Absolute Risk (15 page)

McCormack turned and headed toward the door.

“Are you going to participate in National Pledge Day?” Wallace asked.

McCormack stopped and glanced back, the sudden change in direction throwing him off balance for a moment. He steadied himself against a bookcase, then said, “You’ve given me no choice.” He then turned toward the door and reached for the knob. “I have to.”

A half hour after the president left, Wallace closed the binder and placed it back on the desk.

Nonsense. It was all nonsense. No one took this stuff seriously.

Wallace wondered whether the president had read the Salvation Army’s literature when he’d served on their national advisory board.

Does anyone really think that the Salvation Army’s War College really intends to train people for armed combat?

Does anyone think their generals are real generals and their colonels are real colonels? That their commissioned officers are commissioned to do anything more than slop mashed potatoes onto metal plates?

Wallace rose and walked to the window and looked through bare tree branches toward the White House lawn. In the thin layer of snow he could make out the footprints of a uniformed Secret Service officer, the steps measured as if by a yardstick or by a metronome or by fifes and drums.

How many times had the president greeted the Salvationists, given them awards, held a July Fourth celebration with them on that patch of grass?

How many times had the president asked him to carry the Salvation Army’s luggage up to Capitol Hill? Lobby Congress so the Salvationists wouldn’t be forced to hire homosexuals, but nonetheless receive federal funds. Make sure that faith-based didn’t really mean goodwill to all.

Apolitical my ass,
Wallace thought.
I can do some research on my own.

Wallace returned to the desk and ran a search for the Salvation Army War College on the president’s computer, then navigated to a song titled, “I Am a Soldier in the Army of My God.” He found the words he was looking for and left them on the screen when he walked out:

As Wallace made his way down the rustling hallways, past the ticking keyboards and hushed discussions, he asked himself a question that he was sure the president had never asked himself, especially after church on Sunday with a sermon about the Second Coming still infusing him with joy and lightening his steps:

What need will the country have for a president, or a Congress, or a Supreme Court, or even elections when the Commander returns to govern by the word of God?

And other questions, even more serious ones:

Who is to say when the battle has been won and who has the right to speak for the winner?

G
raham Gage’s cell phone rang as he sat in Batkoun Benaroun’s kitchen with him and his nephew. He held up his forefinger and thumb spaced an inch apart to keep Benaroun from overfilling his wineglass for a second time, then looked at the number and answered.

“Is everything all right?” Gage asked.

Low engine rumble and the grumbling of tires on a rough road filled the long seconds before Faith answered.

“Can you hear me? “ she asked.

Benaroun and Tabari cast him questioning looks from across the table.

“Good enough. Go ahead.”

“I left the kids working in the village. I’m in the back of a military ambulance with Ayi Zhao on my way down to Chengdu.”

“Is she sick?” he asked Faith, while nodding at Benaroun and Tabari to indicate that at least Faith was okay.

“She’s fine. It’s just a dodge. Her son and daughter-in-law are being detained by a workers’ group. The leaders are willing to meet with her before they do anything. We told the garrison commander that she needed medical attention so they’d drive her down to the city.”

“What do the workers want?”

“Specifically, I don’t know. Generally, vengeance. Her son was the vice mayor in charge of construction and his wife was the first party secretary. He’s ultimately responsible for the collapses of the hospitals and the schools and her for the party failing to protect them from foreign exploitation. And they’re rich. Astoundingly rich. But their corrupt money won’t buy them out of—”

A blaring truck horn cut off her last words.

“What’s that?”

“We’re near the edge of town. The other drivers on the road seem to have lost respect either for the military or for ambulances.” She emitted a short, nervous laugh. “I’m not sure which. But it’s not the China I’m used to.”

“Does she have a plan?” Gage asked.

Gage gazed out of the window at the fog blurring the stone-walled patio. It reminded him of an outdoor Chinese court hearing he’d attended in a rural Chongqing village on behalf of Transparency Watch. The defendant had confessed under torture to subversion, a capital crime. Usually these hearings were held in secret, but this one was conducted in public and drawn out over a year to intimidate government opposition in the countryside.

“No plan yet,” Faith said, “but I’m thinking that she’ll have to persuade the workers that the two are worth more alive than dead. Not financially, but in terms of propaganda—but she first has to convince the mob that they don’t have the moral authority to set up a provisional court and start executing people.”

“They’ve already killed—”

More honking, a crash, then a screech of tires.

“What happened?” Gage asked.

“Hold on. Let me look into the cab.”

Gage heard rustling as Faith crawled forward and then conversation in Mandarin.

“Some kid by a school gate threw a rock at the windshield. We’re moving again.”

More rustling as she returned to her seat.

“The problem is that once they believe that the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn, authority is up for grabs. Their view at this point may be that they have as much right as anyone else to run things. The Chinese constitution just becomes a relic of a dead era.”

“Do they already believe that it’s happened?”

“I don’t know, but people are saying the words aloud. One more earthquake. One more riot. One more firestorm. And everything may disintegrate.”

“Then don’t stay too long.”

“I only want to be here long enough to help Ayi Zhao through this, then I’ll gather up the kids and get out.”

Gage thought again of the trial and the defendant being led head down, wearing a prisoner’s blue striped shirt, into the yard day after day to be displayed and humiliated. He also remembered why Faith despised Ringling Brothers, whose bears were forced to dance and whose tigers were forced to leap through rings of fire, kept alive in captivity solely for the purpose of spectacle.

“Maybe she needs to divert them with a circus,” Gage said.

“A what?”

“Nobody wants to kill the clown while he’s performing under the big top. Like the impromptu trials during the Cultural Revolution, it’ll be familiar to everyone. Maybe they’ll be seduced by the symmetry or maybe they’ll find some comfort in history repeating itself. If she’s lucky, maybe she can keep dragging out the interrogations until the rebellion is suppressed.”

“Gotcha. I’ll pitch it to her.” Faith paused for a moment, then said. “I think Ayi Zhao feels horribly guilty, for not saving China from her son and for not saving her son from himself. Now the only hope she has left, and only as his mother, is that maybe she can save his life.”

Benaroun was smiling when Gage disconnected. “I thought there was only one crime stopper in the family.”

“It’s more like applied anthropology,” Gage said.

“That’s kind of what we all do,” Benaroun said. He turned his smile toward Tabari. “You may want to get out your pad and take notes, voices of wisdom are about to speak.” Then back at Gage. “I never met a good detective who wasn’t part psychologist and part anthropologist, especially in this part of the world.”

“And in South Africa,” Gage said.

Benaroun’s smile faded. He gave Tabari a sour look, a way of saying that he had suspected the kid had betrayed a confidence.

“He didn’t warn me off,” Gage said. “Just repeated that you wanted to talk to me about something.”

“No. It was him wanting you to talk me out of something.”

Gage smiled. “Are we going to keep circling, or are we about to land?”

Benaroun cast another glance at Tabari, then said, “I’m starting to suspect that the platinum is being smuggled out of South Africa by air.” He pushed his wineglass aside. “The interesting thing is that there are records of the flights arriving in Johannesburg, but no records of them leaving.”

“Do you know which planes?”

“My informant promises to tell me when I get there. If Transparency Watch authorizes the onetime payment that I want, I’ll deliver it to him in person next week and he’ll give me the details.”

“That’s a hell of a risk to take based on what could be a fantasy or—”

“Or an outright lie,” Tabari said.

“Except that he told me a few things that I’ve been able to verify.” Benaroun held up a finger: “First, there’s now an artificially induced platinum shortage.” He held up another: “Second, buyers are purchasing an enormous volume of futures, placing bets that the price will be rising in the next few months.”

Benaroun lowered his hand and leaned forward.

“The contradiction is third: The companies offering the futures contracts are apparently not increasing the reserves of platinum they keep in their bank vaults to secure the paper.”

“What do you mean by ‘apparently'?”

“My informant is telling me that they’re buying on the black market from the stocks stolen by the president—so the reserves are actually there—but they’re not reporting them publicly.”

“How would he know?”

Benaroun glanced at his nephew, then back at Gage. “He’s the deputy director of the South African Secret Service.”

Gage thought for a moment. He wasn’t sure how someone in South Africa would know what was occurring inside a Swiss vault thousands of miles away.

“There’s an alternative,” Gage finally said. “Maybe the whole thing is a fraud and the sponsors are simply lying about their reserves.”

Benaroun shook his head. “Someone I know who used to be with the Swiss Federal Banking Commission is now the compliance officer at Exchange Traded Metals. He’s the one who counts their coins and bars. And he noticed the same anomaly as my informant did.”

“Then I think he has an obligation to turn his company in to Swiss authorities instead of in to Transparency Watch and—”

“And get himself killed?”

Gage drew back. “Isn’t that a little melodramatic?”

“If there is such a thing as economic war, then there is such a thing as economic terrorism,” Benaroun said. “It has to be prevented, and if it’s too late to be prevented, people have to be punished.” Benaroun gestured toward Tabari. “It isn’t just a coincidence that I asked him to come out here from Marseilles to meet you.”

Gage looked at Tabari. “Did you work on Hennessy’s case?”

Tabari shrugged. “Not directly. There was nothing to work on. It was determined to be a suicide.”

“Or someone was determined to make it a suicide,” Gage said.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Tabari said. “There was no relevant evidence to the contrary.”

Gage smiled at Benaroun. “Your nephew may have a career in politics. His every answer is loaded and invites a follow-up question.”

Benaroun raised his arm and then rotated his forefinger downward as if telling Tabari to put whatever he knew on the table.

Tabari leaned forward and stared down at the grained wood surface. Gage guessed at the choices he was weighing as he sat motionless except for his flicking eyelashes. They were the existential ones with which second generation immigrants, especially those who have achieved conventional success, are confronted. He was a French Algerian. A Jew. An outsider striving for acceptance. His uncle’s asking him to betray official confidences and secrets was more than simply a matter of morality and of integrity, it was a matter of identity.

In Tabari, Gage saw himself thirty years earlier, moving up from Southern Arizona to join the San Francisco Police Department. Everyone in his academy class knew of a local applicant who they’d assumed had been the one pushed aside to make room for Gage, an outsider. The difference was that Gage knew that, unlike Tabari, he wouldn’t spend his career as a police officer and the department wouldn’t be his world.

Gage also grasped that in this conflict of loyalties, Tabari understood that helping him would be a political act requiring enormous courage. They both knew what Benaroun would have done, but Benaroun accepted his position as a pariah, a near untouchable in French society, and rebelled against it, while Tabari hoped to escape it someday by donning a commandant’s uniform.

“I’m not comfortable accessing Police Judiciaire records and releasing the information to you,” Tabari finally said, “but out of respect for my uncle, I’ll do what I can to help.”

Tabari now raised his head and looked at Gage.

“Which means that I’ll find a discreet way to get you into the places where evidence was found, and in the order it was found, and put you in a position to see what any observer who happened to be in the right place and at the right time would’ve seen.”

Gage recognized in Tabari’s clear-eyed gaze and firm tone that this wasn’t a wink and a nod, a game of let’s pretend. The young man understood moral limits, and he’d found a line etched in marble that he wouldn’t pulverize into sand in order to slide past it.

“And I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.”

F
ormer president Randall Harris fanned out on his desk the blue-, red-, black-, and green-covered proposal binders from the four largest accounting firms in the world. Each outlined its strategy for auditing the assets of Relative Growth Funds. He positioned them along the curve as though he was choosing a paint color for his Rockefeller Center office, rather than evaluating the substance of what was contained inside.

Ronald Minsky, CEO of Relative Growth, sat across from him feeling like a messenger from Kinko’s delivering on-demand documents to a Rottweiler: a beast who’d be able to absorb them in torn chunks, but not comprehend them word by word—except Minsky knew that this dog had perfect instincts.

“These things weren’t written to protect Relative Growth,” Harris said, “but to protect the auditors from us if we someday discover that they’ve screwed up.”

Minsky smiled to himself. Harris’s nose hadn’t failed him.

“Of course they need to protect themselves,” Minsky said. “They can’t be held responsible when they rely on others for information.”

Harris glared at Minsky.

“Cowards. That’s all they are.”

He then pointed at Minsky’s face.

“I’ve got a new Golden Rule for you. Forget the old ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Change it to ‘Always act as though you’re president of the United States.’ He’s got no one he can blame when things go wrong. He has to stand up there and take it. If he doesn’t, he looks like a goddamn putz and history will judge him to be a weakling.”

Minsky felt like pointing out that presidential reputations were matters only of image and had no cash value except in the form of book advances for their memoirs and fees for their memberships on corporate boards. Relative Growth, on the other hand, was about real money: who eats and who doesn’t and, as they both knew, who owns the jet.

Instead, Minsky said, “A lawsuit against them would be pointless. None of them have enough errors and omissions or liability insurance to cover even a fraction of the value of the Relative Growth Funds.”

Minsky watched Harris absorb the thought, and the implication that the audits would only possess the appearance of accountability. He decided that he’d better pet the dog.

“I assumed that’s why you wanted to use the hammer of the ten-million-dollar reward to whoever catches another one’s mistakes.”

Harris shrugged. “Yeah. Right. Except I don’t see much protection in that. My guess is that we’ll be paying ten million extra to all of them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’re meeting together right now, agreeing on where to leave the bread crumbs.”

“You sound pissed off at them and they haven’t even begun their work.”

Harris pushed himself to his feet.

“You bet your ass I am. These people have never gotten anything right, but I have no choice but to rely on them.”

Harris held out his hand, his thumb pressed against his little finger.

“Enron.”

He moved his thumb to the next finger. “Adelphia.” Then the next. “Global Crossing.” Then the next. “ImClone.”

Then started over. “Sunbeam. Tyco. AIG. Madoff.”

He spread his arms. “And how do we value all of these damn credit derivatives and options and swaps? The economy collapses and all of a sudden we’re freezing our asses off at two trillion dollars below zero.”

“Can’t happen,” Minsky said, shaking his head. “That’s the whole point of the Ibrahim approach. It assumes that a collapse is inevitable and plans for it, profits from it. We’re the only real hedge fund that ever existed. The rest of them rode the rising tide, and when the tide fell, they went out to sea with it. But not us.”

“Save the advertisement. I don’t need to hear the song and dance again. You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes, I did. You weren’t listening,” Minsky said, trying to suppress the annoyance he felt at the former president. “It’s not going to happen. It can’t. We’re the gravity that controls the tide. It rises when we say rise and falls when we say fall.”

Minsky thought for a moment.

“Let me put it in concrete terms,” Minsky finally said. “You’re a commodities guy, right?”

Harris nodded.

“You like gold and silver and oil and rice and wheat.”

“All of the above. That’s the real economy. That’s why I watch the prices.”

“Then ask yourself: Why was platinum at twenty-six hundred dollars an ounce a year ago and why it’s at seven hundred dollars an ounce today?”

“You and I both know why. A miner’s strike and electrical blackout in South Africa.”

“And why it will rise to two thousand dollars an ounce three months from now? ”

Minsky watched Harris’s eyes widen.

“How could you know—”

“Because we rule the market, that’s why.”

Minsky watched Harris’s face flush before he spoke.

“You mean that you manipulate it by putting people out of work,” Harris said, “and cutting off the lights by which their kids do their homework when it suits your needs.”

“Our needs. Yours. Mine. Ours. The fact is that there’s a certain quantity of human suffering in the world, we just move it around so peoples’ suffering won’t be in vain.” He smiled. “At least some peoples’ suffering won’t be in vain.” Then he laughed. “Who would’ve thought that the invisible hand would have actual fingers.”

“You really are a scumbag, aren’t you?”

Minsky let his smile harden in place and met Harris’s stare and said, “You know what they say. After the tide’s gone out, what’s left behind is the slime.”

They stood in silence, staring at each other. Finally, Minsky said, “Your State of the Union speeches used to amuse me. ‘The state of the economy is strong … the genius of capitalism … the wealth created by the free market.’ You thought it was all real, but it was just ideological poetry.”

Harris’s face reddened.

“Actually, it wasn’t even that. The invisible hand isn’t a scientific concept, it’s a religious one. It’s Calvinism rewrought. It was John Calvin who declared wealth to be a manifestation of the workings of Providence, and transformed greed and accumulation from the devil’s work into a sign of God’s grace. The words in which he framed it—the invisible hand—are Calvin’s, not Adam Smith’s. So you see that the very first act of modern science of economics was intellectual theft.”

Minsky grinned and spread his hands.

“What am I saying? Economic science, my ass. Smith latched on to the concept in order to define beauty—not the operation of the market—but you wouldn’t know that. Would you? Of course not.”

Harris’s fists clenched by his sides.

“You have no scientific basis for anything you believe. You’ve simply absorbed the ideas you’ve lived your life by in the same way a paper towel absorbs a spill.”

Minsky watched Harris’s fists twitch. He waited for Harris to pull one back, but realized that he’d never swing, for Harris wouldn’t want to be remembered in history for a misdemeanor assault and battery.

“The smooth functioning of the market—is there a more stupid phrase ever uttered? Wealth is created when the market breaks down. That’s when there are great winners and great losers. Wealth is created not by greasing the wheels of the market, making it more efficient, but by sabotaging it.”

“The great computer hardware and software companies are proof that you’re wrong. The founders became the richest guys in the world by doing it the old-fashioned way.”

“It’s proof that I’m right and that you’re as deluded as I said you were,” Minsky said. “They’ve all paid out more in civil settlements and fines for monopolistic practices, antitrust violations, market manipulation, and patent violations than the entire net worth of General Motors at its peak. It’s called sabotage. And before they became benevolent philanthropists, they were master saboteurs.”