Steven Gore - Final Target

Peterson thought of all the lawyers and cops and PIs around the country conniving to get themselves on television. Yet he’d never seen Gage interviewed, never saw him quoted anywhere, except in bits of testimony reporters snagged during trials.

“Helluva investigator,” Peterson finally said. “There’s nobody out there like him.”

Zink reddened as if Peterson was making a comparison, not merely a statement. Peterson ignored it.

“Doesn’t this guy have any weaknesses?” Zink asked.

“You mean besides being loyal to a crooked lawyer?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

Peterson hesitated. There’d always been something that bothered him about Gage, but he’d never before had the need to articulate it. He struggled until he found the words. “He doesn’t go to Giants games.”

Zink squinted up at Peterson. “I don’t get it.”

“Gage misses out on some of the best things in life. It’s like they’re invisible to him.”

The blank look on Zink’s face told Peterson that he didn’t understand.

“Put it this way. Gage’s got two close friends: Burch and a homicide cop over at SFPD he grew up with in Arizona. Neither one would invite him to a ball game. Not that they’re not close, they are; like brothers. Not that they wouldn’t want him to come, they would. But they know Gage couldn’t do high fives when there’s a home run or do the wave with everybody else. I guess you could say he’s kind of trapped inside himself.”

“Some of the best times I’ve had were at games with my buddies, hooting it up.”

“Me too. Toward the end of my career with the Raiders I sometimes wished I was up in the stands instead of down on the field. Playing hurt is lonely. You can’t immerse yourself in the game and give in to the blind instinct that great plays are made from. In fact, I can’t imagine Gage playing football or baseball or basketball. I’m kind of surprised he was ever a cop-it’s the ultimate team sport.”

Peterson folded his arms across his chest and stared down at the linoleum floor, trying to puzzle out why.

“And I think I know the reason,” he finally said, pointing toward the courtroom floors above and looking back at Zink. “It’s something Judge Conrad said. She worked for Gage while she was in law school after she quit the FBI. She told me that he’s always aware of what he’s thinking. It’s like he never lets his mind wander unobserved the way people do when they’re cheering or fishing or just watching a sunset.”

“Is that a strength or a weakness?”

Peterson took in a slow breath and exhaled, almost as a sigh. “I don’t know, but it must be a burden sometimes.”

“What do you want me to do about him?”

Peterson didn’t respond, momentarily confused by a feeling of envy. He shook it off and answered, “Nothing. He won’t find out anything. Burch can’t talk, and Matson and Granger are the only ones who know everything that happened. And only one of them is talking-and just to us.” Peterson glanced at the SatTek sign on the door, then back at Zink. “Don’t have Matson come to the Federal Building anymore. Gage may put a tail on him. I don’t want him to figure out that Matson is cooperating.”

Zink grinned. “Until he reads the indictment?”

“Yeah. Until he reads the indictment.”

Z ink telephoned Matson, directing him to an FBI safe house in Palo Alto and telling him only that they needed to have a heart-to-heart. He cringed during the entire drive down. He dreaded having this conversation with Matson, this touchy-feely crap. He almost gagged when he spotted Matson and his lovelorn little face waiting on the doorstep.

“Her name is Alla Tarasova. I didn’t even learn her last name until after we’d slept together when I got back from Lugano.

“She was pretty much on her own. Divorced. Her mother is dead. Never close to her father. He moved out of Ukraine when she was a kid and set up a business in Budapest. She hasn’t talked to him in years. Hates him so much that she resents the way Russians and Ukrainians have to take their middle name from their father’s first name. Hers is Petrovna. Alla Petrovna. It was like a burden to her, so she refuses to use it, even when she introduces herself to Russians and Ukrainians.

“We lay there in bed the next morning, looking out over London.

“Sure, it had crossed my mind that her aim was to use me to get a green card, so I decided to test her a little and asked her what she wanted out of life.

“She’s really into language, so she told me this word, uyutnost. It means ‘coziness.’ Then she said, ‘If there is love and intimacy, even the poor can have uyutnost.’

“After she said that, I knew she wasn’t after money.

“It almost made me cry.

“Then she told me intimacy was something she never got from her ex-husband, and that Ukrainian men are horrified by it. She explained it by giving me another word, trast, and said that for women it means ‘passion,’ but for men it means ‘terror.’

“It’s ironic when you think about it. The first words people usually learn in another language are ‘hello,’ ‘good-bye,’ and ‘thank you.’ And there I was learning ‘coziness’ and ‘passion.’

“I asked her straight out whether that’s why she slept with me, just because I wasn’t him and I wasn’t Ukrainian.

“And here’s where she could’ve looked up at me with baby-girl eyes and told me what I wanted to hear, but she didn’t.

“‘Who knows why,’ she says. ‘Because it happened, today happened. Isn’t that enough reason?’

“Sure as hell was.”

“Pathetic,” Zink said, as he dropped into a chair in Peterson’s office at the end of the day. “Fucking pathetic. Can’t I get back to some real investigation?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Fitzhugh.”

“What’s Matson say?”

“That he’s as dirty as they come. Knew everything. Been running these kinds of scams for years.”

Peterson thought for a moment. “I wish I knew what was going to happen with Burch, so I could decide who to make deals with.”

“What are you hearing?”

“There seems to have been some improvement. He’s moved his hands-but not like he’s actually responding to anything.” Peterson jerked his arm. “That kind of thing.”

Peterson tapped his forefinger on the edge of his desk. “It’ll look bad if the press thinks we’re singling out a road-rage victim-especially a guy like Burch. They’ve been making him into some kind of hero. The U.S. Attorney won’t like it. He likes press coverage, needs it for his campaign for governor, but not that kind.”

Peterson gazed out of his window toward the tree-covered Presidio and the Pacific Ocean beyond. “Let’s make the case look real international.” He looked back toward Zink. “How many countries so far?”

“Switzerland, United Kingdom, Panama, Liechtenstein, China, Vietnam.”

“That’s the way we’ll play it. Let’s indict Burch as soon as he’s conscious-”

“You mean if.”

“Yeah, if…along with Fitzhugh, Granger, the stockbrokers, and maybe some bankers in London and Switzerland. They all knew the whole thing was bogus.” Peterson grinned. “We’ll call ’em fugitives. International fugitives. The boss loves feeding that shit to the press. And Burch won’t look so much like a victim, even if they have to roll him into court in a wheelchair.”

Peterson glanced at his wall calendar. “You better break off what you’re doing with Matson and scoot over to London before Fitzhugh goes underground. He’s got to be hearing drumbeats by now.”

“I’ll call the guy in the Serious Fraud Office who got us the Barclays Bank records.”