Absolute Risk (28 page)

V
ice President Cooper Wallace sat alone in his office in the Executive Office Building after the security briefing. He flicked on the television and then changed the channel from CNN to CNBC. He wasn’t interested in the political pundits’ speculations, but in the numbers that reflected the financial mind of the country. The header rotated from the prices of gold, silver, and oil to the Dow and NASDAQ. They’d both dropped four percent on the news of the transition, then gained three back. The same in London and Berlin.

At first, he felt relief. The markets had time to absorb the news about the president’s health, to weigh it, to allocate their resources, and decided that the world wasn’t coming to an end. Maybe those economics textbooks were right after all. It really was a self-adjusting mechanism, a collective mind that takes in data and prices itself accordingly.

But then a shudder of self-doubt waved through him.

Maybe it wasn’t confidence in him that the market was showing, but a belief that the president would soon resume his place as the captain of the ship of state and that Wallace’s assignment was merely to hold the rudder steady in the meantime.

He, too, had watched the surgeons’ press conference. He, too, had felt no doubt that the surgery would be routine and successful. He, too, saw the confidence in the wire-rimmed Harvard Medical School faces of the white coats. He, too—

But then his mind twisted back down the tunnel of the past, to the president calling him into his study, warning him to think and to listen.

You want to be president in two years, but something could happen to me, and you’d be sitting in this chair tomorrow.

Now the white coats seemed like costumes and the wire rims like props and their words spoken from a script written by the president.

Tomorrow had arrived.

Chief of Staff Paul Nichols knocked on his door, then entered.

“This is the list,” Nichols said, handing Wallace a sheet bearing five names. He then pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “Russian and Chinese interpreters are standing by. The French, German, and Japanese presidents will speak to you in English. The British prime minister will go first.”

Wallace skimmed down the page. He didn’t mind the others, but was disgusted by the thought of having to call the Chinese president to reassure him that the pull on the American oars would remain steady. He could see the man’s soft, round face, beaming like the owner of a company store—

No, that wasn’t it. It was the self-satisfied smirk of a colonial master. They owned the debt and therefore had the U.S. by the pocketbook.

Americans could still feed themselves, but they had to cook on Chinese stoves and in Chinese pots and pans and pay tribute in the form of interest on a trillion dollars of treasury bonds.
If Casher is right,
Wallace thought,
they have us not only by our hearts, minds, and consumer cravings, but by the balls.

Wallace reached for the remote to turn off the television. He hesitated as an inset box appeared showing Manton Roberts standing before a microphone. The business reporter’s voice was replaced by Roberts announcing that National Pledge Day would include prayers for the president’s recovery.

“Smart move,” Nichols said to Wallace. “He never misses a trick. He’ll quadruple the participation. Even the crippled will stand to say the pledge and even the deaf will hear the prayer.”

Wallace didn’t rise to the sarcasm. He might not believe in the event, but he believed in the power of prayer.

“Is Casher still out there?” Wallace asked, punching the mute button.

Nichols nodded, then walked back out to the reception area. Casher entered a moment later carrying his briefcase.

“Was it your decision or the president’s not to mention in the Cabinet meeting that the Chinese are putting together criminal cases against us? “

“The president’s. He didn’t want to chance a leak.”

Wallace wanted to say,
You mean he doesn’t trust his own people?
but he left the thought unspoken for fear of appearing to have forgotten the fundamental lesson of politics: The political animal is first of all an animal, and while some might doubt the theory of evolution, everyone accepted the truth that the first law of nature was survival. And loyalty, like betrayal, was just a weapon.

“But he did ask me to meet with the attorney general,” Casher said, “and in a fill-in-the-blank-later fashion outline the bribery evidence against the corporate officers the Chinese appear to be targeting.”

“You mean to take to a grand jury?”

“Only in case you, or the president, decide to get ahead of the Chinese and charge them with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The U.S. Attorney can simply code all of the targets’ names, the companies’ names, and the offshore accounts that he presents in evidence. Once the grand jurors accept that crimes have been committed, it will take all of ten minutes to fill in the blanks and issue an indictment.”

Wallace didn’t like the path laid out before him. He felt like the Chinese were leading the U.S. into a trap.

“I don’t like the idea,” Wallace finally said. “The Chinese set the terms for doing business over there. If their officials weren’t corrupt, we wouldn’t be paying bribes. Isn’t that what the Mexicans tell us: Stop using drugs and we’ll stop shipping them?”

“You’re right, but it may be out of our hands.”

Casher laid his briefcase on the desk, then opened it and handed Wallace a draft indictment.

“This is it,” Casher said, “with all of the blanks filled in.”

Wallace flipped through the twenty pages. “It seems short, given how massive the scheme was.”

“The indictment doesn’t have to outline our entire theory of the case and every act in the conspiracy,” Casher said, “only enough to prove a single count for each defendant. We picked the most provable.”

“You’ve also named some French and German defendants.”

“We don’t want to take the whole blame.”

“But what’s our jurisdiction? They’re not U.S. citizens.”

“But they paid some of the bribes in U.S. dollars. Our currency, our jurisdiction. That’s good enough for the Supreme Court.”

Casher took it back and opened to the overt acts alleged against RAID, then turned it toward Wallace.

“You’ll see that we’ve tracked a single payment from a RAID account in Singapore to a Hong Kong law firm, and then to the offshore account of a coconspirator we’ve identified only as ‘Chinese Official One.'”

Wallace read down the page. “Who is it?”

“The vice mayor of Chengdu, Zhao Wo-li.”

“Why didn’t you name him?”

“It would make things too messy. He’s escaped the PLA encirclement of the city. We don’t want the story to become one about a massive manhunt—“

“Unless we later want to shift the blame onto the Chinese.”

Casher nodded. “We can also lessen the damage to us by orchestrating the announcement of the indictment and the replacement of the officers so they happen simultaneously.”

“I still don’t like it,” Wallace said. “I don’t like us taking the blame for other countries’ problems.” Wallace flipped the indictment closed. “But if it happens, let it not be during the few days of my watch.”

W
e’re here,” Gage said to Rahmani, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. They were parked under an overhanging oak tree along the edge of Chestnut Hill Reservoir north of Brookline. “Now what?”

The angled parking places on either side of them were empty, save for a pickup truck idling seven spaces away, its occupant talking on his phone and turning pages in what looked to Gage to be a map book.

“We wait.” Rahmani waved his finger back and forth as though to mark the extremes of the area. “My friends are watching to make sure you weren’t followed.”

Gage withdrew his cell phone. “How do you know someone isn’t tracking me through this?”

Rahmani smiled. “I asked around. You wouldn’t let that happen.”

“Then why the bungler crack when I walked into the café?”

“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 naïve.” 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 naïve 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 café 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?”