Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

Abrams’s eyes moved from the blank screen toward the window. He gazed down at the traffic merging at the tip of the sculpture-studded Louise Nevelson Plaza.

“It never crossed my mind,” Abrams said, “that someday it would be cheaper to manufacture a car in China than in India. It’s absolutely astounding.”

He thought of the hundred million Chinese laborers traveling into the cities from the countryside, then from city to city looking for work.

What did Marx call it? Abrams asked himself. A reserve army of labor. Surplus, superfluous people who kept wages low not only in China, and not only in India, but throughout the world.

“I’ll give you a piece of data about China that’s completely reliable,” Thornton said.

Abrams blinked himself back to the present and looked at her.

“The CIA is saying that there have been a hundred and fifty thousand labor actions and riots in the last twelve months. There have even been protests at factories owned by the People’s Liberation Army, and the military is very unhappy. As if to send a message to the Politburo, older representatives of the PLA have been showing up in full-dress uniforms for meetings, even private ones.”

Abrams smiled. “Don’t tell me that the CIA has gone back to analyzing leadership photographs like they did in the cold war days? ”

Thornton smiled back. “I suspect they even know what you’re wearing right now.”

“But at least not what I’m saying.”

Her smile died and her brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

He cocked his head toward the reception area where Viz was sitting. Abrams had introduced him only as a friend of a friend.

“We found listening devices in my apartment. Two sets.”

The color drained from Thornton’s face as she said, “That means that people were listening to us.”

She gripped her hands together on her lap and twisted them, her knuckles whitened, and tears seeped into her eyes.

Abrams nodded and came around his desk. He reached an arm around her shoulder.

She looked up at him. “That means they heard everything… absolutely everything.”

“But we did nothing either of us should be ashamed of.”

Logan Airport was frozen in time and space. Nothing moved on the runways. Even the deicers sat motionless on the tarmac. In the absence of movement, it seemed to Gage as if history had met its end in a nuclear winter.

Gage turned away from the window and toward the mass of fidgeting passengers inside the terminal waiting for their international flights.

Some glared at the ground crew as though controlling the weather was part of their duties. Others stared up at the television monitors, the story of massive pesticide-induced birth defects in Russia replaced by a breaking news report of flooding in Paris, the Seine River overflowing its banks and transforming the city into a French Venice. The aerial view made the Eiffel Tower look like an islanded lighthouse in a sea of gray.

Gage had intended to fly into de Gaulle and spend a day in Paris visiting bankers, lawyers, and money launderers who were unrelated to Ibrahim or Hennessy, and thereby conceal what he had actually come to France to do. But the floods made that impossible. De Gaulle airport had been shut down.

Instead, he was flying to Nice, east of Marseilles along the Mediterranean, and to mask his intentions by pretending to help a friend from Transparency Watch trace the proceeds of the sale of platinum, allegedly stolen and smuggled out of South Africa by its president.

Gage was certain that whoever replaced Gilbert would catch up with him in Marseilles; he just needed twenty-four hours in the city before that happened.

An elderly Catholic priest standing next to Gage mumbled, and then whispered, “That son of a bitch.”

Gage glanced over at him, surprised by the outburst and assuming that his words were meant for the uniformed United Airlines employee standing by the gate. The priest’s eyes were focused instead on a wall-mounted monitor showing Vice President Cooper Wallace looking like a celery stalk next to the tomato-shaped Reverend Manton Roberts, red-faced and sweating, with a flop of chin and neck fat oozing over his collar and smothering the knot of his tie.

The priest looked up at Gage.

“Maybe the son of a bitch will eat himself to death like Jerry Falwell. That would be God’s justice.”

The priest then pointed at the screen as the camera pulled back and displayed a line of suited politicians, evangelicals, and talk radio personalities standing against the background of a two-story American flag with a black cross superimposed on it. It was erected behind a stage centered at the fifty-yard line of the Louisiana Superdome.

“A glutton,” the priest said. “A compulsive gambler. A onetime adulterer. A two-time adulterer. A drug addict. Is there any sin or human corruption that isn’t represented on that stage? ”

A handful of Korean-American missionaries, white shirts, black ties, and matching backpacks, walked forward as though toward an altar and gathered below the television clutching their Bibles.

“I call on all Americans to come together on Sunday,” Roberts said from the podium, “two weeks from tomorrow, at noon Eastern time, all across the country to join in the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance.” Roberts raised his arms as if leading a hymn. “Let everyone driving pull to the side of the road. Let everyone walking pause in their tracks. Let everyone in church stand. Let every checkout clerk’s hands fall still. Let every toll taker close his lane.”

The camera panned the audience of seventy-five thousand. They had risen to their feet, smiling and clapping.

The priest standing next to Gage spoke again.

“It’s a damn national loyalty test, all on one day.” He again looked up at Gage. “But loyal to who? The country or their version of Christianity? ”

“Let every voice rise up in unison as we celebrate our one nation under God.”

The applause morphed into cheering that almost overwhelmed the words, “And let the agents of Satan reveal themselves by their silence.”

Faces in the Superdome turned hard and shaking fists shot skyward.

“God’s punishment is upon us,” Roberts said, his voice now raging and his face engorged with angry blood. “He speaks to us through the earthquakes and the floods and the epidemics and the riots. All is in preparation… all… is… in… preparation, for mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

Roberts was speaking the words, not singing them.

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Then the crowd in a single explosion of song:

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

The missionaries standing below the television interlinked their hands as Roberts spoke again.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:

“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;

Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,

Since God is marching on.”

Gage surveyed the waiting area. A scattering of people stood up. Some of those who were already standing turned toward the monitor.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

Those remaining in their seats glanced at one another. One after another they shrugged and then rose. By the end of the last chorus, nearly half the people in the terminal were singing. The rest sat rigid in their seats, jaws set, eyes locked forward.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!