Absolute Risk gg-2

by Steven Gore

“That was Hani’s word,” Rahmani said. “It didn’t sound quite right when I repeated it.”

  Two Indian men in their mid-sixties came into view walking along the wet concrete path between the car and windswept water. They squinted for a long moment at the windshield as they passed, but didn’t interrupt their conversation.

  Rahmani pointed at their backs.

  “Indians are much healthier than us Muslims. They walk and walk. We sit and sit.” He patted his stomach mounding up under his seat belt. “Fat as a pig without the benefit of pork.”

  The buzz of his cell phone drew Rahmani’s eyes away from the men. He answered in Arabic, listened, and then hung up and said, “Let’s go.”

  Rahmani started the engine, backed up, and merged onto Chestnut Hill Road. Ten minutes later, they looped through the circular driveway of the redbrick Newton City Hall, then headed north up a tree-lined street and pulled into the driveway of a gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial.

  Gage recognized the address. It was Rahmani’s house. The countersurveillance effort now seemed amateurish and idiotic: Anyone who’d been watching Rahmani and had lost him would’ve sent people to his home and office to wait for him to show up.

  “I have a communications system in the basement,” Rahmani said as they walked inside. “Let’s see if we can get Hani to respond.”

  Rahmani led Gage into the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. He reached around the doorjamb, flipped the light switch, and said, “You first.”

  Gage shook his head.

  “It’s not like I’m planning to take you prisoner,” Rahmani said. “You’re not so interesting to me.”

  Gage pointed at the descending wooden stairs.

  Rahmani shrugged, took a couple of steps, ducked under the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and continued down. Gage’s shadow caught up to him at the bottom where Rahmani was waiting. It revealed light emerging from under another door. Rahmani opened it, but didn’t invite Gage to walk in first.

  Gage stepped in behind him.

  Hani Ibrahim looked over from a wheelchair parked in front of a desk at the far end of the room.

  Anger mushroomed within Gage’s feeling of surprise at the unexpected discovery, and at the childish smirk with which Ibrahim greeted Gage.

  “Aren’t you supposed to yell tag?” Ibrahim said.

  “I didn’t think it was a game.”

  “Of course it is. Money is nothing but a game.” Ibrahim pointed toward a chair at the side of his desk. “Have a seat.”

  Gage shook his head. He wanted to stay positioned between Rahmani and the door.

  “You’ll sit,” Rahmani said, his tone sounding less like an order and more like a declaration of a future state of affairs.

  Gage looked over. Rahmani was pointing a small revolver at his chest.

  “Let me have your cell phone,” Rahmani said. Gage handed it to him, then Rahmani gestured with the gun barrel toward the chair.

  “Suddenly you’re looking a whole lot less like a victim,” Gage said to Ibrahim as he walked the ten feet and sat down.

  Gage found himself facing a hospital bed across the room, canopied by an electric-powered patient lift. At its foot stood a small chest of drawers. A door opposite the entrance led to a bathroom.

  “I was once a victim,” Ibrahim said, “but now I’m the judge and the executioner.” He looked over at Rahmani and then cocked his head toward the door. Rahmani stepped through it and locked it from the other side. “But not of people.”

  Gage surveyed the blank walls and concrete floor. It was as bare and hollow as a monk’s cell.

  “You a prisoner in here, too?” Gage asked, looking over at Ibrahim.

  “I’ve been deprived of my liberty, as you can see, but that has little to do with my living conditions.”

  “And what I’ve been trying to find out is why,” Gage said.

  Ibrahim flushed. “Don’t pretend to be naive.” He pointed at the computer monitor centered on his desk. “I’ve had quite a bit of time to research you. You’re not a naive man.”

  Ibrahim reached over, touched his mouse, and then pressed the page-down key. The monitor flashed with a series of news articles about Gage, many of them the same ones that Hennessy’s daughter had printed out for her mother. Following those were excerpts of transcripts of old court testimony. The last image on the screen was a twenty-year-old photograph of Orlando Ferrada, the imprisoned and tortured Chilean economist that Gage had rescued on behalf of Milton Abrams.

  “I’m certain that you know who put me in this condition,” Ibrahim said, “and I’m certain that you know why.”

  Gage shook his head. “I don’t know why. That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to find out.”

  “It’s simple. Hennessy framed me to make himself the hero of post-9/11 America and to advance his career.”

  “For me,” Gage said, “that’s still a question, not an answer I’m ready to accept. What makes you think he’s the one that framed you? “

  Ibrahim didn’t answer at once. Gage watched him rock his head side to side, as though deciding whether it was worth the effort. He straightened in his wheelchair and adopted what seemed to Gage to be an air of professorial distance.

  “The interesting thing about a frame,” Ibrahim finally said, drawing a square with his forefingers in front of Gage’s face, “is that there’s nothing within the four corners. It’s like a skeleton without flesh.”

  Ibrahim lowered his hands. “Did you read my indictment?”

  “What there was of it.”

  “See. A frame. A skeleton without flesh. Overt Act One: Ibrahim conspired with Unindicted Coconspirator A to establish a Manx trust. Overt Act Two: Ibrahim conspired with Unindicted Coconspirator B to wire transfer funds from the Manx trust to the bank account controlled by a Hong Kong law firm. Overt Act Three: Ibrahim conspired with Unindicted Coconspirator C to wire funds from the account controlled by the Hong Kong law firm to a U.S. State Department-listed foreign terrorist organization.”

  Gage shrugged. “I’m sure you’ve done the research and know as well as I do that indictments don’t-“

  “Inform someone what they’re being charged with?”

  ”-detail every fact. That’s not their function,” Gage said, annoyed both by Ibrahim’s childish evasion and by his pedantic sneer.

  “Don’t play dumb,” Gage said. “They told you exactly what you were charged with.” He looked hard at Ibrahim. “How long did it take you to figure out who the unindicted coconspirators were?”

  Ibrahim tapped the side of his head. “I knew as soon as I looked at the indictment.”

  “And the Hong Kong law firm?”

  “The same.”

  “And the terrorist organization?”

  Ibrahim waved Gage off. “This is silly. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Didn’t it cross your mind to wonder why you were even aware of the names of the Hong Kong law firm and the terrorist organization?”

  Ibrahim didn’t respond.

  “And to wonder about who told them to you? And about why they told you? And about what they did to connect you to them?”

  Ibrahim’s brows furrowed and his eyes darted around the room, but he didn’t answer.

  Gage pushed on. “It’s not the guy who finds the evidence who does the framing, it’s the guy who plants it.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes flickered upward. It seemed an unconscious gesture on Ibrahim’s part, but Gage got a piece of the answer he was looking for.

  Ibrahim clenched his jaw and shook his head.

  “It was Hennessy.” Ibrahim jabbed his finger at Gage as though he was Hennessy’s stand-in or proxy. “It was Hennessy who was out to get me. And when the criminal case collapsed under the weight of his idiocy, he put me on a chartered flight to London.” Ibrahim’s voice rose. His finger now thumping the desktop. “And then onto a military flight to Saudi Arabia so his helpers could rip off my flesh in order to put some meat on the skeleton.” />
  Gage reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photo he had discovered inside Hennessy’s notebook and slid it on the desktop toward Ibrahim.

  Ibrahim’s eyes narrowed as he focused on it, then he said, “It’s a fake.”

  “Not all of it,” Gage said. “And I think Hennessy understood which part was real.”

  Ibrahim nodded as he stared at the photo.

  “I don’t remember this being taken,” Ibrahim said. “I’d probably passed out. But I know where and approximately when they took it.” He rubbed his finger over the area of the photo showing where the rope bound his ankles. “You can see they still needed to restrain my feet, so my spine hadn’t been broken yet.”

  Gage winced and for a moment regretted the aggression he’d displayed.

  “I don’t understand how one human being could do that to another,” Gage said, shaking his head and looking down at the picture. He looked up again. “What were they trying to do to you when that happened?”

  Ibrahim shrugged. “It’s not important. Let’s just say that torture isn’t an exact science and they ended up accomplishing more than they intended.”

  “Which was what?”

  Ibrahim’s face flushed again. “I told you. A confession. But once they’d broken me in two, I was no good to them. Testimony from a man whose body they destroyed wouldn’t be convincing.” He pounded the arm of the wheelchair. “A witness they have to roll into court is useless.”

  Gage pointed at the newspaper lying next to Ibrahim’s body in the photograph. “Who do you think superimposed this?” Gage asked.

  “Where’d you get this photo?”

  “It was among Hennessy’s things. Someone forged it and gave to him in the hours before he died.”

  Ibrahim shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “Maybe you should think about it.”

  Gage watched Ibrahim’s eyes make their darting motions again.

  “And about who could’ve gotten hold of the original.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes fixed on the blank far wall above his bed, then went vacant.

  “And about why those people wanted to convince not only Hennessy that you were dead, but those who were tracking him or who later took up his search.”

  Ibrahim blinked and looked back at Gage.

  “If Hennessy wasn’t behind what was done to me,” Ibrahim said, “what did he have to feel guilty about?”

  Gage shook his head. “Your question contains its own answer. He figured out that he’d been used to frame you. That’s why he started searching. But he discovered something along the way, something he was desperate to tell Abrams about.”

  Ibrahim swallowed. Gage sensed that he was trying to control his tone, but his voice rose anyway as he asked, “And did he?”

  “Sort of.”

  Gage reached for a piece of paper and drew out his version of Hennessy’s flowchart, showing the line from the HI box to the G12 box.

  Ibrahim nodded. “Rahmani told me about it.”

  “HI is you. G12 is the Group of Twelve, the People’s Foreign Investment Fund. RGF is the Relative Growth Funds.” Gage looked up again. “Hennessy figured out that you were working for the Chinese.”

  Ibrahim smirked. “So what. Why shouldn’t I have worked for them?”

  Gage pointed at the wheelchair. “Because they’re responsible for you being stuck in that thing and they’ve been on the hunt to finish you off before you found out the truth-or at least before you could act on it.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes widened.

  Gage pointed upward and said, “My guess is that Rahmani sold you out nine years ago and he’s about to do it for a second time.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes darted. Gage watched his fingers rubbing against each other and his brows furrowing as if a fragment of an idea in his mind linked with what Gage was claiming.

  “Even if what you’re saying is true-if-it couldn’t have been Rahmani. He’s not the one who put me in contact with that lawyer in New York. Wycovsky.”

  “Who did?”

  “A Turkish guy in our discussion group. Ilkay. A halal cafe owner. His brother is an accountant who knew the people on the Isle of Man-” Ibrahim shut his eyes and shook his head. “No. Stop. You’re just trying to confuse me.”

  Gage thumped his fist on the desktop. “Who made the connection between you and the Uyghur terrorists who bombed Spectrum? “

  Ibrahim kept shaking his head. “There was no connection. My wife asked…” Ibrahim opened his eyes and glared at Gage. “Now you’re saying my wife set me up?”

  “What did your wife ask you to do?”

  “Talk to other Muslim professors about writing an open letter for a Xinjiang Web site to protest the bombings.” Ibrahim furrowed his brows and bit his lip for a moment. “I did some research about the Uyghur Jihad on the Internet and about how the Chinese government was moving in millions of Han Chinese in order to make the Uyghurs a minority in their own land. The FBI found it.”

  “And who planted the idea in your wife’s mind that you should do it?”

  Ibrahim’s hands flew up as if trying to block the implications of Gage’s question, his rising cuffs exposing red scars etched into his skin by the wire that had been used to bind his wrists. He then interlaced his fingers on top of his head and rocked back and forth in his chair like an autistic child, trying to hold on to his sense of reality.

  Gage watched his eyes fluttering, his mind disassociating, and his hands gripping the wheelchair arms as though he was anchoring his body against a cyclone that was ripping away the landmarks that defined his world And in Ibrahim’s terror, Gage saw that this wasn’t the first time it had happened.

  But then Ibrahim stopped rocking and he whispered to himself, “How could I have missed it? How could I have missed it?”

  He looked at Gage and said, “It’s Ilkay. It has to be.”

  Ibrahim lowered his arms and tapped the flowchart.

  “If I’d flowcharted the last ten years,” Ibrahim said, “all of the arrows would’ve pointed at Ilkay. He was even the one who arranged for me to be released to the Turkish embassy in Riyadh. He helped get me on a flight to Istanbul and then to Beijing.”

  “Does he know you’re here?”

  Ibrahim shook his head. “I had a breakdown while I was working for the G12. They put me into an institution, and when my head cleared I got permission to travel to Canada. I needed to think things through. After I decided not to go back, Rahmani met me there and smuggled me across the border. I’d done what I wanted to do to get even for what America had done to me and just wanted to be left alone.”

  “Get even how? “

  Ibrahim didn’t answer. He just stared at the flowchart. Finally, he said, “It doesn’t make a difference. Even if the Chinese framed me, it was the Americans who had me tortured.”

  “All Americans?”

  “Have any of them been punished for what was done to me?” Ibrahim’s voice rose, almost to a scream. “Anyone at all?”

  Gage paused before he answered. The answer was obvious, but maybe not to a man tortured into hating everything American.

  “Yes,” Gage said. “Three weeks ago in Marseilles.”

  CHAPTER 63

  Manton Roberts is calling.” Cooper Wallace’s secretary spoke over the intercom. “He wants to know whether there’s anything you’d like him to do.”

  Wallace knew that what he wanted Roberts to do was to cancel National Pledge Day. He’d woken up twice the night before: the first time in a hot sweat, his mind pounding out, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and the second time in a cold sweat, the words of “For What it’s Worth” coming at him again. He knew that something was happening, and that what it was wasn’t at all clear.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel.

  Wallace heard the click of the connecting line, then said, “Thanks for calling, Manton.”

  “Is the
re anything-“

  “I wish that you’d consider postponing National Pledge Day,” Wallace said. “There’s uneasiness in the country and I wouldn’t want to exacerbate it.”

  “I think everyone pausing together will have the opposite effect,” Roberts said. “It will bring us together.”

  Wallace felt Roberts’s heavy, evangelical tone seeping into him.

  “It will be like a moment of silence at a football game,” Roberts said, “like for fallen soldiers or for police officers.”

  “At least keep it short,” Wallace said, “and try to mute the apocalyptic tone that seems to have dominated your recent Sunday services and rallies.”

  “I don’t think it’s something that I’m imposing. It feels to me like a welling up of the Holy Spirit.”

  Wallace winced. The least attractive aspect of Roberts’s personality was his view of himself not as a self-motivated actor in the world, but as a vehicle of a higher power.

  Roberts continued before Wallace had a chance to respond. “Maybe it’s just another way of expressing what you call uneasiness.”

  “You could be right.” Wallace felt a sort of relief as he said the words. He did believe in a higher power, and not an impotent one. One that intervened in the world, not observed it like it was a cosmic experiment. But still “Would you consider coming to the White House and leading it from here?” Wallace asked, wondering whether Roberts would rather have the long-term prestige of the place than the immediate thrill of standing before a filled stadium.

  “I’d be honored,” Roberts said. “Maybe you could lead the pledge and I’ll say the prayer for President McCormack.”

  “We’ll work that out between now and then.”

  Wallace’s intercom beeped. “I have a meeting that’s about to start,” he said to Roberts. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  Wallace punched the flashing button and said, “I’ll come out.” He then walked from his office and into the reception area. Former president Randall Harris rose from the couch. They shook hands.

  “Thanks for seeing me,” Harris said.

  Wallace led him back inside and shut the door.

  “I expected you’d be dropping by,” Wallace said, directing Harris to one of two wing chairs, then sitting down in the one next to it. “Or someone like you. The president has always had an indirect way of communicating with me.”