Absolute Risk gg-2

by Steven Gore

  Gage bent down to separate the wool pile to examine the surrounding backing. If there had been a fight, there would’ve been surrounding spatter.

  He felt Elaine staring at him as he straightened up.

  “One of the news articles said that you were once a homicide detective,” she said, “so I know what you’re thinking. The FBI thinks that Michael fought with someone in here.”

  “Was there more blood? “

  She nodded and indicated a path toward the door with a wave of her hand.

  Gage surveyed the room. Every dent in the file cabinet, every scuff on the wall, every missing chip of paint on the windowsill now seemed to speak of violence instead of wear.

  “And they think it was Ibrahim?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “They didn’t say. But I have no reason to think he was here. If he had been, Michael wouldn’t have raced off to Europe looking for him.”

  That pursuit would’ve explained why Hennessy was in France, Gage thought, but maybe not why he was in Marseilles, or at least not the only reason he was there.

  Gage felt the crime scene shift back to the Mediterranean.

  “Do you think Ibrahim might have killed your husband, maybe out of revenge?”

  Elaine’s eyes narrowed and her body stiffened.

  “I’m not going to answer that until I know who hired you.” She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t want to end up like Michael.”

  “The problem is that the person who brought me into this is afraid if it becomes public that he’s interested, the press will portray him in the same way your husband was described by the FBI.”

  “You mean, as a raving lunatic.”

  Gage nodded. “But I can tell you this. He’s the person Michael went to Marseilles to meet.”

  Elaine’s face flushed again. “You’re just like my husband. You’re asking me to trust you, but you’re not willing to trust me.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  Elaine threw up her hands. “Now you’re quoting him. Everything was always too complicated for my little brain.” Her voice rose. “What now? Are you going to pat me on the head, tell me to go bake some cookies like a good little girl?”

  Tears appeared in her eyes and streamed down her cheeks. She dropped into the desk chair, then leaned over and covered her face, her body heaving with sobs.

  Gage knelt down next to her. “I didn’t mean it that way. I only meant that I have to trust the person who hired me just as much as I’m asking you to trust me.”

  Footsteps pounded in the hallway. Vicky ran into the room.

  “What the fuck did you do to her?” she yelled, then pushed Gage away and wrapped her arms around her mother.

  Gage regained his balance, but didn’t rise.

  Elaine straightened in her chair, then took in a long breath and exhaled as she wiped her eyes. She gazed up at Vicky.

  “He didn’t do anything to me. Life did something to me.”

  Elaine looked over at Gage. “I’m just so angry,” she said. “At myself for divorcing him. At him for abandoning us.”

  Vicky pulled away, her face reddening, clenching her fists. “He didn’t abandon us. Stop saying that. He didn’t.”

  “Then why isn’t he here?” Elaine said, opening her hands toward her daughter. “Why isn’t he still alive?”

  Vicky glared at her mother, mouth open, but no answer emerged. She then turned and stared out through the window at the blizzard that had walled off their world.

  Gage could see that every time she’d reached out to protect her mother, she found herself handcuffed and speechless, paralyzed by conflicting emotions and loyalties and unanswered questions.

  “I can’t dissolve the cloud he left behind,” Gage said, rising to his feet. “But at least let me try to take some of the mystery out of how his life ended.”

  Gage looked at Vicky.

  “The man who asked me to do this believes that your father died for something important.”

  And then at Elaine. “And after my meeting you two, I wonder if maybe his search was really an attempt to find a way to come back home as a man you could be proud of.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Two years ago,” the president of International Society for Econometrics said, “the Federal Reserve was in disarray, having been managed by a succession of chairmen who spent their days testing the political winds, instead of interrogating the hard economic data.”

  Harold Lasker scanned the upturned faces of the twelve hundred conference attendees in the ballroom of the Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan. To Milton Abrams, sitting to his left on the raised dais, they looked like refugees huddled in the safety of a school gymnasium after fleeing a war zone.

  Antiglobalization demonstrators had gathered for a second time that day, blocking the hotel entrance, forcing the attendees to sneak in by way of Grand Central Station, their underground route fortified by police and private security guards against the surging protestors.

  “What changed?”

  Lasker shifted his gaze to Abrams, who felt himself recoil as twenty-four hundred eyes fell on him. He felt less like an honored keynote speaker and more like a burglar caught in a patrol officer’s high beams. The sudden attention caused him to cease his fidgeting that had accelerated during Lasker’s introduction. He withdrew his hand from the sweating water glass and the tracks its erratic movements traced on the starched white tablecloth, then dried his fingers on his napkin and dropped his hands to his lap.

  “I’ll tell you what changed,” Lasker said. “We finally have a chairman who has refused to play politics with the economy by pursuing policies that brought a series of booms and busts because of the central bank’s unwillingness to control the expansion of credit.”

  Lasker held up a copy of the society’s latest journal. Everyone in the room knew the single topic to which it was devoted: the coming collapse.

  “The question is whether it’s too late.” Lasker paused, and then said, “I believe that it isn’t. If… if… we’re tough-minded enough.”

  Easy for him to say, Abrams thought-for all of them to say. He knew that to the tenured academics in the room, “tough-minded” meant nothing more than standing firm in their demand for a new photocopier for the economics department or for an extra teaching assistant to whom they could shift more of their work. And to the corporate executives, it meant nothing more than holding their ground with the homeowners’ association design review board or two-putting a par three, or fighting with the company’s compensation committee over an additional million dollars in salary or an additional ten million in stock options.

  None of them, Abrams knew, possessed the kind of toughness required to bring the financial life of the country to a standstill in order to break the cycles of inflation and deflation that were eroding the foundation of the economy.

  And Abrams wondered whether he himself possessed it. Even the fact of his presidential appointment to be Fed chairman hadn’t done much to dampen his self-doubt.

  “And the first place to draw the line is with China.”

  Abrams’s jaw tightened. He felt like grabbing Lasker’s jacket collar and tossing him backward off the dais.

  Lasker had promised not to raise the issue of China’s currency policies-and the whole world was watching. Even worse, Lasker had just criticized the previous chairmen’s testing of the political winds, only to throw Abrams into the storm.

  Abrams knew that as far as the international financial community was concerned, a nonresponse to Lasker’s claim by the chairman of the Federal Reserve would be viewed as a response and would move the markets. Abrams therefore put on what he called the Bernanke Face, the dull-eyed expression of a goat oblivious to the slaughterhouse into which it was being led.

  Staring ahead, Abrams noticed motion at the back of the ballroom. A CNBC producer he recognized was walking out to the foyer, and he grasped what she was doing: alerting the studio that a story was about to break.

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nbsp; Abrams glanced at his watch. The markets would close in forty minutes. He decided that he would find a way to stretch his speech and wait until question time to respond to the China issue, and let the mass of overnight news dissipate the impact of his reaction.

  “China’s currency policies,” Lasker continued, “have destabilized the capital flows throughout the world.”

  Idiot. Abrams thought. Id-i-ot. The esteemed president of the society was one of those who’d demanded for decades that the Chinese let their currency float instead of keeping it fixed unreasonably low against the dollar. Finally they did, and as predicted by its advocates, the price of their products on the international market increased, costing them some of their competitive advantage.

  But as Lasker and others hadn’t predicted, it also sucked into China a trillion dollars a year of foreign investment. Investors, who’d once received only seven hundred thousand Chinese yuan for a million dollars, now received one point four million yuan.

  If it had made economic sense ten years earlier to invest a billion dollars in China, it was insanity not to invest two billion today, for the dollars now bought fifty percent more of the country.

  “The PRC’s dual exchange rate policy,” Lasker said, “one for domestic transactions and one for foreign investment, creates exactly the kind of unfair subsidy prohibited by the WTO.”

  Id-i-ot. What pisses you off is that they outsmarted you. Did you really think they’d follow your advice like it was a doctor’s prescription: Drink liquids, get lots of rest, take one of these tablets twice a day?

  Lasker and his followers had learned the lesson too late: Chinese economics was like Chinese medicine: counterintuitive and impossible to swallow.

  Lasker paused, and then sniffed the air. Seconds later, members of the audience were coughing and wiping their eyes. Those at the back of the room ran toward the exits, the ones in front bunched up behind them.

  Abrams clasped his hands together under the table.

  Thank God for tear gas.

  CHAPTER 10

  How does your wife feel about the work you do? “ Elaine asked Gage. She stood with her back to the fireplace in the den, warming her hands. Observing her from the couch, Gage wondered whether the chill she was fighting was internal or external.

  “Those news articles made it seem like you never sleep in your own bed.”

  Gage glanced at his watch. It was mid-morning in Asia.

  She caught the motion, and asked with an edge in her voice, “You need to be somewhere?” “

  No. I’m worried about my wife. She’s in China.

  ” Elaine’s eyes widened. “Not near the earthquake, I hope.”

  “Too near, but she’s okay.”

  “Why is she there?” She stiffened and cocked her head as if there was another question concealed behind the one she’d asked.

  “She’s an anthropologist. She teaches at UC Berkeley.”

  “Oh, I see.” Elaine’s body relaxed again. “I wondered whether she was working on this, too. Michael thought Ibrahim’s wife might be living over there. Not in the earthquake area. In an autonomous zone called Xinjiang.”

  Gage now understood Hennessy’s call from China to Abrams. He must’ve been thinking that he could get to Ibrahim through his wife. The fact that he’d kept traveling suggested that he hadn’t.

  “She’s a Muslim, too,” Elaine said. “They met in Boston when he was in graduate school.”

  “How did you…”

  She pointed upstairs. “I said I didn’t find anything that exonerated Ibrahim, but I once found some bits and pieces about her.” She smiled. “I spent a lunch hour or two at work trying to fit shredded pieces of paper back together.”

  She lowered her voice as though not wanting Vicky to overhear.

  “That’s the reason I let him keep using the bedroom as his office even after he moved out. So I could spy on him. I felt a little guilty about it because the kids thought I did it so he could spend more time with them.”

  “Do you know whether he found her?” Gage asked.

  “I don’t think so, but that part of the story didn’t make it into the shredder.”

  “Did you save the material you rescued?”

  Elaine smiled and said, “Like a squirrel preparing for winter, I folded them up and tucked them away.”

  She walked over to the entertainment center, selected a DVD from the shelf, and handed it to Gage.

  He flipped it open and turned it toward her. Her mouth gaped. It was empty. No papers inside. She grabbed a second one from the stack and opened it. Then a third.

  She ran to the doorway and yelled toward the stairs, “Vicky. Come down here.”

  Her daughter entered half a minute later and Elaine displayed an empty case toward her.

  “Did you or your friends-“

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?” Vicky smirked as she looked at the title. “You’ve got to be kidding, Mother. I haven’t watched that since I was ten years old.”

  Elaine bit her bottom lip and lowered her hands, then said to herself, “I was in here when the FBI searched. I would’ve noticed. I’m sure I would’ve.”

  “Not the whole time,” Vicky said, looking at her mother as though she was a grandparent edging toward Alzheimer’s. “Remember, they took us into the garage to point out which boxes were Daddy’s.”

  Elaine’s head drifted down, “I guess that’s it.”

  “Why’s that movie suddenly so important?” Vicky asked.

  “No reason,” Elaine said. “You know how I am about keeping things in order, that’s all.”

  Vicky glanced at Gage, then back at her mother as if trying to divine what course of events could’ve led to the opening of a child’s DVD. She scanned the shelf holding the others, then shook her head, and left the room.

  Gage rose and led Elaine to the couch and took a notebook out of his suit pocket.

  “Tell me what you remember about what was on those pages.”

  Elaine leaned back and stared at the ceiling as though her husband’s notes were written there in invisible ink. She exhaled and closed her eyes.

  “Ibrahim’s wife’s name is Ibadat. I looked it up. It means ‘devotion.'” She looked over at Gage. “It’s ironic because she stayed in the U.S. for a year or so after he was deported, then did kind of a European tour before she finally settled in China.”

  “Do you know where in Xinjiang she’s from?”

  “It was unpronounceable. Kizl-something. It’s hard enough to piece together shreds of handwritten English, much less in transliterated Uyghur.”

  “Children?”

  “I didn’t see anything about kids, or parents for that matter. There were a few words that suggested that she may have been a hydrologist or an agronomist or something like that.”

  Elaine thought for a moment, and then said. “I think Michael had written out the notes in order to figure out a route to travel in searching for Ibrahim. One scrap I found had Algiers, Marseilles, and Dublin listed, in that order.”

  “And when he died in Marseilles? “

  “I thought that Ibrahim or terrorists working with him had led Michael into a trap.”

  Gage looked out through the French doors toward the backyard. The fog had finally reached in from the river, but the snowfall had stopped, leaving mounds on top of the woodpile, the toolshed, the rusted swing set, and the brick barbecue. He imagined that it hadn’t been too many years earlier that young families had gathered out there for children’s birthdays and Easter egg hunts.

  Elaine sighed. “I’m bushed. Or maybe just beaten down by all of this.”

  Gage turned toward her. “I didn’t mean to-“

  “It’s not you. It’s the mess everything has become.”

  Her brows furrowed and she shook her head. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Everything was once so perfect. It really was morning in America for us when Michael and I met in high school in the eighties, now it’s all a nightmare.”


  Elaine closed her eyes again. Gage could see her pupils moving under her lids like she was searching through pictures of the past.

  “The Tupperware Family. That’s what my mother called us.”

  She paused, then looked at Gage.

  “When she was growing up, Tupperware and Corning glassware and color television and KitchenAid all meant progress, people on the go, on the way up. The American dream. She saw us as an updated version of her generation. Earnest FBI agent, fresh-faced school librarian, kids, a house, two cars.” She pressed her lips tight for a few seconds, then said, “I’m glad she didn’t live to see what it turned into.”

  Gage didn’t respond. He still didn’t know whether her life could’ve come out otherwise. But he did know that pretending that her life was different than it was would destroy the trust they’d developed.

  And they both knew that their conversation had come to an end.

  As he walked down the front steps a few minutes later, Gage’s peripheral vision caught a break in the pattern of snowbound cars parked along the street. The windshield of one had been wiped during the last few minutes of the blizzard. The passenger side was misted, the driver’s side clear, but there were no fresh tire tracks in the slush or fresh footsteps in the snow on the street or on the sidewalk bordering the car.

  Gage came to a stop near his rental car, patted the breast pocket of his suit, then frowned and turned back toward the house.

  When Elaine answered the door, he said, “Don’t look past me, but I think someone has your house under surveillance.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Only the FBI would still be interested and they got everything.”

  “Trust me on this one. I have thirty years in this business. I’ve learned to read the signs.” Gage pointed toward the interior. “Go back inside and bring me an envelope.”

  Elaine kept her eyes fixed on his and said, “I don’t think you’re right, but I’ll play along.”

  She returned a minute later and handed him a soiled letter-sized envelope. “These are my Price Chopper coupons.” She smiled. “They’re having a two-for-one special on crescent rolls and canned yams.”