Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  And if Hennessy had been murdered, why not do it in the parking lot, or along the road at the first outcropping above the shoreline rocks?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Gage pulled a map out of his jeans pocket and unfolded it. He traced a path from Cassis where he and Tabari had started the hike all the way along the coast to Marseilles, twenty miles to the west. If Hennessy had begun at the trailhead closest to Marseilles, it wouldn’t have been an hour walk, but a ten-hour walk, with tough ascents and treacherous descents on slippery stones and mud.

  But say he really did start at Cassis? A mile or so of indecision, or of confusion, or of anguish—

  “Exactly,” Tabari said, after watching Gage’s eyes scan the map. “From either direction it’s a long way to go to commit suicide.”

  “Maybe not,” Gage said, picturing San Francisco’s Golden Gate, almost two miles in length. “Most people walk to the middle of a bridge before jumping, maybe looking for a certain kind of symmetry, maybe one that confirms their place at the center of the universe at the pivotal moment.”

  “Or as distant as they can get from solid ground,” Tabari said. “I assume that people imagine they’ll enjoy a pristine death, as if the water below would simply absorb them whole and unbroken.”

  “Either way,” Gage said, gesturing toward the rocky trail before them, “they can walk a long way before they kill themselves, sometimes a very long way.”

  Tabari took the lead as they headed toward the deepest part of the cove. The area seemed to Gage to be a counterpoint image of the Utah Badlands, with fractured white chasm walls in place of red rock cliffs, with a pale sea in place of shadowed valleys, and with mesquite and sage and piñon pines in place of Aleppo and myrtle and ferns, but just as desolate.

  After Gage and Tabari made the turn back toward the water, they stopped in the shadow of an oak tree. Through binoculars Gage scanned the path they’d traveled, checking whether they’d been followed. He then inspected the ridges above. He didn’t expect to see anyone, or at least anyone shrewd, since a person assigned to track them and who’d seen where they’d started could’ve guessed where they were headed. In any case, a fishing boat would have been a better choice for surveillance.

  Gage suspected that if he’d been followed to the trailhead and the follower knew their destination and what they would find, he might’ve settled on taking some photos of Tabari and then headed back to Marseilles to try to identify him—

  Unless that someone wanted to follow them not just long enough to identify Tabari or even just to the spot where Hennessy went over, but also to make sure that he and Tabari followed Hennessy all the way down to the rocks below.

  “You tell anyone that you were coming out here?” Gage asked, lowering the binoculars.

  “You see something?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t even tell my father.”

  Gage raised them again and turned the lenses toward the Mediterranean, starting at the pale blue water at the head of the inlet, then back and forth along the shoreline and finally following the darkening channel toward the open sea. A sailboat slid into view from the direction of Cassis, forty feet of white fiberglass and chrome reflecting the risen sun, sails down, motoring, its engine a distant murmur, its wake foaming the still surface.

  A flash of glass told Gage that binoculars had been raised toward them, but had passed on. Gage figured that either they’d just been spotted or they weren’t the person’s target.

  Gage focused on a woman standing alone on the bow. The binoculars flashed again and she raised her arm and pointed, not at them, but at the hill rising up behind them. Gage looked over his shoulder, for a half second expecting to spot a sniper poised on the hill-crest. Instead, it was a peregrine falcon swooping down from a pine top, its nearly two-foot wings first wide and flapping, then folded as it rocketed toward the water. A seagull shrieked and took flight from a yellow buoy at the mouth of the cove. The falcon swept down below the bird, and then slammed up into it, sending it tumbling and flailing, finally catching it by the back of the neck and carrying it to a ledge halfway up the cliff.

  The woman on the boat turned as a man ran toward her. She raised her palm in a high five. He slapped hers with his, then they both jumped in place like delirious football fans after a winning touchdown.

  “I’ve never understood how anyone can celebrate death,” Tabari said. “Any death.”

  Tabari ran his fingers along a rosemary branch, then raised them to his nose. He breathed in the scented resin and said, “This, not death, is worth celebrating.”

  “You sound like your uncle,” Gage said.

  Tabari smiled. “And every day he sounds more like my father than he lets on.” His smiled faded. “Except angrier. A kind of Old Testament, Moses anger.”

  “I noticed that at the airport,” Gage said. “Why the change?”

  “His world has gotten larger since he retired, or at least he’s being confronted by more of it. The narrow, focused gaze that he moved from case to case when he was a detective is now like a searchlight that moves from country to country, from disaster to disaster, from crime to crime, illuminating one evil after another that he feels helpless to stop.” Tabari stared down at the boat, then looked over at Gage and said, “That’s what his platinum smuggling investigation is really about.”

  “You mean it’s not as serious as he makes it out to be?”

  “No. I suspect that he’s right about that. But it’ll continue whether he gets killed trying to stop it or not.”

  “Why are you convinced it’s that dangerous?”

  “Not because I have inside information, but because the breadth of the thing, the size of the organization, the length of the chain and the amount of money involved. It doesn’t make sense for whoever these people are to engage in this wide of a conspiracy unless there are not just millions, but billions at stake. Whoever is behind it has developed the means to control mines and power plants and banks. They can make airplanes appear before the world’s eyes like fireflies in the night and then disappear again. They can make tons of precious metals jump from place to place like they’re subatomic particles—”

  “And you don’t think your uncle gets it.”

  “Worse. To them, he’s just a piece of lint to be flicked off their lapels.”

  Gage understood conceptually why Tabari was worried, but he didn’t have enough facts to know whether they supported the theory. After all, Tabari’s fear could be just the mirror image of his uncle’s misunderstanding of what had been going on, but he’d need time to figure it out.

  “If you want,” Gage said, “I can talk to the people at Transparency Watch. Ask them to pull him off of it or assign him to something else for a while.”

  Tabari shook his head. “That would just humiliate him. He might become even more reckless and try to pursue it on his own.”

  They stood in silence for a few moments, then Gage said, “Let me think about it. I’ll come up with something.”

  “Just don’t get sucked into it, too. You don’t show it, but I know you scan the darkness of the world using the same searchlight as my uncle does. That’s why you and he are friends.”

  Gage didn’t respond. It wasn’t the same searchlight, or if it was, it had never left him feeling helpless. Would it someday? He didn’t know. His father, who’d run his family medical practice into his late eighties, had never felt helpless, perhaps because he’d come to accept the contingencies of life and didn’t fear death. But Batkoun Benaroun seemed to accept neither.

  Gage turned and led the way along the trail. Soon they were midway through the section they’d seen from the opposite side.

  Emerging from a tunnel formed of dense juniper and overhanging oak trees, Gage again spotted the outcropping from which Hennessy had gone down. They walked another hundred yards, then Tabari stopped and pointed down.

  “This is it,” Tabari said.

  Gage held on to a pine trunk and leaned out
. Tabari braced himself against the tree, then grabbed the back of Gage’s jacket as insurance against him falling.

  Looking down, Gage imagined Hennessy’s body tumbling and flailing like the seagull, thudding into the first ledge fifteen feet down before tumbling down onto the two ledges below, each one angled out like stair steps, each ten feet tall, until a final, hundred-foot drop to the rocks along the water’s edge.

  Gage reached for his binoculars again and inspected the porous limestone below for blood spatter that might’ve been absorbed into the rock, and therefore might not have been washed away during the storms that passed through on the days following Hennessy’s death.

  “Looking for blood?” Tabari asked.

  Gage nodded.

  “There was some, but not much. I suspect that he died on impact.”

  Gage straightened up and Tabari released his grip.

  It didn’t make sense. A suicide wants it to be over in an instant, a straight drop into oblivion, not a bouncing journey down a flesh and bone grater.

  Except maybe as self-punishment for sins Gage couldn’t yet imagine.

  When Gage looked over, he saw that Tabari was staring at him, a smile on his face. Gage knew that Tabari had guessed what he was thinking.

  “He went over at night,” Tabari said. “He couldn’t have seen that it wasn’t a freefall to the bottom. He might’ve done what you just did. Found an outcropping. Found the place closest to the edge, held on to the tree to position himself, and then pushed off.”

  Gage shook his head. “His eyes would’ve adjusted to the darkness. Even on a cloudy night—”

  “Which it was.”

  “The ledges down there would’ve glowed.”

  Tabari knelt down and picked at specks in the dirt that looked like mica. He wet his finger, pressed it against one of them, and held it up toward Gage.

  “Water white glass,” Tabari said, “with an antireflective coating.” He wiped it off against his pants. “Flashlight glass.”

  “And you recovered the flashlight?”

  Tabari nodded. “The officers who searched the area. Not me personally.”

  “That’s all the more reason why he wouldn’t have jumped here.”

  “The detective who handled the case theorized that Hennessy did what you did, but lost his balance and committed suicide a little sooner than he planned and in a less advisable place than he would’ve wanted.”

  “In which case it’s an accident and not a suicide since he still could’ve changed his mind.”

  Tabari shrugged. “But nonetheless, not a crime.”

  Gage thought back on the suicides that he’d investigated when he was a homicide detective and on the training he’d received. He couldn’t think of an instance in which a suicide released his grip on whatever was in his hand. A Bible. A cross. A love letter. The instinct was to hold on. He couldn’t imagine Hennessy dropping the flashlight as he jumped or tossing it behind him.

  But Tabari could still be right. It could’ve been an accidental suicide.

  “Of course,” Tabari said, raising his eyebrows, “this is all conjecture.”

  Gage flashed on an image of the trailhead and the stolen car. “And whether it’s correct depends on the means of transportation he used to travel out here.”

  “And maybe also on what we know about what he couldn’t have used to travel out here.”

  “And when will I get that answer?” Gage asked.

  “Tomorrow. I think tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The tyranny of history and the force of its contradictions weighed on Faith as she sat in a corner watching Ayi Zhao, her son, her daughter-in-law, and Jian-jun confronting one another at the metal table in the center of the storage room.

  In the previous days, in sitting with Ayi Zhao at dinner in the house and around the stove they’d used for cooking and heating, fragments of times past had emerged and the roles her family members had played in recent years had become clear.

  Ayi Zhao: once a fifteen-year-old Communist revolutionary whose parents died in the Long March in the 1930s, herself marching toward Beijing in January 1949, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, purged by the party when it turned totalitarian, rehabilitated when it liberalized under Deng Xiaoping, then banished to the countryside by Deng in 1989 after the Tiananmen uprising. To her right, her son, Zhao Wo-li: vice mayor of Chengdu, a city with a population of eleven million. An engineering Ph.D. and owner of secret offshore bank accounts funded with bribes from foreign corporations.

  To her left, her daughter-in-law, Zheng Mu-rong: Communist Party Secretary, enforcer of ideological discipline in Chengdu from the top floor of a two-hundred-million-dollar government complex. Owner of mansions on the Italian Riviera and in San Francisco that were held in the names of Hong Kong front companies.

  Across from Ayi Zhao, her grandson, Jian-jun. A Christian pacifist and rebel against both Communists and capitalists.

  And all sitting in the ruins of a German-owned factory built by penal slave labor in the early 1980s.

  Wo-li straightened in his chair, removed his hands from his overcoat pockets, and laid them on the table in a let-us-begin gesture as though he was leading a meeting of government officials.

  He doesn’t get it, Faith said to herself as she watched him. He’s deluded. He thinks he’s still in charge because he’s under the protection of his mother, but he’s actually drifting in a purgatory of his own making between a past he created and a future that he can’t control.

  Faith glanced at the closed door and noticed the rumbling voices in the hallway outside. At any moment, it could be yanked open and men could rush in and drag Wo-li and his wife out to waiting pickup trucks destined for the killing fields. She was certain that the signs had already been painted. Maybe they’d even wipe off the blood of the executed and reuse the old ones:

  Enemy of the People.

  Predator.

  Traitor.

  Ayi Zhao raised a forefinger and wagged it at him.

  “Don’t deceive yourself,” she said. “The conditions outside this room may be temporary, but death is permanent.”

  Wo-li’s face flushed and his flat hands tightened into fists.

  Ayi Zhao spread her arms. “What is happening here is happening all over Sichuan Province. The people have no prisons in which to house the corrupt, nor have they the certainty that they’ll have power long enough for the sentences they might want to impose to be completed.”

  Wo-li’s widening eyes showed that he understood the implication even before she finished her thought.

  “This means,” Ayi Zhao said, “that the only punishments available for them to inflict are beatings or executions.”

  Faith knew, and was certain they all knew, that since some of those serving below Wo-li and Mu-rong had already been killed, the rough parity observed by the provisional people’s courts would require death for the two of them.

  Wo-li looked across the table toward Mu-rong; something unspoken passed between them. Faith couldn’t determine what it was, but she was certain it wasn’t surrender.

  Like so many of their caste whom Faith had met over the years, she knew them as Nietzschean Supermen, founders of a new but impermanent world in which the strong prevailed and in which they perceived themselves as self-sufficient gods of right and wrong.

  And why shouldn’t they?

  Faith had answered that question countless times in lecture halls at Berkeley: They’d grown up in a country that had spent thirty years without a criminal code and in which justice was truly in the hands of the beholder. And they’d been raised in the absurd contradiction of a Communist-capitalist society in which careers were made or destroyed, lives were taken or given back at a whim, sometimes ideological, sometimes political, sometimes personal.

  It was a world in which nothing was certain and fixed except the inevitability of death, and it was clear to Faith that Wo-li, unlike his mother and his son, believed in nothing beyond his own
instincts for money and power.

  Faith heard an echo in her mind, the last description wasn’t her own, it was Graham’s. It was how he’d described an American hedge fund manager whose firm had been bailed out by the Federal Reserve in the late 1990s.

  “What do they want?” Wo-li asked.

  “Justice,” Ayi Zhao said.

  Wo-li forced a laugh. “You mean money.”

  “When workers haven’t been paid in months, they’re the same,” Ayi Zhao said. “But that’s not what brought them here.”

  Ayi Zhao paused and stared at her son, then she lowered her head and closed her eyes. After a few moments she looked up and asked, “Do you know what the death toll was when the Number Two Hospital collapsed?”

  Wo-li glanced at his wife, then shrugged.

  “Or at the girls’ school?” Ayi Zhao pointed over her shoulder toward the door. “The people outside of this room do.”

  Wo-li said again, “What do they want?”

  “You already know,” Ayi Zhao said. “But we have to give them a reason not to do it. A reason to keep you alive.”

  Wo-li pulled back and threw up his arms. “What? Play the part of puppets in their new Cultural Revolution? Turn us into political clowns and march us through the streets and then stand us up on chairs with signs hanging around our necks announcing our alleged crimes?”

  Jian-jun stared at his father in the silence that followed, and then said, “That’s the problem. They aren’t merely alleged. It’s all an open secret. They know you have accounts, they just don’t know where. And they know that you filled them with payoffs from construction companies and foreign corporations, they just don’t know how and who helped you.”

  “And it’s better that they hang you in effigy,” Ayi Zhao said, “than for real, especially”—she spread her hands again—“since this will not likely last and they know they must act before the rebellion is crushed.”