by Steven Gore
Must be one of the brokers, Gage thought.
Then the passenger door opened. A woman. Blond. A walking centerfold, but hair a mess. She reached into her purse. The parking lights of the car next to his flashed.
The broker steadied himself on the hood of his Lexus as he made his way toward her. He opened her driver’s door, then reached his arms around her. His hands groping under her skirt, reaching between her legs. She giggled and pushed him away. She slid into the car and he staggered to the sidewalk, rocking side-to-side, and watched her drive away.
The broker turned toward the office entrance, keys in hand.
“Tiptoe,” Gage whispered into his cell phone. “He’s coming in.”
Gage ducked back into a cubicle just a second before the office exploded with light.
“It’s me.” The slurred voice was speaking into a phone. Words coming out as “Itch me.” “Sorry. I had to work late…Dinner meeting with a client…yeah…it was Kovalenko’s idea. Fucking slave driver.”
Kovalenko. Kovalenko. Kovalenko.
The name rocketed around in Gage’s head. Burch’s face came to him first. A bull’s-eye encircling it. Only then did an image appear: Semion Kovalenko, an East Coast gangster.
Wait. That can’t be right. Isn’t Semion Kovalenko dead? Who’s he talking about?
“Yeah,” the broker said, “at the office to get some papers…gotta take a pee, then I’ll be home.”
“He’s coming your way,” Gage whispered into his phone.
But he wasn’t.
Gage heard the thud of the man staggering against the corner of the first cubicle. “Son of a bitch.” Then a laugh and “I’m fucking wasted.” The voice was moving closer.
Gage glanced around the carpeted cubicle. The desk and chair and filing cabinet occupied half the space-and Gage filled most of the rest.
The metal joints of the cubicle walls creaked when the broker pulled on it to maintain his balance as he worked his way down the aisle.
Gage knew he couldn’t fight him. Their combined four hundred pounds crashing into walls, buckling partitions, and shattering windows would leave an irreparable battlefield-and send Kovalenko-or whoever he really was-on a hunt for the invader.
The carpeted wall bulged out as the man grabbed on to it just a yard away.
When the broker stopped again to steady himself, Gage snatched a pen off the desk and tossed it in a high arc toward the glass partition behind the receptionist’s station. Gage sprang to his feet as the man turned toward the sound of metal clicking against glass, then stepped up behind him. He locked his hand over the man’s eyes and clamped the crook of his elbow across the man’s neck. The man tried to pry away Gage’s hands and punch at Gage’s head, adrenaline rushing to overwhelm the alcohol that had deadened his brain-but not enough. The broker finally went limp. Gage lowered him to the carpet.
Tiptoe’s head peeked from the far hallway and he pointed at the light switch by the door. Gage shook his head, then met him halfway, next to the glass partition.
“The guy’s car is in front,” Gage said. “Anyone driving by will think he’s working late.”
Tiptoe glanced down the aisle toward the body. His eyes widened. “You didn’t…”
“He’ll be okay. Hopefully, tomorrow morning he’ll just think he passed out.” Gage picked up the pen, then looked back toward the hallway. “What did you find?”
Tiptoe shrugged. “Not much. The cabinet drawer in the storage room with the SatTek label is empty, except for one file. I photographed everything inside. And there were a few folders mixed in with some others in a drawer called Cambridge Investments. The only name I saw was for a guy named Verona, from Nevada. His name was also on some papers for something called Golden West Properties. It owns cars with this address on the registration.”
Gage pointed at the storage room. “Keep searching.” He then headed down the aisle toward what appeared to be the manager’s office. An image of Burch’s face in the bull’s-eye once again appeared in his mind. Then his stomach tensed. Kovalenko.
He called Alex Z. “Do a news archive search for me. Semion Kovalenko. He was involved in a Russian organized crimes stock scam in New York.”
He stepped into the boss’s office, but didn’t turn on the light. He scanned the desk with his flashlight. Stacks of correspondence.
“Alex? It’s not Semion, but Yuri.”
Gage inspected the sparse room as he listened to Alex Z’s keystrokes in the background. No pictures on the walls. No filing cabinets. No diplomas or broker’s licenses. A high-back leather chair and two smaller ones that looked like they’d been salvaged from a skid-row dentist’s office. No computer on the Office Depot desk. Just a twenty-line phone and an adding machine. Gage opened each of the drawers in turn. Nothing about SatTek.
Finally, Alex Z spoke. “I found it. A Business Week article. Three years ago. Yuri is Semion’s brother and was the muscle for the operation. Says here the broker-dealers were terrified of him. Semion was murdered just before he got indicted and Yuri did almost twenty months for refusing to testify.”
“In the fraud trial?”
“No, in the trial against the guys who gunned down his brother…looks like he got shot, too.”
“An old-school gangster. Any kind of testifying is snitching.” The almost bare office now struck Gage as a stage set. A way for Yuri Kovalenko to tell whoever sat across the desk that he had nothing to lose-so don’t cross him. “He must’ve terrified Matson, too.”
“Hold on. It looks like there’s a link to another story…Jeez…the bodies of the killers were found dismembered in Central Park two days after he was released from jail.”
CHAPTER 22
O ceanside’s Pleasant Acres wasn’t near the ocean, wasn’t pleasant, and had no acreage beyond the legally required ten-foot strip between it and Good as Gold Pawnshop on one side and Nguyen’s Nail Salon on the other. And it didn’t strike Gage as the sort of place a stockbroker would expect to spend his declining years.
“Albert will be so pleased to have another visitor,” the receptionist said to Gage. “And you are?”
She was a fleshy middle-aged black woman wearing a yellow shift. Reading glasses hung from a “What Would Jesus Do?” lanyard. Her off-kilter name tag, riding high on huge and structurally supported breasts, said “Dolores B.” She seemed thrilled to have outside company.
“I’m Mr. Ward’s nephew. This is my first chance to get to this part of the country in years. How long has he been here?”
“He came right about my birthday. So about twenty-three months.”
“Then happy birthday.”
Dolores beamed. “Thank you kindly. I hope he remembers you. Even if he doesn’t he’ll be so pleased to have a visitor.”
She turned a sign-in book toward him. Gage wrote in the name Gary Ward.
“He’s out in the patio,” she continued. “Just go down that hallway.” She pointed to her left. “There’s a sliding glass door near the end. He’s dressed. We get them dressed every day, you see.”
Gage walked down the corridor, counting six rooms and a nurses’ station, unattended. Two patients per room. The wall next to room four bore a handwritten label: “A. Ward.” The roommate was dressed, and asleep. The room smelled of urine, cigarettes, and instant coffee. Gage slipped inside, then quickly searched Ward’s closet. The elderly man stirred in his bed, rolling first toward the wall, then back. Gage froze until the man started snoring again, then checked the chest of drawers. There wasn’t a scrap of paper, even a wallet, to show that Ward had any life at all before his abandonment at Pleasant Acres.
Gage found Ward sitting alone in the patio but for a shriveled woman propped in a wheelchair at the far end. He was staring up at metal chimes, rusted and silent. A glass of orange juice rested on a low wrought-iron table, untouched. Standing, he would have been five foot ten. Good complexion. Still had most of his silver hair. Looked his age, seventy-two.
“Mr. Ward?”
Ward squinted up at Gage. “Am I supposed to know you?”
“No.” Gage adopted a sympathetic but respectful smile, as if he’d come to learn from an elder. “But I’d like to ask you about the great work you did with Northstead Securities.”
Ward looked down and repeated the name to himself, then back up at Gage, his face scrunched up in puzzlement.
“What’s that?”
“Aren’t you Albert Ward, the stockbroker?”
“Me?” Ward’s face reddened in frustration and in anger, as if he could no longer bear to walk down memory’s path only to find himself at an abyss. “If I’m a stockbroker, I would know it. Wouldn’t I?”
“Yes,” Gage said, reaching out and squeezing the bewildered man’s shoulder, “you would know it.”
Gage walked back to the reception area where Dolores was seated behind the reception desk.
“Dolores,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a good day. He didn’t even remember my father.”
“Unfortunately”-Dolores sighed-“most days are like that now.”
Gage watched her fondle the cross on the chain around her neck, as if seeking strength to bear nature’s ruthless unpredictability that revealed itself daily in the ossifying mind of Albert Ward. He felt a tenderness for her, a righteous woman trapped by her own history in a job with no future, tending for people with no past.
Gage glanced down at the sign-in book. “You mentioned other visitors?”
“Mr. Kovalenko comes once a month, of course, just for the paperwork and to pay the fees. And…” Dolores stood up, then leaned over and glanced down the hallway. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”
“If it’s something important, someone in the family should know.” Gage took her hand and looked into her eyes. “If you can’t rely on family and our Lord Jesus, who can you rely on?”
“You’re right, of course.” She glanced around again. “You see, an FBI agent came to visit Albert. Zink, his name was Zink. I remember because our old pastor at Love Temple Church of God in Christ was named Zink. It was such a tragedy when he died. We almost renamed the church after him. A saintly man. Except he was black and this Zink is white. But that was on another of Albert’s bad days.”
“Did Agent Zink say what he wanted?”
“No. He just talked to Albert for a few minutes just like you, then he got a box from Albert’s room and left.”
“Do you know what was in the box?”
“Just papers. There was a time when Albert liked to look through them. I’m not sure now he even remembers it.”
“Has Mr. Kovalenko visited since then?”
She shook her head.
“Dolores, I think the family would appreciate you not telling Mr. Kovalenko about Agent Zink until we can look into the matter.”
“Of course. If I was Albert, I’d want that, too. And…” She looked around again. “I don’t like that Mr. Kovalenko. You know how some people have a feature that’s just scary. You know, like eyes, especially eyes. But with Mr. Kovalenko it’s not his eyes. You can’t see nothing in his eyes. But he’s got these big meaty hands, ugly and sweaty. Like…like…”
“Like he could crush your neck with just one of them?”
“Yes. Dear Lord. Yes.”
CHAPTER 23
I s this how they pumped it up?” Gage asked Alex Z on the following morning. They stood in front of a set of four-foot-by-five-foot charts Alex Z had hung on the walls of Gage’s office that displayed dates, events, and share prices.
Gage scanned the first two entries. The stock had been issued on June 5 at two dollars a share, then jumped fifty cents a day later when Investor’s Blue Sheet made a strong buy recommendation.
“I take it Investor’s Blue Sheet is just an arm of Northstead Securities,” Gage said.
“It’s run by a defrocked stockbroker. He calls himself the Maestro.”
“Made to order?”
“All made up to order.”
On June 8, the stock jumped another fifty cents based on a rumor that the Chinese government was placing a thirty-seven-million-dollar order for sound amplifiers to be used as part of an early warning flood control system.
“Who started the rumor?” Gage asked.
“My guess? Maestro the Scumbag.” Alex Z almost spit out the words. He glared at the chart, shaking his head. “This whole thing really pisses me off. When I think of the naive people who fell for this scam…”
Alex Z lowered his head and exhaled, then waved his hand toward the share prices, as if each represented a tragedy in someone’s life. “Actually, it’s worse than that. For the first time ever, I imagined myself old and vulnerable. I felt queasy, almost seasick.” He pointed at a graph to his right and made a chopping motion with his hand that tracked the plummeting of the stock at the end of the scam. “Imagine what the older shareholders went through watching their futures collapse.”
Gage reached his arm around Alex Z’s shoulders. “Maybe we can help them get some of their money back, and give them a chance to start over.”
“I don’t know, boss. I haven’t been able to figure how the scam worked. And if we don’t know how they did it, we won’t be able to figure out where the profits went.”
“Let’s work on the how first, and the where later.” Gage dropped into a chair and looked up at the chart. “Did the Chinese ever buy anything?”
“SatTek put out a press release saying that they were still in negotiations and that was the end of it, but the share price didn’t drop back down.”
Alex Z pointed at the next entry. June 10. The stock had jumped to nearly four dollars a share based on a report that AB Labs was considering a buyout of SatTek.
“And that didn’t happen, either,” Gage said.
“AB Labs’ denial was taken as an attempt to keep the stock price down until they made their move. Meanwhile Matson, Granger, and an engineer started doing road shows. Granger to lend financial credibility, Matson to do the sales pitch and the engineer to explain the technology…And one more guy. Retired from the CIA. He talked about counterterrorism and military applications-”
“To combine the fear of growing old with the fear of dying young in a terrorist attack.”
“And it worked. The stock kept ratcheting up. You can even see little jumps every time Homeland Security raised the threat level.”
Gage scanned down to the next item. June 14–18. SatTek had been one of the most actively traded stocks on NASDAQ, and the price jumped to almost five dollars a share.
“One of the most actively traded on NASDAQ?” Gage asked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Four brokers were responsible for most of the volume. It looks like Northstead just traded the stock among them, millions of shares, back and forth, and around and around. All the activity put the little investors into a frenzy, wanting to get in on it. A couple of days later the stock hit five dollars and thirty-five cents-and then the dump. All of the offshore companies, the blue companies, Cobalt, Blau, and Azul, started selling and the little people started buying heavy. Northstead’s boiler room couldn’t sell the stock fast enough.”
“Which stock?” Gage asked. “From the blue companies?” He didn’t wait for Alex Z to answer. “Couldn’t be. SatTek would’ve fronted a separate chunk to Kovalenko.”
Alex Z nodded. “And Northstead didn’t even pay SatTek for it until after they sold it off. They didn’t take any risk at all.”
Gage studied Alex Z’s chart. “What happened after the stock sold out?”
“SatTek filed its quarterly report with the SEC. Looked perfect. The company was booming like a son of a gun. Tons of money coming in, like from the Asian companies Mr. Burch set up. They paid in full and placed another ten million dollars in orders, each.”
Gage’s body stiffened. He stopped breathing. He could almost hear the cell door slam in Jack Burch’s face. He now grasped Peterson’s theory: Without Burch there couldn’t have been a SatTek fraud. He created t
he Chinese and Vietnamese companies, and they were the key to the entire scam.
Alex Z searched Gage’s face. “What is it, boss?”
Gage looked up. “Where’d the Asian companies Jack set up get the money to pay for the products?”
Alex Z shrugged again. “From sales, I guess.”
“Think. We know they didn’t do that. We found the devices SatTek sent to China piled in a basement, covered with a tarp. Same thing in Vietnam.”
Alex Z stared at the charts, as if the pattern would somehow emerge on its own. “But I don’t…”
Gage pushed himself to his feet. “The money to pay for the products came from the blue companies.”
Alex Z shook his head, almost a double-take. “What?”
“The money…to pay…for the products…came from the blue companies.”
Gage picked up a black marker and began charting.
“Look.”
Alex Z traced the lines with his forefinger. “But…” He locked his hands on top of his head and closed his eyes for a few seconds, then looked back at Gage. “You mean SatTek pretended to sell millions of dollars of products to the Asian customers to convince the SEC to let them issue stock…”
Gage held up a finger. “Step one.”
“Then used the blue companies to sell the stock…”
Gage held up a second finger. “Step two.”
“Then the blue companies wired the money to the Asian customers so they could pretend to pay SatTek for the products they had pretended to purchase?”
“Exactly.” Gage rotated his hand. “Step three was a pirouette. SatTek paid for its own products with the money it made from selling its own stock.”
Alex Z looked back at the flowchart, eyes wide, almost awestruck. “It’s the perfect crime.”
Gage sat down, then grabbed a pen and a legal pad from the conference table. There was a box missing from the chart.