Porzolkiewski pushed himself to his feet and walked into the kitchen. Gage heard him open the refrigerator, then the inside freezer door, expecting him to return with ice water. He came back carrying a Ziploc bag and handed it to Gage.
“This is what you want.”
Gage removed a dozen eight-and-a-half-by-eleven folded pages. Gage laid them out. They warmed in the dining room air.
Displayed before them were photocopies of Brandon Meyer’s life, in paper and plastic.
A s Gage lay in bed that night next to Faith, too jet-lagged for sleep, he didn’t regret traveling halfway around the world to obtain something that all along had lain hidden in a freezer just miles from his office.
Then an image came to him: Porzolkiewski weeping at his dining room table.
And Gage’s last thoughts before finally drifting off to sleep were of a father’s grief finally anchored-forever anchored-to the truth about the corporate murder of his son.
Chapter 28
Senior Special Agent Joe Casey stood by the printer in the Federal Building office of the FBI, watching the last of the search warrant print out. He felt a moment of regret, wishing he could give Gage a heads-up that the sledgehammer he raised when he retrieved the jilted Oscar Mogasci from Switzerland was about to fall. He shielded the machine with his body, for other than himself, only one other special agent, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, and the head of Criminal Division of the Justice Department in Washington knew its contents. Even the team of FBI and IRS agents and forensic computer experts standing by in the warehouse staging area in San Jose didn’t know where they would execute the warrant. Casey would only tell them OptiCom was the target after the judge signed it.
Casey checked the wall clock. Five forty-five P.M. He imagined the judge was also watching the time, and selecting from his repertoire of disagreeable faces the one he’d assume when Casey finally arrived. This judge wouldn’t have been Casey’s choice, but these kinds of cases were always assigned to that judge since he had the expertise to evaluate them.
He removed the search warrant and his affidavit, then turned toward the copy machine and dropped them into the feeder, stapling the collated copies as they came out.
As he walked toward the elevator, Casey glanced into the conference room and nodded to the two agents guarding Mogasci, sitting at the table, his head facedown on his folded arms like an eight-year-old child in school detention. The long linoleum hallway reminded Casey of the one he’d walked two weeks earlier after badging his way past the TSA booth at the San Francisco Airport to meet Gage when he arrived back from Zurich. He’d spotted Gage directing Mogasci toward the glassed-in booths like an owner shepherding a puppy who’d soiled the carpet in the living room. And Mogasci’s expression told the world he knew he’d done wrong.
Gage had returned Mogasci’s passport as they approached the Customs and Border Patrol window. Casey intercepted Mogasci on the other side and waited for Gage to pass through. Casey then badged them past the baggage screeners and out into the arrivals hall, where another agent was waiting to escort them to a Ford Expedition parked at the curb and guarded by airport security.
Only small talk between Casey and Gage accompanied the ride up Highway 101 toward Gage’s Embarcadero office, and there wasn’t much of that. They mostly stared at the smog suffocating the bay and eclipsing the afternoon sun, the gray sky seeming to capture the enormity of what was about to happen.
Gage had climbed out of the SUV in his parking lot, leaving behind a briefcase filled with the trade secrets Mogasci had stolen from FiberLink and the Swiss bank account records Mogasci had surrendered to Gage in his Zurich hotel room three days earlier. Also inside was a flash drive containing an incriminating call between Mogasci and the president of OptiCom that Mogasci hoped to trade with Casey for his freedom.
C asey shook off the memory, then glanced at his watch as he stepped into the elevator. Six P.M. He got off on the eighteenth floor, then knocked on the office door of the judge’s clerk, who let him in. Her purse and coat were piled on her desk, a not so subtle reminder it was an hour past quitting time. She escorted Casey into chambers, where he found the judge sitting on a couch next to a window framing a view of the Marin Headlands and Golden Gate Bridge, the evening traffic bunched up on the deck.
The judge nodded, accepted the search warrant and supporting affidavit, then directed Casey to a side chair. Casey checked his pants pocket for his car keys. In fifteen minutes he’d be out of there and on his way south to San Jose. In twenty-five years, first as a police detective, then as an agent with the FBI, he’d never actually seen a judge read a search warrant affidavit all the way through.
A half hour later, Judge Brandon Meyer was still reading the fifty-five pages.
Another half hour after that, Meyer looked up and said, “I’d like to think about this overnight.”
Fury mushroomed inside Casey. It was a righteous case. Probable cause up the wazoo. But all he said was, “Yes, Your Honor,” and then rose and left chambers.
Casey’s stomach twisted as he walked toward the elevator, wondering if he’d forgotten some element of the crime, some proof of federal jurisdiction, some link in the causal chain-and there was also the embarrassment of calling the staging warehouse to send the agents home because he couldn’t get the goddamn judge to sign the goddamn search warrant.
Casey thought of Gage.
What was Gage going to think when he learned the judge he called the pipsqueak had tossed his clients into a judicial never-never land?
A fter notifying the U.S. Attorney and the search team of the delay, Casey drove the ramp from the garage underneath the Federal Building. He spotted Judge Meyer walking uphill toward the Tenderloin, head down in thought, oblivious to his surroundings, as if it was a regular evening stroll.
Going for a walk to think through a complex case made sense, Casey thought, but wading through drug dealers and hookers while doing it was damn stupid.
Casey was tempted to pull up alongside Meyer to warn him to head another direction, but then changed his mind.
Fuck him.
Chapter 29
Morning sunlight flowing into Gage’s office illuminated the copies Porzolkiewski had made of the contents of Brandon Meyer’s wallet. Gage had laid them out on his conference table and organized them by type: credit cards, medical cards, business cards, identification, phone cards, scraps of paper with telephone numbers, notes, lists of names, cash, receipts, and a slim address book.
Porzolkiewski had even photocopied the condom.
Gage knew Spike Pacheco would be thrilled. The only thing missing from Spike’s mental re-creation of Meyer’s adventure in the Tenderloin was the Viagra.
Gage reached for the telephone. Alex Z arrived forty minutes later, accompanied by a bodyguard who waited in the hallway.
“How do you like your new office?” Gage asked.
Gage had set up Alex Z in a loft on the Oakland waterfront. He wasn’t going to take a chance that whoever pummeled Shakir would get him, too.
Alex Z smiled. “It’s a block from the best Thai food in the Bay Area. It feels like a vacation home. I may not move back.”
“Just be careful when you go out.”
Alex Z glanced toward the door. “Him and his buddies cover me. I feel like a rock star.”
“You are a rock star, at least in San Francisco.”
Alex Z shook his head. “More nerd than star.”
He leaned over the table and surveyed the photocopies. He grinned when he spotted the copy of the condom, then locked onto the page next to it. When he straightened up, Gage was already nodding.