Final Target

CHAPTER 50

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.

“Did they get the test results yet?” Gage asked.

“The infections are gone. Courtney said Jack can go home tomorrow. He’s ready to go. Believe me. The nurses caught him chewing on a leg from that Thanksgiving turkey you sent in. Everyone smelled the stuffing and sweet potatoes from the moment the delivery kid stepped off the elevator. Dr. Kishore thought it was a riot. It was good to see a smile on his face, the way he’s been batted around by doctors.”

“The problem is that he may be making himself just healthy enough to get batted around by the lawyers. Things are heating up on the civil side. Matson thinks it’s to his advantage to shut down SatTek and sell off the pieces.”

“Should Jack’s firm intervene to try to stop him?”

“I won’t know until I figure out whether SatTek is worth more than the sum of its parts, and that means first finding out what the intellectual property is worth. Do you know anyone in the electrical engineering department at Cal who can help me out? Even better, someone who’s retired?”

“And who has a sense of adventure and can keep his mouth shut?”

“Exactly.”

“I know just the guy.”