Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  “And you know this because …”

  “I designed it,” Ibrahim said, then spread his arms to encompass his cell. “And have been managing it from here since I came to the States.”

  Ibrahim lowered his hands and gripped them together on his lap.

  Gage had the sense that Ibrahim had preserved his sanity during the last few years by losing himself in the mechanics of the scheme or maybe in the aesthetics of it.

  Ibrahim sighed. “It seemed so perfect, so beautiful.” He looked at Gage. “Isn’t that what we all expect from justice? A certain perfection? A certain cut-diamond symmetry?” He fell silent, then shook his head, and said, “People forget—I forgot—that in order to create a brilliant diamond you first have to rip apart the earth that sustains us.”

  Gage watched Ibrahim hunch over and seem to close in on himself, trying to shut out of his mind the chaos and violence and starvation that would follow a worldwide collapse. But Ibrahim’s darting eyes and clenching fists told Gage that the man had failed.

  “God help me now.”

  CHAPTER 65

  I need to see you,” Ibrahim spoke into the telephone. “Now. Right now. We have a problem.” Gage watched his face mutate, as if it was the expression of a slow-developing chemical reaction.

  Frown.

  “Tomorrow will be too late.”

  Jaw tightened.

  “Not on the phone.”

  Bit lip.

  “You know where.”

  Nod.

  Ibrahim hung up. “Minsky says he’ll be here in an hour.”

  Gage reached into his pocket for his encrypted cell phone and called Alex Z.

  “I’m not sure this phone is still safe,” Gage said, “so I’ll e-mail you some information in a minute. Do what it says, then e-mail me back.”

  Gage disconnected, then used Ibrahim’s computer to send Alex Z Casher’s cell number and Rahmani’s address.

  They turned at the sound of a light knock on the door and Rahmani entered with a tray bearing two plates of lamb couscous and stuffed grape leaves.

  “I take it I’m not a prisoner anymore,” Gage said.

  Rahmani set the tray down on the dresser, carried the plates over to the desk, and set them down.

  “You knew I wasn’t going to shoot you,” Rahmani said. “Anyway, the truth is that one way or another, we’re all prisoners. Here, everywhere.” He gestured toward Ibrahim. “He calls it human gravity. We’re all subject to it, but no one knows how it operates.”

  Gage looked at Ibrahim. “That sounds like something Milton Abrams might’ve said.”

  Ibrahim nodded. “He did, back when we were friends.”

  Gage pointed at the outline of the revolver in Rahmani’s front pants pocket. “You really need that?”

  Rahmani’s face flushed.

  “I got it because I handle a lot of cash at the dealership.” Rahmani pulled it out and rested it in his palm. “But the thought of shooting someone makes me nauseous.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “The whole idea seems absurd, like death itself.”

  Gage thought of Kenyon Arndt and the fantasy role he’d planned for the videotape in the theater of his mind, and then of Rahmani, standing behind the counter in the gun store, who’d now admitted to doing the same thing.

  But an armed man in the midst of that kind of existential confusion was as dangerous as a sleepwalker wielding an ax.

  Gage held out his hand. Rahmani glanced at Ibrahim, who nodded. He then passed it over, more like he was abandoning it rather than surrendering it. Gage swung out the cylinder, slid out the bullets to check their condition, replaced them, snapped the gun shut, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He then noticed that the two had been watching him as though they were spectators at a military exercise.

  Rahmani sat with them as they ate, then collected their plates.

  Gage’s encrypted cell phone rang as Rahmani closed the door behind him. He glanced at the screen, and then said, “It’s my office calling.”

  “It’s about Faith,” Alex Z said. “She’s been detained by the PLA in Xinjiang, along with Ibrahim’s wife. As soon as she walked into Ibadat’s apartment, soldiers closed in.”

  Gage felt his body tense, but only nodded, as if the call was the confirmation that Alex Z had passed on the message to Casher.

  “Anything else going on?” Gage asked.

  “Boss, didn’t you hear what I said? Oh. I get it. Somebody’s listening.”

  “Exactly.”

  “They let her make some calls. She doesn’t understand why, but for some reason they wanted you to know. She tried your regular cell, but it was turned off and your encrypted phone blocked her call, so she tried here. They’re flying her and Ibadat from Xinjiang to Beijing right now.”

  “Did they say why?”

  “No. But the BBC is saying that the PLA has arrested about a thousand government officials and have given the rebels a deadline to turn over the ones they hold, along with company officers.”

  “Give me a call if anything changes,” Gage said, then disconnected.

  Gage took a sip of tea, afraid to display his worry to Ibrahim, afraid that Ibrahim’s loyalties would reverse again if he learned that his wife had been captured by the Chinese.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” Gage said, trying to anticipate Ibrahim’s reaction when he found out, “why aren’t you and your wife together?”

  “She is a religious person and I committed the sin of theological sarcasm with the offshore tax scheme.”

  Gage pointed upward and said, “Rahmani told me that the whole thing started as a joke.”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Ibrahim said.

  The words echoed in Gage’s mind. They were the ones he’d said to Hennessy’s wife, the ones she’d quoted back to him, her husband’s refusal to explain.

  “I’ll admit that the Manx trust was a stunt, but it was directed at the people involved, not the principle. If the West had followed Sharia finance, which prohibits making money from other money, there wouldn’t have been a dot.com collapse or a mortgage crisis. There would’ve been investment in real production, rather than in gambling on financial derivatives.”

  Ibrahim cocked his head and looked away as though he was rethinking his last thought. Finally, he shook his head and said, “It’s not even gambling, because in gambling you can estimate odds. You know how many spots there are on dice. You know how many suits there are in a deck of cards. These idiots risk trillions on dice whose spots keep disappearing and on cards whose face value keeps changing.”

  “I’m not sure that answers my question.”

  “From my wife’s perspective, my sin was unforgivable every which way. I sinned against the faith. I made it possible for Muslim separatists to blow up innocent people. And I worked for a Chinese government that is repressing her people.”

  Ibrahim sighed. “I should’ve spent the last few years inventing a time machine, that way I could now go back and do things differently.”

  Gage looked toward the door as it opened. He rose as Ronald Minsky strode in. Minsky glared at Gage, and then at Ibrahim. It seemed to Gage as though in an intuitive leap Minsky grasped the meaning of the three points in the triangle they formed in the rectangular world of the room.

  “So you’ve gone over to Abrams’s side,” Minsky said, his face flushing. “And sold out Relative Growth.”

  “But from which side did I move? “ Ibrahim asked.

  Minsky’s eyes narrowed as he stared down at Ibrahim, but he was looking for an answer that lay somewhere in the past.

  “Who do you think I’ve been working for?” Ibrahim asked.

  Gage pointed at the chair next to the desk that he’d vacated. Minsky glanced at Gage and seemed to grasp that it was an order. He walked over and sat down.

  “Tell him how you set him up,” Gage said to Ibrahim.

  Ibrahim looked across the corner of the desk at Minsky, his lips tight, overcoming internal re
sistance like a surgeon saving the life of a man who’d killed his wife.

  “Let me guess what happened in the last few weeks,” Ibrahim said. “They forced you to restructure Relative Growth so you could pass the audit and, more importantly, so you could conceal from the auditors how you manipulate the markets.” Ibrahim lowered his head and raised his eyebrows. “Yes?”

  Minsky didn’t answer.

  “But that left you sitting on a lot of cash that wasn’t earning you anything. The Chinese then suggested that it was time to make a move on the euro. Do the same as what you did to the franc in the old days, except on a huge scale, in the scores of billions. A shock and awe attack that no one would see coming.”

  Gage watched Minsky half smile, unable to suppress his owner’s pride.

  Ibrahim grabbed his mouse and navigated to a spreadsheet, but the entries on it weren’t financial. They were a list of business and financial media. The Financial Times, Bloomberg, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, India Market Watch, and Reuters UK, and next to them falsehoods, half-truth headlines, and fact-sounding rumors and the times they’d be planted in the press:

  “STRIKE TO SHUT DOWN SOUTH AFRICAN PLATINUM MINES”

  “TERRORIST ATTACK ON RUSSIAN GAS PIPELINE THWARTED”

  “FRENCH FLOODS CAUSE LOSSES IN THE BILLIONS, MASSIVE SPIKE IN UNEMPLOYMENT”

  “EU REVEALS $500B TRADE DEFICIT WITH CHINA”

  “GERMANY FALLS BEHIND CHINA IN EXPORTS”

  “MAD COW DISEASE FOUND ON DUTCH FARM, CATTLE INDUSTRY THREATENED”

  Gage imagined Minsky’s currency trading network then engaging, starting to dump euros from a thousand different trading desks around the world, and speculators watching their monitors, then panicking and rushing to trade their euros for dollars ahead of the collapse, each sale driving the euro lower and lower.

  “You think the Group of Twelve are on your side,” Ibrahim said. “A strong dollar means high bond prices. You win, they win. But the truth is that they’ll win, and you’ll lose. The Group of Twelve will be buying the cheap euros you create.”

  Minsky smirked. “You don’t really think that I’m going to fall into a trap and reverse our bets. It’ll break Relative Growth.”

  Ibrahim ignored the protest.

  “In a matter of hours after you begin your attack, NexCo and others will announce that they’re defaulting on their loan payments. Which triggers what? “

  Minsky didn’t respond, but his now-fidgeting hands told Gage that he knew the answer.

  “The Group of Twelve will surrender to you the treasury bonds that are securing the NexCo property and all of the rest of their assets around the world, and the loans will be paid off.”

  Ibrahim looked over at Gage. “See how the setup comes together? The loans on the assets were secured by the bonds, not by the land or buildings or mines. The Group of Twelve will walk away with all Relative Growth’s investors’ money and leave the bonds behind.”

  He looked back at Minsky. “But you’ll say to yourself, ‘That’s okay, investors’ rush into dollars makes the bonds worth even more than before,’ but then the Group of Twelve goes public and the world learns that China has shed them all—and then there’s worldwide panic. A rush to sell as bond prices collapse. Then the dollar collapses and Relative Growth is wiped out.”

  In Minsky’s wide eyes and licking lips, Gage saw that Ibrahim was telling the truth.

  “You think the Group is conspiring with you against the euro,” Ibrahim said, thumping the desk, “but they’re aiming to collapse the dollar you intend to stand on.”

  Minsky rose, wobbled, and then steadied himself against the desk. “I’ve got to stop—“

  Thudding shoes sounded on the stairs.

  Rahmani threw the door open. “The house is surrounded.”

  The crack of shattering wood and fracturing glass racketed down the stairwell. Minsky ran toward Rahmani, elbowed him aside, and turned up the steps as if he believed that those breaking in had come to rescue him.

  Gunshots exploded.

  Gage ran to the door, yanked Rahmani back into the room, then grabbed Minsky’s jacket collar and pulled him backward and down to the floor. He pulled out Rahmani’s gun, reached around the doorjamb, and fired up toward the kitchen. He heard a grunt, then thudding as a body tumbled down the stairs.

  Gage slammed the door just before the body fell against it and then he looked back into the room.

  Rahmani was kneeling over Minsky, staring at the almost bloodless hole in his chest. Minsky was dead before he’d hit the floor.

  Gage glanced over at Ibrahim hunched over in his wheelchair, sobbing, his body trembling, hands covering his eyes; his mind fleeing from the invading chaos of the world.

  Footsteps pounded on the floor of the kitchen and dining room above, followed by snapped orders: Freeze—On your knees—Under arrest. Followed by pleas of surrender.

  In the silence that followed, a rough voice rumbled from the top of the stairs: “Gage?”

  It was Mark Madison, the CIA unit leader.

  Gage grabbed Rahmani’s arm, pulled him to his feet, and pushed him away from the line of fire and toward Ibrahim. He then pressed himself against the wall near the door.

  Gage turned the knob, pointed the revolver downward, and opened the door a few inches. He backed away as the dead man slumped backward over the threshold and to the floor.

  “I’m coming down. The director is on his way.”

  Ten seconds later, Madison stepped into the room and over the body, then glanced down at Minsky. His eyes widened as he recognized Ibrahim, but he didn’t say anything. He turned away and knelt down and searched the man lying in the doorway. He pulled out an ID case and opened it.

  “You ever hear the name David J. Hicks?” Madison asked.

  Gage nodded. “Davey Hicks. He’s a private investigator who’d been tracking Michael Hennessy. He switched to Milton Abrams and then to me.”

  Madison rose. “Why’s that? “

  Gage pointed his shoulder at Ibrahim. “To find him before he found out the truth and to keep him from talking.”

  Madison reached for his radio. Gage slipped the gun into his jacket pocket.

  “We’re gonna need some bodies hauled out of here,” Madison said. “And go around to the neighbors and cool them out.” He cocked his head at the sound of rising sirens. “And the local cops, too. Make sure they understand that they don’t want any part of this.”

  Gage pointed at Rahmani, then at the door. “Why don’t you head back upstairs.”

  Casher appeared at the threshold ninety seconds after Rahmani left, and surveyed the room. His eyes settled on Ibrahim, now sitting numbed and mute, then he looked at Gage.

  “He’s not our only problem,” Gage said, pointing down at Minsky.

  Gage recounted to Casher what had led Minsky to grasping that he’d been set up by the Group of Twelve and to Gage realizing that only Minsky knew how to stop the automated currency attack.

  “But the solution died with him,” Gage said.

  Casher looked upward. “I think that was the idea. We caught Wycovsky driving away. Minsky thought Wycovsky had been sent to protect him, but it was just the opposite. The Group of Twelve guessed that once you got to Ibrahim, you’d find out the truth of what they were up to, and they didn’t want it to leave this room.”

  CHAPTER 66

  Vice President Wallace sat at the head of the conference table in the situation room thinking that the two men whose judgment had guided him throughout his political career might as well be dead: President McCormack was in a coma and former president Harris would likely be implicated in a crime.

  Looking across at Abrams and Casher, Wallace realized that the president trusting them more than the secretaries of treasury and state, maybe said more about him than about them, but it was irrelevant. The treasury secretary was already in Davos for the World Economic Forum and the secretary of state was in the midst of global warming treaty negotiations in Ja
pan.

  Wallace didn’t want Graham Gage in the room at all, didn’t understand his motives, except maybe the pressure he felt to get his wife out of China. And it made Wallace suspicious, that the route Gage had traveled to discover the scheme had taken him through one twisted mind after another: Hennessy, Ibrahim, Minsky.

  In the end, he had to agree with Casher: Everyone who knew what the country was facing must stay together until a decision had been made. It was the only way to ensure that there wouldn’t be a leak that would trigger the collapse. Even the Secret Service agents assigned to Wallace had been sent to the perimeters so nothing could be overheard.

  Except that Gage’s gaze from where he stood leaning against the paneled wall gave Wallace a chill, like a frozen wind against his bare skin, like being exposed to the elements. Gage had been deferential toward the office of the vice president only in manner, not in substance, as though he could see through the constitutional form and into the heart of Wallace’s personal weaknesses and uncertainties, and as though Gage already knew how this would all end.

  Wallace felt his body move toward the table, an unthinking, almost gravitational force sliding his chair closer and rolling his shoulders forward. The movement gave him a sense of having closed a circle with Casher and Abrams, but then he felt a moment of vertigo, for he knew that soon he’d have to push back again and sit up and make a decision.

  “Try to make it simple,” Wallace said, looking back and forth between Abrams and Casher. “And in English.” He pointed across the room toward the blank wall-sized monitor, and then looked at Gage, arms folded over his chest. “We need to make sure that there will be no misunderstandings when your wife translates what we say into Mandarin for the general.”

  Abrams rose from his chair and walked to a whiteboard.

  “I’ll smooth the edges of this thing by using round numbers,” Abrams said. “And go step by step.”

  Heads nodded.

  “First, the Chinese Central Committee decided that debt levels in the U.S. had passed the point at which the principal amount of the treasury bonds they held could be paid back. In fact, they estimated that in five years the U.S. would even default on the interest payments—I’m not saying they were right or wrong. It’s irrelevant at this point.”