Absolute Risk (18 page)

Y
ou 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, looking 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.”

J
ust 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 pooled 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.

Maybe Hennessy missed the signal, or worse, maybe he caught it but got stuck in traffic, his one chance lost—and he just gave up, broken under the strain of failure and of events he couldn’t control.

Gage’s eyes drifted higher toward the rooftops of surrounding office and apartment buildings and church bell towers, all places from which Hennessy could’ve watched—

Or could have been watched.

Had Hennessy been followed? And by someone who grasped the meaning in his motions and understood what he was trying to accomplish? Maybe just a hired hand like Gilbert and Strubb. Go. Hunt. Fetch. Don’t think. Just do.

And what steps had Hennessy taken to lose them? Abandon his car, grab a taxi, then ditch it and grab another—steal another? Each moment the clock ticking down.

Gage’s ringing cell phone crashed into his thoughts. He recognized the number. He stared at the bright screen as he forced Hennessy’s confusion from his mind, and then answered.

“Bonjour,”
Tabari said. “How are the legs?”

While Tabari had driven back to Marseilles, Gage had taken the trail a few miles farther before he returned to Cassis, searching for evidence of Hennessy’s activities before his death. Gage wasn’t convinced that the stolen car found at the trailhead was connected to Hennessy. Suicides don’t wipe away their fingerprints, but car thieves do.

He hoped that Tabari could get time away from work, for today’s trip was supposed to take them to where Hennessy’s rental car had been discovered by the police three days after his body.

“I’m ready for more,” Gage said. “When—”

“It won’t be me. The transport workers have a strike scheduled for this morning. Days off have been canceled and everyone has been assigned to riot duty.”

Gage remembered reading about the last one, a month earlier. Young North African and Arab teenagers had used the pretext of a battle between the strikers and the police as an excuse to ransack and torch a hundred shops.

“My uncle is on his way to pick you up. He had a couple of errands to run beforehand, but he should be near you in a minute or two.”

And that would mean that the inspection would be all show with no chance at all of tell.

Gage scanned the storefronts, then started walking toward a canopied restaurant on the bottom floor of a triangular-shaped building at the terminus of Rue de Republic.

“Have him pick me up in front of Café la Samaritaine,” Gage said.

“No problem,” Tabari said. “I’m sorry I can’t help you more, but I hope today you’ll find the answers you’re looking for.”

Gage crossed the quay and sheltered himself under the café awning against the rising sun. From there he watched buses offloading office workers and listened to the distant wail of sirens. Two car honks from La Canebiere caught Gage’s attention a few minutes later. He looked over and spotted Benaroun waving from the driver’s window of his Citroën as he rolled to a stop along the near curb. Gage climbed in and Benaroun looped around the meridian and headed south, away from the chaos of the city and once again toward the turmoil that had been Hennessy’s last days.

A
yi Zhao stared down at her rice bowl, too tired after thirty-six hours without sleep to lift her hands and manipulate her chopsticks. She closed her eyes and sighed.

“My son is nothing but a criminal,” she said, then looked up at Faith. “Do you have children?”

Faith shook her head.

“It’s better that way.”

Faith reached out and held Ayi Zhao’s hand. “But then you wouldn’t have such a wonderful grandson.”

“I know, and it’s a shame that he’s been so humiliated by his parents. I hope he’s finding comfort in his faith.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand it. Christianity seems so odd. I try to imagine heaven and hell, but I can’t see them except as distorted reflections of what is around me. And I can’t imagine Jesus as a god, only as a foreigner’s benevolent ancestor.”

Ayi Zhao paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then she shook her head as if to say that she’d somehow gone off course.

Faith released Ayi Zhao’s hand and pointed at her bowl. “You need to eat.”

Ayi Zhao reached for her chopsticks and managed them well enough to capture a sliver of green bean lying on top of her rice. Instead of eating it, she said, “It bothered me that Wo-li traveled so much and that he’d never tell me where he was going or where he went. It bothers me even more now that I know what he was doing.”

Knocking on the open storeroom door drew their attention to Old Cat, who walked in.

“We need to know whether Wo-li will do it,” Old Cat said, looking back and forth between them. He spread his arms. “People’s courts have now sprung up in Chongqing and across the border into Qinghai and into the Muslim areas of Xinjiang.”

Old Cat reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, and then held it in his hand by the edges, as though it represented an unfamiliar form of magic.

Faith guessed from his manner that he’d never handled one before this day.

“They’re looking at us for guidance,” Old Cat said.

Ayi Zhao and Faith understood exactly what he meant by guidance: If Chengdu could find a nonviolent form of justice, the others might follow.

“Your grandson was persuasive,” Old Cat said, “and for that reason I was willing to let a judicial process take place, but we’ve reached a stalemate with Wo-li, and the army can attack at any moment—it’s time to act.”

Faith was certain that Old Cat didn’t expect Ayi Zhao to plead for the life of her son and daughter-in-law, and she didn’t.

“If you spare their lives,” Ayi Zhao said, “Wo-li will tell you everything.”

Old Cat cocked his head toward the door and pointed at his ear. Only then did they notice the background murmur of voices in the hallway and the chanting from outside of the building.

As the chanting rose into cheering, Old Cat said, “We’ve liberated a forced labor camp north of the city—”

Ayi Zhao pulled back, as if jolted by Old Cat’s words.

“Does that mean that you freed Xing Ming and Wang Bai?”

Faith recognized the names: Xing and Wang were eighty-year-old women whose sentencing to hard labor for planning a protest at the Beijing Olympics had engendered worldwide condemnation.

Old Cat nodded. “The criminals imprisoned there have fled into the hills, but the political dissidents have joined us here. And having suffered the way they did, they have their own ideas of what should happen to Wo-li and his wife. Especially his wife.” Old Cat looked at Faith. “The party runs the slave labor system and she’s the highest party representative in Chengdu.” Old Cat shrugged. “So you see, their lives are not entirely in my hands.”

“Of course they are,” Ayi Zhao said. “You can let them escape after they cooperate.”

Old Cat squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at her and shook his head.

“They’re too well-known and they don’t have false papers. Even if they could get to a foreign border, there’s no way they could cross.”

Faith raised her hand as a prelude to speaking, but then lowered it. The only immunity she possessed arose out of her position as “the anthropologist,” the nameless professional witness. She looked at Ayi Zhao and understood a mother’s duty, and then asked herself where her own duty lay—and she was neither a mother, nor a revolutionary, nor even Chinese.

But then an image came to her mind of a wire service photographer that she’d once seen in a newspaper. His laying down his camera and diving into a Rwandan river to rescue a Tutsi baby who’d been thrown in to drown by a Hutu militia man—except that Wo-li and his wife weren’t innocent children. They were despicable adults, but they had a mother who didn’t deserve to suffer.

“I can get them out,” Faith said.