Absolute Risk (23 page)

G
age nodded at Tabari, then slipped out of the hospital after Batkoun Benaroun was moved from surgery to the recovery room in Hospital St. Joseph. A platoon of retired police officers guarded the hallway. Gage wasn’t sure that any of them believed the mistaken-identity story that Tabari and the bar owner had told the detectives, but Gage knew that they were all men and women who’d spent careers suspending disbelief in the hope of eventually learning the truth. If they had any doubts, they left them unspoken.

But Gage had to ask himself whether Benaroun was the target, not himself.

Once seated at the bar of an empty café, Gage removed Benaroun’s blood-smeared envelope. In it was a business card-sized piece of paper with three numbers on it: B-3001, B-3020, and B-3134. The envelope itself was unmarked.

It didn’t make sense to him that these numbers could provide a motive for murder, for Benaroun could’ve passed them on to another person in a five-second telephone call or memorized them and put it into an e-mail or text message.

The waiter came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel and took Gage’s order for a cappuccino and a water.

Gage reached for his encrypted cell phone and called Alex Z.

“You set up again?” Gage asked.

“We’re running things through a series of proxy servers,” Alex Z said. “What do you need?”

“Benaroun had been trying to find out the identification numbers of the planes that have been smuggling platinum out of South Africa. I think I have them.”

Gage read them off. He heard Alex Z’s keyboard click.

“If they’re really aircraft registration numbers,” Alex Z said, “and not model or part numbers for something, then they’re all Boeing 737s owned by North China Cargo Airlines.”

“For how long?”

“A year. The first was originally owned by China Eastern … and the second … and the third by China Southern. That’s assuming the Air Registration Database is accurate.”

“I may have more information later,” Gage said. “I’ll call you back.”

Gage disconnected, now wondering whether the planes were involved in the smuggling of platinum from South Africa or were somehow connected to Hennessy and Ibrahim, or even whether they were plane registration numbers at all.

As the waiter delivered the order, Tabari walked in and climbed onto the stool next to Gage, who slid the cappuccino over to him.

“My father is with my uncle,” Tabari said. “He’ll call as soon as he wakes up.”

“When will his wife arrive? I’d like to see her.”

Tabari glanced at his watch. “Another couple of hours.”

“But I don’t want to be in the room when Batkoun comes to. In his drugged state, he may look at me and say something he shouldn’t within the hearing of people who shouldn’t hear it.”

“I thought of suggesting that,” Tabari said as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into the cappuccino, “but I was afraid I’d be misunderstood and you’d think I was blaming you for what happened.”

“One way or another,” Gage said, “I suspect that I am to blame. Either because in my preoccupation with Hennessy, I made us too easy for people watching him to follow us, or because the people who were following me in the States had caught up with me here and I hadn’t spotted them.”

They ceased speaking as the waiter passed behind them to greet two customers at the door, then Tabari said, “You want us to move around Marseilles for an hour and leave a wide scent to see if anyone follows?”

Gage thought for a moment. He didn’t like the feel of it. “I don’t want there to be two Benarouns in the ICU.”

Tabari reached up and squeezed Gage’s shoulder.

“Look on the bright side,” Tabari said, now smiling, “there could be a Gage and a Benaroun up there instead. You and my uncle could even share a room.”

Gage shook his head and smiled back. “No way. I learned when we worked together in Milan that he snores.”

“How about this,” Tabari said. “You need to get your stuff out of your hotel room anyway and—“

“And I need to go back to the bar and collect something.”

Tabari drew back. “What thing? “

“A gun that the shooter dropped. I hid it and in the rush to get your uncle to the hospital, forgot to retrieve it. Maybe you can trace it to someone or to some other crime and figure out who shot your uncle.”

Tabari narrowed his eyes at Gage. “Anything else? “

Gage changed the subject by removing Benaroun’s envelope from his pocket and handing it to Tabari.

“This may have been what they were after. I think they’re airplane registration numbers.”

Tabari’s jaw clenched and his face reddened as he looked at the numbers inside.

“I knew this would happen.” He turned and glared at Gage. “Did you—“

Gage held up his hands. “We hadn’t even talked about South Africa since we were at your uncle’s house the day before yesterday.” He lowered his arms. “I had no idea that one of his errands this morning before he picked me up had anything to do with this—and I still don’t know for certain.” He pointed at the envelope. “And he didn’t say anything about it until after he was shot.”

Tabari fell silent, then shook his head.

“Sorry,” Tabari said. “I think I’ve taken to seeing him as an irresponsible child, and that makes you the adult who failed to supervise him.”

“He’s come to understand that his useful days are counting down,” Gage said, “at least those that would allow him to do the work he’s always done. And I don’t see that he’s ready to remake himself.”

“If the doctors’ fears are realized, he’ll have no choice.” Tabari paused. His eyes moistened and he tried to blink away tears, then wiped them with the back of his sleeve. “He won’t be able to do the work he wants to do from a wheelchair.”

F
aith Gage awoke on her cot in the Meinhard storage room to the squeak of a hinge and the scrape of shoe leather. She squinted toward the doorway and made out a charcoal silhouette against the shadowed hallway. It was in the shape of a tall, thin man with the angular bulge of a semiautomatic on his hip. Four others stood semicircled behind him, two men and two women.

She felt her body tense and her heart jump in her chest. She gripped the bed frame and sat up. She wouldn’t let herself be shot lying down.

The man’s hand rose. His forefinger paused in front of his lips, and then he gestured for her to follow him by a quick turn of his head.

By the profile she recognized Old Cat.

Faith turned toward the sleeping Ayi Zhao as she stood.

“Bu
yao,” Old Cat whispered. Don’t.

Faith pulled on her coat, then followed Old Cat down the hall and outside. The tents were dark and still except for faint snoring and a baby’s soft crying that sounded less like a child in discomfort than an adult’s grief-stricken sobs. The guards passed by and waited to the east of them. She could see a red-gray hint of dawn on the horizon.

“It’s time for you to leave,” Old Cat said. “There’s nothing more you can do. You need to go with the others when the van arrives.”

Faith looked up at Old Cat. “How did you know?”

“The army has been listening to your calls and those of your husband and now those of the man coming to get you.”

“But I hadn’t decided—”

“I’ve decided for you.” Old Cat pointed toward the four. “And they will carry out my orders.”

Old Cat looked away, then back at her. She could tell by the distance in his eyes that he was about to speak to her as a professional witness.

“This will all be over in a few days,” Old Cat said. “Soon the army will have learned what it wanted to learn from our efforts and will have no further use for us. And we can’t defeat them.” He spread his arms toward the tents. “I’m not willing to sacrifice these people in a lost cause. Our rebellion will not become a revolution.”

“But what about this?” Faith pulled out her cell phone and scanned through the images, and then turned the screen toward Old Cat. It was an image of part of the front page of the
New York Times
online edition. “My husband’s office sent me this.”

Old Cat took it in his hands and peered at the words, then shrugged. “I can’t read English.”

Speaking together in Mandarin all during these days had seemed so natural that she’d forgotten the language gap between them.

Faith felt her face flush. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … I only wanted to show you proof that …”

Old Cat smiled. “It’s okay. What does it say?”

“That there’s a mass movement of transient laborers toward Beijing. Ten million of them.”

“They’ll fail, too,” he said, shaking his head. “The army is the one who got them moving and is prepared to stop them.”

Gage’s words came back to her: Uprisings in China take lives in the millions, not in the hundreds.

“You mean—“

“No, not with guns this time, but with rice from the military’s storehouses.”

“And you think that they can be bought off? ”

Old Cat’s voice hardened. “They’re betraying no one, least of all themselves. For them, from the beginning, for all of us from the beginning, this uprising has been about the basics of life, and for them that’s food.”

In the rising gray light Faith watched Old Cat’s breath condense in front of his face and float there for a moment and then dissipate.

“In the end, that’s all we’ve been able to offer them,” Old Cat said. “I have no ideas about how our lives could be different. I think it would’ve been better if I’d been born as a silkworm and could’ve secreted my world around me like a cocoon, instead of a man who had to create it with his mind.”

He looked down at Faith. “You’ve traveled the world. You know politics and economics. You’ve seen how different cultures have organized themselves. Tell me. Tell me how we can build a different society, one without oppression and exploitation. Show me the model. We’ll copy it.” Old Cat spread his arms. “That’s what we do here. Copy. No people are better at it. We …”

Old Cat’s voice trailed away, and in that silence Faith recognized that neither he nor she knew who that “we” was who would take charge and remake the world.

“What about you?” Faith asked. “What will happen to you?”

Old Cat shrugged. “The army has seen to that, too.”

Faith reached for his arm. “Then come with us.”

“And leave others to be sacrificed in my place?”

“If the army has planned this as well as you say, then they’ve already decided on their victims. What you do is irrelevant to them.”

Even as she said the words, she felt the bad faith of not believing what she was saying. The army would scour the countryside looking for him. She released her grip and lowered her hand.

“What I do is not irrelevant to them,” Old Cat said.

“Then go on your own Long March.” Faith pointed at the tents. “Take them all with you.”

“And come back to what?” Old Cat again smiled at her. “See? We’ve gone in a circle.” His smiled faded. “And I’m trapped inside of it.”

Faith searched inside herself for an argument that would dissuade him, but found none. Now she felt foolish in bringing students to China. She didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand the man standing in front of her. And had nothing to offer him.

But as she looked up at him, there was something that seemed even worse. He was a man without a family, and now no chance to have one, a man who would have no descendants to burn incense and to close their eyes and to bow and to remember him on the anniversary of his death.

Old Cat furrowed his brows, then raised a forefinger and said, “Jian-jun told me that the other name for the one that Christians call the Devil is the Prince of This World.” He lowered his hand. “I think now we both can see why.”

Faith looked past him and through the thin dark smoke at the fading orange moon above the city and felt the whole of the world’s evil shudder through her. She wanted to reach out to him again, this precious man, but she knew he’d withdraw from any gesture of comfort.

Old Cat pointed at the generator building. “Go. Wake Ayi Zhao and Jian-jun and collect your things. The van will be here in fifteen minutes. Your students are already inside.”

“What about Wo-li and his wife? ”

Old Cat lowered his voice and leaned down toward her.

“They have escaped.”

He then cocked his head toward the south.

“Perhaps you will encounter them along the road as you drive toward Chongqing.”

L
isten to me.” Former United States president Randall Harris pounded the podium with his fist. “Relative Growth isn’t a Ponzi scheme.”

Despite the grainy picture of the old television and the tinny sound, Gage sensed that Harris didn’t believe what he was saying. Maybe because it echoed in tone Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” proclamation during the Watergate scandal.

Gage was watching from the dining table of a vacation cottage in La Ciotat, east of Marseilles, belonging to the parents of a colleague of Tabari’s. The house was anchored to an oak-treed hillside high above a narrow fishing port lined with tiny night-lit restaurants and slowly rocking trawlers. Lying before him was Hennessy’s cell phone, along with the SIM and memory cards and his notebook. All were drying by the warmth of a space heater.

Gage hoped CNN International would stay with the press conference until the end.

Harris gestured toward the two ex-presidents standing behind him to his left, then said, “We … are … not … crooks.” And then toward the heads of the Big Four accounting firms to his right. “And these men and women aren’t Arthur Andersen and they are in no way willing to betray their clients and shareholders and the public in pursuit of fees.”

The camera drew back in time to catch the hand of
The Nation’s
Ivan Kahn shooting up from the crowd of reporters seated in the room. His body followed it upward and he began speaking.

“Then there really are assets of two trillion dollars held by Relative Growth?”

Harris ignored the questioner, but answered the question from his prepared remarks.

“We’ve spent over fifty million dollars to obtain four independent audits of the holdings of the funds.”

Kahn cut him off. “That just means you kept moving money around so it would be counted over and over.”

Harris now acknowledged him.

“What paper are you with?” Harris asked, his face flushing. “The
Socialist Workers Gazette?”
He paused, then jabbed a forefinger at Kahn. “I told you, the assets are there.”

“Then open your books.”

“So everyone in the world can imitate us? So every day trader in the world gets the results of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research for free? “ Harris raised his forefinger. “Our advantage over others—our only advantage—in the world of finance is our ability to identify opportunities and capitalize on them before anyone else even figures out they exist. Opening our books is the same thing as revealing our trade secrets.”

Harris glanced back at Lucille Nonini, head of AccountCorp Worldwide. “You want to take this? “

Nonini stepped up next to Harris.

“We’ve looked at the books,” Nonini said. “And we did a lot more than that, more than any accounting firm or group of accounting firms ever has. In a matter of a week, we fielded five thousand accountants throughout the world who took simultaneous snapshots of all of the funds’ holdings. There was no opportunity to move money around or transfer assets from one account to another.”

Harris leaned over the podium and pointed at Kahn.

“The kind of false accusations that you and others have made triggered redemption demands by our clients and the only way to dissuade them was to disclose more about our investment strategy than even our investors have the right to know.”

A couple of reporters laughed. Others shook their heads.

Harris’s face flushed and he pounded the top of the podium. “Investors have a right to a share of our profits, not to our methods.”

“What about off-balance-sheet liabilities like Citibank hid in structured investment vehicles?”

Harris shook his head and glared down as though he was about to throw aside the podium and jump Kahn.

“Read … my … lips. There’s nothing—nothing—that’s not included on our balance sheet.”

Harris thinks he’s telling the truth,
Gage thought, but it couldn’t be true. There was no way they could’ve kept paying out dividends unless they were doing it with other investors’ money. Not throughout the massive economic upheavals of the last decade. And calling them chaos funds, as Harris and Minsky usually did, wasn’t an explanation, it was just a label, a marketing gimmick.

The camera operator seemed to anticipate that the next question would come from Kahn and framed his face.

Kahn glanced at the camera, the attention seeming to act as an invitation.

“What about liabilities? “ Kahn asked.

Harris rolled his eyes and said, “What do you think the bottom line of an audit is composed of? It’s assets minus liabilities.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’m asking about liabilities arising out of complex derivatives. If no one has developed a method of pricing them, then how can anyone estimate the liabilities that arise out of holding them? “

Minsky walked forward. Harris stepped to the side.

“We’re a hedge fund,” Minsky said, “and hedging means, among other things—and without giving away our trade secrets and intellectual property—that we take countervailing positions. One part of the economy goes down, another goes up. One currency depreciates, another appreciates.”

Minsky smiled as though he was dismissing a waiter who’d splashed the water onto the tablecloth as he poured it from a pitcher.

“In any case,” Minsky said, “they’re not all that complex and therefore not that hard to value.”

A camera again focused on Kahn’s face, but he remained silent. Gage didn’t think he was alone in seeing in Kahn’s eyes not the aggression he’d displayed before, but a kind of dread. Minsky’s answer had been too simple, his manner had been too slick, and if he was lying, Relative Growth would someday collapse and take the world economy with it. The camera drew back, displaying Kahn standing alone, like a man at the seashore watching an approaching tsunami.

Gage looked from them to the drying notebook and the SIM and memory cards and suspected that the answers about Relative Growth that those at the press conference were searching for might lie concealed before him on the table. He looked at his watch. In another twelve hours he’d know what was in there, Faith would be out of China, and he’d be on his way back to New York and to the beginning of another trailhead.

CNN cut away to the floods in Paris.

Gage turned down the sound, but left the picture on in case coverage continued. He then went into the bathroom and retrieved an electric hair dryer and then returned and focused the streaming heat on the back of the notebook.

The television screen flashed red and white with breaking news: “Mine Collapse in China.”

Gage reached for the remote and increased the volume. An earthquake aftershock in Sichuan Province had triggered the cave-in. Three hundred miners were trapped and feared crushed or asphyxiated. The satellite image on the monitor behind the announcer disappeared, replaced by a grainy and jumpy cell phone video, wives and mothers screaming and weeping on either side of the mine entrance, PLA troops using plastic shields to create barriers to hold them back. The area was gray with mist and low clouds.

It cut to young men rocking a black Land Rover, the bodies of the suited men inside jerking around, shoulders and heads smashing into the windows and against one another. Soldiers stood at the perimeter, not intervening. The SUV went up on two wheels, then back down. Up on two wheels again, then back down, bouncing and rocking when it hit the ground. Then up again on two wheels, hesitating, balancing, then slamming onto its side and mud splattering and men climbing up and stomping on the glass—

The image was replaced with another. An old woman, tears flowing, staring at the camera as though she knew the world was watching. The voice-over translation failing to capture the fury in her words and tone.

“They all knew … everyone knew it would collapse.” She jabbed her hand at an unseen enemy. “They forced the men to work. Work or starve. Work or die.”

Gage knew from growing up in Southern Arizona that what she really meant was: work
and
die. The trapped and dead were no different than the Mexican zinc and copper miners in the 1950s, paid cheap wages to keep the white workers’ wages depressed, forced to work unprotected in the dust, their union leaders beaten and murdered, those who chronicled their struggle in print and film arrested—

Gage reached for his cell phone.

Faith answered his question before he had a chance to ask it. “The van is on its way now.”

“And you?”

“Yes. I’m going, too.”

Gage stifled a sigh. She didn’t need to carry the burden of his worry with her as she fled.

“We’ll be traveling out by way of—“

“Stop,” Gage said, “I think my calls are being intercepted.”

Faith didn’t respond right away. Gage grasped that she was trying to think of a way to communicate something indirectly.

Finally she said, “Maybe mine are, too, but that’s just an amateur’s opinion.”

That was the expression they would use when one of them came up with an idea that would help the other in his work.

“Gotcha,” Gage said. “E-mail me when you get to an area where there’s Internet access. Use the same encryption code that we use to send our financial information.”

After Faith disconnected, Gage noticed a slight corner separation midway through Hennessy’s notebook. He walked into the kitchen and retrieved a fillet knife, then laid the book on its spine. He eased the thin blade in the opening and rocked it back and forth, separating the pages, taking care not to slice into them as he slid along the top edge. As he made the turn, he noticed the sharp-edged corner of what seemed to be a thicker square of paper inside. But as he moved the knife farther, it hit a patch of paper that had disintegrated into pulp, a border at least a quarter of an inch deep. He resisted the urge to push on and force the blade edge through it. He couldn’t take a chance that it would rip away salvageable writing. And for all he knew, it was just a baggage claim check or a train ticket.

He withdrew the point and set the knife down on the table, then once again propped the notebook up, directing the heater toward the inside and hair dryer toward the outside.

Staring at it, he was certain there was something inside that would lead him to Hani Ibrahim and to whatever it was that Hennessy wanted to tell Milton Abrams, but it wasn’t yet ready to reveal itself.

He looked down at Hennessy’s SIM and memory cards. He had less hope for them, for the circuits of both might’ve blown when the rain that soaked through Hennessy’s trench coat had shorted out his phone. And that wasn’t all. Hennessy would’ve encrypted whatever he had stored on the memory card and it might take Alex Z days to break in.

Gage wedged the hair dryer between two serving bowls, then rose and walked to the window. The last of the fishing boats were powering into the harbor, invisible except for their running lights and the winking of glass and chrome against the shore lights and flashing buoys.

Encrypted.
The word echoed in his mind.
Encrypt. Decrypt. Crypt. Cryptic.

He turned back and stared at the table. If the files on the memory card were encrypted, the notes on those pages would be vague and veiled, their substance concealed in a form that Hennessy would think that only he could understand. And if he had been mentally unstable, or even distraught, they’d be incomprehensible, or worse, misleading and they’d send Gage searching down a trail with no end.