Final Target

by Steven Gore

  “Any fallout?”

  “Someone leaked the call to the Financial Times. Jack thought it made his part of the project look political.”

  “It was political.”

  “Not for Jack.” She struggled to smile. “For him it was like playing with Tinkertoys.”

  Gage finished her thought: “And he didn’t want bullies interfering.” He didn’t finish his own: Not wanting the bullies interfering was no guarantee that they wouldn’t. He let it drop and looked elsewhere. “Was Jack worried about anything else?”

  Dr. Kishore emerged from the ICU before she could answer. They rose as the doctor walked toward them. Gage introduced her to Faith and Courtney. Dr. Kishore took Courtney’s hands in hers, but had nothing new to offer; just kind words and no promises, and permission to see her husband.

  As the surgeon walked away, Gage led Faith and Courtney down the hallway toward Burch’s door. He opened it and stepped in first, trying to absorb some of the shock that he knew would jolt Courtney. He stopped at the foot of the bed where Burch lay surrounded by a cockpit of monitors and attached to a half-dozen drips. The only sound was the whoosh-snap of the ventilator, its breathing tube taped to the corner of his mouth. Gauze encased the top of his head, his forearms were mottled with bruises, splotches of yellow and blue surrounding needle punctures. The dim light shadowed his pallid face and his closed, sunken eyes. Burch already looked like the aged man that Gage hoped he would survive to be.

  Courtney walked past Gage, took her husband’s hand, then leaned down and kissed his forehead. She sat in a chair next to the bed and gazed at him for a few moments before lowering her head to rest her cheek on the back of his hand. Her black hair, finally regrown after radiation and two courses of chemotherapy, flowed over their hands and onto the sheets.

  Gage felt Faith’s arm reach around his waist, then her head press against him. He slipped his arm around her shoulders as they watched Burch’s slowly rising and falling chest. Moments later, Gage felt Faith tremble as she fought back her tears, and an ache tore at his heart as the stick figure to which his imagination had held fast, now transformed into blood and flesh.

  Gage and Courtney watched mist glittering in the yellow halogen parking lot lights triggered by cloud-darkened, afternoon skies. He had led her to a quiet spot just outside the hospital entrance to converse out of the hearing of the nurses and technicians tending to Burch. Faith remained at his bedside.

  “I’m sorry to keep pressing you on this,” Gage said, “but I need to know whether there was anything else bothering Jack besides the Russians?”

  Courtney reached out her hand and watched the mist drift between her fingers, almost as if she hadn’t heard his question. Finally she answered: “SatTek.”

  Gage felt his stomach tighten. “Why did—” He caught the motion of a television news truck pulling in from the street. He grabbed Courtney’s arm. “Let’s get back inside.”

  He led her to the cafeteria, then into the employees’ dining room, where reporters wouldn’t think to look. They took seats next to each other, facing away from the door. He pushed aside empty paper plates, soda cups, and crumpled napkins, then called Spike, who promised to block the media from bringing cameras beyond the hospital lobby.

  Gage seized the broken thread of their conversation, now seeming more like a live wire. “Why SatTek?”

  Courtney shook her mind free of the descending media storm and the tens of millions of eyes that would soon drill like termites into their lives. “I don’t know. Jack wouldn’t say.”

  “Then how do you—”

  “He’s been obsessed with the SatTek television coverage for the last week; alternately angry, then dejected, switching among the cable news channels, then searching the Internet, fixated on every rumor about the collapse.”

  Gage reached for the lesser evil. “Did he lose money when the stock fell?”

  Courtney lowered her head. “It wasn’t that.”

  “You mean SatTek was a client?”

  She nodded without looking up.

  “Since when?”

  “Two years ago. A referral from a venture capital firm in New York.”

  There was a momentary silence, but neither of them said the obvious. SatTek had approached Burch just after Courtney was diagnosed. Gage and Burch had spent days together, sitting outside the Stanford Cancer Center as she first underwent surgery, then radiation, and finally chemotherapy. Burch had fled from the uncertainty of her future into talking about his work, the intricacies of each deal, seeking some alternate universe, safe and controllable.

  “Why didn’t he mention SatTek to me?” Gage asked.

  Courtney finally looked at him. “He couldn’t. You were still working on that TM-Micro trade secrets case. He read about your testimony in the Wall Street Journal. SatTek was about to make a huge purchase of TM-Micro products, big enough to push their stock up five or ten percent. He didn’t want to create the appearance that he leaked insider information.”

  She paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then her brows furrowed.

  “Is that it?” she asked, searching Gage’s face. “Is SatTek the reason Jack was shot? Some lunatic shareholder?”

  Gage shook his head. “Not likely. Stockholders come gunning when companies collapse, but not with weapons, only with class action lawyers. If it was otherwise, Enron headquarters would’ve become a war zone.”

  Courtney’s face showed she wasn’t convinced. Her gaze drifted down toward the brown Formica table, then held there as if searching for a constellation among the littered bread crumbs.

  “It just can’t be random,” she finally said, looking up. “It just can’t be. Isn’t life supposed to mean something?”

  Gage sat alone in Burch’s room, next to his bed, his hand resting on Burch’s. Faith had gone with Courtney to call his family in Sydney and hers in Portland.

  Random. The word repeated itself in Gage’s mind, carrying with it a feeling from his early years in homicide. He’d drive up to Twin Peaks or Russian Hill and look out over the nighttime city after a murder, especially one without witnesses, without leads, without hope. A wave of uneasiness would shudder through him as if he were staring into a vast emptiness, as if he, too, was about to lose himself into the abyss in which the victim had disappeared. That unease would soon give way, replaced not by a feigned and swaggering squad room confidence that pretended away the unknown and unknowable, but by a resolve that was as palpable as the relentless breeze flowing in from the ocean.

  He’d gaze down at the lights and the shadows and at the twisted grid of streets, listening to the rumble of traffic and the howl of tugboats on the bay, then he’d get back into his car and turn the ignition, and—

  Gage heard the door swish open behind him. He looked over, then stood as Courtney approached the foot of the bed.

  “Graham,” she said, looking down at her husband. “I need you to find who did this. I need to know he’ll never come back to hurt Jack.”

  “I’ll protect him,” Gage said, “but I can’t promise that I’ll find the man. Sometimes it isn’t possible.”

  “Just knowing you’re out there searching will give me a feeling of security, of stability.” She hugged herself as if fighting off a chill. “I just feel so…so…”

  “Adrift?”

  “Yes, adrift.” She peered up into his eyes. “How did you know?”

  As Gage walked past the waiting room an hour later, car keys gripped in his hand, he heard Spike’s voice, distant and tinny. He glanced over at the television hanging from a bracket in the far corner: CNN. The ticker told the story: “International lawyer Jack Burch shot down in San Francisco. Russian and Ukrainian presidents to issue a joint statement regarding the future of the natural gas agreement.”

  The small screen showed Spike along with Dr. Kishore and the chief of police standing in the hospital lobby behind a dozen microphones. A BBC reporter yelled out a question.

  Gage didn’t break his step
. He already knew the answer.

  “No,” Spike said, staring into the camera, “we have no leads.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Let’s start with Edward Granger,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson said, beginning Stuart Matson’s afternoon session. “We’ll do Jack Burch next.”

  Lyle Zink, the FBI agent seated to Peterson’s left, slid an enlargement of a driver’s license photograph toward Matson. It showed a white male, mid-sixties, brown eyes, long in the face, and self-possessed enough to smile at the Department of Motor Vehicles camera.

  “Is that Granger?” Peterson asked Matson, who stared at the photo for a moment, then nodded.

  Zink flipped it over and laid a pen on top.

  “Sign the back,” Peterson said.

  Matson glanced at his attorney, who gave him a slightly off-center nod. Matson signed. Zink then added his own name, the case number, and the date.

  Peterson fixed his eyes on Matson. “Tell me about how you first got hooked up with Granger.”

  Matson looked around the table and thought back to his first job after college. Burdened with student loans, he’d grabbed the first one that was offered, knowing that he wouldn’t stay long. I got thirty-plus years in the car business, the sales manager at the GM dealership told him the day he started. Trust me, kid, nobody likes buying from a victim. Be a man. At that moment, Matson grasped that he knew more by instinct than his boss had learned in a generation. Five minutes later, he weaseled an old guy into the driver’s seat of a new Cadillac he didn’t want, then slipped into the passenger seat, hung his head, and lied about his wife dying of leukemia. It was the first of three cars he sold that day.

  Showtime.

  “Looking back,” Matson said, “I guess you could say I was sort of a sitting duck.”

  Matson paused, then leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table.

  “You’ve got to understand what kind of a guy Ed Granger is. When he was with Westbrae Ventures in New York, he was huge. Huge. Then all of a sudden he shows up in California and comes walking into our country club. A member named Herb Wilson had invited him. They’d been in the Harvard MBA program together years ago. Herb’s wife tells my wife that the Wall Street Journal article about Granger retiring was just a puff piece. That he’d actually been forced out. Real hush, hush, and nobody at Westbrae was talking.

  “I asked Herb to introduce me, and it was weird. Granger seemed to know who I was and even knew about a turnaround I’d done at Premier Switches.”

  Matson noticed a smirk on Peterson’s face.

  “Look, a turnaround is a turnaround whether you make a better product, or find a way to sue your competition into oblivion.” He thumped a forefinger on the table. “I chose Plan B and it worked.”

  Hackett reached over and grabbed Matson’s forearm. “Take it easy, Scoob. Premier isn’t the issue.”

  Matson took in a breath, then nodded.

  “I knew from the moment that Granger shook my hand that he was on the prowl, and decided right then that I was going to wine him and dine him and three-putt and double-bogey thirty-six straight holes if that’s what it took to get his blessing. I’d spent twenty years waiting for a break, and I wasn’t going to miss this one.

  “When I met him at the country club two days later, I came ready to pitch the hell out of SatTek, but he was already a step ahead of me.

  “Granger was sitting at the bar when I walked in. We started with a little small talk. Golf handicaps, that kind of thing, until my drink arrived. Then he eased into the subject, casual-like, and told me that he’d done a little research on SatTek’s financials.

  “I froze up. Panicked because he might’ve figured out that SatTek was just treading water. The Grangers of the world don’t invest in swimming holes. They want to ride the raging river. They’re chasing new technology, not the old, even if it’s the best in its market.

  “I gave him the pitch anyway because that was all I had. I ran through the whole product line: everything from how our acoustic detectors can pick up a terrorist sneaking across the desert ten miles away, to how our video amplifiers can drop an air-to-ground missile into a coffee cup. I really pounded it. It was the best presentation I ever made.

  “After I’m done, Granger smiled at me and gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder, and said, ‘You don’t need to sell me, I’m already sold.’

  “I felt like an idiot. Granger is a guy with a reputation for knowing everything, and I just pointed at the sun and told him it was daylight.

  “I got flustered. I think I even turned red. But he ignored it and said, ‘Have you thought about bypassing the venture capital route altogether, and taking SatTek public?’

  “For a second, I thought maybe he got dumped from Westbrae for senility. What the hell do you think guys like me daydream about? I’ll tell you what. It’s standing on the podium at the New York Stock Exchange, ringing the bell, and then watching your share price explode through the roof.

  “But I had no reason to think that would ever happen with SatTek and I admitted it. I told him that there was too much pink on our balance sheet and that the SEC would just laugh at us.

  “Granger stared down at his bourbon for a while, took a sip, and then looked back at me and said, ‘I guess we’ll just have to wipe the smiles off their faces.’

  “Man, what a rush. At the time, it felt like he was putting his arm around me, including me in something. But looking back now, I realize it was just him setting the hook.

  “Then he swiveled his stool toward me. I remember his exact words:

  “‘What you’ve got to understand, Scoob, is that success in business has very little to do with whether you’re in the red or in the black. It’s about how aggressive you’re willing to be.’ He paused and stared me right in the eyes, then he said, ‘You know what that means, right? Aggressive.’

  “I really wasn’t sure what he meant, but I nodded anyway and asked him what he had in mind. But he didn’t tell me. Not right then, anyway. He just pointed at my chest and said, ‘Whatever it is, Scoob, don’t waste my time. You’re either going to be in or you’re going to be out.’

  “The fact is, I was in even before I walked through the door.”

  CHAPTER 6

  At seven on the morning following Burch’s shooting, Gage displayed his identification to the security guard stationed behind the counter in the glass and steel lobby of the financial district tower housing Burch’s top floor office. The balding man in the gray uniform waved it away and offered Gage a toothy grin.

  “Don’t you remember me?” the guard asked.

  Gage inspected the man. There was something familiar about the Howdy Doody cheeks, but Gage couldn’t connect the face with anything in his past. He shook his head.

  “I’m Sonny Powers. I was a bailiff when you were with SFPD.”

  Gage smiled and stuck out his hand. “D Day.”

  The courtroom riot in 1982 known as D Day had ended the career of the then-twenty-six-year-old Powers with a crushed knee. Gage was testifying in the homicide trial of three members of the D Block Boys, when four gang members in the gallery jumped the barrier to overpower the bailiffs. The clerk remotely locked the door, and the escape attempt devolved into a pointless melee. Gage shoved the judge under the bench, then weighed into the mix. He last saw Powers writhing on the marble floor while the paramedics tried to stabilize his leg.

  Powers struggled to his feet to shake Gage’s hand, then held up the day’s authorized visitors sheet. He pointed at Gage’s name and the suite number. “You here about Jack Burch?”

  “His secretary came in early to gather up some files for me before the press showed up. I didn’t want to become part of the story.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Not good.” Gage glanced back toward the storm-soaked street where a television truck pulled to a stop to feed a story to the early morning news. “Looks like I’m too late. I better get upstairs.”

  Gage started
toward the elevators.

  “Don’t worry,” Powers called after him, “they won’t get by me. I’ve had enough of those assholes trying to sneak in and out of here.”

  Gage spun back. “What do you mean?”

  “A janitor popped the back door to let one in a while ago. Said he was a producer from ABC News, that 20/20 show, and wanted to use the freight elevator to bring up equipment.” Powers gestured toward the monitors on his desk. “I saw him come in.” He adopted an authoritative tone. “I read the janitor the riot act and told her to go find the guy and bring him down here.”

  A rush of anger followed Gage’s recollection of the only other thing he knew about Powers: He’d ended up as a court bailiff because he was incompetent as a street cop. Gage cringed at the thought of Burch’s secretary, Anne-Marie, already at her desk organizing the SatTek and Moscow files: distraught, preoccupied, and vulnerable.

  “How do you know he was with ABC?”

  “The janitor said he showed an ID, just like all of them.” Powers reddened, then limped toward the end of the counter, as if abandoning his post to look for the man. “You don’t think he’s the guy who shot—”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Dark windbreaker. Black hair.”

  Gage tossed Powers a business card. “Call my cell so I’ll have your number.” He then pointed at the entrance. “Lock the front door and block the back exit.” He sprinted toward the elevators and into an express toward the forty-third floor. His phone rang as the doors closed. He verified that Powers’s number showed on the screen, then punched the end button.

  The elevator seemed to rise in slow motion. The annoying pinging seemed to be counting down rather than up. A final ping signaled the door opening in the empty lobby of Burch’s firm, lit only by the storm-muted sunrise. He listened for a moment, then headed down the long carpeted hallway toward Burch’s office in the opposite corner of the building.

  As he crept along the wall, the snap of metal on metal broke the silence. It sounded to Gage like a file cabinet or a desk drawer. He edged toward the hallway corner and looked around it. Sharp fluorescent light emerging from a small storage room striped the gray carpet thirty feet away. Burch’s office door was open fifteen feet farther down.