Final Target

by Steven Gore

  Another snap, then the slap of a file and the shuffling of papers. The noises seemed to come from the storage room. Gage imagined the layout. Banks of file cabinets on the right and left walls. Copier at the back. Table centered in the middle.

  Gage heard a groan as he approached the threshold. He balanced on the balls of his feet, and then peeked into the room. Anne-Marie lay on her side in front of the copier, hands and feet bound, packing tape over her mouth. She flinched at the motion in the doorway—

  A fist shot toward him from around the doorjamb. It rocked him with a punch to the stomach. The burglar surged forward, jamming his shoulder into Gage’s chest, and ramming him into the opposite wall. Gage slumped to the floor as the man fled down the hallway.

  Fighting for breath, he crawled toward Anne-Marie to untape her mouth, but she shook her head as if to say, Go after him.

  Gage pushed himself to his feet and reached for his cell phone.

  “He’s coming down,” Gage gasped to Powers as he staggered down the hallway.

  A scream sliced through the still air as Gage took the turn into the reception area. The just-arrived janitor stood flush against the wall behind the desk as Gage ran by, her face red, her eyes still wide as she pointed toward the closing elevator. Gage yelled for her to untie Anne-Marie, then pushed open the door to the stairs.

  Leaping more than running, Gage grabbed the steel railings and swung himself around each turn. He imagined the burglar arriving at the first floor and running toward the entrance, bouncing off the locked doors, then searching for the stairway to the underground garage and the rear exit. Gage guessed that Powers would only have to fight the man a minute or two to give him time to catch up.

  But the sound of the rear door slamming as he ran down the last flight into the garage told Gage that Powers hadn’t been up to it. When he burst through the back door into the alley, he spotted a bulldog of a man shielding himself with Powers and dragging him toward the intersection a hundred feet away. Gage ran toward them, arriving at the cross street just after the burglar pushed Powers into the path of a garbage truck and then jumped into the back of an already moving van.

  Gage ran forward and reached down for Powers as thirty-five thousand pounds of steel squealed and skidded sideways into the slick intersection. He yanked hard on the front of Powers’s jacket, dived over him, and rolled with him into the next lane.

  He didn’t hear the truck shudder to a stop. He felt only the heat and smelled the burned rubber of the tire next to his head. And the only sounds were his pounding heart and exploding breath, and the sobbing of Powers lying next to him on the rain-soaked blacktop.

  CHAPTER 7

  Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson opened an FBI evidence envelope and removed a packet of incorporation papers for companies in Vietnam and China.

  “We ended yesterday afternoon with Granger suggesting you set up offshore,” Peterson said, sliding the documents across the conference table to Matson. “Have you ever seen these?”

  Matson flipped through the pages. “These are the companies Jack Burch set up.”

  “Then let’s talk about Burch—and say whatever you would’ve said before he got shot. Road rage is SFPD’s problem, not ours.”

  Matson’s eyes widened. “You didn’t let on—”

  “Don’t worry. We didn’t tell them you’re cooperating.”

  Matson nodded and opened his mouth to speak, then hesitated, unsure what to say or how to say it. “Can I talk to Mr. Hackett for a minute?”

  “Sure.” Peterson looked at his watch. “Take all the time you need. Agent Zink can show you to an empty office.”

  Matson looked at Zink, his face registering for the first time. A chinless rodent. Matson imagined himself slogging through a dark, cavernous sewer, swarmed by miniature Zinks, crawling up his pant legs, nipping at his balls.

  “I think Scoob and I’ll go downstairs,” Hackett told Peterson. “We’ll grab a cup of coffee. Talk down there.”

  Zink escorted them out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and into the hallway by the elevators. Matson started to speak, but Hackett hushed him with a raised finger. They rode in silence down to the second floor restaurant and took a table in the far corner, away from other attorneys and their clients strategizing before court or commiserating afterward.

  “Can’t we just give them Granger and maybe the accountant?” Matson whispered, eyes darting around the dining room as if he was afraid he might be recognized.

  “No. The deal is for Burch. He’s the prize they want.”

  Matson flared and fixed his eyes on Hackett. “And I’m gonna look like a scumbag snitching off a road-rage victim.” His voice rose. “You see what the press is saying about him?”

  “Not so loud.” Hackett reached over and grabbed Matson’s arm. “Not so loud.”

  Matson leaned in and lowered his voice. “They’re making him into a fucking saint. Charity-this and charity-that. His wife’s heroic battle against cancer. Immigrant success story—like fucking Australians don’t grow up speaking English.”

  “Keep your eye on the ball, Scoob. You’re only worth something to the government if you can give them somebody they want. That’s the reason they’re willing to take the heat in the press for letting you walk. They think Burch was in on it and they’ve got a paper trail right to his desk. They think every lawyer who deals offshore is a crook or money launderer. So you’re just telling them what they already believe.”

  Hackett pointed at Matson, his voice insistent. “And there’s something else. Peterson is aiming at SatTek because it’s a hard target that the public can comprehend, not like some squishy securitized loan scam. People can’t make sense of that shit. But SatTek they can, and they need a face to go with it. So far, that face is yours, but Peterson wants it to be Burch’s. Don’t give him time to go weak-kneed and decide it’ll look better to use Burch to roll on you. Because I’ll tell you what’ll happen: Burch’ll go in and say, ‘My wife was sick. I wasn’t thinking straight. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.’ Pretty soon everybody’s thinking he’s your victim instead of you being his. And trust me, nobody’s going to be calling him a snitch. They’re going to say he’s a fucking hero for turning you in—so you better get him before he gets you. Understand?”

  Matson felt like a school kid just sent to the corner. “Yeah, I understand.”

  “And, as your lawyer, I have to tell you one more thing. You need to tell the truth. One lie and this proffer evaporates. You won’t be able to get it back. DOJ policy.”

  Another lawyer covering his ass, Matson thought. He’s supposed to be covering mine.

  Matson and Hackett rode the elevator in silence back to the eleventh floor. The receptionist guided them through the bullet-and bomb-proof glass security doors and down the long hallway to the conference room. They found that Peterson and the agents had removed their jackets and loosened their ties. There were bottles of water and sandwiches collected on a side table. It seemed to Matson that the only thing missing was a picnic bench and a red-checkered tablecloth.

  “Ready, Scoob?” Peterson asked after they returned to their seats.

  “Yeah, I just needed to make sure I was on the right track. I don’t want to blow this.”

  “We were talking about Jack Burch.”

  Matson looked dead straight at Peterson. “Burch was in on it from the beginning. We couldn’t have done anything without him. No way. We didn’t know diddly about the offshore world. We were novices, he was the pro—as slick as they come and looking to make a killing. And I felt like a fucking rabbit in his crosshairs.

  “I’ll admit that I was nervous driving up from San Jose to meet Burch. Granger wanted me to do it alone even though it was new territory for me. I’d spent my life in manufacturing and sales. You make something solid, something real, and sell it. But the meeting with Burch was something I had trouble wrapping my mind around. It was only about air and paper.

  “Sure, SatTek had hired lots of lawyers. Con
tracts. Real estate. Intellectual property. But Burch was in a different league from them. It hit me how different when I got off the elevator on the forty-third floor. The views from up there are more than amazing. They’re unnerving. The whole financial district. The Golden Gate. Blue sky all the way to the horizon.

  “I gave my name to the receptionist and took a seat on the couch. Plush. Soft leather—and I got sucked into the damn thing. My suit jacket got all bunched up. My briefcase was dangling over the edge. Before I had a chance to recover, Burch walked in. Tall. Intense. Almost senatorial—and I’m sitting there like the village idiot.

  “First I got embarrassed, and then pissed, thinking that the couch was set up as booby-trap to put outsiders at a disadvantage.

  “As we walked down the hallway toward his office, I told myself that I needed to get focused and get my head in the game. One amateurish screwup and Burch might drop-kick me out of there. Then a warning from Granger came back to me. ‘Self-control is key,’ he’d said. ‘Be careful what you say and how you say it. The rules are different from what you’re used to and the most important one is this: No one says exactly what he means if he wants to get what he came for.’

  “I hadn’t grasped what Granger meant at the time, but two minutes after I sat down in Burch’s office, I understood exactly.

  “Burch read over some notes on a legal pad, then looked up and said, ‘Ed Granger hasn’t told me the details of what you want to do, other than it somehow involves selling nonmilitary-grade sound and video detectors in Asia.’

  “Even though it must’ve sounded like I was reading from a script, I answered him the way Granger told me to: ‘The plan is to give ourselves an international presence in anticipation of going public.’

  “I waited for Burch to nod like Granger said he would, then I looked him straight on and said: ‘We’re looking to create a flexible structure, one that you might even call aggressive.’

  “Burch’s eyebrows went up a little and he got a half smile on his face, and right then I knew that I’d hit just the way Granger had trained me. Crushed it three hundred yards down the fairway.

  “Hell, when I look back on it now, I think Burch understood where Granger was headed with this thing long before I did.”

  CHAPTER 8

  At 9:30 A.M. Gage pulled into a parking space behind his redbrick converted warehouse office along the Embarcadero. The weather had gone sideways, rain pounding the driver’s side window and sending rivulets streaming across the windshield. He decided to wait it out, for San Francisco storms squalled, rather than swept, their way across the city, cresting and troughing like surging waves.

  Gage’s head and ribs had merely felt stunned and bruised during his meeting with the senior partners of Burch’s firm after the burglary, but were now stiff and throbbing. Since no bones had been broken, he was certain that by the end of the day nothing would be left but aches and twinges.

  Everyone assembled in the windowless boardroom an hour earlier had understood that a press report exposing the breach of their files not only would provoke an onslaught of panicked calls from corporate clients around the world, but would make the firm the focal point of the media’s speculations about the shooting. With the consent of both Burch’s secretary and Sonny Powers, the firm had therefore agreed not to risk a leak by calling in the police, but rather to leave the investigation in Gage’s hands. He knew that they trusted him not only as Burch’s closest friend, but also as someone each of them had worked with since the founding of the firm.

  Nevertheless, in the strained faces of the men and women sitting around the conference table, Gage had observed a silent acknowledgment that the clock was ticking down toward the moment when they would lose control of a story whose implications, both for Burch and for the firm, were as ominous as they were opaque.

  When the rain hesitated, Gage walked around to the passenger side of his truck and grabbed two boxes of files and an overstuffed folder he’d taken from Burch’s office. He braced them against the wall and punched his security code into the back door pad. Once inside, he climbed the steps toward his office. The crisscrossing, floor-to-ceiling I-beams installed throughout the building by earthquake retrofitters made the stairwell feel bunkerlike in the muted fluorescent lighting.

  Emerging on the third floor, Gage heard the voices of three of his investigators making calls to the midday East Coast, or perhaps to end-of-the-day London or Frankfurt, or to nighttime Moscow or Dubai or Kolkata. He knew a dozen more were settled in before their monitors on the two floors below, learning enough about Gage’s own cases to fulfill the reassignments he’d made the previous day. Others on his staff of former FBI, DEA, and IRS agents were at work in those far-off cities, and in others, searching for facts and witnesses to explain why stock prices suddenly plunged or how trade secrets had been stolen or where embezzled money had been cached.

  After hanging his rain jacket on a corner rack in his office, Gage walked to the nearest of the three casement windows facing the bay. Wind-driven raindrops swept across it sounding like cascading dominoes, then attacked the next, and the next. He watched fog swirl in, obscuring the front parking lot, and thought back to the day he had paid off the building: he and Burch sitting on the landing, drinking beer as the sunset gave the bay a reddish glow, their friendship somehow anchored in the brick and the concrete and the steel.

  But standing there now, gazing into the grayness with Burch near death in the ICU, Gage realized that the illusion of permanence had been nothing but a self-deceiving denial of mortality.

  As he turned toward his desk he noticed a stack of messages left for him by his receptionist the evening before. He separated out the ones from reporters, crumpled them up, and threw them into the trash. He selected one from the remainder, a Russian name with a Washington, D.C., area code, and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

  “Alex?” Gage spoke into the intercom as he sat down. He didn’t have to complete his request before Alex Z answered, “Be right there, boss.”

  On any other morning, Gage would’ve had to walk downstairs to Alex Z’s office to get his attention, for the skinny twenty-six-year-old’s ears would’ve been wrapped in headphones, his mind immersed in trails of data dancing across his monitor. It was Alex Z’s job to think and to turn data into information that Gage could use, and if he needed blaring music to make that happen, Gage had always been willing to accommodate him.

  But for Alex Z, as for everyone else at the firm, everything had changed since the shooting of Jack Burch. Gage had heard it in the voices of every employee who’d called him in the last two days. He knew that each, just like Alex Z, would be working with a divided mind: half concentrating on their cases, half listening for Gage’s voice on the intercom.

  The wild-haired, Popeye-tattooed Alex Z arrived a minute after Gage’s call. He still looked like the disaffected computer science graduate student who’d sought out Faith, an anthropology professor at UC Berkeley. He had already surrendered his fellowship and was in search of work that would be more meaningful than simply making the world seem smaller and move faster. Faith had brought him home to Gage like a stray dog from the pound, and during the succeeding five years Alex Z became the one in the office on whom Gage most relied to help him bring order to the chaos of facts and events from which complex cases are formed.

  Alex Z looked over at Gage’s jacket as he walked toward the desk and shook his head at the street grime smearing the arms and elbows and the split seam at the right shoulder.

  “Jeez, boss, you okay?” Alex Z asked as he dropped into a chair.

  “It’s nothing serious.”

  Alex Z glanced again at the jacket. “Has the press gotten ahold of what happened?”

  “The firm agreed not to say anything about it, even to the police, until I look into it.”

  “But what if he was the shooter?”

  Gage shook his head. “He wasn’t. He was at least forty pounds heavier than witnesses described, and I don’t want
to take a chance of SFPD leaking Jack’s connection to SatTek to the press.”

  Alex Z drew back. “No shit? SatTek? Man, the media is going to tear Mr. Burch apart. You see what they’re doing to the company president? They’re picking through his life like it’s a garage sale at the National Enquirer, and nobody even heard of him until a week ago.”

  Gage thought of the press still camped out at the hospital and on the sidewalk in front of Burch’s mansion, and of news cycles that needed feeding.

  “That’s why we better figure out what Jack’s part was before the media paints a bull’s-eye on him.” Gage pointed at a chaotic foot-high stack of documents he’d piled on the conference table centered in his office. “Those are Jack’s SatTek files. They were scattered all over a storage room and his office. The burglar ripped them apart looking for something. There’s an index in there somewhere, see if you can figure out if anything is missing.”

  Alex Z rose. “How soon?”

  “Jack’s wife wants me with her at a meeting with his doctors early this afternoon. She’s afraid she’s not thinking clearly. See if you can have it ready by the time I get back.”

  “Just tell me what you need and when you need it, boss. I’ll be available 24–7.”

  Alex Z’s two lives converged in Gage’s mind. His indispensability occasionally made Gage forget that Alex Z had a second life, what sometimes seemed a second identity, as the lead guitarist for a popular South of Market club scene band.

  “You didn’t cancel—”

  “The moment I heard the news, and everybody in the group is on board with it.”

  Alex Z turned away to gather up the documents, then looked back, brows furrowed. “If the breakin is connected to SatTek, doesn’t that mean the shooting is, too?”