by Steven Gore
I was just-“
“Just what? I’m not sure you even understand the mechanics of this. You’ve never been able to explain it in plain English.”
“It would be like explaining quantum mechanics in words. Can’t be done. Unless you can visualize the math and physics in your head, you can’t really-“
“And the other thing is that we base all of this on the theories of a traitor. How do I know that Ibrahim wasn’t just setting us up? That we haven’t walked into some kind of Islamic trap?”
“Because the trillions of dollars held in the Relative Growth Funds are in our hands, not in those of some ayatollah. And not only can’t they get to it, not only can’t they compete with it, but we make sure we never compete on Islam’s home turf. Why do you think we have no investments in oil outside of the United States and have never speculated in oil futures? “
Harris shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never seen the books. Hell, I’m not sure anyone on the board has seen the books.” He slammed his glass down. Bourbon spilled onto the Morningstar Report. “Hell, I’m not even sure where the goddamn books are.”
“Tell me what you want to see and you can sit down with our accountants and they’ll show it to you.”
“Why should I trust them?”
“Who would you trust?”
“People with an incentive to catch each other cheating.” Harris stared down and drummed his fingers on the desk.
“I’ve got an idea.” He looked up at Minsky. “Do we have some kind of petty cash account?”
Minsky nodded. “I guess you could call it that. Usually about fifty million dollars.”
“Hire all of the Big Four accounting firms. Have them each audit the fund separately. Everything. Offer a reward of ten million for whoever proves the other three wrong about what’s really there.”
“Isn’t that a little excessive?”
“Look.” You self-important little punk. “History won’t remember you, but it sure as hell will remember me. And I need to control how. I’d sooner blow my brains out than have to stand up there like Richard Nixon trying to convince the world that I’m not a crook-nobody believed him then and nobody would believe me now.”
CHAPTER 14
You shouldn’t have jumped bail, asshole.”
Gage yanked his arm away from the hand that locked on to it. The big man had stepped out of the shadow of the concrete support in the six-level Adirondack Plaza parking structure and grabbed Gage as he was leaving to pick up Elaine Hennessy.
A punch to his kidney from the opposite side stunned Gage. He threw an elbow at where he thought the fist came from, but missed, and the two men spun him down to the pavement. They then twisted his wrist behind his back and knelt on him.
“You… got… the wrong… guy,” Gage said. The frozen concrete burned his cheek, and the weight of the men squeezed the air from his lungs. “My name is Graham Gage… and I’m not on bail.” “So you say.”
While the second man held him, Strubb emptied Gage’s pockets, then stood up and laid everything on the trunk of his rental car.
Car doors opened and closed. An elderly couple approached. Strubb flashed a badge at them and said, “I’m a bail agent. This guy skipped out and missed his court date.”
They looked away and hurried on. Strubb flipped open Gage’s ID case. “Who’d you steal the California private eye license from? “
“It’s mine.” “Yeah, right.”
Strubb bent down and compared the picture on the license to Gage’s face. “Good likeness.”
He straightened up and opened the envelope that Elaine had given Gage.
“Coupons?” Strubb said. “You’re a fucking local boy. No out-of-towner would be carrying coupons.”
“Who do you think I am?” Gage asked.
Strubb pulled out a folded piece of paper from the inside pocket of his leather jacket.
“Says here you’re David Michaels and you skipped out on a child-molesting case.”
The second man punched Gage again, and pain daggered into his side. He leaned in close to Gage’s ear and said, “You pervert motherfucker.”
Gage held his breath for a few seconds and gritted his teeth, and then asked, “What’s Michaels look like? “
“Six-two. Two-ten. White guy. Blue. Brown.” Strubb laughed. “I’d say we’ve got a match.”
“Me and a thousand other guys in Albany.”
“Hold on to him,” Strubb told his partner. “Lemme go make a call.”
Strubb walked ten cars away and called Gilbert.
“He’s says his name is Graham Gage and that he’s a-“
“I know who Gage is. Got a big operation out in San Francisco. Lots of international stuff. This guy must’ve stolen his ID. What about the envelope? “
“All it had was coupons.”
“What?”
“Just what I said. Coupons. Grocery store coupons. Cut out of the Albany newspaper.”
“He probably switched out what was in there when he was in his room. Go up there and take a look.”
Strubb slipped the envelope into his back pocket, then returned to where Gage lay and said to his partner, “Hook him up. We’re going to his room.”
After they’d handcuffed Gage and lifted him to his feet, Strubb said, “Just stay cool. If everything checks out, we’ll be on our way in a couple of minutes and you can get on to wherever you were going.” Strubb grinned. “We’ll just call it no harm, no foul.”
Gage decided not to fight them. If they intended to kill him, they’d have stuffed him into a trunk and they’d be on their way to the highway by now. He had the feeling they were just puppets and didn’t have a clue about the purpose of what they were doing or the meaning of what they’d been directed to look for.
Strubb walked close behind Gage to conceal the handcuffs as they walked through the lobby to the elevator and then again down the tenth floor hallway to his room. Strubb opened the door, then pointed Gage toward one of two fabric-covered chairs near the window facing the backlit stained glass of the gothic Episcopal church and the floodlit state capitol beyond.
Gage sat down on the front edge so he wouldn’t be pressing back against his hands and watched them paw through the drawers of the desk and nightstand and then search the closet and his Rollaboard.
Strubb’s partner found a second cell phone in an inside compartment and held it up.
“Why do you need a second one? “
“Taxes. One’s personal and one’s business,” Gage said. The man hadn’t recognized that it was an encrypted model he used to communicate with his office. “I once got audited by the IRS.”
Strubb dropped Gage’s wallet and ID case, along with his keys and the other cell phone, on the desk, and picked up Gage’s portable printer. He turned it over in his hand and set it down again. He then opened and closed the lid of the laptop, not realizing that the printer was also a scanner and that whatever Gage had collected from Elaine, he might’ve hidden on his hard drive.
“No paper in this place at all,” Strubb spoke into his cell phone. “No other ID or nothing.” He fell silent, listening, then pointed back and forth between his partner and Gage.
The partner smirked and then walked between Gage and the window behind him and unlocked the handcuffs.
Gage rose from the chair.
Strubb disconnected the call and slipped the phone into his shirt pocket.
“Sorry man, nothing personal,” Strubb said.
“Why don’t you send your friend outside for a minute?” Gage said, glancing toward Strubb’s partner. “He knows even less than you what this is really about. And it’s better if he stays ignorant. I’d hate to see him go down on a kidnapping.”
Strubb smiled and shook his head. “We ain’t going down on nothing.”
The partner reddened and glared at Strubb. “Kidnapping? What you get me into, Strubb? You said-“
“This guy’s not gonna call the cops,” Strubb said.
; “He’s right,” Gage said. “I won’t.”
Strubb jerked his thumb toward the door. “Wait in the hallway.”
His partner shrugged and then walked out.
Gage stepped over to his Rollaboard and searched through it making sure that nothing had been taken, then went to the desk where Strubb was standing. Gage leaned over as if to inventory his possessions, then spun and slammed his fist into Strubb’s side, just below his rib cage. He then faked a jab to the head, and when the man’s hands flew up to block it, dropped him to the carpet with an uppercut to his diaphragm.
Strubb groaned as he rolled onto his side and curled up.
Gage bent over and grabbed Strubb’s cell phone and wallet, then straightened up and glared down at him.
“You make a move and I’ll kick you until I’ve broken every bone in your face.”
“Son of a bitch… I’m gonna-shit this hurts… I’m gonna be pissing blood… for a… for a fucking week.”
Gage called Alex Z at the office in San Francisco and read off the numbers in the memory of Strubb’s phone and the personal data on his driver’s license.
“See what you can find out about them,” Gage told Alex Z and then disconnected.
Gage looked down at Strubb. “Whose numbers are the last ones you called?”
“Fuck you.”
“The only reason I didn’t hit you in the eye socket is that I didn’t want to damage my hand,” Gage said. “I’m not so concerned about my shoes. Worse that happens, they get a little bloody.” Strubb didn’t answer.
“My guy is working on it now,” Gage said. “No reason to get yourself kicked in the head for something I’ll find out anyway.”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ this hurts… Gilbert. Tony Gilbert. Works out of New York City.”
“How’d you hook up with him?”
“A referral from a PI who hires me to do little jobs once in a while.”
“Like kidnapping.”
Strubb grunted as he sat up, and then leaned back against the side of the desk.
“It ain’t kidnapping when a bail agent does it. He said you was an absconder and that you had some papers somebody wanted. It was supposed to be a two-fer. Double the pay. Anyway, we didn’t move you that far. Just up a couple of floors.”
“Moving somebody half an inch who doesn’t want to go is kidnapping.”
Gage paused, trying to think of a gimmick to shake off both Strubb and Gilbert, at least for a while. He then pointed down at Strubb.
“This is what you’re going to do,” Gage said. “You’re going to tell Gilbert and his pals to stay away from me.”
“Or what?”
Gage stepped back to his Rollaboard and held up his voice recorder. The red record light was lit. He’d turned it on when he’d reached in earlier. “Or I’ll put you and your partner in prison for a very long time.”
Strubb winced as he twisted himself onto his knees, then pushed himself to his feet. He hesitated as though he was thinking he’d make a move to grab the recorder, then his eyes locked on Gage’s right fist, and he turned toward the door.
“Not so fast,” Gage said, reaching out his other hand. “I want my coupons back.”
CHAPTER 15
Faith Gage stood in front of her door and looked over the collapsed warehouse across the narrow street and toward Chengdu in the valley below. Smoke rose in columns from the smoldering remnants of the fires that had been triggered by the earthquake. It then spread like a low fog toward the base of the mountain beneath her, yellow-gray, poisoned by exploding chemical tanks at the factories in the economic development zone. In the near distance she could make out the smoldering shell of the almost completed RAID Technologies microchip plant, the largest building on the western edge of the city.
She recognized that the silent movement of distant things made it hard for her to maintain the images in her mind of the hundreds of thousands of souls entombed in the rubble, the raw hands of searchers, and the roar and grind of earthmoving equipment, and the wail of survivors already gathered in temples, burning incense in honor of the dead.
Shuffling footsteps drew her eyes toward a young man in his mid-twenties carrying a duffel bag over the shoulder of his wool jacket. His dirt- and soot-covered face seemed forlorn against the background of the dusty anarchy of wood, brick, and concrete spilling out into the street. He came to a stop in front of the remains of the wooden shack next to Faith’s. He stared at it, then took in a long breath, exhaled, and lowered his head.
Faith walked over. When he looked up she saw that tears had formed, muddying the dirt at the corners of his eyes. She could perceive beyond the tears a somber core, but she couldn’t tell whether it was a product of nature or trauma or grief, or of all three.
“Aunt Zhao is fine,” she told him in Mandarin, then pointed at her own house. “She’s staying with me.”
He looked down and sighed, then wiped his eyes with his sleeve, tracking the grime across his face and forehead.
“You are?” Faith asked.
“Her grandson. Jian-jun.” He pointed toward Chengdu. “From the city. You must be the anthropologist she told me would be coming.”
Faith nodded, then said, “Chifanle meiyou? “ Have you eaten?
Jian-jun’s face relaxed, seeming to find comfort in the familiar greeting, even though spoken by a gweilo, a white ghost, in a wasteland.
“Chifanle,” he answered. I’m fine.
His sunken cheeks told Faith that he wasn’t, that he probably hadn’t eaten much in days, perhaps even before the earthquake. She led him through the house and into the kitchen where his eighty-five-year-old grandmother sat at the table chopping vegetables for lunch. He walked over and knelt beside her. She reached for him with her thin arms and hugged him against her breast. He pulled back and whispered something to her. She bit her lip and frowned as he again pressed against her.
After pouring him tea, Faith dragged a wooden chair up next to his grandmother. He pulled himself onto it and then warmed his hands on the cup.
“How is it in the city?” Faith asked him.
“Chaos. Fury. Violence.” Jian-jun took a sip of tea; he didn’t seem surprised or put off balance by Faith’s speaking unaccented Mandarin. “Schools and hospitals collapsed everywhere, burying children and sick people.”
His hands tightened around the cup and his face flushed.
“The concrete didn’t just crack, it crumbled. Disintegrated. Mobs hunted down the builders and the mayor and a couple of party leaders and hung them. They’ve now surrounded all of the government offices and intend to starve them out and kill them, too.”
“Isn’t the army-”
Jian-jun shook his head. “The army isn’t intervening, and not because they’re afraid. They’re as sickened by the corruption as everyone else. I think they want to try to contain it to Chengdu and the other cities in the earthquake area, and let it be an object lesson for the rest of the country.”
Ayi Zhao stared ahead. Listening.
“And there’s no clean water. Chemical runoff from the burned factories flowed into the BoTiao River and the waterworks.” He pointed north. “And they can’t use the Zi Pingpu Reservoir. It’s too polluted by lead and cadmium from the electronic recycling companies up in the hills. People are drinking from their toilets.”
Ayi Zhao whispered, ” Tian ming.” It’s the mandate of heaven.
Jian-jun reached over and took her hand.
He and Faith both knew that saying the words was no different than criticizing the party directly. In historical terms, it meant that the government had lost its legitimacy, and withdrawing the mandate was the way heaven authorized an uprising. Tian ming had justified every dynastic change for three thousand years and explained every earthquake and flood. Even Communist Party members feared the phrase.
What had always bothered Faith about the concept was that it was circular: The success of an uprising meant that the mandate had truly been withdrawn; the failure, that it
hadn’t, and millions of lives had been sacrificed over the centuries determining heaven’s intentions.
Ayi Zhao raised a finger and said, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
Faith cast a questioning look at Jian-jun. It sounded to her as though Ayi Zhao had quoted a lost stanza from Yeats’s “Second Coming.” She saw, more than spoke, the famous lines in her mind.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…
“It’s from Karl Marx,” Jian-jun said. “From the Communist Manifesto. Grandmother was a party member in the 1940s, but Mao purged her for supporting Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the 1970s.”
He pointed toward the front door.
“She was sent to a forced labor and reeducation camp outside of Chengdu for five years, but was taken back into the party when Deng took power. Then in the 1980s she was purged again when she protested the Tiananmen Square massacre and Deng’s support of the wealthy against the poor.”
He held out his arms, as if to encompass the village.
“That’s why she’s living up here now. But she remains a hero to those living below. The government can’t kill her or imprison her without inciting bloodshed. She’s like Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi-except that the condition of her freedom and her continued living is silence.”
Jian-jun looked at his grandmother, then back at Faith, his gaze seeming to classify her as a Westerner who saw Communism not as a theory, but as a peasant society’s delusion.
“For people of my grandmother’s generation,” Jian-jun said, “Communism wasn’t an economic system as much as a philosophy of life and a cry of resistance against foreign occupation, a proclamation of the dignity of labor, even the labor of peasants and farmers.”
He pressed his fingers against his chest.
“I’m a Christian,” he said, “but does that mean I believe everything in the Bible? Would I turn my cheek if someone harmed my grandmother? ”
His voice rose, as though he was repeating an argument he’d already had with himself or with an unseen enemy.
