by Steven Gore
“I know you’ve got hard feelings, but I was just doing my job.”
Burch’s face darkened. “Not very well, I’d say.”
“Matson was just so believable,” Zink said. “He fooled us, me and Peterson.”
“Jack’ll calm down in a minute,” Gage said. Then he felt his heart thump as his mind flashed back on Zink poised on the stairs, but kept his voice steady. “Why don’t you take a seat. Maybe we can figure out where he went.”
Gage glanced backward, as if looking for a chair, then spun back at the sound of a ripping Velcro holster strap. His right cross hit Zink in the jaw-
“Graham!” Burch yelled. “What’re you doing?”
A left jab to the nose brought up Zink’s hands, and a right uppercut just below the ribs dropped him to the floor. Gage then knelt down and yanked Zink’s gun from his holster, a battered Ruger. 357.
“What’d you do, Zink? Buy this on the street? Steal it from the evidence room?”
Zink curled up next to the threshold, covering his head as if expecting the next sound to be the gun butt against his skull.
Gage pulled up Zink’s left pant leg, then tore off his ankle holster.
“What’s going on? Graham, he’s a federal agent.”
Gage looked over at Burch, then held up his left hand, trigger finger curled. “The man who shot you now has a face.”
Burch’s mouth dropped. “But he’s…”
Gage glared down at Zink as a nightmarish image sent a tremor through him: Katie Palan’s car spinning out of control and tumbling down the hillside.
“It was the letters.” Gage glanced at Burch. “First Katie sent an anonymous letter about the illegal sale of video amplifiers to Ukraine, and Zink covered it up. Then she sent a signed one about the stock fraud, so he had to get rid of her.”
Instant confirmation appeared in Zink’s rodentlike eyes darting around the room. He reached for a table leg and tried to pull himself to his feet.
Gage pointed down, his finger an inch from Zink’s bleeding nose. “Don’t.”
Zink fell back, grimacing as his shoulder hit the floor.
Bending toward Zink, Gage asked, “Why? Why’d you do it?”
A montage of facts, until then shadowed behind the flash of Zink’s badge or submerged in the chaos of events, turned stark and sharp-edged in Gage’s mind: the sexual harassment complaint that derailed Zink’s career, his compulsive cruising for street prostitutes, the arrests he’d slithered out of.
“Blackmail,” Gage said, as much to himself as to Zink and Burch. “First it was blackmail…then what?…I’ll tell you. They kept you from getting into trouble, even restored you to being a perfect FBI agent, by keeping your sexual addiction satisfied.”
Gage rose, then took a step backward and sat on the edge of the coffee table.
“You knew I’d figure out that they’d gotten to you, but you didn’t know when.” Gage stared at Zink, nodding his head slowly. “And you guessed wrong. Not by much, but you guessed wrong.” He stopped nodding. “What did you stop for? Gas? Burger and fries? Coffee? Take a leak on the side of the road?”
Zink’s eyes just barely widened.
Gage answered the question himself. “Lack of bladder control.” He kept looking at Zink, but spoke to Burch. “He was there when Peterson and me were talking to Matson, him blaming Gravilov and Kovalenko for the killings, for shooting you. He knew we believed Matson and thought we’d wrapped it up. He figured he had all the time in the world.”
Gage finally turned toward Burch. “If he’d gotten here thirty seconds earlier, we’d be dead.”
He then spun back, grabbed Zink by his shirtfront, and yanked him a foot above the floor. “What did you do with our little friend Scoob?”
Zink stared back without answering.
Gage jammed the Ruger muzzle under Zink’s chin, hard against his windpipe. “I said, where’s Matson?”
“Car.”
“And where’s the car?”
“Dirt road.”
Gage lowered him and retrieved an extension cord from the kitchen. He hogtied Zink and removed his car keys.
“You have my permission to blow off his head if he moves.” Gage handed Burch the revolver, then paused and looked around. “Maybe not his head.” He dragged a small table away from Zink’s right and pushed a couple of fly rods farther toward the corner. “Shoot him in the stomach. Brain matter is a helluva mess to clean up.”
Gage found Zink’s car a hundred yards up the road, then slid into the driver’s seat. He made no effort to avoid the bumps and potholes on the drive back to the cabin, under the theory that if Matson was dead, he couldn’t feel it, and if he was alive, he deserved it. Gage parked in front, then popped the trunk. Matson cowered inside, his bound hands covering his face as if flesh could stop lead.
“You want to ride down the mountain in here?” Gage asked. “Or do you want to climb out?”
Matson peeked upward, eyes widening at the sight of Gage.
Gage untied Matson’s feet, then swung them over the lip of the trunk and pulled him out. He reached to untape Matson’s mouth, then stopped.
“I really don’t want to hear another word out of you.”
CHAPTER 82
Just after sunrise Gage returned from the FBI’s Northern California office in Redding, where he had delivered Matson and Zink. The strands of tulle fog he’d followed from the Central Valley into the mountains interwove the pines and oaks and had thickened into mist, but at least Zink’s road to corruption was now clear.
Gage found Burch sitting in a rocker on the porch, Gage’s first off-duty weapon, a snub-nosed Colt. 38, in his right hand, resting on the blanket covering his lap.
“What’s that for?” Gage asked, as he climbed the steps.
“I’ve had one too many surprises.”
“I can understand that.” Gage peered at the gun. “Is it cocked?”
“No.”
“Keep it that way.”
Gage leaned back against the porch railing. “It turns out that while Zink was spying on local gangsters as part of the Organized Crime Task Force, they were spying on him. They figured out his obsession and fed him a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and he wasn’t willing to trade his FBI ID for a Bureau of Prisons number. A couple of years ago, they sold him to Gravilov.”
“And that cost Katie Palan her life.”
Gage nodded.
Burch closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “That poor woman. I should’ve seen what these people were up to.” His face reddened in self-reproach. “There must’ve been something I could have done.”
Gage shook his head. “There’s no way you could’ve figured it out. Matson didn’t even know where this thing was headed in those days, and he was in the middle of it.”
Burch scanned the pines and oaks surrounding the cabin, then looked up at Gage. “But why try to kill me? I didn’t have a clue.”
“Gravilov was afraid you’d start putting together your pieces of the puzzle and they were still a couple of months away from the missile sale.”
“I didn’t even know there was any connection between Gravilov and SatTek.”
“Gravilov couldn’t count on that. Or that Zink was smart enough to contain everything.”
“But that doesn’t explain Fitzhugh. I thought he was one of them.”
“Only at the beginning.” Gage exhaled as a wave of fatigue shuddered through him. Two nights without sleep, debriefing first Matson, and then Zink, had pushed his body close to its limit. “Granger had Fitzhugh ingratiate himself with you months before he even met Matson. Granger was looking to run an offshore scam even before he’d heard of SatTek.”
“But why kill him?”
“Zink showed up in London two days before he contacted the Metropolitan Police. He met Fitzhugh and decided he’d melt when British cops applied the heat. Razor took care of him while Zink cleaned out his files.”
A chill breeze swept through the property and swir
led fine raindrops around them. Burch pulled up the blanket to cover his chest.
“And when Granger decided to cooperate with Peterson,” Burch added, “I guess he had to go, too.”
Gage nodded.
Burch glanced back toward the living room as if Zink was still lying there on the floor. “What did Zink plan to do with Matson?”
“Pretend Matson came up here and killed us, kill him, and then go back to San Francisco and play hero.”
“Seems like it would’ve been smarter to do away with Matson before he got here.”
“He needed the fresh blood spatter to make the crime scene look real.”
Burch stopped rocking. “He really thought it through like that?”
“He started as a street cop. He knew what homicide detectives would look for.”
Burch sat silently for a moment, then said, “I’m still worried about Kovalenko, and now about the gangsters who first got to Zink. Don’t they usually clean up the kind of mess that Matson created?”
Before Gage could answer, a low rumble and a crunching of tread on gravel sounded in the distance.
“What now?” Burch threw aside the blanket and struggled to his feet.
Gage raised his hand toward Burch. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?”
Burch hobbled over to a porch support, then leaned against it, his left palm bracing his gun hand. He glanced at Gage, then jerked his head backward. “Don’t just stand there, get behind me.”
Gage shook his head. “Let me have the gun.”
“Don’t you understand? I have to stand up to these guys. I can’t spend my life hiding.”
Burch lowered himself into a crouch and aimed the barrel dead center on the spot where the road entered the clearing.
As the car approached the last turn and its headlights haloed through the mist-choked trees, Gage slid his hand under Burch’s and raised the gun skyward, then pulled it away from him seconds before Faith’s car emerged into the clearing.
Burch’s whole body sighed. He then slowly pulled himself up using the porch support, and steadied himself against the railing.
While Faith parked the car and Courtney came running toward them, Gage slipped the gun into his back pocket and reached around Burch’s shoulders.
“Not today, champ,” Gage said. “The bad guys aren’t getting you today.”
EPILOGUE
Nine Months Later
Gage pulled his car onto a dirt patch along the winding road where it overlooked the Northern California coast. He gazed through his windshield toward the rolling hills, their crests and valleys covered with oaks and eucalyptus and their sides burned yellow by the summer sun. A lone buzzard circled in the distance, and below it the flattening land disappeared into the hazy nothingness of the Pacific.
He climbed out into the late September heat and walked back along the curving, shimmering blacktop toward a section of aluminum railing far less oxidized than those bracketing it. Its bolts still reflected the morning sun and its posts hadn’t yet faded from greenish-brown to the weather-bleached gray of its neighbors.
As he approached the barrier, he scanned the pavement for skid marks, but they were long worn away or paved over during the two years since Katie Palan had been murdered at this place. He nonetheless felt her wrenching terror as her car suddenly fishtailed, and then her panic and bewilderment as it smashed through the thin metal strip and tumbled down the hillside.
He stopped at the top of the ravine and looked down at the sage and fennel and California poppies, long since healed from their thrashing by the plummeting car. He then picked his way down the rocky trail through dusty shards of glass and plastic, and over the chunks of bark and the shattered branches that marked Katie’s tormented path to her resting place.
In a small clearing at the bottom he found an oil patch, like an anonymous tombstone marking the spot where she died. He knelt by its edge and rubbed the stained dirt between his fingers, then sat on a granite boulder and watched a gray-brown grasshopper flit away. Only then did he notice the finches and sparrows chirping in the trees and the cu-ca-cow of quail fluttering among the low bushes. When they went mute, he glanced up to see a red-tailed hawk swoop and disappear behind a pine. Moments later, their songs began again.
He tore off a sage leaf and wondered whether Katie had smelled the wild herbs during her last moments; whether she heard the shudder of the wind in the eucalyptus; whether hope swelled at the sound of Zink’s footsteps; whether she grasped that he froze in place because he was waiting for her breath to cease; whether, in the last thoughts she spoke to herself, she asked herself why.
Maybe she was lucky, and didn’t live long enough for any of that. Zink had refused to say. He’d just shrugged his shoulders when Gage asked.
Gage stared down at the dark soil, thinking of her parents welcoming Faith and Courtney and Jack and him into their little apartment a week earlier. The dining table was centered in the living room, surrounded by chairs borrowed from neighbors. The home was filled with the aromas of Ukraine, and the pall of sadness. A picture of Katie, framed in silver, rested on a bookshelf between two icons. Eyes that would’ve seemed serious if she was still alive simply looked forlorn.
Jack had taken her mother and father into their bedroom where suitcases and boxes sat half filled in preparation for their return to Ukraine, for there was nothing left to bind them to their adopted country except pain and loss. Jack had closed the door and sat with them, then came out a half hour later, holding Olena’s hand and with his arm around Tolenko’s shoulders, their eyes moist and red.
Gage leaned forward to rise from the boulder, but paused when he caught sight of a Russian Orthodox, triple-barred cross standing under a tiny evergreen at the far edge of the clearing. It hadn’t been there when he last visited in June. He walked around the oil patch and knelt down to read the laminated note attached to the base, its words written in English, in a man’s handwriting Gage had known for a generation: Dear Katie, rest in peace. I’ll make sure your parents will never want for anything.
So what if it was blackmail, Gage said to himself as he rose and looked up the ravine. Maybe even extortion. He and Jack showing up at Franklin Braunegg’s office unannounced a month earlier. Then at Daniel Hackett’s. Both lawyers feigning outrage, slamming their fists, claiming they deserved every nickel of the millions they’d profited from the crimes of SatTek.
It wasn’t that Gage and Jack had demanded that they surrender all the money; only enough to ensure that poverty wouldn’t compound the grief and loneliness of aging parents.
So what if it required a slick bit of money laundering and a Channel Island shell company to funnel the involuntary donations into an offshore account.
So…what.
Gage smiled to himself as he climbed back up to the road.
So what.
He knew the rule. Jack knew the rule.
If they ever get us…it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.
Note to the Reader and Acknowledgments
F inal Target reflects conditions in Ukraine during its first decade and a half of independence. In the course of investigations I conducted there over three years, I met with leading members of both the government and the opposition. Numerous and lengthy conversations with bankers, attorneys, State Security officers, members of Parliament, and two prime ministers, one of whom served in the corrupt and violent Kuchma regime, gave me an inside and troubling view of the practice and psychology of corruption during those years.
The stock fraud described in this book is a composite of various crimes committed in the last ten years and is not intended to stand for any particular one. Further, the characters of Matson, Granger, Gravilov, the stockbrokers, and the offshore bankers and lawyers do not represent actual individuals, but merely the parts that must be played to commit transnational crimes and the sort of people who play them. At the same time, aspects of the physical characteristics, biographies, and personal
ities of the characters are sometimes composites of individuals I have met in my work, sometimes just in passing. Matson, for example, was inspired by a giddy company president I sat next to on a flight from London to Hong Kong who thought that a Dutch girlfriend, a UK bank account, and “the deal” would fill the vacuum that was his life. Slava, on the other hand, was based on…well, maybe I’ll keep that one to myself.
I am better both as an investigator and as a writer due to my good fortune of having worked with interpreters throughout the world who bore the same risks as I under sometimes difficult conditions. They translated my questions into culturally appropriate forms, explained what was meant by what was said, and sometimes simply bought me time to think. Equally important were attorneys who helped me struggle through complex cross-cultural legal and ethical issues. As a representative of them all, I would like to mention the late Senior Advocate Ijaz Hussain Batalvi of Lahore, Pakistan. He will live on in Pakistani history, for ill or for good, as the prosecutor of President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and defense attorney for President Nawaz Sharif, but his true pleasures in life were his family and a lamb kebab cooked on the backyard barbecue. Like so many others, he was a joy to work with.
The counterintuitive notion of blackmail as a form of political power was drawn from the work of Keith A. Darden of Yale University, including: “Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma,” East European Constitutional Review, vol. 10, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 67–71.
The lines, “I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning,” are drawn from Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning,” in Collected Poems, p. 303, New Directions Publishing, 1983. “Beauty is the beginning of terror” is a misquotation by Matson of a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets of Orpheus, p. 5, Mariner Books, 1977 (A. Poulin, translator).
There is one partially nonfictional piece of dialogue: “If they ever get us, it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.” I first heard a line similar to this as an oblique confession to uncharged crimes by a drug trafficker and later heard a different version that originated with an attorney in the Bay Area.
