room. The wall next to room four bore a handwritten label: “A. Ward.” The roommate was dressed, and asleep. The room smelled of urine, cigarettes, and instant coffee. Gage slipped inside, then quickly searched Ward’s closet. The elderly man stirred in his bed, rolling first toward the wall, then back. Gage froze until the man started snoring again, then checked the chest of drawers. There wasn’t a scrap of paper, even a wallet, to show that Ward had any life at all before his abandonment at Pleasant Acres.
Gage found Ward sitting alone in the patio but for a shriveled woman propped in a wheelchair at the far end. He was staring up at metal chimes, rusted and silent. A glass of orange juice rested on a low wrought-iron table, untouched. Standing, he would have been five foot ten. Good complexion. Still had most of his silver hair. Looked his age, seventy-two.
“Mr. Ward?”
Ward squinted up at Gage. “Am I supposed to know you?”
“No.” Gage adopted a sympathetic but respectful smile, as if he’d come to learn from an elder. “But I’d like to ask you about the great work you did with Northstead Securities.”
Ward looked down and repeated the name to himself, then back up at Gage, his face scrunched up in puzzlement.
“What’s that?”
“Aren’t you Albert Ward, the stockbroker?”
“Me?” Ward’s face reddened in frustration and in anger, as if he could no longer bear to walk down memory’s path only to find himself at an abyss. “If I’m a stockbroker, I would know it. Wouldn’t I?”
“Yes,” Gage said, reaching out and squeezing the bewildered man’s shoulder, “you would know it.”
Gage walked back to the reception area where Dolores was seated behind the reception desk.
“Dolores,” he said, “I don’t think it’s a good day. He didn’t even remember my father.”
“Unfortunately”-Dolores sighed-“most days are like that now.”
Gage watched her fondle the cross on the chain around her neck, as if seeking strength to bear nature’s ruthless unpredictability that revealed itself daily in the ossifying mind of Albert Ward. He felt a tenderness for her, a righteous woman trapped by her own history in a job with no future, tending for people with no past.
Gage glanced down at the sign-in book. “You mentioned other visitors?”
“Mr. Kovalenko comes once a month, of course, just for the paperwork and to pay the fees. And…” Dolores stood up, then leaned over and glanced down the hallway. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you.”
“If it’s something important, someone in the family should know.” Gage took her hand and looked into her eyes. “If you can’t rely on family and our Lord Jesus, who can you rely on?”
“You’re right, of course.” She glanced around again. “You see, an FBI agent came to visit Albert. Zink, his name was Zink. I remember because our old pastor at Love Temple Church of God in Christ was named Zink. It was such a tragedy when he died. We almost renamed the church after him. A saintly man. Except he was black and this Zink is white. But that was on another of Albert’s bad days.”
“Did Agent Zink say what he wanted?”
“No. He just talked to Albert for a few minutes just like you, then he got a box from Albert’s room and left.”
“Do you know what was in the box?”
“Just papers. There was a time when Albert liked to look through them. I’m not sure now he even remembers it.”
“Has Mr. Kovalenko visited since then?”
She shook her head.
“Dolores, I think the family would appreciate you not telling Mr. Kovalenko about Agent Zink until we can look into the matter.”
“Of course. If I was Albert, I’d want that, too. And…” She looked around again. “I don’t like that Mr. Kovalenko. You know how some people have a feature that’s just scary. You know, like eyes, especially eyes. But with Mr. Kovalenko it’s not his eyes. You can’t see nothing in his eyes. But he’s got these big meaty hands, ugly and sweaty. Like…like…”
“Like he could crush your neck with just one of them?”
“Yes. Dear Lord. Yes.”
CHAPTER 23
I s this how they pumped it up?” Gage asked Alex Z on the following morning. They stood in front of a set of four-foot-by-five-foot charts Alex Z had hung on the walls of Gage’s office that displayed dates, events, and share prices.
Gage scanned the first two entries. The stock had been issued on June 5 at two dollars a share, then jumped fifty cents a day later when Investor’s Blue Sheet made a strong buy recommendation.
“I take it Investor’s Blue Sheet is just an arm of Northstead Securities,” Gage said.
“It’s run by a defrocked stockbroker. He calls himself the Maestro.”
“Made to order?”
“All made up to order.”
On June 8, the stock jumped another fifty cents based on a rumor that the Chinese government was placing a thirty-seven-million-dollar order for sound amplifiers to be used as part of an early warning flood control system.
“Who started the rumor?” Gage asked.
“My guess? Maestro the Scumbag.” Alex Z almost spit out the words. He glared at the chart, shaking his head. “This whole thing really pisses me off. When I think of the naive people who fell for this scam…”
Alex Z lowered his head and exhaled, then waved his hand toward the share prices, as if each represented a tragedy in someone’s life. “Actually, it’s worse than that. For the first time ever, I imagined myself old and vulnerable. I felt queasy, almost seasick.” He pointed at a graph to his right and made a chopping motion with his hand that tracked the plummeting of the stock at the end of the scam. “Imagine what the older shareholders went through watching their futures collapse.”
Gage reached his arm around Alex Z’s shoulders. “Maybe we can help them get some of their money back, and give them a chance to start over.”
“I don’t know, boss. I haven’t been able to figure how the scam worked. And if we don’t know how they did it, we won’t be able to figure out where the profits went.”
“Let’s work on the how first, and the where later.” Gage dropped into a chair and looked up at the chart. “Did the Chinese ever buy anything?”
“SatTek put out a press release saying that they were still in negotiations and that was the end of it, but the share price didn’t drop back down.”
Alex Z pointed at the next entry. June 10. The stock had jumped to nearly four dollars a share based on a report that AB Labs was considering a buyout of SatTek.
“And that didn’t happen, either,” Gage said.
“AB Labs’ denial was taken as an attempt to keep the stock price down until they made their move. Meanwhile Matson, Granger, and an engineer started doing road shows. Granger to lend financial credibility, Matson to do the sales pitch and the engineer to explain the technology…And one more guy. Retired from the CIA. He talked about counterterrorism and military applications-”
“To combine the fear of growing old with the fear of dying young in a terrorist attack.”
“And it worked. The stock kept ratcheting up. You can even see little jumps every time Homeland Security raised the threat level.”
Gage scanned down to the next item. June 14–18. SatTek had been one of the most actively traded stocks on NASDAQ, and the price jumped to almost five dollars a share.
“One of the most actively traded on NASDAQ?” Gage asked. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Four brokers were responsible for most of the volume. It looks like Northstead just traded the stock among them, millions of shares, back and forth, and around and around. All the activity put the little investors into a frenzy,
