Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

“Is Graham Gage connected to what his wife is doing?” Wallace asked.

  “Indirectly. He’s only done two things: He set up the connection between her and his staff to do the research, and he sent in a human trafficker to smuggle out a couple of people in exchange for their cooperation with the rebels.”

  “A human trafficker? He’s made a career of fighting those gangsters.”

  “He does what he needs to do.” Casher said the words in a tone that implied what they both knew to be true: that Casher had done the same and would do it again.

  “His only motive is to save lives. He’s doing his part long distance, from Marseilles, where he’s working on something else—or at least we think it’s something else. But we’re not sure since most of the calls he’s made to his office have been encrypted and the only nonencrypted call was too vague for us to draw any conclusions from.”

  Wallace paused, realizing that things were moving too fast and as part of a game that seemed to be without rules. He knew that he needed to slow down. He took a step back.

  “Will the PLA really let these people get away? They must know it’s going to happen.”

  “We assume they do, but we don’t know whether they’ll allow it. If they charge into the Meinhard facility within the next twenty-four hours and execute everyone, then we’ll have our answer.”

  “And what do we want them to do? “

  Casher pointed over his shoulder toward the door. “That’s up to the man in the Oval Office, not me.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Batkoun Benaroun filled two shot glasses with bourbon. They were sitting in the back room of a North African bar owned by a childhood friend of Benaroun’s fifteen minutes after they’d broken free from the Mercedes. It was a space of chipped paint and ground-in dirt, of a floor that was swept, but seldom washed, and of hand-smudged entrance and exit doors with deadbolts, but no doorknobs.

  “Great driving,” Gage said, reaching for a glass and raising it toward Benaroun, who raised his in turn. “I owe you.” Gage took a sip.

  Benaroun tossed his drink into his mouth, and then swallowed with a grimace.

  “It’s kind of hard to calculate the balance of debt,” Benaroun said. “If you hadn’t said let’s get out of here, we never would’ve made it.” Benaroun poured himself another shot and then took a sip. “But if you hadn’t made me go there, we wouldn’t have had to escape.”

  Gage smiled. “So you’re saying we’re even?”

  Benaroun smiled back. “Not exactly. Any new thoughts about who they were? “

  Gage shook his head, then pointed at Hennessy’s cell phone and his small water-soaked notebook lying on the table.

  “The answer is probably in there,” Gage said, “but it’ll be a while before we find out.”

  “You want me to see if someone at the Police Scientific Laboratory can help us?”

  “Can’t take the risk. It might put Tabari in a compromising position.”

  Gage picked up the cell phone, opened the back, and removed the battery and the SIM and memory cards and set them on a napkin. All three sheened with water that soaked into the paper. He moved them to another. He laid out more napkins, then spread the leather covers of the notebook as supports and stood it on end.

  Benaroun rose. “I’ll see if Mashaal has a space heater. Maybe that will speed things up.”

  After he left, Gage brushed the corners of the pages with his thumb, trying to get a sense whether they were soaked through to the middle. None of them separated. They were a mass of pulp. It would take hours of slow heat to find out whether they were pulped all the way through.

  Gage closed his eyes, trying to re-create in his mind the moment when the Mercedes had made the corner and had faced them head on. He had only a cloudy image of the faces of the two men inside. Mid-thirties. Dark-skinned. Sunglasses. Suit or sports jackets, but no ties.

  No question but that like Gilbert and Strubb, they were hired help. But by whom and for what reason?

  Benaroun returned with a small radiant heater. He set

  it on the table and plugged it in. Gage positioned it so that just a breath of heat touched Hennessy’s notebook; he didn’t want to warm it too fast and cook the pulp into a hard mass.

  “I once had a stack of bank records we recovered from a money launderer found floating in the sea,” Benaroun said. “He’d only been out there for a short time, but the plastic bag they were in had leaked a little. I used a razor to cut off the edges and was able to spread the pages.”

  Gage thought back to when he had skimmed through Hennessy’s books in his office and had noticed the highlightings and handwritten notes.

  “Can’t take a chance,” Gage said. “Bank records have margins, notepaper doesn’t. And Hennessy was a scribbler who wouldn’t have respected them anyway.”

  Benaroun smiled. “So we just sit here and watch the water evaporate.”

  “And think.” Gage leaned back in his chair and folded his arm across his chest. “Who sent those guys and what were they up to? People hunting for Ibrahim?”

  “Or maybe people protecting him.”

  “I suspect that it was someone trying to find out what Hennessy had learned.”

  A knock on the door drew their eyes away from the drying notebook.

  Mashaal walked in carrying beers they hadn’t ordered and set them down.

  Gage watched Benaroun’s face harden and his jaw clench as Mashaal spoke to him in Arabic. Benaroun nodded and Mashaal walked back out to the bar.

  “He says that the people who chased us now know who I am,” Benaroun said. “And they’re looking for me.”

  Gage sat forward. “How did they figure it out?”

  Benaroun shrugged. “Maybe they recognized me. Maybe they got my license plate number. Their story is that I fled from the scene of an accident.”

  Gage thought of Benaroun’s Citroën parked in the alley two blocks away. “But your car isn’t damaged.”

  Benaroun sighed. “It is now.”

  Gage tilted his head in the direction of the car. “How’d they find it?”

  “I don’t know. I used to use this room to meet with witnesses who were afraid to come to the Hotel de Police. Mashaal and I grew up together in Algiers. They must’ve gotten someone in the department to—“

  Benaroun’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s Tabari.” He answered, listened for thirty seconds, and then nodded.

  “Where were you when they called?” Benaroun asked. He listened again for a few seconds and shook his head at Tabari’s response.

  “And your partner doesn’t know who they were?” Benaroun asked.

  Gage held his palm up toward Benaroun, who told Tabari to stand by.

  “We may need some help getting out of here,” Gage said, then pointed back and forth between the bar and alley. “I’m sure they’ve got the place covered.”

  Benaroun passed on the information to Tabari, listened again, then disconnected and said to Gage, “He’s on his way from the strike with a couple of cars of uniformed police. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  As Benaroun reached down and withdrew a small Beretta from an ankle holster, Gage pointed at a spot to the left of the door from the bar. Benaroun walked over and braced himself against the wall with the gun

  aimed waist-high so anyone in the frame would get hit in the gut.

  Gage unplugged the heater and surveyed the room looking for a place to hide Hennessy’s phone and notebook. He dragged a chair over to the opposite wall, climbed up, and pulled off the cover of an air duct and placed the items inside. He then positioned himself next to the back exit. As he listened for sound from the alley, he caught a whiff of garbage seeping between the door and the loose frame and saw that the concrete abutting the metal threshold was slick with grease and blackened with mildew.

  “Mashaal pretended that he hadn’t seen us,” Benaroun said.

  “Let’s not put him in a bad spot. Call Tabari. Have them first s
care away whoever is in the alley and we’ll go out that way.”

  Benaroun made the call, then disconnected and said, “They’ll be here in—“

  The back door exploded inward, the lock shattering the frame and shooting wood fragments into the room as it slammed against Gage’s shoulder. He pushed it away, then kicked it, swinging it back. A gun discharged. A man grunted. The door swung back at Gage again. He stepped around and reached for the leather jacket of the gunman crouched in the doorway and pulled him facedown to the floor. The gun bounced out of the shooter’s hand when it hit and slid across the linoleum toward Benaroun. Gage dived, sliding along behind it. As he grabbed for it, he heard pounding at the door from the bar, then the thud of a shoulder or a boot smashing against it. He looked up. Benaroun was slumped against the door, his body jerking with each impact. Gage leveled

  the barrel at a chest-high spot on the door—then heard whooping sirens, their scream rising in the alley. He rolled over and sat up and turned the gun toward the alley door. But the man was gone.

  Gage climbed onto the chair again and slid the gun inside the vent next to the phone and notebook, then jumped down and ran to Benaroun. Blood oozed from a hole in his jacket, just below his ribs.

  “I didn’t feel the shot …until now.” Benaroun grimaced. “But the pounding … it hurt like hell.”

  Benaroun slid his hand into the inside chest pocket of his coat, pulled an envelope partway out, and said, “Personal … hospital … shouldn’t see … hide.”

  Then his eyelids fluttered and he lost consciousness.

  Gage heard Tabari calling from the other side of the door.

  “Wait,” Gage yelled back, then took the gun from Benaroun’s hand, laid him down, and pulled him away from the threshold. Holding the gun by his side, Gage opened the door.

  Tabari looked down at his uncle and raised his radio to his lips.

  Gage reached for his cell phone.

  CHAPTER 44

  After he disconnected from Gage, Alex Z set his encrypted cell phone down on his desk and made intercom calls to the senior staff of the firm. He then picked up a binder and a folded flowchart and walked up two flights to the conference room next to Gage’s office.

  Derrell Williams, Gage’s investigations director, was waiting. Two others entered after Alex Z and sat on either side of Williams.

  They all felt the unusual dynamic.

  Alex Z, running the meeting. A tattooed computer genius whose authority derived from the trust Gage invested in him.

  Williams, in the opposite chair, whose authority derived from his judgment and mastery of investigative technique honed during twenty years with the FBI, the last four as special agent in charge in San Francisco.

  Alex Z slid the binder across the rosewood table. Williams flipped it open. The woman on Williams’s right and the man on his left leaned in and scanned the first ten pages as Williams turned them.

  Williams pushed the binder toward the woman, then looked up and asked, “How much of this have you verified?”

  “I’ve been going at it from another direction,” Alex Z said. “The problem is that we don’t have access to the underlying bank records of the corporations that made the bribes to determine whether they match those that Faith has seen. The result is that I’ve had to focus on what I could prove is false, the kind of data that would show that these officials are lying and that their documents are forgeries.”

  Williams nodded. “You mean trying to determine whether or not those who allegedly paid the bribes were in a position to do it—“

  “And whether the offshore companies existed and the banks had branches in the relevant places at the relevant time. If we can prove they lied about one thing, we have to doubt the rest of what they’re saying.”

  “And have you proved anything false?”

  Alex Z shook his head, then unfolded the three-foot-by-three-foot flowchart and turned it toward them.

  “This is what it looks like. The boxes on the left are the corporations who paid the most in bribes to officials in Chengdu. The middle boxes are the intermediaries that handled the money. The boxes on the right are the recipients.” Alex Z pointed at the RAID box. “Follow that one.”

  Williams traced the alleged money trail from RAID to a company named Tai Hing Consulting in Hong Kong to the bank accounts of Zhao Wo-li in the Cayman Islands and of Zheng Mu-rong in France, and to the accounts of a dozen other Chinese officials.

  “Why is there just a dotted line from Tai Hing to Wo-li?” Williams asked. “The rest of the lines are solid.”

  “Because the money didn’t travel directly and Wo-li, and his wife didn’t know that part of the route. The RAID money went into the Tai Hing account in Hong Kong, but came out of a numbered account in the Bahamas. Wo-li assumes they’re related entities, maybe two branches of the same company, but he’s not certain.”

  Williams nodded.

  “Wo-li has now signed an affidavit saying that he negotiated the payment directly with Donald Whitson when he was head of RAID’s Asian operations.”

  “That makes both him and RAID guilty of a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

  “Violations, plural. These bribes were renegotiated and paid every year.” Alex Z pointed at the corporate names on the left side of the flowchart. “And they were all doing it. And if Wo-li is telling the whole truth, and the Justice Department chooses to act on it, the boards of RAID, Spectrum, and the rest will be holding their semiannual meetings in Leavenworth for the next ten years.”

  “And you’re bringing this to us now …”

  “Graham. Things have turned a little rough in the thing he’s working on in Marseilles and he’s worried about Faith and about us.”

  Williams narrowed his eyes at Alex Z. “Us?”

  “As leverage against him and to keep what we’ve put together from becoming public.”

  “At this point it’s all unverified.”

  “But what will happen to the markets if they fear that the Chinese might act on their own and seize the

  assets of the largest U.S. and European corporations over there? It’ll start a run on the companies’ stock and the stocks of all of the banks that they borrowed money from to build those factories.”

  Williams leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. When he’d been the FBI’s legal attaché in Hong Kong eight years earlier, the Economic and Political Section had estimated that China was underreporting foreign investment by at least fifty percent. It was a hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in the manufacturing part of the economy, not seventy-five billion, and of that, twenty-five percent had been paid out in bribes and kickbacks. He opened his eyes and stared down at the flowchart and saw that the method by which the bribes were paid was lying on the table before him.

  The investigators to the left and right of Williams stirred in their seats. They’d seen the implication, too.

  Williams looked back at Alex Z and said, “And Graham thinks he may have inadvertently set us up.”

  “And Faith, too. He’s pretty sure his calls to her have been intercepted, either at his end or hers, and he’s trying to get her out of there.”

  Williams spread his hands, pointing at the two sitting next to him. “Let’s lock the place down and guard the perimeter.”

  Both got up and left the room.

  Then to Alex Z. “Shut down the network. Internet access. E-mails. Everything.”

  Alex Z pointed down toward the two floors of investigators below. “What about them? “

  “Wipe the hard drives on a couple laptops for them to share for e-mails.”

  The conference phone in the middle of the table beeped. Williams pressed the speaker button.

  “What?”

  “It’s Ray Kaplan downstairs. Is something going on? I’m watching a rising curve of attacks on our system. It started last night and it’s moving exponentially for the last few hours.”

  “Have they gotten in?” Williams asked.
<
br />   “Not yet.”

  “Disconnect us.”

  Kaplan’s voice rose. “You mean—”

  “Unplug anything that connects our computers to the outside world.”

  CHAPTER 45

  The smoke from Old Cat’s unfiltered cigarette merged with the fog as he walked across the parking lot and away from the generator building. The whispering and snoring and soft lullabies he heard through the thin cloth of the makeshift tents intermingled with memories of the communal life on the collective farm of his youth.

  He continued for a hundred yards beyond the last tent and the last guard, until there was only silence, except for his slow drag of air through the tobacco and his long exhale. The low mist separated and he could see stars against the blackness and high clouds side-lit by the moon. He shivered as the mist closed over him again.

  His mind drifted back to nights listening to the elderly veterans of the Long March who’d fled the advance of the Nationalists, the long, circling retreat, and he wondered whether a long march of defeat awaited him, too, or whether it would be a short walk with his hands tied behind him that would end with a bullet in the back of his—

  “Don’t move.”

  The voice was low and harsh.

  Old Cat grabbed for the semiautomatic in his coat pocket. Arms locked on to his.

  Warm breath wafted toward him from faces inches away. Cold metal dug into his ear.

  “Make a sound,” the voice said, “and I’ll shoot.”

  Handcuffs snapped around his wrists. Tape slapped against his mouth. Hands clamped onto his elbows and turned him ninety degrees and forced him forward. He stumbled two steps, then his feet caught up with him. A car motor started. A door opened, but the inside light stayed dark.

  From fifteen feet away, he recognized that it was a PLA Brave Warrior combat vehicle. He’d seen them on the roads around Chengdu and often wondered who was the enemy.

  Now he knew. And it was him.

  Soldiers bracketed him in the rear seat as the SUV crept across the parking lot and toward the road leading out of the special economic zone. As they drove toward the gate, Old Cat glanced back at the lamp-lit tents, imagining the comforting sounds he’d heard just minutes earlier, and the nostalgic moments that followed, and became aware that while he regretted dying, he wasn’t afraid.