Steven Gore - Final Target

After logging off, Gage rose and looked out of his seventeenth floor window at the city lights, the traffic sounds muffled by glass and elevation. He imagined Burch lying in his bed, insulated from life by his coma. For a moment, he wished that Burch could remain there, suspended in time and space, at least long enough for Gage to construct a seawall around him; for if Burch regained consciousness now, it would be only to see a wave cresting above him.

A whelping ambulance siren passing on the street below shook Gage’s mind free of the fantasy. Whatever the doctors’ intent may have been in saying it, the notion that Burch’s condition could be unchanged was at best an evasion to comfort Courtney, and at worst a delusion. The truth was that each day he would get weaker and his body would become less able to fight toward daylight.

P lump little Totie Fitzhugh had spent the week after her husband’s murder sorting through his papers-at least the ones the police and Agent Zink hadn’t taken, and the ones hidden in the pantry. As she was the only employee, she was not unfamiliar with the companies her husband managed, and where he secreted what he called his Special Project files.

Agent Zink had seemed pleased when he left and said he’d covered all the bases, an American idiom she didn’t at all understand. He also invited her to San Francisco to testify at a grand jury two weeks later. Expenses paid. She’d never visited San Francisco, so she gladly accepted. One never knew, perhaps she might find a stash of her husband’s money there.

As Alla drove them toward the Fitzhughs’ detached cottage west of London, Matson didn’t know how Totie would greet him. Calling her Isabella, the name of Fitzhugh’s Lugano girlfriend, the first time they met hadn’t been a good beginning. Matson wondered whether this was the reason she hadn’t returned his increasingly urgent calls since he’d arrived in London.

Mickey, trying to stay with Alla through the morning commute traffic, nearly croqueted a Mini into the rear of her Jaguar when she sped up unexpectedly, then abruptly slowed. For the first mile, Gage thought she was engaged in rather daring countersurveillance, but then concluded that it was rather daring for her to be driving at all.

Jet lag hadn’t ceased making occasional visits to Gage, so over Mickey’s small objection, he opened the passenger window of the boxy white Volvo sedan. The chilly mid-November air buffeted the interior and cleared his head as they drove into the countryside. The image of Fitzhugh as a black hole returned, but with the sense that, at least for the moment, he remained the gravitational center of the SatTek’s offshore money flow.

Alla turned from a narrow lane into a hedge-lined driveway. The stucco and timber Tudor cottage sat toward the back of the large, wooded lot. She parked near the front door.

Mickey pointed at the house number, “It’s Fitzhugh’s.” He then pulled to a stop across the lane in a spot offering just a glimpse of Matson and Alla as they stood knocking, Alla in a waist-length fur jacket and gray slacks, Matson in a black wool overcoat.

“Bli-mey,” Mickey said. “Look at those legs.”

Gage watched Matson knock, first lightly, then vigorously. Alla pinched her nose and brushed away a bug buzzing around Matson’s face, then swiped at one near her ear and scurried back into the Jaguar. Matson knocked a few more times, then also returned to the car. The two of them sat looking at the unanswered door as if deciding whether to wait or come back later when the occupant returned. After a few minutes they drove off.

“I think we better go in,” Gage said, “before the police do. It may be the only chance we’ll ever have.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I’ll ring up Hixon One and ask him to catch on to Matson when they return to the flat.”

Five minutes after the Jaguar pulled away, Mickey drove to the front of the cottage. Neither he nor Gage bothered to knock on the front door. Gage walked down the left side of the house peering into the windows. Mickey took the right. They met at the rear.

“She’s in the dining room,” Gage said.

Since he was the younger by nearly twenty years, it fell to Gage to kick in the back door. Impatient house-flies pursuing decaying flesh raced in with them.

An hour and a half later Chief Inspector Devlin and Homicide Inspector Rees arrived to assume control over the crime scene from the local branch of the Metropolitan Police.

“Superintendent Ransford,” Devlin said, reaching out his hand. “I never expected to find you in a place like this again.”

“Well, Eamonn, if it weren’t for my friend Mr. Gage here, I wouldn’t be.” Mickey pointed first to his left, then to his right. “Mr. Gage, Chief Inspector Devlin. By the way Eamonn, I’m now officially Mickey.”

“So…Mickey. What do we have here and how did you end up in the middle of it?”

“I’ll let Mr. Gage fill you in.”

“Apparently, you failed to mention to Devlin that we followed Matson out to the Fitzhugh cottage,” Mickey said, as he and Gage sat in a borrowed blue Fiat parked just west of Matson’s flat late in the afternoon.

“There were so many details to remember, it could’ve slipped my mind. How about I’ll drop him a line when I get back to the States?”

“Excellent.” Mickey’s eyes lit up. “And equally excellent is the timely emergence of the lovely Alla, as if a butterfly from a cocoon. Unfortunately, the water beetle is with her.”

Mickey fell in behind Alla’s Jaguar as she led them haltingly from Knightsbridge, through Kensington toward Notting Hill Gate, then pulled into a space near Holland Park. Mickey found a spot near the squash courts and crawled out of the Fiat to follow Matson and Alla on foot. He returned fifteen minutes later, mixed in among the aging pigeon feeders while he checked for countersurveillance, then drifted away and called Gage.

“They both went into the Ukrainian consulate. She presented a packet of papers to a clerk. I couldn’t tell what it was. But I saw Matson reach for something in his coat pocket and pull out airline tickets to get to it. The ticket jackets were for Aurigny Airlines. Bright red and yellow. Aurigny flies to Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney in the Channel Islands.”

Gage thought for a moment. “There’s a company in Guernsey that’s connected to SatTek, Cobalt Partners. Find out what Hixon Two is doing for the next few days.”

“You don’t want to do it?”

“No. I’ve got something else to take care of.”

Matson and Alla returned to their car and drove directly back to the flat. After Gage was certain that they were in for the night, he returned to the hotel to start his something else.

A llo,” the heavy voice spoke into the phone.

“ Dobredin, Slava, this is Graham Gage.”

“What can I say? Little misunderstanding. We friends again. Right?” Slava didn’t wait for a response. “Your little interpreter from America. What’s his name?”

“Pavel.”

“ Da, Pavel.” Slava laughed. “Saved your fucking life and he can’t tell nobody how.”

Pavel did it by losing bladder control when he thought the leader of Russia’s largest organized crime group was about to blow Gage’s brains down a Moscow street just weeks earlier. Gage smiled to himself as he remembered Slava’s shadowed face transforming from fury to puzzlement as he watched a puddle form on the sidewalk around Pavel’s shoes.

Slava laughed until he erupted in choking, wheezing coughs.

“Those cigars will kill you,” Gage said, after Slava’s coughing died down.

“No, other vory-v-zakone kill me, I just be smoking at time.”