W hen Gage arrived at his office after a futile morning meeting with Courtney and Burch’s doctors at SF Medical, he found that Alex Z had converted it into a war room. Conference tables. Easels. An additional computer workstation. Redbrick walls now bare, waiting for poster boards bearing flowcharts and chronologies.
“SatTek was self-underwriting,” Alex Z reported as he sat down across the desk from Gage. “They sold a lot of the stock themselves. The rest through a brokerage firm called Northstead Securities.”
Gage sat poised behind his desk, chin propped on his folded hands.
“It’s owned by Albert William Ward, a broker hanging on to his license by a thread.” Alex Z pointed toward the floors below. “I asked all of our ex-FBI people to use their contacts at the SEC. It turns out that he’s been on their radar for a long time.” He slid a Securities and Exchange Commission Litigation Release across the desk. “The Enforcement Division slapped his wrist a few years ago. He laid low for a while, then came back as Northstead.”
Gage picked it up and read it over. “Is he still in Colorado?”
“No. San Diego. Off Highway 5 close to downtown, right near the Hyatt Regency.” Alex Z grinned. “I mean real, real close by.”
Gage drew back, brows furrowed. “What does the Hyatt Regency have to do with Northstead?”
“I made you a reservation for tonight. Late check-in.”
Gage shook his head and smiled. “I think we’ve been working together too long.”
“Your flight is at 7 P. M. out of SFO.”
“I’ll be on it.”
“Pretty soon after SatTek went public, they used some stock to buy an engineering software firm in Ireland. No cash changed hands. A shares-for-equity deal. Three million shares worth about fifteen million dollars.”
“And the shareholders put up with that?”
“Some didn’t like it but it went through anyway. They thought SatTek was straying from its business plan with no justification.”
“Still, that’s quite a chunk.”
“SatTek did everything in chunks. There were eleven big shareholders. The biggest were Blau Anstalt, Azul Limited, and Cobalt Partners.”
“Blue companies.”
Alex Z’s face washed with puzzlement as if he’d gone colorblind. “Blue companies?”
“ Blau is ‘blue’ in German. Azul is ‘blue’ in Spanish. Cobalt is blue as the deep blue sea.”
“You think they’re linked some way?”
Gage nodded. “It’s not likely to be a coincidence. Any blue ones on the domestic side?”
“Nope, but there’s a large shareholder in Nevada. The registered agent is named Chuck Verona.”
“Send someone out there to find out who he is and what else he’s into.” Gage pointed at an easel bearing a fresh pad of poster board. There was already too much to keep track of in his head. “Then chart all of this out.”
“I’ll do it tonight.”
“You don’t have to spend-”
Alex Z shook his head. “I know I’m just a computer guy but something smells real bad about what happened to Mr. Burch. So I’ll be living here until you figure it out.”
Gage reached for the phone to make a call as Alex Z headed back downstairs to his office.
“Tiptoe?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Graham Gage.”
Gage heard Tiptoe chewing. He was always chewing. Gum. Tobacco. Beef jerky. He said it kept the rest of his body steady, especially his hands. His life-spent performing black-bag jobs for the good guys-sometimes depended on it.
“What’s cookin’?”
Gage heard his lips smack.
“I’ve got a little situation. You doing anything tonight?”
“Depends on what’s on the Playboy Channel and how much you wanna spend.”
“A thousand.”
“I think my cable just went out.”
“How long would it take you to get to San Diego?”
“That also depends…”
Tiptoe’s jaws fell silent.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Two hours.”
“The place is called Northstead Securities.”
Alex Z had a rental van reserved for Gage when he arrived at the San Diego International Airport. American. Gray. Anonymous. Tinted windows.
Gage made a quick run down Pacific Highway, glanced at the bay and the Naval Air Station on North Island, then cut a few blocks inland. Northstead Securities was located on the ground floor of a U-shaped glass and metal office building north of downtown. Parking places filled and surrounded the U.
At 8:45 P. M. Gage slipped into a parking space shadowed by a Torrey pine. The lights inside Northstead were still on; a few brokers remained. Gage didn’t need to bug the place to know what was going on. Every boiler room he’d ever investigated was the same. Twenty, thirty, forty cubicles. Guys, all guys. Not members of a team or a group or a staff, but a crew that moved like a toxic cloud. When it was time for Northstead to evaporate, they’d condense somewhere else and adopt a new British-sounding name with the resonance of marble columns and old money: Oxford Capital or Oxford Securities or Oxford Investments, Stratford Asset Management or Stratford Equities or Stratford Partners.
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Gage surveyed the brokers working the phones, pumping and dumping penny stocks, an archaic nickname for those selling for less than five bucks, and often, Gage knew, not worth a cent. As he watched their bobbing heads and gesticulating hands, he imagined the pitches Northstead used to push SatTek, ones appealing to the war on terror, the military’s need for SatTek’s proprietary technology to fight it, and its stock being a way to make a patriotic killing in the stock market.
Gage saw two of them jump to their feet, high-fiving their half-height cubicles. A sucker bit.
Moments after the last of the brokers turned off the lights two hours later, a potbellied little man in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans appeared out of the darkness. He opened Gage’s passenger door and climbed in. He cradled a black canvas bag on his lap.
“Can you get us in?” Gage asked Tiptoe.
“I’ve already been inside. They had a little electrical problem earlier. It fucked up their security system.”
“And you fixed it?”
Tiptoe grinned. “I caused it.”
Gage pointed at the lights glowing in a third floor window. “Do we need to worry about them?”
“No. They’re just kids running a start-up. As long as they don’t spot us going in, we’ll be okay.”
An hour later, Tiptoe jimmied the lock and stepped through the double glass doors. He pulled out a tiny flashlight, turned toward the wall, and punched in the code to disable the alarm. Gage scanned the parking lot, then followed him inside.
They stood silently, letting their eyes adjust to the semidarkness. Only the screen saver on the receptionist’s monitor and an exit sign at the end of a short hallway provided light.
Gage spotted a restroom sign and an arrow pointing down the hallway, then whispered to Tiptoe, “The file storage room is probably down there.”
Tiptoe slipped away while Gage skirted the reception station and the glass partition behind it, then headed along the carpeted floor toward the half-height cubicles of the boiler room. The empty desks seemed like epicenters of thousands of tragedies: retirement savings lost, college funds wasted, and houses in foreclosure.
Gage’s foot slipped on a piece of paper. He flicked on his flashlight. A handout for the brokers. The title: “Human Motivation.” And below that, the scales of justice with one side labeled “Greed,” the other “Fear.”
He moved on, then stopped halfway down the aisle and pointed his flashlight at a desk. A lead book. A thick
