Steven Gore - Final Target

T hat wasn’t so bad, was it, Scoob?” Zink asked as he walked Matson toward the elevator from the Magistrate’s Court on the sixteenth floor of the Federal Building. U.S. Marshals guarded the door while Matson uttered the single word that ratified his transformation from citizen into convict. The only witnesses were Peterson, Zink, Hackett, the magistrate, the clerk, and the stenographer. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, the hearing never happened.

For Matson, it really was bad. So bad Matson felt himself splitting in two. Or maybe three or four. He remembered looking around the courtroom, his eyes flinching at the light, his stomach turning. At the same time, he felt a nauseating hollowness, as if his mind was a shriveled nut inside a shell bouncing down a hillside.

Walking away, rerunning the scene in his mind, it hit him. It was just a goddamn play. Everybody knew their parts, played them like they’d read the same lines a thousand times before. There was Peterson. Huge, dominating. Zink. A rodent waiting to gather up the scraps. The magistrate. Just a judge’s helper. A guy who wasn’t smart enough or didn’t kiss enough political ass to get appointed district court judge. The magistrate would do what Peterson told him to do. And Matson would do what Hackett told him to do.

Hackett. How much money did I pay that shyster? Matson asked himself as Zink led him down the hallway. Whose side was he really on? What did he tell me?

“When the magistrate asks whether you were threatened into entering the plea, answer no, got it?”

“But they were gonna throw away the fucking key if I didn’t.”

“So what? If you say yes, there’s no deal.”

What’s all this about the truth? It’s all about lying at the right time, just like business. These people are hypocrites.

Matson noticed that he was now in the elevator, descending, just him and Zink. Hackett had abandoned him at the courtroom door.

Matson knew it was his voice that answered, “Guilty,” but his mind, cowering in an internal crevice, hadn’t pushed the word out. Hackett simply trained him to say, “Guilty, Your Honor,” and he did.

How did I get into this mess? Matson asked himself as he and Zink got off the elevator on the thirteenth floor. I shouldn’t have listened to Hackett. He’s a punk. Fucking snitch lawyer. I could’ve beat this case. What’ve they really got? Nothing. That’s what Granger said.

Zink stuck a security badge on Matson’s suit jacket, then walked him through the armored entrance into the FBI office. A few steps inside, Matson saw a wooden door, a sign taped to it bearing the single word “SatTek.”

“This is where we’ll be working,” Zink said, directing Matson inside.

Matson took a step across the threshold. Instantly all of his parts snapped together.

To his left was a poster board covered with photos. His. Burch’s. Granger’s. Fitzhugh’s. They know about Fitzhugh. Next to that a world map. Red-headed pins impaling San Francisco, Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh City, London, Guernsey. They know about Guernsey. To his right were flowcharts taped to the wall. Money. Accounts. Companies. Straight ahead were file boxes. SEC. SatTek. The China company. The Vietnam company. Cobalt Partners. Damn, they know about Cobalt, too.

Matson felt an itchiness, like there was a gun barrel pointed at that edgy little spot between his eyes. He finally understood Hackett’s phrase, “a slam-dunk case.”

He dropped into a blue cloth-covered chair, hands clammy, as if watching the dentist’s drill approaching before the Novocain kicked in.

Zink sat down behind the desk, then withdrew a white legal pad from a drawer.

Matson studied Zink’s face, sickened by his willful failure to suppress his self-satisfaction, his pride of ownership.

Matson couldn’t say Granger hadn’t warned him. “If you cooperate, they’ll own you. You’ll think you’re gonna get over on ’em, but you won’t. Nobody does.”

And Matson had promised him, “I’m not makin’ no deal. No way. Fuck ’em. I’m not sayin’ shit.”

But that was before Hackett told Matson how much time he could do and before he decided that there was no fucking way he was going to do it-not if he was going to have a life after SatTek.

Hackett had also told him something else, maybe the most important thing. As long as he kept setting up other targets, the prosecutor would stop aiming at him, and that would give him time to feather his nest for a soft landing. And Matson knew that unless he did a little more feathering, he’d crash real hard.

“Let’s start with Fitzhugh,” Zink said, his pen poised. “How much did he know?”

“I flew to London and checked into the Park Lane Hilton by Hyde Park. At 6 P. M., I went down to the lobby bar to meet him. He looked up soon as I hit the door and caught my eye. I’m jet-lagged as hell, so I order some coffee before I sit down. I don’t want to miss a word of what he has to say.

“Helluva name. Morely Alden Fitzhugh IV. But it fit with him being an accountant. Thin, pale face. Conservative black suit. The only thing that didn’t match the profile were his Bono-type eyeglasses and a gold Patek Philippe chronograph. I later saw a watch just like it at Tiffany’s. It cost about thirty grand.

“We talked a little bit, and once he felt comfortable with me, he went into his spiel.

“‘Mr. Granger told me that SatTek is on the verge of greatness, and that you’re the right man at the right time.’ Then he leaned over the table and lowered his voice. ‘I know you trust Mr. Granger and Mr. Granger trusts me. And you know the offshore world is about trust. We’re not gangsters and there aren’t any courts with real substance that can deal with even minor disputes. So it’s up to the parties to work together, fairly. Everything aboveboard.’

“That shook me up a little. There was no reason to bring up gangsters. We were just doing business. But I wasn’t there to argue, so I let it go.

“Fitzhugh paused for a few moments, then he adopted a sort of effeminate pose and said, ‘Mr. Granger has, as I understand it, assumed the role of, shall we say, adviser. What’s it called at the Vatican? Consigliere.’ Then he punches the air with his forefinger, like in punctuation. ‘That’s it, consigliere.’

“I’m not the pope, and I told him that.

“‘But every enterprise needs a principal. That’s you. My function is solely as a fiduciary, someone to advise you on financial matters and to whom you may issue instructions in complete confidence that they will be faithfully executed.’

“There was only one problem with that: Granger told me that I was supposed to be following his orders; not him following mine.”

Matson watched Zink finish writing down the last sentence on his legal pad, then said he needed to use the bathroom.

Zink escorted him down the hallway and pointed to the men’s room door. Matson entered and stepped into a stall, but just stood there. He didn’t need to pee, he needed to think. Something else had happened in the Park Lane Hilton lounge that evening, and Zink had no right to pry into it.

As the waitress approached with his coffee, he had noticed a woman sitting alone at the bar behind her, twenty-five feet across the room. The contrasts among her black chemise dress, pale skin, Asiatic eyes, and Slavic cheekbones had unnerved him. She seemed foreign in a more profound way than any woman he’d ever seen.

His eyes followed hers as they swept along the row of bottled whiskeys doubled by the bar mirror behind them. Their eyes met in reflection. He looked away, but was drawn back. And as he gazed into the dark pupils looking back, he felt a depth and solidity in himself that he hadn’t experienced before, and realized that somehow, in a way he didn’t yet understand, the world that Granger had invited him into was making him into a new man.