Absolute Risk (16 page)

F
aith 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:

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.

S
unlight infused the blue-hued palette of the Mediterranean 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.

And if Hennessy had been murdered, why not do it in the parking lot, or along the road at the first outcropping above the shoreline rocks?

It didn’t make sense.

Gage pulled a map out of his jeans pocket and unfolded it. He traced a path from Cassis where he and Tabari had started the hike all the way along the coast to Marseilles, twenty miles to the west. If Hennessy had begun at the trailhead closest to Marseilles, it wouldn’t have been an hour walk, but a ten-hour walk, with tough ascents and treacherous descents on slippery stones and mud.

But say he really did start at Cassis? A mile or so of indecision, or of confusion, or of anguish—

“Exactly,” Tabari said, after watching Gage’s eyes scan the map. “From either direction it’s a long way to go to commit suicide.”

“Maybe not,” Gage said, picturing San Francisco’s Golden Gate, almost two miles in length. “Most people walk to the middle of a bridge before jumping, maybe looking for a certain kind of symmetry, maybe one that confirms their place at the center of the universe at the pivotal moment.”

“Or as distant as they can get from solid ground,” Tabari said. “I assume that people imagine they’ll enjoy a pristine death, as if the water below would simply absorb them whole and unbroken.”

“Either way,” Gage said, gesturing toward the rocky trail before them, “they can walk a long way before they kill themselves, sometimes a very long way.”

Tabari took the lead as they headed toward the deepest part of the cove. The area seemed to Gage to be a counterpoint image of the Utah Badlands, with fractured white chasm walls in place of red rock cliffs, with a pale sea in place of shadowed valleys, and with mesquite and sage and piñon pines in place of Aleppo and myrtle and ferns, but just as desolate.

After Gage and Tabari made the turn back toward the water, they stopped in the shadow of an oak tree. Through binoculars Gage scanned the path they’d traveled, checking whether they’d been followed. He then inspected the ridges above. He didn’t expect to see anyone, or at least anyone shrewd, since a person assigned to track them and who’d seen where they’d started could’ve guessed where they were headed. In any case, a fishing boat would have been a better choice for surveillance.

Gage suspected that if he’d been followed to the trailhead and the follower knew their destination and what they would find, he might’ve settled on taking some photos of Tabari and then headed back to Marseilles to try to identify him—

Unless that someone wanted to follow them not just long enough to identify Tabari or even just to the spot where Hennessy went over, but also to make sure that he and Tabari followed Hennessy all the way down to the rocks below.

“You tell anyone that you were coming out here?” Gage asked, lowering the binoculars.

“You see something?”

“No.”

“I didn’t even tell my father.”

Gage raised them again and turned the lenses toward the Mediterranean, starting at the pale blue water at the head of the inlet, then back and forth along the shoreline and finally following the darkening channel toward the open sea. A sailboat slid into view from the direction of Cassis, forty feet of white fiberglass and chrome reflecting the risen sun, sails down, motoring, its engine a distant murmur, its wake foaming the still surface.

A flash of glass told Gage that binoculars had been raised toward them, but had passed on. Gage figured that either they’d just been spotted or they weren’t the person’s target.

Gage focused on a woman standing alone on the bow. The binoculars flashed again and she raised her arm and pointed, not at them, but at the hill rising up behind them. Gage looked over his shoulder, for a half second expecting to spot a sniper poised on the hill-crest. Instead, it was a peregrine falcon swooping down from a pine top, its nearly two-foot wings first wide and flapping, then folded as it rocketed toward the water. A seagull shrieked and took flight from a yellow buoy at the mouth of the cove. The falcon swept down below the bird, and then slammed up into it, sending it tumbling and flailing, finally catching it by the back of the neck and carrying it to a ledge halfway up the cliff.

The woman on the boat turned as a man ran toward her. She raised her palm in a high five. He slapped hers with his, then they both jumped in place like delirious football fans after a winning touchdown.

“I’ve never understood how anyone can celebrate death,” Tabari said. “Any death.”

Tabari ran his fingers along a rosemary branch, then raised them to his nose. He breathed in the scented resin and said, “This, not death, is worth celebrating.”

“You sound like your uncle,” Gage said.

Tabari smiled. “And every day he sounds more like my father than he lets on.” His smiled faded. “Except angrier. A kind of Old Testament, Moses anger.”

“I noticed that at the airport,” Gage said. “Why the change?”

“His world has gotten larger since he retired, or at least he’s being confronted by more of it. The narrow, focused gaze that he moved from case to case when he was a detective is now like a searchlight that moves from country to country, from disaster to disaster, from crime to crime, illuminating one evil after another that he feels helpless to stop.” Tabari stared down at the boat, then looked over at Gage and said, “That’s what his platinum smuggling investigation is really about.”

“You mean it’s not as serious as he makes it out to be?”

“No. I suspect that he’s right about that. But it’ll continue whether he gets killed trying to stop it or not.”

“Why are you convinced it’s that dangerous?”

“Not because I have inside information, but because the breadth of the thing, the size of the organization, the length of the chain and the amount of money involved. It doesn’t make sense for whoever these people are to engage in this wide of a conspiracy unless there are not just millions, but billions at stake. Whoever is behind it has developed the means to control mines and power plants and banks. They can make airplanes appear before the world’s eyes like fireflies in the night and then disappear again. They can make tons of precious metals jump from place to place like they’re subatomic particles—”

“And you don’t think your uncle gets it.”

“Worse. To them, he’s just a piece of lint to be flicked off their lapels.”

Gage understood conceptually why Tabari was worried, but he didn’t have enough facts to know whether they supported the theory. After all, Tabari’s fear could be just the mirror image of his uncle’s misunderstanding of what had been going on, but he’d need time to figure it out.

“If you want,” Gage said, “I can talk to the people at Transparency Watch. Ask them to pull him off of it or assign him to something else for a while.”

Tabari shook his head. “That would just humiliate him. He might become even more reckless and try to pursue it on his own.”

They stood in silence for a few moments, then Gage said, “Let me think about it. I’ll come up with something.”

“Just don’t get sucked into it, too. You don’t show it, but I know you scan the darkness of the world using the same searchlight as my uncle does. That’s why you and he are friends.”

Gage didn’t respond. It wasn’t the same searchlight, or if it was, it had never left him feeling helpless. Would it someday? He didn’t know. His father, who’d run his family medical practice into his late eighties, had never felt helpless, perhaps because he’d come to accept the contingencies of life and didn’t fear death. But Batkoun Benaroun seemed to accept neither.

Gage turned and led the way along the trail. Soon they were midway through the section they’d seen from the opposite side.

Emerging from a tunnel formed of dense juniper and overhanging oak trees, Gage again spotted the outcropping from which Hennessy had gone down. They walked another hundred yards, then Tabari stopped and pointed down.

“This is it,” Tabari said.

Gage held on to a pine trunk and leaned out. Tabari braced himself against the tree, then grabbed the back of Gage’s jacket as insurance against him falling.

Looking down, Gage imagined Hennessy’s body tumbling and flailing like the seagull, thudding into the first ledge fifteen feet down before tumbling down onto the two ledges below, each one angled out like stair steps, each ten feet tall, until a final, hundred-foot drop to the rocks along the water’s edge.

Gage reached for his binoculars again and inspected the porous limestone below for blood spatter that might’ve been absorbed into the rock, and therefore might not have been washed away during the storms that passed through on the days following Hennessy’s death.

“Looking for blood?” Tabari asked.

Gage nodded.

“There was some, but not much. I suspect that he died on impact.”

Gage straightened up and Tabari released his grip.

It didn’t make sense. A suicide wants it to be over in an instant, a straight drop into oblivion, not a bouncing journey down a flesh and bone grater.

Except maybe as self-punishment for sins Gage couldn’t yet imagine.

When Gage looked over, he saw that Tabari was staring at him, a smile on his face. Gage knew that Tabari had guessed what he was thinking.

“He went over at night,” Tabari said. “He couldn’t have seen that it wasn’t a freefall to the bottom. He might’ve done what you just did. Found an outcropping. Found the place closest to the edge, held on to the tree to position himself, and then pushed off.”

Gage shook his head. “His eyes would’ve adjusted to the darkness. Even on a cloudy night—”

“Which it was.”

“The ledges down there would’ve glowed.”

Tabari knelt down and picked at specks in the dirt that looked like mica. He wet his finger, pressed it against one of them, and held it up toward Gage.

“Water white glass,” Tabari said, “with an antireflective coating.” He wiped it off against his pants. “Flashlight glass.”

“And you recovered the flashlight?”

Tabari nodded. “The officers who searched the area. Not me personally.”

“That’s all the more reason why he wouldn’t have jumped here.”

“The detective who handled the case theorized that Hennessy did what you did, but lost his balance and committed suicide a little sooner than he planned and in a less advisable place than he would’ve wanted.”

“In which case it’s an accident and not a suicide since he still could’ve changed his mind.”

Tabari shrugged. “But nonetheless, not a crime.”

Gage thought back on the suicides that he’d investigated when he was a homicide detective and on the training he’d received. He couldn’t think of an instance in which a suicide released his grip on whatever was in his hand. A Bible. A cross. A love letter. The instinct was to hold on. He couldn’t imagine Hennessy dropping the flashlight as he jumped or tossing it behind him.

But Tabari could still be right. It could’ve been an accidental suicide.

“Of course,” Tabari said, raising his eyebrows, “this is all conjecture.”

Gage flashed on an image of the trailhead and the stolen car. “And whether it’s correct depends on the means of transportation he used to travel out here.”

“And maybe also on what we know about what he couldn’t have used to travel out here.”

“And when will I get that answer?” Gage asked.

“Tomorrow. I think tomorrow.”