Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  Abrams shook his head, mouth sour. “He’s not that sophisticated. He just likes butterflies, and says he’s a firm believer in Einstein’s opinion that God doesn’t play dice. Of course, he’s never read Einstein.”

  “What’s he going to make of the earthquake?”

  Abrams bit his lip, thinking. Then he nodded and said, “I think he’ll make it into a lesson in faith-based economics. Somehow he’ll construe it as God’s punishment for something the Chinese did, maybe for inventing Confucianism. If he could construe the Holocaust

  into a divine hint that the Jews of Europe should create the state of Israel in order to set the stage for the Second Coming, his mind is elastic enough to wrap any tragedy inside a theory about God’s purpose.”

  Abrams looked down at the phone in his hand. “I hate this thing.” Then back up at Gage. “Just say the word if you need help getting Faith out of there. It can be used for good as well as for nonsense.”

  Distant thumping drums drew them both to the bay window overlooking Central Park West. The sound was approaching them from the north.

  “If the antiglobalization groups are marching,” Abrams said, “it must be World Trade Organization Friday.” He chanted along, “No. No. WTO,” and then said, “I wish they’d go back to rioting down on Wall Street instead of up here. You’d think they’re trying to interfere with my work.”

  “Do they pass by or stop out front? “

  “Pass by”—Abrams tilted his head in the other direction—“on their way to Columbus Circle so they can jump onto the subway after the march and get to class or to the Starbucks where they work.”

  “Then I guess they don’t know you live here.”

  Abrams shrugged and smiled. “Not yet, but they will, and the dictators on the co-op board will not be pleased to pay for all of the windows they’ll break.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hell, I even called the CIA.”

  Vice President Cooper Wallace glared at his chief of staff sitting across the desk from him in his ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

  Paul Nichols knew the outburst wasn’t meant for him, but for a world that was resisting Wallace’s will. It had been that way during the ten years that Wallace served as the CEO and Nichols had been the CFO of Spectrum, the world’s largest multilevel marketing company. Wallace’s father had started it in the family garage to sell Christian products, and after it mainstreamed into foods, vitamins, and nutritional supplements, the son used it as a springboard into politics. And this was one of those times that Nichols wished he hadn’t.

  Wallace pulled the phone away from his ear and turned it toward Nichols.

  “A billion-dollar investment,” the sharp but distant voice said, “and you’re telling me you don’t even know whether the goddamn building is still standing?”

  The caller was the CFO of RAID Technologies, a U.S.-based microchip manufacturer, and corporate backer of Wallace’s elevation from business executive to senator, to presidential candidate, and finally to vice president.

  Turning the phone back toward his ear, Wallace said, “Half of Chengdu is on fire. For all I know even the Spectrum distribution center has already burned. It’s not the fault of the United States government if your people over there are too busy to pick up the telephone to report to you.” He listened for a moment, then said, “I’ll have Paul contact you as soon as we have some information,” and disconnected.

  “Why is he so worried?” Nichols asked. “They built the RAID plant to resist the largest earthquakes.”

  Wallace shook his head. “They designed it to resist. Whether the Chinese construction company built it to those specifications is a different thing.” He spread his hands. “And at what magnitude? Even the Three Gorges Dam was built only to withstand a seven-point-zero, not an eight-point-one. At least that’s what I was told years ago by the staff of the Commerce Committee.”

  Wallace rose and gazed down on Seventeenth Street, already closed to traffic in anticipation of Saturday’s anti-World Bank and International Monetary Fund demonstration. He hummed Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as he surveyed the flak-jacketed D.C. police officers posted at the corners.

  Nichols heard the music in his head and recognized that neither of them knew what was really happening outside and what it meant for them or the country. He watched Wallace’s head nod in rhythm as he looked out, as if the images were melding with the words: guns, signs, and songs embodying divisions deeper than mere political disagreement.

  He remembered the first time—the exact day—he’d heard the song in 1967. He’d gone to a friend’s house after school where they’d played the record on the stereo over and over, memorizing the words. His father, a police captain who was home on his day off, rose from his chair and glared at Nichols as he walked in through the front door singing:

  Paranoia strikes deep

  Into your life it will creep

  It starts when you’re always afraid

  You step out of line, the man come and take you away—

  Then the man stepped out of the song, walked across the living room, and slapped his son across the face.

  Nichols blinked away memory and focused again on Wallace.

  “I was right when I warned RAID not to build over there,” Wallace said, then held up his hands. “So Jeshurun waxed fat and spurned the Rock of his salvation.” He lowered them again and turned back toward Nichols. “I guarantee you that Spectrum won’t call today. They couldn’t wait for me to be gone so they could go into China, and now look how they’ve been punished for it.”

  Nichols cocked his head toward the reception area where the president and executive officers of the Baptist Missionary Convention waited.

  Wallace smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t say that in front of the cameras. The public isn’t quite ready to face the truth without blinders on. When the time comes, they’ll rip them off themselves.” He paused in thought, then snapped his fingers. “This may be a chance for BMC to send some missionaries into China, maybe as relief workers. We should encourage RAID to take a few along when they go over to assess the damage.”

  “There’s no way they’ll get visas.”

  “We’ll make it a human rights issue. That way—“

  “And I’m not sure we should put kids at risk. Things are only going to get worse.”

  “Then that’s exactly where they need to be to do the most good. What do the Chinese say about crises creating opportunities? This is one of those times.”

  Nichols tensed. Wallace’s central weakness was that he was impulsive. It was a defect Nichols had long ago discovered in the character of boys with strong but loving fathers, like Wallace’s, who forgave mistakes too easily.

  “You’ll need to run it by the president’s people before you start down that road,” Nichols said, but knew Wallace wouldn’t.

  The last time Wallace had shoved the president in the direction of religious freedom in China, the Chinese maneuvered him into a position where he either had to speak out in support of the anti-Christian Falun Gong or step back. He retreated and was weakened when he went to Beijing to negotiate the terms of a revised trade agreement.

  “The president shouldn’t have chickened out last time,” Wallace said. “Anything that encourages instability in China helps us. Combine a hundred million landless laborers rioting in the streets and fifty million Falun Gong members lotusing in the intersections and a bunch of Tibetans and separatist Muslims bombing the power stations, and the whole government will collapse and we’ll get the kind of revolution that should’ve happened the first time.”

  Wallace stepped toward the door.

  “Anyway,” Wallace said, reaching for the knob, “I’m not going to push the president to do the right thing—these people are.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Driving north through a snowstorm from New York toward Albany, Gage felt the uncertainty of Faith’s situation, but resisted calling again for fear of
turning his worry into interference.

  At the same time, he felt as though Milton Abrams had sent him walking on a trampoline.

  “Are you asking me to find out whether Hennessy was murdered,” Gage had asked as he rose from the living room couch, “or whether Ibrahim was framed?”

  “Neither, exactly. I want you to find out why the possible framing of Ibrahim became a matter of life or death for Hennessy.”

  “It didn’t seem all that important to Ibrahim. He’s had nine years to proclaim his innocence, but he’s remained silent and out of sight.”

  “Then maybe that’s the answer I’m looking for—assuming that he’s still alive. But I don’t think it’s the one we’ll discover.”

  Gage found it hard to make out the Hudson River to his right as he looped over the thruway and headed west toward downtown. The Dunn Memorial Bridge reached into the gray nothingness, looking more like a pier than a span. Only the creeping headlights emerging from the swirling fog confirmed that it was attached to the opposite bank. From there on he let the rental car’s GPS guide him through the blurred intersections to the Adirondack Plaza Hotel along State Street, a few blocks from the capitol.

  After checking in, he called his assistant, Alex Z, at the firm’s office in San Francisco. He smiled to himself as he pictured the wild-haired, multitattooed Alex Z perched at his cockpit of a desk, surrounded by computers and monitors, trolling cyberspace for information that allowed Gage and the twenty other investigators in his firm to triangulate their position inside the cases they worked.

  “Court records in Albany show that Elaine divorced Hennessy five years ago,” Alex Z said. “She got the house and half his retirement. He got joint custody of the kids, but I don’t think that meant that much in the long run because they were already in their mid-teens.”

  “Was it contested?”

  “At the start, but he caved in before they got into the juicy details of exactly what their differences were and what made them irreconcilable.”

  “How about making a pretext call to the house to see if she’s there. Pretend to be a pollster. Run it through a New York number so she’ll think it’s local.”

  “No problem and I’ll hit you with an e-mail of everything I’ve found out about them.”

  During the following hour, Gage tried to construct a living human out of the papier-mâché of Alex Z’s research, then drove west and walked up the concrete steps to a century-old brick Craftsman two blocks from the frozen Washington Park Lake in the center of town. He was wearing a suit, but left his overcoat in the car, playing the odds that she might let him into the house if only to get him out of the cold—but first he’d have to get past a young woman peeking out from the near edge of the living room drapes as he raised his hand to knock on the door.

  She swung it open, but before Gage had a chance to identify himself, she said, “My mother doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”

  Her features were too soft for the hard look she tried to use to wall Gage off, but he didn’t try to break through it with a smile, for it seemed to be part of an honest attempt to protect her mother.

  Reaching out with his business card, Gage said, “I’m a private investigator—“

  “For who?” Her voice went from protective to demanding. “Who sent you?”

  “Someone who was worried about your father before he died.”

  She didn’t accept the card. He lowered it. Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the door.

  “You mean, before he was murdered.”

  Gage didn’t yet know whether that was true, but he neither wanted to challenge her nor agree with her and thereby set up a future betrayal if it wasn’t.

  “That’s what the man who hired me suspected,” Gage said, “and asked me to find out.”

  An older female voice called out from the interior: “Who’s at the door?”

  The young woman glanced behind her and said, “A man.”

  The voice rose, the tone of an exasperated mother. “What man?”

  Footsteps thumped on the hardwood floor, becoming louder as they approached.

  The woman who appeared at the door matched the school librarian that Alex Z had described in his e-mail. Slim. Short. Red hair tied back. She looked at Gage, then at her daughter.

  “You’re right, Vicky. It’s a man.”

  Vicky reddened. “I was just trying to—“

  “And she did it very well,” Gage said. He smiled and handed her his card. “I may want to hire her to protect me.”

  Elaine examined it as her daughter backed away. “You came all the way out here from California to talk to me?”

  “Actually, I came all the way out here to talk to someone who wanted me to talk to you.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I’d rather not say right away.”

  Reaching out to return the card, she said, “I’ve had enough mysteries already.”

  Gage held up his hands. “How about this? I’ll explain to you why I’m here, and then you decide whether it makes any difference who hired me.”

  Elaine stared up at him for a few moments, and then turned away from the door and said, “Come on in.”

  As Gage stamped his feet to knock off the snow that had collected on his shoes as he walked from his car, she looked back and smiled and said, “Nice try with shivering-in-the-cold gimmick. My husband used to use that one, too. He knew all of the tricks.” Her smiled died. “A lot of good it did him in the end.”

  CHAPTER 8

  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 s
upport 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.”