Absolute Risk (5 page)

I
only divorced him so he couldn’t spend all of our savings trying to find Ibrahim,” Elaine said, as they sat across the kitchen table from each other. She gestured toward the 1950s knotty-pine cabinets, the Formica countertops, and the lime green refrigerator. “He spent our kitchen remodeling money chasing him across Eastern Europe.” She exhaled, shaking her head. “Assuming Ibrahim was even in Eastern Europe.”

Lying between them were online newspaper articles about Gage that Vicky had printed out. He was sure that she’d searched for them hoping to find something that would convince her mother not to talk to him. But they had the opposite effect, and he respected her courage in bringing them down to her mother anyway.

Elaine spun one around and faced it toward Gage. It was about Gage’s capture of a fugitive in Budapest who’d stolen five hundred million dollars from a Russian-U.S. oil production joint venture.

“Since you found this guy,” Elaine said, “maybe you can locate Ibrahim and figure out what happened to Michael. And why.” Her gaze settled on the article. “I suspect that if Michael had been worth half a billion dollars, too, there’d have been more people interested in finding out.”

Elaine’s hands shook as she took a sip of tea. Gage wasn’t sure whether it was from anger or fatigue. Her gray-framed eyes and errant strands of hair suggested the latter.

“What was driving him?” Gage asked.

“You mean, why was he obsessed?”

Gage shook his head. “I don’t know enough about him or what happened to say that.” He smiled. “It may be that after a few weeks working on this, people will say the same thing about me.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then smiled back.

“I think I like you,” she said. “Most investigators I’ve met, especially FBI, have been assholes. Pricks with badges.” She flushed. “Sorry for the body part analogies. I learned them from my kids.” She pointed at the church events calendar held to the refrigerator by an apple-shaped magnet. “It’s hard for a preacher’s daughter to admit, but ‘asshole’ is the most exquisite and versatile word in the English language.”

Elaine’s eyes went vacant as though images of those to whom the word applied were passing through her mind, then she blinked and said, “It really wasn’t an obsession. People who collect stamps and who pull slot machine handles in twelve-hour shifts are obsessed. For Michael it was a moral crusade, one that I’m afraid I didn’t understand. And because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t support it.” She raised her teacup to take another sip, but then set it back down. “That’s not right. I couldn’t find a way to support it. And I tried. I really did.”

“You mean you don’t think Ibrahim was framed?”

“I never saw anything that showed he wasn’t guilty.” She glanced upward. “I even searched Michael’s office when he wasn’t home, trying to find out. All I ever got from him was, ‘You don’t understand,’ and ‘It’s too dangerous for you to know,’ or ‘I can’t violate Bureau policy. I know they’ll take me back once I prove I’m right.’ “

“You mean he was concerned that he might violate FBI policy by disclosing what he’d learned when he was an agent? “

Elaine nodded.

“Which means that whatever he learned, he learned while he was still with the agency.”

She nodded again.

“Did he leave anything behind?”

She hesitated for a moment, and then said, “The FBI came and took everything, including his safe, which they weren’t able to open while they were here.”

“Did they have a search warrant?”

“You mean, did they see him as a suspect, rather than as a victim? “

Gage shrugged. “I guess you could say that’s the flip side of the question.”

“They said they needed it in order to investigate his death, so I signed a consent form. They may have had a search warrant with them just in case, but they didn’t show it. They said they’d send me a receipt once they had inventoried everything.”

“Have they?”

“No. And it’s been a week.” She sighed. “I wonder if I made a mistake by making it so easy for them.”

“If they hadn’t brought a warrant, they could’ve easily gotten one just based on the suspicion that he took FBI records with him when he left the Bureau.”

She shook her head. “I think it was less a theft and more that he failed to return the files. He’d started on his crusade about eight years ago and when he wouldn’t let it go, they fired him.”

Elaine paused, the memory seeming to well up in her. “Devastating. It was devastating. For the first few months he sat in his office just staring out of the window, then something happened, I don’t know what, and he went manic over the thing again.”

Gage pointed up toward her husband’s office. “You mind if I look at what’s left? Maybe it’ll help me understand him.”

“Then you’ll know a lot more than I did, and I was married to him for almost twenty years.”

Elaine led him up the oak staircase they’d passed on the way to the kitchen, then down a carpeted hallway to a converted bedroom.

“Before he lost his sense of humor,” she said, as she gestured him inside, “he used to invite people in here by saying, ‘Welcome to the scene of the crime.'”

Elaine’s face reddened as her eyes traveled from the desk to the battered file cabinet and paper shredder and past the sagging bookcases toward a framed FBI shield on the wall.

“And the agents who came here sure as hell treated it that way.”

Gage walked over and scanned the titles of the books. He noticed a few that were also on his own shelves: manuals on securities fraud, money laundering, and financial investigation, along with a shelf devoted to stock and bond trading, technical analysis, and principles of finance."Did he do day trading?” Gage asked, flipping through

a twelve-hundred-page volume on financial modeling. He turned toward her. “This is pretty sophisticated material. Graduate-level math.”

Elaine shook her head. “He barely passed algebra in high school. I know. I sat behind him and fed him the answers.”

She reached past Gage and pulled out a volume titled
The Fractal Analysis of Finance.

“Look at this thing,” she said, opening it near the middle. “He highlighted almost every sentence and I’m not sure whether he understood any of it.”

Gage recognized the book. It was an attack on the theories of finance that had guided the actions of the central banks in both the U.S. and Europe for two generations, and on the models used for risk assessment by corporations, investment houses, mutual funds, and currency traders. He wasn’t sure whether anyone other than the author of the book understood the argument, or if anyone did, whether he’d found a way to make use of it, except—according to legend and the prospectus of the offshore Relative Growth hedge fund—Hani Ibrahim.

“Did he study Ibrahim’s journal articles?” Gage asked, glancing over at her.

Elaine nodded. “But the FBI took the whole lot because he’d written notes on them.”

Gage’s mind looped back and he repeated her earlier words, “'Treated the place like a crime scene.’ What did you mean?”

“They even dusted for fingerprints.”

Elaine stepped toward the desk and pointed to the floor next to one of the legs.

“And they cut out a sliver of the carpet where they found blood. I told them it was Michael’s from when he sliced himself moving the file cabinet, but they didn’t believe me.”

Or they had a theory, Gage suspected, about how it got there, one in which Hennessy’s blood was evidence as much as anyone else’s.

Gage bent down to separate the wool pile to examine the surrounding backing. If there had been a fight, there would’ve been surrounding spatter.

He felt Elaine staring at him as he straightened up.

“One of the news articles said that you were once a homicide detective,” she said, “so I know what you’re thinking. The FBI thinks that Michael fought with someone in here.”

“Was there more blood? “

She nodded and indicated a path toward the door with a wave of her hand.

Gage surveyed the room. Every dent in the file cabinet, every scuff on the wall, every missing chip of paint on the windowsill now seemed to speak of violence instead of wear.

“And they think it was Ibrahim?” he asked.

She shrugged. “They didn’t say. But I have no reason to think he was here. If he had been, Michael wouldn’t have raced off to Europe looking for him.”

That pursuit would’ve explained why Hennessy was in France, Gage thought, but maybe not why he was in Marseilles, or at least not the only reason he was there.

Gage felt the crime scene shift back to the Mediterranean.

“Do you think Ibrahim might have killed your husband, maybe out of revenge?”

Elaine’s eyes narrowed and her body stiffened.

“I’m not going to answer that until I know who hired you.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t want to end up like Michael.”

“The problem is that the person who brought me into this is afraid if it becomes public that he’s interested, the press will portray him in the same way your husband was described by the FBI.”

“You mean, as a raving lunatic.”

Gage nodded. “But I can tell you this. He’s the person Michael went to Marseilles to meet.”

Elaine’s face flushed again. “You’re just like my husband. You’re asking me to trust you, but you’re not willing to trust me.”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

Elaine threw up her hands. “Now you’re quoting him. Everything was always too complicated for my little brain.” Her voice rose. “What now? Are you going to pat me on the head, tell me to go bake some cookies like a good little girl?”

Tears appeared in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She dropped into the desk chair, then leaned over and covered her face, her body heaving with sobs.

Gage knelt down next to her. “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant that I have to trust the person who hired me just as much as I’m asking you to trust me.”

Footsteps pounded in the hallway. Vicky ran into the room.

“What the fuck did you do to her?” she yelled, then pushed Gage away and wrapped her arms around her mother.

Gage regained his balance, but didn’t rise.

Elaine straightened in her chair, then took in a long breath and exhaled as she wiped her eyes. She gazed up at Vicky.

“He didn’t do anything to me. Life did something to me.”

Elaine looked over at Gage. “I’m just so angry,” she said. “At myself for divorcing him. At him for abandoning us.”

Vicky pulled away, her face reddening, clenching her fists. “He didn’t abandon us. Stop saying that. He didn’t.”

“Then why isn’t he here?” Elaine said, opening her hands toward her daughter. “Why isn’t he still alive?”

Vicky glared at her mother, mouth open, but no answer emerged. She then turned and stared out through the window at the blizzard that had walled off their world.

Gage could see that every time she’d reached out to protect her mother, she found herself handcuffed and speechless, paralyzed by conflicting emotions and loyalties and unanswered questions.

“I can’t dissolve the cloud he left behind,” Gage said, rising to his feet. “But at least let me try to take some of the mystery out of how his life ended.”

Gage looked at Vicky.

“The man who asked me to do this believes that your father died for something important.”

And then at Elaine. “And after my meeting you two, I wonder if maybe his search was really an attempt to find a way to come back home as a man you could be proud of.”

T
wo years ago,” the president of International Society for Econometrics said, “the Federal Reserve was in disarray, having been managed by a succession of chairmen who spent their days testing the political winds, instead of interrogating the hard economic data.”

Harold Lasker scanned the upturned faces of the twelve hundred conference attendees in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan. To Milton Abrams, sitting to his left on the raised dais, they looked like refugees huddled in the safety of a school gymnasium after fleeing a war zone.

Antiglobalization demonstrators had gathered for a second time that day, blocking the hotel entrance, forcing the attendees to sneak in by way of Grand Central Station, their underground route fortified by police and private security guards against the surging protestors.

“What changed?”

Lasker shifted his gaze to Abrams, who felt himself recoil as twenty-four hundred eyes fell on him. He felt less like an honored keynote speaker and more like a burglar caught in a patrol officer’s high beams. The sudden attention caused him to cease his fidgeting that had accelerated during Lasker’s introduction. He withdrew his hand from the sweating water glass and the tracks its erratic movements traced on the starched white tablecloth, then dried his fingers on his napkin and dropped his hands to his lap.

“I’ll tell you what changed,” Lasker said. “We finally have a chairman who has refused to play politics with the economy by pursuing policies that brought a series of booms and busts because of the central bank’s unwillingness to control the expansion of credit.”

Lasker held up a copy of the society’s latest journal. Everyone in the room knew the single topic to which it was devoted: the coming collapse.

“The question is whether it’s too late.” Lasker paused, and then said, “I believe that it isn’t. If … if … we’re tough-minded enough.”

Easy for him to say, Abrams thought—for all of them to say. He knew that to the tenured academics in the room, “tough-minded” meant nothing more than standing firm in their demand for a new photocopier for the economics department or for an extra teaching assistant to whom they could shift more of their work. And to the corporate executives, it meant nothing more than holding their ground with the homeowners’ association design review board or two-putting a par three, or fighting with the company’s compensation committee over an additional million dollars in salary or an additional ten million in stock options.

None of them, Abrams knew, possessed the kind of toughness required to bring the financial life of the country to a standstill in order to break the cycles of inflation and deflation that were eroding the foundation of the economy.

And Abrams wondered whether he himself possessed it. Even the fact of his presidential appointment to be Fed chairman hadn’t done much to dampen his self-doubt.

“And the first place to draw the line is with China.”

Abrams’s jaw tightened. He felt like grabbing Lasker’s jacket collar and tossing him backward off the dais.

Lasker had promised not to raise the issue of China’s currency policies—and the whole world was watching. Even worse, Lasker had just criticized the previous chairmen’s testing of the political winds, only to throw Abrams into the storm.

Abrams knew that as far as the international financial community was concerned, a nonresponse to Lasker’s claim by the chairman of the Federal Reserve would be viewed as a response and would move the markets. Abrams therefore put on what he called the Bernanke Face, the dull-eyed expression of a goat oblivious to the slaughterhouse into which it was being led.

Staring ahead, Abrams noticed motion at the back of the ballroom. A CNBC producer he recognized was walking out to the foyer, and he grasped what she was doing: alerting the studio that a story was about to break.

Abrams glanced at his watch. The markets would close in forty minutes. He decided that he would find a way to stretch his speech and wait until question time to respond to the China issue, and let the mass of overnight news dissipate the impact of his reaction.

“China’s currency policies,” Lasker continued, “have destabilized the capital flows throughout the world.”

Idiot.
Abrams thought.
Id-i-ot.
The esteemed president of the society was one of those who’d demanded for decades that the Chinese let their currency float instead of keeping it fixed unreasonably low against the dollar. Finally they did, and as predicted by its advocates, the price of their products on the international market increased, costing them some of their competitive advantage.

But as Lasker and others hadn’t predicted, it also sucked into China a trillion dollars a year of foreign investment. Investors, who’d once received only seven hundred thousand Chinese yuan for a million dollars, now received one point four million yuan.

If it had made economic sense ten years earlier to invest a billion dollars in China, it was insanity not to invest two billion today, for the dollars now bought fifty percent more of the country.

“The PRC’s dual exchange rate policy,” Lasker said, “one for domestic transactions and one for foreign investment, creates exactly the kind of unfair subsidy prohibited by the WTO.”

Id-i-ot. What pisses you off is that they outsmarted you. Did you really think they’d follow your advice like it was a doctor’s prescription: Drink liquids, get lots of rest, take one of these tablets twice a day?

Lasker and his followers had learned the lesson too late: Chinese economics was like Chinese medicine: counterintuitive and impossible to swallow.

Lasker paused, and then sniffed the air. Seconds later, members of the audience were coughing and wiping their eyes. Those at the back of the room ran toward the exits, the ones in front bunched up behind them.

Abrams clasped his hands together under the table.

Thank God for tear gas.