Final Target

by Steven Gore

  Matson emitted a nervous laugh. “The only one who was at risk right then was me.”

  Zink smirked. “Don’t tell me you’re claiming you got coerced into doing this by Kovalenko?”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I was still thinking that if we did things just right, and brought in enough money, even at two bucks a share, we could grow SatTek into a big company. Five million shares meant ten million dollars for SatTek. That and a little leverage and we could buy up some of our competition.”

  Matson rose to his feet and started pacing.

  “Kovalenko took us into a big trading floor, about forty guys working the phones, and then across the hall to meet an old man they called the Maestro. A droopy-jowled guy with the worst rosacea I’ve ever seen. I never learned his real name. His job was to push the stock. Plant stories in the press. Spam out stock tips.

  “Granger was pissed at me when we left because I had challenged Kovalenko and I was pissed at him because he was always treating me like a child, and I was sick of it. But we needed to get cash coming in, so the next morning I did what he told me. I called the stock transfer agent and had him issue five million shares to Northstead and then two million each to Cobalt Partners, Azul Limited, and Blau Anstalt.”

  Matson paused, and his eyes went vacant for a moment.

  “Right after I hung up the phone, I got a real sick feeling in my stomach.” He looked down at Zink. “You ever go to a magic show in Vegas?”

  Zink shook his head.

  “The magician asks somebody to come up on the stage, then he does a little razzle-dazzle, and suddenly he’s holding the guy’s wallet and everybody in the audience is laughing at him. I decided right then that I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I called the guy back and had an extra two million shares issued to Cobalt Partners. Then I told the lawyer in Guernsey to have the nominee directors sell them as soon as the stock hit five dollars a share and send the profit to my Barclays account in London.”

  “And that’s the first money that went into TAMS?”

  Matson nodded.

  “Did you tell Granger and Fitzhugh about the additional shares?”

  “Fuck no.”

  CHAPTER 21

  When Gage arrived at his office after a futile morning meeting with Courtney and Burch’s doctors at SF Medical, he found that Alex Z had converted it into a war room. Conference tables. Easels. An additional computer workstation. Redbrick walls now bare, waiting for poster boards bearing flowcharts and chronologies.

  “SatTek was self-underwriting,” Alex Z reported as he sat down across the desk from Gage. “They sold a lot of the stock themselves. The rest through a brokerage firm called Northstead Securities.”

  Gage sat poised behind his desk, chin propped on his folded hands.

  “It’s owned by Albert William Ward, a broker hanging on to his license by a thread.” Alex Z pointed toward the floors below. “I asked all of our ex-FBI people to use their contacts at the SEC. It turns out that he’s been on their radar for a long time.” He slid a Securities and Exchange Commission Litigation Release across the desk. “The Enforcement Division slapped his wrist a few years ago. He laid low for a while, then came back as Northstead.”

  Gage picked it up and read it over. “Is he still in Colorado?”

  “No. San Diego. Off Highway 5 close to downtown, right near the Hyatt Regency.” Alex Z grinned. “I mean real, real close by.”

  Gage drew back, brows furrowed. “What does the Hyatt Regency have to do with Northstead?”

  “I made you a reservation for tonight. Late checkin.”

  Gage shook his head and smiled. “I think we’ve been working together too long.”

  “Your flight is at 7 P.M. out of SFO.”

  “I’ll be on it.”

  “Pretty soon after SatTek went public, they used some stock to buy an engineering software firm in Ireland. No cash changed hands. A shares-for-equity deal. Three million shares worth about fifteen million dollars.”

  “And the shareholders put up with that?”

  “Some didn’t like it but it went through anyway. They thought SatTek was straying from its business plan with no justification.”

  “Still, that’s quite a chunk.”

  “SatTek did everything in chunks. There were eleven big shareholders. The biggest were Blau Anstalt, Azul Limited, and Cobalt Partners.”

  “Blue companies.”

  Alex Z’s face washed with puzzlement as if he’d gone colorblind. “Blue companies?”

  “Blau is ‘blue’ in German. Azul is ‘blue’ in Spanish. Cobalt is blue as the deep blue sea.”

  “You think they’re linked some way?”

  Gage nodded. “It’s not likely to be a coincidence. Any blue ones on the domestic side?”

  “Nope, but there’s a large shareholder in Nevada. The registered agent is named Chuck Verona.”

  “Send someone out there to find out who he is and what else he’s into.” Gage pointed at an easel bearing a fresh pad of poster board. There was already too much to keep track of in his head. “Then chart all of this out.”

  “I’ll do it tonight.”

  “You don’t have to spend—”

  Alex Z shook his head. “I know I’m just a computer guy but something smells real bad about what happened to Mr. Burch. So I’ll be living here until you figure it out.”

  Gage reached for the phone to make a call as Alex Z headed back downstairs to his office.

  “Tiptoe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Graham Gage.”

  Gage heard Tiptoe chewing. He was always chewing. Gum. Tobacco. Beef jerky. He said it kept the rest of his body steady, especially his hands. His life—spent performing black-bag jobs for the good guys—sometimes depended on it.

  “What’s cookin’?”

  Gage heard his lips smack.

  “I’ve got a little situation. You doing anything tonight?”

  “Depends on what’s on the Playboy Channel and how much you wanna spend.”

  “A thousand.”

  “I think my cable just went out.”

  “How long would it take you to get to San Diego?”

  “That also depends…”

  Tiptoe’s jaws fell silent.

  “Fifteen hundred.”

  “Two hours.”

  “The place is called Northstead Securities.”

  Alex Z had a rental van reserved for Gage when he arrived at the San Diego International Airport. American. Gray. Anonymous. Tinted windows.

  Gage made a quick run down Pacific Highway, glanced at the bay and the Naval Air Station on North Island, then cut a few blocks inland. Northstead Securities was located on the ground floor of a U-shaped glass and metal office building north of downtown. Parking places filled and surrounded the U.

  At 8:45 P.M. Gage slipped into a parking space shadowed by a Torrey pine. The lights inside Northstead were still on; a few brokers remained. Gage didn’t need to bug the place to know what was going on. Every boiler room he’d ever investigated was the same. Twenty, thirty, forty cubicles. Guys, all guys. Not members of a team or a group or a staff, but a crew that moved like a toxic cloud. When it was time for Northstead to evaporate, they’d condense somewhere else and adopt a new British-sounding name with the resonance of marble columns and old money: Oxford Capital or Oxford Securities or Oxford Investments, Stratford Asset Management or Stratford Equities or Stratford Partners.

  Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Gage surveyed the brokers working the phones, pumping and dumping penny stocks, an archaic nickname for those selling for less than five bucks, and often, Gage knew, not worth a cent. As he watched their bobbing heads and gesticulating hands, he imagined the pitches Northstead used to push SatTek, ones appealing to the war on terror, the military’s need for SatTek’s proprietary technology to fight it, and its stock being a way to make a patriotic killing in the stock market.

  Gage saw two of them jump to their feet, high-fivin
g their half-height cubicles. A sucker bit.

  Moments after the last of the brokers turned off the lights two hours later, a potbellied little man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans appeared out of the darkness. He opened Gage’s passenger door and climbed in. He cradled a black canvas bag on his lap.

  “Can you get us in?” Gage asked Tiptoe.

  “I’ve already been inside. They had a little electrical problem earlier. It fucked up their security system.”

  “And you fixed it?”

  Tiptoe grinned. “I caused it.”

  Gage pointed at the lights glowing in a third floor window. “Do we need to worry about them?”

  “No. They’re just kids running a start-up. As long as they don’t spot us going in, we’ll be okay.”

  An hour later, Tiptoe jimmied the lock and stepped through the double glass doors. He pulled out a tiny flashlight, turned toward the wall, and punched in the code to disable the alarm. Gage scanned the parking lot, then followed him inside.

  They stood silently, letting their eyes adjust to the semidarkness. Only the screen saver on the receptionist’s monitor and an exit sign at the end of a short hallway provided light.

  Gage spotted a restroom sign and an arrow pointing down the hallway, then whispered to Tiptoe, “The file storage room is probably down there.”

  Tiptoe slipped away while Gage skirted the reception station and the glass partition behind it, then headed along the carpeted floor toward the half-height cubicles of the boiler room. The empty desks seemed like epicenters of thousands of tragedies: retirement savings lost, college funds wasted, and houses in foreclosure.

  Gage’s foot slipped on a piece of paper. He flicked on his flashlight. A handout for the brokers. The title: “Human Motivation.” And below that, the scales of justice with one side labeled “Greed,” the other “Fear.”

  He moved on, then stopped halfway down the aisle and pointed his flashlight at a desk. A lead book. A thick blue binder. “Do Not Remove. Property of Smith Barney.” He flipped it open. Names. Telephone numbers. Pages and pages and pages of leads. Smuggled out and sold to Northstead for cash that had been stolen from previous victims. Tacked above on the cubicle wall were scripts for pushing new stocks. One was for a company promising renewable energy using a process the brokers weren’t allowed to disclose and, Gage suspected, didn’t exist.

  Headlights swept the window, backlighting the closed blinds. Gage snapped off his flashlight and ducked down. Headlights once again. This time bearing down. Then off.

  Gage reached for his cell phone. Tiptoe’s number was set for redial. “A car pulled up.” He crawled to the window and peeked out. The driver’s door opened. A man stepped out. His starched white shirt glowed in the parking lot’s halogen lights. Black hair. No more than thirty-five. Six foot two. Broad-shouldered.

  Must be one of the brokers, Gage thought.

  Then the passenger door opened. A woman. Blond. A walking centerfold, but hair a mess. She reached into her purse. The parking lights of the car next to his flashed.

  The broker steadied himself on the hood of his Lexus as he made his way toward her. He opened her driver’s door, then reached his arms around her. His hands groping under her skirt, reaching between her legs. She giggled and pushed him away. She slid into the car and he staggered to the sidewalk, rocking side-to-side, and watched her drive away.

  The broker turned toward the office entrance, keys in hand.

  “Tiptoe,” Gage whispered into his cell phone. “He’s coming in.”

  Gage ducked back into a cubicle just a second before the office exploded with light.

  “It’s me.” The slurred voice was speaking into a phone. Words coming out as “Itch me.” “Sorry. I had to work late…Dinner meeting with a client…yeah…it was Kovalenko’s idea. Fucking slave driver.”

  Kovalenko. Kovalenko. Kovalenko.

  The name rocketed around in Gage’s head. Burch’s face came to him first. A bull’s-eye encircling it. Only then did an image appear: Semion Kovalenko, an East Coast gangster.

  Wait. That can’t be right. Isn’t Semion Kovalenko dead? Who’s he talking about?

  “Yeah,” the broker said, “at the office to get some papers…gotta take a pee, then I’ll be home.”

  “He’s coming your way,” Gage whispered into his phone.

  But he wasn’t.

  Gage heard the thud of the man staggering against the corner of the first cubicle. “Son of a bitch.” Then a laugh and “I’m fucking wasted.” The voice was moving closer.

  Gage glanced around the carpeted cubicle. The desk and chair and filing cabinet occupied half the space—and Gage filled most of the rest.

  The metal joints of the cubicle walls creaked when the broker pulled on it to maintain his balance as he worked his way down the aisle.

  Gage knew he couldn’t fight him. Their combined four hundred pounds crashing into walls, buckling partitions, and shattering windows would leave an irreparable battlefield—and send Kovalenko—or whoever he really was—on a hunt for the invader.

  The carpeted wall bulged out as the man grabbed on to it just a yard away.

  When the broker stopped again to steady himself, Gage snatched a pen off the desk and tossed it in a high arc toward the glass partition behind the receptionist’s station. Gage sprang to his feet as the man turned toward the sound of metal clicking against glass, then stepped up behind him. He locked his hand over the man’s eyes and clamped the crook of his elbow across the man’s neck. The man tried to pry away Gage’s hands and punch at Gage’s head, adrenaline rushing to overwhelm the alcohol that had deadened his brain—but not enough. The broker finally went limp. Gage lowered him to the carpet.

  Tiptoe’s head peeked from the far hallway and he pointed at the light switch by the door. Gage shook his head, then met him halfway, next to the glass partition.

  “The guy’s car is in front,” Gage said. “Anyone driving by will think he’s working late.”

  Tiptoe glanced down the aisle toward the body. His eyes widened. “You didn’t…”

  “He’ll be okay. Hopefully, tomorrow morning he’ll just think he passed out.” Gage picked up the pen, then looked back toward the hallway. “What did you find?”

  Tiptoe shrugged. “Not much. The cabinet drawer in the storage room with the SatTek label is empty, except for one file. I photographed everything inside. And there were a few folders mixed in with some others in a drawer called Cambridge Investments. The only name I saw was for a guy named Verona, from Nevada. His name was also on some papers for something called Golden West Properties. It owns cars with this address on the registration.”

  Gage pointed at the storage room. “Keep searching.” He then headed down the aisle toward what appeared to be the manager’s office. An image of Burch’s face in the bull’s-eye once again appeared in his mind. Then his stomach tensed. Kovalenko.

  He called Alex Z. “Do a news archive search for me. Semion Kovalenko. He was involved in a Russian organized crimes stock scam in New York.”

  He stepped into the boss’s office, but didn’t turn on the light. He scanned the desk with his flashlight. Stacks of correspondence.

  “Alex? It’s not Semion, but Yuri.”

  Gage inspected the sparse room as he listened to Alex Z’s keystrokes in the background. No pictures on the walls. No filing cabinets. No diplomas or broker’s licenses. A high-back leather chair and two smaller ones that looked like they’d been salvaged from a skid-row dentist’s office. No computer on the Office Depot desk. Just a twenty-line phone and an adding machine. Gage opened each of the drawers in turn. Nothing about SatTek.

  Finally, Alex Z spoke. “I found it. A Business Week article. Three years ago. Yuri is Semion’s brother and was the muscle for the operation. Says here the broker-dealers were terrified of him. Semion was murdered just before he got indicted and Yuri did almost twenty months for refusing to testify.”

  “In the fraud trial?”

  “No, i
n the trial against the guys who gunned down his brother…looks like he got shot, too.”

  “An old-school gangster. Any kind of testifying is snitching.” The almost bare office now struck Gage as a stage set. A way for Yuri Kovalenko to tell whoever sat across the desk that he had nothing to lose—so don’t cross him. “He must’ve terrified Matson, too.”

  “Hold on. It looks like there’s a link to another story…Jeez…the bodies of the killers were found dismembered in Central Park two days after he was released from jail.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Oceanside’s Pleasant Acres wasn’t near the ocean, wasn’t pleasant, and had no acreage beyond the legally required ten-foot strip between it and Good as Gold Pawnshop on one side and Nguyen’s Nail Salon on the other. And it didn’t strike Gage as the sort of place a stockbroker would expect to spend his declining years.

  “Albert will be so pleased to have another visitor,” the receptionist said to Gage. “And you are?”

  She was a fleshy middle-aged black woman wearing a yellow shift. Reading glasses hung from a “What Would Jesus Do?” lanyard. Her off-kilter name tag, riding high on huge and structurally supported breasts, said “Dolores B.” She seemed thrilled to have outside company.

  “I’m Mr. Ward’s nephew. This is my first chance to get to this part of the country in years. How long has he been here?”

  “He came right about my birthday. So about twenty-three months.”

  “Then happy birthday.”

  Dolores beamed. “Thank you kindly. I hope he remembers you. Even if he doesn’t he’ll be so pleased to have a visitor.”

  She turned a sign-in book toward him. Gage wrote in the name Gary Ward.

  “He’s out in the patio,” she continued. “Just go down that hallway.” She pointed to her left. “There’s a sliding glass door near the end. He’s dressed. We get them dressed every day, you see.”