Final Target (23 page)

W
estbrae 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.”

C
an 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.”

A
lex 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 you 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?”

Matson nodded. “I’ve been driving around for hours. I went all through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park
and Chinatown, and stayed off the freeway coming back down.”

Gage signaled the waitress and they turned their coffee cups right side up.

“Who goes first?” Matson asked.

“Me.” Gage glanced around the half-empty café, then leaned forward and crossed his forearms on the table. “As I told you on the phone, one of your competitors is interested in obtaining certain technology you possess.”

“Which one?”

“If I told you that, you’d cut me out. Right?”

Matson smiled. “It crossed my mind.”

“That wouldn’t be a good move. You’d lose your insulation.” Gage jabbed his own breastbone hard enough to make a thump. “And I’m your insulation.”

Matson’s smile faded.

“Suppose somebody figures out where my client got it?” Gage pointed at Matson. “You want a trail back to you?”

Matson shook his head.

Gage leaned back and spread his hands for a moment. “So what if it gets traced to me? I’ll already be Mr. White or Mr. Blue or Mr. Orange the second this deal is done.” Gage locked his eyes on Matson. “You understand?”

Matson swallowed, then nodded.

“So we’re not going to play any games,” Gage said.

“No. No games.”

They fell silent as the waitress arrived to fill their cups.

Gage tilted his head toward Blanchard after she walked away. “Mr. Black here will tell me what the technology is worth.”

Matson looked at Blanchard, whose face remained impassive, then back at Gage. “What if he’s wrong?”

“He’ll be right. When he’s done looking at the devices he’ll give me a number. It’ll be my only offer.”

“What if I don’t like it?”

“Then we never met. But you need to think about something.” Gage paused until he saw a glimmer of bewilderment in Matson’s eyes. “How many Mr. Greens have come knocking on your door?”

“Well…” Matson looked back and forth between them, then chewed on his thumbnail before finally focusing his eyes on Gage. “How do I get paid if we do the deal?”

“That’s up to you.”

Matson was quick to answer. “I want cash.”

Gage tapped his forefinger on the table. “Cash will cost me ten percent. I’ll need to deduct it from your end.”

“That’s a little steep.”

“It’s also a little risky. Money laundering will get me a lot more time than a little trade secrets beef.”

Matson’s eyes darted around the café, as if he was expecting FBI agents to spring from behind opened newspapers.

“If we can agree on a price,” Matson finally said, “I’ll take it in cash.”

“No problem. Why don’t you tell me what you think it’s worth?” Gage slipped his arm under the table and gripped the top of Blanchard’s thigh to keep him from reacting to Matson’s answer.

Matson took a sip of his coffee. The cup rattled slightly when he set it down. He leaned forward.

Gage tightened his hold on Blanchard’s thigh.

“Three million.”

Gage paused. “I think Mr. Black may find that a little high.”

“I’ll need to examine the devices,” Blanchard said.

Gage removed his hand.

“See,” Gage said with a slight grin. “That’s why I trust him. He doesn’t just tell me what I want to hear. When can he get a look at them?”

“There are a few more things I want to know,” Matson said.

“Shoot.”

“How do I know you won’t try to steal the technology?”

Gage smiled. “First, because I’m not in a labor-intensive business. I don’t work for a living. I merely put people who have something together with people who want something. Second, you know as well as I do that you can’t reverse-engineer these things. You need the code. And third, all Mr. Black needs is access to your facility to run a few tests. He won’t remove anything. Right, Mr. Black?”

“Right.” Blanchard sounded relaxed, friendly, now into the part. “That’s all I need. I don’t need to take anything and I don’t need to look at your code.”

Matson nodded. “Okay. I’ll go that far.”

“There’s one other thing,” Gage said. “Companies auction off their assets when they fold. I don’t want you including the intellectual property.”

Matson blanched.

Gage smiled to himself as he watched Matson’s plan to sell the IP twice evaporate, and then said, “I’ll arrange a leak to the financial press that the run-of-the-mill SatTek products are the same as everybody else’s and the higher-end technology is quickly becoming dated. Everybody will think the IP is more trouble than
it’s worth. And I’ll throw in that SatTek conceded that one of your competitors makes the best devices in the field.”

“So then I just auction off the hardware?”

“Right. And if somebody wants to look at the IP, Mr. Black will screw around with the software until it travels in circles. Right, Mr. Black?”

Blanchard hesitated as if thinking through how he could rewrite the code, then nodded. “No problem.”

“When can he get in?” Gage asked.

Matson looked at his watch. “I want to get this over with. Let’s make it this afternoon.”

“We’ll be there at two o’clock.”

Gage and Blanchard slipped from the booth, then headed for the door, leaving Matson to deduct the three coffees from his end.

Once in the car, Gage retrieved the pen from Blanchard’s shirt pocket, repeated the date and the new time, then clicked it off.

“Matson has no idea what it’s worth,” Blanchard said as they drove away. “It’s a good thing you grabbed my leg, I would’ve laughed out loud.”

“As soon as he asked, ‘Who goes first?’ I knew he hadn’t thought everything through. He’s forgotten SatTek had a real product. For him it’s now just numbers. How much he needs, not what it’s worth. I’ll bet he was thinking he’d ask for five, but the words “money laundering” punched him in the gut.”

“It punched
me
in the gut. Why did Matson go for it so easily?”

“He hasn’t yet, but he will. There are only two things he needs to worry about. One, that we don’t rip him off.
And two, that we’re not cops. And he knows we’re not cops.” Gage looked over and smiled. “When is the last time anybody your age worked undercover?”

Blanchard drew back. “In Berkeley we call that ageism. But what’s the real reason?”

“It’s because the one lesson he’s learned since he started cooperating with the U.S. Attorney is that the cops are on his side. He knows they need him. He’s told them lots of lies, held back things he didn’t want them to know. He’s figured out that they’ll believe anything he tells them because they
want
to believe him.”

“But wouldn’t they test him once in a while? Just to see if he lies.”

“It would be the end of their case.”

“Then why don’t you just take the recording of our meeting to the prosecutor?”

“Because Matson will say he was setting us up, trying to deliver something new in order to work more time off of his sentence—and they’ll believe him.”

Blanchard shook his head. “Suddenly electromagnetics and plasma physics seem somewhat less confusing than law.”

“This isn’t law, it’s called the gray area.”

Gage reached for his phone and called Milsberg.

“I need you to make yourself scarce this afternoon, and don’t ask why.”

He disconnected and made a quick call to Viz, then took the on-ramp to 101 South toward San Jose.

Matson met them in the SatTek lobby.

“How long will this take?” Matson asked Gage, eyes darting toward the entrance, then back and forth be
tween the hallway toward the lab and the one toward the accounting and marketing departments.

“A couple hours. If anybody asks questions, just tell them we’re interested in bidding on the inventory.”

Matson stayed in the lab long enough to watch Blanchard hooking lines up to the RF input and the video output of the same model video amplifier he’d already tested.

“So what do you want to do for two hours?” Gage asked, after the door closed behind Matson.

“I’ll give you a lesson in how these things work.”

Matson looked in every fifteen or twenty minutes, each time observing Blanchard pointing at a device or at a computer monitor and making notes.

They left SatTek at four o’clock with an understanding they’d meet Matson at seven for dinner.

Gage called Viz as they drove toward the freeway. “Where’d you find Milsberg?”

“The AccuSoft parking lot, spying on SatTek.”

“Let me talk to him.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gage,” Milsberg pleaded before Gage had a chance to speak. “Viz scared the daylights out of me. It was like this huge shadow fell across my windshield, like an eclipse. I’ll never do it again. I promise.”

Gage adopted the stern tone he’d used as Mr. Green. “Look, Robert. I can’t take a chance of you screwing up, and that sometimes means you can’t know some of the things I’m doing. You understand?”

“I’m sorry. I messed up—”

“If you need our help, we’ll help you. But we don’t have time to waste.”