Absolute Risk Read online

Ayi Zhao glanced over at Faith, then back and forth between her son and daughter-in-law.

  “They want names.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Gage’s cell phone rang as he checked his e-mails at the desk in his hotel room in Marseilles. The window next to him overlooked the Old Port from high above the night-jeweled Quai de Rive Neuve that formed its southern border.

  He looked at the number and the time. It was Faith and it was 3:30 A.M. in China. As he reached for the phone, he felt the force of the contrasting images of the devastation in Chengdu and the starlit perfection of sailboats rocking in their slips and the purring Mercedes limousines sliding by below. “I need some help,” Faith said. “Is everything—”

  “I’m fine, really. The government shut down the Internet and I need to check something.”

  “Hold on.” Gage closed his e-mail program and opened a Web browser.

  “What are you trying to find out?” he asked, as it loaded.

  “Do you know who Donald Whitson is?”

  “The CEO of RAID Technologies. He was on the news the other day, talking about the destruction of their plant in Chengdu.”

  “I need to know whether he was once head of their East Asian operations.”

  Gage navigated to the RAID Web site, the officers’ tab, and then to Whitson’s résumé page.

  “From 1988 through 1991,” Gage told her, then heard her repeat the information in Mandarin. “Who are you with?”

  “A workers’ committee in the economic development zone east of the city. They want evidence that Whitson was in a position to have arranged payoffs to Ayi Zhao’s son.”

  “Let me call Alex Z and I’ll conference you in.”

  Gage put her on hold and punched in Alex Z’s number in San Francisco, then connected him to her and explained the issue.

  “We need something fast,” Gage said, “so they won’t think Faith made it up. But she’s got no e-mail access.”

  “No problem, boss,” Alex Z said. “I’ll get Whitson’s résumé on my monitor. I’ll bypass the Internet by sending a photograph to her cell phone. A screen shot. I’ll magnify it so it’s readable and she can zoom in even closer.”

  Gage heard the ticking of Alex Z’s keyboard in the background, then “It’s on its way.”

  “Keep sending whatever you can find about Whitson,” Gage said. “Then find out where he lived in China, who he worked with, and who the RAID bankers in Asia were at the time.”

  “I’m on it,” Alex Z said, then disconnected.

  “Do you need to get out of there?” Gage asked. “I can send Mark Fong over.”

  “Let me go into another room,” Faith said.

  Gage listened as a door was opened and closed, then murmuring voices, then another door opening and closing, then the tap of her shoes, and finally silence.

  “I’m not sure that it’ll be necessary to smuggle us out,” Faith said. “Anyway, a snakehead’s background may be a little too shady for the circumstances.”

  “Which are?”

  “What’s going on here is one of the most astounding things I’ve ever seen. The farmers and workers have formed themselves into an investigative body, kind of like a French inquisitorial court. Some of these people can barely read and they’re questioning and deliberating like the best judges I’ve ever seen. If only—” Faith’s voice broke. She paused, then sighed. “If only the mobs hadn’t killed so many before they got to this point.”

  “I know it’s small comfort,” Gage said. “But it could’ve been worse. China usually kills in the millions, not in the hundreds.”

  “You have a better perspective than I do since you’ve been in the middle of this kind of thing before. I’ve always been the note taker that comes by afterward, when things are settled and new institutions are in place.”

  Faith fell silent. Gage didn’t interrupt her thoughts.

  “There have been some amazing things,” she finally said. “You should’ve seen Ayi Zhao’s grandson. A sweetheart of a boy. He took the leader aside before the meeting began in which his parents were first questioned. They call him Lao Mao, Old Cat. Not because of his appearance—he’s tall and long and lean—but because of his silent pantherlike grace and because of the look he has in his eyes, how he takes things in and sees inside of people. He seems severe until you look at him closely, then you can make out how weary he is. Just beat. These people haven’t slept much for days and days and you can see it in his face. He’s in his mid-fifties, but right now he looks mid-sixties.

  “They stopped a few feet away from me, just outside of the door to the provisional court. Jian-jun looked up at Old Cat and told him the story of Moses and how God wouldn’t let him enter the Promised Land because his hands were bloody from fighting his way across the desert. He was trying to explain to Old Cat that legitimacy requires clean hands.”

  “I’m not sure whether that’s courageous,” Gage said, “or just crazy.”

  Faith exhaled. “I was holding my breath. Old Cat gave him a puzzled look, then walked inside and whispered to a man already seated at the judge’s table. I was sure he’d just given the order to have Jian-jun hauled away. The man nodded and Old Cat turned back, and then walked past Jian-jun and out the door. Just like that. It was stunning.”

  “And that’s the difference between tyranny and rebellion,” Gage said. “I hope it lasts.”

  “I’m afraid that tyranny will return pretty soon, but from another direction, when the government decides that things have gone far enough and sends in People’s Liberation Army troops to take control—hold on.”

  Ten seconds later, Faith said, “The photo just arrived from Alex Z.”

  “There should be more coming in a few minutes.”

  Gage heard a door open in the background, and a voice calling to Faith in Mandarin.

  “I need to go,” she said.

  “Call me the instant you need to get out. I’ll find a way.”

  After Faith disconnected, Gage checked his contact list and called a number in Taiwan.

  The phone rang four times before a man said, “Wei,” then yawned.

  “Mark, it’s Graham.”

  “Ah, Da-li Shi-fu.” Marble Buddha was Mark Fong’s nickname for Gage, given to him when they’d last worked together. “What do you need? ”

  “Faith is in Chengdu.”

  “And you need to get her out? ”

  “When she’s ready. Her and students. Six altogether, one with a leg in a cast. And not by air since the airport may still be shut down.”

  “Why not just have someone drive them over to Chongqing. My cousin can meet them and help them get tickets and they can fly out from there. They won’t even need to change planes in China. They can go straight to Bangkok, then back to the States.”

  Gage stepped to his window and looked toward downtown Marseilles at the east end of the port, and at the cars streaming out of the city center.

  “I have a feeling that the country may cave in toward the middle,” Gage said, “and they’d be trapped. They may need to take a land route, maybe across a few borders, and I need someone who knows how to get that done.”

  Fong laughed and said, “You mean someone who can slither like a snake? ”

  “Exactly.”

  CHAPTER 36

  You don’t need to stay with me,” Milton Abrams said to Viz McBride, sitting on his couch. “It’s not like I’m in any personal danger.” “I’m not the guy you have to convince,” Viz said. “Graham is.” “And if I asked you to leave?”

  “I’d tell you that you’d have to call 911 and have me arrested. Graham wants me with you until he gets back and can figure out who killed Tony Gilbert, and why.”

  “Then maybe your time would be better spent doing that.”

  Viz rose from the couch. He hoped that his six-foot-four height, supplemented by his cowboy boots, might help accomplish what he hadn’t through argument: put an end to the discussion.

  “I do two things,” Viz said, l
ooking over at Abrams sitting at the dining table. “And two things only. I protect people and I do electronic surveillance and countersurveillance. That’s my role in Graham’s firm. He may send someone out here to look into the murder or he may not. There’s a reason why he hasn’t and I’m not going to second-guess him.”

  Viz walked past Abrams and into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “What about my privacy?” Abrams asked when Viz returned.

  Glancing over at the DVD player in which Abrams had watched him locate a bugging device, Viz said, “You haven’t had any privacy for a long time.”

  Abrams reddened. “You know what I mean.”

  Viz caught on to what the real issue was for Abrams.

  “You want to get laid, get laid,” Viz said. “It’s not like I’ll be sitting in your bedroom.” He sat down on the couch again. “You sleep with her before? ”

  Abrams nodded.

  “Then it ain’t no secret.” Viz pointed at the table. A couple of legal pads lay in front of Abrams, along with a stack of Federal Reserve research papers. “Don’t you have testimony to prepare? ”

  Abrams opened his mouth to speak, as if to keep arguing the point, but closed it again in surrender. He then nodded and said, “I think it’s more of a public suicide.”

  “Graham says you’re a straight shooter,” Viz said. “Makes it more likely that you’ll catch a ricochet. You want to try it out on a civilian?”

  “You follow the markets? “ Abrams asked.

  Viz shrugged. “Not really. I look at my retirement account statements, but Graham and his people make all of the decisions.”

  “That bother you?”

  “No. We’ve ridden out all of the …” Viz grinned. “What do you all call them? Corrections? I’m not sure what was being corrected, they all seemed like collapses to me.”

  “And I think there’s going to be another one.”

  Viz’s grin died. He didn’t like to hear from a Federal Reserve chairman that his retirement account was going to tank. He leaned forward on the couch.

  Abrams turned fully toward him, resting his arm on the back of the chair.

  “You know what an equity bubble is.”

  Viz nodded. “Like the stock market in the late 1990s and the real estate market in the 2000s.”

  “We now have a government debt bubble. We have about ten trillion dollars of treasury bonds and treasury bills out there, but they’re not worth that much. Not even close, because we can’t pay back all of the money. The only way we’d ever be able to is to turn over chunks of the country to the holders of the bonds.”

  Viz pointed toward the window. “You mean hand over Central Park to the Chinese in exchange for the paper?”

  “And Yosemite and Yellowstone and Ellis Island and Alcatraz.”

  “What’s gonna happen when people figure that out?” Abrams smiled. “We’ll have what we used to call a correction.”

  Viz thought for a moment. “But if you come out and admit that, then the whole thing—”

  “Collapses.”

  Abrams rose and walked toward Viz, stopping in the middle of the room.

  “The year before the Berlin Wall fell,” Abrams said, “Graham told me a story he heard in Dresden.” He pointed upward. “A kid watching a circus asks his father, ‘What’s the man on the tightrope doing with that pole?’ The father answers, ‘He’s using it to balance himself.’ The kid then asks, ‘What if it gets away from him?’ And the father answers, ‘It won’t. He’s keeping it steady.’ ”

  “Sounds like at least some people recognized that the Soviet Union was on the verge of falling,” Viz said.

  “But not the CIA, not Reagan, not Bush, not Kissinger, not Rice, not Rumsfeld, not Cheney, not the State Department. Nobody. They all got it wrong. They were completely, even ideologically, oblivious.”

  “But they all took credit for it when it happened.”

  Abrams locked his hands on his waist. “This time around it will all be about blame.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Just before dawn, Gage walked from his hotel, past the sailboats tied up at their slips and east along Quai de Rive Neuve toward the head of the box canyon port. He bought a cup of café Americano at a boulangerie, then walked across the boulevard and stopped next to a small boathouse. From there he looked over the water toward the wall of stone and stucco buildings, extending from the thirteenth-century Fort Saint-Jean at the entrance to the harbor, up past the seventeenth-century city hall, and then past twentieth-century marble-faced apartment houses. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but felt the granite gaze of the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde from atop a distant limestone hill.

  As he sipped his coffee and watched the steam swirling above the cup, Gage wondered whether Tabari Benaroun was already at his desk in the Hotel de Police a few blocks beyond the façades of civilian life across the water, and what he was thinking, and whether his supervisors had pressed him about where he’d spent the last two days and who he had been with.

  Gage was annoyed at where Tabari had decided to draw the line; his leaving unanswered how Hennessy had gotten to the coast trail and his showing-but-not-telling-draw-your-own-conclusions method.

  At the same time, Gage recognized that he hadn’t been forthright with Tabari either. He hadn’t told the young detective, and had asked Benaroun not to tell him, about how Hennessy had arranged the meeting with Abrams, about how Abrams had given the signal that it would take place, and about the reason that they were meeting.

  Anyone watching him and Tabari on the trail the previous day would’ve assumed they were hikers, perhaps concluding from their clothing that one was a local who was guiding a foreigner. Two men out early, before the boaters and rock climbers, when the air was still and the path untrodden and the shadows on the inlet walls were still waning and falling toward the sea—

  That is, almost anyone.

  Gage thought of Faith. She could recognize a rite of passage where a tourist would see only a native dance.

  And Batkoun Benaroun. He could recognize money laundering where a bank clerk would see only a wire transfer.

  And Viz. He could recognize countersurveillance where a pedestrian walking on Madison Avenue would see only a man reading a New York transit map.

  Connected dots sometimes made not just a route, but a picture.

  Gage wondered who was watching him and how, and what they were recognizing in the places and things that he could still only perceive as pieces of a puzzle scattered on a floor.

  A church bell rang in the distance. The faint D-G-B notes were soon lost in the rush and rumble of the early morning traffic, but they repeated themselves in his mind with a vague familiarity that merged with his imaginings of Hennessy.

  In the ringing bells Gage heard the first three notes of “Amazing Grace.” And they led him to thoughts of Hennessy’s blindness, and of his coming to see, and of what must have been a struggle for redemption, and of his wife and his daughter and the trail of tears that had led them into the emotional wilderness in which they now wandered.

  Gage felt a heaviness in his chest as he rested his forearms on the wooden railing next to the boathouse. He stared down at the blue water, at the rocking boats and the reflections of the lightening sky and the buildings on the other side of the port.

  Maybe he wasn’t so wrong when he implied to Ibrahim’s old friend in Boston that Hennessy’s family was his client. After all, for Abrams, Hennessy’s death was merely an episode in his life, while for Hennessy’s wife and daughter, it was the event that now gave their lives its meaning.

  The hymnal notes sounded again and Gage remembered walking from his Saturday job at the local newspaper when he was fifteen years old to his father’s medical office in Nogales, Arizona, stopping on the sidewalk to listen to choir practice at the storefront Papago Baptist Church, the hymn sung in a low guttural Spanish. Then he thought of Hennessy’s wandering in a desert of his inadvertent design, one that was po
oled with mirages and whose horizon receded as he had advanced.

  Gage let the song fade to silence in his mind, then pushed off from the railing and continued along Quai de Rive Neuve. Soon he was enveloped by the diesel exhaust of buses and the salty-slimy stench of the fishmongers’ stands lined up along the dock. He heard a yelp and glanced over to see a fisherman holding up a squirming octopus, waving it like a wet mop, and two old women giggling and backing away and then him slamming it down like pizza dough on a marble slab. Next to him a sea urchin vendor waved a sample and yelled at passersby, “Treize a la douzaine, Treize a la douzaine,” thirteen for twelve, a baker’s dozen.

  As Gage passed three fishermen mending their nets near the corner, he spotted the grass meridian that split into halves the boulevard that bordered the east end of the port. Beyond it was central Marseilles: the financial district, museums, mosques, cathedrals, Arab markets, and elite chain stores.

  Gage continued until he reached the spot where the broad La Canebiere, the city’s Champs-Elysées, dead-ended at the port. From there he could make out the front of the Bourse et Chambre de Commerce, the old Stock Exchange and Chamber of Commerce, where Abrams had met with the other central bankers before his planned meeting with Hennessy.

  But instead of seeing the delivery trucks and commuters that were driving toward him, Gage imagined a line of limousines making a turn south.

  Except one.

  Abrams’s car had spun off the other way and had escaped into the Basket, a maze of streets and alleys that might have served the needs of the city a thousand years earlier, but now left it choked with traffic, and might have done so on that night. If the limousine had broken through to the other side, it would have then worked its way toward Belsunce, the North African section of the city, an area of old cafés, bars, and couscousaries where Abrams would have climbed out and entered a restaurant and found a back table at which to wait for Hennessy.

  Perhaps it was as simple as that, Gage said to himself as he looked from intersection to intersection, from café to café, from storefront to storefront, scanning for the place where Hennessy might have stationed himself.