Steven Gore - Power Blind

“My guess? The votes on the Supreme Court nominees.”

“How come so fast? I thought that took months and months.”

“They were confirmed for appeals court seats less than a year ago. They’re known quantities. No need for lengthy FBI checks or extended committee hearings.”

“And the Meyer boys are paying off some senators for their votes?”

“Not them. Their campaigns.”

“Same difference.” Viz pointed at his notes written on a piece of scratch paper. “I know what political action committees are, but what’s a 527?”

“It covers a lot of things, but I suspect the Meyer boys are using the type that can raise all the money it wants but doesn’t have to register with the Federal Election Commission and doesn’t have to report where the money came from or where it went. Like the Swift Boat Veterans. Now a lot of contributors are going even further and are using super-PACs that sprang up after the Citizens United decision, but the public is getting suspicious of them so they might not go that way.”

“And I take it the idea is to launder the money though these groups to hide the sources?”

Gage nodded. “That’s how it looks. And it ties in with Landon’s genius as a strategist. He would get an initiative on the ballot in each state that he could uniquely tie to the senatorial candidate he was backing-abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research-then would flood the 527s supporting the initiative with money whose sources he doesn’t have to disclose.”

“And Brandon’s the bag man? I’m not sure a federal judge ought to be doing that.”

“He’s a federal judge who’s spent his whole career doing what he shouldn’t be doing-so stay on him.”

Viz glanced at his watch. “He should be leaving court in a half hour or so.” He smiled. “Maybe tonight we’ll find out why he had the condom in his wallet.”

“We know the why, we just need to figure out the who and where.” Gage rose. “I called Socorro and offered her and the kids the ranch for a couple of weeks. I made it sound casual so she wouldn’t get panicked.”

“I spoke to her right afterward.” Viz pointed north. “Why not your cabin?”

Gage shrugged.

“Was it because it’s easier in the desert than in the forest to spot someone sneaking up?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“Mine, too.”

“I’ve got a security system with cameras covering the property,” Gage said. “I’ll have Alex Z link into them through his computer in the loft so he can keep an eye on the place.”

Gage lowered the lid on his gas barbecue, then sat down in one of the four chairs surrounding the wrought-iron table on the deck of his hillside home. FBI Special Agent Joe Casey was seated in another, sipping a beer and gazing out at the bay.

“It’s another world up here, isn’t it?” Casey said. He pointed at San Francisco. “I thought you made a mistake when you bought this place because it meant having to look every day at a city where you worked so many homicides.”

Casey surveyed the three-story glass-walled house, the four acres on which it sat, and the pines, oaks, and redwoods surrounding it, then nodded and said, “But it doesn’t feel that way.”

“It’s a mystery to me,” Gage said, “but somewhere between the time I start up the canyon and when I pull into the garage, the magic happens. Maybe it’s because from up here I can see the whole, and not just the parts.”

But that wasn’t entirely true, for sometimes he dragged parts with him as he ascended the eleven hundred feet. And that was the reason Casey was sitting across from him now.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. “Most of all, it’s because this place is about only one thing: Faith and me. And whenever we’re here, it seems like the center of the universe.”

They fell silent as they watched a young hawk ride an updraft and pass over, flying toward the crest of the hill behind them.

Casey sniffed at the aromas drifting over from the grill.

“Smells good,” Casey said, “but you shouldn’t be cooking my dinner, I should be cooking yours. Maybe all your dinners. OptiCom is the third case you’ve handed me in the last four years. The special agent in charge keeps wondering if I’m paying you off.”

“He knows that’s not true. He’s seen your paycheck.” Gage winked. “He knows you can’t afford me.”

Gage twisted the cap off a beer bottle and took a sip.

“Has Oscar Mogasci stopped trembling yet?” Gage asked.

“I don’t know. I got the judge to release him on a no-money-down bail this morning and then I pushed him out the door. The idiot thought he was going to get the federal Witness Protection Program, but all he got was a Caltrain ticket back to San Jose.”

“San Jose? You’re not telling me his wife took him back after almost ruining her.”

“Not his wife, his mother.”

“I should’ve guessed it would be something like that,” Gage said. “He struck me as a mama’s boy. The only powerful woman he could stand to have in his life was his mother, so he had to try to break his wife when she’d become successful.”

Casey tilted his head toward the kitchen window. His wife, a former FBI agent and now a supervisor of the nuclear detection unit at the Oakland Port, was huddled with Faith drinking wine and displaying pictures of her new niece.

“I should ask Illyse,” Casey said. “She reads Psychology Today like it’s the Bible. She says it helps her manage her underlings. Every month or so the magazine has what they call self-tests. I missed something she said last week so she gave me one to check my attention span.”

“How’d you do?”

“On a scale of one to ten, I got a failed miserably.”

“On purpose?”

“Of course. It’s best to keep the bar as low as possible.” Casey flashed a grin. “She made a point of failing it, too.”

Gage returned to the barbecue, flipped over the steaks, and then laid a salmon fillet next to them.

“But enough about my disabilities. What’s going on with the Charlie Palmer thing?”

Gage filled him in while he kept an eye on the grill.

“Now that I lay it all out in one piece,” Gage said, “it sounds kind of outlandish.”

“What part? The planting of sodium monofluoroacetate in some Tenderloin shopkeeper’s storeroom? Naming the whole operation after a constellation? Or maybe just the part about the shopkeeper cutting off his comb-over in the county jail?”

“Is that multiple choice?”

“Yes.”

“Then the answer is all the above.”

Casey shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the weirdest crime I’ve ever heard of. Close, but not quite.” He sipped on his beer. There was no reason to retrade war stories. “What can I do to help?”

“How difficult would it be for you to access the wire transfer database the government started gathering up after 9/11?”

“It’s just a couple of keystrokes,” Casey said. “You want me to put in the Arabic names and see what comes back?”

“That’s all it would take.”

“I don’t need actual probable cause, but I’ll need some articulable suspicion. Got any ideas?”

“Call it money laundering. That covers a host of sins.”

N ot exactly a home run,” Casey told Gage over the telephone the next day.

“A triple?”

“I don’t think so, but maybe. You got your list of names and the spreadsheet?”

“Hold on.” Gage retrieved both from the safe in the opposite corner of his office. “Okay.”

“Let’s go over a few and I’ll e-mail the rest.”

Gage heard keystrokes ticking in the background.

“The Pegasus wire transfer records go back about ten years,” Casey said. “But none of the Arabic names show up until about four years ago.”