Steven Gore - Final Target

“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 cuop toi.”

“What’s that mean?”

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

I t never crossed my mind that your two bookends would be brought together like this,” Faith said, standing in their granite-countered kitchen.

Gage took in a long breath, then exhaled. “Neither did I.”

Faith always referred to Spike and Burch as a slightly mismatched set. Immigrants from different worlds. Spike, as a five-year-old carried on his farmworker father’s shoulders wading the Rio Grande. Burch, an Oxford-trained barrister flying in on British Airways, first to add a law degree at Berkeley, then to storm the U.S. legal profession.

Now one was investigating the attempted murder of the other.

A break in the rain had allowed Gage to uncover the barbecue on the redwood deck and cook salmon steaks while Faith made rice and fixed a salad. They carried their plates to the dining room, where windows framed San Francisco against the backdrop of offshore cumulus clouds and a variegated pink, yellow, and red sunset.

Gage propped his forearms on the table and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers as he stared out at the bay.

Faith reached over and rested her hand on his shoulder. “He may make it. The doctors are telling Courtney it’s going to be a long haul.”

“Come on. I was there. That wasn’t a prognosis, it was just a way to muzzle her and keep her from demanding answers they don’t have.”

He filled Faith’s wineglass, then outlined what he’d learned about Burch’s role in SatTek.

“I love Jack as much as you,” Faith said, “but I’ve got to ask. Why are you so sure he wasn’t at least partly responsible? Maybe the lesson he learned from Courtney’s illness was that the world’s not a fair place, so there’s no reason not to grab what you can.”

Gage shook his head. “Not Jack. He never believed money was a substitute for immortality.”

“Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first to express rage against the world as greed.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Maybe you don’t want to see it.”

Gage pulled back and looked at Faith out of the corner of his eye. “Ouch.”

“When it comes to Jack, you have a way of overlooking how impulsive he can be. It’s been that way since we were in graduate school. You, the philosopher forgiving human folly, and him, the reckless daredevil.”

“He’s just a little adventurous.”

Faith threw up her hands. “See?”

Gage smiled. “Touche.”

“And there’s something else.” She reached over and took his hand. “Loyalty sometimes comes at a price that’s too high to pay.”

“You don’t mean bailing out-”

“No. Just be careful. That burglar at Jack’s office could just as well have shot his way out.” She pointed at Gage’s bruised shoulder. “You can pretend that doesn’t hurt, but I wince every time you take your shirt off.”