Absolute Risk gg-2

by Steven Gore

  CHAPTER 38

  Ayi Zhao stared down at her rice bowl, too tired after thirty-six hours without sleep to lift her hands and manipulate her chopsticks. She closed her eyes and sighed.

  “My son is nothing but a criminal,” she said, then looked up at Faith. “Do you have children?”

  Faith shook her head.

  “It’s better that way.”

  Faith reached out and held Ayi Zhao’s hand. “But then you wouldn’t have such a wonderful grandson.”

  “I know, and it’s a shame that he’s been so humiliated by his parents. I hope he’s finding comfort in his faith.” She shrugged. “I don’t understand it. Christianity seems so odd. I try to imagine heaven and hell, but I can’t see them except as distorted reflections of what is around me. And I can’t imagine Jesus as a god, only as a foreigner’s benevolent ancestor.”

  Ayi Zhao paused for a moment and her eyes went vacant, then she shook her head as if to say that she’d somehow gone off course.

  Faith released Ayi Zhao’s hand and pointed at her bowl. “You need to eat.”

  Ayi Zhao reached for her chopsticks and managed them well enough to capture a sliver of green bean lying on top of her rice. Instead of eating it, she said, “It bothered me that Wo-li traveled so much and that he’d never tell me where he was going or where he went. It bothers me even more now that I know what he was doing.”

  Knocking on the open storeroom door drew their attention to Old Cat, who walked in.

  “We need to know whether Wo-li will do it,” Old Cat said, looking back and forth between them. He spread his arms. “People’s courts have now sprung up in Chongqing and across the border into Qinghai and into the Muslim areas of Xinjiang.”

  Old Cat reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, and then held it in his hand by the edges, as though it represented an unfamiliar form of magic.

  Faith guessed from his manner that he’d never handled one before this day.

  “They’re looking at us for guidance,” Old Cat said.

  Ayi Zhao and Faith understood exactly what he meant by guidance: If Chengdu could find a nonviolent form of justice, the others might follow.

  “Your grandson was persuasive,” Old Cat said, “and for that reason I was willing to let a judicial process take place, but we’ve reached a stalemate with Wo-li, and the army can attack at any moment-it’s time to act.”

  Faith was certain that Old Cat didn’t expect Ayi Zhao to plead for the life of her son and daughter-in-law, and she didn’t.

  “If you spare their lives,” Ayi Zhao said, “Wo-li will tell you everything.”

  Old Cat cocked his head toward the door and pointed at his ear. Only then did they notice the background murmur of voices in the hallway and the chanting from outside of the building.

  As the chanting rose into cheering, Old Cat said, “We’ve liberated a forced labor camp north of the city-”

  Ayi Zhao pulled back, as if jolted by Old Cat’s words.

  “Does that mean that you freed Xing Ming and Wang Bai?”

  Faith recognized the names: Xing and Wang were eighty-year-old women whose sentencing to hard labor for planning a protest at the Beijing Olympics had engendered worldwide condemnation.

  Old Cat nodded. “The criminals imprisoned there have fled into the hills, but the political dissidents have joined us here. And having suffered the way they did, they have their own ideas of what should happen to Wo-li and his wife. Especially his wife.” Old Cat looked at Faith. “The party runs the slave labor system and she’s the highest party representative in Chengdu.” Old Cat shrugged. “So you see, their lives are not entirely in my hands.”

  “Of course they are,” Ayi Zhao said. “You can let them escape after they cooperate.”

  Old Cat squinted toward the ceiling, then looked back at her and shook his head.

  “They’re too well-known and they don’t have false papers. Even if they could get to a foreign border, there’s no way they could cross.”

  Faith raised her hand as a prelude to speaking, but then lowered it. The only immunity she possessed arose out of her position as “the anthropologist,” the nameless professional witness. She looked at Ayi Zhao and understood a mother’s duty, and then asked herself where her own duty lay-and she was neither a mother, nor a revolutionary, nor even Chinese.

  But then an image came to her mind of a wire service photographer that she’d once seen in a newspaper. His laying down his camera and diving into a Rwandan river to rescue a Tutsi baby who’d been thrown in to drown by a Hutu militia man-except that Wo-li and his wife weren’t innocent children. They were despicable adults, but they had a mother who didn’t deserve to suffer.

  “I can get them out,” Faith said.

  CHAPTER 39

  Where are we going?” Gage asked Batkoun Benaroun as he gunned the six cylinders of his Citroen around the rising curves of the Marseilles hills. He sped through the oncoming flow of commuter traffic like a salmon swimming upstream, and with the same driven instinct.

  “I’m not allowed to say until we get there,” Benaroun said.

  “Isn’t this a little silly?”

  “Of course, it’s like dancing the rumba without music or watching The Man in the Iron Mask without sound.” Benaroun glanced over and smiled. “In any case, we’ve come to the point in the program where we’ll have to supply our own lyrics.” He pointed ahead to where the road rose between banks of apartment buildings. “All they found up here was the car Hennessy had rented. Nothing else.”

  Benaroun reached into his glove compartment and handed Gage a map. Looking at it, it wasn’t difficult for Gage to guess their location. The port was to the north behind them. The Mediterranean to the west. And the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, overlooking the city, was high in front of them and now coming into view atop a limestone cliff.

  They worked their way through the winding streets west of the church until the road forked, one prong heading toward the entrance, the other around the back. They then made a final ascent, and Benaroun drove to the base of the hill on the west side of the church, where it bordered a residential area composed of one-story bungalows and multistory apartments.

  Just after he turned onto a narrow dead end street, Benaroun gestured toward the backs of the wall-to-wall hillside homes whose balconies on their far sides faced the sea a mile away.

  “He parked just by that yellow one with the green shutters,” Benaroun said. “In front of the door.”

  “You mean his car was discovered there,” Gage said.

  Benaroun’s face reddened. “Sorry. I went a little beyond the evidence.”

  He then made a three-point U-turn and pulled to the curb across from a spreading stand of aloe cactus and olive trees and bushes growing from patches of earth and from cracks in the hillside rock.

  The sun that met them as they stepped from the car seemed to Gage to cast pure white light, hard and stark, that made the pastels of the houses and reds and blacks and blues of the cars on the street seem less like overlaid coloring and more like the things themselves.

  Gage walked twenty-five yards to the end of the street. He stopped and looked west through a gap between the houses toward the Frioul archipelago a mile offshore. He could just make out the Chateau d’If, France’s Alcatraz, on the smallest of the four islands. It was where the French government once imprisoned political and religious dissenters. Despite the actual suffering inflicted there that Gage had read about in school, the castle-shaped structure now existed in the public imagination only as the setting for the fictional Count of Monte Cristo. He wondered whether Hennessy, too, had hesitated at this spot and saw Ibrahim and himself in the fictional mirror of a wrongful prosecution and a struggle for justice and redemption.

  Gage continued a little farther, past the end of the pavement and onto a dirt trail. He walked another thirty yards to where he could overlook the port-and realized that Benaroun had not at all gone beyond the evidence.

  Stan
ding in this place with the city glowing gemlike below, even without binoculars Hennessy could’ve made out the north end of the grass meridian at the head of the port and the backdrop of buildings that framed it. With binoculars, the limousine procession would have passed before him like a line of ants under a magnifying glass.

  Gage heard Benaroun’s footsteps come to a stop next to him.

  “Is this where he was watching from?” Benaroun asked.

  “No,” Gage said, staring down at the city.

  Benaroun turned toward Gage and squinted up at him. “I don’t understand.”

  Gage directed his thumb over his shoulder. “Hennessy wouldn’t have parked back there and then walked all this way. There was no reason to. He’d have parked where the pavement ended.” He thought of Hennessy’s wife and her smile when she mentioned her husband’s investigative techniques. “His FBI training would’ve insisted on it. He would’ve parked as close as he could to where he was headed and then faced the car in the direction he wanted to go when he left.” He smiled at Benaroun. “Just like you did.”

  Gage turned and pointed up at the basilica, then drew a line with his finger from the gleaming golden statue of the Madonna and Child at the top and down to where Hennessy’s car had been parked and then back up again.

  “He must’ve been a mountain goat,” Benaroun said. “Even if he wanted to park down here for some reason, there are stairs close by.” Benaroun made a curving motion to the right with his hand, indicating the far side of the hill. “Those would’ve been easier. Or he could’ve walked back down the main road until he reached the fork and then back up again to the front of the church.”

  “It’s likely that he did just that,” Gage said, enacting in his mind what Hennessy might have been thinking. “I suspect that he was concerned about surveillance. He’d do some evasive driving through town to get here, then pretend to be a tourist. Take the stairs and mix in with the crowd. And if he became convinced that they’d caught up with him, he could slip into the shadows and work his way down the hillside.”

  Gage pointed up at the church. “How about drive me up to the top and I’ll make my way back down. You come back here and search a strip along the bottom of the hill, maybe ten meters wide. See if you can find anything.”

  Gage’s cell phone rang as they walked back to the car.

  “I need the snakehead after all,” Faith said.

  Gage didn’t express the relief he felt.

  “You ready to come out?”

  “I need to stay a little longer. It’s for the students and Ayi Zhao’s son and daughter-in-law.”

  Benaroun cast him a puzzled look, and Gage mouthed Faith’s name.

  “How soon?”

  “Two days. Assuming Wo-li agrees to it.” “You mean the rebels are trading exile for information?”

  “And Wo-li is deciding how much to give them. For him it looks like a long-term solution to what may be a short-term problem. If he spills everything and the rebellion fails, he’ll have torpedoed his future. The government will have to arrest him and will probably have to execute him as an example.”

  “At least this way,” Gage said, “he saves his life, and once he’s out of the country he can find a way to catch up with wherever his offshore cash is hidden.”

  “As much as she hates to do it, that’s the pitch his mother is giving him.”

  “I’ll call Mark Fong and give him your number.”

  “Won’t he want some money?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Gage said, then thought for a moment. “Make sure you gather up whatever identity documents Wo-li and his wife have and any extra passport pictures. Mark may need to fudge up some papers to get them across the borders.”

  Gage called Fong after he and Benaroun had gotten back into the car.

  “We’ll settle up afterward,” Fong said.

  “How soon-”

  “My cousin in Chongqing will rent a big van and arrive there tomorrow, me the day after. We’ll collect the students first”-Fong laughed-“and then the criminals.”

  Gage then understood why Fong wasn’t worried about payment. Either Wo-li and his wife would direct their offshore banker to wire the fee into Fong’s account, or he’d make sure that they’d never make it out of China.

  “If you have to leave them somewhere along the road,” Gage said, “then leave them, but make sure the kids get out.”

  “Of course.”

  Gage disconnected and slipped his phone back into his pocket.

  Benaroun grinned at Gage as he turned the ignition.

  “Exile?” Benaroun said. “Like the Dalai Lama?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And you trust this snakehead? The name certainly doesn’t inspire it.” Benaroun smiled. “I think I’d have more confidence in something a little more marsupial.”

  “The situation calls for someone cold-blooded,” Gage said, “and I know of no one colder.”

  CHAPTER 40

  As Gage climbed the steps from the east parking lot to the entrance of the Basilique Notre Dame de la Garde, he was certain that Hennessy had ascended them with a stronger feeling of expectation than he did. Gage even suspected that he might be wasting his time, for he recognized that he was following a chain of possibilities and probabilities, no stronger than its weakest hypothetical link.

  Even more, Gage wasn’t sure that he’d come to understand Hennessy any better for having retraced his route. But he had to do it. And he knew Benaroun had to do it. Despite his claims that his relegation to financial investigations was an anti-Semitic gesture by the commissioner, his compulsive, methodical persistence made him a perfect choice for that kind of work, and for this kind, too.

  Without articulating the need, they both understood that neither one of them was willing to suffer the lingering thought that the Marseilles police had missed something. And Gage was already certain that the detectives had misunderstood why Hennessy had parked on the street below.

  Gage attached himself to the trailing end of a German tour group as he passed through the wrought-iron front gates and ascended the zigzagging steps to the terrace. He stayed with them as they walked the low-walled perimeter. The angle of view toward the port was now more extreme and the entire meridian was visible.

  Gage followed the group up another level, checked the perspective, and then walked back down and out through the gate.

  A footpath to his left led away from the concrete walkway. He followed it along the arched walls at the base of the church, his view of the city curtained and shadowed by oaks, pines, and brush. He soon emerged into daylight and worked his way over a limestone bluff until he could see the yellow house next to which Hennessy had parked his car.

  Gage glanced up at the golden Madonna statue, concluding it would’ve been the most visible landmark at night, then picked his way farther, in between aloe and evergreen bushes, until he was in a direct line between it and the car. But a few steps down showed him that a direct line didn’t mean a direct route.

  The shortest distance between where Gage stood and the car was a long drop off a slick boulder. He worked his way first down to its right, then back to the top and down to its left, looking for some sign that Hennessy had passed on either side: a pen, a scrap of paper-anything.

  But he found nothing.

  From there, Gage headed down through a tunnel of brush and trees until he emerged into a clearing. He looked up at the Madonna and found that he was off course by thirty feet. He imagined that Hennessy, descending in the darkness down the angled slope, had drifted in the same direction.

  Gage heard rocks tumble, a landslide of dirt and stones, Benaroun yelping, and then, “Merde. Merde. Merde.” Shit. Shit. Shit.

  “You okay?” Gage yelled down.

  “I got a damn aloe thorn in my ass. How do you think I am?”

  “You need help?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  Gage worked his way back toward the direct line, sidestepping down the
incline until the hill flattened just behind the trees and the plants that lined the street. He searched back and forth along them, inspecting between the rocks and along the rough ground, then gave up and stepped into the street.

  Benaroun was grinning and leaning back against his car wearing a wrinkled, mud-smeared overcoat, arms folded over his chest.

  “I like your new wardrobe,” Gage said, as he walked up.

  “It’s not mine exactly,” Benaroun said. “But since I punctured my butt getting it, I could make a claim. Anyway, the man who owned it is not coming back to get it.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I figure because you were right.” Benaroun pointed up the hill, seeming to enjoy the clowning. “It was jammed into a bush about twenty feet up.”

  “What does that have to do with us?”

  “Hennessy must’ve taken it off trying to change his appearance.”

  “What?” Gage’s eyes narrowed at the coat. “Are you sure-”

  “It’s got an American mobile phone and a little leather notebook with the initials MH on it.”

  Benaroun unfolded his arms and reached out to hand the items to Gage.

  As Gage accepted them, his mind jumped back past Benaroun’s conclusion to Hennessy falling coatless over the cliff, then jumped forward to the present.

  “He only would’ve changed his appearance,” Gage said, “if he thought someone had spotted him.”

  Gage scanned the street and rooftops and the hillside looking for surveillance. He found none. Or at least nothing obvious. He pointed at the car.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gage said.

  Benaroun cast him a puzzled look. “You don’t want to look for more? ”

  “Not now.” Gage pointed at the driver’s seat. “Let’s go. I don’t want to get trapped.”

  Benaroun started the engine even before his door was closed. A black Mercedes squealed around the corner. Its momentum and the driver’s overcompensating yank on the steering wheel carried it in a sweeping curve from one side of the street to the other. Benaroun punched the accelerator and shot through the gap, then hung a hard right and rocketed down the hill.