Absolute Risk Read online

  Wycovsky smirked. “I saw the news, they killed him.”

  “But they did a few things to him first.” Arndt jerked his thumb upward. He smiled to himself as Wycovsky winced. He imagined his boss’s butt cheeks clenching.

  “Hicks is certain that the details of what they did to Gilbert can be deduced from the autopsy report,” Arndt said, “but the police haven’t released it to the press.”

  Wycovsky didn’t respond for a few moments. He just stood there, frowning.

  Arndt suspected that Wycovsky was watching his imagination play out the nightmare of the attack. Arndt wished he had some sort of mental probe so he could determine whether Wycovsky’s fantasy of what had happened was a product of his personal terrors or was instead a form of wish fulfillment. It wasn’t hard for Arndt to imagine Wycovsky wanting to do physically what he did psychologically to the junior members of the firm.

  “I may have underestimated you,” Wycovsky finally said.

  Arndt smiled as if in satisfaction, but said to himself, Not in the way you think.

  “Whenever we need to take Gage out of the game,” Arndt said, “we’ll just finger him for Gilbert’s murder. It won’t stick in the end.” He grinned at his wordplay. “But he’ll be out of our client’s way for a while.”

  CHAPTER 28

  A persistent, rhythmic thumping and the rattle of the front door against the loose frame drew Faith out of the shadows of sleep into a predawn gray. By the time she’d climbed out of bed and made it into the front room, Jian-jun had opened it. Standing across the threshold from him was a young woman wearing a military surplus coat. A battered scooter was parked behind her on the bare yard, the motor silent, but the headlight glowing into the haze.

  The woman whispered two sentences, then fell silent as her eyes widened at the sight of Faith, who wondered whether her surprise was provoked by the fact that this white ghost standing in the darkness hadn’t fled like the rest of the Westerners had done in the days after the earthquake.

  Jian-jun turned around, following the woman’s gaze.

  “What is it?” Faith asked.

  Jian-jun pointed back over his shoulder.

  “She says that a couple of the rebels have found where I hid my parents. But out of respect for my grandmother, they haven’t turned them over to the mob.”

  Jian-jun walked over to where Ayi Zhao was still asleep on a cot and sat down next to her. He touched her on the shoulder. Her eyelids fluttered, then she looked up. He told her what had happened as he helped her to her feet.

  Faith gestured for the woman to come inside.

  Jian-jun introduced her in Mandarin only as Xiao Mei, Little Mei, and Faith only as “the anthropologist.”

  Faith knew the unspoken question behind Little Mei’s eyes, for she’d heard versions of it throughout her career: for what was an anthropologist, but a spy in plain sight, a psychoanalyst of families and of relationships and of culture using obscure methods to discern the function behind the structure and the living reality behind the camouflage of appearances—at best to objectify people, and at worst, to strip them naked.

  Little Mei’s blank expression and averted gaze seemed to Faith to be those of a sister or girlfriend who suspected she’d been discussed in therapy and whose secrets had been exposed and dissected—

  Except today those secrets were political and the consequence of exposure wasn’t shame or embarrassment, but death.

  They all understood that there’d be no time to argue filial piety to a mob. Appearances would be everything.

  “I’ll show myself,” Ayi Zhao said, then looked from the woman to her grandson. “That will give the children time to escape.”

  Jian-jun shook his head. “The army may view your arrival as a provocation. We can’t take the chance that they’ll use it as an excuse to intervene.”

  Ayi Zhao raised her palm toward Jian-jun. “They don’t need an excuse. Their orders come from Beijing and the issues now are bigger than the symbolism of an old lady.” She pointed down toward the city. “Tell them I’m coming.”

  Faith looked back and forth between Little Mei and Jian-jun, then gestured with her hand through the open door toward the scooter and said, “Go. I’ll find a car to bring her down.”

  Jian-jun grabbed his jacket and then said to Ayi Zhao, “They’re in the backup generator room of the burned out Meinhard electronics factory.”

  He turned to Faith. “It’s on the western edge of the city in the economic development zone.”

  Faith’s body jerked sideways as the house jolted in an aftershock. She grabbed a chair back to steady herself. The scooter fell over. A glass next to the sink toppled and shattered.

  As Jian-jun reached an arm around Ayi Zhao’s shoulders, he and Little Mei stared at each other, trading end-of-the-world looks.

  In their anguished gaze, Faith saw that she was a Christian, too. Maybe an evangelical, and this was her secret.

  The quake had half the force of the last one, and Faith’s internal calculator, calibrated by a lifetime in San Francisco, told her it was either a small aftershock nearby or a huge one far away.

  Faith thought of the Three Gorges Dam, fearing that it had given way as the cracking and crumbling schools and hospitals of Chengdu had. But she said nothing, for she knew that they were all thinking the same thing, and they understood that if it had given way, it was too late for fear, or for hope.

  “Most of the mob has moved back to the center of the city,” Jian-jun said to Faith. “But be careful. Don’t show yourselves until you get to the factory. I’ll come out to meet you.”

  Jian-jun led Little Mei outside and then straightened up the scooter. He sat forward on the elongated seat and she climbed on behind him.

  Faith walked to the door and looked past them and toward the valley, wondering what would greet them when they arrived.

  The motor rattled, then engaged, shaking the bike. Exhaust belched from the tailpipe as he gunned it to keep it from stalling, then the cloud swirled in the air and grayed the rising sun.

  Faith blocked the glare with her hand and squinted at the city. Smoke no longer drifted up from yesterday’s smoldering factories in the industrial clusters, but still billowed from the mile-diameter tire pile adjacent to the solid waste incineration plant. She knew that it would burn for months and suspected that the mob, now choking on its fumes, had come to regret having chosen arson as a form of protest. In the pollution that now blanketed the countryside, they had spread the scourge they had fought to contain.

  Jian-jun leaned toward the handlebars, pushed the bike off its stand, and accelerated down the dirt street toward the center of town and then beyond it to the highway on the other side.

  Ayi Zhao walked up next to Faith and looked up at her.

  “You don’t need to do this,” Ayi Zhao said. “I can find a way down on my own.”

  “We can protect each other,” Faith said. “Because of you, no one will harm me. And because of me, the army and police will see that the world is watching and perhaps will leave you alone.”

  Faith thought for a moment. It struck her that the best way to shield Ayi Zhao from the army might be to recruit them to help.

  “Is there an herbalist up here that you can trust?” Faith asked. “Maybe he can put something together to raise your blood pressure and make you look like you have a fever. Then we can ask the garrison to take you to the People’s Hospital. They won’t want you to die on their watch.”

  Ayi Zhao nodded. “I can do it myself. All I need is ephedra, ginseng, and ginger. We can get those at the vegetable market.” She paused and then asked, “Do you have any cold pills? They always make my heart beat faster.”

  “I think so,” Faith said, reaching out her hand and gripping Ayi Zhao’s shoulder. “Just be careful not to overdo it.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Vice President Cooper Wallace fidgeted with a paperweight on his desk in the West Wing of the White House. He rubbed his thumb across the gold preside
ntial seal, then tossed it onto his blotter. For a moment it seemed turdlike, hard and dried and petrified. He fantasized the president sneaking from office to office, dropping his pants, squatting, and leaving a marker behind, and the thought disgusted him. And the thought that he even had the thought disgusted him more.

  Wallace recalled a psychology class he’d taken at the University of Kansas the year after he’d returned from his second tour in Vietnam. The professor was a left-wing freak, a former priest who’d left the Jesuit order to marry the soon-to-be ex-wife of a parishioner. And the class was nothing but a camouflaged attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular, which the professor portrayed as a contradictory mass of outward projections of internal repressions and delusions.

  Wallace remembered walking into the lecture hall one morning, seeing quotes from Martin Luther that the professor had written in bold letters on the chalkboard: I am like ripe shit and the world is a gigantic asshole. I have shit in the pants, and you can hang it around your neck and wipe your mouth with it.

  He’d stopped in the descending aisle as he read the words, the acidic taste of bile rising in his throat. He’d swallowed hard, then dropped in the nearest seat and gritted his teeth and breathed in and out, steeling himself for what was to follow.

  Then the professor launched off from the lines into a lecture about Freud and anality and the origins of Protestantism that Wallace didn’t hear—couldn’t hear—because all his senses had been obliterated by the sight of the words. He even had to feel for his legs after class was over so he could stand up, both his body and soul now too numbed even for rage.

  That came later, during a night of wrenching, racing thoughts, at the end of which he resolved that someday, after he’d made his stake in Spectrum with his father, he’d enter politics and find a way to crush those lunatics and cleanse the universities.

  But somehow that purpose had morphed over the following decades into something else. What that was, he now wasn’t certain, except it led him to the second most powerful office in the world—if he ignored the fact that it had no constitutional power at all. Even as president of the Senate he wasn’t his own man, for he had to follow the president’s orders.

  Wallace glanced around at the blue couch and pale yellow chairs where he’d posed for photographs with the lesser leaders of the world.

  Who the hell even knew where Comoros was? Or Burundi? Or Suriname? Or Tuvalu? Or whatever those piss-poor countries were called on the day their leaders came visiting. Collectively they had the gross national product of a Detroit pawnshop. Them coming to beg for money, putting their loyalty up for sale, first to the U.S., then to the Russians, then to the Chinese. Then to all three of the world powers at the same time.

  He remembered staring at the wristwatch of one of their prime ministers, a crook who’d graduated from Missouri State, working his way through school handing out towels in the gym, then spending twenty years in his country’s civil service, and finally showing up in the White House wearing a hundred-thousand-dollar Rolex.

  And the man kept glancing at it as if taunting Wallace, telling him that if the U.S. wanted to buy his country’s loyalty, it would have to make the down payment to him first.

  But it didn’t work because they both knew that as China had done throughout Africa, the resources of his country could be bought for pocket change, just like Sudanese oil, and Zambian copper, and Nigerian natural gas.

  A light knock on Wallace’s door pulled him from the reveries of the past and onto the obstacle course of the present and toward the president, who was standing by with the starter pistol.

  Wallace could see the distant finish line, for it was always in the same place: Tuesday after the first Monday in November—but he hadn’t yet figured out how to get there.

  President Thomas McCormack was sitting at his desk when Wallace walked into his study next to the Oval Office. He was alone, reaching for a sheet emerging from his printer. A briefing book lay open before him, the pages both tabbed with blue labels and tagged with yellow Post-it notes. As Wallace sat down on the couch next to the desk, he could see that the writing on the notes was the president’s. From that alone Wallace concluded that whatever course the president wanted him to run, he’d designed and constructed it himself, and wanted only two people on the field.

  Wallace didn’t feel like waiting for the president to meander his way to the issue. Every substantive conversation between them traveled the same route, one that began with their six years serving together, the closeness of their wives, the perfecting of the right and right-center coalition among voters that had won them the White House twice. And ending with self-congratulations on their developing the center coalition in the House and Senate that got more of their own legislation through Congress than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

  The president had spent his prepolitical career as a lawyer and never lost the urge or the talent to lay a foundation for the evidence he intended to offer, even if it was obvious.

  “Mr. President—”

  McCormack shook his head. “This isn’t a Mr. President moment. It’s personal. Me to you. It’s not your political soul that I’m concerned about. It’s something else.” He tapped the binder with his forefinger. “And I’ll shred this thing after we’re done.”

  Wallace felt his body stiffen. He hadn’t a clue what was contained in those pages, but he already felt stripped naked, cold and shivering. His mind raced through every misstep and indiscretion in his career, from a fraternity party brawl when he was twenty to his wife’s recent second-guessing his appearance with Manton Roberts.

  And the president’s promise to destroy whatever evidence was in those pages felt less like a guarantee of liberation, and more like a garrote around his balls.

  McCormack had issued the most widespread records preservation order in the history of the office. There was no e-mail, no confidential memo, no scrap of paper that he hadn’t ordered preserved. The joke at the National Archives was that they still hadn’t figured out a method for storing his unarticulated thoughts.

  “Is this about National Pledge Day?” Wallace asked.

  “I didn’t know—”

  “That’s the point. You should’ve known. You’ve lent the stature of your office—of this administration—to an event you couldn’t control.” McCormack threw up his hands. “Jesus Christ, man, you let them turn the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ into a marching anthem for intolerance.”

  “I didn’t let—”

  “Then you consented with your silence. It stands in American history as a symbol, an abolitionist song about liberty for everyone, not the liberty of a few to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.”

  McCormack pounded the desktop with his fist.

  “Next to the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘God Bless America,’ it’s the most important song in our history. And those sons of bitches have stolen it.”

  “Mr. President, I think that overstates what happened.”

  Ignoring Wallace’s defensive stab, McCormack reached for the sheet he’d removed from the printer as Wallace had entered the office.

  “Which pledge do you suppose they intend to use,” McCormack asked. “This one?”

  Wallace took it in his hands. It was marked, “Confidential. From the Desk of Rev. Manton Roberts,” and contained a single paragraph.

  “Go ahead,” McCormack said, “read it.”

  Wallace read the words to himself.

  I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.

  “No. Aloud.”

  Wallace glanced around the room, eyes hesitating on the heat vent and the computer and clock on the desk.

  “Don’t worry,” McCormack said. “The place isn’t bugged. Go ahead. Aloud.”

  Wallace shook his head. “I can’t say this.”

  “I didn’t think so, but you p
ut yourself at the front of a crowd of seventy-five thousand people who did before you arrived.”

  McCormack raised his chin toward a framed American flag on the wall above the printer.

  “Have you even read what our party platform says about the flag?”

  Wallace shrugged. He was surprised that McCormack had paid attention to the platform. In both elections, he’d neither run on it nor run from it. He’d just ignored it.

  McCormack flipped to the front of his binder and turned it toward Wallace.

  “This is our position. You don’t need to read it aloud.”

  Protecting Our National Symbols: The symbol of our unity, to which we all pledge allegiance, is the flag. By whatever legislative method is most feasible, Old Glory should be given legal protection against desecration.

  “Do you realize that our party wants people sent to the federal penitentiary for making a necktie out of the thing, and you let these traitors paint a goddamn black cross on it? ”

  Wallace pushed the binder away.

  “That’s different,” Wallace said. “Desecration means depriving something of its sacred character. This is a Christian nation. Adding the cross confirms it by combining two sacred symbols.”

  “Don’t play word games.”

  “Anyway it’s free speech.”

  “Wrong again. Not according to the Supreme Court. Flag desecration isn’t speech at all. Rehnquist said that it’s no more than a grunt or a roar, no more protected by the First Amendment than a fart in an elevator.”

  Wallace had no answer.

  They sat in silence for a few moments, then McCormack leaned back in his chair and said, “I don’t understand what’s happening to you. If you’d run Spectrum with the lack of insight and consistency you’ve been displaying, you’d still be selling Bibles and Jesus dashboard ornaments out of your father’s garage.”