Final Target

by Steven Gore

  “That’s not unusual. It happened all the time.”

  Zink raised his eyebrows. “Guess who his cousin is?”

  “I couldn’t guess.” Peterson frowned, not in the mood for game playing.

  “Scuzzy Thomas.”

  Peterson sat up. “No fucking way!”

  Peterson slammed his fist on Zink’s desk. Pens and notebooks jumped. The computer monitor shook. “Are you telling me that we’ve got a relative of a mobster who’s in the joint for jury tampering sitting on a federal grand jury? Rose is gonna go nuts…Did you look at his juror questionnaire?”

  “No, they’re under seal. We’ll need a court order.”

  Peterson stood up. “I’ll get an order for all of them. This is a fucking can of worms.” He looked at the chart, shaking his head. “I’m starting to wish I never opened it.”

  He started toward the door, then hesitated and looked back at Zink. “Did it cross your mind that whoever wants all these other guys dead also wants to keep Matson alive?” He then turned away and marched down the hallway.

  CHAPTER 46

  Why is somebody keeping Matson alive?” Gage wondered aloud when Alex Z walked into the office kitchen where he was making a pot of coffee.

  “Keeping or leaving?”

  “Leaving means he’s harmless, keeping means he’s got something somebody wants.”

  Alex Z reached into the cabinet and pulled out two cups. “If I was him, I’d get a bodyguard.”

  “He must have a krysha, a roof.” Gage held his hand above his head, palm down. “Somebody is protecting him.” Gage lowered his arm. “Slava thought that Gravilov would squeeze Matson for money and it was Alla Tarasova’s job to keep an eye on him.”

  “Protecting him so they can squeeze him?”

  “That’s what a protection racket is all about. They protect you from other crooks so you can keep paying.”

  “Why not just put a gun to his head?” Alex Z formed his hand into the shape of a revolver. “You know, ‘Gimme all you got.’”

  “What would you do if somebody did that to you?”

  “I’d need to run out and sell my guitars and stuff.”

  “So would Matson. We need to figure out where his money is.” Gage flicked his thumb toward Alex Z’s office. “Why don’t you go over Matson’s phone records and the ones I got out of Fitzhugh’s house? See if you can tell who they were calling. Maybe we can find a pattern.”

  Alex Z brought a computer printout with him into Gage’s office a few hours later.

  “It’s pretty clear Matson only used his office phone for SatTek business calls,” Alex Z reported. “In fact, all the overseas calls were to companies on the sales leads or customer lists or to suppliers of manufacturing equipment. Germany and France. I checked a bunch of the numbers. Almost all were listed. But his cell phone records show calls to a bunch of unlisted and disconnected numbers in places that haven’t even been on the horizon. Like Singapore. Why would he be calling Singapore? Or Taiwan? Switzerland I can understand. Liechtenstein, yeah. UK, sure. But Singapore?”

  “Any pattern?”

  “Pattern? Yes. Explanation? No—but whatever it was, Fitzhugh was in the middle of it. Calls to him kept crisscrossing all the others. Switzerland, Fitzhugh. Singapore, Fitzhugh. Taiwan, Fitzhugh. He’d get a call from Matson, then right away call a bank or a law office in Lugano, or Guernsey, or London. Bang, bang. Just like that.”

  Gage turned his head and squinted toward the light coming into his office window, then back at Alex Z with the barest hint of a smile.

  “There’s something we haven’t thought much about,” Gage said. “Matson’s exit strategy. How does he think this’ll end? He knows the government will make him forfeit all the money. Peterson isn’t a fool. A jury asked to convict Burch wouldn’t be too pleased if he let Matson keep any. But Matson’s not a fool, either. He’s got to have a stash. He doesn’t want to come out of this thing broke. And the best place to hide money is where nobody would think to look.”

  “You think maybe Alla is part of his exit strategy? Dump the wife and disappear?”

  “If Slava is reading this correctly, he’ll disappear, all right.”

  “I don’t know, boss, her name is just too pretty for a crook. Alla Tarasova. It’s musical, even lyrical. It sort of floats in the air.”

  Gage remembered someone else who’d talked about her in almost the same way, as a butterfly with a beautiful name.

  “That’s what Mickey thought, too.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Mickey took it. He just lay there and took it. He didn’t scream. He didn’t yell for help. He knew if they’d intended to kill him, he’d already be dead.

  The giant kicked him one last time in the ribs as he lay sprawled in the shadows of Azenby Road in Southeast London, then lumbered into a waiting Mercedes and sped away.

  Mickey didn’t remember passing out. He just remembered the message and the pain when a constable passing by just after sunrise mistook him for a vagrant and shook him back into consciousness.

  The Metropolitan Police officer who followed the ambulance down Peckham Road and up Denmark Hill to the King’s College Hospital recognized Mickey as soon as the blood was washed off his face. Superintendent Michael Ransford was a legend whose retirement picture hung in the station to which the officer was assigned.

  The officer winced as he inspected the superintendent’s shattered face, for a moment imagining it was his own infirm grandfather lying there. But then he caught himself. Ransford was a pro. The best. He’d remember the details that civilian victims forget. He felt lucky to be the officer assigned to do the interview.

  “Superintendent?”

  Mickey opened his eyes.

  “What did he look like, Superintendent?”

  Mickey squeezed his answer out through his fractured jaw. “Never saw him.”

  “Would you recognize his voice?”

  “No.”

  The officer hesitated, almost bewildered. Of course he should recognize a voice…unless he was senile.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “What about his accent?”

  “Cockney.”

  Finally. At least the superintendent remembered something they could build on later. He pushed ahead.

  “What were you doing on Azenby Road, sir?”

  “Walking. Just walking.”

  The officer watched Mickey’s eyes close, then shook his head while gazing down at the battered man, wondering why one of the top detectives in Metropolitan Police history had deteriorated so quickly in retirement. He thought again of his grandfather, and an answer appeared: Alzheimer’s. Perhaps he should call the superintendent’s wife, offer to help keep an eye on him; maybe even gather up some other officers and take turns. Clearly the old man shouldn’t be permitted to wander the streets alone.

  The Russian was smart, Mickey thought as he listened to the officer’s footsteps fade toward the door. If they’d killed me, Peckham would’ve been swarming with police. No one gets away with murdering a retired superintendent. An assault case with no leads? Well, that’s an altogether different thing.

  “Uncle Mickey’s hurt.”

  The grim voice of Hixon Two followed a ringing that startled Gage and Faith as they sat on the couch near midnight watching the last embers in the fireplace turn dark.

  “What is it?” Faith asked. “Jack? Did they take Jack back to the ICU?”

  Gage shook his head, then placed a hand on her arm.

  “Will he be okay?” Gage asked Hixon Two.

  Hixon Two took in a short breath, trying to maintain her soldier’s composure. “He’ll live. But they beat the bloody hell out of him.”

  Gage covered the mouthpiece and turned to Faith. “Mickey’s been hurt.”

  “Gravilov’s thugs,” Hixon Two continued. “Hammer and Britva. Ribs, right arm, right eye socket, jaw, a gash on his forehead.”

  Gage winced at the imag
e. “How did it—”

  “He enjoyed the taste of work again, so he went out on his own.”

  “I never should’ve—”

  “Don’t blame yourself. He said you’d do that.”

  “What was he thinking? These are dangerous people.”

  “He was thinking that maybe he’d learn something that would help you. He started following Gravilov, but they led him into a trap. Azenby Road is a tiny street that dead ends at Warwick Gardens. He was trapped.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s still under. They went in to find the source of internal bleeding and they’ll wire his jaw. I could tell he learned something, but they raced him into surgery before he could finish.”

  Gage disconnected the call and remained sitting on the edge of the couch.

  “Mickey thought he was invisible,” he told Faith, “like lost keys.” He felt himself well up. “I never should’ve gotten him into this.”

  “It’s not your fault. The little jobs you gave him made him feel important, still useful in the world.”

  Gage turned toward her. “But I always made sure somebody younger and stronger was with him.”

  “He never realized it, did he?”

  Gage shook his head. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings…For something like this, he should’ve called me to come do it, not tried it himself.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to look stupid if he was wrong.”

  “Sometimes it’s not worth being right.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Hixon Two called back early the next morning, catching Gage on the drive down the hill toward the flatlands and the Bay Bridge.

  “He’s got a sparkle in his eye and is quite proud of himself.” The worry was gone from her voice.

  “Wait till the painkillers wear off.”

  “I don’t think it’ll make a difference.”

  “Can he talk?”

  “Yes, but he sounds like he has a lisping Chinese accent from a 1940s film. He kept saying he ‘crowsht a shirkle.’”

  “Closed a circle? What’d he mean?”

  “Get this.” She paused as she’d been instructed by Mickey to set Gage up for the surprise. “He spotted Gravilov coming out of Alla’s building three days ago.”

  “Now that’s what I would call closing a circle.” The black hole left by Fitzhugh had been filled with Alla Tarasova. He paused, trying to visualize the possible orbits, then thought out loud. “Either she’s now Matson’s proxy or she’s got a separate deal with Gravilov. Maybe Slava is right, she and her father are working with Gravilov.”

  But that was all step two. Step one was still Mickey.

  “Do you think Gravilov had any idea why Mickey was following them? SatTek can’t be the only scam he’s got running.”

  “No way to tell. They just beat him up and warned him not to talk. That’s it.”

  After Hixon Two rang off, Gage found himself lost in circles. There were too many threads doubling back on each other, and he couldn’t get his head clear. He decided it was time to go beat on something. He cut off the freeway at the last exit before the bridge and headed east.

  Twenty minutes later, Stymie Jackson came limping out of his East Oakland gym office. Gage had just slipped on his bag gloves. The sixty-eight-year-old former middleweight contender waved to Gage, then pulled up a stool next to the heavy bag.

  “Where ya been?” he asked Gage. “You missed a few weeks.”

  “A friend of mine is in a little trouble.”

  Over thirty years since Stymie had first trained Gage for the police Olympics, he had learned never to ask Gage for details. He reached for the stopwatch hanging on a lanyard around his neck, and nodded.

  Gage threw two left jabs and then a right uppercut that made the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag jump three inches.

  “That’s it. Stick it. Jab, jab, power jab. Come on. Jab, jab, power jab. Step into it. Jab, jab, power jab.”

  The word “trouble” echoed back. Gage then realized that there was something that had drawn him there. “My trouble” was the phrase Stymie always used to describe the day in the late fifties when he refused to take a fall in a fight. Chicago gangsters mangled his right leg as punishment, both for the money they’d lost and for not keeping his mouth shut. Stymie used to tell Gage: They was telling me that everybody’d be betting against me like crazy on the next fight expecting me to lose—and they’d let me win. The bad guys said it was for the good of the game. But their game really wasn’t boxing, it was something else.

  Gage stopped punching. He wiped his brow with the backs of his bag gloves, then glanced around the empty gym. Speed bags still. Ring empty. Jump ropes hung on hooks. A thought was lurking in his mind, but it was still too deep to dredge.

  “Did I say it’s time to stop?” Stymie looked down at his stopwatch. “You got forty-five seconds left. Come on, stick it.”

  Gage got back into the rhythm, then switched to a series of straight rights. The phrase “for the good of the game” repeated itself with each punch. For the thump of the game, for the thump of the game, for the thump of the game.

  “Stop.”

  Gage slipped a towel off a worn wooden bench, gripped it between his gloves, and wiped the sweat from his face. He wondered whether the mobsters would’ve let Stymie keep fighting if he’d kept silent; just a broken leg, not a mangled one that destroyed his career.

  Maybe that’s it, Gage thought as he stared at the still swinging bag. Then the answer arrived in Stymie’s voice: So what if Matson’s talkin’? He ain’t talkin’ about things the bad guys don’t want him talkin’ about.

  But Gage didn’t have a clue what that was.

  CHAPTER 49

  Gage called Alex Z into his office after driving in from Stymie’s.

  “What’s up, boss?” Alex Z said as he dropped into a chair.

  Gage got up from behind his desk and walked to an easel, marker in hand.

  “I need your help thinking this through.”

  He started a fresh charting of the players, drawing arrows showing the known relationships.

  “We know how everybody connects together except for Matson, Alla, and Gravilov,” Gage said, then stepped back from the chart.

  “Three people can all meet each other in six different sequences,” Alex Z said, shaking his head. “And when you factor in all of the rest, you spin off into infinity.”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” Gage said. “Too many moving parts.”

  Alex Z made a show of looking around the office. At the bookcases lined with files, the fireproof safes anchored to the floor, and a network server containing millions of scanned documents. “I thought those were the only kinds of cases you did.”

  “But this one we need to simplify before it gets away from us.”

  Gage crossed his arms across his chest. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who introduced whom?” He glanced at Alex Z’s SatTek chronology hanging from the wall, then back at the chart. “Matson travels to London just before the IPO, he hooks up with Alla…or she hooks up with him…Why? Was she looking to snag him? Or maybe they meet by chance…In any case, he brags. He says ‘I’ve got an IPO coming up,’ and she calls Budapest to tell her gangster daddy.” Gage pointed at the lines connecting Matson, Alla, and Gravilov. “What did Granger say?…Sometimes children grow up and do things you never expected in your wildest imagination…Gage looked at Alex Z. “What does Granger do when he figures it out—whatever it was? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s unhappy, maybe about not getting a cut, but he has to keep his mouth shut. He can’t snitch off Matson without snitching off himself.”

  “You think Matson has told the government about Gravilov?” Alex Z asked.

  Gage repeated the question aloud, then shook his head and smiled. “That’s it. That’s exactly what Granger had to trade. And what shocked the hell out of him was that Matson had the balls to deal directly with a gangster at Gravilov’s level.” He looked again at the Granger circle, n
ow transfixed. “Wait a second…Wait a second.”

  Alex Z’s eyes followed Gage as if he was a high-wire artist balancing over a canyon.

  Gage flipped the marker back and forth between his hands a few times, then stopped and looked at Alex Z. “If Granger had lived long enough to tell Peterson that Matson and Gravilov were working together, then Matson would’ve been no good to the government. It would’ve busted Matson’s plea deal because he got caught lying. Peterson couldn’t use him. A jury would never believe a word he said.”

  “Then Peterson gives Granger a chance to work off some time.”

  “Exactly. Granger could give up everybody Matson could. And he’s untainted. He steps in and pushes Matson out of the way. Matson does the hard time and Granger gets no more than a couple of years.”

  “So Matson kills Granger?”

  Gage shook his head. “I don’t see a runt like him killing anybody. He’s got somebody protecting him, maybe somebody sent by Gravilov…And whoever is behind the murder of Granger is also behind the murders of the Fitzhughs and the attempt on Jack and the burglary at his office.”

  “But why Mr. Burch?”

  “He knows something. Fitzhugh and Matson asked him to set up TAMS Limited, the company that owns the London flat. Maybe Matson used Tarasova-Alla-Matson-Stuart Limited for whatever deal he had with Gravilov. Him and Alla working together…”

  Gage paused as a shudder passed through his body, an image of Burch, weak and vulnerable, appeared in his mind. “It could be a lot worse. Jack may know something he doesn’t realize he knows.”

  Gage tossed the marking pen onto his desk and surveyed the chart and the chronology hanging next to it.

  “I have a feeling that regardless of whether this all started with Alla meeting Matson by chance or with her targeting him,” Gage finally said, “it’ll end up at the same place.”