Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  “And I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Former president Randall Harris fanned out on his desk the blue-, red-, black-, and green-covered proposal binders from the four largest accounting firms in the world. Each outlined its strategy for auditing the assets of Relative Growth Funds. He positioned them along the curve as though he was choosing a paint color for his Rockefeller Center office, rather than evaluating the substance of what was contained inside.

  Ronald Minsky, CEO of Relative Growth, sat across from him feeling like a messenger from Kinko’s delivering on-demand documents to a Rottweiler: a beast who’d be able to absorb them in torn chunks, but not comprehend them word by word—except Minsky knew that this dog had perfect instincts.

  “These things weren’t written to protect Relative Growth,” Harris said, “but to protect the auditors from us if we someday discover that they’ve screwed up.”

  Minsky smiled to himself. Harris’s nose hadn’t failed him.

  “Of course they need to protect themselves,” Minsky said. “They can’t be held responsible when they rely on others for information.”

  Harris glared at Minsky.

  “Cowards. That’s all they are.”

  He then pointed at Minsky’s face.

  “I’ve got a new Golden Rule for you. Forget the old ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Change it to ‘Always act as though you’re president of the United States.’ He’s got no one he can blame when things go wrong. He has to stand up there and take it. If he doesn’t, he looks like a goddamn putz and history will judge him to be a weakling.”

  Minsky felt like pointing out that presidential reputations were matters only of image and had no cash value except in the form of book advances for their memoirs and fees for their memberships on corporate boards. Relative Growth, on the other hand, was about real money: who eats and who doesn’t and, as they both knew, who owns the jet.

  Instead, Minsky said, “A lawsuit against them would be pointless. None of them have enough errors and omissions or liability insurance to cover even a fraction of the value of the Relative Growth Funds.”

  Minsky watched Harris absorb the thought, and the implication that the audits would only possess the appearance of accountability. He decided that he’d better pet the dog.

  “I assumed that’s why you wanted to use the hammer of the ten-million-dollar reward to whoever catches another one’s mistakes.”

  Harris shrugged. “Yeah. Right. Except I don’t see much protection in that. My guess is that we’ll be paying ten million extra to all of them. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they’re meeting together right now, agreeing on where to leave the bread crumbs.”

  “You sound pissed off at them and they haven’t even begun their work.”

  Harris pushed himself to his feet.

  “You bet your ass I am. These people have never gotten anything right, but I have no choice but to rely on them.”

  Harris held out his hand, his thumb pressed against his little finger.

  “Enron.”

  He moved his thumb to the next finger. “Adelphia.” Then the next. “Global Crossing.” Then the next. “ImClone.”

  Then started over. “Sunbeam. Tyco. AIG. Madoff.”

  He spread his arms. “And how do we value all of these damn credit derivatives and options and swaps? The economy collapses and all of a sudden we’re freezing our asses off at two trillion dollars below zero.”

  “Can’t happen,” Minsky said, shaking his head. “That’s the whole point of the Ibrahim approach. It assumes that a collapse is inevitable and plans for it, profits from it. We’re the only real hedge fund that ever existed. The rest of them rode the rising tide, and when the tide fell, they went out to sea with it. But not us.”

  “Save the advertisement. I don’t need to hear the song and dance again. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, I did. You weren’t listening,” Minsky said, trying to suppress the annoyance he felt at the former president. “It’s not going to happen. It can’t. We’re the gravity that controls the tide. It rises when we say rise and falls when we say fall.”

  Minsky thought for a moment.

  “Let me put it in concrete terms,” Minsky finally said. “You’re a commodities guy, right?”

  Harris nodded.

  “You like gold and silver and oil and rice and wheat.”

  “All of the above. That’s the real economy. That’s why I watch the prices.”

  “Then ask yourself: Why was platinum at twenty-six hundred dollars an ounce a year ago and why it’s at seven hundred dollars an ounce today?”

  “You and I both know why. A miner’s strike and electrical blackout in South Africa.”

  “And why it will rise to two thousand dollars an ounce three months from now? ”

  Minsky watched Harris’s eyes widen.

  “How could you know—”

  “Because we rule the market, that’s why.”

  Minsky watched Harris’s face flush before he spoke.

  “You mean that you manipulate it by putting people out of work,” Harris said, “and cutting off the lights by which their kids do their homework when it suits your needs.”

  “Our needs. Yours. Mine. Ours. The fact is that there’s a certain quantity of human suffering in the world, we just move it around so peoples’ suffering won’t be in vain.” He smiled. “At least some peoples’ suffering won’t be in vain.” Then he laughed. “Who would’ve thought that the invisible hand would have actual fingers.”

  “You really are a scumbag, aren’t you?”

  Minsky let his smile harden in place and met Harris’s stare and said, “You know what they say. After the tide’s gone out, what’s left behind is the slime.”

  They stood in silence, staring at each other. Finally, Minsky said, “Your State of the Union speeches used to amuse me. ‘The state of the economy is strong … the genius of capitalism … the wealth created by the free market.’ You thought it was all real, but it was just ideological poetry.”

  Harris’s face reddened.

  “Actually, it wasn’t even that. The invisible hand isn’t a scientific concept, it’s a religious one. It’s Calvinism rewrought. It was John Calvin who declared wealth to be a manifestation of the workings of Providence, and transformed greed and accumulation from the devil’s work into a sign of God’s grace. The words in which he framed it—the invisible hand—are Calvin’s, not Adam Smith’s. So you see that the very first act of modern science of economics was intellectual theft.”

  Minsky grinned and spread his hands.

  “What am I saying? Economic science, my ass. Smith latched on to the concept in order to define beauty—not the operation of the market—but you wouldn’t know that. Would you? Of course not.”

  Harris’s fists clenched by his sides.

  “You have no scientific basis for anything you believe. You’ve simply absorbed the ideas you’ve lived your life by in the same way a paper towel absorbs a spill.”

  Minsky watched Harris’s fists twitch. He waited for Harris to pull one back, but realized that he’d never swing, for Harris wouldn’t want to be remembered in history for a misdemeanor assault and battery.

  “The smooth functioning of the market—is there a more stupid phrase ever uttered? Wealth is created when the market breaks down. That’s when there are great winners and great losers. Wealth is created not by greasing the wheels of the market, making it more efficient, but by sabotaging it.”

  “The great computer hardware and software companies are proof that you’re wrong. The founders became the richest guys in the world by doing it the old-fashioned way.”

  “It’s proof that I’m right and that you’re as deluded as I said you were,” Minsky said. “They’ve all paid out more in civil settlements and fines for monopolistic practices, antitrust violations, market manipulation, and patent violations than the entire net worth
of General Motors at its peak. It’s called sabotage. And before they became benevolent philanthropists, they were master saboteurs.”

  CHAPTER 32

  Faith spread the curtains that separated the back of the ambulance from the cab and looked through the cracked windshield to determine how close they’d gotten to Chengdu. The open highway that had bisected rice, wheat, and rapeseed fields had now cut into a grid of suburbs composed of silent factories, dark apartment towers, and streets devoid of the cars and trucks and bicycles that had jammed them just days earlier. It seemed as though the city center had become a magnet drawing toward it anything and everyone not anchored in place—

  Almost anything and almost everyone.

  A quivering speck of color appeared in the distant haze. A vehicle coming toward them on the highway. It seemed to float above the gray pavement. Seconds later, it separated into three, and then resolved from specks into squares, and then from squares into open-bed trucks, their beds crowded, three men standing at the rear of each one, the man in the middle tied to a stake with a painted sign above his head.

  A queasy feeling waved through Faith as she read the characters:

  Enemy of the People.

  Predator.

  Traitor.

  And she recognized who the bracketed men were: condemned government officials on their way to the killing fields, the execution grounds to which they or others like them had sent not only fraudsters and murderers, but workers who’d protested working conditions with their bodies and writers who’d fought censorship with their keyboards.

  Faith looked down, afraid to see their terrified eyes, afraid their eyes would see hers, and even more afraid that one of them might be the son of Ayi Zhao.

  Even the ambulance driver, a rock-faced man hardened by a career among the dying and the dead, looked away and stared down at the white lane lines ticking by.

  Faith kept her thoughts to herself and returned to her seat. If it hadn’t been Ayi Zhao’s son in one of the trucks, by turning back and trying to catch up to find out, they might arrive in Chengdu too late to save him.

  Just after the trucks passed, the ambulance cut off the freeway and drove north, heading toward the economic development zone and the incinerated Meinhard plant.

  As they neared, the bite of particulate smoke made them tear up and the acridity of burning chemical waste choked their throats.

  Ayi Zhao handed Faith a tissue to breathe through, and then covered her own mouth.

  Five minutes later, the ambulance slowed to a stop. When the noise of the rumbling motor died, murmuring voices and yelled orders rose up.

  The rear doors swung open. Faith tensed as she looked out at a semicircle of faces staring in, men and women bundled against the frozen air in wool coats and down parkas, with gray swirling clouds of moist breath rising in a mass.

  The crowd was so transfixed on the impossible presence of a white ghost that at first they didn’t notice Ayi Zhao sitting behind her.

  Layered behind the first row were hundreds of other peering faces and stretching necks.

  Faith’s eyes caught a North Face logo on one and Nike shoes on another and Levi’s on another, followed by a bitter thought: The new Chinese Revolution will be carried out by an army dressed to kill in tennis shoes and knockoffs.

  She leaned forward to make her way out, but Ayi Zhao grabbed her arm.

  “Let me go before you,” Ayi Zhao said. “Uncertainty is our enemy.”

  Ayi Zhao pushed herself up from the bench seat and stooped her way past Faith. As two men rushed forward to help her down, those standing behind them bowed one after another as they recognized her. Others murmured her name. The whispered words “Ayi Zhao, Ayi Zhao” swept through the crowd like a rustling breeze.

  Bodies shifted like stalks of wheat as someone maneuvered through the mass. The front row held firm, phalanxlike, unwilling to give up their places and surrender the moment. They were transfixed, for none of them had viewed Ayi Zhao since her trial after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the crushing of the revolt.

  Hands reached up and grabbed the shoulders of two women standing next to each other in the front row. They lost their balance and cried out. Jian-jun burst through the sudden gap between them. In one motion, the men who’d guided Ayi Zhao down from the ambulance spun back and threw him to the bare ground, and then knelt on his back.

  “Stop,” Ayi Zhao yelled.

  The men jumped to their feet, as if they were soldiers given orders by a commanding officer. They looked from her to Jian-jun and back.

  Faith stiffened, stunned by their unthinking obedience and the authority in Ayi Zhao’s voice. Faith hadn’t seen that kind of personal power exercised since she observed a tribal jirga in Balochistan decades earlier, its unelected elders exercising absolute control, the wave of a hand or the nod of a head signifying an unappealable decision.

  “He’s my grandson,” Ayi Zhao said.

  The men reached down and helped Jian-jun to his feet and brushed the twigs and soil off his clothes.

  But then Faith thought back on the three prisoners driven to slaughter on the killing fields and realized that even the solidity of Ayi Zhao’s stature might not be a defense against the force of events.

  Jian-jun reached for Faith’s hand to help her down, not because she needed it, but because his gesture would be seen as that of a proxy for his grandmother, and Faith would step out of the ambulance and under the umbrella of her protection.

  “Are your parents okay?” Faith whispered, as first one foot, then the other touched down on the frozen ground.

  “For now.”

  The front of the crowd separated as though it was fabric being unzipped, and kept opening as Ayi Zhao and Faith and Jian-jun walked toward the generator building. It closed behind them until it had formed again into a single piece by the time they’d reached the entrance to the provisional concrete prison.

  Guards with peasant faces and ragged coats lowered their AK-47s, then opened the doors. Jian-jun led them down a hallway, past looted offices and silent turbines, toward a storage room, passing more guards with each step.

  The leader stepped forward and removed his wool cap. His skull seemed stark against the soot that masked his fifty-year-old face and etched crevices around his eyes and mouth. He nodded to Ayi Zhao as if they’d once been comrades for whom no spoken greeting was required, and then narrowed his eyes and looked at Faith.

  “You’re the anthropologist? “ he asked in Mandarin.

  Faith felt the weight of the question, as if he’d said, You’re the witness. It is you who’ll watch and report what we do.

  “I’m not here in the service of science,” Faith said, “but of justice.”

  “Doesn’t truth serve both?”

  “It hasn’t so far,” Faith said, “at least in Beijing.”

  His hard face splintered into a smile.

  “Welcome to the revolution,” he said, then stepped aside and waved at the man behind him to open the storage room door.

  Jian-jun’s parents looked up with wide eyes from where they sat on the linoleum floor, leaning against the wall, their arms around their legs. Their eyes closed and air exploded from their lungs as though they’d received a reprieve in the minutes before their scheduled execution. Together they rolled forward onto one knee, but they didn’t rise. Instead, they kowtowed toward Ayi Zhao, lowering their heads, a humbling gesture not seen in China since the Cultural Revolution.

  But standing there watching, Faith wondered whether two of the once most powerful people in Sichuan Province were begging for forgiveness from someone who couldn’t give it—at least not alone—or simply playacting a traditional role to save their lives.

  The revulsion in her stomach told her it was the latter.

  Then she remembered what her Mandarin teacher had once warned her: The true survivor in China wasn’t the tiger, but the chameleon.

  CHAPTER 33

  Sunlight infused the blue-hued palette of the Medi
terranean cove and warmed the backs of Gage and Tabari Benaroun as they hiked the juniper-bordered trail along a cliff edge east of Marseilles. In the previous hour, shadows had descended the limestone walls and the distant sea had lightened below the wide sky and merged with the southern horizon.

  They’d driven from Nice the evening before, mostly in silence. Gage had decided to let Tabari control the conversation and not to press him to violate the oath he’d made to himself and reveal more than he intended. In Gage’s mind, Tabari, like his uncle, was not a rag to be used to wipe away grime and then thrown away. He was certain that the young detective would find a way to lead him to discover the facts on his own.

  They were a slow mile in from the trailhead parking lot near the fishing village of Cassis. As they started out, Tabari had pointed out where a stolen car had been discovered on the day after Hennessy’s body was found. Tabari hadn’t commented about it beyond showing where it was parked and the condition it was in, and then had led Gage down a dirt road to the trail.

  Tabari stopped and then braced himself against an oak tree and kicked at a granite boulder, knocking off the mud that had built up around the soles of his boots.

  “How far?” Gage asked as he did the same.

  Tabari pointed across the inlet toward a columnar outcropping that looked like the hoodoos Gage had seen in Zion and Bryce canyons in the American Southwest, but instead of glowing red or orange or yellow, it stood chalk white against the mazy green hillside and the cut brown trail and the azure sky.

  “Just to the right,” Tabari said, “where the path nears the rim.” He lowered his hand until his finger settled on a spot just above where the incoming tide lapped against the rocks. “Hennessy’s body was found on that ledge.”

  Gage imagined Hennessy walking their same route. Despite the cold, but wearing no jacket or overcoat, at least according to what Milton Abrams had learned, and passing three other inlets along the way and dozens of other places where he could have jumped.

  Why, Gage asked himself, did Hennessy suffer the shivering and the frozen feet and the wind biting at his face and hands and piercing his clothing and needling his skin? Why not just get it over with? Put to an end both his psychological and physical suffering.