by Steven Gore
Gage walked over, pulled an armchair to face him, then sat down. “How’s it feel to be home?”
Burch spread his hands as if to encompass the house. “It’s either a prison…” He cleared his throat while pressing his hands against his chest. “Or a fortress. I’m not sure yet.”
On the drive over, Gage had considered asking a few questions, then leaving and thereby postponing Burch’s confrontation with the case Peterson and Braunegg were building around him. But Burch took the decision out of his hands.
“I heard Courtney arguing with someone outside of my door at the hospital,” Burch said. “I finally convinced her to tell me why.” He reached over and picked up a glass of water from a low table, then took a sip. “How’d you get them to withdraw the subpoena?”
Gage shrugged. “Let’s say I appealed to their good consciences.”
Burch offered a weak smile. “Assumes facts not in evidence.” He coughed lightly, then continued. “But it’s time I learned what the facts are.”
Burch’s earnest expression told Gage he was ready to do more than simply answer questions. He wanted to know where he stood.
Gage watched Burch’s mood rise and fall, his eyes widen and narrow, as he listened to Gage describe what he’d done and what he’d learned since the shooting. He told Burch everything except what happened to Mickey. That was something for him to feel responsible for, not Burch.
Burch didn’t interrupt. Thirty years of listening to clients try to explain complex issues had taught him discipline and patience, but he appeared so drawn and drained at the end that Gage feared he’d gone too far and exposed Burch to too much all at once.
But Burch wasn’t thinking about himself. “I had no idea…I didn’t want you to devote your whole life to…”
Gage reached over and patted his forearm. “It’s okay, champ. You’d do the same for me. We both know it.”
“Still…”
Gage stopped him with a wagging forefinger, then changed the subject. “I need to know about Goldstake.”
Burch thought for a moment, as if unwilling to leave something unsaid. Gage pointed at him and smiled. “Goldstake.”
“Okay.” He smiled back, then spoke. “It’s owned by the Moscow Bank of Commerce.” Burch licked his dry lips and swallowed. “Contacted me about five years ago. A referral from the Bank of America, wanting a bank license in the States. It was funded with foreign capital.” Burch glanced toward his bodyguard in the next room, then leaned toward Gage and lowered his voice. “But there was a problem. When I was dealing with the Moscow bank, it was owned by a client who made his money in the natural gas market.” Burch cleared his throat and took another sip of water. “But things changed. When the oligarchs…and that’s what the client was…went to war, the Russian government couldn’t protect the bank so he turned to the maffiya. And I resigned.”
“Who became your client’s roof?”
Burch leaned farther toward Gage. “There were two. One was the Podolskaya Group…and since the client had investments in Ukraine—”
Gage held up his hand. “Don’t tell me. It’s Gravilov.”
Burch sat up, then flinched in pain and pressed his palms against his chest. “Does Peterson know?” Burch’s voice rose. “Is he talking about two indictments? Like I’m some kind of mob lawyer?”
Gage shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m not sure he even knows all the ways Goldstake Bank is connected to SatTek—”
“It’s what?” The color drained from Burch’s face. “That can’t be—”
Gage nodded. “Goldstake Bank now owns the SatTek facility.”
Burch slumped. “And that means Peterson can connect me at both ends, make me look like the one who put this whole thing together. Bigger even than Granger. Just like he’s been trying to do all along.”
“Not yet, but it’s just a matter of time.” Gage looked down and thought for a moment. “Maybe…” Then back up at Burch. “We need to loop back, before SatTek. You know anybody at Granger’s old firm in New York?”
CHAPTER 53
Westbrae Ventures Executive VP Herb Smothers was wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin as he answered the front door of his Westchester County colonial outside New York City the following night. He was still dressed in his suit slacks, starched blue shirt, and red tie. His sandy hair was short and graying at the temples. His face was open and friendly, as if expecting a neighbor—until Gage identified himself and said, “Jack Burch suggested I talk to you.”
Smothers’s Ivy League face slammed shut. He clenched his teeth and locked his eyes on Gage. “And I told Jack I had nothing to say.”
Gage heard the clunk of rubber cleats on the walkway behind him, then a male voice saying, “We sure fucked up those assholes.” Then another male voice laughing and hands slapping. He glanced over his shoulder as two men in their early twenties, wearing mud-splattered blue and yellow striped rugby shirts, emerged from the darkness and into the light cast by the porch fixture. They alerted like Rottweilers to the tension on their father’s face and came to a stop behind Gage.
The larger of the two pointed at Gage’s back. “This guy giving you a problem, Pop?” The two stepped forward, bracketing Gage, their shoulders touching his and their stale beer breath wafting toward him.
Smothers looked back and forth between his sons. Uncertainty clouded his face as he grasped the absurdity of having his drunk sons come to his rescue.
Smothers fixed his eyes on Gage, but spoke to his sons, “I’ll take care of it.”
Gage turned sideways to allow them to pass, then back toward Smothers as they thunked across the marble foyer and toward the kitchen.
“Smart move,” Gage said. “Now tell me about Granger.”
Smothers shook his head. “You wasted the trip.” Smothers’s voice was now firm, as if a businesslike tone could convince Gage to leave with his questions unanswered. “I couldn’t even if I wanted to.” He then tried a limp my-hands-are-tied shrug. “Corporate counsel locked the whole thing down the moment Granger walked away from Westbrae. It was mutual. He doesn’t talk about us. We don’t talk about him.”
“Granger’s dead. It’s not like he can sue anybody. And somebody in Westbrae has got to start showing some courage—and it might as well be you.”
“It’s just…” Smothers’s voice weakened. He leaned forward and peered into the darkness. Fear showed in his eyes. “You don’t understand who Granger was…and the people who he…”
But Gage did understand. “You’re afraid of something worse than getting fired.”
Smothers nodded, then swallowed hard. “I can always get another job—”
“But not another life.”
Smothers flinched at the words, then spread his hands in acknowledgment and defeat. “After what happened to Jack and to Granger, I can’t…”
Gage’s mind flashed on a bouquet that had stood by Burch’s bedside in the hospital.
“I know you want to help Jack. That was the message you were really sending with the flowers.” He looked back over his shoulder and made a show of inspecting the cars parked in the shadows along the street. Then once again at Smothers. “What do you say we step inside? I’ll make my pitch and you decide whether you can help.”
Smothers thought for a moment, studying Gage as if the answer lay with Gage, not within himself.
“The grand jury is already meeting, moving like a locomotive,” Gage said. “And I’m running out of time to derail it.” Gage shrugged. “If Jack gets indicted, it’s all going to be out of my hands. His lawyers are going to hit Westbrae with subpoenas for every piece of paper and e-mail that has anything to do with Granger, and probe into every crooked thing he did and what Westbrae knew about it. They’ll lay Westbrae open like a filleted catfish.”
Gage slowly shook his head, as if in commiseration. “I won’t be able to stop it.” He then tossed Smothers a life-line. “But I don’t need everything, I only want to know about one thing…Just one thing.�
�� Gage locked his eyes on Smothers. “And just between you and me.”
Smothers swallowed. “What’s that?”
Gage pointed into the house. “I think we better talk inside.”
Driving back to the airport an hour later, Gage had what he needed, but was furious that with the grand jury clock ticking down, he’d consumed eighteen hours getting it.
But it finally made sense why Granger suddenly showed up in California. He had used Kovalenko and Goldstake Securities in a pump and dump with a Midwestern restaurant chain, and Westbrae had buried the crime in money before the SEC could find out about the scam.
The links in the SatTek chain snapped tight as Gage approached the rental car return at JFK. Gravilov had been running the SatTek scam from the beginning: first through Granger, then through Kovalenko, and, finally, through Alla Tarasova—and had been protecting it one dead body at a time.
Gage flashed back on the burglar’s shoulder crushing into him outside Burch’s office, then shuddered at the irony. The burglary had probably saved Burch’s life. If there was anything in the SatTek file suggesting that Burch had connected SatTek to Goldstake, Gravilov would’ve had to finish Burch off.
Gage pulled to the stop in the Hertz return line and reached toward the glove compartment for the rental agreement, but his hand froze as his heart sank. Gravilov’s people had been watching Granger the whole time. And by forcing him to run to the government to make a deal, Gage had flushed him out so they could pick him off.
He looked into his rearview mirror, now chilled by the thought that he might have led Smothers into the same trap—but then caught himself. It was a trap the coward deserved to be in. If Westbrae hadn’t concealed Granger’s crime, there never would’ve been a SatTek scam—and no need for a cover-up that left Burch bullet-ridden and Granger and the Fitzhughs dead.
But at least tonight, for whatever reason, Smothers had done the right thing.
Gage reached for his cell phone. “You have any vacation time?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for Smothers to answer. “Take it, now. And as far away as you can get.”
CHAPTER 54
Can you come to the lab?”
“When?” Gage asked, swinging his legs over the edge of his bed. He smiled to himself. The excitement in Blanchard’s voice dissipated the gloom that had enveloped Gage during the sleepless night.
“Now’s a good time.”
“Who is it?” Faith asked, propping herself up on a pillow.
Gage covered his cell phone’s mouthpiece. “It’s Blanchard.”
“Unless he’s invented a perpetual motion machine, I’m not sure what excuse is good enough for waking me up at…at…”
“Five-fifteen.”
“So, can you make it?” Blanchard asked.
“Sure. Forty-five minutes.”
Instead of heading north to Berkeley, Gage took the tunnel toward the Central Valley, then looped back over the hills. Only after he was sure he’d shaken any surveillance he might have picked up after his meeting with Smothers did he drive toward the campus.
The professor was waiting at the entrance to the concrete and glass Cory Hall at UC Berkeley when Gage arrived.
“Matson is an idiot, a greedy idiot,” Blanchard said. “The detector video amplifier is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” He peeked out toward the dark campus, and then headed down the hall toward the lab. “If any of these nerds get here early, just say you’re my nephew from…where do you want to be from?”
“Tulsa. I’d like to be from Tulsa.”
“Okay, you’re my nephew from Tulsa. What’s your name?”
“Elmore.”
“What about your last name?”
“Blanchard. I’m from your side of the family. Did you forget or are you just embarrassed?”
“Embarrassed? Never. Even as a small child I was proud of you…Little League and all that.”
Gage gave him a thumbs-up. “I think we got the story down.”
Blanchard led Gage to a computer monitor, then spread his hands as if introducing Gage to a dear friend. “Look at this.”
Gage stared at meaningless oscillations with equally obscure labels, “Pulse Response,” “Rise Time,” and “Fall Time,” all measured in nanoseconds.
“I’d like to meet the team that designed this device. It’s pure genius,” Blanchard said. “Say you installed one like this in a submarine periscope. You could see a sardine do a backflip ten miles away.”
Blanchard punched a couple of keys, and a moving bar graph appeared on the screen.
“And footprint, talk about footprint. This draws so little power, you could run it off of a hearing aid battery.” Blanchard grinned. “Well, maybe not. I exaggerate when I get excited.”
“How much is it worth?”
“I could sell the design to Vidyne Industries for ten million by lunchtime. They’d just need to market a couple hundred of the devices and they’d have made their money back, including production costs.”
Gage found himself nodding slowly. “That’s it. That’s Matson’s exit strategy. The government seizes all his stock fraud profits, and he slips away with SatTek’s intellectual property while no one is watching.”
“And there’s also the low-noise amplifier. I imagine that’s worth a helluva lot, too.”
Blanchard glanced down at the monitor. “The funny thing is that Matson could’ve legitimately made a bundle on this if he was just patient and knew how to market it.”
Gage shook his head. “No. SatTek would have made a bundle. All he would’ve gotten was a salary and maybe a Christmas bonus, and only got those until the board members realized that they could find someone better.” He paused, trying to figure out how to set a trap for Matson and drive him into it. “I think it may be time to apply the stick.”
“Or perhaps the carrot?”
Gage looked over and smiled. “Professor Blanchard, you have an evil mind.”
CHAPTER 55
Alex Z designed business cards for Gage and Blanchard and purchased pay-as-you-go cell phones. Gage was Mr. Green of Technology Brokers. Blanchard was Mr. Black of Detector Consultants. “Good morning, Mr. Black,” Gage said twenty-four hours later, as Blanchard sat down in the passenger seat of the rental car outside the Embarcadero BART Station in San Francisco. “I like your suit. But isn’t black a little cliché for a conspiracy?”
“It’s my funeral suit. You don’t know what a relief it is to be dressed up and not to be going to one, or the opera. And it still fits me as long as I don’t button it.” He sighed. “I thought I’d shrink as I aged but discovered Ben & Jerry’s just about when that was supposed to happen.” He patted his stomach. “Cherry Garcia.”
“Did you practice your part?”
“I didn’t need to.” Blanchard flashed a grin. “You’re used to fake people who play fake parts. I’m a real person playing a fake part.” He peered over at Gage.
“But there’s one thing that bothers me.”
“Shoot.”
“Isn’t this entrapment?”
“It’s only entrapment when the police do it. When we do it we’re just coconspirators.”
“My wife won’t be too pleased to hear me referred to as a coconspirator.” He laughed, then slapped Gage on the knee. “On the other hand, it could spice up the bedroom a bit. Maybe you can teach me gangster talk.”
“Maybe I’ll introduce you to a real gangster.”
“Maybe not. I think I’ll stick with the fantasy.”
“Here’s a little reality.” Gage pointed at the dashboard. “In the glove box you’ll find a cell phone, business cards, and a pen in a blue case.”
Blanchard removed the items and put the cell phone and cards into his coat pocket. He smiled as he inspected the pen. “It’s a transmitter, just like in the movies. What’s the range?”
“Fifty yards.”
“Maybe I can tweak it a bit for you later.”
Gage cast Blanchard a mock disapproving glance. “Are y
ou done with the microwave?”
Blanchard drew back. “Whose side are you on?”
“Neither. I don’t get involved in domestic cases. It’s safer.”
The professor scanned the road ahead as Gage took the Highway 101 on-ramp. “Where’s our friend Mr. Matson meeting us?”
“A hole-in-the-wall diner in South San Francisco.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means he watches too much television.”
Gage and Blanchard rode in silence until they reached the Grand Avenue exit, halfway between the 49ers’ stadium and the airport.
“Give me the pen,” Gage said.
Blanchard removed it from his pocket and handed it over.
“I want a clean tape. So don’t say anything after I turn it on until we meet him. And then don’t say anything after the meeting ends, until we get back to the car.”
“Okay.” Blanchard licked his lips, and swallowed. “I’ll follow your lead.”
Gage looked over and smiled. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”
“Just a few butterflies.”
“Play yourself. You’re the good guy in this—and don’t react to what I do. I’ll probably need to scare him. Remember, it’s just acting.”
Blanchard nodded.
“I’ll do an introduction as we get close. Date, time, and what we expect to happen. It’s for our protection and to use as evidence.”
Gage parked down the block from the café, then did the tape introduction.
As they entered the café, Gage spotted Matson sitting alone in a booth at the back. A few of the tables were occupied by what appeared to be regulars. Matson was dressed in a pink Izod golf shirt overlaid with a tan sweater vest. Gage caught Matson’s eye as they entered.
“I’m Mr. Green and this is Mr. Black,” Gage said after they sat down. Matson slid his unopened Wall Street Journal toward the wall. Gage and Blanchard then reached across the table and handed Matson their business cards.
Gage looked hard at Matson. “You make sure nobody followed you here?”