“No. I think poison in the tablets did.”
“Hey man, I didn’t sign up for that.” Jeffrey looked again at the door. “Shit. Then who’s trying to kill me, Palmer’s people or Botas?”
They were one and the same, but it wasn’t something Jeffrey needed to know.
“Botas. You seem to be a link in a chain that needs to be broken.”
Jeffrey leaned away from Gage as if he was afraid of being caught in a crossfire. “I’m starting to think maybe you’re one, too.”
Chapter 81
'You’re in the crosshairs.” FBI senior special agent Joe Casey’s voice blasted through the phone at Gage the following morning. Gage imagined him stomping around his Federal Building office. “Because of what happened yesterday.”
“How’d you find out so fast?” Gage was sitting at his desk searching online news reports to see how the shooting at MetroTowers had been reported. He and Jeffrey had been convincing. It had been reported as random shots, just an aggravated malicious mischief, and neither of their names had been mentioned.
“What do you mean, how did I find out so fast?” Casey said. “I was there.”
“Then why’d didn’t you do something?”
“They don’t let me talk in court.”
“In court?”
“Yeah, in court.”
Gage laughed. “I think we’re talking about different crosshairs.”
“Don’t laugh man, Brandon Meyer painted a bull’s-eye on your face yesterday afternoon. Mine, too.”
Gage sat up. “What?”
“OptiCom is claiming you threatened Oscar Mogasci into implicating their executives and you tampered with the recording you made of the call between Mogasci and the OptiCom president. They’ve even got a declaration from the little punk. He says you held him hostage in Zurich until he said the right words.”
“Why didn’t you call me last night?”
“Orders. The head of my office and the chief of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office ordered me not to talk to you until they debriefed me. And it didn’t end until past midnight.”
“How is OptiCom going to get around the fact that they bought stolen designs?”
“They’re claiming they came up with their own simultaneously with FiberLink.”
“That’s a crock. The material you seized during the search shows it’s not true.”
“That’s the other thing. Meyer’s making sounds like he’s going to suppress the evidence.”
“Let me guess. Based on false statements in the affidavit?”
“Yeah. And get this, that the search warrant was too broad.”
“But he signed the thing.”
“So what. His argument is that once you delete from the affidavit what the defense is claiming is false, what’s left doesn’t justify what he’s now calling a fishing expedition.”
Gage heard Skeeter Hall’s voice in his head: Asshole.
“He’s claiming you lied to him in the affidavit?”
“Not yet,” Casey said. “But he will. And that you lied to him through me.”
“Who’s representing OptiCom?”
“Two lawyers from Kemper Stewart and one from Anston’s firm to give them some extra leverage. Word is Meyer mentored him when he was a new associate twenty years ago and they stayed close after he became a judge.”
“I should’ve guessed. This isn’t about OptiCom.”
“You bet your ass it isn’t. It’s about attacking your credibility in case you want to go to the media about TIMCO. Didn’t anybody from the press call you after the hearing?”
“There were calls from the Chronicle and the New York Times and Bloomberg and a few others. I assumed they just wanted some background on OptiCom. I wasn’t going to call them back anyway.”
Gage heard Casey drop into his chair, then the sound of tapping keys.
“What are you searching for?” Gage asked.
“OptiCom’s share price.” The sound of Casey’s fist slamming his desk reverberated though the phone line. “Son of a bitch. It’s five points higher than where it was the day before we kicked in their door. The value of the OptiCom president’s stock options just went through the roof. It isn’t the wages of sin, it’s the rewards of sin. I’ll bet he made millions.”
“What about FiberLink’s claims?”
“Rumor is that OptiCom is going to buy them out and shut them up-I thought you said those women were straight shooters?”
“They probably had no choice. The cost of civil litigation would’ve wiped them out.”
Gage leaned back in his chair. He imagined OptiCom’s stock chart.
“What are you thinking?” Casey asked.
“Somebody who bought OptiCom stock the day after your search and after it dropped fifty percent, and then sold it this morning would’ve made an astronomical amount of money.”
“You mean if he was certain the case was going to go away?”
“Exactly. Buy low and wait for it to go high-and who’d be in the best position to know that?”
H ow’d you know it was going to happen, boss?” Alex Z hadn’t bothered knocking. He stood breathless in front the desk holding a file folder. “Mann Trust just gave out another three point three million dollars in loans.”
Gage pointed at a chair. Alex Z dropped into it, then scratched his head.
“There’s just one problem. I’m not sure where the money came from. Just like you thought, the investment arm of Mann Trust bought a couple of million shares of OptiCom the day after the search, right when it hit bottom, but as far as I can tell, they never sold them. The three point two must’ve originated somewhere else.”
The financial flowchart Gage had drawn in his mind fractured.
“That means our theory is wrong and there’s no way to link it to Meyer.”
“Looks that way.” Alex Z withdrew a sheet from his folder, and reached it out toward Gage. “And you’ve got nothing to fight this. It just hit the Internet. It’ll be on all the cable channels in a few minutes.”
Gage took it and read the Reuters headline:
“FBI Agent Under Investigation for Perjury, Relationship with PI Under Scrutiny”
Chapter 82
Tansy Amaro was weeping when she appeared at Gage’s office door, shoulders shuddering, face buried in her hands. He walked around his desk and put his arm around her.
“Is it Moki?” he asked.
She shook her head and pointed at the television next to the corner safe. He walked over to his desk, picked up the remote, and punched the on button. It was already tuned to CNN.
News anchor Warren Jennings stared into the camera.
The screen-in-screen showed a satellite image of Mount Shasta in Northern California.
“As you just heard, Oregon senator Edward Lightfoot’s twin engine Cessna crashed into California’s Mount Shasta at about ten-fifteen this morning, just forty minutes ago.”
The satellite image was replaced by a close-up of the snow-covered crash scene. The word “Live” was pasted across the top of the screen in red letters.
“Mount Shasta is part of the Cascade Range and rises 14,162 feet above sea level. It’s a dormant volcano,
