Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

  Whoever it is that wants to watch me freefall, Old Cat thought, has simple tastes, like a farmer.

  A door opened in front of him. He felt the brief pressure of a hand against his back and then he walked on his own into the cabin. A lone man in an officer’s uniform sat in a leather chair fifteen feet away. His pressed green jacket bore no insignias. He could be any rank from a lie bin, private, to a yi ji shang jiang, first-class senior general, except his age—seventy or seventy-five—meant he had to be high up, very high up.

  Old Cat was certain that it couldn’t be a yi ji shang jiang; few had claimed to have seen one in person. Some farmers thought they were mythological figures like the ancient warlords in the Three Kingdoms legend since they’d only seen images of them in the news, but never in real life.

  The officer rose, then stepped around the desk and approached Old Cat. He reached out an arthritic knotted hand and said, “I’m Shi Rong-bang.”

  Old Cat extended his hand in return, but only as he’d test the handle of an iron teapot to see how hot it was.

  “I apologize for the means I used to bring you here,” Shi said, then gestured toward the chair across the table from where he’d been sitting.

  Only then did Old Cat recognize the soldier from a generation ago within the uniform that seemed to sheath, rather than clothe, his thinned body, and beneath the corroded patina of old age: the liver spots and wisped hair and sagging skin and drooping eyelids.

  The recognition immobilized Old Cat, gripped by a Confucian tradition that he recognized and despised, but couldn’t resist. No one sat in the presence of men like First-Class Senior General Shi. He lowered his gaze.

  Shi took Old Cat’s arm. And like a lever, it moved his feet and walked him forward until he reached the chair and sat down.

  Old Cat’s body felt like it was floating on the soft leather. He pulled his hands off the armrests for fear of soiling them or scratching them with his calluses. Imprints of palm sweat gleamed under the fluorescent light. He felt his face flush as he wiped them off with his sleeves.

  The plane shuddered as a jet fighter powered up off the runway next to them, then stilled as the engine scream faded into the distance.

  “They tell me you’re a farmer,” Shi said. “Alone in the world. No wife. No children. No parents still alive. And a very exceptional man.”

  Old Cat swallowed. “What do you intend to do with me?”

  “I didn’t bring you here to harm you.”

  “Then …”

  “I thought I’d better meet the most important man in Central China.”

  Old Cat squinted at General Shi and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you understand that the whole world is watching you?” Shi opened the laptop on the table and turned it toward Old Cat. The screen displayed the front page of Taiwan’s China Times. On the left was a photograph of Old Cat standing before a throng outside the Meinhard plant, and above it were printed the characters: 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 café, 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 agai
n?” 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? “

  “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 harden
ed. “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.”