So…what.
Gage smiled to himself as he climbed back up to the road.
So what.
He knew the rule. Jack knew the rule.
If they ever get us…it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.
Note to the Reader and Acknowledgments
F inal Target reflects conditions in Ukraine during its first decade and a half of independence. In the course of investigations I conducted there over three years, I met with leading members of both the government and the opposition. Numerous and lengthy conversations with bankers, attorneys, State Security officers, members of Parliament, and two prime ministers, one of whom served in the corrupt and violent Kuchma regime, gave me an inside and troubling view of the practice and psychology of corruption during those years.
The stock fraud described in this book is a composite of various crimes committed in the last ten years and is not intended to stand for any particular one. Further, the characters of Matson, Granger, Gravilov, the stockbrokers, and the offshore bankers and lawyers do not represent actual individuals, but merely the parts that must be played to commit transnational crimes and the sort of people who play them. At the same time, aspects of the physical characteristics, biographies, and personalities of the characters are sometimes composites of individuals I have met in my work, sometimes just in passing. Matson, for example, was inspired by a giddy company president I sat next to on a flight from London to Hong Kong who thought that a Dutch girlfriend, a UK bank account, and “the deal” would fill the vacuum that was his life. Slava, on the other hand, was based on…well, maybe I’ll keep that one to myself.
I am better both as an investigator and as a writer due to my good fortune of having worked with interpreters throughout the world who bore the same risks as I under sometimes difficult conditions. They translated my questions into culturally appropriate forms, explained what was meant by what was said, and sometimes simply bought me time to think. Equally important were attorneys who helped me struggle through complex cross-cultural legal and ethical issues. As a representative of them all, I would like to mention the late Senior Advocate Ijaz Hussain Batalvi of Lahore, Pakistan. He will live on in Pakistani history, for ill or for good, as the prosecutor of President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and defense attorney for President Nawaz Sharif, but his true pleasures in life were his family and a lamb kebab cooked on the backyard barbecue. Like so many others, he was a joy to work with.
The counterintuitive notion of blackmail as a form of political power was drawn from the work of Keith A. Darden of Yale University, including: “Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma,” East European Constitutional Review, vol. 10, nos. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2001), pp. 67–71.
The lines, “I was much too far out all my life, And not waving but drowning,” are drawn from Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning,” in Collected Poems, p. 303, New Directions Publishing, 1983. “Beauty is the beginning of terror” is a misquotation by Matson of a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets of Orpheus, p. 5, Mariner Books, 1977 (A. Poulin, translator).
There is one partially nonfictional piece of dialogue: “If they ever get us, it’ll only be for something we didn’t do.” I first heard a line similar to this as an oblique confession to uncharged crimes by a drug trafficker and later heard a different version that originated with an attorney in the Bay Area.
While one of the thrills in private investigation is finding facts, one of the thrills of writing is that you get to make things up. I have therefore taken liberties with technology, geography, and certain physical locations.
Thanks go to Ray McMullin, Steve Homer, David Agretelis, Marian Sticht, Dennis Barley, Davie Sue Litov, Don Eichler, Randy Schmidt, Carol Keslar, Chris Cannon, and Denise Fleming. To Teresa Wong and Linh Nguyen who helped with translations. To Seth Norman, whose acclaimed angling essays are populated as often by corrupt cops and dead-eyed pit bulls as by artificial flies and actual fish. And to my cousin Bruce Kaplan, a race car driver who has walked away from more crashes on southwestern dirt tracks than Road Runner.
Thanks also to Carl Lennertz of HarperCollins, who took on this book after we met through the Book Passage Bookstore, and to my agent, Helen Zimmermann.
My mother, Martha Gore, and late father, Victor M. Gore, were thrilled to receive an early version of the book, if only hoping to find out what I really do for a living. (Mom, it’s fiction. Really.) I haven’t given a copy to my mother-in-law, Alice Litov, a minister’s widow, as it contains words she doesn’t think I even know, much less use.
About the Author
STEVEN GORE is a private investigator whose international thrillers draw on his investigations of murder, fraud, money laundering, organized crime, political corruption, and drug, sex, and arms trafficking, in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Gore has been featured on 60 Minutes for his work and has been honored for excellence in his field. He is trained in forensic science and has lectured to professional organizations on a wide range of legal and criminal subjects. Visit his website at www.stevengore.com.
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Praise
FINAL TARGET
S teven Gore bursts onto the international thriller scene with a captivating debut… Lightning paced, deftly plotted, and compulsively readable… From the boardrooms of the Bay Area to the international financial centers in London to outposts in Kiev…Graham Gage is a character worth rooting for. We will be hearing much more from Steven Gore.”
Sheldon Siegel,
New York Times bestselling author of Judgment Day
“A n action-packed debut thriller with a unique plot and vivid characters that gives readers a fascinating look into the world of international industrial espionage. I’m looking forward to the investigator Graham Gage’s next adventure.”
Phillip Margolin,
New York Times bestselling author of Executive Privilege and Fugitive
By Steven Gore
