Final Target Read online

  Steven Gore

  Final Target

  For Liz,

  the love of my life and gentle critic

  who taught me the craft of storytelling,

  one question mark at a time

  Contents

  Prologue

  More surprising than spinning out of control, than smashing through…

  Chapter 1

  Come on buddy, don’t die on me. Don’t you dare…

  Chapter 2

  The city began to emerge as Gage drove down the…

  Chapter 3

  Stuart Matson, president of SatTek Incorporated, faced Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson…

  Chapter 4

  We heard it on the news, boss.”

  Chapter 5

  Let’s start with Edward Granger,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson said, beginning…

  Chapter 6

  At seven on the morning following Burch’s shooting, Gage displayed…

  Chapter 7

  Assistant U.S. Attorney William Peterson opened an FBI evidence envelope and…

  Chapter 8

  At 9:30 A.M. Gage pulled into a parking space behind…

  Chapter 9

  You ain’t paying me enough to become a floater in…

  Chapter 10

  It never crossed my mind that your two bookends would…

  Chapter 11

  Mr. Hackett, there’s a Mr. Peterson on line one.”

  Chapter 12

  Gage and Spike were working the Take Back the Streets…

  Chapter 13

  That wasn’t so bad, was it, Scoob?” Zink asked as…

  Chapter 14

  Hey, Graham. There’s a rumor going around that the attorney…

  Chapter 15

  Was Fitzhugh a competent guy?” Zink asked Matson as he…

  Chapter 16

  I thought your pal in Washington told you to fold…

  Chapter 17

  Zink looked over his notes from the previous day, wondering…

  Chapter 18

  How’s Matson doing?” Peterson asked, walking into the SatTek room…

  Chapter 19

  Zink telephoned Matson, directing him to an FBI safe house…

  Chapter 20

  Whoever dumped Fitzhugh’s body into the Thames on the day…

  Chapter 21

  When Gage arrived at his office after a futile morning…

  Chapter 22

  Oceanside’s Pleasant Acres wasn’t near the ocean, wasn’t pleasant, and…

  Chapter 23

  Is this how they pumped it up?” Gage asked Alex…

  Chapter 24

  The train is leaving the station,” William Peterson told defense attorney…

  Chapter 25

  Viz was just finishing a large pepperoni and anchovy pizza…

  Chapter 26

  Don’t panic,” Gage said when he dropped his business card…

  Chapter 27

  Mr. Gage, this is Robert Milsberg.”

  Chapter 28

  Twenty-four hours later, Gage was standing in the economy line…

  Chapter 29

  Hixon One, parked down the block from Matson’s flat, gave…

  Chapter 30

  Plump little Totie Fitzhugh had spent the week after her husband’s…

  Chapter 31

  Allo,” the heavy voice spoke into the phone.

  Chapter 32

  They only had eyes for each other,” Mickey told Gage…

  Chapter 33

  Faith was waiting curbside when Gage walked out of the…

  Chapter 34

  Peterson and Zink arrived ten minutes early for their meeting…

  Chapter 35

  The middle-aged foreperson seated at a semicircular raised judge’s bench…

  Chapter 36

  Edward Granger arrived at the driving range of his country club…

  Chapter 37

  A voice mail from Peterson was waiting for Gage when…

  Chapter 38

  You’re right,” Gage said, “the beef chow fun isn’t bad.”

  Chapter 39

  When Gage walked into his office the next morning carrying…

  Chapter 40

  When Gage and his interpreter, Pavel, were invited into the…

  Chapter 41

  Let me get this straight,” Peterson said, his sarcasm reverberating…

  Chapter 42

  Burch was sitting in a reclining chair when Gage and…

  Chapter 43

  Derrell Williams, an ex–FBI special agent who’d worked with Gage for…

  Chapter 44

  Franklin Braunegg was just biting into a BLT when Gage pulled…

  Chapter 45

  I think we’ve got a leak from the grand jury…

  Chapter 46

  Why is somebody keeping Matson alive?” Gage wondered aloud when…

  Chapter 47

  Mickey took it. He just lay there and took it.

  Chapter 48

  Hixon Two called back early the next morning, catching Gage…

  Chapter 49

  Gage called Alex Z into his office after driving in…

  Chapter 50

  Mr. Gage, you’ve got to stop him.”

  Chapter 51

  The ranch-style house on Grizzly Peak Road, high in the…

  Chapter 52

  I’m sorry I sounded so panicky on the phone,” Milsberg…

  Chapter 53

  Westbrae Ventures Executive VP Herb Smothers was wiping his mouth…

  Chapter 54

  Can you come to the lab?”

  Chapter 55

  Alex Z designed business cards for Gage and Blanchard and…

  Chapter 56

  We’ve done everything we can,” Peterson said when he stopped…

  Chapter 57

  Matson arrived for his dinner meeting with Mr. Green and Mr. Black,…

  Chapter 58

  Gage rolled out of bed at 6 A.M. and called…

  Chapter 59

  Mr. Green returned Matson’s calls when he arrived back from Switzerland.

  Chapter 60

  Are you ready for a little work?” Gage began his…

  Chapter 61

  Gage’s flight landed at Borispol Airport fifty kilometers west of…

  Chapter 62

  When Gage walked into Kiev’s Pechersk Restaurant, he found that…

  Chapter 63

  At 9 A.M. Gage and Ninchenko entered a battered Volkswagen…

  Chapter 64

  Lovers’ quarrel,” Ninchenko said after he disconnected his cell phone.

  Chapter 65

  Ninchenko bumped Gage with his elbow as they drove toward…

  Chapter 66

  I think they finally made up,” Gage said to Ninchenko,…

  Chapter 67

  Ninchenko and Gage drove back toward the apartment, leaving Ninchenko’s…

  Chapter 68

  Midnight shadows dominated the wide boulevard sweeping through the heart…

  Chapter 69

  Low clouds hanging over Dnepropetrovsk muted the daylight that met…

  Chapter 70

  At 7:15 P.M. Gravilov’s car reappeared at the hotel. Gravilov,…

  Chapter 71

  The sun broke through the previous day’s cloudy remnants as…

  Chapter 72

  In the early evening, Hixon One was reclining in his…

  Chapter 73

  A white-coated doctor waited in the darkness just off the…

  Chapter 74

  Gage and Alla returned to the hospital in early afternoon.

  Chapter 75

  Mr. Green? This is Mr. Black.”

&n
bsp; Chapter 76

  Special Agent Zink was waiting near the customs scanners when…

  Chapter 77

  Peterson called seconds after Gage sat down in his office…

  Chapter 78

  Alex Z was sitting cross-legged on the landing in front…

  Chapter 79

  At 3 P.M. Gage turned off the main highway onto…

  Chapter 80

  I’ve got him stashed,” Gage told Peterson across the conference…

  Chapter 81

  Burch and Gage stared at the flames consuming oak logs…

  Chapter 82

  Just after sunrise Gage returned from the FBI’s Northern California…

  Epilogue

  Gage pulled his car onto a dirt patch along the…

  Note to the Reader and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Steven Gore

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  Eighteen Months Earlier

  More surprising than spinning out of control, than smashing through the railing, than tumbling trunk-over-hood down the hillside; more surprising even than the sheet metal buckling around her, was that she was dying in English. The woman tried to die in Russian, then in Ukrainian, but the words had forsaken her. Even her given name had fled into the swirling dust at the bottom of the ravine. She remembered only what others called her: Katie.

  Katie grieved the loss of the inner voice of her childhood, as she knew would her parents, then comforted herself with the knowledge that they’d never find out.

  The police officers standing with an interpreter at their apartment door would say she died instantly, sparing them the horror that their only child suffered any final thoughts at all.

  In truth, she felt no horror. Nor panic. Nor dread.

  There was just the rush of wind in the eucalyptus, as if an overture to the passing of her life before her eyes. But her mind drifted not into the past, but to another place in her present: her SatTek coworkers gathering a mile away, under coastal redwoods surrounded by acres of spring grass. She wondered whether they would miss her, backtrack along the twisting road when she didn’t answer her cell phone, or notice the broken railing as they drove home sunburned and bleary-eyed, then scramble down the hillside to find her body. She wished she could freshen her makeup and comb her hair, just in case.

  Katie inspected the red soil blanketing the gray vinyl interior, then looked through her burst side window at dust dancing and gliding in a beam of morning sunlight. She heard the rustling of tiny feet in dry leaves. Perhaps a rabbit, a gray squirrel, or a finch returning to its work, pecking at wildflower seeds scattered by the three thousand pounds of steel and glass that had thrashed the hillside.

  A warm gust churned the air. She smelled her mother’s kitchen in the bay leaves sweating in the overhanging branches and in the sage and fennel crushed by her car. She then saw herself at the dining table a month earlier, hunched over her laptop, heart pounding, typing a San Francisco address, and then later, hands shaking as she slid a letter into the corner mailbox.

  Dear Mr. Special Agent in Charge:

  The president of Surveillance and Targeting Technologies of San Jose, California, is engaged in a massive—

  Which of them knew? Which of those she saw in her mind’s eye just a mile away, starting charcoal, setting up volleyball nets, pinning down the corners of tablecloths with ketchup and mustard bottles. Those men tossing footballs and glancing over at the women in little outfits they’d never worn to the office. The women trying not to giggle at white nerd-legs stuck into brown socks and clearance-rack Nikes or stare too long at the Cancún-bronzed chests of the men from the loading dock.

  Which of them knew? A chill vibrated through her body. Which of them knew that she knew?

  The lenses of her eyes changed focus from the thistles and nettles beyond the fractured windshield to the pale green Tupperware lying upside-down on the dashboard, her potato salad still sealed inside. Wasted. Even back home in Lugansk among the collapsed coal mines, even in the worst of times, no one wiped off blood to eat the food of the dead. It would be—What did Father Roman say? It would be like eating the bread of the Eucharist without the sacrament.

  Katie closed her eyes, her shallow breath once again infused with bay and sage and fennel—then a wrenching vertigo, as if she’d been tossed from a sailboat twisting in a hurricane. My name…I need…to know…my name.

  She wanted to smile when it finally reached out to her from the whirlwind…Ekaterina. But there wasn’t time.

  CHAPTER 1

  Come on buddy, don’t die on me. Don’t you dare die on me.”

  The rain-slickered EMT pressed hard on the side-by-side bullet holes in the fifty-year-old jogger’s sternum while a paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over the man’s nose and mouth. The runner was splayed out on a predawn sidewalk fronting ten-million-dollar mansions in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights.

  “Come on, man. Hang in there. You’re gonna make it. You’re gonna make it. You just gotta help me.”

  “One, two, three, lift,” and the victim was moved from the wet concrete to the collapsible gurney. “One, two, three, lift,” and the gurney was raised and rolled toward the fire department ambulance.

  “Any ID?” a beat-weary patrol officer asked as the gurney slid into the back.

  “Nothing. Just this hanging around his neck.” The EMT tossed over a silver chain and house key. “Sorry, I couldn’t get his name.”

  The cop rotated the key between his fingers and inspected it under the streetlight as if puzzled by how a jagged sliver of metal could imprison him on duty long after his shift. He shook his head slowly, then looked up. “Am I supposed to try this thing in every fucking door in San Francisco?”

  “Just do your job,” the EMT mumbled as he ran toward the cab. “Just do your job.”

  Private investigator Graham Gage lowered the barbell onto its crutches, then grabbed his ringing cell phone from the carpeted floor of his basement gym.

  “Graham, it’s Spike.”

  “Can’t be.” The wall clock read 5:37. “The only Spike I know is still lying in bed dreaming about bass fishing.” Gage expected a clever response. He didn’t get one.

  Spike’s voice held steady. “It’s about Jack Burch.”

  Gage felt his heart twist in his chest. He pushed himself up from the weight bench, then braced the phone against his shoulder and ripped off his lifting gloves. Spike was the lieutenant in charge of SFPD Homicide.

  “How bad is it?” Gage asked, heading toward the stairs to the main floor.

  “I don’t know. It just came in.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  “Hold on…3E44…What’s your 1020?”

  Gage took the steps two at a time. He caught a jumble of voices and static as the officer answered.

  “They’re just pulling into SF Medical,” Spike said.

  A crack of thunder drew Gage’s eyes toward a wall of windows in the living room of his Oakland post-and-beam house. He had expected to see the lights of San Francisco across the bay, but a late-October alloy of fog and storm clouds sweeping in from the Pacific had enveloped the city. Even the oak branches that framed his view were webbed in gray, their resident birds mute, invisible, cowering against a squall advancing up the hillside.

  “What happened?” Gage asked as he climbed toward his third floor bedroom.

  “The uniforms on the scene are telling me it was road rage. Witnesses said he’d just started jogging from his house when a guy blew the stop sign at Webster and Pacific. Jack yelled something and the asshole did a U-turn, fired a couple of shots, then took off. A neighbor recognized Jack as they put him into the ambulance.”