by Steven Gore
Final Target
( Graham Gage - 1 )
Steven Gore
Steven Gore
Final Target
PROLOGUE
Eighteen Months Earlier
More surprising than spinning out of control, than smashing through the railing, than tumbling trunk-over-hood down the hillside; more surprising even than the sheet metal buckling around her, was that she was dying in English. The woman tried to die in Russian, then in Ukrainian, but the words had forsaken her. Even her given name had fled into the swirling dust at the bottom of the ravine. She remembered only what others called her: Katie.
Katie grieved the loss of the inner voice of her childhood, as she knew would her parents, then comforted herself with the knowledge that they’d never find out.
The police officers standing with an interpreter at their apartment door would say she died instantly, sparing them the horror that their only child suffered any final thoughts at all.
In truth, she felt no horror. Nor panic. Nor dread.
There was just the rush of wind in the eucalyptus, as if an overture to the passing of her life before her eyes. But her mind drifted not into the past, but to another place in her present: her SatTek coworkers gathering a mile away, under coastal redwoods surrounded by acres of spring grass. She wondered whether they would miss her, backtrack along the twisting road when she didn’t answer her cell phone, or notice the broken railing as they drove home sunburned and bleary-eyed, then scramble down the hillside to find her body. She wished she could freshen her makeup and comb her hair, just in case.
Katie inspected the red soil blanketing the gray vinyl interior, then looked through her burst side window at dust dancing and gliding in a beam of morning sunlight. She heard the rustling of tiny feet in dry leaves. Perhaps a rabbit, a gray squirrel, or a finch returning to its work, pecking at wildflower seeds scattered by the three thousand pounds of steel and glass that had thrashed the hillside.
A warm gust churned the air. She smelled her mother’s kitchen in the bay leaves sweating in the overhanging branches and in the sage and fennel crushed by her car. She then saw herself at the dining table a month earlier, hunched over her laptop, heart pounding, typing a San Francisco address, and then later, hands shaking as she slid a letter into the corner mailbox. Dear Mr. Special Agent in Charge: The president of Surveillance and Targeting Technologies of San Jose, California, is engaged in a massive-
Which of them knew? Which of those she saw in her mind’s eye just a mile away, starting charcoal, setting up volleyball nets, pinning down the corners of tablecloths with ketchup and mustard bottles. Those men tossing footballs and glancing over at the women in little outfits they’d never worn to the office. The women trying not to giggle at white nerd-legs stuck into brown socks and clearance-rack Nikes or stare too long at the Cancun-bronzed chests of the men from the loading dock.
Which of them knew? A chill vibrated through her body. Which of them knew that she knew?
The lenses of her eyes changed focus from the thistles and nettles beyond the fractured windshield to the pale green Tupperware lying upside-down on the dashboard, her potato salad still sealed inside. Wasted. Even back home in Lugansk among the collapsed coal mines, even in the worst of times, no one wiped off blood to eat the food of the dead. It would be- What did Father Roman say? It would be like eating the bread of the Eucharist without the sacrament.
Katie closed her eyes, her shallow breath once again infused with bay and sage and fennel-then a wrenching vertigo, as if she’d been tossed from a sailboat twisting in a hurricane. My name…I need…to know…my name.
She wanted to smile when it finally reached out to her from the whirlwind… Ekaterina. But there wasn’t time.
CHAPTER 1
C ome on buddy, don’t die on me. Don’t you dare die on me.”
The rain-slickered EMT pressed hard on the side-by-side bullet holes in the fifty-year-old jogger’s sternum while a paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over the man’s nose and mouth. The runner was splayed out on a predawn sidewalk fronting ten-million-dollar mansions in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.
“Come on, man. Hang in there. You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna make it. You just gotta help me.”
“One, two, three, lift,” and the victim was moved from the wet concrete to the collapsible gurney. “One, two, three, lift,” and the gurney was raised and rolled toward the fire department ambulance.
“Any ID?” a beat-weary patrol officer asked as the gurney slid into the back.
“Nothing. Just this hanging around his neck.” The EMT tossed over a silver chain and house key. “Sorry, I couldn’t get his name.”
The cop rotated the key between his fingers and inspected it under the streetlight as if puzzled by how a jagged sliver of metal could imprison him on duty long after his shift. He shook his head slowly, then looked up. “Am I supposed to try this thing in every fucking door in San Francisco?”
“Just do your job,” the EMT mumbled as he ran toward the cab. “Just do your job.”
Private investigator Graham Gage lowered the barbell onto its crutches, then grabbed his ringing cell phone from the carpeted floor of his basement gym.
“Graham, it’s Spike.”
“Can’t be.” The wall clock read 5:37. “The only Spike I know is still lying in bed dreaming about bass fishing.” Gage expected a clever response. He didn’t get one.
Spike’s voice held steady. “It’s about Jack Burch.”
Gage felt his heart twist in his chest. He pushed himself up from the weight bench, then braced the phone against his shoulder and ripped off his lifting gloves. Spike was the lieutenant in charge of SFPD Homicide.
“How bad is it?” Gage asked, heading toward the stairs to the main floor.
“I don’t know. It just came in.”
“Where’s he now?”
“Hold on…3E44…What’s your 1020?”
Gage took the steps two at a time. He caught a jumble of voices and static as the officer answered.
“They’re just pulling into SF Medical,” Spike said.
A crack of thunder drew Gage’s eyes toward a wall of windows in the living room of his Oakland post-and-beam house. He had expected to see the lights of San Francisco across the bay, but a late-October alloy of fog and storm clouds sweeping in from the Pacific had enveloped the city. Even the oak branches that framed his view were webbed in gray, their resident birds mute, invisible, cowering against a squall advancing up the hillside.
“What happened?” Gage asked as he climbed toward his third floor bedroom.
“The uniforms on the scene are telling me it was road rage. Witnesses said he’d just started jogging from his house when a guy blew the stop sign at Webster and Pacific. Jack yelled something and the asshole did a U-turn, fired a couple of shots, then took off. A neighbor recognized Jack as they put him into the ambulance.”
Gage knew his friend’s morning route, knew the intersection. Animated stick figures reenacted the shooting in his mind as if in a virtual re-creation. He fought off the image of an early morning downpour washing Jack Burch’s blood into a leaf-clogged gutter.
“Anybody ID the shooter?” Gage asked.
“Nobody we’ve talked to yet, but chances are slim. The commute hadn’t started and there weren’t many runners and dog walkers out because of the weather.”
“And the car?”
“Generic every which way, and nobody caught the plate.”
Spike’s radio crackled in the background. Gage heard him double-click the handset to confirm receipt of the message.
“What’s that?” Gage asked.
“They asked me for his next of kin.”
Gage froze at the top of the sta
irs, then caught his breath, steeling himself for the answer before he asked the question. “Did he…”
“No. Sorry, man. It’s not that. They just wanted contact info.”
Gage exhaled. “Put me down until his wife gets there.”
“Where is she?”
“With Faith up at the cabin. I’ll call her on the way.”
In his bedroom, Gage slipped on a pair of Levi’s, then reached for a gray hooded sweatshirt, and slid it over his body like armor.
CHAPTER 2
The city began to emerge as Gage drove down the pine-and oak-treed canyon toward the Bay Bridge. The clouds had lifted enough to expose a pattern of lights hinting at the shapes of buildings spread around the San Francisco financial district. His mind’s eye perceived what he still couldn’t quite make out: the top three floors of a steel and glass Montgomery Street office tower, home to Jack Burch’s international law firm. His thoughts then drifted up toward Pacific Heights, still masked in gray, now and forever stained in his sight. He then imagined a faceless driver in an anonymous car disappearing into the mazelike city spreading out before him.
Gage glanced at his dashboard clock as he crested the cantilever section of the bridge, beginning the decline toward the waterfront: 5:59. He punched on the radio, already tuned to the local CBS News affiliate. He didn’t know how long it would be until some nurse or clerk or paramedic leaked Burch’s shooting to the press-but he knew how long it would remain there: weeks, maybe months. It wasn’t imaginable that the man who charted the courses by which half of the Fortune Global 500 navigated the world’s turbulent markets had been randomly shot down in the street. The cable news channels would demand a Greater Meaning, perhaps even a Conspiracy. Day after day. Night after night.
The 6 A. M. national feed began with the collapse of Silicon Valley’s Surveillance and Targeting Technologies and the outbursts of betrayal from its devastated shareholders. Networks had hovered over the SatTek story for days like news helicopters at a crime scene, the downdraft creating a turbulence of uninformed speculation that seemed to feed less on new facts than on itself. The disintegration of a key manufacturer of components for anti-terror and missile guidance systems had left the cottage industry of analysts at a loss for explanations, though not for words, and a new surge had been triggered by the arrival of U.S. Marshals to secure the chaotic SatTek facility.
Through a breach in the veil of drizzling fog, Gage caught a glimpse of Mount Sutro rising two thousand feet above sea level. The radio and television tower stood poised like a monstrous, three-pronged gigging spear, clouds masking its barbs. Anger surged when he realized that the news channels would soon abandon SatTek to obsess over Burch’s shooting, and through that obsession lay waste to Burch and his wife’s intimate lives. He took in a breath, then gripped the steering wheel as his body warmed from within. He exhaled when he recognized the source: how much easier it was to rage at the media than at a faceless and anonymous-what? Thug? Lunatic? Assassin?
Gage jabbed the off button, then stared at the pavement ahead and at the lane lines bracketing him: a familiar path now leading him into the unknown. He drove the rest of the way listening only to his racing thoughts against the background of the gusting wind, the raindrops tapping his windshield, and the rhythmic sweep of his wipers.
Gage spotted Lieutenant Humberto “Spike” Pacheco at the end of a wide hallway, leaning against the wall outside the packed emergency waiting room. Thick arms crossed above his belly flared out the front panels of his navy sports jacket. It revealed a middle-aged paunch that belied the childhood nickname he carried with him when he had joined Gage at SFPD thirty years earlier.
“Any word from the doctors?” Gage asked softly, a step away.
Spike shook his head as he looked up. His dark face and bloodhound eyes revealed nothing. He wasn’t about to give passersby fodder for speculation, later to be whispered to tabloid reporters as fact: Then this private eye came up. Tall. Solid-looking. About fifty. Not a snap-your-neck-tough-guy type, but you could tell he works out. First I thought he was like a college professor or something. Now I’m thinking that he looked a helluva lot more like a cop than the short, fat detective-that guy couldn’t run nobody down. Somebody told me the PI said he was going to…
“What about the shooter?”
“Not a damn thing.” Spike’s tone was low, grim.
Murmuring flowed from the waiting room. Gage glanced inside at the families of the night’s wounded huddled together in plastic chairs under brutal fluorescent lights. The air was heavy, almost sweating, reeking of unwashed bodies ripped from sleep by sickness or violence.
Gage and Spike turned as one as Dr. Ajita Kishore approached. She acknowledged Spike with a quick nod. They didn’t need an introduction. The trauma surgeon had sought him out a hundred times before on that same square of speckled tan linoleum, more often than not to report that a shooting or stabbing or beating had become a homicide.
Kishore looked up at Gage, her deep-set South Asian eyes expressing a compassionate familiarity, even an affection, that he hadn’t expected.
“You must be Graham,” she said. Her accent was Indianized British. Formal, but not distant.
Gage nodded, his jaw set tight for the worst, his eyes riveted on her.
She held his gaze. “Mr. Burch raised his hand and mumbled, ‘Graham, tell Graham’ just before we put him under. Something in his voice told me you’d be here when I finished. He must trust you very much.”
“How is he?” Gage asked.
“Alive.” Kishore pressed her fingertips against the green surgical scrubs covering her breastbone. “It’s not just damage from the slugs, the CAT scan shows his brain absorbed a tremendous shock when he fell. Unfortunately, he’s now slipped into a coma.”
Gage smothered the urge to ask the questions to which he knew Kishore couldn’t have answers: How long would it last, and how would it end.
Kishore looked at him apologetically. “We put him on a ventilator. We couldn’t count on his brain functioning well enough to maintain his breathing.”
A timer started counting down in Gage’s mind. The science hadn’t changed that much in the quarter century since he’d left SFPD Homicide. Given his age and the severity of his injuries, three weeks was all Burch had to fight his way out of the coma and avert a descent into a lethal vegetative state-if he survived the next few hours.
Kishore cast an expectant look toward the emergency entrance. “Has his wife been called?”
Gage nodded, finishing her sentence in his head: In case he doesn’t make it.
“She’ll be here by ten o’clock. She and my wife-”
A glimmer of a question caught him short. He fought his way back from an uncertain future to the image of Burch raising his hand-and to his own past as a young detective: riding in ambulances, then following gurneys to operating room thresholds, pursuing facts binding a victim to a shooter, or a dying declaration linking a wounded killer to his crime.
“Do you know what he was trying to say?” he asked Kishore.
The doctor shook her head. “I’m sorry. That’s all there was.”
They stood silently for a moment, then Kishore furrowed her brows as if she’d taken a wrong turn in a familiar city. “I assumed you’d be Australian, too.” She inspected Gage’s graying brown hair. “Maybe his older brother.”
Gage’s mind leaped back a half a life. Looking down from a dusty one-lane bridge, spotting a ruddy fisherman waist-deep in the Smith River, wading boots losing traction on the descending tail of a submerged sandbar with boulder-strewn rapids gapping and foaming below. Then Gage racing downstream, sliding down the hillside, crawling out on a fallen log above the rapids…reaching…reaching…reaching toward the young man flailing in the torrent, the crush of water filling his waders-
Gage blinked, then refocused on Kishore, his answer unspoken: Brothers are bestowed by chance and nature; friends you love by choice.
Kishore squeezed Gage’s upper
arm, then turned toward Spike. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Lieutenant?”
Gage watched them walk down the hallway, hoping to read more of Burch’s future in her manner and gestures. Kishore stopped fifty feet away and rotated her hand in front of her chest, then dug into her pocket and handed Spike a small plastic bag bearing a white label. Gage knew what it contained: two mangled slugs caked with Burch’s blood, now seeming less like evidence and more like sacred artifacts. Spike cradled them in his hand and looked back down the hallway at Gage. He nodded in silent comprehension, then slipped them into his breast pocket.
Gage turned away and reached for his cell phone to call Faith. She answered on the first ring. He heard her all-terrain tires rumbling on the pavement. She and Courtney Burch were just south of Mount Lassen in Northern California, entering the desolate expanse of the Central Valley. Gage told her the truth, counting on her to mold it into softer words to pass on.
He found himself staring at the screen after he disconnected, imagining Burch’s playful face, hearing his accented voice during the calls and messages that marked the turning points in their lives. “Graham, it’s Jack, guess what, best man? Courtney said yes…I just got the bar results. If that bloody champagne hasn’t become vinegar…We’re on our way to the hospital. I can’t believe it, in a few hours I’ll be a father. Me. A father…It’s about my mother. I’m flying home to Sydney…We just got Courtney’s MRI. It’s spread to her lymph nodes…call as soon as you can.”
Gage looked up and spotted Spike striding toward him, followed by two uniformed officers. Spike directed the pair toward the ICU, then said to Gage, “Let’s go outside.”
As they walked from the emergency entrance into the parking lot, Gage found that the rain had stopped. The cloud-filtered light falling on the blacktop seemed vague and directionless; even the shallow puddles rippling in the breeze reflected nothing but gray.
