CHAPTER 39
W hen Gage walked into his office the next morning carrying two cups of coffee, he found Alex Z asleep, slumped in a chair across from his desk. A ramen noodle fragment was stuck to his gray T-shirt and his right sleeve was smudged with chocolate, as though he’d wiped his mouth while staring at his monitor.
Alex Z shook himself awake, then rubbed his red, dark-ringed eyes with his palms.
“Were you up all night?” Gage asked, handing him a cup.
Alex Z stretched, then looked at his watch. “I guess not quite all of it. I came in to drop off something about fifteen minutes ago, but I guess I’m the one that dropped off.”
“You awake enough to show me how to get into the financial data?”
Alex Z reached down and picked up a folder from the floor and handed it to Gage. “I wrote it out.” He pushed his scraggly hair away from his face, then took a sip of coffee. “I ran a few searches just to test them out, and the results kept me awake. They didn’t match my understanding of how the scam worked. I got sort of panicky and wanted to figure it out before you came in.”
Gage sat down behind his desk. “What didn’t make sense?”
“I thought all of the SatTek sales outside the U.S. were bogus and only the domestic ones were real. But then I looked at the product descriptions and discovered that SatTek sold millions of dollars of DVLAs, ERDLVAs and LNAs that weren’t controlled under the ECCNs.”
Gage smiled. “Could you translate that into English?”
Alex Z’s face reddened. “Sorry, boss. I had to learn a new language to figure this stuff out. That just means they sold sound and video detection devices overseas that didn’t need government approval. Low-power ones. Under 10.5 gigahertz. Like the kind used in electronic testing equipment.”
“Why do you think they’re real sales?”
“Because the accounting system shows a lot of small orders, mostly between thirty and eight hundred thousand dollars, some a little higher. It also shows partial payments. Odd numbers. The fake payments were big round ones. One million even, two million even. Like those from the dummy Asian companies. The ones that look authentic were in amounts like $246,231 and $513,952.”
Alex Z struggled to stay focused, like a marathoner approaching the finish line.
“And I found another thing. They assigned internal purchase order numbers and used them to track the manufacturing, from ordering parts to the final shipping cost. So they knew exactly how much each device cost to build. But the fake sales didn’t track all the way through.”
Gage nodded slowly, trying to visualize the product flow through SatTek.
Alex Z faded for a moment, then blinked. “And this is interesting. It looks like the fake orders were all for the same kind of device. All digital video amplifiers with the same model number.”
“Is that what SatTek dumped in the storage rooms in China and Vietnam?”
“You got it, boss. Every single one. I can’t find any real buyers in Asia, only in the U.S. and the European Union. England, France, and Germany.”
Alex Z’s mind drifted away as he finished the sentence. He stared blankly at Gage.
“I think you need to get a nap,” Gage said.
“What? What did you want?” Alex Z blinked again and shook his head. “No problem. What country?”
“I said nap, you should get a nap.”
“Oh. I thought you said map.”
Gage came around the desk as Alex Z heaved himself to his feet. “How about I’ll take a look at what you downloaded, while you take a n-a-p.”
While Alex Z slogged off to sleep, Gage worked his way through the SatTek files, troubled by the offshore sales. He located a copy of the hard drive of the workstation used in the sales office, then found the correspondence directory, organized by country.
One stood out. A company in Ukraine, not a member of the European Union, had tried to buy twenty 18- gigahertz, military-grade video amplifiers. The application to export the devices to TeleTron Ukraina had been handled by a SatTek employee named Katie Palan.
The denial notice was blunt: This application is rejected pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act of 2000. The Bureau of Industry and Security, in consultation with the Department of Defense, has concluded that this export would be detrimental to the national security interests of the United States.
Gage wasn’t surprised. There was no way the U.S. would allow the export of military-grade devices to Ukraine; their next stop would’ve been Iran or Syria. Since Ukraine no longer had any enemies, its defense industry now existed solely to generate hard currency for a struggling economy.
He ran an Internet search on TeleTron Ukraina and found the congressional testimony of the director of the Bureau of Industry and Security:
Chairperson: Do you find that dual-use devices are redirected from civilian to military uses?
Director: Repeatedly. And it’s for that reason that we investigate who the real end users of technology are likely to be. For example, we recently discovered that a company named TeleTron Ukraina was merely a front for the Yuzhmash Defense Production Plant in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. This plant conducted most of the research for various Ukrainian radar and missile targeting systems. Additionally, I would point out that the president of Ukraine, the former head of the Yuzhmash Plant, personally approved the sale of a hundred-million-dollar Kolchuga radar system to Iraq in violation of the arms embargo.
Chairperson: Do you know what front company they’re using now?
Director: I’m sorry to say I don’t.
Gage called Robert Milsberg.
“You know how I can contact Katie Palan?”
“You can’t. She died in a car accident eighteen or nineteen months ago on her way to the company picnic.” Milsberg sighed. “She was really a sweet kid. The Highway Patrol figured a deer ran across the road-the area is lousy with them-and she swerved and tumbled down a ravine. It really devastated her parents. They blamed themselves.”
“Why’d they think it was their fault?”
“They fled Ukraine because they despised the corruption and violence, but figured if they’d stayed there, she’d still be alive.”
“The name Katie Palan doesn’t sound Ukrainian.”
“Ekaterina. Palan was her ex-husband’s name. In addition to her native language, she spoke Russian, German, and a little French, so she was involved in most of the European sales.”
After hanging up, Gage sent an e-mail to Alex Z for him to retrieve when he awoke:
“Z: Get me the names of every Ukrainian company that shows up in SatTek records. Market research. Purchase orders. Sales. E-mails. Everything.”
Alex Z answered immediately:
“I’ll get right on it.”
“What happened to the nap?”
“Couldn’t sleep-it must have been the sound of your mind working that kept me awake.”
CHAPTER 40
W hen Gage and his interpreter, Pavel, were invited into the one-bedroom San Jose apartment of Katie Palan’s parents, Gage felt as if he’d been warped back a generation earlier and thousands of miles to rural Ukraine. The living room contained a heavily embroidered couch and matching chairs, a two-door pinewood cabinet painted in vibrant green and red, three flat-weave rugs, and half a dozen egg-shaped Russian Orthodox icons.
Katie’s father, Tolenko Palchinsky, a balding, stocky man still wearing his BIG Security Company uniform, answered the door. His wife, Olena, scurried up behind him, drying her hands on a flowery but threadbare full-length apron. Air wafting from the apartment was still thick with the aroma of beef and potatoes, herring and sour cream,
