Absolute Risk gg-2

by Steven Gore

  Old Cat Paralyzes Beijing.

  Old Cat felt his stomach turn. The headline was a death sentence, if not at the hands of the man sitting across from him, at the hands of those in the capital.

  “How-“

  “We thought it was important that the outside know what was happening in Chengdu,” Shi said.

  Old Cat stared at the screen, his mind trying to link the words on the page with Shi’s statement and with where he’d just come from.

  “What is happening in Chengdu?” Old Cat finally said, looking up. “Maybe you can explain it to me.”

  Shi smiled. “They were right about you. You are an insightful man. I should’ve said that we wanted the outside world to know that something was happening in Chengdu.”

  Old Cat didn’t smile back. “I’m not an educated man-“

  Shi cut him off with a wave of his hand. “We’ve had too many educated men in China.” His voice rose. “The educated class in China has become a criminal organization, a cancer that replicates itself and spreads until”-Shi pointed high and away-“until even the high streams of Mount Emei Shan are polluted.”

  They fixed their eyes on each other. Old Cat’s home village sat on a flank of the Buddhist holy mountain, just below its snow and fog, but within its sacred forests.

  Old Cat didn’t trust Shi enough to dismiss from his mind the fear that beneath the general’s observation was a threat: Cooperate with us, for we know where your friends live and where your ancestors are buried.

  Shi’s softening eyes suggested that he realized that his gesture of common cause had backfired.

  “I, too,” Shi said, “have climbed to the Golden Summit. It was years ago, to visit my son.” He smiled again. “Now I take the tram.”

  The air around Old Cat thickened with meaning. Shi’s son must be a monk who lived on the mountain.

  “What do you want from me?” Old Cat asked.

  “Only what China needs from you.”

  “China? There is no China in the way you mean,” Old Cat said, his voice strengthening. “There are only people pursuing money. China is merely the land on which they do it.”

  Shi shook his head. “The Chengdu rebellion is evidence that you’re wrong.”

  Old Cat wasn’t so sure.

  “How do you know that the people aren’t motivated by greed,” Old Cat finally said. “To take from the rich and distribute it among themselves?”

  “Is that your aim?”

  “I don’t know what my aim is. I can’t imagine a future that’s any different from the past.” Old Cat looked hard at General Shi. “Can you?”

  Shi shrugged. “We Chinese have never been good at political theory. We replicate. We pirate. Sometimes well. Sometimes badly. We are masters, not of invention, but of improvisation, of living without a past or a future, with neither a history nor a script to guide us.”

  Old Cat felt rage blossom in his chest. He now understood Shi’s intentions.

  “For you Chengdu is merely an experiment, like grafting a shoot onto a persimmon tree or a new heart into a dying man. If it takes, fine. If not, you’ll rip it out.”

  Shi shook his head again. “It’s more than that.” He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “Look what you’ve done with your courts. Look at how you’ve controlled the violence. You’ve created fair institutions in the place of corrupt ones. And did it in just days. We want to see what grows in the time it has.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll find out together.”

  Shi paused and gazed into Old Cat’s eyes and realized that he owed the farmer not just part of the truth, but all of it.

  “But don’t think that you’ll come out of this alive,” Shi said. “I don’t see how that can happen.”

  CHAPTER 49

  Gage nodded at Tabari, then slipped out of the hospital after Batkoun Benaroun was moved from surgery to the recovery room in Hospital St. Joseph. A platoon of retired police officers guarded the hallway. Gage wasn’t sure that any of them believed the mistaken-identity story that Tabari and the bar owner had told the detectives, but Gage knew that they were all men and women who’d spent careers suspending disbelief in the hope of eventually learning the truth. If they had any doubts, they left them unspoken.

  But Gage had to ask himself whether Benaroun was the target, not himself.

  Once seated at the bar of an empty cafe, Gage removed Benaroun’s blood-smeared envelope. In it was a business card-sized piece of paper with three numbers on it: B-3001, B-3020, and B-3134. The envelope itself was unmarked.

  It didn’t make sense to him that these numbers could provide a motive for murder, for Benaroun could’ve passed them on to another person in a five-second telephone call or memorized them and put it into an e-mail or text message.

  The waiter came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel and took Gage’s order for a cappuccino and a water.

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

  “You set up again?” Gage asked.

  “We’re running things through a series of proxy servers,” Alex Z said. “What do you need?”

  “Benaroun had been trying to find out the identification numbers of the planes that have been smuggling platinum out of South Africa. I think I have them.”

  Gage read them off. He heard Alex Z’s keyboard click.

  “If they’re really aircraft registration numbers,” Alex Z said, “and not model or part numbers for something, then they’re all Boeing 737s owned by North China Cargo Airlines.”

  “For how long?”

  “A year. The first was originally owned by China Eastern… and the second… and the third by China Southern. That’s assuming the Air Registration Database is accurate.”

  “I may have more information later,” Gage said. “I’ll call you back.”

  Gage disconnected, now wondering whether the planes were involved in the smuggling of platinum from South Africa or were somehow connected to Hennessy and Ibrahim, or even whether they were plane registration numbers at all.

  As the waiter delivered the order, Tabari walked in and climbed onto the stool next to Gage, who slid the cappuccino over to him.

  “My father is with my uncle,” Tabari said. “He’ll call as soon as he wakes up.”

  “When will his wife arrive? I’d like to see her.”

  Tabari glanced at his watch. “Another couple of hours.”

  “But I don’t want to be in the room when Batkoun comes to. In his drugged state, he may look at me and say something he shouldn’t within the hearing of people who shouldn’t hear it.”

  “I thought of suggesting that,” Tabari said as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into the cappuccino, “but I was afraid I’d be misunderstood and you’d think I was blaming you for what happened.”

  “One way or another,” Gage said, “I suspect that I am to blame. Either because in my preoccupation with Hennessy, I made us too easy for people watching him to follow us, or because the people who were following me in the States had caught up with me here and I hadn’t spotted them.”

  They ceased speaking as the waiter passed behind them to greet two customers at the door, then Tabari said, “You want us to move around Marseilles for an hour and leave a wide scent to see if anyone follows?”

  Gage thought for a moment. He didn’t like the feel of it. “I don’t want there to be two Benarouns in the ICU.”

  Tabari reached up and squeezed Gage’s shoulder.

  “Look on the bright side,” Tabari said, now smiling, “there could be a Gage and a Benaroun up there instead. You and my uncle could even share a room.”

  Gage shook his head and smiled back. “No way. I learned when we worked together in Milan that he snores.”

  “How about this,” Tabari said. “You need to get your stuff out of your hotel room anyway and-“

  “And I need to go back to the bar and collect something.”

  Tabari drew back. “What thing? “<
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  “A gun that the shooter dropped. I hid it and in the rush to get your uncle to the hospital, forgot to retrieve it. Maybe you can trace it to someone or to some other crime and figure out who shot your uncle.”

  Tabari narrowed his eyes at Gage. “Anything else? “

  Gage changed the subject by removing Benaroun’s envelope from his pocket and handing it to Tabari.

  “This may have been what they were after. I think they’re airplane registration numbers.”

  Tabari’s jaw clenched and his face reddened as he looked at the numbers inside.

  “I knew this would happen.” He turned and glared at Gage. “Did you-“

  Gage held up his hands. “We hadn’t even talked about South Africa since we were at your uncle’s house the day before yesterday.” He lowered his arms. “I had no idea that one of his errands this morning before he picked me up had anything to do with this-and I still don’t know for certain.” He pointed at the envelope. “And he didn’t say anything about it until after he was shot.”

  Tabari fell silent, then shook his head.

  “Sorry,” Tabari said. “I think I’ve taken to seeing him as an irresponsible child, and that makes you the adult who failed to supervise him.”

  “He’s come to understand that his useful days are counting down,” Gage said, “at least those that would allow him to do the work he’s always done. And I don’t see that he’s ready to remake himself.”

  “If the doctors’ fears are realized, he’ll have no choice.” Tabari paused. His eyes moistened and he tried to blink away tears, then wiped them with the back of his sleeve. “He won’t be able to do the work he wants to do from a wheelchair.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Faith Gage awoke on her cot in the Meinhard storage room to the squeak of a hinge and the scrape of shoe leather. She squinted toward the doorway and made out a charcoal silhouette against the shadowed hallway. It was in the shape of a tall, thin man with the angular bulge of a semiautomatic on his hip. Four others stood semicircled behind him, two men and two women.

  She felt her body tense and her heart jump in her chest. She gripped the bed frame and sat up. She wouldn’t let herself be shot lying down.

  The man’s hand rose. His forefinger paused in front of his lips, and then he gestured for her to follow him by a quick turn of his head.

  By the profile she recognized Old Cat.

  Faith turned toward the sleeping Ayi Zhao as she stood.

  “Bu yao,” Old Cat whispered. Don’t.

  Faith pulled on her coat, then followed Old Cat down the hall and outside. The tents were dark and still except for faint snoring and a baby’s soft crying that sounded less like a child in discomfort than an adult’s grief-stricken sobs. The guards passed by and waited to the east of them. She could see a red-gray hint of dawn on the horizon.

  “It’s time for you to leave,” Old Cat said. “There’s nothing more you can do. You need to go with the others when the van arrives.”

  Faith looked up at Old Cat. “How did you know?”

  “The army has been listening to your calls and those of your husband and now those of the man coming to get you.”

  “But I hadn’t decided-”

  “I’ve decided for you.” Old Cat pointed toward the four. “And they will carry out my orders.”

  Old Cat looked away, then back at her. She could tell by the distance in his eyes that he was about to speak to her as a professional witness.

  “This will all be over in a few days,” Old Cat said. “Soon the army will have learned what it wanted to learn from our efforts and will have no further use for us. And we can’t defeat them.” He spread his arms toward the tents. “I’m not willing to sacrifice these people in a lost cause. Our rebellion will not become a revolution.”

  “But what about this?” Faith pulled out her cell phone and scanned through the images, and then turned the screen toward Old Cat. It was an image of part of the front page of the New York Times online edition. “My husband’s office sent me this.”

  Old Cat took it in his hands and peered at the words, then shrugged. “I can’t read English.”

  Speaking together in Mandarin all during these days had seemed so natural that she’d forgotten the language gap between them.

  Faith felt her face flush. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean… I only wanted to show you proof that…”

  Old Cat smiled. “It’s okay. What does it say?”

  “That there’s a mass movement of transient laborers toward Beijing. Ten million of them.”

  “They’ll fail, too,” he said, shaking his head. “The army is the one who got them moving and is prepared to stop them.”

  Gage’s words came back to her: Uprisings in China take lives in the millions, not in the hundreds.

  “You mean-“

  “No, not with guns this time, but with rice from the military’s storehouses.”

  “And you think that they can be bought off? ”

  Old Cat’s voice hardened. “They’re betraying no one, least of all themselves. For them, from the beginning, for all of us from the beginning, this uprising has been about the basics of life, and for them that’s food.”

  In the rising gray light Faith watched Old Cat’s breath condense in front of his face and float there for a moment and then dissipate.

  “In the end, that’s all we’ve been able to offer them,” Old Cat said. “I have no ideas about how our lives could be different. I think it would’ve been better if I’d been born as a silkworm and could’ve secreted my world around me like a cocoon, instead of a man who had to create it with his mind.”

  He looked down at Faith. “You’ve traveled the world. You know politics and economics. You’ve seen how different cultures have organized themselves. Tell me. Tell me how we can build a different society, one without oppression and exploitation. Show me the model. We’ll copy it.” Old Cat spread his arms. “That’s what we do here. Copy. No people are better at it. We…”

  Old Cat’s voice trailed away, and in that silence Faith recognized that neither he nor she knew who that “we” was who would take charge and remake the world.

  “What about you?” Faith asked. “What will happen to you?”

  Old Cat shrugged. “The army has seen to that, too.”

  Faith reached for his arm. “Then come with us.”

  “And leave others to be sacrificed in my place?”

  “If the army has planned this as well as you say, then they’ve already decided on their victims. What you do is irrelevant to them.”

  Even as she said the words, she felt the bad faith of not believing what she was saying. The army would scour the countryside looking for him. She released her grip and lowered her hand.

  “What I do is not irrelevant to them,” Old Cat said.

  “Then go on your own Long March.” Faith pointed at the tents. “Take them all with you.”

  “And come back to what?” Old Cat again smiled at her. “See? We’ve gone in a circle.” His smiled faded. “And I’m trapped inside of it.”

  Faith searched inside herself for an argument that would dissuade him, but found none. Now she felt foolish in bringing students to China. She didn’t understand it. Didn’t understand the man standing in front of her. And had nothing to offer him.

  But as she looked up at him, there was something that seemed even worse. He was a man without a family, and now no chance to have one, a man who would have no descendants to burn incense and to close their eyes and to bow and to remember him on the anniversary of his death.

  Old Cat furrowed his brows, then raised a forefinger and said, “Jian-jun told me that the other name for the one that Christians call the Devil is the Prince of This World.” He lowered his hand. “I think now we both can see why.”

  Faith looked past him and through the thin dark smoke at the fading orange moon above the city and felt the whole of the world’s evil shudder through her. She wanted to reach out to him again, this preci
ous man, but she knew he’d withdraw from any gesture of comfort.

  Old Cat pointed at the generator building. “Go. Wake Ayi Zhao and Jian-jun and collect your things. The van will be here in fifteen minutes. Your students are already inside.”

  “What about Wo-li and his wife? ”

  Old Cat lowered his voice and leaned down toward her.

  “They have escaped.”

  He then cocked his head toward the south.

  “Perhaps you will encounter them along the road as you drive toward Chongqing.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Listen to me.” Former United States president Randall Harris pounded the podium with his fist. “Relative Growth isn’t a Ponzi scheme.”

  Despite the grainy picture of the old television and the tinny sound, Gage sensed that Harris didn’t believe what he was saying. Maybe because it echoed in tone Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” proclamation during the Watergate scandal.

  Gage was watching from the dining table of a vacation cottage in La Ciotat, east of Marseilles, belonging to the parents of a colleague of Tabari’s. The house was anchored to an oak-treed hillside high above a narrow fishing port lined with tiny night-lit restaurants and slowly rocking trawlers. Lying before him was Hennessy’s cell phone, along with the SIM and memory cards and his notebook. All were drying by the warmth of a space heater.

  Gage hoped CNN International would stay with the press conference until the end.

  Harris gestured toward the two ex-presidents standing behind him to his left, then said, “We… are… not… crooks.” And then toward the heads of the Big Four accounting firms to his right. “And these men and women aren’t Arthur Andersen and they are in no way willing to betray their clients and shareholders and the public in pursuit of fees.”

  The camera drew back in time to catch the hand of The Nation’s Ivan Kahn shooting up from the crowd of reporters seated in the room. His body followed it upward and he began speaking.