Steven Gore - Final Target

Matson rose to his feet and started pacing.

“Kovalenko took us into a big trading floor, about forty guys working the phones, and then across the hall to meet an old man they called the Maestro. A droopy-jowled guy with the worst rosacea I’ve ever seen. I never learned his real name. His job was to push the stock. Plant stories in the press. Spam out stock tips.

“Granger was pissed at me when we left because I had challenged Kovalenko and I was pissed at him because he was always treating me like a child, and I was sick of it. But we needed to get cash coming in, so the next morning I did what he told me. I called the stock transfer agent and had him issue five million shares to Northstead and then two million each to Cobalt Partners, Azul Limited, and Blau Anstalt.”

Matson paused, and his eyes went vacant for a moment.

“Right after I hung up the phone, I got a real sick feeling in my stomach.” He looked down at Zink. “You ever go to a magic show in Vegas?”

Zink shook his head.

“The magician asks somebody to come up on the stage, then he does a little razzle-dazzle, and suddenly he’s holding the guy’s wallet and everybody in the audience is laughing at him. I decided right then that I wasn’t going to let that happen to me. I called the guy back and had an extra two million shares issued to Cobalt Partners. Then I told the lawyer in Guernsey to have the nominee directors sell them as soon as the stock hit five dollars a share and send the profit to my Barclays account in London.”

“And that’s the first money that went into TAMS?”

Matson nodded.

“Did you tell Granger and Fitzhugh about the additional shares?”

“Fuck no.”

W hen Gage arrived at his office after a futile morning meeting with Courtney and Burch’s doctors at SF Medical, he found that Alex Z had converted it into a war room. Conference tables. Easels. An additional computer workstation. Redbrick walls now bare, waiting for poster boards bearing flowcharts and chronologies.

“SatTek was self-underwriting,” Alex Z reported as he sat down across the desk from Gage. “They sold a lot of the stock themselves. The rest through a brokerage firm called Northstead Securities.”

Gage sat poised behind his desk, chin propped on his folded hands.

“It’s owned by Albert William Ward, a broker hanging on to his license by a thread.” Alex Z pointed toward the floors below. “I asked all of our ex-FBI people to use their contacts at the SEC. It turns out that he’s been on their radar for a long time.” He slid a Securities and Exchange Commission Litigation Release across the desk. “The Enforcement Division slapped his wrist a few years ago. He laid low for a while, then came back as Northstead.”

Gage picked it up and read it over. “Is he still in Colorado?”

“No. San Diego. Off Highway 5 close to downtown, right near the Hyatt Regency.” Alex Z grinned. “I mean real, real close by.”

Gage drew back, brows furrowed. “What does the Hyatt Regency have to do with Northstead?”

“I made you a reservation for tonight. Late check-in.”

Gage shook his head and smiled. “I think we’ve been working together too long.”

“Your flight is at 7 P. M. out of SFO.”

“I’ll be on it.”

“Pretty soon after SatTek went public, they used some stock to buy an engineering software firm in Ireland. No cash changed hands. A shares-for-equity deal. Three million shares worth about fifteen million dollars.”

“And the shareholders put up with that?”

“Some didn’t like it but it went through anyway. They thought SatTek was straying from its business plan with no justification.”

“Still, that’s quite a chunk.”

“SatTek did everything in chunks. There were eleven big shareholders. The biggest were Blau Anstalt, Azul Limited, and Cobalt Partners.”

“Blue companies.”

Alex Z’s face washed with puzzlement as if he’d gone colorblind. “Blue companies?”

“ Blau is ‘blue’ in German. Azul is ‘blue’ in Spanish. Cobalt is blue as the deep blue sea.”

“You think they’re linked some way?”

Gage nodded. “It’s not likely to be a coincidence. Any blue ones on the domestic side?”

“Nope, but there’s a large shareholder in Nevada. The registered agent is named Chuck Verona.”

“Send someone out there to find out who he is and what else he’s into.” Gage pointed at an easel bearing a fresh pad of poster board. There was already too much to keep track of in his head. “Then chart all of this out.”

“I’ll do it tonight.”

“You don’t have to spend-”

Alex Z shook his head. “I know I’m just a computer guy but something smells real bad about what happened to Mr. Burch. So I’ll be living here until you figure it out.”

Gage reached for the phone to make a call as Alex Z headed back downstairs to his office.

“Tiptoe?”

“Yeah?”

“This is Graham Gage.”

Gage heard Tiptoe chewing. He was always chewing. Gum. Tobacco. Beef jerky. He said it kept the rest of his body steady, especially his hands. His life-spent performing black-bag jobs for the good guys-sometimes depended on it.

“What’s cookin’?”

Gage heard his lips smack.

“I’ve got a little situation. You doing anything tonight?”

“Depends on what’s on the Playboy Channel and how much you wanna spend.”

“A thousand.”

“I think my cable just went out.”

“How long would it take you to get to San Diego?”

“That also depends…”

Tiptoe’s jaws fell silent.

“Fifteen hundred.”

“Two hours.”

“The place is called Northstead Securities.”

Alex Z had a rental van reserved for Gage when he arrived at the San Diego International Airport. American. Gray. Anonymous. Tinted windows.

Gage made a quick run down Pacific Highway, glanced at the bay and the Naval Air Station on North Island, then cut a few blocks inland. Northstead Securities was located on the ground floor of a U-shaped glass and metal office building north of downtown. Parking places filled and surrounded the U.

At 8:45 P. M. Gage slipped into a parking space shadowed by a Torrey pine. The lights inside Northstead were still on; a few brokers remained. Gage didn’t need to bug the place to know what was going on. Every boiler room he’d ever investigated was the same. Twenty, thirty, forty cubicles. Guys, all guys. Not members of a team or a group or a staff, but a crew that moved like a toxic cloud. When it was time for Northstead to evaporate, they’d condense somewhere else and adopt a new British-sounding name with the resonance of marble columns and old money: Oxford Capital or Oxford Securities or Oxford Investments, Stratford Asset Management or Stratford Equities or Stratford Partners.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Gage surveyed the brokers working the phones, pumping and dumping penny stocks, an archaic nickname for those selling for less than five bucks, and often, Gage knew, not worth a cent. As he watched their bobbing heads and gesticulating hands, he imagined the pitches Northstead used to push SatTek, ones appealing to the war on terror, the military’s need for SatTek’s proprietary technology to fight it, and its stock being a way to make a patriotic killing in the stock market.

Gage saw two of them jump to their feet, high-fiving their half-height cubicles. A sucker bit.

Moments after the last of the brokers turned off the lights two hours later, a potbellied little man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans appeared out of the darkness. He opened Gage’s passenger door and climbed in. He cradled a black canvas bag on his lap.

“Can you get us in?” Gage asked Tiptoe.