Absolute Risk gg-2 Read online

  “More toward the bottom, but with a feeling of hope. He told me that he had reason to think that Ibrahim was still alive.”

  Abrams fell silent. Gage watched his eyes narrow as though he was looking into the tunnel of the past.

  “I don’t know about the present condition of Ibrahim’s mind or body,” Abrams finally said, “but his reputation hasn’t suffered much in the long run. I imagine that if the Swedes could find him now, they’d probably give him the Nobel Prize in economics.”

  Even though Gage’s practice focused on finance from the perspective of fraud and money laundering, he was familiar with Ibrahim’s work. And in the years since his disappearance, Ibrahim and his quantum theory of finance had achieved mythological, Janus-faced status, with his name either issued as an epithet or whispered in awe. His fame rested on a few papers he’d published twenty years earlier, when he was in his thirties, and on claims by a few large hedge funds, known as chaos funds, that they invested and traded based on his theories.

  “I suspect that if he’d stayed in physics rather than moving into finance,” Abrams said, “he would’ve gotten the Nobel in that and he’d still be puttering away at MIT instead of…”

  “Instead of what?”

  Abrams shrugged and stared at the road ahead. “I don’t have a clue. Maybe Hennessy knew.”

  Gage circled back to the call from Abrams that brought him from San Francisco to New York.

  “I don’t see what any of this has to do with you,” Gage said. “I haven’t read your job description, but I’m sure it doesn’t include rectifying nine-year-old presumed wrongs committed by the Justice Department.”

  “That assumes that I was Hennessy’s first choice.” Abrams glanced back at Gage. “I wasn’t. He’d already tried the CIA and the head of the European Central Bank and who knows who else. They all turned him away after recommending that he have his head examined. That’s why he wanted to meet with me. He wanted to prove by his manner and his presentation that he wasn’t crazy. He saw on the news that I’d be in Marseilles for a central bankers’ meeting, and called me at home one night and-“

  “How did he get your number?”

  Abrams shrugged again. “I don’t know. Other than my assistant, only the secretary of the treasury and the president were supposed to have it. That’s part of the reason I called the FBI. They promised to do an investigation, but never followed through, or at least didn’t give me the results. In any case, Hennessy said he’d be somewhere along the Mediterranean at the same time as the conference. The deal was that I would give him fifteen minutes in person at a restaurant in the Oliviers District-“

  “That’s crazy. It’s a drug-infested-“

  “But not a place where anyone would recognize the Federal Reserve chairman.”

  Gage shook his head. “It was just substituting one danger for another.”

  Abrams dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No damage done. He promised to lay out his case and then leave it to me whether I wanted to pursue it.”

  “But he didn’t show up. Instead he jumped off a cliff.”

  “Or was spit out.”

  Gage turned toward Abrams. “I don’t understand why you think he’s a modern-day Jonah. He could’ve just as easily decided that he’d made a fool of himself, or that he’d deluded himself for a second time, and couldn’t face going home.”

  “That was the theory of the local police, that he’d come to the end of his rope. Encouraged no doubt in that conclusion by the FBI’s claim that he was crazy and by the fact that diving headfirst onto the rocks along the Cote d’Azur isn’t an unusual way to do yourself in. The area is Marseilles’ version of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

  Gage recognized that the logic also worked the opposite way: What better way to disguise a murder than as a suicide, but there was still the question of motive and whether it had anything to do with Abrams.

  “Did the Marseilles police know that he was there to meet you?” Gage asked.

  Abrams shook his head. “I couldn’t take the risk-the U.S. couldn’t take the risk-of having my name connected with Hennessy’s, at least until I knew whether he had told me the truth.” Abrams spread his hands. “What do you think would happen in the markets if the press put out a story that I had engaged in some sort of mind-meld with a lunatic? “

  Gage looked up to see that they were now heading due west, the midtown skyline and Manhattan rising in the distance against the now graying sky, the city seeming less like a destination than a way station, for he knew that Abrams hadn’t asked him to come to New York just for a talk.

  “Did you contact the FBI again after his body was discovered,” Gage asked, “and try to find out the backstory?”

  “I left a vague message for the deputy director.” Abrams paused, and then glanced over at Gage. “But it was the director himself who returned my call.”

  Gore, Steven

  Absolute Risk

  CHAPTER 2

  H e didn’t get on a flight,” the caller spoke into his cell phone. “Just picked up a tall, middle-aged guy near the taxi stand outside of terminal one. I’m about a hundred yards behind him on the Long Island Expressway heading toward the city.”

  Kenyon Arndt hunched over his desk in the fifty-sixth-floor office of Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky. It was an involuntary motion, like his whole being, mind and body, had cringed at the thought of what he was doing. He whispered his response, even though his door was closed.

  “Did you get a photo?”

  “We’re not amateurs, Mr. Arndt. I’ll e-mail them to you when they get wherever they’re going. Maybe you’ll recognize him.”

  Arndt felt as though he was standing in quicksand just deep enough to trap him, but not deep enough to suck him under. He didn’t know who their client was or why he wanted the chairman of the Federal Reserve followed. And in a sleepless week of nightmares and night sweats, he’d thought of lots of reasons a client might want it done, but none that was legitimate for a law firm to pursue.

  If Abrams had committed a crime, then the FBI should be doing it.

  If Abrams had leaked insider Fed information about interest adjustments or corporate bailouts to the financial community, then the FBI and the SEC should be doing it.

  If he had sold out the country to foreign interests, then the FBI and the CIA and the NSA should be doing it-not Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky. Not three floors of the whitest of white collars and the blackest of three-button suits.

  What Arndt did think of were all the nauseating consequences of public exposure: disbarment, embarrassment, maybe even federal prison. He’d even be disavowed by the rest of the members of his Yale Law School graduating class-not for doing it, he knew, but for getting caught.

  “Are you sure you won’t lose him?” Arndt asked.

  “No chance. We have, shall we say, an electronic means of tracking his car.”

  “Isn’t that-“

  The man laughed. “Creative? “ “I was going to say illegal.”

  “Seems to me that you’re getting paid a bundle to find a way to argue it isn’t. Capisci? “

  Arndt felt his palm perspiring against the receiver. He’d known only one other person who’d used the correct Italian for “you understand.” He had been a mafioso who’d lived across the street when Arndt was growing up on Long Island-that is, until the gangster was found sitting in the driver’s seat of his car in his garage with a bullet hole in the back of his head.

  “Yes,” Arndt said. “I understand.”

  Arndt set down the receiver, and then wiped his hands on his pants in what felt like a gesture of cleansing. He leaned forward to rise from his chair, but his childhood nightmare of the neighbor’s chunks of exploded skull and brain crusted on the dashboard rose up in his mind. A wave of nausea rolled his body forward. He rested his forehead on his folded arms, sweat beading and his mouth watering.

  After it passed, he straightened up and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. He the
n pushed himself to his feet, shrugged on his suit jacket, and made the long walk down the wood-paneled hallway toward the office of Edward Wycovsky, the senior partner in the thirty-two-attorney firm, who was awaiting his report.

  Arndt’s hands dampened again before he reached Wycovsky’s door. They began to vibrate, not just in fear, but in frustration and anger. A cold shockwave shot up his arms and into his chest. He felt his fingers tightening into fists and imagined himself walking around Wycovsky’s desk and flattening the man’s angular nose into his pockmarked face.

  But not yet, Arndt told himself. He needed to stay with the firm and with this assignment long enough to discover what they were up to, and then turn them in.

  A glance at the distant reception station at the center of the two wings of the floor restarted the drama in his mind. Him standing there watching the FBI lead Wycovsky and the others toward the elevators and then down to the lobby where news video cameras would seek out their pale rat faces. He’d follow them and watch them duck their heads behind their cuffed hands and he’d watch people crowded on the sidewalk leaning hard against the police lines and shaking their fists and screaming out their outrage and But he knew these fantasies were nothing but imaginary flight, relative to nothing and anchored to air-for that was his character: honest enough to recognize his self-deceptions, but too weak to act on the knowledge. That’s why his wife had once told him that the law was the perfect profession for him. It was all form, and no substance; all talk, and no responsibility. And she was right. Even the bar’s code of ethics had read to him like a permission slip to do evil without shame or guilt.

  As he approached Wycovsky’s office, Arndt steeled himself against the reality of his role and the roles of the other Ivy League graduates with whom Wycovsky had jeweled the firm: They were nothing but gemmed pendants hanging from a whore’s neck.

  Wycovsky raised a forefinger as Arndt entered the office, holding him at attention while he completed his telephone call with a cryptic “Then we understand each other.” He lowered his right hand as he hung up the phone with his left and looked over at Arndt.

  “We don’t accuse the private investigators we retain to assist us of engaging in criminality,” Wycovsky said.

  Arndt reddened.

  “We only hire professionals and we rely on them to act within the law-and we don’t second-guess them.”

  “I didn’t think we’d want to risk-” Arndt caught himself, for he realized that this was exactly the risk Wycovsky had been willing to take.

  Wycovsky didn’t respond, his silence pressuring Arndt to finish the sentence.

  “I mean, I thought we should make sure we were on solid legal ground.”

  Wycovsky waved the argument away. “Do you ask Acme Plumbing whether their corporate filings are in order before you hire them to fix a leak? Do you ask to look at your bank’s cash reserves before you write a check?”

  Arndt clenched his jaw and shook his head.

  Wycovsky never argued facts or law; he crushed his opponents by analogy. It was a form of argumentation ridiculed at Yale, but encouraged at the street fighters’ law school that Wycovsky had attended at night forty years earlier.

  “Don’t question the surveillance people,” Wycovsky said. “Just write down what they tell you and report to me.” He pointed at Arndt’s face. “I don’t want to receive another call like this again.”

  Arndt’s emotions battered at him as he walked back to his office. Anger. Fear. Self-reproach. And him defenseless, straitjacketed by the life he’d chosen. Twenty-eight years old and confined to the debtors prison of Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky by mortgage and credit card balances that he was permitted by his bank to carry only because greed had made him accept the most lucrative offer after law school, not the best.

  And what tore at him most of all as he paused in the doorway to his office was why it hadn’t crossed his mind why Wycovsky had been willing to pay partners’ wages for associates’ work Until right then.

  CHAPTER 3

  I was so preoccupied that I forgot to ask about your wife,” Abrams said, sitting across from Gage at the breakfast table in his Central Park West apartment. “Faith is fine. She took a team of students to Sichuan Province to work on an archeological dig.”

  Abrams frowned. “Isn’t that a little dangerous? We’re getting reports of labor riots from Guangzhou all the way up to Mongolia.”

  “They’re in a village way out in the countryside. They only stopped in Shanghai to change planes and in Chengdu just long enough to get on a chartered bus.” Gage tapped the cell phone in his shirt pocket. “She calls every few days.”

  Abrams reached over to the kitchen counter, spread out a stack of Federal Reserve finance and economic discussion papers, and handed one of them to Gage titled “Human Capital in China.”

  “There are a hundred million migrant laborers over there,” Abrams said. “Another ten million added in the last year. Fleeing farms that can’t produce even enough to support the villages around them. An average wage of fifty cents a day, and their life expectancy is dropping as though the Chinese economy was collapsing instead of expanding.” He pointed at the cover. “If all the little wildfires come together, there’ll be a conflagration. I’d hate to see her caught in the middle of it.”

  “Given the places I’ve spent my career,” Gage said, “I’m not in a position to issue warnings.” Even though he knew that there were many times when he wished he was. But that was between him and Faith alone.

  Abrams rose and retrieved the coffeepot and refilled their cups.

  “You’re a tougher man than me.” Abrams paused and gazed out of the window down toward Central Park. “I was afraid even to let Jeanine jog around the reservoir.” He shrugged and offered a weak smile. “Maybe that’s why she ran away altogether.”

  “Have you heard from her lately?”

  “Not since I was appointed chairman. Not even an e-mail after I was confirmed.”

  Gage didn’t have to ask why. He knew Jeanine well enough to understand that for her it was like Abrams had become the high priest of a materialistic religion that, in words she’d written to Faith, reduced hope and fear to matters of cash value. And it wasn’t that Jeanine had become a new age mystic. It was that she could no longer see the man she’d married under the vestments of his office or hear the voice that had once known how to speak in words other than data.

  “Has she filed for a divorce?” Gage asked.

  Abrams shook his head. “And I haven’t either.”

  Gage wondered whether Abrams’s anxiety over the twisted life of Michael Hennessy was an unconscious attempt to prove to himself he wasn’t the man his wife believed he’d become.

  Abrams sat down again and slid a file folder across the table.

  “This is all I’ve been able to gather up about the Ibrahim case,” Abrams said. “And there was something screwy about it. If the case was as real as the FBI said it was, he’d be doing life in Leavenworth.” His voice trailed away and his eyebrows furrowed as he stared down at the file. “I don’t get it.”

  “Was Hennessy still trying to figure out whether Ibrahim was guilty of something,” Gage said, “or was he certain that Ibrahim had been framed and decided to go looking for him?”

  “For what?” Abrams spread his hands. “To ask forgiveness? The facts are the facts. Hennessy could’ve just written a blog and posted it for the world to see: Dear Professor Ibrahim. So sorry. Give me a call and we’ll do lunch.”

  Gage imagined Abrams’s wife cringing at Abrams’s drift into sarcasm, his method of protecting himself from experiencing Hennessy’s guilt and Ibrahim’s terror, but Gage chose neither to confront Abrams nor to participate.

  “Maybe Hennessy was the kind of man who needed to do it face-to-face,” Gage said, trying to imagine the strivings of a human being he didn’t yet understand. “A message in a bottle won’t do for some people, they need to touch the hand of the person they’ve wronged.”

  Ab
rams smiled. “You’re the only investigator in the world who thinks like that.” His smile faded and he squinted at Gage. “Doesn’t that get to you after a while? “

  “What get to me?”

  “Climbing inside other people’s minds.”

  “That’s what you do, but inside hundreds of millions of them at once, instead of one at a time.”

  “Not quite. I mostly see people once removed, out of a limousine window or through economic data.” Abrams’s face reddened. “Except it’s really a kind of self-created distortion. Economics isn’t a science, it’s fantasy adorned in jargon.”

  Gage drew back, stunned and puzzled by the seeming non sequitur, the leap from Hennessy to Abrams’s professional self-doubt. Somehow everything had become wrapped together into a personal crisis, and Gage wasn’t sure why.

  “Even behavioral finance,” Abrams said, “to which I devoted the best part of my life, is just a form of modern voodoo, a collection of anecdotes shrouded in mathematical equations.”

  “I’m not sure what-“

  Abrams elbowed his way past Gage’s attempt to return him to the problem that had brought them together.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ve really learned and what no one wants to hear.” Abrams pounded the table with his forefinger. “No one. The markets are nothing but a form of gambling driven by fear and greed. And all of the world’s mainframes linked together couldn’t predict when one or the other will lead the charge.”

  Abrams’s voice hardened as if he was arguing with a naive colleague, or with himself.

  “A science that can’t predict anything isn’t a science. They shouldn’t give a Nobel Prize in economics. They should just make it a subcategory of literature.”

  Abrams’s breath came hard as he ended his unintended speech. He stared at Gage, eyes blank, as if he was looking through him at something in the distance.