Absolute Risk (11 page)

G
age’s encrypted cell phone rang as he drove from the MIT campus toward the western edge of Boston. It was Alex Z calling from San Francisco. “I checked Ibrahim for friends and associates,” Alex Z said. “And there weren’t many outside of a Muslim men’s group that met at his house. A member has a blog and mentioned Ibrahim’s first name and MIT, so it was easy to ID him.”

“Find out if the U.S. Attorney up here filed tax fraud cases against any of them. I need to know who was involved. Ibrahim’s was the only name I found in the news articles.”

Gage heard the rapping of Alex Z’s fingers on his keyboard.

“Ibrahim sounds like a real multitasker,” Alex Z said, “Terrorist financing, abstract financial theories, and tax evasion.”

“I’m starting to think they’re all part of the same package,” Gage said, “or maybe different passages in the same maze.”

“I just entered one of the names in the Federal Case Index,” Alex Z said. “Hold on … nothing.”

“Try the rest and call me back.”

The snowfall let up as Gage headed back across the Harvard Bridge and down Massachusetts Avenue. He cut right at Symphony Hall and drove into the multistory garage, then up the circular floors until he located a dry space between two vans. He climbed out and knelt down next to the car to check for a GPS tracking device. He worked his way around the perimeter and the wheel wells, then checked the engine compartment from below and above.

Nothing.

Whoever had been hired to replace Gilbert hadn’t gotten on to him yet. He knew they would, and could, anytime they felt like it. All they had to do was wait for him to show up at the few places connected with Ibrahim, Abrams, or Hennessy—assuming they were following him because he’d met with Abrams, and assuming that they were following Abrams because of Hennessy.

Gage walked the circumference of the garage, scanning the cars parked around the sculpture garden next to the street below and along the front of the Whole Foods Market. His phone rang again as he surveyed the parking places that had a view of the garage exit. If someone was set up to follow him when he left, that’s where they would’ve parked to be ready.

“Bugs everywhere, boss,” Viz said.

It was Hector McBride, Gage’s surveillance chief. Gage had nicknamed him Viz, for the same reason fat people were named Slim and slim people were named Fats. Despite being six-four and two hundred and thirty pounds, he was invisible to his targets. Even after a decade of working together, Gage still didn’t understand his magic.

“Where are you now?” Gage asked.

“I’m freezing my ass off in Central Park by the reservoir, and Abrams is at his office at the Fed. He doesn’t know yet.”

“How bad is it?”

“It doesn’t get much worse than this. There were multiple devices in every room, but not for fail-safe reasons. I think they were installed by different groups.”

“That means that whoever got there second has got to know about whoever got there first, and left the bugs installed.”

“That’s what I’m thinking. But they may not know who installed them.”

“And the second group couldn’t disable the original ones without giving themselves away or provoking the first group to come back and reinstall other devices.”

Viz laughed. “It’s game theory in practice. I should’ve paid more attention in college.”

Gage turned away from the street and walked back toward his car. There were too many possibilities for who’d installed the bugs. Foreign governments. Hedge funds looking for inside information. Those looking for Ibrahim. Maybe even Abrams’s estranged wife—and he didn’t yet know enough to exclude any of them.

“Interesting thing,” Viz said. “One set of devices are modified cell phones. The other set is hooked into his cable system. Both are connected into the electrical system and use lithium ion batteries. That means they’re always powered on and can be accessed from anywhere in the world, either by calling into the phones or through the Internet.”

“Any way to follow the signals to whoever is listening?”

“I could probably abstract some information out of the SIM cards—at least the numbers that have been called—and maybe Alex Z could backtrack the Internet traffic.”

Gage paused next to his rental car and scanned the rest of the vehicles on the floor, then climbed in.

“Call Abrams,” Gage said. “Tell him you need him at the apartment. Be cryptic in case they’ve also got his phones bugged. Meet him out front. Let’s assume they’ve broken into his computer, too. Have him give you access so you can get whatever information you need. DNS. Gateway. IP address. Then go with him to check his office and pass on whatever you learn there to Alex Z. Once he’s done with whatever tracing he can do, go back into the apartment and make a show of switching him from cable to satellite and set up something to interfere with cell service in the apartment. Once we figure out who they are, we can switch everything back on and feed them bum leads.”

T
he salesman’s smile on Abdul Rahmani’s face flamed out when Gage introduced himself as a private investigator. He got up from his desk behind the counter at Ijara Automobiles along Boston’s Soldier’s Field Road, yanked his pants up an inch, and waddled over. “Why can’t you guys leave me alone?” “Who is ‘you guys'?”

“FBI. IRS. That good-for-nothing Hennessy. And for the last couple of weeks, PIs.”

“Like Tony Gilbert?”

Rahmani nodded.

“He won’t be coming by anymore.”

“You his replacement?”

“Not exactly. We’re on different sides.” Gage shrugged. “But I’m not quite sure what all the sides are.”

Rahmani’s smile returned. “Join the club.”

“All I know is that the spokes of the wheel revolve around Hani Ibrahim.”

Rahmani spread his hands and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “May Allah grant my wish that I never hear that name again.”

“How about I’ll refer to him as Fred,” Gage said.

Rahmani looked back at Gage. “And how about you tell me why you’re interested in Fred and I’ll tell you if I want to talk to you.”

“Can I buy you a cup of coffee while I try?”

Rahmani stared at Gage for a few seconds, his head rocking side to side, then said, “Let me get my coat and close up shop. Nobody’s car shopping today anyway.”

After Rahmani locked the front door behind them, Gage gestured toward the empty lot. “Where are the cars?”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

Rahmani led Gage past storefront real estate and insurance offices and a liquor store and pawnshop to a Turkish halal café. He waved to the owner as he escorted Gage to a booth at the rear of the empty restaurant. The owner brought over coffee without waiting for their order.

Gage leaned over the table in order to talk without the owner overhearing.

Rahmani shook his head. “No reason for secrecy.” He pointed at the owner. “Ilkay got snagged, too.”

Gage sat back and said, “From what I’ve been told, Hennessy—”

“You mean the lunatic.”

“Maybe, maybe not. He seemed to believe that Fred was innocent.”

“So he told me, but it didn’t help me with my tax bill.” Rahmani pointed at Gage. “You know what they dinged me for? Sixty thousand dollars in penalties and interest. And what I spent on lawyers, you wouldn’t fucking believe. I had to get a loan to pay for everything.”

“For using the hybrid company? ”

“And for proving that I wasn’t guilty by association with a guy—Fred—who wasn’t guilty at all. Terrorist financing? Fred hated those people. Hated—hated—hated. He was barely even a Muslim, much less a radical one. The only reason he participated in the discussion group we had was so that he could tell us every week what hypocrites we were, and he never missed a chance.”

“I thought the whole point of the hybrid was Islamic financing.”

Rahmani laughed. “Fred meant it as a joke. He only went through with it as an object lesson for us.”

Gage shook his head. “You’ve completely lost me.”

“An example.” Rahmani laid his forearms on the table, palms up. “You know how Orthodox Jews aren’t allowed to turn light switches on or off on the Sabbath?”

Gage nodded.

“The way they get around it is to use a shade that you can rotate so that it blocks the light. They flip the switch on before sundown on Friday and leave it on until sundown on Saturday. By rotating the shade, they get light when they want. Ingenious. They also have elevators that stop on every single floor on Saturdays so nobody has to push a button.”

“They invented ways to get around the rules.”

“In fact, but not in spirit. It’s all bullshit.”

Rahmani glanced at Ilkay standing at the counter reading a newspaper, and then lowered his voice.

“Like my business. Muslims aren’t supposed to pay interest—
riba
—so instead of the customer financing the car through a bank, I buy it, lease it to them, and at the end of the lease, they give me a little extra and they then own the car.” He pointed in the direction of his office. “That’s what
ijara
means in my company’s name. Lease.”

“And your bullshit is calling it profit, instead of interest.”

Rahmani raised his cup, took a sip, and then said, “Exactly.”

“How does Fred fit—”

“I’ll tell you. One evening, Fred explains how a hybrid company works. He says that we’re not shareholders. We don’t own it. We’re what they call guarantors. We’re responsible for the debts—”

“Or the profits—”

”—when the company closes down. In the meanwhile it’s completely out of our control. Com-pletely. Fred then asks whether it’s okay if the hybrid loans out money and earns interest and the value of the company increases, and then pays it all to us as profit when the company closes down.”

Rahmani held up a forefinger. “Remember. It’s not our company when it’s earning the interest. The money is out of our hands and Sharia law doesn’t apply.”

“And that also means,” Gage said, “that the profits at the end could be considered capital gains instead of regular income.”

Rahmani grinned. “You’re good. Really good. Fifteen percent federal tax rate, instead of thirty or more. And we don’t have to take the gains until the company goes out of existence. It’s like a 401(k), except offshore and you can put in as much money as you want.”

“It should’ve sounded too good to be true.”

Rahmani shrugged. “Nothing ever sounds too good to be true at the time. At that point we’re on our feet dancing, and the idiots that we were, we dance right down the path Fred laid out for us.”

“And the rest is history.”

“If the terrorist financing allegation hadn’t come up, we’d probably still be doing it.”

Framed by 9/11, Gage knew that there was no way Hennessy, or any FBI agent or U.S. Attorney, would’ve found Rahmani and Ibrahim’s defense credible. No one sets up a tax fraud as a joke.

But there was still the question of where the money went that these men had put into the hybrid.

“How was the money used for terrorist financing?” Gage asked.

Rahmani shrugged again. “We never learned for sure.” He gestured toward Ilkay. “His wife was close to Fred’s wife, Ibadat. You know she’s a Muslim from China, right?”

Gage nodded. “Xinjiang.”

“Ibadat told Ilkay’s wife that Hennessy leaned on her about a Muslim separatist group that bombed a U.S.-owned company over there ten years ago. Spectrum. Vice President Wallace’s old company. Hennessy implied that money from the hybrid was used to finance the bombing.” Rahmani rapped on the tabletop with his knuckle. “But I never saw or heard of a single piece of evidence that proved it.”

Gage suspected that pressure to prosecute Ibrahim had come from Wallace and that Ibrahim’s deportation must’ve been a compromise: face saving for the FBI and a way for Ibrahim to protect his wife. And the cover-up of the details served everyone’s interest: The FBI prevented the widespread use of the technique and Ibrahim didn’t get exposed to the Muslim community around the world as a heretic.

Gage now also understood that Rahmani’s “May Allah grant …” was an act. The man liked Ibrahim, didn’t blame him for anything, not even for the tax bill. And Rahmani had long ago acknowledged to himself that he’d brought that on himself.

“Did you tell all of this to Tony Gilbert when he came by?”

“He didn’t seem all that interested. All he wanted was to find Fred. Or so he said.”

“You help him?”

Rahmani shook his head. “How could I? I don’t know where Fred is or even if he’s still alive. And even if I did know, I wouldn’t have told him. Gilbert was like a pit bull wagging his tail. You don’t know which end to believe, so you keep your hands in your pockets.”

Gage smiled. “I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to touch dogs at all.”

“Religious opinion is divided on the subject.” Rahmani smiled back. “It’s sort of like tax law.”

“But you settled with the government.”

“We all decided it would be better for us and for Fred if the story didn’t stay in the news—”

“And the details didn’t come out.”

Rahmani rocked his head side to side, and then nodded and took another sip of his coffee.

“And now you know my story,” Rahmani said. “What’s yours?”

“Hennessy may have been killed—” Rahmani flopped a hand toward Gage, cutting him off. “That’s his story. I want to know yours.”

“Personally, I don’t have one. Professionally, someone asked me to locate Fred and find out what really happened.”

“Maybe you should go knock on the door of the hedge fund. Rumors in the financial pages say that he’s their secret weapon. Maybe they know where he is.” Rahmani smiled. “Maybe they have him in an old missile silo, ready to shoot down their competition.”

Gage recognized that the maybes were a test to divine his intent.

“It seems a long way around to connect two points,” Gage said. “And I’m not sure that whatever he’s doing now—or is alleged to be doing now—is relevant to what happened then.”

In fact, Gage believed the opposite, but the more narrow the focus, and the more Rahmani believed that exonerating Ibrahim was Gage’s aim, the more likely he’d help.

“It seems to me,” Rahmani said, “that your real interest is not in Fred, but in what happened to Hennessy.”

“Only in the sense that his death provoked my client into wanting to know whether or not Hennessy was right about Fred being framed and whether that had something to do with Hennessy’s death.”

Rahmani smiled, then looked over at the café owner and called out, “Ilkay, turn on the music. Mr. Gage here seems to want to dance.”

Gage shook his head.

“It’s true that I wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t a suspicion that Hennessy had been murdered. And it’s true that the person who hired me wants to know whether he’s dead because he intended to expose something—either about the past or about the future.” Gage raised his right hand as if to swear an oath. “But at this point, all of the evidence I have points to the past.”

When he said the word “evidence,” Gage felt a little like Bill Clinton manipulating the word “is” or George Bush redefining the word “torture.”

“I can see you’re not an idiot, Mr. Gage, so you’ve no doubt noticed that there are similarities between a hybrid company and a hedge fund. Your money is out of your control for a period of time, you don’t know what they’re doing with it, and you don’t have the right to know.”

Gage drew back. “You’re not suggesting that the Relative Growth Funds is engaged in terrorist financing?”

“Not with its board dominated by the last three Republican administrations. All I’m saying is that the past may not be all that distinct from the present.”

“Only one man knows the answer.”

Rahmani nodded. “But if I was that man, I’d want to know who’s really asking the question.”

Gage leaned forward and rested his chin on his cupped hands, trying to give the appearance of deliberating over whether to reveal the name of his client. There was no way he’d say it was Abrams, but he thought of a partial truth that would satisfy them both.

“You married?” Gage asked.

“Of course.”

“You have children?”

Rahmani paused and stared into Gage’s eyes, and then said, “I see. This must be very painful for Hennessy’s family.” He shrugged. “The problem is that Fred agreed to deportation to protect his wife and the group and for that reason broke off contact with us after he left.”

They sat in silence for a few moments. Gage didn’t think it was safe to pressure him any further.

“I can try to get a message to him,” Rahmani finally said, “but I may never know whether it gets delivered or even whether he’s still alive to receive it.”

Driving away from the café, Gage found that he believed Rahmani, but wasn’t convinced of the man’s reasoning. It was just as likely that it was Ibrahim who had isolated himself from his past to protect himself as much as to protect his friends.

What worried Gage now was that if Ibrahim had been unjustly prosecuted by his adoptive country, then he’d have a motive to get even, and if he hadn’t been the mastermind of a terrorist financing plot before, he might have acquired a reason to become one.

A genius like Ibrahim wouldn’t find it hard to divert a few million dollars, maybe tens of millions of dollars, from a two-trillion-dollar hedge fund into a terrorist’s hands.

In any case, Gage decided, the answer wouldn’t be found in Boston, where the trail had begun, but where it had ended.

He glanced at his watch as he merged onto the highway toward Logan Airport. It was still too early in the Chinese morning to call Faith. The news reports he’d listened to on the way to meet Rahmani had said that the Chengdu uprising was spreading east toward the industrial cities, not west into the mountains, but he was sure it would soon, and he feared she’d get caught up in it, for the largest volume product now being manufactured in China was blame.