Final Target (6 page)

A
t 9:30
A
.
M
. Gage pulled into a parking space behind his redbrick converted warehouse office along the Embarcadero. The weather had gone sideways, rain pounding the driver’s side window and sending rivulets streaming across the windshield. He decided to wait it out, for San Francisco storms squalled, rather than swept, their way across the city, cresting and troughing like surging waves.

Gage’s head and ribs had merely felt stunned and bruised during his meeting with the senior partners of Burch’s firm after the burglary, but were now stiff and throbbing. Since no bones had been broken, he was certain that by the end of the day nothing would be left but aches and twinges.

Everyone assembled in the windowless boardroom an hour earlier had understood that a press report exposing the breach of their files not only would provoke an onslaught of panicked calls from corporate clients around the world, but would make the firm the focal point of the media’s speculations about the shooting. With the consent of both Burch’s secretary and Sonny Powers,
the firm had therefore agreed not to risk a leak by calling in the police, but rather to leave the investigation in Gage’s hands. He knew that they trusted him not only as Burch’s closest friend, but also as someone each of them had worked with since the founding of the firm.

Nevertheless, in the strained faces of the men and women sitting around the conference table, Gage had observed a silent acknowledgment that the clock was ticking down toward the moment when they would lose control of a story whose implications, both for Burch and for the firm, were as ominous as they were opaque.

When the rain hesitated, Gage walked around to the passenger side of his truck and grabbed two boxes of files and an overstuffed folder he’d taken from Burch’s office. He braced them against the wall and punched his security code into the back door pad. Once inside, he climbed the steps toward his office. The crisscrossing, floor-to-ceiling I-beams installed throughout the building by earthquake retrofitters made the stairwell feel bunkerlike in the muted fluorescent lighting.

Emerging on the third floor, Gage heard the voices of three of his investigators making calls to the midday East Coast, or perhaps to end-of-the-day London or Frankfurt, or to nighttime Moscow or Dubai or Kolkata. He knew a dozen more were settled in before their monitors on the two floors below, learning enough about Gage’s own cases to fulfill the reassignments he’d made the previous day. Others on his staff of former FBI, DEA, and IRS agents were at work in those far-off cities, and in others, searching for facts and witnesses to explain why stock prices suddenly plunged or how trade secrets had been stolen or where embezzled money had been cached.

After hanging his rain jacket on a corner rack in his office, Gage walked to the nearest of the three casement windows facing the bay. Wind-driven raindrops swept across it sounding like cascading dominoes, then attacked the next, and the next. He watched fog swirl in, obscuring the front parking lot, and thought back to the day he had paid off the building: he and Burch sitting on the landing, drinking beer as the sunset gave the bay a reddish glow, their friendship somehow anchored in the brick and the concrete and the steel.

But standing there now, gazing into the grayness with Burch near death in the ICU, Gage realized that the illusion of permanence had been nothing but a self-deceiving denial of mortality.

As he turned toward his desk he noticed a stack of messages left for him by his receptionist the evening before. He separated out the ones from reporters, crumpled them up, and threw them into the trash. He selected one from the remainder, a Russian name with a Washington, D.C., area code, and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“Alex?” Gage spoke into the intercom as he sat down. He didn’t have to complete his request before Alex Z answered, “Be right there, boss.”

On any other morning, Gage would’ve had to walk downstairs to Alex Z’s office to get his attention, for the skinny twenty-six-year-old’s ears would’ve been wrapped in headphones, his mind immersed in trails of data dancing across his monitor. It was Alex Z’s job to think and to turn data into information that Gage could use, and if he needed blaring music to make that happen, Gage had always been willing to accommodate him.

But for Alex Z, as for everyone else at the firm, ev
erything had changed since the shooting of Jack Burch. Gage had heard it in the voices of every employee who’d called him in the last two days. He knew that each, just like Alex Z, would be working with a divided mind: half concentrating on their cases, half listening for Gage’s voice on the intercom.

The wild-haired, Popeye-tattooed Alex Z arrived a minute after Gage’s call. He still looked like the disaffected computer science graduate student who’d sought out Faith, an anthropology professor at UC Berkeley. He had already surrendered his fellowship and was in search of work that would be more meaningful than simply making the world seem smaller and move faster. Faith had brought him home to Gage like a stray dog from the pound, and during the succeeding five years Alex Z became the one in the office on whom Gage most relied to help him bring order to the chaos of facts and events from which complex cases are formed.

Alex Z looked over at Gage’s jacket as he walked toward the desk and shook his head at the street grime smearing the arms and elbows and the split seam at the right shoulder.

“Jeez, boss, you okay?” Alex Z asked as he dropped into a chair.

“It’s nothing serious.”

Alex Z glanced again at the jacket. “Has the press gotten ahold of what happened?”

“The firm agreed not to say anything about it, even to the police, until I look into it.”

“But what if he was the shooter?”

Gage shook his head. “He wasn’t. He was at least forty pounds heavier than witnesses described, and I don’t
want to take a chance of SFPD leaking Jack’s connection to SatTek to the press.”

Alex Z drew back. “No shit? SatTek? Man, the media is going to tear Mr. Burch apart. You see what they’re doing to the company president? They’re picking through his life like it’s a garage sale at the
National Enquirer
, and nobody even heard of him until a week ago.”

Gage thought of the press still camped out at the hospital and on the sidewalk in front of Burch’s mansion, and of news cycles that needed feeding.

“That’s why we better figure out what Jack’s part was before the media paints a bull’s-eye on him.” Gage pointed at a chaotic foot-high stack of documents he’d piled on the conference table centered in his office. “Those are Jack’s SatTek files. They were scattered all over a storage room and his office. The burglar ripped them apart looking for something. There’s an index in there somewhere, see if you can figure out if anything is missing.”

Alex Z rose. “How soon?”

“Jack’s wife wants me with her at a meeting with his doctors early this afternoon. She’s afraid she’s not thinking clearly. See if you can have it ready by the time I get back.”

“Just tell me what you need and when you need it, boss. I’ll be available 24–7.”

Alex Z’s two lives converged in Gage’s mind. His indispensability occasionally made Gage forget that Alex Z had a second life, what sometimes seemed a second identity, as the lead guitarist for a popular South of Market club scene band.

“You didn’t cancel—”

“The moment I heard the news, and everybody in the group is on board with it.”

Alex Z turned away to gather up the documents, then looked back, brows furrowed. “If the break-in is connected to SatTek, doesn’t that mean the shooting is, too?”

The words reminded Gage of his throbbing shoulder, as if the connection between the two was visceral. But he knew that the web of relationships that formed Jack’s world wasn’t that simple.

“Until we know a lot more we’re going to have to treat it as a coincidence,” Gage said, “just like the natural gas deal. It’s merely a blip on the screen over here, but it’s front page news in Europe.” He thought of the message slip in his pocket. “Over there, everyone is assuming that Jack was shot to prevent it from going through.”

“So, for the Europeans, SatTek is like a tree falling in a forest.”

Gage nodded. “But not for us.” He again reached for the telephone. “Let’s get to work finding out who’s hiding in the trees.”

Alex Z pointed at a sealed file box stamped with Burch’s firm name sitting on Gage’s credenza. “What about that?”

“It’s something Jack and I worked on in Afghanistan. I figured I better keep it locked up over here. We did a few things that might be misunderstood in light of SatTek.”

Gage punched the radio button preset to NPR while driving back to his office from the meeting with Burch’s doctors, whose vague answers and shrugs revealed nothing more than the limits of their science. He caught the
closing segment of
Marketplace
, the afternoon business report, devoted solely to SatTek.

A Brookings Institution Fellow asked, “Where was the Securities and Exchange Commission during the last two years?”

A Harvard Law professor demanded, “Where was the Justice Department?”

It seemed to Gage that neither had answers that even satisfied themselves, much less their listeners.

The host concluded the program as Gage turned off Market Street onto the Embarcadero and drove along the pier-studded bay: “Where, exactly, do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars go when a company collapses? When a stock descends? When monitors silently flicker in empty cubicles and customers’ e-mails go unanswered? Where, exactly, is Nowhere?”

“Looks like Matson and Granger hired Mr. Burch to set up SatTek’s international operation,” Alex Z said, sitting down next to Gage in the third floor conference room and flipping open a binder. “It was run out of a holding company in London. The managing director is a chartered accountant named Morely Alden Fitzhugh IV.”

“Sounds like the name of a kid who got beat up a lot,” Gage glanced over at Alex Z. “Old money?”

“Once. His family was the last of the line to join the middle class. Now everybody works for a living. His little enterprise is called Fitzhugh Associates.”

“Which means there aren’t any.”

“You guessed it. A one-man show.”

Gage gestured toward Alex Z’s binder. “Does he have a Web site?”

“Nope.” Alex Z turned a few pages. “But here’s a screen shot of the one from the London holding company. It’s as polished as they come. They sure wanted to make the thing look legit.” He pointed at a photo. “That’s him.”

A bookish man in his early forties, with dark hair and rimless glasses, looked up from the page. Gage recognized what he was trying to project: didn’t cheat at bridge, lunched on the same thing at the same restaurant at the same time every day, except Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, he got his hair cut. A well-chosen image for an accountant, Gage thought, perhaps too well chosen.

“How about the Asian companies?” Gage asked.

Alex Z opened a second binder. “No Web sites, but here’s an old PR packet from Mr. Burch’s file.”

It showed the directors of the Chinese and Vietnamese companies to be cookie-cutter Asian managers. Both were engineers with prior experience in electronics, though not in the precise field of sound and video amplifiers. Each stared uncomfortably at the camera, hair not quite combed, cowlicks springing upward, heavy black-rimmed glasses resting on flattish noses and set off by well-fed pudgy cheeks.

Gage looked back and forth between the faces, then back and forth between the photos of the companies’ headquarters.

“I better send someone over to take a look,” Gage finally said.

His eyes came to rest on Hawei Electronics located in Southern China, and wondered if it was what the NPR commentator had been searching for: the outer edge of Nowhere.

Y
ou ain’t paying me enough to become a floater in the South China Sea,” Brian Early whined from Hong Kong as Gage sat down behind his desk the following morning.

Gage shook off the image of the pale and comatose Jack Burch that he’d carried away from his and Faith’s 8
A
.
M
. visit. He glanced at Burch’s SatTek file and Alex Z’s research binders that he’d worked through the night before, then looked at his watch. It was after midnight in China, which meant that Early had gotten the job done in less than twelve hours, or at least had tried.

“What are you talking about?” Gage asked.

“I went to that address in Guangzhou you gave me.”

Early was the entirety of Pacific Rim International Investigations Limited. Ex–U.S. Customs agent stationed in Hong Kong for the last five years of his twenty-seven-year career. Married his Filipina maid and stayed. She really loved him. He loved himself, and talking.

“I haven’t gotten that chilly a reception since we did that software piracy case in Beijing.” Early laughed. “But at least this time the folks didn’t have guns.”

“I just told you to look, Brian, not touch.”

“Well, it was like this—”

“Whenever you begin like that, I start to feel a little queasy. What did you do? And skip the detours.”

Gage grabbed a legal pad from the top of the credenza behind him.

“Okay. You know that old Gertrude Stein line about Oakland? ‘There’s no there, there.’ Well, there was almost no there, there.”

Gage looked up at the ceiling and exhaled loudly enough for Early to hear. “Brian?”

“What?”

“You’re already on a detour.”

“Okay, okay. Gotcha. I hopped a train across the border to Guangzhou and took a taxi to the building. The office number you gave me was on the seventh floor. No elevator. I hiked up and peeked in. A picayune office. A couple of middle-aged women pushing papers. I just said the company name, Hawei, and got the big chill. Then one of them starts chanting, ‘
Bu zai zhe li, bu zai zhe li.
’ Not here, not here.”

“Was it once?”

“It was there all right. Two guys were waiting for me when I got back down to the street. Wanzi and Panzi or maybe it was Kung Fu and Dung Fu. Anyway, Wanzi gets in my face and says, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘No thanks.’ And he says, ‘It’s not here.’ So I say, ‘I just figured that out, pal.’ And then Panzi puts his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘So you won’t be coming back?’ and I say, ‘Nope, no need to.’ I kinda pawed the sidewalk for a few seconds with my knockoff Nikes, then skedaddled out of there.”

“Come on, Brian, that hardly qualifies you for hazard pay.”

“That’s not the end of the story.”

“You went back?”

“Couldn’t help myself. Last night. Late. Real late. The building is in a district of the city that the Great Leap Forward leaped over and where nobody, at least on the legit side, ever made any real dough after China joined the capitalist road. The whole area is deserted at night except for a noodle place on the first floor and a karaoke bar down the block. Just the bouncer and a couple of hookers poking their heads out. So I go around the back. The noodle shop’s door is propped open for ventilation. I figure I’ll have a little look-see. Maybe I can work my way into the rest of the building. But once I get inside, the only door goes to the basement. What the hell? I go down there—smelled like rotted pig guts.

“Looks like everybody in the building uses it for storage. Bunch of caged-in compartments, heavy chicken wire. Dried noodles, office supplies, old files, that kind of stuff. One of ’em got a big, industrial-strength canvas tarp over everything inside. So I grab a broom and get down on my knees. I jam the handle under the edge of the tarp. Weighed a ton. No leverage. But I got the corner up, and guess what?”

Gage felt his body stiffen even before he said the word. “SatTek.”

“Damn right. Must be seven, eight hundred devices. Millions of dollars’ worth. Millions. Made in the good old USA. They were marked LNA. That stands for ‘low noise amplifier.’ I looked it up on the Net. I found something about China using nonmilitary-grade detectors
like these in a new flood warning system. They pick up vibrations from older dams that may be starting to weaken.”

“Could you tell when they were shipped over?”

“Nope. Could’ve been anytime up to when SatTek collapsed—maybe a last shipment Hawei hadn’t paid for yet.”

“That can’t be right. These are made to spec. Hawei wouldn’t have ordered the devices unless it already had a contract to resell them.” Gage paused, wondering what SatTek had tossed into the Chinese black hole. “You get a sample?”

“Nope. But I was thinkin’ I should try, when this greasy T-shirt comes in waving a cleaver at the end of his string-bean arm. He’s yelling, ‘
Zie! Zie! Zie!
’ You know, ‘Thief. Thief. Thief.’ I’m still on my knees, thinkin’ he’s gonna chop my head off. So I grab my stomach and I kinda slur out, ‘
Wo he zui le
’ like I’m drunk and gonna puke. He points the cleaver at the door, then back at me like,
What’re you doing in here?
I reach in my pocket and he raises the cleaver again. I pull out my hand, real slow, empty, no money, like I’ve been robbed. I say, ‘
Ji nu
,’ you know, ‘Hooker,’ like she came down there to do me and robbed me instead. And the guy starts laughing and points me toward the door.”

“Can you get back in?”

“No way. Right after I grabbed a taxi to scoot to the train station, I looked back and saw Wanzi screeching up in a Mercedes G55. It’s like a Land Rover, but costs twice—”

“Brian?”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. Once greasy T-shirt told ’em what I looked like I’ll bet they moved the boxes out of there,
pronto. In fact, I’ll bet Wanzi or Panzi is sittin’ down there right now with an AK-47 waiting to blow my head off.”

“What about flying over to Ho Chi Minh City to look at the other one?”

“It’s your money, but I think whatever was there is gone, too.”

“Just to cover the bases. You know any Vietnamese?”

“Sure
Con d
cuóp tôi
.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It sorta means, ‘The hooker robbed me.’”