants. None. By method? A few.”

  “Suspects?”

  “In Fitzhugh? None. In dismemberments? Russians or Chechens.” Rees looked toward Zink. “Of the fifty-four nationalities in the City of Westminster, few others have the stomach for this kind of work. But anything is possible.”

  “Motive?” Zink asked.

  “Until you arrived, we had no thoughts beyond the likelihood that it was a contract killing or, of course, a domestic manslaughter followed by a desperate attempt to dispose of the body.”

  “Have you searched his home and office?” Devlin asked.

  Rees shook his head. “That’s next on the agenda.”

  “Why don’t you take Agent Zink with you? I’m certain he’ll be interested in examining Fitzhugh’s files.”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector.”

  “And I’d like you to copy me on your reports.”

  “Yes, Chief Inspector.”

  As Zink was boarding his Heathrow flight back to San Francisco, he telephoned Matson, ordering him to appear at the Palo Alto safe house at 3 P.M., fifty-five minutes after his scheduled landing.

  Twelve hours later, Matson’s sunken-eyed, ashen face stared at Zink on the other side of the coffee table.

  “Who have you been talking to?” Zink demanded.

  “No one. No one knows.”

  “Burch gets hit just before we’re about to lean on him. Now it’s Fitzhugh.”

  “I haven’t said anything to anyone. Not even my wife.”

  “Bullshit. What about Granger? When did you last talk to Granger?”

  “A week ago. But we didn’t talk about the case except he said he wasn’t gonna make a deal. I was gonna tell you about it when you got back from London.”

  “And when were you going to tell me about your connection to TAMS Limited? I found the papers in Fitzhugh’s house.”

  Matson blanched. “I was gonna…”

  Zink sprang across the table and grabbed Matson by the shirtfront, yanking him from the sofa.

&
nbsp; “You were gonna what? I could go to Peterson right now and get your ass indicted by sundown. Is that what you want? Hide one more thing from me and that’s what you’re going to get. You got it, you little shit?…I said, you got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Matson squeaked out. “I got it.”

  Zink pushed Matson back down, but remained standing, glaring at him. Matson flinched when Zink reached into his briefcase for a legal pad, still astonished that a man that small could be so strong, and so quick.

  Zink yanked a pen from his shirt pocket, then sat down.

  “Tell me every fucking thing about TAMS fucking Limited.”

  “It’s nothing.” Matson wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Just a company Fitzhugh set up. Burch was supposed to do it, but he was busy or something. TAMS owns a flat in London. Alla lives there. I wasn’t hiding it. We haven’t even gotten to the stockbrokers yet. They came long before TAMS. You got to have money before you can buy anything. Even though Granger had gotten the SEC to let us issue the shares, we still had to find somebody to sell them for us. That’s how we hooked up with Northstead Securities.”

  Matson took in a breath and exhaled, then leaned forward on the couch.

  “The guy we dealt with was named Yuri Kovalenko. You should’ve seen this monster. Granger and I walked into his office in San Diego and sitting behind the desk was a guy with a huge, shaved head and hands like a meatpacker.

  “Kovalenko had a spreadsheet all ready. It showed that SatTek was supposed to issue Northstead some shares at two dollars each, and that they would keep whatever they could sell it for above that. The stock goes up to five, they get three; goes up to six, they get four. It pissed me off. They could be making twice as much as SatTek.

  “I wanted to get up and walk out right then, but it hit me real hard what kind of guy I’m talking to, and I’m not sure who to be more frightened of, the SEC Enforcement Division or him. But I figure I need to say something, so I tell him that the SEC will only let us pay a commission. A few percent. Kovalenko looks at me like I’m a fool and points this sausagelike finger at me, but Granger cuts in and says how much of a risk Northstead is taking in the deal and blah, blah, blah.”