Absolute Risk (2 page)

S
an Francisco private investigator Graham Gage handed his Rollaboard to the chauffeur, and then climbed into the backseat of the Town Car stopped at the slick and frozen curb in front of terminal one at John F. Kennedy Airport.

“Thanks for coming out,” Federal Reserve Chairman Milton Abrams said, the words emerging as a sigh. “Sorry I was so cryptic on the phone. The flight must’ve felt like a red-eye into the unknown.” Abrams made a show of surveying the solid shoulders on Gage’s six-foot-two frame. “And a cramped one at that.”

Gage inspected Abrams’s face. He found it difficult to make out beneath the lined and sagging flesh the academic who’d first sought him out two decades earlier. Back then, as an assistant professor of finance at MIT, Abrams had viewed economics as a form of play, mathematics as a form of poetry, and algorithms as a form of magic. While his days had been spent in intellectual combat and in a struggle for mainframe time, he celebrated his nights in a dream world of weightless possibilities and of ambition without responsibility.

But that game had come to an end six months earlier, with his appointment by the president and his confirmation by the Senate. Now he resided in a nightless world of twenty-four-hour securities markets and currency speculation, of war and terrorism, of human-made and natural disasters, all of which bore down on him at subatomic speed and seemed to have etched away his youth.

As the car accelerated away from the curb, Gage glanced out of the window at the line of just-arrived passengers standing in the taxi queue, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, stark and brilliant in a blue sky that had been unmasked by the overnight passing of a January blizzard.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Abrams said. “If the press finds out, I’ll look like an utter lunatic.”

“I’m not sure they’re paying attention to Michael Hennessy anymore,” Gage said, looking over. “He was at the center of only a single news cycle. It was pretty small in diameter and it’s already a week old.”

The only coverage of Hennessy’s death that Gage had found was a local story in
Metro Marseilles
and in Hennessy’s hometown paper: Former FBI agent found dead. Suicide suspected.

In the
Albany Times Union,
the special agent in charge had referred to Hennessy’s life as a train wreck that they’d been helpless to stop. It seemed to Gage that he wasn’t at all grief-stricken by the tragedy. His tone had suggested a kind of relief, as though a disturbing episode for Hennessy, for the Bureau, and perhaps for Hennessy’s family, had come to an end.

Abrams mumbled what sounded to Gage like lines from a poem as they drove from the airport grounds and onto the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan.

“Was that intended for me?” Gage asked.

Abrams half smiled and repeated the words. Gage recognized their source in the Old Testament:

”
I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you … So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea.”

“Which means that you don’t believe Michael Hennessy killed himself,” Gage said.

Abrams shook his head. “No one works as hard as he did to convince me to meet with him, only to devise a creative way to do himself in.”

Gage had seen too many people flinch or pivot or self-destruct just short of their goal to find the argument convincing. Humans didn’t run on a track like the Staten Island Railway. Decades as a police officer and as a private investigator had taught him that humans were a maze of intersecting thoughts, motives, and fears, any one of which could lead them into the abyss of a life not worth living and then over the edge toward homicide or suicide.

“After Hennessy first contacted me,” Abrams said. “I called the deputy director of the FBI. He told me that Hennessy had been fired because they considered him obsessed and delusional.”

“Then why’d you agree to meet with him? “

“It was something my assistant said. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and did her economics dissertation on Adam Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments.
She told me that delusional people chase phantoms around inside their own heads or within their own neighborhoods, they don’t pursue them overseas. And the first time Hennessy called he said he was in China.”

Gage shrugged. “Unless believing he was there was part of his delusion.”

Abrams shook his head. “Evidence showed up on my cell phone bill as an incoming call from a local Shanghai number. And the second time it was from Dubai, and the third from Algeria. And he never sounded nuts. Not paranoid. Not thinking that people were out to get him—“

“Or at least shrewd enough not to say it aloud.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Abrams said. “He just sounded guilty, genuinely ashamed of himself. Desperate for my help in making up for what he’d done to Hani Ibrahim.”

Although Gage hadn’t remembered Michael Hennessy’s name when Abrams called the day before, he did recall the FBI’s arrest of Ibrahim for a terrorist financing conspiracy. Ibrahim had been a financial mathematician who’d come to MIT a few years before Abrams had moved on to Harvard. He masterminded a scheme for funneling money from within the U.S. to foreign terrorist groups by using offshore trusts and charities. No criminal case was ever proven, but he was nonetheless deported.

“At some point,” Abrams said, “when, I don’t know—how, I don’t know—and why, I don’t know, Hennessy began to suspect that Ibrahim had been framed.”

“You mean that Hennessy participated in framing him.”

Abrams nodded. “But not knowingly. Or at least that was Hennessy’s claim.”

Gage thought back to the few years after 9/11, and asked, “Was Ibrahim simply deported, or was he flown to a country where a stronger case against him could be developed through torture?”

“I don’t know, but I got the sense that the rendition possibility figured into Hennessy’s desperation. The first time I spoke to him, he seemed to be at the opposite end of the exhilaration he’d displayed after Ibrahim’s arrest. I remember the photo. Him standing behind the director at a press conference in Washington, basking in the glory. It was his career case. He got a promotion to senior special agent and was made second in command of the FBI’s Anti-terrorism Task Force.” “Where was he on the arc the last time you spoke to him?”

“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 Côte 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.”

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 & 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 & 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 then 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 & 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.