by Steven Gore
Matson nodded. “I’ve been driving around for hours. I went all through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park and Chinatown, and stayed off the freeway coming back down.”
Gage signaled the waitress and they turned their coffee cups right side up.
“Who goes first?” Matson asked.
“Me.” Gage glanced around the half-empty café, then leaned forward and crossed his forearms on the table. “As I told you on the phone, one of your competitors is interested in obtaining certain technology you possess.”
“Which one?”
“If I told you that, you’d cut me out. Right?”
Matson smiled. “It crossed my mind.”
“That wouldn’t be a good move. You’d lose your insulation.” Gage jabbed his own breastbone hard enough to make a thump. “And I’m your insulation.”
Matson’s smile faded.
“Suppose somebody figures out where my client got it?” Gage pointed at Matson. “You want a trail back to you?”
Matson shook his head.
Gage leaned back and spread his hands for a moment. “So what if it gets traced to me? I’ll already be Mr. White or Mr. Blue or Mr. Orange the second this deal is done.” Gage locked his eyes on Matson. “You understand?”
Matson swallowed, then nodded.
“So we’re not going to play any games,” Gage said.
“No. No games.”
They fell silent as the waitress arrived to fill their cups.
Gage tilted his head toward Blanchard after she walked away. “Mr. Black here will tell me what the technology is worth.”
Matson looked at Blanchard, whose face remained impassive, then back at Gage. “What if he’s wrong?”
“He’ll be right. When he’s done looking at the devices he’ll give me a number. It’ll be my only offer.”
“What if I don’t like it?”
“Then we never met. But you need to think about something.” Gage paused until he saw a glimmer of bewilderment in Matson’s eyes. “How many Mr. Greens have come knocking on your door?”
“Well…” Matson looked back and forth between them, then chewed on his thumbnail before finally focusing his eyes on Gage. “How do I get paid if we do the deal?”
“That’s up to you.”
Matson was quick to answer. “I want cash.”
Gage tapped his forefinger on the table. “Cash will cost me ten percent. I’ll need to deduct it from your end.”
“That’s a little steep.”
“It’s also a little risky. Money laundering will get me a lot more time than a little trade secrets beef.”
Matson’s eyes darted around the café, as if he was expecting FBI agents to spring from behind opened newspapers.
“If we can agree on a price,” Matson finally said, “I’ll take it in cash.”
“No problem. Why don’t you tell me what you think it’s worth?” Gage slipped his arm under the table and gripped the top of Blanchard’s thigh to keep him from reacting to Matson’s answer.
Matson took a sip of his coffee. The cup rattled slightly when he set it down. He leaned forward.
Gage tightened his hold on Blanchard’s thigh.
“Three million.”
Gage paused. “I think Mr. Black may find that a little high.”
“I’ll need to examine the devices,” Blanchard said.
Gage removed his hand.
“See,” Gage said with a slight grin. “That’s why I trust him. He doesn’t just tell me what I want to hear. When can he get a look at them?”
“There are a few more things I want to know,” Matson said.
“Shoot.”
“How do I know you won’t try to steal the technology?”
Gage smiled. “First, because I’m not in a labor-intensive business. I don’t work for a living. I merely put people who have something together with people who want something. Second, you know as well as I do that you can’t reverse-engineer these things. You need the code. And third, all Mr. Black needs is access to your facility to run a few tests. He won’t remove anything. Right, Mr. Black?”
“Right.” Blanchard sounded relaxed, friendly, now into the part. “That’s all I need. I don’t need to take anything and I don’t need to look at your code.”
Matson nodded. “Okay. I’ll go that far.”
“There’s one other thing,” Gage said. “Companies auction off their assets when they fold. I don’t want you including the intellectual property.”
Matson blanched.
Gage smiled to himself as he watched Matson’s plan to sell the IP twice evaporate, and then said, “I’ll arrange a leak to the financial press that the run-of-the-mill SatTek products are the same as everybody else’s and the higher-end technology is quickly becoming dated. Everybody will think the IP is more trouble than it’s worth. And I’ll throw in that SatTek conceded that one of your competitors makes the best devices in the field.”
“So then I just auction off the hardware?”
“Right. And if somebody wants to look at the IP, Mr. Black will screw around with the software until it travels in circles. Right, Mr. Black?”
Blanchard hesitated as if thinking through how he could rewrite the code, then nodded. “No problem.”
“When can he get in?” Gage asked.
Matson looked at his watch. “I want to get this over with. Let’s make it this afternoon.”
“We’ll be there at two o’clock.”
Gage and Blanchard slipped from the booth, then headed for the door, leaving Matson to deduct the three coffees from his end.
Once in the car, Gage retrieved the pen from Blanchard’s shirt pocket, repeated the date and the new time, then clicked it off.
“Matson has no idea what it’s worth,” Blanchard said as they drove away. “It’s a good thing you grabbed my leg, I would’ve laughed out loud.”
“As soon as he asked, ‘Who goes first?’ I knew he hadn’t thought everything through. He’s forgotten SatTek had a real product. For him it’s now just numbers. How much he needs, not what it’s worth. I’ll bet he was thinking he’d ask for five, but the words “money laundering” punched him in the gut.”
“It punched me in the gut. Why did Matson go for it so easily?”
“He hasn’t yet, but he will. There are only two things he needs to worry about. One, that we don’t rip him off. And two, that we’re not cops. And he knows we’re not cops.” Gage looked over and smiled. “When is the last time anybody your age worked undercover?”
Blanchard drew back. “In Berkeley we call that ageism. But what’s the real reason?”
“It’s because the one lesson he’s learned since he started cooperating with the U.S. Attorney is that the cops are on his side. He knows they need him. He’s told them lots of lies, held back things he didn’t want them to know. He’s figured out that they’ll believe anything he tells them because they want to believe him.”
“But wouldn’t they test him once in a while? Just to see if he lies.”
“It would be the end of their case.”
“Then why don’t you just take the recording of our meeting to the prosecutor?”
“Because Matson will say he was setting us up, trying to deliver something new in order to work more time off of his sentence—and they’ll believe him.”
Blanchard shook his head. “Suddenly electromagnetics and plasma physics seem somewhat less confusing than law.”
“This isn’t law, it’s called the gray area.”
Gage reached for his phone and called Milsberg.
“I need you to make yourself scarce this afternoon, and don’t ask why.”
He disconnected and made a quick call to Viz, then took the on-ramp to 101 South toward San Jose.
Matson met them in the SatTek lobby.
“How long will this take?” Matson asked Gage, eyes darting toward the entrance, then back and forth between the hallway toward the lab and the one toward the accounting and marketing depa
rtments.
“A couple hours. If anybody asks questions, just tell them we’re interested in bidding on the inventory.”
Matson stayed in the lab long enough to watch Blanchard hooking lines up to the RF input and the video output of the same model video amplifier he’d already tested.
“So what do you want to do for two hours?” Gage asked, after the door closed behind Matson.
“I’ll give you a lesson in how these things work.”
Matson looked in every fifteen or twenty minutes, each time observing Blanchard pointing at a device or at a computer monitor and making notes.
They left SatTek at four o’clock with an understanding they’d meet Matson at seven for dinner.
Gage called Viz as they drove toward the freeway. “Where’d you find Milsberg?”
“The AccuSoft parking lot, spying on SatTek.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gage,” Milsberg pleaded before Gage had a chance to speak. “Viz scared the daylights out of me. It was like this huge shadow fell across my windshield, like an eclipse. I’ll never do it again. I promise.”
Gage adopted the stern tone he’d used as Mr. Green. “Look, Robert. I can’t take a chance of you screwing up, and that sometimes means you can’t know some of the things I’m doing. You understand?”
“I’m sorry. I messed up—”
“If you need our help, we’ll help you. But we don’t have time to waste.”
CHAPTER 56
We’ve done everything we can,” Peterson said when he stopped by U.S. Attorney Willie Rose’s office at the end of the day. “We can’t find the grand jury leak.”
Rose wasn’t pleased. He could read the headlines before they’d been written: “Grand Jury Scandal Rocks Federal Court. U.S. Attorney’s Office Forced to Dismiss Two Hundred Indictments.”
Peterson sat down in a chair and passed a folder across Rose’s desk.
“These are Zink’s reports. The chief judge knew that Number Twenty-two’s cousin was Scuzzy Thomas. He put it in his jury questionnaire. In any case, we’ve followed him day and night. Work. Church. Soccer with the kids. We even checked his phone records going back five years. No contact at all with Scuzzy’s part of the family. But Zink will stay on him, just in case.”
“What about Number Six?”
“Nothing. The guy annoys people everywhere, not just U.S. Attorneys in the grand jury. He’s always calling the police on his neighbor, whose only crime is having a dog that does what everybody wants their dog to do: bark at strangers. The dispatchers cringe when they see his name and address pop up on the 911 screen.”
“What about the one the chief judge read the riot act to?”
“That’s Number Thirteen. Zink found out that he’s showed up at the arraignments of everybody this grand jury indicted. He really enjoys seeing people humiliated in public. Killing them would take the fun out of it.”
“So we’re at a dead end?”
“That’s the way it looks.”
“Have you come up with any ideas that won’t force us to reindict two hundred defendants?”
Peterson came prepared to answer that question, but knew he had to give it in exactly the right manner. He propped his forearms on the armrests of his chair and steepled his hands.
“Let me put it this way. We have no proof there’s a leak from this grand jury. We have no proof there have been prior leaks from this grand jury. Everybody indicted by this grand jury deserved it. They’re all righteous cases. This grand jury worked long and hard. Very, very long and hard.”
Rose arched his eyebrows. “How long is very long?”
“Their term expires in ten days.”
“Tsk, tsk.” Rose smiled his understanding of what Peterson was trying to say, then pushed the unopened folder of Zink’s reports back across the desk. “What a shame to have labored so diligently on SatTek, then to run out of time.”
“That’s just what I thought.”
Rose leaned back in his chair, then gazed out toward the fog oozing into downtown San Francisco from the Pacific. There were other headlines he was worried about, ones generated by crime victims’ groups demanding to know when something would finally be done to punish the crooks behind SatTek.
He looked back at Peterson. “Suppose you got a new grand jury impaneled the moment the old one expires, then jammed them real hard, ten hours a day. How long would it take to get an indictment?”
Peterson was ready with that answer, too. “A week.”
CHAPTER 57
Matson arrived for his dinner meeting with Mr. Green and Mr. Black, driving a metallic blue Mercedes 600 Roadster and wearing a navy sports jacket and a yellow button-down shirt. After handing his keys to the valet, he waited by the entrance to Buccio’s Italian Cuisine for Gage and Blanchard, who were pulling into a parking space.
Gage had been amused by Matson’s choice. The chateau-style restaurant, standing at the far end of a commercial district that trailed off into a neighborhood of Tudors and California bungalows, had for two generations served as the meeting place and watering hole for the criminal and financial elite on the Peninsula.
Blanchard looked over at Gage and smiled. “Isn’t this the place where—”
Gage nodded. A year earlier, an FBI bug hidden in the men’s restroom as part of a racketeering investigation revealed that the mayor of San Jose not only was on the take from a local contractor, but had severe prostate problems.
“Matson’s an idiot,” Gage said, as he turned off the ignition. “This is out of a mafia movie. If he says bada-bing I’ll strangle him. It’s a damn good thing we’re not for real.” He glanced at Blanchard. “Turn on the transmitter. Do the date and time and put it in your coat pocket.”
“Is this the lab part of the course?”
“It counts for fifty percent of your grade.”
They crossed the parking lot, then nodded to Matson and followed him inside, where the maître d’ greeted him by name.
Matson left for the restroom shortly after they were seated. Gage followed him. By the time he arrived, Matson was in a stall. He came out a minute later and stepped up to wash his hands. Gage dried his own, then reached over and grabbed Matson by his back collar, spun him around, and jammed him back inside.
Matson pawed the walls as Gage forced him to look down toward the clean, clear water in the bowl.
“You fucking amateur.”
Matson hadn’t used the toilet, so he hadn’t flushed.
Gage yanked Matson out of the stall, patted him down, then spun him back around. He reached into Matson’s right breast pocket, pulled out a small digital tape recorder. The screen showed that it had been running for only thirty seconds. Gage dropped it on the floor and crushed it with his heel.
“Are you some fucking snitch?” For a moment Gage really felt like Mr. Green, and showed it. “Are you setting me up, you fucking asshole?”
“No, no. I just…protection. I needed protection…in case you rip me off. That’s all. Really, that’s all.”
Sweat beaded on Matson’s face as he tried to lick his lips with a dry tongue. His eyes were wide, as if imagining himself strangled, propped up on the toilet until his body was discovered at closing time, or maybe not until the following day. Gage released his grip moments before Matson’s bladder would’ve given way.
“You try this shit again and I’ll blow your fucking brains out.” Gage stared down into Matson’s reddening eyes. “You got it?”
“Yes. I got it.”
“Let’s go back.”
Matson grimaced. “I need to pee.”
“I’ll wait.”
Gage walked behind Matson as they left the restroom. Matson snagged a napkin from a supply cart near the kitchen, wiped his face and then dropped it into a dirty dish tub. Gage gave Blanchard a thumbs-up as they approached the table.
A waitress distributed menus as soon as they were reseated, and then laid the wine list in front of Mr. Matson, the regul
ar.
Matson lowered his menu, mouth looking sour. “I’m not very hungry.”
“Come on, man,” Gage said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
Matson rubbed his forehead, still hot and moist, then let out a sigh while looking around the restaurant at the normalcy around him. The well-heeled diners sipping their wines and savoring their pastas. The waiters poised to serve.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world,” Gage continued. “Anybody with a brain will grab a little money for themselves. It’s called business.”
“Yeah…I guess.”
“I’ve heard you’re a smart guy. A smooth operator. Somebody who knows how to seize an opportunity.”
Matson brightened. “Yeah, I’ve done that a few times.”
“Us, too. And this one will make us a lot of money.” Gage smiled. “Let’s celebrate. On me. You pick the wine.”
Matson reached under his menu and pulled out the wine list. He turned the pages back and forth, working his finger up and down the lists, until he finally settled on a Cavallotto Barolo Boschis ’98. Gage signaled the wine steward, who remained expressionless as Matson mispronounced his selection. He slipped away, returning a minute later, bottle in hand. He and Matson did the label-cork-taste dance, which ended with filled glasses.
Gage picked his up first. “To business.”
Then Blanchard, “To business.”
Finally and unenthusiastically, Matson said, “To business.”
It wasn’t until their salads arrived that Matson was ready to pop the money question.
“I think we can go as high as two-point-five,” Gage said. “Three is just way too much.”
“Does that include the ten percent?”
“No, that’ll drop it to two-point-two-five.”
“How about we split the difference?”
Gage shook his head. “No can do. I trust Mr. Black. He told me what we can sell it for and I believe him.”
“What if I didn’t take it in cash?”
“Then you keep the ten percent. But you’ll need to tell me how you want it.”
“I don’t know yet.” Matson glanced down at his glass and swirled the wine. “Well, I guess I really want it in cash. The FBI can trace wire transfers anywhere.”
