Final Target

by Steven Gore

  “I’ll find out whether Jack’s line is accessible at his secretary’s desk or the conference room next to his office. Maybe Matson hung around after the meeting and made the call.”

  “There are also the Nevada companies. Peterson claimed that Mr. Burch set up a company for Kovalenko with Verona as the registered agent.”

  “That’s what he was suggesting.”

  “I looked at the secretary of state’s records. Kovalenko wasn’t one of the original officers. He bought it from someone else. And Verona runs a company that does nothing but act as registered agents. If you’re incorporated in Nevada, you need a registered agent there. If you don’t, you can’t operate.”

  “And if you don’t operate there, you can’t get the Nevada tax breaks.”

  “It looks like half the corporate lawyers in San Francisco use Verona, not just Mr. Burch.”

  “What about the Fitzhugh connection?” Gage asked. “Peterson claims that Fitzhugh was Jack’s boy.”

  “I found the calls from Mr. Burch to Fitzhugh. And the international call records you took out of Fitzhugh’s house in London show a bunch of calls to Mr. Burch that Peterson doesn’t know about.” Alex Z pointed at the folders. “The bottom one has copies of Fitzhugh’s cell phone bills matched up with Mr. Burch’s.”

  Gage flipped it open and scanned a half-dozen lines Alex Z had highlighted in yellow.

  “This doesn’t look good.”

  “Sorry boss, but I figured you should know.”

  “Faith and I will visit Jack tonight,” Gage said, closing the file. “I’ll ask him about it.”

  Alex Z rose to his feet and headed toward the door.

  “Alex?”

  Alex Z turned back.

  “Thanks,” Gage said.

  CHAPTER 42

  Burch was sitting in a reclining chair when Gage and Faith entered his hospital room. The IV lines running to his still-bruised arms were undiminished, but the breathing tube had been removed. If the good color in Burch’s face was a reliable indicator, it was gone for good.

  The oxygen mask hung below his chin while he performed breathing exercises with a spirometer measuring lung capacity.

  “Come on, Jack,” Courtney said, a cheerleader’s smile on her face, “a little harder. Up to one thousand. You can do it.”

  Burch was pink and sweaty from effort and used the excuse of their arrival to stop.

  “How are you doing, champ?” Gage gripped his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

  “O…okay.”

  “What are the doctors saying?”

  “Another six…” Burch broke into a fit of coughing. Gage reached for a tissue and handed it to him.

  Courtney took over. “As soon as he gets over this lung infection, they’ll let him go home. Probably no more than six days. Hopefully by Thanksgiving. It’s partly up to Jack.” She frowned at Burch as if he was her child, not her husband. “He won’t eat. He needs to. He’s lost fifteen pounds. They want him to gain five back before he leaves.”

  “The food…terrible…leather and…cardboard.” Burch placed the oxygen mask over his face.

  “Has Spike come by?” Gage asked, turning toward Courtney.

  “This morning,” Courtney said. “He told us about the other jogger who got shot. He’s thinking maybe he doesn’t need to keep the officer guarding the room.”

  Gage had also spoken to Spike. The truth was that Spike was under pressure from his department. The chief knew that the U.S. Attorney would soon indict Jack and figured it would look bad in the press if SFPD was protecting a grand jury target.

  Gage looked down at Burch. “What do you say we bring in our own people? I’d sleep better at night knowing you had somebody with you all the time, especially since you’ll be moving around a little more.”

  “Just tell us who you want us to hire,” Courtney said.

  Gage nodded, then looked over at Faith and made a slight motion with his head.

  “Courtney,” Faith said, “let’s go down to the cafeteria. You need a break and I’d like some tea.”

  “Will you be all right, Jack?” Courtney asked, then looked at Gage. “Of course you will. Boy talk.”

  “Just a little,” Gage said.

  Gage waited until the door closed, then sat down next to Burch and leaned in close. “I need to know about Fitzhugh.”

  Burch drew in a breath, then removed the oxygen mask.

  “A disappointment. A great…disappointment. Should’ve told before. But I didn’t understand…how he fit in.”

  “How does he?”

  Gage winced as Burch erupted into coughing.

  “Let me tell you about…” He coughed again, then wiped his mouth. “About how I met him.”

  “Just try short sentences, Jack.”

  Burch nodded. “Conference. In London.” Burch drew on the oxygen. “Recommended by colleague…Nothing dodgy about him…My London people…too busy. Matson seemed low risk. So I gave him Fitzhugh to…to manage the holding company.”

  “What happened?”

  “Him and Matson. And Granger. Must’ve done things. On their own. Used my name, my connections. Changed the companies. Got new ones.”

  Burch drew on the oxygen. Short, hard gasps on the edge of gagging. Body weakened, wracked by coughs. Breath raspy, wheezy.

  Gage reached again for his shoulder. “Why don’t we do this later?”

  Burch shook his head. “Got to finish…All in my head…too long…. Fitzhugh and Matson…Matson came to my office…asked me to set up a company…to buy real estate and make investments. TAMS Limited.”

  “Why didn’t Fitzhugh do it himself?”

  “Said Matson was my client…Didn’t want to steal him.” Burch took in a breath, then looked up. “I didn’t understand where Matson was getting his money…He said stock options. But it was too soon…for him to exercise them…Then said inheritance.”

  “So you backed off?”

  “No choice.”

  Gage didn’t show the relief he felt. At least Peterson couldn’t link Burch to SatTek’s money laundering.

  Burch’s eyes teared. “Maybe if Fitzhugh hadn’t set up TAMS…”

  “So you know?”

  “Murdered. Horrible…My secretary found out. His wife, too.” Burch looked up at Gage. Childlike. Tears spilling from his eyes. No longer seeming the international lawyer or daredevil skier, no longer living on the edge by choice.

  “Graham, I’m afraid.”

  Gage reached his arm around Burch’s shoulders.

  “I know. Don’t worry, champ. They had their chance at you, and they’re not getting another.”

  Gage remained at Burch’s bedside until his friend fell asleep, then went in search of Faith and Courtney. He found them in the hallway walking back from the cafeteria.

  “Courtney,” Faith said, reaching around her shoulders, “you need to tell Graham.”

  Courtney looked up at Gage. “Promise you won’t say anything to Jack yet, please.”

  Gage nodded. Burch’s tears had told him that the less Burch knew about what was going on outside his hospital room, the better.

  “A man came to serve Jack with a subpoena for his files. A class action suit.” She glanced at her husband’s room. “I had to block the door to keep him outside.”

  Gage knew this skirmish in the battle would be coming; he just didn’t know when and what angle they’d take. “Did they name Jack?”

  “No. They just want his records. Jack will be devastated if he gets named. It’ll be bad enough just to testify.”

  “Who’s the law firm?”

  “Simpson & Braunegg.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Gage tried to herd Courtney toward Burch’s room, but she remained planted.

  “Graham,” Courtney peered up into Gage’s eyes, “tell me the truth. Did Jack do something wrong?”

  He looked toward Faith as if to say he wasn’t ready for this conversation, then back at Courtney. “I don’
t think so, at least not intentionally.”

  She shook her head. “You’re not telling me everything. I need to know. It’s my life, too.”

  Gage tried to fend her off, not with a lie, but with the truth. “I don’t know the whole story yet.”

  “Tell me what you do know.”

  “I need to look into a few more things.”

  Courtney’s eyes were still fixed on him. “Please.”

  He felt his resistance break under the recognition that if he was in her place, he would’ve demanded the truth, too. Without it there’d be no firm ground on which to stand in the face of the gathering storm.

  “Let’s sit down.”

  He led them to a corner of the waiting room, where they huddled in chairs under an indoor palm. Gage outlined what he’d learned, and how the case was closing in around Burch. By the end Courtney was no longer looking at him, her head hung, eyes focused on her interwoven fingers resting on her lap. Faith reached her arm around Courtney’s shoulders.

  “I think Peterson is aiming at a conspiracy case based on the substantive offenses of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. That way he can go after Jack for crimes committed by the others, even if he didn’t know exactly what they did. Peterson just needs to show what the others did was foreseeable.”

  Courtney looked up. “But if he wasn’t part of it, how can anything they did be foreseeable?”

  “That’s the burden of proof in conspiracy cases.”

  “But what’s that based on?” Courtney’s face bore the bewilderment of a person lost in a maze of underground tunnels. “I mean, how do they prove—”

  “Words. Conspiracies are words. And proof in conspiracy cases is how the words are repeated.”

  “But that’s hearsay. I thought—”

  “Conspiracies are the exception to the hearsay rule.”

  Courtney’s shoulders slumped. “So it’s whatever Matson says.”

  Gage nodded. “And to be of value to the government, Matson needs to say that Jack was a coconspirator. That’s what the government wants to hear. In fact, that’s all they’ll accept. Peterson has spent a lot of time and a lot of the government’s money on this case and it all hinges on Matson.”

  Courtney turned fully toward Gage. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  Gage searched his mind for a way to begin that wouldn’t end by crushing her determination to fight. He decided to start at a distance.

  “Part of what Jack does is tax law. In fact, that has a lot to do with how Jack structured SatTek’s offshore companies. He set them up so that the profits from sales made outside of the U.S. wouldn’t be taxed here.”

  “But he didn’t know they were all fake.”

  Gage nodded and took her hand. “Of course he didn’t.”

  “But—”

  Gage held up his palm. “Let me finish.”

  She nodded.

  “Everybody knows what a burglary is. It’s just a matter of overlaying the law onto the facts. But tax law is different, it’s made by people testing limits. And that’s because there is no way the U.S. Congress or the Russian Duma or the Hong Kong Executive Council can anticipate all the inventive ways people do business.

  “The problem is that Jack sometimes works the way he skis. Naïvely. Overconfidently. Always on the edge. And his clients are always trying to push him over, sometimes just by not telling him exactly what they’re up to. Then, if the client gets in trouble, he says, ‘My lawyer told me it was all right.’ It’s cowardly, but that’s what they do.”

  “But this is a lot more serious than a tax case.”

  “Yes.”

  “How serious?”

  Gage shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

  “Graham.” Her eyes searched his face.

  “I haven’t figured it out. The sentencing guidelines are about a thousand pages long. Then you need to do a lot of calculating. Points are added for some things, deducted from other things. And you have to figure in the amount of the loss. So it’s very complicated.”

  “Graham, I need to know.”

  “Courtney—”

  “Please.”

  Gage looked up at Faith. She nodded. Courtney needed an answer.

  “If Peterson got the indictment he wants and Jack got convicted of everything, it would be kind of long…”

  “How long is long?”

  “Maybe about…” Gage hesitated, hating to say the words that would stab at Courtney’s heart. “Twenty years.”

  Faith drew her close as Courtney’s eyes filled with tears.

  “But I know he didn’t do it,” Courtney said, voice rising. “Jack doesn’t work for money. It’s all just play for him. You know that, Graham, don’t you?”

  “I know that. So does everybody who knows Jack. But our first chance to prove it to everyone else may not be until the trial.”

  Courtney lowered her head, then wiped her eyes with a tissue. Gage and Faith sat silently, not diminishing her by backtracking, and pretending the truth was otherwise.

  After a minute, Courtney looked up. She took Gage and Faith’s hands. “Thank you.”

  “This case has turned into a steamroller,” Gage said to Faith as they drove away an hour later. “Between Washington wanting a whipping boy for corporate crime and the class action lawyers looking to make a killing, I don’t think there’s a way to stop it.”

  “What do you know about Simpson & Braunegg?” Faith asked.

  “That they’re disgusting. It’s one of those firms that deceives itself into thinking it’s on the side of truth and justice, when it’s really just after the money—sometimes ruthlessly. It almost makes you respect gangsters like Matson’s pal Gravilov. At least they don’t pretend to be serving the public good.” Gage exhaled and shook his head as he stared at the car taillights in front of them. “Simpson & Braunegg will sue Jack whether they believe he was in the wrong or not. He has deep pockets and his firm has deep pockets.”

  “Why didn’t they just name him now?”

  “Because they don’t want a big fight over his files. They want him to believe that he’s just going to be a witness. They’re hoping he’ll give them everything if he thinks it’ll keep them from naming him.”

  “Jack may be weak at the moment, but he’s not stupid.”

  “And you know what else?” Gage wasn’t looking for an answer. “I think Peterson fed them the case.”

  Faith’s head swung toward him. “But isn’t that un-ethical? U.S. Attorneys aren’t supposed to do that, are they?”

  “No, they’re not. But we won’t be able to prove it and, even if we did, nobody’ll care. Not with Simpson & Braunegg on the courthouse steps showing off a bunch of retirees who lost everything.”

  “Can you do anything?”

  “I don’t know.” Gage felt the pressure of two clocks ticking. The criminal case and the civil suit, each counting down toward explosions that would rip Jack and Courtney’s lives apart. “There’s one thing I do know. I need to buy some time.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Derrell Williams, an ex–FBI special agent who’d worked with Gage for almost a decade, intercepted him as he walked from his car toward the front steps of his building.

  “Hey, Chief. I had a meeting over at the U.S. Attorney’s Office on your antitrust case. The good news is that they were so thrilled to have the thing handed to them in a package that they did a little more tongue wagging than they should’ve.”

  “And the bad news?” Gage asked, eyes fixed on Williams.

  “You better watch your back. The word is that Peterson is pretending to be playing the SatTek case like it’s a game of Sunday touch football, but inside his four walls he’s been screaming that you’re screwing up his indictment and that he’s going to hammer you.”

  Gage nodded. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Williams smiled. “That’s what you always say, and then you do whatever you were going to do anyway.” His smile faded. “B
ut I’m not sure that’s a safe way to go this time. My old partner was at the meeting. On the way out, he whispered that Peterson asked him whether there’s a connection between you and a Hong Kong company called TD Limited. He thought it was chickenshit. But it sounds to me like Peterson is following your tracks, trying to get you into his crosshairs.”

  Gage knew Williams was right. Peterson was looking for a way to make him duck and run. Toxic Disposal Limited was a front company he and Burch created to smuggle medical supplies through Pakistan by mislabeling them as contaminated equipment sent for recycling. It was the only way to keep it from being stolen and sold on the black market. The problem was that the scheme required first presenting fraudulent export documents to U.S. Customs, a felony that could cost Gage both his license and a year in federal prison.

  “Sounds that way to me, too,” Gage said, “but I’m working on getting Peterson into mine. We’ll see who locks on first.”

  Alex Z hustled to catch up with Gage as he walked down the hallway toward his office.

  “You guessed it, boss,” Alex Z said, following him inside. “There’s a connection. The partner at Simpson & Braunegg who’s handling the SatTek suit was a frat brother of Peterson at Cal. Franklin Braunegg. And they’re golfing buddies now. They even belong to the same country club.”

  Gage pointed at a chair in front of his desk. “How’d you find out?”

  “Alumni bulletins. That kind of thing.” Alex Z sat, then flipped open a folder and turned it toward Gage. “I even found a photo of them holding up a trophy from a tournament. They play in what’s called the Winter Circuit.”

  “Can you find out whether Peterson was ever—”

  “Already did.” He slid over a spreadsheet. “I found three securities cases where Peterson was the prosecutor and Braunegg was the class action lawyer. A total of about fifty-five million dollars.”