Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  The headlights came on and illuminated the near highway, but faded into a distant darkness—

  And that was it. That was the source of his regret: a future he couldn’t imagine.

  Perhaps if he’d gone to college, maybe even as far as high school, he might’ve been able to devise a destination for himself and for the rebellion.

  Instead, all he knew, all any of them knew, was what they were fleeing from:

  Confucianism had been death.

  Nationalism had been death.

  Communism had been death.

  And now capitalism had become death.

  They had all believed that a rebellion would come someday—all the starving farmers and the sick children and the slaves and the wage-slave workers and the landless laborers.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  They had all merely hoped. And since it had been mere hope, they hadn’t prepared, and not just with arms, but with ideas.

  Old Cat watched the lights of the Chengdu Military Air Base rise up in the distance, a razor-edged jewel stark-lit in the surrounding dark countryside.

  And he wondered how they would kill him.

  Preparation. How does one prepare? Maybe that had been the Chinese problem all along, the legacy of Buddhism. One endures. One suffers. One burns incense for ancestors who suffered before. If life is suffering, then death is no more than a flame gone out and memory is no more than dissipating smoke, and the future can be no different than the past.

  An image of the innocent face of the Christian kid came to him. What was his name? Jian-jun? Yes. Jian-jun. He had a good story to tell, but his religion had no answer either.

  The man on the cross, would he build a car or dam a river or spray pesticides? If not, what work would he do?

  Old Cat then remembered a cartoon he’d seen years earlier: a textile worker looking up from where he was

  sewing a “What Would Jesus Do?” baseball cap and saying, “I’m not sure what Jesus would do, but I’m sure he wouldn’t be doing this.”

  Old Cat thought of the anthropologist sleeping in the storage room. She must have answers to these questions. She’d spent her life watching, listening, thinking. Maybe she had seen a society where people didn’t poison each other, where all was not suffering and exploitation.

  The Brave Warrior came to a stop.

  A gate slid open.

  Soldiers saluted. Their arms sleeved in sharp-creased jackets. Their heads encased in matte-black helmets. Their machine gun barrels glinting in the headlights.

  If only there’d been time to ask.

  CHAPTER 46

  The hearing will come to order.”

  Senator Geoff Prescott struck his gavel a second time and the news reporters and photographers spread into streams moving from the front of the room and circling toward their seats. He then looked at Milton Abrams.

  “I apologize for the delay due to the archaic nature of the Senate’s roll call procedures, Mr. Chairman.” Prescott smiled, a smile that Abrams assumed he was not alone in recognizing communicated the opposite of the sincerity that Prescott intended. Abrams suspected that Prescott enjoyed as much as the others hearing his name called in the Senate chamber. “It’s not just the economy that needs modernizing.”

  Prescott looked over the notes lying before him. “Where were we?” An aide stepped forward and then pointed down. “Ah, yes. I see. We’d just gotten to the issue of inflation and the theory under which your predecessor operated, in effect, claiming that price stability requires less than a hundred percent employment.”

  Abrams nodded.

  “But let’s clarify our terms,” Abrams said. “Until I was confirmed as Federal Reserve chairman, the phrase ‘full employment’ meant up to seven percent unemployment, and price stability meant inflation at a rate that didn’t threaten what was called full employment. What I did was to simply—“

  “You made your ideas clear at your confirmation hearing and we all know you executed it.” Prescott glanced at his watch. “Can’t you advance the ball here a little bit?”

  Abrams thought of Viz McBride sitting in the back row of the hearing room and remembered the size of his hand when he’d picked up a water glass in the kitchen. It was so large that his fingers met the base of his palm—and Abrams imagined it wrapped around Prescott’s throat.

  “The point I intended to make, Senator, was that the figures that we’ve relied on for the last four administrations have underestimated inflation by at least fifty percent, perhaps more, and the same is true of unemployment.”

  Abrams pointed his finger over his shoulder at the business press.

  “The markets need not panic,” Abrams said. “Indeed, anyone who trades in the next few hours based on those comments is a fool. The world is what it is. The economy is what it is. None of that has changed in the last thirty seconds.”

  Abrams noticed that three of the twelve senators smiled, seven frowned, and two were looking at their BlackBerrys and had missed the exchange altogether.

  Prescott’s face flushed.

  “You’re saying that the last four presidents have been

  lying to the American people about the true rates of inflation and unemployment?”

  Abrams ground his right knuckles into his left palm under the table. He wanted to answer by saying that they couldn’t have been lying because none of them understood enough about the economy to know what the truth really was. They lied no more than his brother-in-law’s myna bird did when it proclaimed to anyone entering the living room that the sky was falling.

  “No, Senator. I think that they were misled by certain conceptual issues of measurement and definition.”

  “And the point is?”

  “That we need to be realistic about inflation, about real inflation. The world is watching. The fact that we lie to ourselves doesn’t mean that foreign governments on whom we rely to buy our debt aren’t telling themselves the truth.” Abrams raised his finger. “The only reason—the only reason—that the U.S. bond market hasn’t collapsed in recent years is that foreign purchasers of our debt—based on their own, independent calculations and based on readily available data—still believe that despite the true rates of inflation and unemployment we’re still a good risk.”

  Abrams let them absorb that thought, then said, “In addition to inflation as normally defined, there is also what I call functional inflation. Eighteen percent interest on credit card debt and the decline in real wages during the last thirty-five years, both have the same effect as inflation, but it has not been recognized as such.”

  “Say our real inflation rate is seven percent,” Prescott said, “say our real unemployment rate is fourteen percent—I’m not conceding that it is—but just say. What does that mean for our bond markets?”

  “It means that if there’s a spike in worldwide commodity prices, for example, for tin, copper, and platinum, inflation will skyrocket. We won’t be able to pay our debts and the usual buyers of our treasury bonds will back away.”

  “To say nothing of what would happen if oil prices increase again.”

  Abrams nodded.

  “And if that happens all at once? “

  Abrams heard the rustle of the business reporters leaning forward in their seats to make sure that they got the quote right.

  “The economy won’t recover for a generation.”

  Abrams thought for a moment, then decided to put the problem in the kind of concrete terms the public would understand.

  “Let’s put it this way. To the holders of treasury bonds alone, we owe an amount equal to the gross domestic product of the U.S. for a single year. That is, all of the goods and services produced for consumption inside of the country—and there are a couple of ways at looking at how to pay it off.”

  Abrams spread his hands.

  “Just for purposes of perspective, here’s a hypothetical. Imagine paying it off in one year. Every penny that anyone earns goes to pay the debt. That means that no one in the U.S. eats a
nything, burns any fuel, drives anywhere, buys anything.”

  Abrams watched a smirk appear on Prescott’s face. Apparently the only hypotheticals he appreciated were the ones he himself offered.

  “Imagine on the other hand that we pay it off in ten years,” Abrams continued. “In that case, American lives

  will be limited to three things. Working, eating, and sleeping. And every penny that isn’t needed to pay for housing or for food, won’t go into movie tickers or cell phone bills or iPods, but will travel offshore to pay off the debt.”

  Abrams watched the senators swallow and reach for their collars and dress necklines as if the truth was suffocating them.

  Senator Prescott’s face flushed again.

  “That’s science fiction, Mr. Chairman. Not economics. You can take any scenario and stretch it and expand it and turn it into a nightmare.”

  Prescott’s pounding finger thunked against the oak dais, reverberating through the microphone in time with his sentences like a creeping monster.

  “And I see no benefit in playing out in this hearing a fantasy of zombies and the world coming to an end.”

  CHAPTER 47

  CIA Director John Casher’s eyes surveyed the flowchart displayed on the wall-sized monitor at the opposite end of the conference table. He then glanced over at Glenn Pollock, the head of the Analysis and Liaison Division of the Financial Crimes Information Network.

  “Does Gage have any idea of what he’s stumbled into?” Casher asked.

  “About as much as we do.” Pollock pointed at the flowchart. “We believe that Tai Hing Consulting handled a little over a billion dollars in bribes and kickbacks, mostly for business done by U.S. and EU companies in Sichuan Province.”

  “And they weren’t the only ones.”

  Pollock shook his head. “They took five percent of whatever passed through their accounts, then transferred—“

  “Five? I thought money launderers were still getting seven.”

  “That was only step one. Another five percent was taken as the money went through accounts in the Bahamas—but there are some troublesome crossovers.” Pollock paused for a moment. “Really troublesome. For one, Tai Hing operates out of the same address as the front company that paid for the Muslim bombing in Xinjiang nine years ago that led to the arrest of Hani Ibrahim.”

  Casher squinted over at Pollock. “Why pick that one to mention? “

  “Because we think that Gage is on the prowl for Ibrahim.”

  “His idea or someone else’s?”

  Pollock shrugged.

  “What do you mean by ‘same address’?” Casher asked. “Street number, suite number, what?”

  “All of the above. It’s a shell company that’s managed by a British law firm in Hong Kong.”

  Casher didn’t break his gaze, but felt himself cringe. The Muslim separatists had made the CIA look like idiots. The wire transfer order that paid for the bomb-making materials used by the terrorists stated on its face that it was in payment for explosives, but to be used in seismic studies to find natural gas deposits. It was like hiding in plain sight.

  Casher looked back at the flowchart. “Any of the other companies on that thing operate out of the same place? “

  Pollock nodded. “Two we’ve identified so far. Altogether the firm manages the affairs of about a thousand clients.”

  “You mean they move money around for about a thousand clients without asking questions.”

  “That goes without saying. Lawyers in the firm have come up on a hundred different money laundering investigations. Italian prime ministers. Colombian drug

  traffickers. Offshore gambling. The French accused them of handling some of the bribes that Halliburton and KBR paid the Nigerians during the 1990s.”

  Casher rose and walked to the monitor, then pointed at three empty boxes and asked, “How long will it take you to fill these in?”

  “That’s a problem. Gage’s office has dropped off the Internet grid and the last information that his wife called in was coded somehow.”

  “You mean they caught on that we and the Chinese are watching and listening in? “

  “It looks like it, but we don’t know what alerted them.”

  “Let me get this right,” Casher said, and then held up his right arm high and to the right. “Over here we have some Muslim businesspeople in Boston who sent money to an offshore island, supposedly as a tax dodge.” He raised his left arm. “And over here we have a Hong Kong company that the money passed through and ended up in—“

  “That’s not quite right. The account wasn’t in Hong Kong, but in the Caribbean, same as for the Boston people that Ibrahim set up the trust for.”

  Casher lowered his arms.

  “This bribery scheme isn’t really a Hong Kong operation,” Pollock said. “Except to the extent that the formalities are run out of there. The RAID bribe was drawn from the proceeds of sales of Asian-made memory chips that they negotiated in Dubai—“

  “For tax reasons? “

  “They deposited the money into accounts in the Caymans because there’s no corporate or income tax. From there, chunks went into Tai Hing and out again to pay the bribes.”

  Casher glanced at a stack of binders on the conference table. “Do you have spreadsheets of all of this?”

  Pollock walked over, selected one, opened it, and then returned to show it to Casher.

  “The first section sorts the transfers first by company,” Pollock said, “then by date, by account, and by amount. The second section sorts first by date.”

  Casher knew what he was looking for so he flipped to the date-sorted spreadsheets. He ran his finger down the amount column on the first page, then the second and third, until he got to the end.

  “Just what I suspected,” Casher finally said. “The amounts fall as time passes.”

  Pollock shook his head. “Can’t be. Investment into China has gone up every year, so kickbacks had to have gone up also.” He turned the spreadsheet pages back and forth from the first to the last, then looked up at Casher. “You’re right. What does it mean?”

  “It means that they moved from paying the bribes in dollars to other currencies. It’s the Patriot Act kicking us in the ass. We made it so hard to launder money in dollars that they moved into euros, and dropped off our radar.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Old Cat found himself examining in mechanical terms the method of his execution: who, what, where, when, and how, at the end, they’d dispose of his remains.

  Left on the roadside as an example for others?

  Maybe separated into reusable and unusable body parts. Liver, kidney, bladder, and leg bones in one pile. Head and skin and intestines in another.

  Runway lights came into view in the distance and he had his answer: dropped from the sky like a propaganda leaflet.

  When he was young, he’d heard about the CIA doing that in Vietnam and the military doing it in Chile. The tales had been passed around by little boys like himself who thrilled to scary and violent stories. Later, in school, he’d watched a film about the Vietnamese War of Liberation that showed a body falling from an American Chinook helicopter, but by that time he’d learned not to believe anything he was taught. Once they’d tried to teach him that in the nineteenth century one of every three people in the American South had been a slave. He realized that the number would be equivalent to four hundred million slaves in China. An impossibility. He knew it couldn’t be true and wondered which of its own crimes the government had been concealing under the lie.

  As the Brave Warrior drove past the barracks, armories, and hangars of the Chengdu Military Air Base, Old Cat felt the connection snap apart that had linked him and the farmers and workers in the fields around the Meinhard plant. He could see them in his mind’s eye, but couldn’t feel them. He knew there was a phrase for the thing his brain was doing to him. He thought of jing shen fen lie zheng, the mind-split disease, but he knew he wasn’t crazy. He felt an internal shrug and wondered
if that was also something the anthropologist might understand.

  The officer in the passenger seat pointed toward an unmarked airplane parked on the tarmac between two facing rows of fighters. The SUV made a hard right and pulled to a stop. A hand reached over and pulled at the edge of the tape covering Old Cat’s mouth, then stripped it away. Old Cat thought that it had been duct tape and had imagined the awful pain of its being ripped off, tearing at his face and his five days’ beard. He was surprised to see that it was just the thin paper type used for painting.

  The soldiers guided Old Cat out of the backseat and onto his feet, then removed the handcuffs. He felt like rubbing the feeling back into his wrists and hands like he’d seen criminals do on the television shows, but decided not to. Let them think he wasn’t afraid of pain, then maybe they’d pass on any thoughts of torture and just get it over with.

  As he was escorted toward the tail of the plane, Old Cat looked up at the side door. He’d seen that on television, too. How skydivers jumped out. He imagined himself one of them, in freefall. Arms and legs spread, falconlike. Not flailing. After all, what would be the point? But then his body tensed as he saw himself hitting the ground—except it seemed like someone else’s body, for imagining the impact was like imagining himself dead.

  Old Cat glanced over his shoulder, trying to look past the floodlights to find an escape between the buildings, or even out onto the runway, but it was like trying to look through fire. The soldiers on either side of him spotted the motion and tightened their grips.

  A jet swooped down onto the runway sounding like a giant vacuum. Its tires chirped as they struck the concrete. Old Cat felt air getting sucked by and then dust swirled around him and pecked at his eyes.

  They were now steering him like his body was a wheelchair. Now turning left and stopping at the bottom step and looking up into the dark interior of the plane. The soldiers slid in behind him. A slight pull upward on his arms and he took the first step. Then another and another. Ten more and he was standing in a kitchen. Narrow. Tiny. They’d always seemed bigger in the movies. It smelled of black beans and chili paste and chow fun.