“What do you want me to do about him?”
Peterson didn’t respond, momentarily confused by a feeling of envy. He shook it off and answered, “Nothing. He won’t find out anything. Burch can’t talk, and Matson and Granger are the only ones who know everything that happened. And only one of them is talking-and just to us.” Peterson glanced at the SatTek sign on the door, then back at Zink. “Don’t have Matson come to the Federal Building anymore. Gage may put a tail on him. I don’t want him to figure out that Matson is cooperating.”
Zink grinned. “Until he reads the indictment?”
“Yeah. Until he reads the indictment.”
CHAPTER 19
Z ink telephoned Matson, directing him to an FBI safe house in Palo Alto and telling him only that they needed to have a heart-to-heart. He cringed during the entire drive down. He dreaded having this conversation with Matson, this touchy-feely crap. He almost gagged when he spotted Matson and his lovelorn little face waiting on the doorstep.
“Her name is Alla Tarasova. I didn’t even learn her last name until after we’d slept together when I got back from Lugano.
“She was pretty much on her own. Divorced. Her mother is dead. Never close to her father. He moved out of Ukraine when she was a kid and set up a business in Budapest. She hasn’t talked to him in years. Hates him so much that she resents the way Russians and Ukrainians have to take their middle name from their father’s first name. Hers is Petrovna. Alla Petrovna. It was like a burden to her, so she refuses to use it, even when she introduces herself to Russians and Ukrainians.
“We lay there in bed the next morning, looking out over London.
“Sure, it had crossed my mind that her aim was to use me to get a green card, so I decided to test her a little and asked her what she wanted out of life.
“She’s really into language, so she told me this word, uyutnost. It means ‘coziness.’ Then she said, ‘If there is love and intimacy, even the poor can have uyutnost.’
“After she said that, I knew she wasn’t after money.
“It almost made me cry.
“Then she told me intimacy was something she never got from her ex-husband, and that Ukrainian men are horrified by it. She explained it by giving me another word, trast, and said that for women it means ‘passion,’ but for men it means ‘terror.’
“It’s ironic when you think about it. The first words people usually learn in another language are ‘hello,’ ‘good-bye,’ and ‘thank you.’ And there I was learning ‘coziness’ and ‘passion.’
“I asked her straight out whether that’s why she slept with me, just because I wasn’t him and I wasn’t Ukrainian.
“And here’s where she could’ve looked up at me with baby-girl eyes and told me what I wanted to hear, but she didn’t.
“‘Who knows why,’ she says. ‘Because it happened, today happened. Isn’t that enough reason?’
“Sure as hell was.”
“Pathetic,” Zink said, as he dropped into a chair in Peterson’s office at the end of the day. “Fucking pathetic. Can’t I get back to some real investigation?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Fitzhugh.”
“What’s Matson say?”
“That he’s as dirty as they come. Knew everything. Been running these kinds of scams for years.”
Peterson thought for a moment. “I wish I knew what was going to happen with Burch, so I could decide who to make deals with.”
“What are you hearing?”
“There seems to have been some improvement. He’s moved his hands-but not like he’s actually responding to anything.” Peterson jerked his arm. “That kind of thing.”
Peterson tapped his forefinger on the edge of his desk. “It’ll look bad if the press thinks we’re singling out a road-rage victim-especially a guy like Burch. They’ve been making him into some kind of hero. The U.S. Attorney won’t like it. He likes press coverage, needs it for his campaign for governor, but not that kind.”
Peterson gazed out of his window toward the tree-covered Presidio and the Pacific Ocean beyond. “Let’s make the case look real international.” He looked back toward Zink. “How many countries so far?”
“Switzerland, United Kingdom, Panama, Liechtenstein, China, Vietnam.”
“That’s the way we’ll play it. Let’s indict Burch as soon as he’s conscious-”
“You mean if.”
“Yeah, if…along with Fitzhugh, Granger, the stockbrokers, and maybe some bankers in London and Switzerland. They all knew the whole thing was bogus.” Peterson grinned. “We’ll call ’em fugitives. International fugitives. The boss loves feeding that shit to the press. And Burch won’t look so much like a victim, even if they have to roll him into court in a wheelchair.”
Peterson glanced at his wall calendar. “You better break off what you’re doing with Matson and scoot over to London before Fitzhugh goes underground. He’s got to be hearing drumbeats by now.”
“I’ll call the guy in the Serious Fraud Office who got us the Barclays Bank records.”
“Tell him we’ll send a Mutual Legal Assistance Request as soon as we get Washington’s approval. In the meantime, maybe he can start checking out Fitzhugh-but carefully.”
Zink rose to leave.
“We don’t want this guy spooked,” Peterson said. “So make sure they don’t haul him in until we’re ready.”
CHAPTER 20
W hoever dumped Fitzhugh’s body into the Thames on the day Chief Inspector Devlin and Agent Zink were to knock on his door wasn’t a fisherman, a meteorologist, or a sailor. Instead of drifting out to the North Sea, Fitzhugh’s remains rode a tidal surge upstream, driven by winds blowing in from the east. Fishermen dropping lines off Victoria Embankment, where he was found wedged between a skiff and a piling, considered and debated the matter for weeks. The consensus, ultimately, was that Fitzhugh must’ve been dropped into the river at St. Katharine’s Docks, perhaps even dragged down Alderman’s Stairs. In any case, certainly no nearer than the Tower Bridge. After all, the paper said Fitzhugh hadn’t been dead all that long when the young solicitor walking in the darkness along the river toward his office in Blackfriars vomited at the sight of Fitzhugh’s headless and limbless torso floating by.
Chief Inspector Eamonn Devlin was disappointed. While some officers viewed the murder of a criminal as just deserts, Devlin figured it was no more or less than a timely escape from justice. He often fantasized about becoming the Lord High Executioner, thinking it a shame that the position no longer existed.
Devlin wasn’t personally certain Fitzhugh was a crook, but when the FBI rings up and asks you to perform discreet inquiries, and when an agent arrives bearing a most solicitous letter from Washington, it wasn’t much of a leap.
By the time he’d noticed the homicide entry on the morning bulletin, Fitzhugh’s two arms and one leg had been recovered. By noon, when Zink arrived at Devlin’s office, Fitzhugh’s head, which had been bobbing along and unnerving tourists near the Houses of Parliament, had been netted by a passing tour boat captain.
Just before 2 P. M., Devlin received word that Fitzhugh had been provisionally identified based on a missing person’s report filed by his wife when he hadn’t returned home the previous evening.
Devlin walked Zink down the hallway in the City of Westminster’s Agar Street Station to meet with Inspector
