“Granger’s dead. It’s not like he can sue anybody. And somebody in Westbrae has got to start showing some courage-and it might as well be you.”
“It’s just…” Smothers’s voice weakened. He leaned forward and peered into the darkness. Fear showed in his eyes. “You don’t understand who Granger was…and the people who he…”
But Gage did understand. “You’re afraid of something worse than getting fired.”
Smothers nodded, then swallowed hard. “I can always get another job-”
“But not another life.”
Smothers flinched at the words, then spread his hands in acknowledgment and defeat. “After what happened to Jack and to Granger, I can’t…”
Gage’s mind flashed on a bouquet that had stood by Burch’s bedside in the hospital.
“I know you want to help Jack. That was the message you were really sending with the flowers.” He looked back over his shoulder and made a show of inspecting the cars parked in the shadows along the street. Then once again at Smothers. “What do you say we step inside? I’ll make my pitch and you decide whether you can help.”
Smothers thought for a moment, studying Gage as if the answer lay with Gage, not within himself.
“The grand jury is already meeting, moving like a locomotive,” Gage said. “And I’m running out of time to derail it.” Gage shrugged. “If Jack gets indicted, it’s all going to be out of my hands. His lawyers are going to hit Westbrae with subpoenas for every piece of paper and e-mail that has anything to do with Granger, and probe into every crooked thing he did and what Westbrae knew about it. They’ll lay Westbrae open like a filleted catfish.”
Gage slowly shook his head, as if in commiseration. “I won’t be able to stop it.” He then tossed Smothers a life-line. “But I don’t need everything, I only want to know about one thing…Just one thing.” Gage locked his eyes on Smothers. “And just between you and me.”
Smothers swallowed. “What’s that?”
Gage pointed into the house. “I think we better talk inside.”
Driving back to the airport an hour later, Gage had what he needed, but was furious that with the grand jury clock ticking down, he’d consumed eighteen hours getting it.
But it finally made sense why Granger suddenly showed up in California. He had used Kovalenko and Goldstake Securities in a pump and dump with a Midwestern restaurant chain, and Westbrae had buried the crime in money before the SEC could find out about the scam.
The links in the SatTek chain snapped tight as Gage approached the rental car return at JFK. Gravilov had been running the SatTek scam from the beginning: first through Granger, then through Kovalenko, and, finally, through Alla Tarasova-and had been protecting it one dead body at a time.
Gage flashed back on the burglar’s shoulder crushing into him outside Burch’s office, then shuddered at the irony. The burglary had probably saved Burch’s life. If there was anything in the SatTek file suggesting that Burch had connected SatTek to Goldstake, Gravilov would’ve had to finish Burch off.
Gage pulled to the stop in the Hertz return line and reached toward the glove compartment for the rental agreement, but his hand froze as his heart sank. Gravilov’s people had been watching Granger the whole time. And by forcing him to run to the government to make a deal, Gage had flushed him out so they could pick him off.
He looked into his rearview mirror, now chilled by the thought that he might have led Smothers into the same trap-but then caught himself. It was a trap the coward deserved to be in. If Westbrae hadn’t concealed Granger’s crime, there never would’ve been a SatTek scam-and no need for a cover-up that left Burch bullet-ridden and Granger and the Fitzhughs dead.
But at least tonight, for whatever reason, Smothers had done the right thing.
Gage reached for his cell phone. “You have any vacation time?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for Smothers to answer. “Take it, now. And as far away as you can get.”
CHAPTER 54
C an you come to the lab?”
“When?” Gage asked, swinging his legs over the edge of his bed. He smiled to himself. The excitement in Blanchard’s voice dissipated the gloom that had enveloped Gage during the sleepless night.
“Now’s a good time.”
“Who is it?” Faith asked, propping herself up on a pillow.
Gage covered his cell phone’s mouthpiece. “It’s Blanchard.”
“Unless he’s invented a perpetual motion machine, I’m not sure what excuse is good enough for waking me up at…at…”
“Five-fifteen.”
“So, can you make it?” Blanchard asked.
“Sure. Forty-five minutes.”
Instead of heading north to Berkeley, Gage took the tunnel toward the Central Valley, then looped back over the hills. Only after he was sure he’d shaken any surveillance he might have picked up after his meeting with Smothers did he drive toward the campus.
The professor was waiting at the entrance to the concrete and glass Cory Hall at UC Berkeley when Gage arrived.
“Matson is an idiot, a greedy idiot,” Blanchard said. “The detector video amplifier is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” He peeked out toward the dark campus, and then headed down the hall toward the lab. “If any of these nerds get here early, just say you’re my nephew from…where do you want to be from?”
“Tulsa. I’d like to be from Tulsa.”
“Okay, you’re my nephew from Tulsa. What’s your name?”
“Elmore.”
“What about your last name?”
“Blanchard. I’m from your side of the family. Did you forget or are you just embarrassed?”
“Embarrassed? Never. Even as a small child I was proud of you…Little League and all that.”
Gage gave him a thumbs-up. “I think we got the story down.”
Blanchard led Gage to a computer monitor, then spread his hands as if introducing Gage to a dear friend. “Look at this.”
Gage stared at meaningless oscillations with equally obscure labels, “Pulse Response,” “Rise Time,” and “Fall Time,” all measured in nanoseconds.
“I’d like to meet the team that designed this device. It’s pure genius,” Blanchard said. “Say you installed one like this in a submarine periscope. You could see a sardine do a backflip ten miles away.”
Blanchard punched a couple of keys, and a moving bar graph appeared on the screen.
“And footprint, talk about footprint. This draws so little power, you could run it off of a hearing aid battery.” Blanchard grinned. “Well, maybe not. I exaggerate when I get excited.”
“How much is it worth?”
“I could sell the design to Vidyne Industries for ten million by lunchtime. They’d just need to market a couple hundred of the devices and they’d have made their money back, including production costs.”
Gage found himself nodding slowly. “That’s it. That’s Matson’s exit strategy. The government seizes all his stock fraud profits, and he slips away with SatTek’s intellectual property while no one is watching.”
“And there’s also the low-noise amplifier. I imagine that’s worth a helluva lot, too.”
Blanchard glanced down at the monitor. “The funny thing is that Matson could’ve legitimately made a bundle on this if he was just patient and knew how to market it.”
Gage shook his head. “No. SatTek would have made a bundle. All he would’ve gotten was a salary and maybe a Christmas bonus, and only got those until the board members realized that they could find someone better.” He paused, trying to figure out how to set a trap for Matson and drive him into it. “I think it may be time to apply the stick.”
“Or perhaps the carrot?”
Gage looked over and smiled. “Professor Blanchard, you have an evil mind.”
