by Steven Gore
But that was all step two. Step one was still Mickey.
“Do you think Gravilov had any idea why Mickey was following them? SatTek can’t be the only scam he’s got running.”
“No way to tell. They just beat him up and warned him not to talk. That’s it.”
After Hixon Two rang off, Gage found himself lost in circles. There were too many threads doubling back on each other, and he couldn’t get his head clear. He decided it was time to go beat on something. He cut off the freeway at the last exit before the bridge and headed east.
Twenty minutes later, Stymie Jackson came limping out of his East Oakland gym office. Gage had just slipped on his bag gloves. The sixty-eight-year-old former middleweight contender waved to Gage, then pulled up a stool next to the heavy bag.
“Where ya been?” he asked Gage. “You missed a few weeks.”
“A friend of mine is in a little trouble.”
Over thirty years since Stymie had first trained Gage for the police Olympics, he had learned never to ask Gage for details. He reached for the stopwatch hanging on a lanyard around his neck, and nodded.
Gage threw two left jabs and then a right uppercut that made the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag jump three inches.
“That’s it. Stick it. Jab, jab, power jab. Come on. Jab, jab, power jab. Step into it. Jab, jab, power jab.”
The word “trouble” echoed back. Gage then realized that there was something that had drawn him there. “My trouble” was the phrase Stymie always used to describe the day in the late fifties when he refused to take a fall in a fight. Chicago gangsters mangled his right leg as punishment, both for the money they’d lost and for not keeping his mouth shut. Stymie used to tell Gage: They was telling me that everybody’d be betting against me like crazy on the next fight expecting me to lose-and they’d let me win. The bad guys said it was for the good of the game. But their game really wasn’t boxing, it was something else.
Gage stopped punching. He wiped his brow with the backs of his bag gloves, then glanced around the empty gym. Speed bags still. Ring empty. Jump ropes hung on hooks. A thought was lurking in his mind, but it was still too deep to dredge.
“Did I say it’s time to stop?” Stymie looked down at his stopwatch. “You got forty-five seconds left. Come on, stick it.”
Gage got back into the rhythm, then switched to a series of straight rights. The phrase “for the good of the game” repeated itself with each punch. For the thump of the game, for the thump of the game, for the thump of the game.
“Stop.”
Gage slipped a towel off a worn wooden bench, gripped it between his gloves, and wiped the sweat from his face. He wondered whether the mobsters would’ve let Stymie keep fighting if he’d kept silent; just a broken leg, not a mangled one that destroyed his career.
Maybe that’s it, Gage thought as he stared at the still swinging bag. Then the answer arrived in Stymie’s voice: So what if Matson’s talkin’? He ain’t talkin’ about things the bad guys don’t want him talkin’ about.
But Gage didn’t have a clue what that was.
CHAPTER 49
G age called Alex Z into his office after driving in from Stymie’s.
“What’s up, boss?” Alex Z said as he dropped into a chair.
Gage got up from behind his desk and walked to an easel, marker in hand.
“I need your help thinking this through.”
He started a fresh charting of the players, drawing arrows showing the known relationships.
“We know how everybody connects together except for Matson, Alla, and Gravilov,” Gage said, then stepped back from the chart.
“Three people can all meet each other in six different sequences,” Alex Z said, shaking his head. “And when you factor in all of the rest, you spin off into infinity.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” Gage said. “Too many moving parts.”
Alex Z made a show of looking around the office. At the bookcases lined with files, the fireproof safes anchored to the floor, and a network server containing millions of scanned documents. “I thought those were the only kinds of cases you did.”
“But this one we need to simplify before it gets away from us.”
Gage crossed his arms across his chest. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who introduced whom?” He glanced at Alex Z’s SatTek chronology hanging from the wall, then back at the chart. “Matson travels to London just before the IPO, he hooks up with Alla…or she hooks up with him…Why? Was she looking to snag him? Or maybe they meet by chance…In any case, he brags. He says ‘I’ve got an IPO coming up,’ and she calls Budapest to tell her gangster daddy.” Gage pointed at the lines connecting Matson, Alla, and Gravilov. “What did Granger say?… Sometimes children grow up and do things you never expected in your wildest imagination…Gage looked at Alex Z. “What does Granger do when he figures it out-whatever it was? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s unhappy, maybe about not getting a cut, but he has to keep his mouth shut. He can’t snitch off Matson without snitching off himself.”
“You think Matson has told the government about Gravilov?” Alex Z asked.
Gage repeated the question aloud, then shook his head and smiled. “That’s it. That’s exactly what Granger had to trade. And what shocked the hell out of him was that Matson had the balls to deal directly with a gangster at Gravilov’s level.” He looked again at the Granger circle, now transfixed. “Wait a second…Wait a second.”
Alex Z’s eyes followed Gage as if he was a high-wire artist balancing over a canyon.
Gage flipped the marker back and forth between his hands a few times, then stopped and looked at Alex Z. “If Granger had lived long enough to tell Peterson that Matson and Gravilov were working together, then Matson would’ve been no good to the government. It would’ve busted Matson’s plea deal because he got caught lying. Peterson couldn’t use him. A jury would never believe a word he said.”
“Then Peterson gives Granger a chance to work off some time.”
“Exactly. Granger could give up everybody Matson could. And he’s untainted. He steps in and pushes Matson out of the way. Matson does the hard time and Granger gets no more than a couple of years.”
“So Matson kills Granger?”
Gage shook his head. “I don’t see a runt like him killing anybody. He’s got somebody protecting him, maybe somebody sent by Gravilov…And whoever is behind the murder of Granger is also behind the murders of the Fitzhughs and the attempt on Jack and the burglary at his office.”
“But why Mr. Burch?”
“He knows something. Fitzhugh and Matson asked him to set up TAMS Limited, the company that owns the London flat. Maybe Matson used Tarasova-Alla-Matson-Stuart Limited for whatever deal he had with Gravilov. Him and Alla working together…”
Gage paused as a shudder passed through his body, an image of Burch, weak and vulnerable, appeared in his mind. “It could be a lot worse. Jack may know something he doesn’t realize he knows.”
Gage tossed the marking pen onto his desk and surveyed the chart and the chronology hanging next to it.
“I have a feeling that regardless of whether this all started with Alla meeting Matson by chance or with her targeting him,” Gage finally said, “it’ll end up at the same place.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t know yet. But we’ve got to get there before they do.”
CHAPTER 50
M r. Gage, you’ve got to stop him.”
Milsberg’s panicked voice wrenched Gage away from trying to project the future from the fragments of a partially known past.
Gage leaned forward in his chair and pressed his phone to his ear. “Stop who from doing what?”
“Matson. If he shuts this place down, I’m out of a job and I’ve got no place to go. Nobody’s going to hire me.”
“What makes you think he wants to shut it down?”
“It dawned on the rat that he can sell the manufacturing equipment and the SatTek proprietary t
echnology to pay back a little money to the shareholders and make himself look better at sentencing time and in the civil suit.” Milsberg’s voice turned sarcastic. “He gets the benefit and all we get is unemployment.”
“Whether there is any benefit depends on what everything is worth.”
“Most of the value is in the intellectual property, but you’d need to ask somebody in the field.” Milsberg paused. “That’ll be tough because of the trade secrets problem. You’ll need to show the material to someone in a position to evaluate it and those would be competitors.”
“Let’s worry about that later,” Gage said. “How far along are you?”
“I’ve inventoried all of the hard assets and a software engineer has just finished working on intellectual property, like the code we developed for the low noise and video amplifiers. He’s put together four or five DVDs.”
“Can you make copies and smuggle out a 20-gigahertz video device? I need them this afternoon.”
Milsberg didn’t answer right away.
“Don’t let me down, Robert.”
Milsberg sighed, then answered. “But you’ll have to watch my back. I don’t think there’d be a big market for The Prison Poetry of Robert Milsberg, CPA.”
Gage heard Milsberg shuffle papers.
“And there’s more bad news. I got a grand jury subpoena yesterday. An FBI agent named Zink dropped it off.”
Gage knew it would be coming. The meeting at his office and the call about Katie Palan showed that Peterson had mastered enough of the case to get it through a grand jury.
“When do they want you?”
“The date on the subpoena is for next Wednesday.” Milsberg sighed. “But that’s not the bad part. There was a target letter attached. I knew there would be, but it’s a punch in the face when you actually see one with your name on it.”
“Did you hire a lawyer?”
“I’m broke. Completely busted. But I was hoping I could just say, ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination’ and they’d let me go.”
“That’s only about things that really could incriminate you. If they ask you where you stored invoices, you may be required to answer.”
“Damn. I was afraid it wouldn’t be that easy. Maybe that’s why I keep having Jonah dreams.”
“Sounds like you need a harpoon.” Gage thought for a moment. “I’ve got somebody in mind.”
“Hey, Clara. You want to have some fun?”
He heard a laugh at the other end of the line, then: “I take it that means a freebie?”
“What about personal satisfaction? Isn’t that why you left corporate law? Or is that just a line you feed the press?”
Clara Nance was on everybody’s list of the top ten women lawyers in the country. Her real and only satisfaction in life was crushing opponents, and sometimes clients who didn’t follow her orders. Gage had seen prosecutors cringe when she drew her six-foot frame to its full height and announced to the court that she was coming into a case.
“Don’t make fun, Graham. Oprah about wept when I told her my epiphany story.”
“Now you have a name for it?”
“And it’s mostly true. Well, about as true as any of my closing arguments. But enough chitchat. What am I doing?”
“A grand jury target in a securities fraud case. He’s a small fry but he’s helping out in something that’s real important to me.”
“Does it have to do with your pal Jack Burch?”
“How’d you guess?”
“A fresh rumor in the Federal Building.”
“How specific was it?”
“Just that Peterson went to the grand jury with the SatTek case and Burch had something to do with it. Also, somebody spoke to Hackett in the attorneys’ lounge. He was all puffed up like he gets in a big-fee case. He talked about spending a lot of time outside the grand jury room, which means that his guy is cooperating-of course, his clients always cooperate. So what’s new. Who’s he got?”
“The president of the company, Stuart Matson.”
“Who’s mine?”
“Robert Milsberg, the controller. I think you’ll like him.”
“I’ll like him if he does what I tell him, if he doesn’t, I ream him a new-”
“Hey, don’t talk like that about your client. He’s a sensitive guy, writes haiku. Maybe if he gets through this, someday he’ll write you a check.”
“More likely a haiku about how he can’t pay. Who’s the agent?”
“Zink.”
“Ick!”
“What do you mean ‘ick’? Clara Nance doesn’t say ‘ick.’”
“That perverted crotch gawker once spent half a day trying to look up my skirt-from the witness stand, no less.”
“But you wear slacks.”
“Now I do.”
Gage checked his watch after he hung up. Faith was just finishing up a seminar. He left her a message to call him, and his phone rang a couple of minutes later.
“Did they get the test results yet?” Gage asked.
“The infections are gone. Courtney said Jack can go home tomorrow. He’s ready to go. Believe me. The nurses caught him chewing on a leg from that Thanksgiving turkey you sent in. Everyone smelled the stuffing and sweet potatoes from the moment the delivery kid stepped off the elevator. Dr. Kishore thought it was a riot. It was good to see a smile on his face, the way he’s been batted around by doctors.”
“The problem is that he may be making himself just healthy enough to get batted around by the lawyers. Things are heating up on the civil side. Matson thinks it’s to his advantage to shut down SatTek and sell off the pieces.”
“Should Jack’s firm intervene to try to stop him?”
“I won’t know until I figure out whether SatTek is worth more than the sum of its parts, and that means first finding out what the intellectual property is worth. Do you know anyone in the electrical engineering department at Cal who can help me out? Even better, someone who’s retired?”
“And who has a sense of adventure and can keep his mouth shut?”
“Exactly.”
“I know just the guy.”
CHAPTER 51
T he ranch-style house on Grizzly Peak Road, high in the Berkeley Hills, was surrounded by a garden so geometrically perfect as to be unnerving. The heavy, gray-haired man who met Gage at the door wasn’t. Seventy-three-year-old retired professor Ben Blanchard, dressed in blue baggy-kneed sweatpants, a coffee-stained white top, and running shoes that had never run, led Gage through a museumlike living room, out a sliding glass door, and through a covered patio to his workshop. A desk and two chairs were jammed into the far corner, heated and partially illuminated by a lone radiant heater.
“My wife calls this The Fort,” Blanchard said, smiling. “She’s not far wrong. The most attractive aspect of academic life is one they don’t list on the employment announcement, an everlasting childhood.”
Blanchard laughed, as he undoubtedly had the four or five thousand previous times he’d used the line. His timing, as he well recognized, was perfect, and Gage laughed on cue.
Gage glanced around The Fort as Blanchard led him to his desk. Apparently unfinished projects seemed to immeasurably outnumber the apparently finished. One on the workbench seemed to be close to completion.
“What are you working on?” Gage asked.
Blanchard cast Gage a teasing look. “I don’t know you well enough.”
“For what?”
“It’s top secret.”
“From whom?”
“My wife.”
Blanchard’s conspiratorial pause invited the obvious question.
“And it is…?”
“A real cool garage door opener. Very sophisticated. It practically knows my name.”
“Unless it also opens a missile silo, I’m not sure it qualifies as top secret.”
“It does too.” Blanchard grinned. “My wife thinks I’m fixing the microwave.”
Blanchard knocked papers
off a metal folding chair. “Have a seat. You want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Blanchard reached into a half-height refrigerator and pulled out two Budweisers. “I know this is Berkeley so I’m supposed to drink a microbrew, but it’s my fort and I’ll drink what I want.” He handed one bottle to Gage, then twisted the cap off his own. “Faith says you have something top secret, too.”
Gage opened his briefcase and displayed the DVDs and a black plastic box Milsberg had delivered. “I don’t want to put you in a difficult position, but these contain the trade secrets of a defense contractor in Silicon Valley. SatTek.”
“SatTek? Very interesting.” Blanchard pointed at the box. “What’s in there?”
“A video detector for a Hellfire missile.”
A look of delight followed Blanchard’s raised eyebrows. “Even more interesting, but I’m not worried. The Fort is like international waters, and its citizens, of which you are now one, are immune from prosecution.”
Gage laid the items on Blanchard’s desk, then outlined the case that was being framed around Burch and Matson’s efforts to appraise the assets of SatTek.
“I need to understand what their intellectual property is worth, but it may be a little complicated to figure out. Not only do they produce offensive devices like video detectors, but they also manufacture defensive ones, like bi-static radar and acoustic amplifiers.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about.” Blanchard tapped his forefinger on his desk. “If we’d had those devices along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Osama bin Laden never would have escaped. You can pick up the sound of a sandal stepping into sand.” He shrugged. “Of course, there was no way the U.S. would’ve let Pakistan have anything this sophisticated. They’d use them against us someday.”