Absolute Risk (20 page)

W
hat the devil is the Chinese army doing?” Vice President Cooper Wallace asked the CIA director. “Are they going to stand by while those criminals destroy every American asset in Central China?”

Wallace’s coffee had turned cold in the study of his Naval Observatory home as he’d inspected dozens of satellite images of the burned-out Spectrum distribution center in Chengdu, and farther south in Chongqing and Guiyang, and even farther south in Kunming. Other photos showed incinerated Meinhard plants and RAID factories and branches of German and French and Taiwanese companies, the smoke from the ruins hovering like patches of fog over the crosshatch of roads and buildings in the special economic zones.

CIA Director John Casher slid a DVD across the desk and pointed at the vice president’s laptop. Wallace pressed it into the drive.

Casher waited until the video activated, then said, “These shots were taken outside of a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party.”

Wallace’s eyes jerked from the screen to Casher.

“How did you—“

The director waved his hand. “It’s not important. What is, is that you see three old guard PLA generals walking inside. The last of the true believers.”

“What does it mean? “

“We think it means that the army, or at least part of it, is taking the position that the rebellion in Central China should be allowed to run its course.” Casher pointed at the computer. “During the 1950s, when these men were young, Mao staged what was called the Hundred Flowers Campaign.”

Wallace nodded. “I read about it in college. Let a hundred flowers bloom—and then Mao snipped them off one after another.”

“Exactly. What’s happening now is that workers, laborers, and farmers are identifying and rounding up corrupt officials. And it seems as though the army wants those flowers to bloom.”

“Are the flowers the rebels or the officials?”

“Both. But our intelligence is telling us that the army is most focused on making an example of some of the officials and on having it happen in the outlying provinces where it can be contained. When the time comes, they’ll crush the rebellion before it spreads to Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou where it might spin out of control.”

Wallace remembered something else from his Asian history course.

“It could just as easily spread like a wildfire and we’d have another Cultural Revolution that would bring their economy to a halt.” Wallace pointed toward the window. “And ours too. Eighty percent of our suppliers

are in China. Store shelves will be empty in a matter of days. Car assembly lines will stop moving. A million empty containers will stack up at our ports with nowhere to go.”

Wallace looked down at the satellite images lying on his desk.

“Isn’t there something you can do about stopping the destruction?”

Casher spread his hands and shrugged.

“For the most part,” Casher said, “all we can do is monitor what is going on with the few agents we have in those areas and by monitoring telephone traffic.”

“What about the Internet? “

“The Chinese have suspended it out there. They’ve left it up along the industrial coast since international commercial order processing requires it.”

“Which means you have to listen to a billion phone calls to figure out what’s going on?”

“Sort of.”

Wallace stared at the director. He had a sense that Casher had slipped something by him, maybe because Casher didn’t fully trust him with the entire truth, but wanted to shift the burden onto him for not asking the right questions in case there were recriminations later.

Then it hit him. “What did you mean by ‘for the most part’ all you can do is monitor with a few agents? “

Wallace watched Casher stiffen. He smiled to himself.
These bureaucrats, maybe even the president, think I’m some kind of bumbler, but they forget that I’m the one that made Spectrum the biggest multilevel marketing company in the world.
Maybe he hadn’t adjusted to the political game as early as he should have, and as quickly as he should have, but he knew how to listen.

Casher took in a breath, then stretched his neck and adjusted his tie.

“We’re…uh…sharing information with the PLA.”

Wallace fixed his own expression in place. He knew that Casher expected him to redden and pound the desk, furious at the thought of making an alliance with the second most powerful army in the world that was also the force behind the economic machine aimed at crushing the West.

Instead, Wallace asked, “Is it a two-way street?”

Casher nodded.

“And what have we gotten for what we’ve given them? “

Wallace watched Casher lean forward, not quite like a dam breaking, but close.

“Most of our attention is focused on Chengdu because that’s where the rebellion began—“

“Because of all of the deaths in the earthquake.”

Casher nodded. “The surrounding provinces are watching the rebels there. A leader has emerged, a quiet guy, but charismatic. Over the last few days he’s stopped the killing and burning and organized the mob into a militia of sorts. He’s even set up people’s courts and detention centers for corrupt officials.”

Wallace’s face betrayed him with a smirk. “Some kind of a Sichuan-flavored George Washington?”

“Not as different as you might think. And that’s why the PLA takes him seriously.”

Wallace felt the pressure of Casher’s stare.

“You ever put your life on the line for something?” Casher asked. “Knowing that you were going to lose it?”

They both knew the answer. Wallace’s two tours in Vietnam were spent working in the embassy. Never once in his life had Wallace doubted but that he’d die

in his sleep when old age had depleted his body. Even the occasional death threats he’d received from fringe lunatics hadn’t driven him toward thoughts of mortality and the shuddering terror of a violent death.

“Old Cat is a dead man and he knows it,” Casher said. “He’s shouldering the guilt for the lynchings and the bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head-executions even though it was just mob violence and he didn’t order any of it.”

“You sound like you have a lot of respect for the guy.”

Casher sighed. “I wish he was on our side. I’d trade for him in a heartbeat. I’d trade away all of our wannabe Pinochets and Afghan tribal leaders and Mubaraks and the whole lot of Saudi princes for just one like—“

Wallace raised his hand. “This isn’t the time or place to get into those issues. The question on the table is what we can learn from him.”

Wallace watched Casher flush, and he knew he was wrong. He grasped that now was exactly the time and place, and that the failure to address those kinds of issues at the right time and in the right place had led to one U.S. foreign policy disaster after another, from Vietnam to Iraq.

“Let me rephrase that,” Wallace said. “Let’s start with what’s going on now, then you can have as much time as you need to tell me what you think all of this means.”

Wallace picked up his telephone from its cradle and punched in the intercom numbers for his secretary. He waited for her to answer, then said, “Cancel all of my appointments for the rest of the day…all of them.”

He hung up and looked at Casher and nodded.

“The PLA has made sure that there is uninterrupted cell service in the areas in which Old Cat operates,” Casher said. “His people have taken over the government

complex in central Chengdu and they’re operating a court at the Meinhard plant in the special economic zone.”

“Does he realize that he’s being intercepted? “

Casher shook his head. “I don’t think so. He’s a farmer. He’d probably never even touched a mobile phone until a few days ago. But he’s using one now and the people around him are using them, too. And one of those is an anthropologist from Berkeley, Faith Gage.”

Wallace did a little head shake. “You mean an American has joined the revolution. Or worse, is leading it?”

“Not quite. She’s there with her students doing research. Her husband is Graham Gage, the private investigator.”

“From San Francisco. I know who he is. Spectrum hired him years ago when a triad tried to extort our people in Taipei. He made the gangsters go away, but I never found out how.”

“His wife has been feeding information about payoffs—names, dates, and bank account numbers—to the staff in his office. And then they’re using it to do a huge amount of data mining to put it all together in what will in the end probably look like a mass criminal indictment.”

Wallace cocked his head as he looked over at Casher. “Are we allowed to intercept domestic Internet traffic without a warrant? “

“We’re not doing it. The PLA is and then they’re passing the information on to us.”

Wallace bit his lower lip for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know much about criminal law, but that sounds like illegally obtained evidence.”

“It’s only evidence if we use it to prosecute people,

which is not our intention. But Old Cat is. They’re debriefing officials and company owners and executives and then trying to verify what the crooks say before they act on it.”

“You mean line people up against the wall.”

Casher nodded. “Probably.”

Wallace thought back to the exasperated expression on his chief of staff’s face as he explained to Wallace the facts of Chinese corruption and the hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes that RAID had paid over the years, and by implication what Spectrum and other U.S. companies had paid.

“How bad will it be for us if this information gets out?” Wallace asked.

“Devastating. We’d be forced to indict the elite of our corporate leadership or lose whatever moral authority we have left in the world.”

The words hung in the silence that followed, sharing space with the implication that disclosure was unavoidable.

“Is Graham Gage connected to what his wife is doing?” Wallace asked.

“Indirectly. He’s only done two things: He set up the connection between her and his staff to do the research, and he sent in a human trafficker to smuggle out a couple of people in exchange for their cooperation with the rebels.”

“A human trafficker? He’s made a career of fighting those gangsters.”

“He does what he needs to do.” Casher said the words in a tone that implied what they both knew to be true: that Casher had done the same and would do it again.

“His only motive is to save lives. He’s doing his part long distance, from Marseilles, where he’s working on something else—or at least we think it’s something else. But we’re not sure since most of the calls he’s made to his office have been encrypted and the only nonencrypted call was too vague for us to draw any conclusions from.”

Wallace paused, realizing that things were moving too fast and as part of a game that seemed to be without rules. He knew that he needed to slow down. He took a step back.

“Will the PLA really let these people get away? They must know it’s going to happen.”

“We assume they do, but we don’t know whether they’ll allow it. If they charge into the Meinhard facility within the next twenty-four hours and execute everyone, then we’ll have our answer.”

“And what do we want them to do? “

Casher pointed over his shoulder toward the door. “That’s up to the man in the Oval Office, not me.”

B
atkoun Benaroun filled two shot glasses with bourbon. They were sitting in the back room of a North African bar owned by a childhood friend of Benaroun’s fifteen minutes after they’d broken free from the Mercedes. It was a space of chipped paint and ground-in dirt, of a floor that was swept, but seldom washed, and of hand-smudged entrance and exit doors with deadbolts, but no doorknobs.

“Great driving,” Gage said, reaching for a glass and raising it toward Benaroun, who raised his in turn. “I owe you.” Gage took a sip.

Benaroun tossed his drink into his mouth, and then swallowed with a grimace.

“It’s kind of hard to calculate the balance of debt,” Benaroun said. “If you hadn’t said let’s get out of here, we never would’ve made it.” Benaroun poured himself another shot and then took a sip. “But if you hadn’t made me go there, we wouldn’t have had to escape.”

Gage smiled. “So you’re saying we’re even?”

Benaroun smiled back. “Not exactly. Any new thoughts about who they were? “

Gage shook his head, then pointed at Hennessy’s cell phone and his small water-soaked notebook lying on the table.

“The answer is probably in there,” Gage said, “but it’ll be a while before we find out.”

“You want me to see if someone at the Police Scientific Laboratory can help us?”

“Can’t take the risk. It might put Tabari in a compromising position.”

Gage picked up the cell phone, opened the back, and removed the battery and the SIM and memory cards and set them on a napkin. All three sheened with water that soaked into the paper. He moved them to another. He laid out more napkins, then spread the leather covers of the notebook as supports and stood it on end.

Benaroun rose. “I’ll see if Mashaal has a space heater. Maybe that will speed things up.”

After he left, Gage brushed the corners of the pages with his thumb, trying to get a sense whether they were soaked through to the middle. None of them separated. They were a mass of pulp. It would take hours of slow heat to find out whether they were pulped all the way through.

Gage closed his eyes, trying to re-create in his mind the moment when the Mercedes had made the corner and had faced them head on. He had only a cloudy image of the faces of the two men inside. Mid-thirties. Dark-skinned. Sunglasses. Suit or sports jackets, but no ties.

No question but that like Gilbert and Strubb, they were hired help. But by whom and for what reason?

Benaroun returned with a small radiant heater. He set

it on the table and plugged it in. Gage positioned it so that just a breath of heat touched Hennessy’s notebook; he didn’t want to warm it too fast and cook the pulp into a hard mass.

“I once had a stack of bank records we recovered from a money launderer found floating in the sea,” Benaroun said. “He’d only been out there for a short time, but the plastic bag they were in had leaked a little. I used a razor to cut off the edges and was able to spread the pages.”

Gage thought back to when he had skimmed through Hennessy’s books in his office and had noticed the highlightings and handwritten notes.

“Can’t take a chance,” Gage said. “Bank records have margins, notepaper doesn’t. And Hennessy was a scribbler who wouldn’t have respected them anyway.”

Benaroun smiled. “So we just sit here and watch the water evaporate.”

“And think.” Gage leaned back in his chair and folded his arm across his chest. “Who sent those guys and what were they up to? People hunting for Ibrahim?”

“Or maybe people protecting him.”

“I suspect that it was someone trying to find out what Hennessy had learned.”

A knock on the door drew their eyes away from the drying notebook.

Mashaal walked in carrying beers they hadn’t ordered and set them down.

Gage watched Benaroun’s face harden and his jaw clench as Mashaal spoke to him in Arabic. Benaroun nodded and Mashaal walked back out to the bar.

“He says that the people who chased us now know who I am,” Benaroun said. “And they’re looking for me.”

Gage sat forward. “How did they figure it out?”

Benaroun shrugged. “Maybe they recognized me. Maybe they got my license plate number. Their story is that I fled from the scene of an accident.”

Gage thought of Benaroun’s Citroën parked in the alley two blocks away. “But your car isn’t damaged.”

Benaroun sighed. “It is now.”

Gage tilted his head in the direction of the car. “How’d they find it?”

“I don’t know. I used to use this room to meet with witnesses who were afraid to come to the Hotel de Police. Mashaal and I grew up together in Algiers. They must’ve gotten someone in the department to—“

Benaroun’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s Tabari.” He answered, listened for thirty seconds, and then nodded.

“Where were you when they called?” Benaroun asked. He listened again for a few seconds and shook his head at Tabari’s response.

“And your partner doesn’t know who they were?” Benaroun asked.

Gage held his palm up toward Benaroun, who told Tabari to stand by.

“We may need some help getting out of here,” Gage said, then pointed back and forth between the bar and alley. “I’m sure they’ve got the place covered.”

Benaroun passed on the information to Tabari, listened again, then disconnected and said to Gage, “He’s on his way from the strike with a couple of cars of uniformed police. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

As Benaroun reached down and withdrew a small Beretta from an ankle holster, Gage pointed at a spot to the left of the door from the bar. Benaroun walked over and braced himself against the wall with the gun

aimed waist-high so anyone in the frame would get hit in the gut.

Gage unplugged the heater and surveyed the room looking for a place to hide Hennessy’s phone and notebook. He dragged a chair over to the opposite wall, climbed up, and pulled off the cover of an air duct and placed the items inside. He then positioned himself next to the back exit. As he listened for sound from the alley, he caught a whiff of garbage seeping between the door and the loose frame and saw that the concrete abutting the metal threshold was slick with grease and blackened with mildew.

“Mashaal pretended that he hadn’t seen us,” Benaroun said.

“Let’s not put him in a bad spot. Call Tabari. Have them first scare away whoever is in the alley and we’ll go out that way.”

Benaroun made the call, then disconnected and said, “They’ll be here in—“

The back door exploded inward, the lock shattering the frame and shooting wood fragments into the room as it slammed against Gage’s shoulder. He pushed it away, then kicked it, swinging it back. A gun discharged. A man grunted. The door swung back at Gage again. He stepped around and reached for the leather jacket of the gunman crouched in the doorway and pulled him facedown to the floor. The gun bounced out of the shooter’s hand when it hit and slid across the linoleum toward Benaroun. Gage dived, sliding along behind it. As he grabbed for it, he heard pounding at the door from the bar, then the thud of a shoulder or a boot smashing against it. He looked up. Benaroun was slumped against the door, his body jerking with each impact. Gage leveled

the barrel at a chest-high spot on the door—then heard whooping sirens, their scream rising in the alley. He rolled over and sat up and turned the gun toward the alley door. But the man was gone.

Gage climbed onto the chair again and slid the gun inside the vent next to the phone and notebook, then jumped down and ran to Benaroun. Blood oozed from a hole in his jacket, just below his ribs.

“I didn’t feel the shot …until now.” Benaroun grimaced. “But the pounding … it hurt like hell.”

Benaroun slid his hand into the inside chest pocket of his coat, pulled an envelope partway out, and said, “Personal … hospital … shouldn’t see … hide.”

Then his eyelids fluttered and he lost consciousness.

Gage heard Tabari calling from the other side of the door.

“Wait,” Gage yelled back, then took the gun from Benaroun’s hand, laid him down, and pulled him away from the threshold. Holding the gun by his side, Gage opened the door.

Tabari looked down at his uncle and raised his radio to his lips.

Gage reached for his cell phone.