Steven Gore - Final Target

“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.