Final Target

by Steven Gore

  “Yeah, if he lives that long.”

  Peterson nodded slowly. “With a little push, he’ll run the numbers and come in. He’ll have no choice.”

  “You know how Fitzhugh and Granger hooked up, don’t you?” Matson asked Zink, as he balled up a potato chip bag and dropped it into a wastebasket next to Zink’s desk.

  They were meeting in a temporary office Zink had set up a few blocks from the Federal Building.

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Through Burch.” Matson pointed at Zink’s uneaten sandwich. “You want that?”

  Zink shook his head, then got up and walked to the easel. He drew an arrow from the box containing the name Burch to one containing the name Fitzhugh.

  “I thought it was obvious,” Matson said, tearing off the plastic wrapper. “Granger and I didn’t know anybody in London who could run the holding company or handle the money we were running through China and Vietnam. I thought you understood that.”

  This guy’s a dunce, Matson said to himself. How did he get into the FBI?

  “That’s what led to the Irish software deal. Burch hooked us up. I figured you didn’t ask me about that because you already had it covered.”

  “There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. I hadn’t gotten to that one yet.” He turned back toward Matson. “You have any proof?”

  Matson nodded. “Sure. I’ve got paperwork in a box of junk in London. Let me have my passport back and I’ll go get it. And there are guys over there who worked with Granger before. I can see if they’ll let something slip.”

  Zink’s step was lighter as he walked back to the Federal Building to get Peterson’s approval. He’d gotten what the prosecutor wanted: an angle on Granger. He smiled when he realized that the source of Matson’s enthusiasm wasn’t the possibility of success, but something else: The weasel probably hasn’t gotten laid since that last time he saw his Ukrainian love bunny.

  It didn’t make any difference to Zink what else Matson did over there as long as he brought back the leverage Peterson needed.

  Anyway, Zink thought, there’s nothing—absolutely nothing—he can do that I won’t find out about in the end.

  CHAPTER 25

  Viz was just finishing a large pepperoni and anchovy pizza when Gage climbed into the passenger seat of his blue-green Yukon half a block away from SatTek.

  “How can you eat that stuff?” Gage asked. “You’ll be burping anchovies for the rest of the day.”

  “I have a high tolerance for discomfort.”

  “What about my discomfort?”

  “You should’ve called ahead. I’d have picked up tofu and saltines.”

  “I’ll do that next time.”

  Viz pointed at a monitor propped on the truck console. It showed a magnified entrance to SatTek, an image captured by a video camera concealed in a gym bag resting on the dashboard. SatTek was housed in a half-block-sized, nearly windowless white concrete block with bold red letters spelling the company name along the front. To the right was the entrance. To the left, a long dock and four metal roll-up doors.

  Gage surveyed the wide strips of manicured grass surrounding each building in the industrial complex. A coed group was playing volleyball farther down the block, and across the street from them three young men tossed a Frisbee.

  Viz pointed toward SatTek. “See that guy with the brown sports jacket? He’s the controller.”

  Gage focused on the man fifty yards away.

  “His name is Robert ‘Don’t-Call-Me-Bob’ Milsberg. Accounting degree from SF State in the early nineties.”

  Gage watched Milsberg climb into a ten-year-old Nissan station wagon. “What’s he been up to?”

  “Arrives at 9 A.M. Goes out to lunch at 11:50. Comes back at 12:50. Leaves at 5 P.M. Except yesterday. Yesterday broke the pattern.”

  Viz noticed movement in the dock area and reached forward to reposition the camera. He then reached again, turning it a quarter inch.

  Gage smiled. “Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “It’s called dramatic tension,” Viz said, smiling back. “I’m thinking about taking a film class.”

  “You could teach a film class. So what about yesterday?”

  “I had one of the guys take over for me here so I could follow him. He went to a mortgage company in Cupertino. Came out looking real grim. I asked Alex Z to run him. Turns out his house is in foreclosure. He’s lived there since the eighties. Lots of equity. Refinanced last year. Took out a huge chunk of change. And guess what he did with the money?”

  “SatTek stock.”

  “Bingo. Alex Z looked it up. Milsberg used the whole four hundred thousand dollars plus another eight hundred and fifty thousand, probably from his retirement account.”

  “And he didn’t get out in time?”

  “Nope.”

  “That means Matson didn’t clue him in that SatTek was collapsing.”

  “I guess not. And now he’s got almost nothing, literally nothing if he loses his house.”

  “It must’ve jangled in his number-crunching brain that something was wrong when the FBI started poking around,” Gage said.

  “I don’t think so. Look over there.”

  Viz pointed at another white block building housing AccuSoft, an accounting software company whose insider trading scandal rode the front pages for months.

  “Gotcha,” Gage said, nodding his head. “Don’t-Call-Me-Bob must have thought SatTek was targeted for the same reason as they were.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  Gage’s eyes fell on the last slice of Viz’s pizza and his mind looped back through their conversation. “Where’s he eat lunch?”

  “A Chinese place over on Tully.”

  “Maybe I should join him for a little kung pao chicken tomorrow.”

  “Great idea, then you can bring me back some pot stickers. And a mandarin beef.” Viz held up his forefinger. “No, make it a mu shu pork. Or one of those—”

  Gage made a show of studying his watch. “How about you try to decide between today and tomorrow?”

  “Sure, boss, deciding on lunch is one of the few diversions for a surveillance guy.”

  Gage left Viz searching his mental menu, then slipped back into his car. He called Faith on her cell as he was driving back to his office.

  “I’m here now.” The words came out as a sigh, her tone answering what would’ve been his next question. There’d been no improvement.

  Gage heard shuffling as she walked from Burch’s room. “The doctors come by?”

  “Kishore was in an hour ago, but only to give Courtney a hug and try to boost her spirits. The new critical care doctor strode into the room a few minutes ago as if he could do something, but after flipping through the chart and shining a light in Jack’s eyes, he just stood there, kind of slump-shouldered, then shuffled away. It was heartbreaking and—”

  Gage winced as Faith’s voice caught. He imagined her and Courtney sitting for hours, their eyes darting toward the monitors, flinching at each beep, then looking to the doctors for reassurance that was never forthcoming.

  “Then one of the nurses took Courtney aside and asked whether Jack had an advance directive, and then she just fell apart.”

  “I’ll be there in forty minutes.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Don’t panic,” Gage said when he dropped his business card on the table-for-two in the almost vacant Jade Garden Chinese Restaurant in San Jose twenty-four hours later.

  “Private investigator?” the diner asked, looking up. “What did I do?”

  “I think it may be something that got done to you.” Gage glanced at the empty chair. “May I?”

  “Sure. Why not? Things can’t get any worse.”

  Gage sat down and rested his folded hands on the edge of the table, careful to make sure his suit jacket didn’t touch. The plastic tablecloth was sticky, the soy sauce bottle was grimy, and the napkin holder was empty.

  “How’s the food?” Gage asked. />
  “Cheap and better than bringing my lunch.”

  Robert Milsberg picked up the card. “Graham Gage, Private Investigator. San Francisco.” He then looked at Gage. “I knew somebody would come knocking, I just figured it would be the FBI.”

  “You mean you haven’t been interviewed?”

  Milsberg should’ve been the first on the list at SatTek after Matson.

  “Not yet.” Milsberg offered a weak smile. “I assumed they were still gathering documents and then they’d call us in one by one.”

  “About what?”

  “The whole freaking thing. Even Matson…” He peered across the table at Gage. “I guess you know about Matson if you’re talking to me. Even Matson says they haven’t questioned him yet.”

  “What’s the whole freaking thing?”

  “You know or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “It looks like a pump and dump with an offshore angle.”

  Milsberg jabbed the air with his chopsticks. “Bingo. Matson and me both got slammed by Granger and that lawyer in San Francisco, Burch. That son of a bitch. Matson lost almost a million and me one-point-two.”

  A listless waitress wandered up to the table, order pad in hand.

  “What’s good?” Gage asked Milsberg.

  “Chow fun. Beef chow fun.”

  “That’s fine,” Gage told her, and she shuffled off toward the kitchen.

  Milsberg cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief. Pale skin surrounded reddened eyes and a comb-over that was graying and far less than adequate. He reminded Gage of those awkward kids in high school whose body parts seemed to grow at different rates.

  “Who you working for?” Milsberg asked.

  “Some of the shareholders.” Gage had planned the lie in advance. Better that Milsberg believed that Gage’s clients were fellow victims, rather than one of those he thought were the masterminds. “Most are devastated. Others are just pissed.”

  “Not half as much as me. Once this all hits the papers, I won’t even get hired to count eggs at a chicken farm.” He didn’t laugh at his own attempted joke. “What’s your theory?”

  Gage took a chance, saying a little more than he could yet prove. “Fake receivables paid for by selling stock.”

  Milsberg nodded. “That’ll be the headline all right.”

  “Why are you still hanging around?”

  “We still have some orders to fill and somebody’s got to do the books. There’s enough money coming in to cover our reduced salaries. It’s not much, but I’ve got a kid in college, so a little is better than none.”

  The waitress set a pot of tea, a cup, and a napkin in front of Gage.

  “When did you figure it out?” Gage asked.

  “One day too late. There was something weird since just before we went public. We’d get these big orders from Asia, but I never knew how. We never had a sales staff out there. I’d ask Matson. He’d tell me that it was through Granger’s connections. That’s why the board approved his fees. A couple of hundred grand in two years. I could understand the orders from Europe. Matson was traveling there all the time, working the market. That’s what he was always good at, sales. He could sell a pork sandwich to a vegan—twice.”

  Milsberg poked around in his chow fun with his chopsticks.

  “It was only after the collapse that Matson told me that Granger and Burch set up a bunch of burn companies…You know what burn companies are, right?”

  Gage nodded.

  “When Matson went back after the collapse, the customers were gone. Poof. Up in smoke.”

  Milsberg set down his chopsticks.

  “If it weren’t for our pastor, my wife would’ve divorced me. She’s kind of a religious nut. She used to teach this marriage class at the church. You know, ‘It’s not a contract, it’s a covenant with God.’ That kind of stuff. Naïve. She says I’m naïve. She never liked Matson. She thought he was slick. And Madge. My wife saw through her the first time they met. But you can’t blame Matson. He looks at his wife, he still sees what she was like when they first got together. We’re all that way.”

  Gage had come to the restaurant ready for psychological combat with an accountant constantly calculating his position, but what he saw before him was a fragile, flailing man.

  “It’s called being human.”

  “I guess so. But you didn’t come here to listen to me ramble on.”

  “It’s okay. You’ve had a tough couple of months.”

  “I wasn’t sure whether to blow my brains out or Granger’s or Burch’s.”

  Gage’s eyes went dark.

  Milsberg pulled back and held up his hands. “I didn’t shoot Burch. It wasn’t me.” He shook his head. “I haven’t the stomach for any kind of violence.” He hunched forward again and stared down at this chow fun. “I can only eat this stuff because I don’t think about how cow becomes beef.”

  Gage glanced toward the door. “How about we go for a walk?” he said. “Get some fresh air. Talk a little more.”

  “Sure. I got nothing much to do at the office. What about your lunch?”

  “She can pack it up. I know somebody who’ll eat it.”

  Gage drove Milsberg to Coyote Creek Park. They entered the Japanese Friendship Garden, bought fish food pellets, and walked to the crest of the bridge over the koi pond.

  “You don’t know me,” Gage said, as he tossed a few pellets to the koi schooling below, “and I don’t know you.”

  “That’s not quite true.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I’ll bet you’ve met a lot of Robert Milsbergs in your career and you take them to comforting places like this for a little heart-to-heart.”

  “You’re an insightful guy.”

  “Sometimes too much. You know what I wanted to be when I was in college? A poet. I wanted to be a poet. And I could write, too.” Milsberg tore open his bag of pellets. “There was something heroic about being a poet. Now look at me. I’m as broke as if I was one. But I ain’t no hero. I’m a middle-aged guy who screwed up his life.”

  Milsberg leaned over the wooden railing and stared down toward the water, his eyes losing focus, then he blinked hard and tossed a few pellets to the koi.

  “You know haiku?” Milsberg asked, watching the fish vacuum them up.

  “Of course.”

  “Try this one: The somber wind stills, the dark river of pain speaks, of what might have been.”

  “That could be anyone.”

  “But it’s me. I write haiku to keep from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.” Milsberg sighed, still staring at the koi. “What do you need?”

  “Look at me,” Gage said, as if a father to his son.

  Milsberg turned to face him.

  “You tried to ride this scam, didn’t you?”

  Milsberg glanced away, then returned his eyes to Gage’s.

  “I shouldn’t have. But I did. Everybody said we had great products, ones the country really needed. And I thought everything would work out in the end.”

  “But it didn’t. And a lot of people suffered, not just you.”

  “Maybe I’m lucky. I’m still young enough to earn it again.”

  “But not the old folks who lost all of their retirement money.”

  Milsberg hesitated, off balance, as if for the first time seeing the victims in his mind’s eye. “No. Not them.”

  “And you knew Matson was in on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you did what he told you?”

  “Yes. And my name is all over the paperwork. Even the SEC filings.”

  Gage pulled a photograph out of his suit pocket, holding it by the bottom center between his thumb and forefinger.

  “You know what building this is?”

  “Sure.” Milsberg shrugged. “It’s the Federal Building in San Francisco. I went there a few times to pick up tax forms, back when the IRS had an office on the first floor.”

  “And what’s in the Federal Building now?”

>   “Courts, U.S. Attorney, FBI.”

  Gage moved his thumb.

  Milsberg’s head jerked forward. Eyes riveted on the small figure walking toward the entrance. “That son of a bitch!”

  CHAPTER 27

  Mr. Gage, this is Robert Milsberg.”

  Gage glanced at his watch. 9:01 A.M. He was surprised by the call so soon after their talk the previous day.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve been thinking about our conversation. And I talked to my wife. She reads situations pretty well. For her everything is basically black and white. Maybe that’s what religion does for her. She doesn’t think the U.S. Attorney will believe me if I tell him that I was just doing what Matson told me to do. And she figures since they made the deal with him first, he’s their guy. She says they’re invested, no pun intended. They’re invested in him.”

  “She’s right. That’s exactly how it works.”

  “And I’m thinking, they don’t need me anyway, except to make their indictment longer and pump up their stats.”

  “I think so, too.”

  “You know, there’s a rule in writing. It’s called show, don’t tell. And if they won’t believe what I say, then I’ll just show them who Matson really is.”

  Gage held his breath. He was a heartbeat away from getting inside SatTek, but he couldn’t risk Milsberg later finding out the truth and bailing out when Gage needed him most. “Robert, there’s something you need to know before you tell me anything else.”

  “About Jack Burch?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering if there was a connection. I saw the look on your face when I talked about wanting to shoot him. His wife hire you?”

  “No. I volunteered.” Gage knew that he had to give Milsberg a picture of Burch that would give him confidence that he was doing the right thing. “This isn’t about money. I’ve known him half my life. The worst he can be accused of is negligence, not realizing what Matson was really up to—but there’s mitigation. Matson showed up right after Burch’s wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. We didn’t know if she’d survive. He just stopped thinking, his mind followed his heart and his heart was with her.”