that?”
“It’s something Jack and I worked on in Afghanistan. I figured I better keep it locked up over here. We did a few things that might be misunderstood in light of SatTek.”
Gage punched the radio button preset to NPR while driving back to his office from the meeting with Burch’s doctors, whose vague answers and shrugs revealed nothing more than the limits of their science. He caught the closing segment of Marketplace, the afternoon business report, devoted solely to SatTek.
A Brookings Institution Fellow asked, “Where was the Securities and Exchange Commission during the last two years?”
A Harvard Law professor demanded, “Where was the Justice Department?”
It seemed to Gage that neither had answers that even satisfied themselves, much less their listeners.
The host concluded the program as Gage turned off Market Street onto the Embarcadero and drove along the pier-studded bay: “Where, exactly, do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars go when a company collapses? When a stock descends? When monitors silently flicker in empty cubicles and customers’ e- mails go unanswered? Where, exactly, is Nowhere?”
“Looks like Matson and Granger hired Mr. Burch to set up SatTek’s international operation,” Alex Z said, sitting down next to Gage in the third floor conference room and flipping open a binder. “It was run out of a holding company in London. The managing director is a chartered accountant named Morely Alden Fitzhugh IV.”
“Sounds like the name of a kid who got beat up a lot,” Gage glanced over at Alex Z. “Old money?”
“Once. His family was the last of the line to join the middle class. Now everybody works for a living. His little enterprise is called Fitzhugh Associates.”
“Which means there aren’t any.”
“You guessed it. A one-man show.”
Gage gestured toward Alex Z’s binder. “Does he have a Web site?”
“Nope.” Alex Z turned a few pages. “But here’s a screen shot of the one from the London holding company. It’s as polished as they come. They sure wanted to make the thing look legit.” He pointed at a photo. “That’s him.”
A bookish man in his early forties, with dark hair and rimless glasses, looked up from the page. Gage recognized what he was trying to project: didn’t cheat at bridge, lunched on the same thing at the same restaurant at the same time every day, except Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, he got his hair cut. A well-chosen image for an accountant, Gage thought, perhaps too well chosen.
“How about the Asian companies?” Gage asked.
Alex Z opened a second binder. “No Web sites, but here’s an old PR packet from Mr. Burch’s file.”
It showed the directors of the Chinese and Vietnamese companies to be cookie-cutter Asian managers. Both were engineers with prior experience in electronics, though not in the precise field of sound and video amplifiers. Each stared uncomfortably at the camera, hair not quite combed, cowlicks springing upward, heavy black-rimmed glasses resting on flattish noses and set off by well-fed pudgy cheeks.
Gage looked back and forth between the faces, then back and forth between the photos of the companies’ headquarters.
“I better send someone over to take a look,” Gage finally said.
His eyes came to rest on Hawei Electronics located in Southern China, and wondered if it was what the NPR commentator had been searching for: the outer edge of Nowhere.
CHAPTER 9
Y ou ain’t paying me enough to become a floater in the South China Sea,” Brian Early whined from Hong Kong as Gage sat down behind his desk the following morning.
Gage shook off the image of the pale and comatose Jack Burch that he’d carried away from his and Faith’s 8 A. M. visit. He glanced at Burch’s SatTek file and Alex Z’s research binders that he’d worked through the night before, then looked at his watch. It was after midnight in China, which meant that Early had gotten the job done in less than twelve hours, or at least had tried.
“What are you talking about?” Gage asked.
“I went to that address in Guangzhou you gave me.”
Early was the entirety of Pacific Rim International Investigations Limited. Ex-U.S. Customs agent stationed in Hong Kong for the last five years of his twenty-seven-year career. Married his Filipina maid and stayed. She really loved him. He loved himself, and talking.
“I haven’t gotten that chilly a reception since we did that software piracy case in Beijing.” Early laughed. “But at least this time the folks didn’t have guns.”
“I just told you to look, Brian, not touch.”
“Well, it was like this-”
“Whenever you begin like that, I start to feel a little queasy. What did you do? And skip the detours.”
Gage grabbed a legal pad from the top of the credenza behind him.
“Okay. You know that old Gertrude Stein line about Oakland? ‘There’s no there, there.’ Well, there was almost no there, there.”
Gage looked up at the ceiling and exhaled loudly enough for Early to hear. “Brian?”
“What?”
“You’re already on a detour.”
“Okay, okay. Gotcha. I hopped a train across the border to Guangzhou and took a taxi to the building. The office number you gave me was on the seventh floor. No elevator. I hiked up and peeked in. A picayune office. A couple of middle-aged women pushing papers. I just said the company name, Hawei, and got the big chill. Then one of them starts chanting, ‘ Bu zai zhe li, bu zai zhe li. ’ Not here, not here.”
“Was it once?”
“It was there all right. Two guys were waiting for me when I got back down to the street. Wanzi and Panzi or maybe it was Kung Fu and Dung Fu. Anyway, Wanzi gets in my face and says, ‘Can I help you?’ and I say, ‘No thanks.’ And he says, ‘It’s not here.’ So I say, ‘I just figured that out, pal.’ And then Panzi puts his hand on my shoulder and says, ‘So you won’t be coming back?’ and I say, ‘Nope, no need to.’ I kinda pawed the sidewalk for a few seconds with my knockoff Nikes, then skedaddled out of there.”
“Come on, Brian, that hardly qualifies you for hazard pay.”
“That’s not the end of the story.”
“You went back?”
“Couldn’t help myself. Last night. Late. Real late. The building is in a district of the city that the Great Leap Forward leaped over and where nobody, at least on the legit side, ever made any real dough after China joined the capitalist road. The whole area is deserted at night except for a noodle place on the first floor and a karaoke bar down the block. Just the bouncer and a couple of hookers poking their heads out. So I go around the back. The noodle shop’s door is propped open for ventilation. I figure I’ll have a little look-see. Maybe I can work my way into the rest of the building. But once I get inside, the only door goes to the basement. What the hell? I go down there- smelled like rotted pig guts.
“Looks like everybody in the building uses it for storage. Bunch of caged-in compartments, heavy chicken wire. Dried noodles, office supplies, old files, that kind of stuff. One of ’em got a big, industrial-strength canvas tarp over everything inside. So I grab a broom and get down on my knees. I jam the handle under the edge of the tarp. Weighed a ton. No leverage. But I got the corner up, and guess what?”
Gage felt his body stiffen even before he said the word. “SatTek.”
“Damn right. Must be seven, eight hundred devices. Millions of dollars’ worth. Millions. Made in the good old USA. They were marked LNA. That stands for ‘low noise amplifier.’ I looked it up on the Net. I found something about China using nonmilitary-grade detectors like these in a new flood warning system. They pick up vibrations from older dams that may be starting to weaken.”
“Could you tell when they were shipped over?”
“Nope. Could’ve been anytime up to when SatTek collapsed-maybe a last shipment Hawei hadn’t paid for
