crawling out on a fallen log above the rapids…reaching…reaching…reaching toward the young man flailing in the torrent, the crush of water filling his waders-
Gage blinked, then refocused on Kishore, his answer unspoken: Brothers are bestowed by chance and nature; friends you love by choice.
Kishore squeezed Gage’s upper arm, then turned toward Spike. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Lieutenant?”
Gage watched them walk down the hallway, hoping to read more of Burch’s future in her manner and gestures. Kishore stopped fifty feet away and rotated her hand in front of her chest, then dug into her pocket and handed Spike a small plastic bag bearing a white label. Gage knew what it contained: two mangled slugs caked with Burch’s blood, now seeming less like evidence and more like sacred artifacts. Spike cradled them in his hand and looked back down the hallway at Gage. He nodded in silent comprehension, then slipped them into his breast pocket.
Gage turned away and reached for his cell phone to call Faith. She answered on the first ring. He heard her all-terrain tires rumbling on the pavement. She and Courtney Burch were just south of Mount Lassen in Northern California, entering the desolate expanse of the Central Valley. Gage told her the truth, counting on her to mold it into softer words to pass on.
He found himself staring at the screen after he disconnected, imagining Burch’s playful face, hearing his accented voice during the calls and messages that marked the turning points in their lives. “Graham, it’s Jack, guess what, best man? Courtney said yes…I just got the bar results. If that bloody champagne hasn’t become vinegar… We’re on our way to the hospital. I can’t believe it, in a few hours I’ll be a father. Me. A father…It’s about my mother. I’m flying home to Sydney…We just got Courtney’s MRI. It’s spread to her lymph nodes…call as soon as you can.”
Gage looked up and spotted Spike striding toward him, followed by two uniformed officers. Spike directed the pair toward the ICU, then said to Gage, “Let’s go outside.”
As they walked from the emergency entrance into the parking lot, Gage found that the rain had stopped. The cloud-filtered light falling on the blacktop seemed vague and directionless; even the shallow puddles rippling in the breeze reflected nothing but gray.
Spike stopped next to his police-issued Mercury Marquis, then looked up at Gage.
“I’ve ordered round-the-clock security.”
“You really think the shooter’s coming after him?”
“I don’t know. It’s something Kishore said.” Spike formed his small hands into a tight circle like a bull’s-eye. “It was like Jack was wearing a target and the shooter scored two tens. Side-by-sides into his breastbone.” Spike widened his hands, as if framing Burch’s heart and lungs. “If he scored two fives, Jack would be dead. That’s damn accurate shooting for a maniac who’s pissed off and on the move.”
Spike opened his car door, withdrew a black leather folder, then flipped it open. “Even though the witnesses are describing road rage, I have to ask, has Jack complained to you about anybody threatening him?”
Gage shook his head.
“You know what he was working on?”
“The usual. He was in Geneva for a few days, then in Moscow.”
Gage had answered mechanically, then felt a wrenching expansion of the world as Russia, which had faded into an icy stillness since his return two weeks earlier, now came monstrously alive: a hydra head of criminal and political threats feeding off the corpse of the former Soviet Union-and willing to destroy those, like Jack Burch, who had interfered with their feast.
Spike peered up at Gage. “Weren’t you just in Moscow?”
Gage nodded slowly as a slide show of Slavic mug shots flashed through his mind.
“Did it have anything to do with Jack?”
Gage trusted Spike as a man, but if a gangster had reached across the Atlantic to assassinate Burch, no local cop could help Gage punch back.
“Not directly.”
“What about indirect-” Gage’s opaque eyes and tone of irrevocability strangled the word in Spike’s throat. He reddened. “Don’t stonewall me on this thing, Graham.”
“It’s not my decision. As long as there’s a chance he’ll survive, it’s up to him what gets revealed about what he did over there. I’m not taking that away from him.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Gage fixed his eyes on Spike. “Then I’ll decide.”
“Come on, man,” Spike’s voice turned pleading. “For all we know the guy who did this is boarding a flight back to Moscow right now.”
“Then it’s already too late.”
They stood silently at the impasse until Gage found a middle ground that he knew would leave Spike stranded.
“I’ll tell you what’s been in the European press and you can take it as far as you want.”
Spike nodded.
Gage paused, trying both to tear his mind from the image of the bullet holes in Burch’s chest and to find a way to make a complicated story short, simple, and vague enough that Spike couldn’t extract any leads from it.
“This was the issue,” Gage finally said. “After the fall of the Soviet Union, crime bosses and politicians in Russia and Ukraine began using the natural gas trade as their private piggy bank. Billions of dollars were extorted by the maffiya to fund arms-and sex-trafficking schemes. Billions more were siphoned off by Russian and Ukrainian presidents to finance their political campaigns.
“The gas is Russian, but the pipeline that carries it to Western Europe is Ukrainian. And last year Ukraine tried to force Russia to give them a bigger cut of the profits by shutting off the flow. The EU went ballistic. Forty percent of what they consume comes through Ukraine. They threatened to build a line of their own through Turkey from gas fields in Central Asia.”
“But that would just put them at the mercy of a different set of crooks.”
“Exactly. That’s why the EU chose the known over the unknown and brought Jack in to restructure the market. He realized that the key was to eliminate all of the intermediaries used to skim money and replace them with a single transparent authority, a kind of joint venture run out of a third country that would have its books open to the world.”
They ceased speaking as an elderly doctor parked his car in the next space.
Spike waited until he had walked toward the hospital and out of earshot, then said, “I can understand why the Russian and Ukrainian governments might cave in; for them it’s a foreign policy issue. But not the gangsters. I just don’t see them backing off.”
“Let’s just say that they came to understand that all of Western Europe would be inspecting this thing with a microscope, and decided to show restraint.”
Spike raised his eyebrows in a knowing look that assumed what he was trying to discover: that Gage had been Burch’s emissary. “They decided on their own, or were persuaded?”
Gage cast Spike a reproachful look. “I don’t know. Maybe one led to the other.”
From the moment Burch asked Gage to join him in Moscow, he had understood that a public disclosure that they’d approached the underworld would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the plan, for everyone watching would assume that there had been a secret quid pro quo.
Spike shrugged. “If you say so.” He jerked his thumb toward the Richmond District north of Golden Gate Park, now a Little Russia. “But persuasion isn’t exactly the weapon of choice around here these days.”
A month earlier he’d complained to Gage that the mayor had summoned him to City Hall, less concerned about the slug-ridden corpses of what the newspapers were calling “Russian businessmen” than about stray bullets and November elections. Spike had called Gage as he drove away from that dressing-down, infuriated not only by the pressure, but by his own helplessness in solving murders ordered by gangsters overseas whose identities and motives he had no way of ascertaining.
“Are you sure they didn’t change their minds?” Spike asked. “Hitting Jack would send a message that it’s going to be business as usual.”
