“Let me tell you about…” He coughed again, then wiped his mouth. “About how I met him.”
“Just try short sentences, Jack.”
Burch nodded. “Conference. In London.” Burch drew on the oxygen. “Recommended by colleague…Nothing dodgy about him…My London people…too busy. Matson seemed low risk. So I gave him Fitzhugh to…to manage the holding company.”
“What happened?”
“Him and Matson. And Granger. Must’ve done things. On their own. Used my name, my connections. Changed the companies. Got new ones.”
Burch drew on the oxygen. Short, hard gasps on the edge of gagging. Body weakened, wracked by coughs. Breath raspy, wheezy.
Gage reached again for his shoulder. “Why don’t we do this later?”
Burch shook his head. “Got to finish…All in my head…too long… Fitzhugh and Matson…Matson came to my office…asked me to set up a company…to buy real estate and make investments. TAMS Limited.”
“Why didn’t Fitzhugh do it himself?”
“Said Matson was my client…Didn’t want to steal him.” Burch took in a breath, then looked up. “I didn’t understand where Matson was getting his money…He said stock options. But it was too soon…for him to exercise them…Then said inheritance.”
“So you backed off?”
“No choice.”
Gage didn’t show the relief he felt. At least Peterson couldn’t link Burch to SatTek’s money laundering.
Burch’s eyes teared. “Maybe if Fitzhugh hadn’t set up TAMS…”
“So you know?”
“Murdered. Horrible…My secretary found out. His wife, too.” Burch looked up at Gage. Childlike. Tears spilling from his eyes. No longer seeming the international lawyer or daredevil skier, no longer living on the edge by choice.
“Graham, I’m afraid.”
Gage reached his arm around Burch’s shoulders.
“I know. Don’t worry, champ. They had their chance at you, and they’re not getting another.”
Gage remained at Burch’s bedside until his friend fell asleep, then went in search of Faith and Courtney. He found them in the hallway walking back from the cafeteria.
“Courtney,” Faith said, reaching around her shoulders, “you need to tell Graham.”
Courtney looked up at Gage. “Promise you won’t say anything to Jack yet, please.”
Gage nodded. Burch’s tears had told him that the less Burch knew about what was going on outside his hospital room, the better.
“A man came to serve Jack with a subpoena for his files. A class action suit.” She glanced at her husband’s room. “I had to block the door to keep him outside.”
Gage knew this skirmish in the battle would be coming; he just didn’t know when and what angle they’d take. “Did they name Jack?”
“No. They just want his records. Jack will be devastated if he gets named. It’ll be bad enough just to testify.”
“Who’s the law firm?”
“Simpson amp; Braunegg.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Gage tried to herd Courtney toward Burch’s room, but she remained planted.
“Graham,” Courtney peered up into Gage’s eyes, “tell me the truth. Did Jack do something wrong?”
He looked toward Faith as if to say he wasn’t ready for this conversation, then back at Courtney. “I don’t think so, at least not intentionally.”
She shook her head. “You’re not telling me everything. I need to know. It’s my life, too.”
Gage tried to fend her off, not with a lie, but with the truth. “I don’t know the whole story yet.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
“I need to look into a few more things.”
Courtney’s eyes were still fixed on him. “Please.”
He felt his resistance break under the recognition that if he was in her place, he would’ve demanded the truth, too. Without it there’d be no firm ground on which to stand in the face of the gathering storm.
“Let’s sit down.”
He led them to a corner of the waiting room, where they huddled in chairs under an indoor palm. Gage outlined what he’d learned, and how the case was closing in around Burch. By the end Courtney was no longer looking at him, her head hung, eyes focused on her interwoven fingers resting on her lap. Faith reached her arm around Courtney’s shoulders.
“I think Peterson is aiming at a conspiracy case based on the substantive offenses of wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering. That way he can go after Jack for crimes committed by the others, even if he didn’t know exactly what they did. Peterson just needs to show what the others did was foreseeable.”
Courtney looked up. “But if he wasn’t part of it, how can anything they did be foreseeable?”
“That’s the burden of proof in conspiracy cases.”
“But what’s that based on?” Courtney’s face bore the bewilderment of a person lost in a maze of underground tunnels. “I mean, how do they prove-”
“Words. Conspiracies are words. And proof in conspiracy cases is how the words are repeated.”
“But that’s hearsay. I thought-”
“Conspiracies are the exception to the hearsay rule.”
Courtney’s shoulders slumped. “So it’s whatever Matson says.”
Gage nodded. “And to be of value to the government, Matson needs to say that Jack was a coconspirator. That’s what the government wants to hear. In fact, that’s all they’ll accept. Peterson has spent a lot of time and a lot of the government’s money on this case and it all hinges on Matson.”
Courtney turned fully toward Gage. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”
Gage searched his mind for a way to begin that wouldn’t end by crushing her determination to fight. He decided to start at a distance.
“Part of what Jack does is tax law. In fact, that has a lot to do with how Jack structured SatTek’s offshore companies. He set them up so that the profits from sales made outside of the U.S. wouldn’t be taxed here.”
“But he didn’t know they were all fake.”
Gage nodded and took her hand. “Of course he didn’t.”
“But-”
Gage held up his palm. “Let me finish.”
She nodded.
“Everybody knows what a burglary is. It’s just a matter of overlaying the law onto the facts. But tax law is different, it’s made by people testing limits. And that’s because there is no way the U.S. Congress or the Russian Duma or the Hong Kong Executive Council can anticipate all the inventive ways people do business.
“The problem is that Jack sometimes works the way he skis. Naively. Overconfidently. Always on the edge. And his clients are always trying to push him over, sometimes just by not telling him exactly what they’re up to. Then, if the client gets in trouble, he says, ‘My lawyer told me it was all right.’ It’s cowardly, but that’s what they do.”
“But this is a lot more serious than a tax case.”
“Yes.”
“How serious?”
Gage shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”
“Graham.” Her eyes searched his face.
“I haven’t figured it out. The sentencing guidelines are about a thousand pages long. Then you need to do a lot of calculating. Points are added for some things, deducted from other things. And you have to figure in the amount of the loss. So it’s very complicated.”
“Graham, I need to know.”
