Steven Gore - Final Target

“I am. Him and the guys who jacked me.” Zink offered a weak smile. “I feel like a fucking idiot.”

“Tough break. What can we help you with?”

“I need to talk to you two.” Zink remained standing near the door as if hesitant to approach Burch. “See if you have any ideas about where Matson might go, where he might’ve stashed money. He’ll need some cash to live on. And I gotta go through you to speak to Alla, see what she knows.”

“Matson turned out to be a lot smarter than any of us figured,” Gage said.

“Sure was.”

“Well, I’m sure as bloody hell not talking to you,” Burch said. “And I have no apologies.”

“I know you’ve got hard feelings, but I was just doing my job.”

Burch’s face darkened. “Not very well, I’d say.”

“Matson was just so believable,” Zink said. “He fooled us, me and Peterson.”

“Jack’ll calm down in a minute,” Gage said. Then he felt his heart thump as his mind flashed back on Zink poised on the stairs, but kept his voice steady. “Why don’t you take a seat. Maybe we can figure out where he went.”

Gage glanced backward, as if looking for a chair, then spun back at the sound of a ripping Velcro holster strap. His right cross hit Zink in the jaw-

“Graham!” Burch yelled. “What’re you doing?”

A left jab to the nose brought up Zink’s hands, and a right uppercut just below the ribs dropped him to the floor. Gage then knelt down and yanked Zink’s gun from his holster, a battered Ruger. 357.

“What’d you do, Zink? Buy this on the street? Steal it from the evidence room?”

Zink curled up next to the threshold, covering his head as if expecting the next sound to be the gun butt against his skull.

Gage pulled up Zink’s left pant leg, then tore off his ankle holster.

“What’s going on? Graham, he’s a federal agent.”

Gage looked over at Burch, then held up his left hand, trigger finger curled. “The man who shot you now has a face.”

Burch’s mouth dropped. “But he’s…”

Gage glared down at Zink as a nightmarish image sent a tremor through him: Katie Palan’s car spinning out of control and tumbling down the hillside.

“It was the letters.” Gage glanced at Burch. “First Katie sent an anonymous letter about the illegal sale of video amplifiers to Ukraine, and Zink covered it up. Then she sent a signed one about the stock fraud, so he had to get rid of her.”

Instant confirmation appeared in Zink’s rodentlike eyes darting around the room. He reached for a table leg and tried to pull himself to his feet.

Gage pointed down, his finger an inch from Zink’s bleeding nose. “Don’t.”

Zink fell back, grimacing as his shoulder hit the floor.

Bending toward Zink, Gage asked, “Why? Why’d you do it?”

A montage of facts, until then shadowed behind the flash of Zink’s badge or submerged in the chaos of events, turned stark and sharp-edged in Gage’s mind: the sexual harassment complaint that derailed Zink’s career, his compulsive cruising for street prostitutes, the arrests he’d slithered out of.

“Blackmail,” Gage said, as much to himself as to Zink and Burch. “First it was blackmail…then what?…I’ll tell you. They kept you from getting into trouble, even restored you to being a perfect FBI agent, by keeping your sexual addiction satisfied.”

Gage rose, then took a step backward and sat on the edge of the coffee table.

“You knew I’d figure out that they’d gotten to you, but you didn’t know when.” Gage stared at Zink, nodding his head slowly. “And you guessed wrong. Not by much, but you guessed wrong.” He stopped nodding. “What did you stop for? Gas? Burger and fries? Coffee? Take a leak on the side of the road?”

Zink’s eyes just barely widened.

Gage answered the question himself. “Lack of bladder control.” He kept looking at Zink, but spoke to Burch. “He was there when Peterson and me were talking to Matson, him blaming Gravilov and Kovalenko for the killings, for shooting you. He knew we believed Matson and thought we’d wrapped it up. He figured he had all the time in the world.”

Gage finally turned toward Burch. “If he’d gotten here thirty seconds earlier, we’d be dead.”

He then spun back, grabbed Zink by his shirtfront, and yanked him a foot above the floor. “What did you do with our little friend Scoob?”

Zink stared back without answering.

Gage jammed the Ruger muzzle under Zink’s chin, hard against his windpipe. “I said, where’s Matson?”

“Car.”

“And where’s the car?”

“Dirt road.”

Gage lowered him and retrieved an extension cord from the kitchen. He hogtied Zink and removed his car keys.

“You have my permission to blow off his head if he moves.” Gage handed Burch the revolver, then paused and looked around. “Maybe not his head.” He dragged a small table away from Zink’s right and pushed a couple of fly rods farther toward the corner. “Shoot him in the stomach. Brain matter is a helluva mess to clean up.”

Gage found Zink’s car a hundred yards up the road, then slid into the driver’s seat. He made no effort to avoid the bumps and potholes on the drive back to the cabin, under the theory that if Matson was dead, he couldn’t feel it, and if he was alive, he deserved it. Gage parked in front, then popped the trunk. Matson cowered inside, his bound hands covering his face as if flesh could stop lead.

“You want to ride down the mountain in here?” Gage asked. “Or do you want to climb out?”

Matson peeked upward, eyes widening at the sight of Gage.

Gage untied Matson’s feet, then swung them over the lip of the trunk and pulled him out. He reached to untape Matson’s mouth, then stopped.

“I really don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

Just after sunrise Gage returned from the FBI’s Northern California office in Redding, where he had delivered Matson and Zink. The strands of tulle fog he’d followed from the Central Valley into the mountains interwove the pines and oaks and had thickened into mist, but at least Zink’s road to corruption was now clear.

Gage found Burch sitting in a rocker on the porch, Gage’s first off-duty weapon, a snub-nosed Colt. 38, in his right hand, resting on the blanket covering his lap.

“What’s that for?” Gage asked, as he climbed the steps.

“I’ve had one too many surprises.”

“I can understand that.” Gage peered at the gun. “Is it cocked?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way.”

Gage leaned back against the porch railing. “It turns out that while Zink was spying on local gangsters as part of the Organized Crime Task Force, they were spying on him. They figured out his obsession and fed him a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and he wasn’t willing to trade his FBI ID for a Bureau of Prisons number. A couple of years ago, they sold him to Gravilov.”

“And that cost Katie Palan her life.”

Gage nodded.

Burch closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “That poor woman. I should’ve seen what these people were up to.” His face reddened in self-reproach. “There must’ve been something I could have done.”

Gage shook his head. “There’s no way you could’ve figured it out. Matson didn’t even know where this thing was headed in those days, and he was in the middle of it.”

Burch scanned the pines and oaks surrounding the cabin, then looked up at Gage. “But why try to kill me? I didn’t have a clue.”

“Gravilov was afraid you’d start putting together your pieces of the puzzle and they were still a couple of months away from the missile sale.”

“I didn’t even know there was any connection between Gravilov and SatTek.”