Absolute Risk (32 page)

W
allace tried to focus on Manton Roberts’s face as he came to the end of the story, wanting to read something in the tea leaves of the minister’s eyes. But his focus kept drifting toward Roberts’s fidgeting legs, his thighs squeezing together like a little boy who needed to pee.

“If what they are telling me is true,” Wallace said, “the economy will contract into a black hole, a nuclear winter in which nothing will move on the streets of America.”

But then he noticed Roberts’s widening eyes and scissoring legs moving in tandem and realized that the thought of the world collapsing gave him a kind of sexual excitement.

Wallace watched Roberts’s fists clench, like a child in the instant before fate would decide whether a wish would come true.

And Wallace grasped that Roberts wanted it. Wanted a financial earthquake, an economic Armageddon. He was already imagining himself living in the prophesy, standing on top of the biblically ordained Mount Megiddo, looking beyond a mere seizing of power, of taking control of Congress and the courts and the presidency, but of watching the final battle between the armies of Christ and the Antichrist—and reveling in it.

Roberts pushed himself to his feet. He paced the carpet, his fists pulsing. He turned back toward Wallace.

“Let it happen. You have to let it happen.” Roberts stopped and closed his eyes and held his fingers to his temples. “I see it. This is the Book of Revelations come true.” He opened his eyes again. “Who says that the end times have to begin only with floods and earthquakes and pestilence and disease? Why can’t it begin with a crime we commit against ourselves?”

Wallace felt his body tense. “You mean let the world financial system collapse and let people starve?”

Roberts nodded. “It’s God’s will.”

It was Wallace’s turn to rise, and for the first time he felt like he was truly the president of the United States. He faced Roberts, planting himself like a statue in his path, then jabbed a forefinger into his chest.

“No, Manton. It’s your will, and your will alone.”

Roberts shook his head. His sagging chin and wattle swung, painting the knot of his tie with sweat. He pushed away Wallace’s hand and glared into Wallace’s eyes.

“Don’t trivialize the Word of God into mere opinion,” Roberts said. “He speaks to me. He’s always spoken to me, and this is His Word.”

Roberts pushed by him and mumbled as he strode toward the door.

Wallace could only make out a fragment.

“What about hands?” he asked. “What are you saying about hands?”

Roberts glanced back and said, “I said, it’s now out of your hands.” He then drew his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and reached for the door handle. “In thirty seconds, the whole world will know.”

Wallace ran forward, grabbed the back of Roberts’s jacket, and yanked. Roberts fell back into Wallace. He tried to hold Roberts up, but his body was too heavy to control. Wallace ducked aside as Roberts lost his balance and stumbled toward the center of the room. Wallace covered his eyes as Roberts’s forehead slammed against the edge of the desk, and then opened them in time to see Roberts slump to the carpet.

The door opened. Gage and Casher ran in.

Gage knelt down next to Roberts, feeling for a pulse at his wrist.

Casher’s eyes darted back and forth between Wallace and Roberts, and then fixed on Wallace.

“What happened?” “I had to—“

Gage threw his hand up toward Wallace. “Stop. Don’t say anything.”

“I have to tell—“

Gage reached up and grabbed Wallace’s shirtfront and yanked him down onto the couch, and then pushed himself to his feet and leaned down against him.

“I told you to shut up.”

Gage glanced over his shoulder and said to Casher, “Roberts has a pulse.” Then back to Wallace, “If the Secret Service finds out what happened, they’ll have to arrest you. And we don’t have time to swear in the next in succession.” Then back to Casher, “When the medics get here we’ll say that Roberts fainted from the stress.”

Casher nodded.

Wallace struggled under Gage’s weight. “What if—“

Gage shook Wallace, glaring down at him. “Not … another … word.” He looked over at Roberts, then at Casher. “Where can we put him?”

Casher pointed downward. “There’s a medical facility in the subbasement.”

“Once we get a doctor in here,” Gage said, “lock down the White House. Nobody in. Nobody out.” He looked back at Wallace. “That’s what you were trying to do, right? Keep him from telling the world? “

Wallace nodded.

“Then let’s get him down there before he comes to,” Gage said.

Casher called the operator to send for medical help, and then ran from the room and down the hallway until he spotted a Secret Service agent and ordered him to retrieve a gurney.

Gage had guided Wallace to his desk chair by the time Casher had returned.

Gage glanced at his watch. “Everybody’s waiting.” He pointed at Casher. “You take him with you. I’ll wait here and tell a fable.”

Wallace took in a breath as if preparing to protest. Casher shook his head, then signaled for Wallace to follow him.

When Gage arrived back at the situation room, Wallace was asking Casher, “Do you have the indictments?”

Casher nodded. “And the provisional arrest warrants. You give the order and they’ll be served on Swiss authorities in Davos. Their police are standing by, but they don’t know why yet.”

Abrams gestured toward the chair next to him and Gage sat down. Wallace looked back and forth between them. “Ibrahim?”

Gage shook his head. “Even if we could bring him out of his catatonic state, I’m not sure he knows where any of these traders are located.”

“What can we do? “ Wallace asked.

Bodies stirred in their seats, and pairs of hands fidgeted on the table.

“I mean, what can I do?” Wallace said. “I don’t even know if all of this is true. I mean …”

Gage pushed himself to his feet, feeling a revulsion he’d never felt before.

Ibrahim had been broken. Hennessy was dead. Batkoun Benaroun was paralyzed. Gage had seen the look in Minsky’s eyes moments before he died. And Old Cat would be getting a bullet in the back of the head. It was true. Every bit of it was true—and Faith was in the hands of General Shi.

Gage glared down at Wallace, his disgust rising like lava in his throat.

“There is only one thing you can do.”

Wallace stiffened. “And what exactly is that?”

Gage pointed at the monitor as if General Shi were still visible on the screen and holding up the lists.

“Do what he wants and then stop the world.”

“What … what do you mean, stop the world?”

Gage looked at Abrams. “You explain it to him. I’m going to get my wife.”

T
his is the captain speaking.”

Bodies stirred in the shadowed airplane cabin. Gage squinted at his watch. They were still four hours from Beijing, too early for the breakfast wake-up announcement.

“I need to advise you that while we will land at Beijing as scheduled, your credit and ATM cards will not function. The entire international financial network has been shut down.”

Hands reached up to turn on reading lights as if they would illuminate what had been said.

“Those of you who have cash with you should have no problem. We’ve been advised that the crisis will soon pass and everything will return to normal within thirty-six hours.”

Gage found his palms pressing against his pants pockets, filled with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of yuan, euros, and dollars that Casher had delivered to him at Dulles Airport.

“The travel advisory issued by the State Department has been withdrawn as far as Beijing is concerned. The city is calm and the revolt in the Western Provinces is nearly over.”

A click seemed to end the captain’s communication, but then he came back on.

“We’ll be routing BBC News through video channel eleven.”

Gage pressed the remote, but didn’t put on the headphones. He knew what the pictures and video would mean; he didn’t need it explained to him. The screen showed a Forex trading monitor with the currency values unchanging. The camera drew back. Farther and farther, until it encompassed a silent trading floor. Hundreds of dealers sitting in silence.

The image switched to a video of downtown Chicago, wool-coated pedestrians staring at a television in a department store window, then to the streets of New York and San Francisco and a pub in London and a café in Paris.

Everyone was looking up at monitors showing the vice president sitting at a desk, not standing to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, their faces bearing the expressions of people just told that nuclear war had begun.

A digital clock appeared in the lower right corner, its red numbers counting the seconds toward noon.

Gage heard gasps from those sitting around him, as though the captain’s announcement had been part of a dream and they’d woken up to find it matched reality, as though they were experiencing
jamais vu
: their minds still trying to deny what they knew to be true.

The camera zoomed in on Wallace’s face. He glanced to his left, toward someone not visible on the screen, and nodded as 12:00 showed on the clock.

That was the moment when the world had stopped.

The screen divided as Wallace spoke. His face on the left side, a list of the world’s stock and commodity exchanges on the other, the word “closed” appearing next to each name.

The image of the right side changed. A video of PLA troop carriers rolling into Chengdu and laborers and farmers walking, or riding in open-bed trucks, out of the city, returning home.

Then to Davos. The Swiss police herding dozens of suited and handcuffed men and women into buses for the ride to the airport and delivery to the Schloss Thorberg prison in Bern and later extradition to their home countries for trial. A breaking news alert flashed at the bottom of the screen: “Trading on world’s stock markets and futures exchanges suspended for forty-eight hours as corporate boards replace arrested officers.”

Now both images faded. Replaced by a head shot of Manton Roberts and the headlines: “Massive brain hemorrhage. Fainted at the White House during prayer.” Followed by his dates of birth and death.

And Gage knew that the truth would be buried with him.

When Gage walked from the gate into the terminal, he was met by a funereal silence. The duty-free shops were open, but empty. The Starbucks was crowded with huddled Americans and Europeans. Lines extended from the windows of the currency exchanges, but the clerks just stared forward, unmoving, as if waiting for someone to tell them what yuan or dollars or euros were now worth.

Passing by a row of chairs, Gage spotted the front page of the English language
China Daily
lying on the floor. He stopped and looked down at it. A man gazed back at him from the bed of a troop carrier, tied to a stake. Even before Gage spotted the headline bearing the man’s name, he guessed it was Old Cat. Chinese characters were painted on the sign above his head. Gage didn’t know what they said, but he knew what they meant: Old Cat’s heroism had been reduced to mere criminality and he’d been taken to the killing fields.

A broom reached past him and swept the newspaper into a long-handled dustpan that then lifted it into a wheeled trash barrel. As Gage watched the forlorn image of Old Cat drop into the garbage, he felt like grabbing the oblivious janitor by the front of his shirt and tossing him in, too.

But he needed to save himself for another fight that would soon begin.

Gage heard thumping footsteps behind him, maybe passengers running to make a connection. Then he felt stiff cloth brush his shoulder and found himself bracketed by PLA soldiers. Without glancing over his shoulder, he knew that at least one more was behind him.

“Start walking,” one of them said in English. “General Shi is waiting.”

Gage saw two others poised at the opening to the long hallway leading to immigration and passport control.

With his free hand, Gage touched his pants pocket holding part of the money Casher had given him. He now understood the director’s generosity: It was part of a setup to deliver him into the hands of General Shi.

But why?

Because only one person other than Casher and Wallace knew the truth about how Roberts had died and the
New York Times
was just one phone call from a headline reading: “Acting U.S. President Murders Evangelical Leader.”

And it wasn’t that Casher had any interest in protecting Wallace. His motive was entirely patriotic, and it had made him bedfellows with General Shi.

The two soldiers opened a side door, and the five marched Gage down outdoor stairs to a jeep that then sped them across the tarmac to the rear stairs of a waiting jet. They held him in the kitchen long enough to strip him of his money, his cell phones, and his identification, and then opened the door to the main cabin.

Faith turned toward him as he stepped inside. They met halfway down the aisle. They were still in a silent embrace when a door opened and General Shi shuffled toward them from the cockpit. They separated. Shi reached out an arthritic hand. Gage left it untouched.

“The blood is too fresh,” Gage said. “I saw the photo of Old Cat.”

Shi lowered it and said, “I didn’t expect to hear that from you.” Gage was surprised to find that Shi spoke English. “From your calls that we intercepted, I imagined that you were a man who understood historical necessities. Old Cat understood and went willingly.”

“That’s a lie,” Faith said.

Gage now looked at her full-on and saw that her eyes were bloodshot and the skin around them raw.

“He didn’t resist because he didn’t want others murdered in his place.” Faith lowered her head. “I tried to convince him to flee, but he refused.”

“His death was a condition of the Central Committee’s cooperation. They couldn’t risk him becoming a rallying point for further uprisings.” Shi spread his hands and then looked at Gage. “People die all the time in order to preserve order.”

“How can you be sure that they won’t decide to make your death a condition of their future cooperation,” Gage said, “or a means to withdraw it?”

Shi smiled. “Because I’m more mythological than real. Some people even doubt that I exist, and one doesn’t kill a myth so easily.”

“Then why didn’t you try to save him?”

“There wasn’t time. It was only a matter of hours before the army fragmented,” Shi said. “Part of it siding with the rebels and part siding with the government. There would’ve been a civil war.”

He then gestured toward two of the four seats around the table.

“Maybe it would’ve become a revolution,” Gage said, after they all sat down. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“When I was young, but now I know that it isn’t possible.” Shi shrugged. “I’ve learned that the concept itself is meaningless. Even your own revolution left everything the same for most of your people, the destitute, the slaves, and the Indians. And a revolution here would do the same, except for the million or two who would die in the process.”

The plane’s jet engines engaged with a low rumble and then a wail.

Shi gazed toward the airport lights, then sighed and said, “In any case, no one in China will miss a simple farmer.”

Gage stared at the profile of the old man, his face paled by fluorescent lights, its lines etched deep, his withered body shelled by a uniform that no longer fit, and saw in his wet eyes that Shi would miss Old Cat as much as Faith.

Their bodies jerked as the plane began to roll toward the runway.

“Where are we going? “ Gage asked, pointing toward the now whining engines.

“To complete fulfilling promises I made to your wife and to Old Cat. To your wife, I promised to send Ibadat Ibrahim to the States to care for her husband, and to send Ayi Zhao back to her home in the mountains. The garrison will protect her.”

“And to Old Cat?”

“I promised to allow your wife to burn incense for him on Mount Emei Shan, near his home, for he has no family left to do it.”

In a single sweeping move, the plane swung onto the runway and accelerated, and thirty seconds later it rose from the tarmac. Gage watched the lights of Beijing spread out beneath them, then contract as they turned west, toward Chengdu. When he looked back, General Shi had fallen asleep.

“The two of them weren’t that different,” Faith whispered. “Neither one of them had a vision for the future. They both felt helpless, as if they’d somehow lost traction in the world.”

“Except that one of them had his finger on the trigger of the largest army in the world,” Gage said, looking at Shi, “and history didn’t pull it, he did.”

Faith stared at Shi for a moment, then nodded and removed her cell phone from her pocket and held it in front of her.

“Old Cat once showed me the phone they’d given him. He’d never touched one before the rebellion began. He told me that some children had explained to him that it had a GPS. He stared at it and said that it could tell him on what street corner he was standing, but couldn’t tell him his place in the universe.”

She pressed a key and the screen lit up.

“The kids also showed him how he could get news from all over the world …” Tears came to her eyes and her body curled forward. Gage reached his arm around her shoulders. “And he wondered aloud how anyone could bear to witness that much suffering.”

They remained silent for a few moments, then she returned the phone to her pocket and said, “I think that at the end, all of existence seemed to him to be absurd and strange and alien.”

“Does that mean he’d resigned himself to dying?”

Faith’s eyes narrowed in thought, and then she said, “Only in the sense that wisdom teaches people to accept the inevitable.”

Two hours later, Shi awoke as the plane landed at the military base northwest of Chengdu. He pointed toward the back of the plane and told them that a guide and a driver were waiting, then rose and walked into the cockpit. Seconds later, the rear door opened into daylight and the staircase ratcheted down. A soldier returned Gage’s phones, money, and identification at the top of the stairs. As they arrived at the bottom, a young man climbed out of a jeep.

Faith reached for him, and they held each other’s hands as she introduced Jian-jun to Gage.

They rode in silence as they skirted the western edge of the occupied city, past the ruins in the special economic zones, and then into the foothills, the road narrowing from the four lanes that had passed through crosshatched suburbs, down to two lanes, and then from pavement to dirt tracks through hillside villages.

It was clear to Gage that Jian-jun didn’t trust the driver, perhaps viewing him as General Shi’s spy, perhaps assuming that if he knew where Old Cat’s body lay, he’d been one of those who’d buried him—and did so in a place too remote to become a shrine for the masses.

Faith shrugged when Gage cast her a questioning look.

Jian-jun sensed the movement, and then looked back from the front passenger seat and said, “Old Cat’s ancestors made pilgrimages to a little monastery on the western flank.” He pointed toward the driver. “He knows where it is.”

Gage caught glimpses of the Emei Shan mountain range from different angles. They seemed to be circling the mountain rather than aiming toward its foot, where Buddhist pilgrims usually began their climb.

Two hours later, they ascended into mist, then through it into low clouds. The green of the pine trees faded to gray against the charcoal of the deep forest. And an hour after that, they made a long, curving turn and the road funneled into a path. The driver parked and they got out of the jeep. The cold thin air told Gage that they had ascended eight or nine thousand feet since leaving Chengdu.

The driver pointed down the path and spoke to Jian-jun in Mandarin.

“It’s about a forty-minute walk,” Faith told Gage, as they began the hike, Jian-jun in the lead and the soldier at the rear.

After just a few steps, the mist and shadow closed the trail behind them, and a few steps after that monkeys revealed themselves, shrieking at the invaders and leaping from branch to branch above them. Others chattered in the distance, as though warning the rest of the troop hiding in the forest.

As they approached a wooden bridge, the crash of a waterfall drowned out the monkeys’ screams, and a couple of hundred yards after they crossed the stream, the trail came to a rocky overlook. They could see an open-walled, six-sided pinewood temple, no bigger than a living room, on the opposite side of the valley. Its sweeping roof tiles were covered in moss and lichen and their upturned corners seemed to reach into the canopy of trees. And beyond it in the distance, the steep peaks of karstic mountains emerged above the mist.

It reminded Gage of looking across the Mediterranean inlet at the limestone pillar near where Michael Hennessy had come to rest, and he realized with an ache in his chest that the only kind of incense Elaine would ever burn for her husband would be in the form of suffering and rage and guilt that would continue to smolder. He felt he understood her well enough to know that convicting Wycovsky and his Chinese accomplices for his murder wouldn’t extinguish her pain.