Steven Gore - Final Target

“You think Matson has told the government about Gravilov?” Alex Z asked.

Gage repeated the question aloud, then shook his head and smiled. “That’s it. That’s exactly what Granger had to trade. And what shocked the hell out of him was that Matson had the balls to deal directly with a gangster at Gravilov’s level.” He looked again at the Granger circle, now transfixed. “Wait a second…Wait a second.”

Alex Z’s eyes followed Gage as if he was a high-wire artist balancing over a canyon.

Gage flipped the marker back and forth between his hands a few times, then stopped and looked at Alex Z. “If Granger had lived long enough to tell Peterson that Matson and Gravilov were working together, then Matson would’ve been no good to the government. It would’ve busted Matson’s plea deal because he got caught lying. Peterson couldn’t use him. A jury would never believe a word he said.”

“Then Peterson gives Granger a chance to work off some time.”

“Exactly. Granger could give up everybody Matson could. And he’s untainted. He steps in and pushes Matson out of the way. Matson does the hard time and Granger gets no more than a couple of years.”

“So Matson kills Granger?”

Gage shook his head. “I don’t see a runt like him killing anybody. He’s got somebody protecting him, maybe somebody sent by Gravilov…And whoever is behind the murder of Granger is also behind the murders of the Fitzhughs and the attempt on Jack and the burglary at his office.”

“But why Mr. Burch?”

“He knows something. Fitzhugh and Matson asked him to set up TAMS Limited, the company that owns the London flat. Maybe Matson used Tarasova-Alla-Matson-Stuart Limited for whatever deal he had with Gravilov. Him and Alla working together…”

Gage paused as a shudder passed through his body, an image of Burch, weak and vulnerable, appeared in his mind. “It could be a lot worse. Jack may know something he doesn’t realize he knows.”

Gage tossed the marking pen onto his desk and surveyed the chart and the chronology hanging next to it.

“I have a feeling that regardless of whether this all started with Alla meeting Matson by chance or with her targeting him,” Gage finally said, “it’ll end up at the same place.”

“Where’s that?”

“I don’t know yet. But we’ve got to get there before they do.”

M r. Gage, you’ve got to stop him.”

Milsberg’s panicked voice wrenched Gage away from trying to project the future from the fragments of a partially known past.

Gage leaned forward in his chair and pressed his phone to his ear. “Stop who from doing what?”

“Matson. If he shuts this place down, I’m out of a job and I’ve got no place to go. Nobody’s going to hire me.”

“What makes you think he wants to shut it down?”

“It dawned on the rat that he can sell the manufacturing equipment and the SatTek proprietary technology to pay back a little money to the shareholders and make himself look better at sentencing time and in the civil suit.” Milsberg’s voice turned sarcastic. “He gets the benefit and all we get is unemployment.”

“Whether there is any benefit depends on what everything is worth.”

“Most of the value is in the intellectual property, but you’d need to ask somebody in the field.” Milsberg paused. “That’ll be tough because of the trade secrets problem. You’ll need to show the material to someone in a position to evaluate it and those would be competitors.”

“Let’s worry about that later,” Gage said. “How far along are you?”

“I’ve inventoried all of the hard assets and a software engineer has just finished working on intellectual property, like the code we developed for the low noise and video amplifiers. He’s put together four or five DVDs.”

“Can you make copies and smuggle out a 20-gigahertz video device? I need them this afternoon.”

Milsberg didn’t answer right away.

“Don’t let me down, Robert.”

Milsberg sighed, then answered. “But you’ll have to watch my back. I don’t think there’d be a big market for The Prison Poetry of Robert Milsberg, CPA.”

Gage heard Milsberg shuffle papers.

“And there’s more bad news. I got a grand jury subpoena yesterday. An FBI agent named Zink dropped it off.”

Gage knew it would be coming. The meeting at his office and the call about Katie Palan showed that Peterson had mastered enough of the case to get it through a grand jury.

“When do they want you?”

“The date on the subpoena is for next Wednesday.” Milsberg sighed. “But that’s not the bad part. There was a target letter attached. I knew there would be, but it’s a punch in the face when you actually see one with your name on it.”

“Did you hire a lawyer?”

“I’m broke. Completely busted. But I was hoping I could just say, ‘I refuse to answer on the grounds of self-incrimination’ and they’d let me go.”

“That’s only about things that really could incriminate you. If they ask you where you stored invoices, you may be required to answer.”

“Damn. I was afraid it wouldn’t be that easy. Maybe that’s why I keep having Jonah dreams.”

“Sounds like you need a harpoon.” Gage thought for a moment. “I’ve got somebody in mind.”

“Hey, Clara. You want to have some fun?”

He heard a laugh at the other end of the line, then: “I take it that means a freebie?”

“What about personal satisfaction? Isn’t that why you left corporate law? Or is that just a line you feed the press?”

Clara Nance was on everybody’s list of the top ten women lawyers in the country. Her real and only satisfaction in life was crushing opponents, and sometimes clients who didn’t follow her orders. Gage had seen prosecutors cringe when she drew her six-foot frame to its full height and announced to the court that she was coming into a case.

“Don’t make fun, Graham. Oprah about wept when I told her my epiphany story.”

“Now you have a name for it?”

“And it’s mostly true. Well, about as true as any of my closing arguments. But enough chitchat. What am I doing?”

“A grand jury target in a securities fraud case. He’s a small fry but he’s helping out in something that’s real important to me.”

“Does it have to do with your pal Jack Burch?”

“How’d you guess?”

“A fresh rumor in the Federal Building.”

“How specific was it?”

“Just that Peterson went to the grand jury with the SatTek case and Burch had something to do with it. Also, somebody spoke to Hackett in the attorneys’ lounge. He was all puffed up like he gets in a big-fee case. He talked about spending a lot of time outside the grand jury room, which means that his guy is cooperating-of course, his clients always cooperate. So what’s new. Who’s he got?”

“The president of the company, Stuart Matson.”

“Who’s mine?”

“Robert Milsberg, the controller. I think you’ll like him.”

“I’ll like him if he does what I tell him, if he doesn’t, I ream him a new-”

“Hey, don’t talk like that about your client. He’s a sensitive guy, writes haiku. Maybe if he gets through this, someday he’ll write you a check.”

“More likely a haiku about how he can’t pay. Who’s the agent?”

“Zink.”

“Ick!”

“What do you mean ‘ick’? Clara Nance doesn’t say ‘ick.’”

“That perverted crotch gawker once spent half a day trying to look up my skirt-from the witness stand, no less.”

“But you wear slacks.”

“Now I do.”

Gage checked his watch after he hung up. Faith was just finishing up a seminar. He left her a message to call him, and his phone rang a couple of minutes later.