by Steven Gore
“But everyone will think you do.”
Heart pounding, Alex Z climbed out of the car and followed Matson through the security checkpoint and into the elevator. Matson pressed 11, then glanced over at Alex Z.
“Thanks, I’m going there, too,” Alex Z squeaked out.
Matson stepped out of the elevator on the eleventh floor. Alex Z followed him down the hall into the lobby of the Office of the United States Attorney.
Alex Z took a seat, then waved a clammy hand toward the receptionist behind the bulletproof glass, mouthing the words, “I’m waiting for my lawyer.”
Matson walked up to the counter.
“I’m here to see Mr. Peterson.”
Two minutes later, after the receptionist handed Matson a stick-on security badge and buzzed him in, Alex Z slipped back to the elevator.
“He went into the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Alex Z told Gage when he got back into the car. “He asked for someone named Peterson.”
“Damn.”
Gage noticed Alex Z’s hands shaking. “It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, but good job getting it.”
He radioed Viz. “The little punk is setting up Jack in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Go down to SatTek. The workers still there are either unemployable elsewhere or real tight with Matson. Try to figure out who’s who, but be careful. We’re going to have to stay in the shadows until we can shine a little light on the inner workings of this scam.”
CHAPTER 17
Z ink looked over his notes from the previous day, wondering how much Matson was holding back. He didn’t glance up, but sensed Matson inspecting his thinning hair.
He knew more was churning in Matson’s mind than was coming out of his mouth. Fifteen years in law enforcement taught him that’s the way crooks were, even when they were telling the whole so-called truth.
Matson studied Zink’s lowered head, wondering how Zink became an FBI agent. Hackett told him that Zink’s career stalled out six years earlier, something to do with a sexual harassment complaint by one of the secretaries. He didn’t even put in his name for promotions anymore. Now just a day laborer, counting the months and years until his retirement, which Matson could see was still a long way away.
Matson decided that thinking of Zink as a rodent was probably a little unfair. Zink didn’t choose his scrawny features; they were a result of his parents unwisely choosing each other. He could only be held blameworthy for failing to mitigate his physical disadvantages. Plastic surgery might’ve helped, Matson thought, but he knew of no operation that could enlarge Zink’s minuscule ears. Matson figured he’d ask his wife. She had personal experience bumping up against the limits of plastic surgery.
Actually, Matson thought, Zink’s not a bad guy. Just doing his job. I can work with him, but he’s hard to read.
Zink felt Matson trying to gauge how he was doing. He knew snitches always did that. Are they pleasing their masters or not? Are they saying too much or too little? They’re always wondering where’s the finish line. Of course, there wasn’t one. It took most crooks a long time to figure that out, and Matson hadn’t even started.
He stepped to a chalkboard, then charted out the companies Fitzhugh set up in Guernsey.
“Now tell me about the bank accounts,” Zink said, turning around, and wondering how much of the truth he would get.
Matson got up and walked to the map on the wall. He pointed at a city next to a lake in Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.
“I didn’t even know where Lugano was until the day before we flew in.” He faced Zink. “Ever been to one of those Swiss banks?”
Zink shook his head.
“If it weren’t for the brass plate mounted outside that said ‘Banca Rober,’ I’d never have known what it was. No teller window. No signs advertising mortgage rates. Just security like the CIA and a bunch of little offices.”
Matson sat back down. “You know why Fitzhugh chose Lugano?” He laughed. “A woman. Isabella. This pipsqueak set up the Azul Limited and Blau Anstalt accounts there just so he could get laid.”
“Just like you.”
Matson blushed, then flared. “I’m not the one who chose to run this thing out of London. She just happened to be there.”
“Sorry,” Zink said. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”
“Hell, not only did I not know why he chose London, I didn’t even know how the scam was going to fit together. All Granger had said up to that point was that he wanted to put a structure in place. I didn’t even realize that when I told Burch we needed a flexible structure, I was telling the truth. And at that point, it was all form and no substance.”
“Did the banker know that?”
“Of course he did, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him. He was about as expressive as a dead carp. He had the account opening forms filled out even before we walked into his office. Fitzhugh introduced me, then threw out the phrase, ‘strategic partnerships,’ and the guy slid the papers across the table for him to sign. Like some choreographed dance. I’m laughing as we’re driving away because the banker didn’t even ask what the companies did.
“I elbowed Fitzhugh and told him that I must’ve missed the wink again. He just grinned and said, ‘No wonder, in Switzerland it’s the nod.’ Then he pointed toward a mountain across the lake, punched the gas, and said, ‘Let’s go see Isabella.’”
Zink’s ringing cell phone interrupted the story. He gestured at Matson to stay put, then answered the call and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
Just like you.
Matson felt a surge of anger as Zink’s accusation came back to him.
Alla wasn’t about getting laid, he thought, but punks like Zink wouldn’t understand that.
He had met thousands of Zinks at sales conventions all over the country. He had once been one of them himself, and even had still been one when he arrived in Lugano. But that changed a half hour after leaving Banca Rober.
Fitzhugh had wound through town, then along the northern edge of Lake Lugano and up the switch-backs etched into the side of Monte Bre. Just below the summit, he pulled to a stop in front of a tan stucco house. Matson paused to look down at the city lights, then followed Fitzhugh inside and into the kitchen where Isabella was waiting. Tall, slim, shoulder-length black hair, spaghetti-strapped red dress covered by a knee-length white apron. She turned as their footsteps sounded on the marble floor.
Stunning. Heart-wrenchingly stunning.
As he stood there looking at her, Matson remembered a line of German poetry that a girl he dated in college liked to quote. It had stuck with him over the years even though its meaning had always been obscure: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.”
Right then he understood why he had ended up with a Madge, instead of an Isabella or an Alla.
Matson accepted a glass of wine from her and then followed Fitzhugh into the dining room, the table set with English bone china and the candles already lit.
Throughout dinner Matson watched the playfulness, the intimacy, and an acceptance of each other that made what he’d been taught were the institutional bedrocks of society, like marriage, like his own twenty-year marriage, seem hollow. And the hours would’ve been entirely joyful, even blissful, were he not haunted by the suspicion that he’d wasted his entire life.
CHAPTER 18
H ow’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 m
ake 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
Z ink 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 ‘terror.’
“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 sai
d, 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.”
