yet.”
“That can’t be right. These are made to spec. Hawei wouldn’t have ordered the devices unless it already had a contract to resell them.” Gage paused, wondering what SatTek had tossed into the Chinese black hole. “You get a sample?”
“Nope. But I was thinkin’ I should try, when this greasy T-shirt comes in waving a cleaver at the end of his string-bean arm. He’s yelling, ‘ Zie! Zie! Zie! ’ You know, ‘Thief. Thief. Thief.’ I’m still on my knees, thinkin’ he’s gonna chop my head off. So I grab my stomach and I kinda slur out, ‘ Wo he zui le ’ like I’m drunk and gonna puke. He points the cleaver at the door, then back at me like, What’re you doing in here? I reach in my pocket and he raises the cleaver again. I pull out my hand, real slow, empty, no money, like I’ve been robbed. I say, ‘ Ji nu,’ you know, ‘Hooker,’ like she came down there to do me and robbed me instead. And the guy starts laughing and points me toward the door.”
“Can you get back in?”
“No way. Right after I grabbed a taxi to scoot to the train station, I looked back and saw Wanzi screeching up in a Mercedes G55. It’s like a Land Rover, but costs twice-”
“Brian?”
“Okay, okay. Sorry. Once greasy T-shirt told ’em what I looked like I’ll bet they moved the boxes out of there, pronto. In fact, I’ll bet Wanzi or Panzi is sittin’ down there right now with an AK-47 waiting to blow my head off.”
“What about flying over to Ho Chi Minh City to look at the other one?”
“It’s your money, but I think whatever was there is gone, too.”
“Just to cover the bases. You know any Vietnamese?”
“Sure Con d cuop toi.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It sorta means, ‘The hooker robbed me.’”
CHAPTER 10
I t never crossed my mind that your two bookends would be brought together like this,” Faith said, standing in their granite-countered kitchen.
Gage took in a long breath, then exhaled. “Neither did I.”
Faith always referred to Spike and Burch as a slightly mismatched set. Immigrants from different worlds. Spike, as a five-year-old carried on his farmworker father’s shoulders wading the Rio Grande. Burch, an Oxford- trained barrister flying in on British Airways, first to add a law degree at Berkeley, then to storm the U.S. legal profession.
Now one was investigating the attempted murder of the other.
A break in the rain had allowed Gage to uncover the barbecue on the redwood deck and cook salmon steaks while Faith made rice and fixed a salad. They carried their plates to the dining room, where windows framed San Francisco against the backdrop of offshore cumulus clouds and a variegated pink, yellow, and red sunset.
Gage propped his forearms on the table and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers as he stared out at the bay.
Faith reached over and rested her hand on his shoulder. “He may make it. The doctors are telling Courtney it’s going to be a long haul.”
“Come on. I was there. That wasn’t a prognosis, it was just a way to muzzle her and keep her from demanding answers they don’t have.”
He filled Faith’s wineglass, then outlined what he’d learned about Burch’s role in SatTek.
“I love Jack as much as you,” Faith said, “but I’ve got to ask. Why are you so sure he wasn’t at least partly responsible? Maybe the lesson he learned from Courtney’s illness was that the world’s not a fair place, so there’s no reason not to grab what you can.”
Gage shook his head. “Not Jack. He never believed money was a substitute for immortality.”
“Maybe, but he wouldn’t be the first to express rage against the world as greed.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Maybe you don’t want to see it.”
Gage pulled back and looked at Faith out of the corner of his eye. “Ouch.”
“When it comes to Jack, you have a way of overlooking how impulsive he can be. It’s been that way since we were in graduate school. You, the philosopher forgiving human folly, and him, the reckless daredevil.”
“He’s just a little adventurous.”
Faith threw up her hands. “See?”
Gage smiled. “Touche.”
“And there’s something else.” She reached over and took his hand. “Loyalty sometimes comes at a price that’s too high to pay.”
“You don’t mean bailing out-”
“No. Just be careful. That burglar at Jack’s office could just as well have shot his way out.” She pointed at Gage’s bruised shoulder. “You can pretend that doesn’t hurt, but I wince every time you take your shirt off.”
They sat quietly, watching the horizon drain of color. Fog wormed its way through the Golden Gate, led in by three oil tankers making for the Chevron Refinery along the north bay.
Faith spooned salad on each of their plates, then broke the silence. “Anyway, isn’t it possible that somebody in the natural gas deal was behind Jack’s shooting?”
“Others are asking the same question,” Gage said. “I returned a call to Ambassador Pougachev yesterday morning. State Security reported to him that I’d been seen with Jack in Moscow-”
“State Security?”
Gage waved off the implication. “Since the cold war ended, they have a lot of time on their hands.”
“Graham…”
“Nothing to worry about. All Pougachev wanted to know is whether Jack brought me in to fix something that was broken. He was preparing for interviews with Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel. They weren’t satisfied with the Russian president’s answers at the press conference about whether Jack’s shooting would interfere with completing the joint venture. Winter is coming and houses need to be heated.”
“Does he think there’s a connection?”
“I don’t know. Pougachev is less interested in the causes than the effects.”
Gage cringed as the world narrowed to twin images of Burch lying helpless in the hospital and of a self- satisfied Pougachev sitting across from them in a Washington, D.C. restaurant a few months earlier, sucking on crab legs.
“Jack’s being gunned down means nothing to him,” Gage said.
“But after that dinner you two had with him, Jack said-”
“He’s never been able to understand that for the Russian elite, people are nothing more than a means to an end. He actually believed those bureaucrats from the finance and energy ministries when they expressed sympathy for Courtney and all she went through. They were really just probing for weaknesses. It was painful to watch, but I couldn’t take it away from him.”
He pointed at Faith’s plate, wanting to lighten the moment. Nothing he could say now could reverse what happened back then.
“You should have a little more salmon,” he said. “I’d hate to think this poor fish gave his life in vain.”
Faith ate a small piece, then pushed on. “Does Pougachev know that you met with organized crime bosses?”
“That’s another bit of information he got from State Security.”
“Did he ask if Jack brought you into this?”
“I told him Jack didn’t bring me into anything.”
“Did you tell him you volunteered?”
“He wasn’t perceptive enough to ask.” Gage smiled. “He doesn’t have your skills in cross-examination.” He
