Steven Gore - Final Target

Peterson reached in again.

“This is Burch’s brokerage account statement. He bought a hundred thousand shares of SatTek at two bucks, then dumped it like all the other insiders at five. He cleared a cool, crooked three hundred grand-on top of his enormous legal fee.”

“Then how do you explain the hits on Burch and Fitzhugh?”

“Burch wasn’t a hit. It was road rage. While you were wasting your time in London, another jogger was shot in the Mission District. Same MO. As for Fitzhugh and his wife? The London police say they did a little work for Russian organized crime. Zink looked through Fitzhugh’s files. There was nothing to connect SatTek to any of Fitzhugh’s Russian clients.”

Gage started to reach for his folder to show Peterson the photos he took of the Russians Matson met with in London, then hesitated. He hadn’t heard the punch line yet.

“And Matson can tie the whole thing together. Trust me. He’s given us everything he’s got and he’s been going out and gathering up more every day.”

Gage thought back on Matson’s route. London. Guernsey. Lugano. Maybe he was putting the financial pieces together for Peterson. Maybe he was still trying to snare Granger. In the end it didn’t make any difference. Matson was Peterson’s boy, and Peterson believed Matson’s every word.

“One thing you don’t have is motive-”

Peterson flashed a palm at Gage. “We don’t need motive. The facts speak for themselves.”

“You may not,” Gage said, “but juries want to hear it-and Burch didn’t need the money.”

“Needing and wanting are two different things.”

“He gives away three times your salary to charity every year. He handles the money for a dozen international relief organizations-never a hint that he skimmed a dime.”

“Big fucking deal. What he does for charity is a sentencing issue. Maybe it’ll buy him a downward departure. Get him down to twenty-eight years instead of thirty.” Peterson jabbed a forefinger at Gage. “We both know why these do-gooders want to use him. It’s because he knows how to move money so corrupt governments can’t get ahold of it. We call it money laundering for a good cause. That’s why we look the other way.” Peterson smirked. “You think we don’t suspect what you two did in Afghanistan? Is there a federal crime you guys didn’t commit setting that up?”

A nightmare came to life in Gage’s mind: Burch being arrested in the critical care unit and Spike’s uniformed cop being replaced by a U.S. Marshal. Peterson had everything he needed: a paper trail, a money trail, and Matson to tell the story-and Gage hadn’t seen it coming. He didn’t look over, but he felt Zink grinning like a teenage punk who didn’t have a clue what was friendship, or grief, or tragedy. He clenched his jaws and kept his face expressionless. He wasn’t going to give Peterson the satisfaction.

“When will you indict him?”

“As soon as we can roll him into court. From what I hear he’s making good progress.” Peterson paused. Gage saw in his eyes that, at least for a moment, he grasped what this meant to Gage. But the moment passed. “Sorry, man, you can’t win ’em all.”

Gage returned to his office after escorting Peterson and Zink to the lobby, each step accompanied by the anguish that Faith had been right: Burch’s rage against Courtney’s cancer had indeed expressed itself as greed.

But then two poem fragments spoke to him as he settled into his chair and gazed out toward the bay: I was much too far out all my life…not waving but drowning. And he wondered whether that had been Jack Burch from the beginning. Maybe that was why the memory of their first meeting came to him in the emergency room hallway the morning Burch was shot.

Maybe it wasn’t greed after all, but simply self-destructive recklessness.

Gage took in a breath, feeling the same unease that had troubled him along the Smith River twenty-five years earlier. He remembered watching a young fisherman walk past him into a cliffside cafe overlooking the river, his gait and earnest face announcing that his mind was too much on the water, his arms and back already feeling the tension of the fly line tight in the guides of a bowed rod.

“Watch out for the Oregon Hole,” Gage had warned him and pointed at three off-kilter crosses jammed into lava rocks atop the canyon wall. “Those rapids will beat you to death.”

Burch had glanced back over his shoulder, grinned, and answered without breaking stride, “Thanks, mate. I’ll take care.”

At midday, another moment of unease. Gage looking down from the cliff, catching sight of a slight shifting of Burch’s shoulders and hips as he dug his wading boots into the sandy river bottom. Then again, at sunset, with long shadows falling across the river. Gage slowing as he drove across the suspension bridge and glanced down into the gorge, wondering where was the fisherman whose mind had been too much on the river-and catching sight of flailing arms and a fly rod whipping the air.

Maybe that was it all along, Gage thought, turning away from the window and sitting up in his chair. Maybe that had always been Burch: not waving, but drowning.

Gage folded his hands on his desk, his duty-to Jack, to Courtney, and to himself-now framed both by memory and by the fear that instead of asking what and who and how, he should’ve been asking why.

T he middle-aged foreperson seated at a semicircular raised judge’s bench looked over her reading glasses at a phalanx of occupied student-style Formica desks filling the grand jury room. A clerk sat to her left and the court reporter sat one level below her. The witness box to her right was empty. The foreperson first directed the secretary to take the roll, then invited Assistant United States Attorney William Peterson to address the grand jurors.

Peterson rose from his seat at the prosecutor’s table front and center in the grand jury room, picked up his SatTek notes, and then stepped to the podium.

“Today, the government will begin presenting testimonial evidence that it expects to show conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and money laundering by SatTek Incorporated of San Jose and by its officers, agents, lawyers, and consultants.”

Peterson looked down the far left row of jurors and counted to six. From others in the office he knew that Grand Juror Number Six, a wild-haired, middle-aged former middle manager, was a runaway. Number Six thought he had a mind of his own. Even worse, he thought the grand jury was supposed to possess a collective mind of its own. He was big trouble.

Number Six didn’t take an interest in every case, just a few, and he telegraphed his move by taking notes right from day one. No one in the office knew how he chose a case to go rabid on. He just did and wasted an enormous amount of time asking questions ad nauseam in a nasally whine that made everyone in the room cringe and their palms sweat. One prosecutor had told Peterson that after one of these episodes, the foreperson had whispered to him in the hallway that because of Number Six, the eighteen-month grand jury term felt like a life sentence.

Everyone in the U.S. Attorney’s Office figured that someday they’d spot Number Six on a park bench or in the public library with the other loonies scribbling stream-of-consciousness notes in a weathered spiral notebook. But the scuttlebutt was that you could beat him down if you worked at it and he’d vote with the rest of the sheep when the time came-it was just that nobody in the office liked playing sheepdog.

“You’ll recall that a month ago the grand jury approved the issuance of subpoenas for stock and bank records relating to SatTek. At that time I outlined our suspicions and also described the roles of the SatTek officers, advisers such as Edward Granger, attorneys such as Jack Burch, and offshore agents such as Morely Alden Fitzhugh. Beginning today you will see the fruits of the subpoenas and learn the details of our investigative labors.”