Final Target

CHAPTER 60

A re you ready for a little work?” Gage began his call to Burch. Matson’s fifty thousand dollars was piled on Gage’s desk.

“How I’ve waited to hear those words, but the doctors won’t let me leave the bloody house. I’m not even sure I can make it down the stairs.”

“You can do it from home. Matson needs a company and an account to put money he’s got stashed, but he doesn’t have Granger and Fitzhugh to do it anymore.”

“It wasn’t just them.” The weight of the pending indictment crushed the enthusiasm out of Burch’s voice. “It was Granger, Fitzhugh, and me.”

“Hang in there, champ. They knew what was going on, you didn’t.”

Gage heard Burch take in a breath and exhale, as if recharging his resolve. “Where?”

“I sold him on Nauru.”

“What?” Burch laughed. “Let me guess. You convinced him that he’ll have actual cash piled up out in the Pacific?”

Gage felt his fear that Burch’s mind had lost its quickness and strategic sense dissolve.

“And we’ll need to use a correspondent account in Switzerland.”

The humor disappeared from Burch’s voice. “But what if something goes wrong? It’ll look exactly like what Peterson is accusing me of, helping Matson launder money.”

“Jack, you’re forgetting the Afghanistan rule. If they ever get us-”

“It’ll only be for something we didn’t do. But this time I’m doing it, and they’re probably going to find out.”

“Don’t worry. I know a prosecutor in Geneva. I’ll tell him in advance what we’re up to and give him the name of the bank and the account number.”

Gage thought for a moment. He had planned to handle the second part of the setup himself, but decided that rebuilding Burch’s confidence required bringing him along. “What do you know about Chuck Verona?”

“Just a paper shuffler. His job is just to make sure corporate fees get paid and do whatever I need to maintain companies in Nevada. And not just me, everybody in the business in San Francisco uses him. Russian immigrant. Grateful to be in the States.”

“Any Russian organized crime connections?”

“None that I ever heard of. There’s always a risk that he was unwittingly used-I know how that is.”

“Does he trust you?”

“Of course. I’m the one who passed his name around.”

“Matson sent three FedEx boxes to a company called Checker Trading in Las Vegas that Verona runs. They contain microchips he’s stealing to fund his lifestyle until he can tap his offshore money again. Find out from Verona what he did with them-”

“I see where you’re going. Then we backtrack the money from the Swiss correspondent account-”

“And dress the little punk in prison stripes and drop him on Peterson’s doorstep.”

Gage’s cell phone rang the moment he hung up from Burch. It was Milsberg.

“He’s traveling again. To London. First-class. And we’re running out of money for office supplies. I searched his office when he went out to lunch and found the ticket in his briefcase. Same flight as last time, and-this is the good part-a book about Kiev. Brand-new.”

“Is there a ticket for Ukraine?”

“No. But he must be traveling there. Matson isn’t a reader.”

Gage got up from his desk, looked over the charts and chronologies hanging on his wall, wondering both what Peterson expected to learn as a result of allowing Matson to travel out of the country again and why Matson hadn’t booked his flight all the way through to Kiev.

Does Peterson even know he’s traveling? Gage asked himself. And is Kiev part of Matson’s exit strategy? Slip out of London and break the chain connecting his neck to Peterson’s hand? Maybe even make the sale to Mr. Green in the comfortable surroundings of a Ukrainian dacha?

Gage snagged an international treaty book from the shelf, checked the index, and turned to the U.S./Ukraine section.

There wasn’t an extradition agreement.

The U.S. couldn’t touch him any more than it could touch Gravilov or the other gangsters involved in the scam. Matson and Alla would live happily ever after, just out of reach.

But treaties only bound governments.

Gage flipped the volume closed and reached for his cell phone to call a man who didn’t accept the legitimacy of either.