Final Target (38 page)

J
ust after sunrise Gage returned from the FBI’s Northern California office in Redding, where he had delivered Matson and Zink. The strands of tulle fog he’d followed from the Central Valley into the mountains interwove the pines and oaks and had thickened into mist, but at least Zink’s road to corruption was now clear.

Gage found Burch sitting in a rocker on the porch, Gage’s first off-duty weapon, a snub-nosed Colt .38, in his right hand, resting on the blanket covering his lap.

“What’s that for?” Gage asked, as he climbed the steps.

“I’ve had one too many surprises.”

“I can understand that.” Gage peered at the gun. “Is it cocked?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way.”

Gage leaned back against the porch railing. “It turns out that while Zink was spying on local gangsters as part of the Organized Crime Task Force, they were spying on him. They figured out his obsession and fed him a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and he wasn’t willing
to trade his FBI ID for a Bureau of Prisons number. A couple of years ago, they sold him to Gravilov.”

“And that cost Katie Palan her life.”

Gage nodded.

Burch closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “That poor woman. I should’ve seen what these people were up to.” His face reddened in self-reproach. “There must’ve been something I could have done.”

Gage shook his head. “There’s no way you could’ve figured it out. Matson didn’t even know where this thing was headed in those days, and he was in the middle of it.”

Burch scanned the pines and oaks surrounding the cabin, then looked up at Gage. “But why try to kill me? I didn’t have a clue.”

“Gravilov was afraid you’d start putting together your pieces of the puzzle and they were still a couple of months away from the missile sale.”

“I didn’t even know there was any connection between Gravilov and SatTek.”

“Gravilov couldn’t count on that. Or that Zink was smart enough to contain everything.”

“But that doesn’t explain Fitzhugh. I thought he was one of them.”

“Only at the beginning.” Gage exhaled as a wave of fatigue shuddered through him. Two nights without sleep, debriefing first Matson, and then Zink, had pushed his body close to its limit. “Granger had Fitzhugh ingratiate himself with you months before he even met Matson. Granger was looking to run an offshore scam even before he’d heard of SatTek.”

“But why kill him?”

“Zink showed up in London two days before he con
tacted the Metropolitan Police. He met Fitzhugh and decided he’d melt when British cops applied the heat. Razor took care of him while Zink cleaned out his files.”

A chill breeze swept through the property and swirled fine raindrops around them. Burch pulled up the blanket to cover his chest.

“And when Granger decided to cooperate with Peterson,” Burch added, “I guess he had to go, too.”

Gage nodded.

Burch glanced back toward the living room as if Zink was still lying there on the floor. “What did Zink plan to do with Matson?”

“Pretend Matson came up here and killed us, kill him, and then go back to San Francisco and play hero.”

“Seems like it would’ve been smarter to do away with Matson before he got here.”

“He needed the fresh blood spatter to make the crime scene look real.”

Burch stopped rocking. “He really thought it through like that?”

“He started as a street cop. He knew what homicide detectives would look for.”

Burch sat silently for a moment, then said, “I’m still worried about Kovalenko, and now about the gangsters who first got to Zink. Don’t they usually clean up the kind of mess that Matson created?”

Before Gage could answer, a low rumble and a crunching of tread on gravel sounded in the distance.

“What now?” Burch threw aside the blanket and struggled to his feet.

Gage raised his hand toward Burch. “What are you doing?”

“What do you think?”

Burch hobbled over to a porch support, then leaned against it, his left palm bracing his gun hand. He glanced at Gage, then jerked his head backward. “Don’t just stand there, get behind me.”

Gage shook his head. “Let me have the gun.”

“Don’t you understand? I have to stand up to these guys. I can’t spend my life hiding.”

Burch lowered himself into a crouch and aimed the barrel dead center on the spot where the road entered the clearing.

As the car approached the last turn and its headlights haloed through the mist-choked trees, Gage slid his hand under Burch’s and raised the gun skyward, then pulled it away from him seconds before Faith’s car emerged into the clearing.

Burch’s whole body sighed. He then slowly pulled himself up using the porch support, and steadied himself against the railing.

While Faith parked the car and Courtney came running toward them, Gage slipped the gun into his back pocket and reached around Burch’s shoulders.

“Not today, champ,” Gage said. “The bad guys aren’t getting you today.”

Nine Months Later

G
age pulled his car onto a dirt patch along the winding road where it overlooked the Northern California coast. He gazed through his windshield toward the rolling hills, their crests and valleys covered with oaks and eucalyptus and their sides burned yellow by the summer sun. A lone buzzard circled in the distance, and below it the flattening land disappeared into the hazy nothingness of the Pacific.

He climbed out into the late September heat and walked back along the curving, shimmering blacktop toward a section of aluminum railing far less oxidized than those bracketing it. Its bolts still reflected the morning sun and its posts hadn’t yet faded from greenish-brown to the weather-bleached gray of its neighbors.

As he approached the barrier, he scanned the pavement for skid marks, but they were long worn away or paved over during the two years since Katie Palan had been murdered at this place. He nonetheless felt her wrenching terror as her car suddenly fishtailed, and
then her panic and bewilderment as it smashed through the thin metal strip and tumbled down the hillside.

He stopped at the top of the ravine and looked down at the sage and fennel and California poppies, long since healed from their thrashing by the plummeting car. He then picked his way down the rocky trail through dusty shards of glass and plastic, and over the chunks of bark and the shattered branches that marked Katie’s tormented path to her resting place.

In a small clearing at the bottom he found an oil patch, like an anonymous tombstone marking the spot where she died. He knelt by its edge and rubbed the stained dirt between his fingers, then sat on a granite boulder and watched a gray-brown grasshopper flit away. Only then did he notice the finches and sparrows chirping in the trees and the cu-ca-cow of quail fluttering among the low bushes. When they went mute, he glanced up to see a red-tailed hawk swoop and disappear behind a pine. Moments later, their songs began again.

He tore off a sage leaf and wondered whether Katie had smelled the wild herbs during her last moments; whether she heard the shudder of the wind in the eucalyptus; whether hope swelled at the sound of Zink’s footsteps; whether she grasped that he froze in place because he was waiting for her breath to cease; whether, in the last thoughts she spoke to herself, she asked herself why.

Maybe she was lucky, and didn’t live long enough for any of that. Zink had refused to say. He’d just shrugged his shoulders when Gage asked.

Gage stared down at the dark soil, thinking of her parents welcoming Faith and Courtney and Jack and him into their little apartment a week earlier. The dining
table was centered in the living room, surrounded by chairs borrowed from neighbors. The home was filled with the aromas of Ukraine, and the pall of sadness. A picture of Katie, framed in silver, rested on a bookshelf between two icons. Eyes that would’ve seemed serious if she was still alive simply looked forlorn.

Jack had taken her mother and father into their bedroom where suitcases and boxes sat half filled in preparation for their return to Ukraine, for there was nothing left to bind them to their adopted country except pain and loss. Jack had closed the door and sat with them, then came out a half hour later, holding Olena’s hand and with his arm around Tolenko’s shoulders, their eyes moist and red.

Gage leaned forward to rise from the boulder, but paused when he caught sight of a Russian Orthodox, triple-barred cross standing under a tiny evergreen at the far edge of the clearing. It hadn’t been there when he last visited in June. He walked around the oil patch and knelt down to read the laminated note attached to the base, its words written in English, in a man’s handwriting Gage had known for a generation:
Dear Katie, rest in peace. I’ll make sure your parents will never want for anything
.

So what if it was blackmail
, Gage said to himself as he rose and looked up the ravine.
Maybe even extortion.
He and Jack showing up at Franklin Braunegg’s office unannounced a month earlier. Then at Daniel Hackett’s. Both lawyers feigning outrage, slamming their fists, claiming they deserved every nickel of the millions they’d profited from the crimes of SatTek.

It wasn’t that Gage and Jack had demanded that they
surrender all the money; only enough to ensure that poverty wouldn’t compound the grief and loneliness of aging parents.

So what if it required a slick bit of money laundering and a Channel Island shell company to funnel the involuntary donations into an offshore account.

So…what.

Gage smiled to himself as he climbed back up to the road.

So what.

He knew the rule. Jack knew the rule.

If they ever get us…it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.

F
inal Target
reflects conditions in Ukraine during its first decade and a half of independence. In the course of investigations I conducted there over three years, I met with leading members of both the government and the opposition. Numerous and lengthy conversations with bankers, attorneys, State Security officers, members of Parliament, and two prime ministers, one of whom served in the corrupt and violent Kuchma regime, gave me an inside and troubling view of the practice and psychology of corruption during those years.

The stock fraud described in this book is a composite of various crimes committed in the last ten years and is not intended to stand for any particular one. Further, the characters of Matson, Granger, Gravilov, the stockbrokers, and the offshore bankers and lawyers do not represent actual individuals, but merely the parts that must be played to commit transnational crimes and the sort of people who play them. At the same time, aspects
of the physical characteristics, biographies, and personalities of the characters are sometimes composites of individuals I have met in my work, sometimes just in passing. Matson, for example, was inspired by a giddy company president I sat next to on a flight from London to Hong Kong who thought that a Dutch girlfriend, a UK bank account, and “the deal” would fill the vacuum that was his life. Slava, on the other hand, was based on…well, maybe I’ll keep that one to myself.

I am better both as an investigator and as a writer due to my good fortune of having worked with interpreters throughout the world who bore the same risks as I under sometimes difficult conditions. They translated my questions into culturally appropriate forms, explained what was meant by what was said, and sometimes simply bought me time to think. Equally important were attorneys who helped me struggle through complex cross-cultural legal and ethical issues. As a representative of them all, I would like to mention the late Senior Advocate Ijaz Hussain Batalvi of Lahore, Pakistan. He will live on in Pakistani history, for ill or for good, as the prosecutor of President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and defense attorney for President Nawaz Sharif, but his true pleasures in life were his family and a lamb kebab cooked on the backyard barbecue. Like so many others, he was a joy to work with.

The counterintuitive notion of blackmail as a form of political power was drawn from the work of Keith A. Darden of Yale University, including: “Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma,”
East European Constitutional Review
, vol. 10, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 67–71.

The lines, “I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning,” are drawn from Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning,” in
Collected Poems
, p. 303, New Directions Publishing, 1983. “Beauty is the beginning of terror” is a misquotation by Matson of a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s
The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets of Orpheus
, p. 5, Mariner Books, 1977 (A. Poulin, translator).

There is one partially nonfictional piece of dialogue: “If they ever get us, it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.” I first heard a line similar to this as an oblique confession to uncharged crimes by a drug trafficker and later heard a different version that originated with an attorney in the Bay Area.

While one of the thrills in private investigation is finding facts, one of the thrills of writing is that you get to make things up. I have therefore taken liberties with technology, geography, and certain physical locations.

Thanks go to Ray McMullin, Steve Homer, David Agretelis, Marian Sticht, Dennis Barley, Davie Sue Litov, Don Eichler, Randy Schmidt, Carol Keslar, Chris Cannon, and Denise Fleming. To Teresa Wong and Linh Nguyen who helped with translations. To Seth Norman, whose acclaimed angling essays are populated as often by corrupt cops and dead-eyed pit bulls as by artificial flies and actual fish. And to my cousin Bruce Kaplan, a race car driver who has walked away from more crashes on southwestern dirt tracks than Road Runner.

Thanks also to Carl Lennertz of HarperCollins, who took on this book after we met through the Book Passage Bookstore, and to my agent, Helen Zimmermann.

My mother, Martha Gore, and late father, Victor M.
Gore, were thrilled to receive an early version of the book, if only hoping to find out what I really do for a living. (Mom, it’s fiction. Really.) I haven’t given a copy to my mother-in-law, Alice Litov, a minister’s widow, as it contains words she doesn’t think I even know, much less use.