Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  The shortest distance between where Gage stood and the car was a long drop off a slick boulder. He worked his way first down to its right, then back to the top and down to its left, looking for some sign that Hennessy had passed on either side: a pen, a scrap of paper—anything.

  But he found nothing.

  From there, Gage headed down through a tunnel of brush and trees until he emerged into a clearing. He looked up at the Madonna and found that he was off course by thirty feet. He imagined that Hennessy, descending in the darkness down the angled slope, had drifted in the same direction.

  Gage heard rocks tumble, a landslide of dirt and stones, Benaroun yelping, and then, “Merde. Merde. Merde.” Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “You okay?” Gage yelled down.

  “I got a damn aloe thorn in my ass. How do you think I am?”

  “You need help?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  Gage worked his way back toward the direct line, sidestepping down the incline until the hill flattened just behind the trees and the plants that lined the street. He searched back and forth along them, inspecting between the rocks and along the rough ground, then gave up and stepped into the street.

  Benaroun was grinning and leaning back against his car wearing a wrinkled, mud-smeared overcoat, arms folded over his chest.

  “I like your new wardrobe,” Gage said, as he walked up.

  “It’s not mine exactly,” Benaroun said. “But since I punctured my butt getting it, I could make a claim. Anyway, the man who owned it is not coming back to get it.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I figure because you were right.” Benaroun pointed up the hill, seeming to enjoy the clowning. “It was jammed into a bush about twenty feet up.”

  “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Hennessy must’ve taken it off trying to change his appearance.”

  “What?” Gage’s eyes narrowed at the coat. “Are you sure—”

  “It’s got an American mobile phone and a little leather notebook with the initials MH on it.”

  Benaroun unfolded his arms and reached out to hand the items to Gage.

  As Gage accepted them, his mind jumped back past Benaroun’s conclusion to Hennessy falling coatless over the cliff, then jumped forward to the present.

  “He only would’ve changed his appearance,” Gage said, “if he thought someone had spotted him.”

  Gage scanned the street and rooftops and the hillside looking for surveillance. He found none. Or at least nothing obvious. He pointed at the car.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gage said.

  Benaroun cast him a puzzled look. “You don’t want to look for more? ”

  “Not now.” Gage pointed at the driver’s seat. “Let’s go. I don’t want to get trapped.”

  Benaroun started the engine even before his door was closed. A black Mercedes squealed around the corner. Its momentum and the driver’s overcompensating yank on the steering wheel carried it in a sweeping curve from one side of the street to the other. Benaroun punched the accelerator and shot through the gap, then hung a hard right and rocketed down the hill.

  Benaroun glanced over as he cut through an alley toward a boulevard leading to the center of the city, and asked, “How did you know? ”

  “I didn’t.” Gage pointed at the overcoat. “That thing told me that whoever killed Hennessy wasn’t done with him yet.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Is that everything?” Old Cat asked, standing next to the table in the Meinhard storage room, hands locked on his waist. Neither Wo-li nor Mu-rong looked up from where they sat across from each other. They just nodded.

  Between them lay bank records, spreadsheets, and notes that Jian-jun had retrieved from a safe anchored to the foundation in the basement of their mansion. Down the hallway and in the remaining buildings on the Meinhard property, workers were questioning other government officials and party members and factory managers—each now confessing who paid them, how much money, by what routes—not pleading for their lives, but truth-telling for them.

  Faith glanced up from her notes. She didn’t believe that Wo-li and Mu-rong had disclosed everything, and the expression on Old Cat’s face told her that he didn’t believe they had either.

  But she did believe something else: If what they had admitted to so far was confirmed by their records, every

  U.S. corporation that had invested in Sichuan Province could be convicted of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the U.S. and their officers convicted of bribery in China. She imagined the business elite of the Western world, men and women dressed in suits and handcuffs, lined up in front of courthouses in London, New York, Paris, Bonn, and Beijing and taken in bus caravans to prisons.

  She flipped back through the pages, the mass of names and amounts. Two hundred million from RAID Technologies. A hundred million from Spectrum. A hundred million from Meinhard. Payments made to officials from Beijing to Chengdu and into accounts and shell companies from Hong Kong to the Bahamas to Zurich, to front companies in every world capital and in every offshore haven.

  A shudder of dread shook through her. In the intensity of the last hours, her mind hadn’t broken free from the immediacy to realize that thousands of officials and company officers would kill to suppress what lay on the table and what was contained in her notes. Like the odor of the stale food on the table and the old sweat stained into their clothes and the generator oil soaked into the concrete floor, she’d been too enveloped in it. Now she could see that the trails starting from these records would eventually implicate the entire Chinese government and its corporate elite.

  Her eyes fell on her notes about RAID and she knew what Graham would’ve done next: followed the RAID money back to its Hong Kong account, then out to all the other Chinese officials they’d kicked money up and down to.

  A fist rapped on the door.

  Old Cat grabbed the documents, dropped them into a cardboard box at his feet, and folded the lid closed.

  The man he’d whispered to before the start of the people’s court hearing entered. He fixed his eyes first on Wo-li, then on Mu-rong. Finally he looked up at Old Cat.

  “Have they cooperated? “ the man asked.

  Old Cat nodded. “But we’ll need another forty-eight hours to examine their documents to verify what they’ve told us.”

  Wo-li and Mu-rong both slumped as though to say they couldn’t endure another two days of questioning.

  Unless it was an act, Faith thought, they didn’t seem to realize that Old Cat had just told them that he’d decided to let them escape.

  “Tell the people to return to their homes,” Old Cat said. “There’s nothing for them to do until we call them back for the trial.”

  Mu-rong’s hands flew to her face. Moments later, sobs emerged from behind them.

  Old Cat’s arm shot out and he backhanded her. Her head snapped to the side.

  “Shut up,” Old Cat said. “The time to cry was when the hospital collapsed.”

  Faith pushed herself to her feet. Old Cat turned toward her, facing away from the man, a slight shake of the head telling her that though the violence was real, it was a performance to convince the audience of one standing at the door that justice would be done.

  Mu-rong’s sobbing stopped.

  Faith sat down and lowered her head, acting as though she’d been reprimanded and as though she feared that he’d slap her next.

  Old Cat looked back at the man, then said, “Go.”

  The man nodded and turned away.

  “Wait,” Old Cat said, “let me have your gun.”

  The man turned back and handed Old Cat the semiautomatic that was stuck between his belt and pants.

  “One more outburst like that,” Old Cat said, “and I may finish her off myself.”

  Faith tensed. The words hadn’t sounded at all like a performance.

  CHAPTER 42

  What the devil is the Chinese army doing?” Vice President Co
oper Wallace asked the CIA director. “Are they going to stand by while those criminals destroy every American asset in Central China?”

  Wallace’s coffee had turned cold in the study of his Naval Observatory home as he’d inspected dozens of satellite images of the burned-out Spectrum distribution center in Chengdu, and farther south in Chongqing and Guiyang, and even farther south in Kunming. Other photos showed incinerated Meinhard plants and RAID factories and branches of German and French and Taiwanese companies, the smoke from the ruins hovering like patches of fog over the crosshatch of roads and buildings in the special economic zones.

  CIA Director John Casher slid a DVD across the desk and pointed at the vice president’s laptop. Wallace pressed it into the drive.

  Casher waited until the video activated, then said, “These shots were taken outside of a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party.”

  Wallace’s eyes jerked from the screen to Casher.

  “How did you—“

  The director waved his hand. “It’s not important. What is, is that you see three old guard PLA generals walking inside. The last of the true believers.”

  “What does it mean? “

  “We think it means that the army, or at least part of it, is taking the position that the rebellion in Central China should be allowed to run its course.” Casher pointed at the computer. “During the 1950s, when these men were young, Mao staged what was called the Hundred Flowers Campaign.”

  Wallace nodded. “I read about it in college. Let a hundred flowers bloom—and then Mao snipped them off one after another.”

  “Exactly. What’s happening now is that workers, laborers, and farmers are identifying and rounding up corrupt officials. And it seems as though the army wants those flowers to bloom.”

  “Are the flowers the rebels or the officials?”

  “Both. But our intelligence is telling us that the army is most focused on making an example of some of the officials and on having it happen in the outlying provinces where it can be contained. When the time comes, they’ll crush the rebellion before it spreads to Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou where it might spin out of control.”

  Wallace remembered something else from his Asian history course.

  “It could just as easily spread like a wildfire and we’d have another Cultural Revolution that would bring their economy to a halt.” Wallace pointed toward the window. “And ours too. Eighty percent of our suppliers

  are in China. Store shelves will be empty in a matter of days. Car assembly lines will stop moving. A million empty containers will stack up at our ports with nowhere to go.”

  Wallace looked down at the satellite images lying on his desk.

  “Isn’t there something you can do about stopping the destruction?”

  Casher spread his hands and shrugged.

  “For the most part,” Casher said, “all we can do is monitor what is going on with the few agents we have in those areas and by monitoring telephone traffic.”

  “What about the Internet? “

  “The Chinese have suspended it out there. They’ve left it up along the industrial coast since international commercial order processing requires it.”

  “Which means you have to listen to a billion phone calls to figure out what’s going on?”

  “Sort of.”

  Wallace stared at the director. He had a sense that Casher had slipped something by him, maybe because Casher didn’t fully trust him with the entire truth, but wanted to shift the burden onto him for not asking the right questions in case there were recriminations later.

  Then it hit him. “What did you mean by ‘for the most part’ all you can do is monitor with a few agents? “

  Wallace watched Casher stiffen. He smiled to himself. These bureaucrats, maybe even the president, think I’m some kind of bumbler, but they forget that I’m the one that made Spectrum the biggest multilevel marketing company in the world. Maybe he hadn’t adjusted to the political game as early as he should have, and as quickly as he should have, but he knew how to listen.

  Casher took in a breath, then stretched his neck and adjusted his tie.

  “We’re…uh…sharing information with the PLA.”

  Wallace fixed his own expression in place. He knew that Casher expected him to redden and pound the desk, furious at the thought of making an alliance with the second most powerful army in the world that was also the force behind the economic machine aimed at crushing the West.

  Instead, Wallace asked, “Is it a two-way street?”

  Casher nodded.

  “And what have we gotten for what we’ve given them? “

  Wallace watched Casher lean forward, not quite like a dam breaking, but close.

  “Most of our attention is focused on Chengdu because that’s where the rebellion began—“

  “Because of all of the deaths in the earthquake.”

  Casher nodded. “The surrounding provinces are watching the rebels there. A leader has emerged, a quiet guy, but charismatic. Over the last few days he’s stopped the killing and burning and organized the mob into a militia of sorts. He’s even set up people’s courts and detention centers for corrupt officials.”

  Wallace’s face betrayed him with a smirk. “Some kind of a Sichuan-flavored George Washington?”

  “Not as different as you might think. And that’s why the PLA takes him seriously.”

  Wallace felt the pressure of Casher’s stare.

  “You ever put your life on the line for something?” Casher asked. “Knowing that you were going to lose it?”

  They both knew the answer. Wallace’s two tours in Vietnam were spent working in the embassy. Never once in his life had Wallace doubted but that he’d die

  in his sleep when old age had depleted his body. Even the occasional death threats he’d received from fringe lunatics hadn’t driven him toward thoughts of mortality and the shuddering terror of a violent death.

  “Old Cat is a dead man and he knows it,” Casher said. “He’s shouldering the guilt for the lynchings and the bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head-executions even though it was just mob violence and he didn’t order any of it.”

  “You sound like you have a lot of respect for the guy.”

  Casher sighed. “I wish he was on our side. I’d trade for him in a heartbeat. I’d trade away all of our wannabe Pinochets and Afghan tribal leaders and Mubaraks and the whole lot of Saudi princes for just one like—“

  Wallace raised his hand. “This isn’t the time or place to get into those issues. The question on the table is what we can learn from him.”

  Wallace watched Casher flush, and he knew he was wrong. He grasped that now was exactly the time and place, and that the failure to address those kinds of issues at the right time and in the right place had led to one U.S. foreign policy disaster after another, from Vietnam to Iraq.

  “Let me rephrase that,” Wallace said. “Let’s start with what’s going on now, then you can have as much time as you need to tell me what you think all of this means.”

  Wallace picked up his telephone from its cradle and punched in the intercom numbers for his secretary. He waited for her to answer, then said, “Cancel all of my appointments for the rest of the day…all of them.”

  He hung up and looked at Casher and nodded.

  “The PLA has made sure that there is uninterrupted cell service in the areas in which Old Cat operates,” Casher said. “His people have taken over the government

  complex in central Chengdu and they’re operating a court at the Meinhard plant in the special economic zone.”

  “Does he realize that he’s being intercepted? “

  Casher shook his head. “I don’t think so. He’s a farmer. He’d probably never even touched a mobile phone until a few days ago. But he’s using one now and the people around him are using them, too. And one of those is an anthropologist from Berkeley, Faith Gage.”

  Wallace did a little head shake. “You mean an American has
joined the revolution. Or worse, is leading it?”

  “Not quite. She’s there with her students doing research. Her husband is Graham Gage, the private investigator.”

  “From San Francisco. I know who he is. Spectrum hired him years ago when a triad tried to extort our people in Taipei. He made the gangsters go away, but I never found out how.”

  “His wife has been feeding information about payoffs—names, dates, and bank account numbers—to the staff in his office. And then they’re using it to do a huge amount of data mining to put it all together in what will in the end probably look like a mass criminal indictment.”

  Wallace cocked his head as he looked over at Casher. “Are we allowed to intercept domestic Internet traffic without a warrant? “

  “We’re not doing it. The PLA is and then they’re passing the information on to us.”

  Wallace bit his lower lip for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know much about criminal law, but that sounds like illegally obtained evidence.”

  “It’s only evidence if we use it to prosecute people,

  which is not our intention. But Old Cat is. They’re debriefing officials and company owners and executives and then trying to verify what the crooks say before they act on it.”

  “You mean line people up against the wall.”

  Casher nodded. “Probably.”

  Wallace thought back to the exasperated expression on his chief of staff’s face as he explained to Wallace the facts of Chinese corruption and the hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes that RAID had paid over the years, and by implication what Spectrum and other U.S. companies had paid.

  “How bad will it be for us if this information gets out?” Wallace asked.

  “Devastating. We’d be forced to indict the elite of our corporate leadership or lose whatever moral authority we have left in the world.”

  The words hung in the silence that followed, sharing space with the implication that disclosure was unavoidable.