Alex Z shook his head. “Did I tell you I don’t want kids?”
“Too late, hop to it.”
“What do I say if-”
“Say you got busted in an ecstasy case.”
“But I don’t use ecstasy.”
Alex Z’s eyes tracked Gage’s as he scanned his earrings, tattoos, and unkempt hair.
“But everyone will think you do.”
Heart pounding, Alex Z climbed out of the car and followed Matson through the security checkpoint and into the elevator. Matson pressed 11, then glanced over at Alex Z.
“Thanks, I’m going there, too,” Alex Z squeaked out.
Matson stepped out of the elevator on the eleventh floor. Alex Z followed him down the hall into the lobby of the Office of the United States Attorney.
Alex Z took a seat, then waved a clammy hand toward the receptionist behind the bulletproof glass, mouthing the words, “I’m waiting for my lawyer.”
Matson walked up to the counter.
“I’m here to see Mr. Peterson.”
Two minutes later, after the receptionist handed Matson a stick-on security badge and buzzed him in, Alex Z slipped back to the elevator.
“He went into the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” Alex Z told Gage when he got back into the car. “He asked for someone named Peterson.”
“Damn.”
Gage noticed Alex Z’s hands shaking. “It wasn’t the answer I was hoping for, but good job getting it.”
He radioed Viz. “The little punk is setting up Jack in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Go down to SatTek. The workers still there are either unemployable elsewhere or real tight with Matson. Try to figure out who’s who, but be careful. We’re going to have to stay in the shadows until we can shine a little light on the inner workings of this scam.”
CHAPTER 17
Z ink looked over his notes from the previous day, wondering how much Matson was holding back. He didn’t glance up, but sensed Matson inspecting his thinning hair.
He knew more was churning in Matson’s mind than was coming out of his mouth. Fifteen years in law enforcement taught him that’s the way crooks were, even when they were telling the whole so-called truth.
Matson studied Zink’s lowered head, wondering how Zink became an FBI agent. Hackett told him that Zink’s career stalled out six years earlier, something to do with a sexual harassment complaint by one of the secretaries. He didn’t even put in his name for promotions anymore. Now just a day laborer, counting the months and years until his retirement, which Matson could see was still a long way away.
Matson decided that thinking of Zink as a rodent was probably a little unfair. Zink didn’t choose his scrawny features; they were a result of his parents unwisely choosing each other. He could only be held blameworthy for failing to mitigate his physical disadvantages. Plastic surgery might’ve helped, Matson thought, but he knew of no operation that could enlarge Zink’s minuscule ears. Matson figured he’d ask his wife. She had personal experience bumping up against the limits of plastic surgery.
Actually, Matson thought, Zink’s not a bad guy. Just doing his job. I can work with him, but he’s hard to read.
Zink felt Matson trying to gauge how he was doing. He knew snitches always did that. Are they pleasing their masters or not? Are they saying too much or too little? They’re always wondering where’s the finish line. Of course, there wasn’t one. It took most crooks a long time to figure that out, and Matson hadn’t even started.
He stepped to a chalkboard, then charted out the companies Fitzhugh set up in Guernsey.
“Now tell me about the bank accounts,” Zink said, turning around, and wondering how much of the truth he would get.
Matson got up and walked to the map on the wall. He pointed at a city next to a lake in Switzerland, just north of the Italian border.
“I didn’t even know where Lugano was until the day before we flew in.” He faced Zink. “Ever been to one of those Swiss banks?”
Zink shook his head.
“If it weren’t for the brass plate mounted outside that said ‘Banca Rober,’ I’d never have known what it was. No teller window. No signs advertising mortgage rates. Just security like the CIA and a bunch of little offices.”
Matson sat back down. “You know why Fitzhugh chose Lugano?” He laughed. “A woman. Isabella. This pipsqueak set up the Azul Limited and Blau Anstalt accounts there just so he could get laid.”
“Just like you.”
Matson blushed, then flared. “I’m not the one who chose to run this thing out of London. She just happened to be there.”
“Sorry,” Zink said. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”
“Hell, not only did I not know why he chose London, I didn’t even know how the scam was going to fit together. All Granger had said up to that point was that he wanted to put a structure in place. I didn’t even realize that when I told Burch we needed a flexible structure, I was telling the truth. And at that point, it was all form and no substance.”
“Did the banker know that?”
“Of course he did, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him. He was about as expressive as a dead carp. He had the account opening forms filled out even before we walked into his office. Fitzhugh introduced me, then threw out the phrase, ‘strategic partnerships,’ and the guy slid the papers across the table for him to sign. Like some choreographed dance. I’m laughing as we’re driving away because the banker didn’t even ask what the companies did.
“I elbowed Fitzhugh and told him that I must’ve missed the wink again. He just grinned and said, ‘No wonder, in Switzerland it’s the nod.’ Then he pointed toward a mountain across the lake, punched the gas, and said, ‘Let’s go see Isabella.’”
Zink’s ringing cell phone interrupted the story. He gestured at Matson to stay put, then answered the call and stepped out into the hallway, closing the door behind him.
Just like you.
Matson felt a surge of anger as Zink’s accusation came back to him.
Alla wasn’t about getting laid, he thought, but punks like Zink wouldn’t understand that.
He had met thousands of Zinks at sales conventions all over the country. He had once been one of them himself, and even had still been one when he arrived in Lugano. But that changed a half hour after leaving Banca Rober.
Fitzhugh had wound through town, then along the northern edge of Lake Lugano and up the switch-backs etched into the side of Monte Bre. Just below the summit, he pulled to a stop in front of a tan stucco house. Matson paused to look down at the city lights, then followed Fitzhugh inside and into the kitchen where Isabella was waiting. Tall, slim, shoulder-length black hair, spaghetti-strapped red dress covered by a knee-length white apron. She turned as their footsteps sounded on the marble floor.
Stunning. Heart-wrenchingly stunning.
As he stood there looking at her, Matson remembered a line of German poetry that a girl he dated in college liked to quote. It had stuck with him over the years even though its meaning had always been obscure: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.”
Right then he understood why he had ended up with a Madge, instead of an Isabella or an Alla.
Matson accepted a glass of wine from her and then followed Fitzhugh into the dining room, the table set with English bone china and the candles already lit.
Throughout dinner Matson watched the playfulness, the intimacy, and an acceptance of each other that made what he’d been taught were the institutional bedrocks of society, like marriage, like his own twenty-year marriage, seem hollow. And the hours would’ve been entirely joyful, even blissful, were he not haunted by the suspicion that he’d wasted his entire life.
CHAPTER 18
H ow’s Matson doing?” Peterson asked, walking into the SatTek room where Zink was typing up his notes during a break in the debriefing.
“Not bad.” Zink looked up from his keyboard. “Interesting thing, though. At the beginning of this scam he was kind of a doofus; Granger needing to hold his hand all the time. But by the middle of it he was a helluva operator all on his own. It was like…What do you call those graphs with the bump in the middle they use in statistics?”