by Steven Gore
Spike stopped next to his police-issued Mercury Marquis, then looked up at Gage.
“I’ve ordered round-the-clock security.”
“You really think the shooter’s coming after him?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Kishore said.” Spike formed his small hands into a tight circle like a bull’s-eye. “It was like Jack was wearing a target and the shooter scored two tens. Side-by-sides into his breastbone.” Spike widened his hands, as if framing Burch’s heart and lungs. “If he scored two fives, Jack would be dead. That’s damn accurate shooting for a maniac who’s pissed off and on the move.”
Spike opened his car door, withdrew a black leather folder, then flipped it open. “Even though the witnesses are describing road rage, I have to ask, has Jack complained to you about anybody threatening him?”
Gage shook his head.
“You know what he was working on?”
“The usual. He was in Geneva for a few days, then in Moscow.”
Gage had answered mechanically, then felt a wrenching expansion of the world as Russia, which had faded into an icy stillness since his return two weeks earlier, now came monstrously alive: a hydra head of criminal and political threats feeding off the corpse of the former Soviet Union-and willing to destroy those, like Jack Burch, who had interfered with their feast.
Spike peered up at Gage. “Weren’t you just in Moscow?”
Gage nodded slowly as a slide show of Slavic mug shots flashed through his mind.
“Did it have anything to do with Jack?”
Gage trusted Spike as a man, but if a gangster had reached across the Atlantic to assassinate Burch, no local cop could help Gage punch back.
“Not directly.”
“What about indirect-” Gage’s opaque eyes and tone of irrevocability strangled the word in Spike’s throat. He reddened. “Don’t stonewall me on this thing, Graham.”
“It’s not my decision. As long as there’s a chance he’ll survive, it’s up to him what gets revealed about what he did over there. I’m not taking that away from him.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Gage fixed his eyes on Spike. “Then I’ll decide.”
“Come on, man,” Spike’s voice turned pleading. “For all we know the guy who did this is boarding a flight back to Moscow right now.”
“Then it’s already too late.”
They stood silently at the impasse until Gage found a middle ground that he knew would leave Spike stranded.
“I’ll tell you what’s been in the European press and you can take it as far as you want.”
Spike nodded.
Gage paused, trying both to tear his mind from the image of the bullet holes in Burch’s chest and to find a way to make a complicated story short, simple, and vague enough that Spike couldn’t extract any leads from it.
“This was the issue,” Gage finally said. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, crime bosses and politicians in Russia and Ukraine began using the natural gas trade as their private piggy bank. Billions of dollars were extorted by the maffiya to fund arms-and sex-trafficking schemes. Billions more were siphoned off by Russian and Ukrainian presidents to finance their political campaigns.
“The gas is Russian, but the pipeline that carries it to Western Europe is Ukrainian. And last year Ukraine tried to force Russia to give them a bigger cut of the profits by shutting off the flow. The EU went ballistic. Forty percent of what they consume comes through Ukraine. They threatened to build a line of their own through Turkey from gas fields in Central Asia.”
“But that would just put them at the mercy of a different set of crooks.”
“Exactly. That’s why the EU chose the known over the unknown and brought Jack in to restructure the market. He realized that the key was to eliminate all of the intermediaries used to skim money and replace them with a single transparent authority, a kind of joint venture run out of a third country that would have its books open to the world.”
They ceased speaking as an elderly doctor parked his car in the next space.
Spike waited until he had walked toward the hospital and out of earshot, then said, “I can understand why the Russian and Ukrainian governments might cave in; for them it’s a foreign policy issue. But not the gangsters. I just don’t see them backing off.”
“Let’s just say that they came to understand that all of Western Europe would be inspecting this thing with a microscope, and decided to show restraint.”
Spike raised his eyebrows in a knowing look that assumed what he was trying to discover: that Gage had been Burch’s emissary. “They decided on their own, or were persuaded?”
Gage cast Spike a reproachful look. “I don’t know. Maybe one led to the other.”
From the moment Burch asked Gage to join him in Moscow, he had understood that a public disclosure that they’d approached the underworld would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the plan, for everyone watching would assume that there had been a secret quid pro quo.
Spike shrugged. “If you say so.” He jerked his thumb toward the Richmond District north of Golden Gate Park, now a Little Russia. “But persuasion isn’t exactly the weapon of choice around here these days.”
A month earlier he’d complained to Gage that the mayor had summoned him to City Hall, less concerned about the slug-ridden corpses of what the newspapers were calling “Russian businessmen” than about stray bullets and November elections. Spike had called Gage as he drove away from that dressing-down, infuriated not only by the pressure, but by his own helplessness in solving murders ordered by gangsters overseas whose identities and motives he had no way of ascertaining.
“Are you sure they didn’t change their minds?” Spike asked. “Hitting Jack would send a message that it’s going to be business as usual.”
Gage wasn’t at all sure, but the answer wasn’t one Spike could help him get, so he fixed his eyes on his friend and answered, “Yes.”
Spike held his gaze for a moment, then conceded by drawing a line across his pad.
“What else was Jack up to?”
“IPOs. Bank mergers. Nothing anybody goes to war over.”
Gage glanced down the long hospital driveway toward the street. Commuter traffic inched by. Overfilled trolleys crawled along the wet pavement. Another ambulance rolled up to the emergency entrance followed by a patrol car, lights flashing, arriving with the last of the night’s victims.
Spike followed Gage’s eyes, then pointed at the windows lining the ICU and sighed. “I always figured it would be you or me lying in there.”
“Until two years ago, I had no doubt it would be Jack.” Gage made a steep gliding motion with his arm. “The way he used to rocket down the ski slopes like some oblivious teenager. But that all changed when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. First he flared up the way he always would, ready to take on the forces of nature. But two weeks in, he realized it was all about chemistry and physiology, not force of will. Courtney’s or his. It crushed him, really crushed him.”
“Tough for a guy like that to feel helpless.”
“It was more than that. He felt…”
In grasping for words, Gage saw what habit and familiarity had obscured when he’d spotted Burch three weeks earlier climbing out of a limousine in front of the tsarist-era Baltschug Hotel in Moscow. His cheeks hung on his thinned face, his square shoulders had rounded, his gray tailored suit was ill-fitting and misshapen. Where they once faced each other eye-to-eye at six-two, Gage remembered looking slightly down as they waited to check in.
A lump in Gage’s throat caught him by surprise when he found the word. He swallowed hard. “Fragile,” Gage finally said, struggling to keep his voice even. “I think he felt fragile for the first time in his life.”
Spike folded his arms across his chest, as if trying to resist seeing Burch, and maybe himself, through the eyes of Gage, a man who’d never felt the least bit invincible, even as a young cop kicking doors and always the first one in.
“Jack was terrified that he might leave Courtney a widow,” Gage said, “sick and alone. So he kept himself out of harm’s way and tried to control everything around them.” His eyes caught the glitter of fine drops now settling on Spike’s roof. “He would’ve stopped the rain when she stepped out of the house if there was a way to do it. They just adored each other.”
“Why was he willing to leave her and go to Russia?”
“He wasn’t,” Gage said. “She insisted because she missed the joy he took in his work. He recovered some of the old Jack in Moscow, and life seemed secure enough to start running the hills again when he got back.” Gage glanced in the direction of Pacific Heights, then shook his head slowly. “I wish he hadn’t, or at least-”
“Don’t even think it. You can’t be everywhere.” Spike flipped his notebook closed. “I know it looks grim, but it’s not over yet. There’s still a chance he’ll make it.”
Gage looked up at the ICU, then down at Spike. “How many shootings did we work together?”
“Hundreds, I guess. Would’ve been thousands by now if you hadn’t gone private.” Spike’s eyes widened as he finished the sentence, knowing Gage had trapped him.
“And how many victims survived slugs in the chest?”
“Well…I mean…there must-” Spike threw up his hands. “Your heart’s aching over what life did to Jack even before he got shot, but your mind keeps churning like a goddamn mainframe, calculating the odds of whether he’ll survive.” Spike’s face reddened in frustration, almost in anger. “And nobody’s gonna see the rage you feel until the end of this thing, and maybe not even then. Sometimes you scare the hell out of me.”
Spike pulled out his car keys and gripped them in his hand.
“Ever since we were kids you thought differently than me; saw the world differently. Different from anybody I ever met. For a while I fooled myself into thinking we were following the same path when SFPD recruited us, but we weren’t.
“I’ll help you however I can, Graham. But for the first time in our lives I think you’re holding things back from me.” Spike’s lips went tight for a moment, then he took in a long breath and exhaled. “It makes me afraid that the road less traveled is going to take you off a cliff.”
CHAPTER 3
S tuart Matson, president of SatTek Incorporated, faced Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson across a conference table on the eleventh floor of the San Francisco Federal Building. Peterson was flanked by an FBI agent on one side and an IRS agent on the other.
On Matson’s right sat his attorney, Daniel Hackett. His other flank was exposed.
Thunder reverberated through the steel-framed building and into the book-lined room as Peterson pushed aside his unfinished morning coffee. He aligned two government-issued Paper Mates along the top edge of his legal pad, and said, “Mr. Matson-”
“Just call me Scoob,” Matson said, attempting the ingratiating smile that had begun to fail him a week earlier when he found himself in the crosshairs of a securities fraud investigation.
“Mr. Matson, this is what we call a Queen for a Day. It’s your one and only chance to convince me to allow you to cooperate with the government.”
Matson curled his hands inward toward his chest and adopted the practiced indignation of a professional salesman. “I thought you were asking for me to cooperate. ”
Peterson shifted his eyes to Hackett. “Your client doesn’t seem to grasp that we’d just as soon take this case to trial.” He turned to the FBI agent at his side. “What’s the loss?”
“Almost three hundred million dollars.” The agent’s voice was flat. He fixed his gaze on Matson, his face as expressionless as a spreadsheet. “And counting.”
“So we’re talking what? Twenty years? Thirty?” Peterson looked back at Hackett. “What do you think, Counselor? I’m sure you’ve done the math.”
Matson thought back to the day the SEC suspended trading in SatTek stock. Sitting in Hackett’s office. The lawyer’s black-haired, hawkish little head bent over the thousand-page Federal Sentencing Manual, working his mental calculator, then summing the total in a nightmarish bottom line: Unless Matson won at trial or delivered others to Peterson’s chopping block, he’d spend the next three decades sleeping in a concrete box, eighteen inches from a lidless steel toilet.
Peterson glared at Matson. “I don’t have time to waste on this.” He then pushed himself to his feet and reached down to gather his files.
As the six-one and two-hundred-thirty-pound former NFL linebacker loomed over him, Matson saw himself as he knew Peterson did: the twenty extra pounds bunched around his small frame, his soft hands with their manicured fingernails, and his face that fell just short of handsome; a chin just a shade too small, eyes just a shade too narrow, and a nose just a shade too large.
Matson blinked away the image and embraced another, one he’d earned through four decades of struggle, of standing outside his body, of molding it and training it: the steady gaze, the ingratiating smile, the trustworthy handshake, even the perfect golf swing.
“Wait.” Hackett shot his palm up toward Peterson. “Wait. Scoob wants to continue.” He swung fully toward Matson. “Right, Scoob? You do want to continue?”
Matson clenched his jaw, face reddening, furious that his freedom might hinge simply on whether the prosecutor turned toward the door. He answered, staring at Hackett, not at Peterson. “Sure. I wanna continue.”
Peterson jabbed his forefinger down at Matson. “And that means no more game playing about why we’re here.”
Matson knew that was exactly what he’d done, made a couple of preemptive moves, trying to avoid becoming Peterson’s pawn, but he looked up and said, “I’m not playing a game. I just want to know where I stand.”
“Does that mean you’re ready to listen?” Peterson asked.
“Yeah. I’m ready to listen.”
Peterson sat down, laid out his files, and then fixed his eyes on Matson.
“You know, I know, and your attorney knows that you’ve been lying for years. To the SEC, to shareholders, to your employees, and to your family. The first thing you need to prove to me is that you’re ready to step up, be a man…”
Matson imagined the prosecutor mentally pulling back his fist, then pausing before the punch.
“And just tell the truth.”
The jab landed, and the expression of satisfaction Matson saw on Peterson’s face meant that he’d seen it hit.
Matson straightened in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He reminded himself that this wasn’t a done deal; he could still walk out, hire a half-dozen Hacketts to fortify the defense table and force Peterson to prove an intricate securities scheme to jurors whose credit card balances testified to their inability to understand even compound interest.
And Matson realized something else: It wasn’t just him sitting there wanting something, Peterson wanted something, too.
“I won’t ask you everything,” Peterson continued, “only enough to decide whether to allow you to go forward with your cooperation. And what…exactly…does that mean?”
Matson smiled to himself; it wasn’t a question, but a setup. He felt a comforting familiarity in the cadence, the beats between the words. He’d done it a thousand times himself, motivating sales teams pushing everything from silicon switches to SatTek stock: And what…exactly…does an activity quota, or a unit target, or a sales goal mean to you?
Peterson snapped him back to the present. “It means you better prove you can give us people we couldn’t indict without your testimony. If we’ve got them anyway, we don’t need you. We’ll make a deal with somebody else. And trust me, the ladies are already lining up.”
Matson cringed as a half smile flashed on Peterson’s face. He felt shaken and weakened rather than repulsed by the prosecutor’s scorn.
Voices in the hallway penetrated the conference room; muffled words followed by laughter. Matson imagined it was a joke another prosecutor would later share with Pet
erson. And in that moment, Matson grasped that life would go on unchanged for Peterson regardless of what happened to him. And with that realization, the balance shifted: He knew he wanted it more than Peterson did.
“If we accept your proffer, we’ll work out a plea agreement with Mr. Hackett. That’s why we call this a Queen for a Day, like the old TV show.” Another half smile appeared on Peterson’s face. “The one who tells the best story wins the crown and goes home with all the goodies.”
Matson blew past the sarcasm and reached for the prize, overcome for a moment by the urge to just give in, say whatever the prosecutor wanted, and escape the mess his life had become-
But Peterson yanked it away. “Of course, there’s no way it’ll guarantee you won’t go to the joint.”
Matson gritted his teeth against the suffocating nightmare of toilet fumes wafting toward his face.
“It comes down to this,” Peterson said. “The more people you give us, the less time you’ll do.”
Matson pasted a smirk on his face. “And who makes that little decision?”
“Me,” Peterson said. “I do.”
Matson rolled his eyes. “I figured.”
“You have a problem with that?”
“Technically, the court decides on the sentence,” Hackett said, looking back and forth between the two.
“Technically.” Peterson said the word with a dismissiveness that told Matson that there wasn’t a judge in the entire Northern District who’d rise up on his hind legs to challenge Peterson-at least not over SatTek.
“Technically,” Matson repeated, shaking his head slowly and picking at a fingernail.
“Your attorney and I have agreed that you’ll proffer information regarding the involvement of others in the stock fraud itself and in the use of offshore companies to accomplish it. Is that also your understanding?”
Matson nodded, now panicked by the admissions Peterson would extract from him and wanting to push away from the table and bolt toward the door-but he could feel neither his arms nor his legs.
“You also need to understand that the government appreciates that you have a Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. And it’s no secret to anyone in this room that by implicating your coconspirators you’ll be incriminating yourself.”