Steven Gore - Final Target

Actually, Matson thought, Zink’s not a bad guy. Just doing his job. I can work with him, but he’s hard to read.

Zink felt Matson trying to gauge how he was doing. He knew snitches always did that. Are they pleasing their masters or not? Are they saying too much or too little? They’re always wondering where’s the finish line. Of course, there wasn’t one. It took most crooks a long time to figure that out, and Matson hadn’t even started.

He stepped to a chalkboard, then charted out the companies Fitzhugh set up in Guernsey.

“Now tell me about the bank accounts,” Zink said, turning around, and wondering how much of the truth he would get.

Matson got up and walked to the map on the wall. He pointed at a city next to a lake in Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.

“I didn’t even know where Lugano was until the day before we flew in.” He faced Zink. “Ever been to one of those Swiss banks?”

Zink shook his head.

“If it weren’t for the brass plate mounted outside that said ‘Banca Rober,’ I’d never have known what it was. No teller window. No signs advertising mortgage rates. Just security like the CIA and a bunch of little offices.”

Matson sat back down. “You know why Fitzhugh chose Lugano?” He laughed. “A woman. Isabella. This pipsqueak set up the Azul Limited and Blau Anstalt accounts there just so he could get laid.”

“Just like you.”

Matson blushed, then flared. “I’m not the one who chose to run this thing out of London. She just happened to be there.”

“Sorry,” Zink said. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”

“Hell, not only did I not know why he chose London, I didn’t even know how the scam was going to fit together. All Granger had said up to that point was that he wanted to put a structure in place. I didn’t even realize that when I told Burch we needed a flexible structure, I was telling the truth. And at that point, it was all form and no substance.”

“Did the banker know that?”

“Of course he did, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him. He was about as expressive as a dead carp. He had the account opening forms filled out even before we walked into his office. Fitzhugh introduced me, then threw out the phrase, ‘strategic partnerships,’ and the guy slid the papers across the table for him to sign. Like some choreographed dance. I’m laughing as we’re driving away because the banker didn’t even ask what the companies did.

“I elbowed Fitzhugh and told him that I must’ve missed the wink again. He just grinned and said, ‘No wonder, in Switzerland it’s the nod.’ Then he pointed toward a mountain across the lake, punched the gas, and said, ‘Let’s go see Isabella.’”

Zink’s ringing cell phone interrupted the story. He gestured at Matson to stay put, then answered the call and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.

Just like you.

Matson felt a surge of anger as Zink’s accusation came back to him.

Alla wasn’t about getting laid, he thought, but punks like Zink wouldn’t understand that.

He had met thousands of Zinks at sales conventions all over the country. He had once been one of them himself, and even had still been one when he arrived in Lugano. But that changed a half hour after leaving Banca Rober.

Fitzhugh had wound through town, then along the northern edge of Lake Lugano and up the switch-backs etched into the side of Monte Bre. Just below the summit, he pulled to a stop in front of a tan stucco house. Matson paused to look down at the city lights, then followed Fitzhugh inside and into the kitchen where Isabella was waiting. Tall, slim, shoulder-length black hair, spaghetti-strapped red dress covered by a knee-length white apron. She turned as their footsteps sounded on the marble floor.

Stunning. Heart-wrenchingly stunning.

As he stood there looking at her, Matson remembered a line of German poetry that a girl he dated in college liked to quote. It had stuck with him over the years even though its meaning had always been obscure: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.”

Right then he understood why he had ended up with a Madge, instead of an Isabella or an Alla.

Matson accepted a glass of wine from her and then followed Fitzhugh into the dining room, the table set with English bone china and the candles already lit.

Throughout dinner Matson watched the playfulness, the intimacy, and an acceptance of each other that made what he’d been taught were the institutional bedrocks of society, like marriage, like his own twenty-year marriage, seem hollow. And the hours would’ve been entirely joyful, even blissful, were he not haunted by the suspicion that he’d wasted his entire life.

H ow’s Matson doing?” Peterson asked, walking into the SatTek room where Zink was typing up his notes during a break in the debriefing.

“Not bad.” Zink looked up from his keyboard. “Interesting thing, though. At the beginning of this scam he was kind of a doofus; Granger needing to hold his hand all the time. But by the middle of it he was a helluva operator all on his own. It was like…What do you call those graphs with the bump in the middle they use in statistics?”

“Bell curve.”

“That’s it. Strong in the middle and weak at the ends.” Zink shook his head. “And cheating on his wife seemed to make a real man out of him, for a while.”

Peterson paused for a moment, for the first time wondering what a jury would think of Matson’s adultery. “Have you talked to his wife?”

“I’ve been putting it off. Madge doesn’t have a clue how bad this will be. She still thinks the whole thing is about disgruntled shareholders.” Zink frowned. “And Matson’s too much of a coward to tell her the truth. He wants me to take the brunt of it and then try to make her think he’s some kind of victim in this thing.”

“You ever meet a snitch who didn’t think he was really the victim?”

“You got that right. The weird thing is I don’t think he minds bringing her down with him. Like he blames her for his own greed.”

“I think I better sit down with both of them,” Peterson said. “Like it or not, she’s gonna have to stand by her man, at least through trial. It’ll make him look less like a snake if the jury thinks she’s forgiven him for the affair.”

Peterson nodded toward Matson’s empty chair. “Where’s our little hero now?”

“He went for a walk. Said he wanted to clear his head. I may have been a little tough on him about Ms. Love-at-First-Sight.”

“Push him as much as you can. I need to know everything about her so we don’t get surprised when the defense cross-examines him at trial. We’ve got to know what they know before they know it.” Peterson thought for a moment, trying to work a bad fact into a good trial strategy. “I’ve got it. We’ll make him admit cheating on his wife during direct, right from the get-go, try to defuse the thing. Just make sure you don’t let him hold anything else back that’ll bite us in the ass.”

“Speaking of biting us in the ass, agents in the San Jose office are picking up drumbeats that Graham Gage’s people have been sniffing around. Just asking a few offhand questions to witnesses in a couple of fraud cases they’re investigating. You want to scare him off?”

“We’d have better luck trying to scare off a hyena.”

“Hyena? I thought you and him got along.”

“Only when he’s on our side.” Peterson pointed at Zink. “The FBI tried to recruit Gage out of SFPD. Put a lot of time into it but he wouldn’t sign on-you ever meet the guy?”

“No.”

“He has a kind of presence even though he never acts like he’s more important than whatever he’s working on.”