Absolute Risk

by Steven Gore

Gage disconnected and walked over and inspected Hennessy’s notebook. The narrow opening had widened as the surrounding sheets had dried. He retrieved tweezers from the bathroom and tilted the top edge of the notebook toward the lamp next to the table and reached into the space and tugged at the square of paper. He felt it pull free from the opposite side, then he worked it back and forth up the gap. First a white glossy border appeared, the gray of concrete, then the black of leather shoes and laces, then the brown of socks and cuffs, the slacks splotched with water or—

  The photograph slipped free of its sheath. It was blood.

  Gage stared at the mutilated body. Its arms bound with wire that cut into the skin. Its shirt torn exposing a chest pocked with burns. The slacks pulled down to its knees. But the face was untouched, eyes dulled with death, mouth open as if he’d died with a last gasp.

  Gage opened the MIT brochure that he’d gotten from

  Goldie Goldstein and matched the portrait of Ibrahim to the face in the photo.

  It was him. There could be no doubt.

  A newspaper lay next to the body. The International Herald Tribune. The photo on the cover showed the French president greeting the world’s central bankers in Marseilles on the day before Abrams was to meet Hennessy.

  The message was clear. Hennessy couldn’t have missed it. There was no need for words, for an explanation, or an accusation, or a threat.

  In his pursuit of Ibrahim, Hennessy had forced someone’s hand, and they’d used it to torture Ibrahim to death and then aimed the photograph like a sickle to slash at the fragile membrane that had shielded Hennessy from the abyss.

  CHAPTER 53

  Tabari waited in the hallway of Hospital St. Joseph’s ICU with his uncle’s retired colleagues while Gage entered the room alone. Even in the semidarkness, the sterility shocked him, offended him. The unforgiving stainless steel. The disposable plastics. The starched sheets. The cool air. The caustic stink of disinfectant. The mechanical clicks and beeps—each of them—all of them—belied not only the broken body of a man who’d tried to do good in an evil world, but the tragedy of a wife’s grief and the distress of a rabbi sitting outside, head in hands, whose God had failed him.

  Benaroun’s hands lay folded on his chest. His legs, unmoving. His head turned and his eyes blinked at the sound of Gage setting down a chair close to the bed. Benaroun glanced at the remote to raise the bed and Gage eased him up from a flat to an angled position. Benaroun then raised a forefinger and pointed it toward his feet. Gage leaned over and followed its trajectory.

  Benaroun’s big toe moved.

  Gage felt his chest fill and moisture come to his eyes. He grabbed Benaroun’s shoulder and squeezed.

  “First a toe,” Benaroun whispered, “then someday a foot … and then someday a leg.”

  Gage’s eyes closed and the tension of the last twenty-four hours seemed to sigh out of him.

  A slight smile met his gaze when he opened them again.

  “You shouldn’t worry so much,” Benaroun said, his voice now a little stronger. “Bad for the heart.”

  “It was as much guilt as worry,” Gage said.

  “You have nothing to feel guilty about.” Benaroun licked his lips. Gage dipped an oral swab in a cup of water and then wet them. “They were after me, not you.”

  Gage pulled the airplane registration numbers out of his jacket pocket and held them up for Benaroun to see.

  Benaroun nodded.

  “They’re owned by a Chinese company,” Gage said. “But I don’t know what that means.”

  “I do. The Chinese got mining concessions from the South Africa president—“

  “For smuggling out the platinum for him.”

  Benaroun nodded. “And gold, manganese, and vanadium. He kept the Russians out and gave it all to China.”

  “And no money trail back to him.”

  “He plans to leave the platinum in Swiss vaults until the Chinese drive up the price.”

  “How did you—“

  “The promise of the money was enough and my informant in the”—Benaroun glanced toward the closed door—“in the South African Secret Service. He called me and then sent the numbers.”

  “You sure it was the money that persuaded him?”

  Benaroun stared past Gage for a few seconds, then looked back and said, “I don’t know.” He yawned and his eyes closed. He shook his head and opened them again. “Maybe patriotism. The last flight in brought Chinese saboteurs to shut down the mines.”

  Gage turned at the sound of a light knock on the door. A nurse entered, followed by Tabari.

  “I think that’s enough for now,” she said, coming to a stop next to Gage. “There will be time later to catch up with friends.”

  Benaroun’s face flushed. “But I need—“

  “Rest. You need rest.” She adjusted Benaroun’s pillow, then looked at Gage and asked, “Can you return later? “

  Gage rose to his feet and glanced at his watch as though he intended to suggest a time. But he knew that he wouldn’t be coming back. His flight to New York was leaving in two hours.

  A siren wailed outside, its blare muted by the double-paned windows and heavy drapes.

  When Gage looked back at Benaroun, he found that the exertion of his protest had drained him and he’d fallen asleep.

  Gage noticed that he’d been holding his breath. He released it. At least now he wouldn’t have to lie to his friend.

  CHAPTER 54

  Where is he?” Gage asked as he stepped into Viz’s rented SUV next to the curb at John F. Kennedy Airport. “He should be on his way back to a Fed Governors meeting in D.C. I recruited a retired FBI friend who does executive security to stay with him.”

  Viz handed Gage a new cell phone. “This will probably be good for a day or two until the bad guys catch on to it.” He then pointed at the leather attaché case on Gage’s lap. “That have the stuff?”

  Gage nodded. “I didn’t try the SIM or memory cards. I was afraid there might still be moisture inside.” “No problem. I’ll take care of it.” Viz turned the ignition. His headlights reflected off the limousine in front of them and enveloped it in swirling snow as if in a globe.

  “What about the rest?” Viz asked as he merged into the passing traffic.

  “A lot of his notebook was pulped by soaking in water, so I wasn’t able to recover much, and what I did find is so cryptic that I don’t know what to make of it. Parts of it read like the stream-of-consciousness rambling of those homeless guys who hang out in public libraries scribbling in spiral notebooks. And flowcharts, or at least pieces of them.”

  Gage turned on an overhead light, and then opened the briefcase and removed a sheet of paper.

  “I tried to piece them together, but there was only one box common to all.” Gage tapped it with his finger. “RGF.”

  “Relative Growth Funds.”

  “I assume so.”

  Viz glanced over as Gage held up one of the flowcharts he’d recovered.

  “And HI is Hani Ibrahim?”

  “It was always in the biggest letters and always framed by an input box as though he was the mastermind behind Relative Growth Funds. But if Abrams is right, that Ibrahim’s theories were just beautiful nonsense, it can’t be true. No one could build an investment strategy on them.”

  Viz smiled. “He gave me that speech a few times. Hell, I didn’t know what the uncertainty principle was, or entanglement, or fractals. I’m not sure Abrams even noticed that I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.” Viz laughed. “I understood what he said about it being impossible to predict the unpredictable only because I learned what a tautology was when I took sociology.”

  “I take it he got a little excited.”

  “How’d you guess?”

  “Because Abrams knows that Ibrahim’s argument wasn’t just a word game, playing with definitions. Ibrahim’s argument was that what people have always considered to be unpredictable isn’t.”

  “You mean tha
t it’s predictable that I’ll get a raise once we get back to San Francisco.”

  It was Gage’s turn to smile. “That depends on whether you can lead me to Davey Hicks.”

  Viz looked at his watch. “That’s easy. In a couple of minutes, right after Abrams climbs out of his limousine in front of his apartment building, Hicks will drive into Central Park, pull off the road, and hide his car in a thicket. After that, he’ll layer-up like an Eskimo and sneak in among some evergreens and relieve the lookout he’s had sitting there all day—does that mean I get my raise? “

  “Probably.”

  “Why’s he so important?”

  “I found his name in Hennessy’s notebook. Along with Anthony Gilbert’s.”

  Viz’s head snapped toward Gage. “You mean Hennessy knew they were on to him? “

  “But I don’t know whether he acted on the knowledge.”

  Viz pointed at the flowchart. “What about the rest of the acronyms? “

  “I can’t even guess what HA, CU and G12 are,” Gage said. “I think INV stands for investors and the lines are transfers of money, but I can’t be sure of that.”

  Gage reached into his attaché for another sheet.

  “The words and phrases I found scattered among the pages, like bond derivative and strike date, were intermingled with nonsense telephone numbers and ramblings and self-accusations like ‘I’m an idiot’ or ‘I had it backward’ or ‘financial Armageddon,’ as if every time he learned something it made him doubt himself. And some were just crazy. There was half a page devoted to the sound of a motorcycle engine: buffeta-buffeta-buffeta.”

  “Sounds like he’s a Honda man,” Viz said. “A Harley-Davidson guy would’ve written potato-potato-potato.”

  “We’ll never find out.”

  Gage turned off the overhead lamp and stared past the slow sweeping windshield wipers and through wisping snowfall at the New York skyline advancing toward them, the city lights haloed by moisture and reflecting off low clouds. He then took out his laptop to check his e-mail. The one he had been waiting for had finally arrived. He decrypted it and then read it to himself.

  We’re in Chongqing. Things are calm. Mark Fong is holding on to Wo-li and Mu-rong. He said you wouldn’t mind if he made them pay their own way. I thought a snakehead would look more gangsterlike, but he made me think of Bartleby the Scrivener. He has the face of a nineteenth-century bookkeeper. I sent all of the kids home except the one with the broken leg. He suffered some swelling on the drive down and I didn’t want to risk making it worse. A doctor will give him a blood thinner for the trip. We’ll catch a flight within the next 48 hours. Love.

  A new message arrived in his office e-mail folder. It was from Alex Z.

  I was able to decode some of Hennessy’s telephone numbers. The first was once assigned to the University of Hydraulic & Electric Engineering in Yichang City in Hubei Province. The line is disconnected.

  The university was merged with a couple of others in 2002 and is now called Three Gorges University. We checked their Web site and no one with the name Ibadat Ibrahim is on the faculty there.

  The second number is a disconnected cell phone in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The third number is an unlisted fax machine in Beijing.

  “I don’t get it,” Gage said. “The only telephone numbers I found in Hennessy’s notebook are either disconnected or a fax number.” Gage stared at the numbers. “Unless they were coded a second time. But by only one or two digits. Something Hennessy could figure out in his head.”

  Gage sent an encrypted e-mail back:

  Alex: See what happens if you keep increasing the last digit of each telephone number by one. Call Annie Ng and ask her to come up with a Chinese name that sounds a little like Ibadat. Maybe something like Yei bao-dai, then have her call. It may provoke Ibadat to say her name if we get a hit. It’s 8 a.m. over there now.

  He then did a search on the Three Gorges University Web site, then sent an e-mail back to Faith.

  Hennessy was convinced that Hani Ibrahim was murdered, and the evidence is strong, but the road leading to the answers I need will pass by his body, whether he’s dead or alive. Any chance you could fly up to Yichang and check at the Three Gorges University for his wife? Alex Z is working on some leads. Press reports are saying that things are calm there. They have a Culture Research Center in the College of Arts. Maybe you know someone from an anthropology conference.

  Gage closed his laptop, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder.

  “What do you think? Anyone behind us?”

  Viz shook his head. “Can’t tell, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll lose them once I get into Manhattan.” He looked over. “That’s where you want to go, right? After Hicks?”

  “I’m thinking, maybe not. If we corner Hicks and then he runs to whoever hired him, they’ll be ready for us. I’m thinking we go after somebody who’s got nobody to run to.”

  “And that means?”

  “Shake whoever may be tailing us, and head north.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Why isn’t Strubb hiding out?” Viz wondered aloud as he pulled to the curb across the street and half a block away from the Jupiter Club at the edge of downtown Albany.

  “Because if the police could’ve made him for the murder of Gilbert,” Gage said, “they would’ve already.”

  Viz looked over at Gage. “I hope his apartment manager didn’t drop a dime on us and tell him we came looking for him.”

  Gage stared ahead at the broken neon sign tacked to the brick façade of the bar, the J burned out and “upiter” flashing in red.

  “He probably didn’t,” Gage said. “There’s too many people coming by looking for Strubb—probation officers and parole agents and cops—that he doesn’t bother anymore.”

  Two leather-chapped men walked into the recessed entrance. Muted light flooded the shadow as they opened the door and was eclipsed as it swung closed behind them.

  Opening the SUV door, Gage said, “I’ll go around to the back of the building just in case he tries to slip out that way.” He stepped down in the slush mounding up from the street and over the curb and then looked back into the cab. “On second thought, if you’re getting a raise, maybe you should be the one to chill your bones out here instead of me.”

  “That’s fine with me. I’d rather do that than what you have in mind for me.” Viz smiled. “If he doesn’t come out of there in the next half hour, you’re gonna want me to go inside and dance with somebody.”

  “Shoot,” Gage said, smiling back. “I was going to make that a surprise.”

  Viz reached into his jacket and pulled out Hennessy’s SIM and memory card, then said, “I’ll try to do some work on these while we’re waiting.”

  Gage closed the door, made his way down the sidewalk, turned left at a corner store, and then looped around to the alley. The far streetlight backlit two men smoking next to a dumpster by the rear door to the Jupiter Club. They stamped their feet as they smoked, their wool-capped heads clouded in gray swirls. Even in puff jackets they seemed too thin to be Strubb, and although wearing motorcycle boots, they seemed too short. One after the other, they flicked their cigarettes in high arcs like single streams of fireworks that exploded when they hit the rear wall of the building across the alley.

  Just after the men reentered the bar, Gage angled to the other side, then worked his way along the trash cans and delivery trucks until he obtained a straight-on view of the back door through the muck-splattered passenger and driver’s windows of a cargo van.

  A man came out alone, lit up, and then reached for his cell phone and made a call.

  “Hey. It’s me … I’m out in the back. It’s dead as dead can be except for Eddie.” The man laughed. “He thinks he’s gonna hook up with Strubb and Pike, but there’s no fucking way that’s gonna happen … That’s what I told him.” The man laughed again. “Three-way Eddie will be going it alone tonight … No, his phone got turned off. You want to talk to him? �
�� I’ll get him.”

  The man opened the back door and yelled inside.

  “Strubb. My buddy wants to talk to you.”

  Strubb filled the doorway ten seconds later. He held a beer bottle in one hand and a pool cue in the other. He traded the cue for the phone and stepped outside.

  “Who’s this?” Strubb asked, then listened for a few seconds. “Yeah, I’m kinda between jobs. The last one went sour so I’m not working with Davey no more. Guy’s an asshole. Stiffed me. He shows up here again, I’m gonna kick his butt back to NYC … Sure. What’s the gig? … Yeah. I can do that … I’m good. Only had one beer. Pick me up out front in ten minutes.”

  Gage reached for his cell phone as soon as the door closed behind Strubb.

  “He’ll be coming out in a couple of minutes,” Gage told Viz. “Waiting for someone to pick him up. Blue jacket. Jeans. Work boots. The voice recorder is cued up to the right spot. Come up on him from the east. Soon as you reach him, I’ll head in from the west.”

  Gage worked his way back to the corner market and waited until Strubb appeared. He watched Viz step out of the SUV, and then stroll up the block and stop next to Strubb. Viz set himself so that Strubb’s back would be facing Gage as he walked up.

  Ten feet away, Gage heard his own voice on the recorder:

  No reason to get yourself kicked in the head for something I’ll find out anyway. Then Strubb’s.

  Gilbert. Tony Gilbert. Works out of New York City. Strubb backed away from Viz. Then Gage’s voice again.

  This is what you’re going to do. You’re going to tell Gilbert and his pals to stay away from me.

  Strubb spun and took a step. He jerked to a stop when he spotted Gage, who grabbed his jacket front and took him down to the sidewalk. Viz locked down Strubb’s legs before he could start kicking, then Gage froze him with a wrist lock and they pulled him to his feet.

  “Say anything and I’ll break your arm,” Gage said to Strubb, and then looked at his watch and said to Viz, “His pal will be here in a minute or two.”

  Gage and Viz marched Strubb across the street and down the block to the SUV. Viz frisked him, then they waited in its shadow as a pickup truck pulled to a stop in front of the bar. It waited a minute, then the driver honked twice, then leaned on the horn for a long one. Finally the driver walked inside the bar. He came out thirty seconds later.