Steven Gore: Final Target

“I gave my name to the receptionist and took a seat on the couch. Plush. Soft leather-and I got sucked into the damn thing. My suit jacket got all bunched up. My briefcase was dangling over the edge. Before I had a chance to recover, Burch walked in. Tall. Intense. Almost senatorial-and I’m sitting there like the village idiot.

“First I got embarrassed, and then pissed, thinking that the couch was set up as booby-trap to put outsiders at a disadvantage.

“As we walked down the hallway toward his office, I told myself that I needed to get focused and get my head in the game. One amateurish screwup and Burch might drop-kick me out of there. Then a warning from Granger came back to me. ‘Self-control is key,’ he’d said. ‘Be careful what you say and how you say it. The rules are different from what you’re used to and the most important one is this: No one says exactly what he means if he wants to get what he came for.’

“I hadn’t grasped what Granger meant at the time, but two minutes after I sat down in Burch’s office, I understood exactly.

“Burch read over some notes on a legal pad, then looked up and said, ‘Ed Granger hasn’t told me the details of what you want to do, other than it somehow involves selling nonmilitary-grade sound and video detectors in Asia.’

“Even though it must’ve sounded like I was reading from a script, I answered him the way Granger told me to: ‘The plan is to give ourselves an international presence in anticipation of going public.’

“I waited for Burch to nod like Granger said he would, then I looked him straight on and said: ‘We’re looking to create a flexible structure, one that you might even call aggressive.’

“Burch’s eyebrows went up a little and he got a half smile on his face, and right then I knew that I’d hit just the way Granger had trained me. Crushed it three hundred yards down the fairway.

“Hell, when I look back on it now, I think Burch understood where Granger was headed with this thing long before I did.”

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, everything 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?”