Steven Gore: Final Target

Courtney shook her mind free of the descending media storm and the tens of millions of eyes that would soon drill like termites into their lives. “I don’t know. Jack wouldn’t say.”

“Then how do you-”

“He’s been obsessed with the SatTek television coverage for the last week; alternately angry, then dejected, switching among the cable news channels, then searching the Internet, fixated on every rumor about the collapse.”

Gage reached for the lesser evil. “Did he lose money when the stock fell?”

Courtney lowered her head. “It wasn’t that.”

“You mean SatTek was a client?”

She nodded without looking up.

“Since when?”

“Two years ago. A referral from a venture capital firm in New York.”

There was a momentary silence, but neither of them said the obvious. SatTek had approached Burch just after Courtney was diagnosed. Gage and Burch had spent days together, sitting outside the Stanford Cancer Center as she first underwent surgery, then radiation, and finally chemotherapy. Burch had fled from the uncertainty of her future into talking about his work, the intricacies of each deal, seeking some alternate universe, safe and controllable.

“Why didn’t he mention SatTek to me?” Gage asked.

Courtney finally looked at him. “He couldn’t. You were still working on that TM-Micro trade secrets case. He read about your testimony in the Wall Street Journal. SatTek was about to make a huge purchase of TM-Micro products, big enough to push their stock up five or ten percent. He didn’t want to create the appearance that he leaked insider information.”

She paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then her brows furrowed.

“Is that it?” she asked, searching Gage’s face. “Is SatTek the reason Jack was shot? Some lunatic shareholder?”

Gage shook his head. “Not likely. Stockholders come gunning when companies collapse, but not with weapons, only with class action lawyers. If it was otherwise, Enron headquarters would’ve become a war zone.”

Courtney’s face showed she wasn’t convinced. Her gaze drifted down toward the brown Formica table, then held there as if searching for a constellation among the littered bread crumbs.

“It just can’t be random,” she finally said, looking up. “It just can’t be. Isn’t life supposed to mean something?”

Gage sat alone in Burch’s room, next to his bed, his hand resting on Burch’s. Faith had gone with Courtney to call his family in Sydney and hers in Portland.

Random. The word repeated itself in Gage’s mind, carrying with it a feeling from his early years in homicide. He’d drive up to Twin Peaks or Russian Hill and look out over the nighttime city after a murder, especially one without witnesses, without leads, without hope. A wave of uneasiness would shudder through him as if he were staring into a vast emptiness, as if he, too, was about to lose himself into the abyss in which the victim had disappeared. That unease would soon give way, replaced not by a feigned and swaggering squad room confidence that pretended away the unknown and unknowable, but by a resolve that was as palpable as the relentless breeze flowing in from the ocean.

He’d gaze down at the lights and the shadows and at the twisted grid of streets, listening to the rumble of traffic and the howl of tugboats on the bay, then he’d get back into his car and turn the ignition, and-

Gage heard the door swish open behind him. He looked over, then stood as Courtney approached the foot of the bed.

“Graham,” she said, looking down at her husband. “I need you to find who did this. I need to know he’ll never come back to hurt Jack.”

“I’ll protect him,” Gage said, “but I can’t promise that I’ll find the man. Sometimes it isn’t possible.”

“Just knowing you’re out there searching will give me a feeling of security, of stability.” She hugged herself as if fighting off a chill. “I just feel so…so…”

“Adrift?”

“Yes, adrift.” She peered up into his eyes. “How did you know?”

As Gage walked past the waiting room an hour later, car keys gripped in his hand, he heard Spike’s voice, distant and tinny. He glanced over at the television hanging from a bracket in the far corner: CNN. The ticker told the story: “International lawyer Jack Burch shot down in San Francisco. Russian and Ukrainian presidents to issue a joint statement regarding the future of the natural gas agreement.”

The small screen showed Spike along with Dr. Kishore and the chief of police standing in the hospital lobby behind a dozen microphones. A BBC reporter yelled out a question.

Gage didn’t break his step. He already knew the answer.

“No,” Spike said, staring into the camera, “we have no leads.”

L et’s start with Edward Granger,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson said, beginning Stuart Matson’s afternoon session. “We’ll do Jack Burch next.”

Lyle Zink, the FBI agent seated to Peterson’s left, slid an enlargement of a driver’s license photograph toward Matson. It showed a white male, mid-sixties, brown eyes, long in the face, and self-possessed enough to smile at the Department of Motor Vehicles camera.

“Is that Granger?” Peterson asked Matson, who stared at the photo for a moment, then nodded.

Zink flipped it over and laid a pen on top.

“Sign the back,” Peterson said.

Matson glanced at his attorney, who gave him a slightly off-center nod. Matson signed. Zink then added his own name, the case number, and the date.

Peterson fixed his eyes on Matson. “Tell me about how you first got hooked up with Granger.”

Matson looked around the table and thought back to his first job after college. Burdened with student loans, he’d grabbed the first one that was offered, knowing that he wouldn’t stay long. I got thirty-plus years in the car business, the sales manager at the GM dealership told him the day he started. Trust me, kid, nobody likes buying from a victim. Be a man. At that moment, Matson grasped that he knew more by instinct than his boss had learned in a generation. Five minutes later, he weaseled an old guy into the driver’s seat of a new Cadillac he didn’t want, then slipped into the passenger seat, hung his head, and lied about his wife dying of leukemia. It was the first of three cars he sold that day.

Showtime.

“Looking back,” Matson said, “I guess you could say I was sort of a sitting duck.”

Matson paused, then leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table.

“You’ve got to understand what kind of a guy Ed Granger is. When he was with Westbrae Ventures in New York, he was huge. Huge. Then all of a sudden he shows up in California and comes walking into our country club. A member named Herb Wilson had invited him. They’d been in the Harvard MBA program together years ago. Herb’s wife tells my wife that the Wall Street Journal article about Granger retiring was just a puff piece. That he’d actually been forced out. Real hush, hush, and nobody at Westbrae was talking.

“I asked Herb to introduce me, and it was weird. Granger seemed to know who I was and even knew about a turnaround I’d done at Premier Switches.”

Matson noticed a smirk on Peterson’s face.

“Look, a turnaround is a turnaround whether you make a better product, or find a way to sue your competition into oblivion.” He thumped a forefinger on the table. “I chose Plan B and it worked.”

Hackett reached over and grabbed Matson’s forearm. “Take it easy, Scoob. Premier isn’t the issue.”

Matson took in a breath, then nodded.

“I knew from the moment that Granger shook my hand that he was on the prowl, and decided right then that I was going to wine him and dine him and three-putt and double-bogey thirty-six straight holes if that’s what it took to get his blessing. I’d spent twenty years waiting for a break, and I wasn’t going to miss this one.