Steven Gore: Absolute Risk

“Then why’d you agree to meet with him? “

“It was something my assistant said. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and did her economics dissertation on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. She told me that delusional people chase phantoms around inside their own heads or within their own neighborhoods, they don’t pursue them overseas. And the first time Hennessy called he said he was in China.”

Gage shrugged. “Unless believing he was there was part of his delusion.”

Abrams shook his head. “Evidence showed up on my cell phone bill as an incoming call from a local Shanghai number. And the second time it was from Dubai, and the third from Algeria. And he never sounded nuts. Not paranoid. Not thinking that people were out to get him-“

“Or at least shrewd enough not to say it aloud.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Abrams said. “He just sounded guilty, genuinely ashamed of himself. Desperate for my help in making up for what he’d done to Hani Ibrahim.”

Although Gage hadn’t remembered Michael Hennessy’s name when Abrams called the day before, he did recall the FBI’s arrest of Ibrahim for a terrorist financing conspiracy. Ibrahim had been a financial mathematician who’d come to MIT a few years before Abrams had moved on to Harvard. He masterminded a scheme for funneling money from within the U.S. to foreign terrorist groups by using offshore trusts and charities. No criminal case was ever proven, but he was nonetheless deported.

“At some point,” Abrams said, “when, I don’t know-how, I don’t know-and why, I don’t know, Hennessy began to suspect that Ibrahim had been framed.”

“You mean that Hennessy participated in framing him.”

Abrams nodded. “But not knowingly. Or at least that was Hennessy’s claim.”

Gage thought back to the few years after 9/11, and asked, “Was Ibrahim simply deported, or was he flown to a country where a stronger case against him could be developed through torture?”

“I don’t know, but I got the sense that the rendition possibility figured into Hennessy’s desperation. The first time I spoke to him, he seemed to be at the opposite end of the exhilaration he’d displayed after Ibrahim’s arrest. I remember the photo. Him standing behind the director at a press conference in Washington, basking in the glory. It was his career case. He got a promotion to senior special agent and was made second in command of the FBI’s Anti-terrorism Task Force.” “Where was he on the arc the last time you spoke to him?”

“More toward the bottom, but with a feeling of hope. He told me that he had reason to think that Ibrahim was still alive.”

Abrams fell silent. Gage watched his eyes narrow as though he was looking into the tunnel of the past.

“I don’t know about the present condition of Ibrahim’s mind or body,” Abrams finally said, “but his reputation hasn’t suffered much in the long run. I imagine that if the Swedes could find him now, they’d probably give him the Nobel Prize in economics.”

Even though Gage’s practice focused on finance from the perspective of fraud and money laundering, he was familiar with Ibrahim’s work. And in the years since his disappearance, Ibrahim and his quantum theory of finance had achieved mythological, Janus-faced status, with his name either issued as an epithet or whispered in awe. His fame rested on a few papers he’d published twenty years earlier, when he was in his thirties, and on claims by a few large hedge funds, known as chaos funds, that they invested and traded based on his theories.

“I suspect that if he’d stayed in physics rather than moving into finance,” Abrams said, “he would’ve gotten the Nobel in that and he’d still be puttering away at MIT instead of…”

“Instead of what?”

Abrams shrugged and stared at the road ahead. “I don’t have a clue. Maybe Hennessy knew.”

Gage circled back to the call from Abrams that brought him from San Francisco to New York.

“I don’t see what any of this has to do with you,” Gage said. “I haven’t read your job description, but I’m sure it doesn’t include rectifying nine-year-old presumed wrongs committed by the Justice Department.”

“That assumes that I was Hennessy’s first choice.” Abrams glanced back at Gage. “I wasn’t. He’d already tried the CIA and the head of the European Central Bank and who knows who else. They all turned him away after recommending that he have his head examined. That’s why he wanted to meet with me. He wanted to prove by his manner and his presentation that he wasn’t crazy. He saw on the news that I’d be in Marseilles for a central bankers’ meeting, and called me at home one night and-“

“How did he get your number?”

Abrams shrugged again. “I don’t know. Other than my assistant, only the secretary of the treasury and the president were supposed to have it. That’s part of the reason I called the FBI. They promised to do an investigation, but never followed through, or at least didn’t give me the results. In any case, Hennessy said he’d be somewhere along the Mediterranean at the same time as the conference. The deal was that I would give him fifteen minutes in person at a restaurant in the Oliviers District-“

“That’s crazy. It’s a drug-infested-“

“But not a place where anyone would recognize the Federal Reserve chairman.”

Gage shook his head. “It was just substituting one danger for another.”

Abrams dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No damage done. He promised to lay out his case and then leave it to me whether I wanted to pursue it.”

“But he didn’t show up. Instead he jumped off a cliff.”

“Or was spit out.”

Gage turned toward Abrams. “I don’t understand why you think he’s a modern-day Jonah. He could’ve just as easily decided that he’d made a fool of himself, or that he’d deluded himself for a second time, and couldn’t face going home.”

“That was the theory of the local police, that he’d come to the end of his rope. Encouraged no doubt in that conclusion by the FBI’s claim that he was crazy and by the fact that diving headfirst onto the rocks along the Cote d’Azur isn’t an unusual way to do yourself in. The area is Marseilles’ version of the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Gage recognized that the logic also worked the opposite way: What better way to disguise a murder than as a suicide, but there was still the question of motive and whether it had anything to do with Abrams.

“Did the Marseilles police know that he was there to meet you?” Gage asked.

Abrams shook his head. “I couldn’t take the risk-the U.S. couldn’t take the risk-of having my name connected with Hennessy’s, at least until I knew whether he had told me the truth.” Abrams spread his hands. “What do you think would happen in the markets if the press put out a story that I had engaged in some sort of mind-meld with a lunatic? “

Gage looked up to see that they were now heading due west, the midtown skyline and Manhattan rising in the distance against the now graying sky, the city seeming less like a destination than a way station, for he knew that Abrams hadn’t asked him to come to New York just for a talk.

“Did you contact the FBI again after his body was discovered,” Gage asked, “and try to find out the backstory?”

“I left a vague message for the deputy director.” Abrams paused, and then glanced over at Gage. “But it was the director himself who returned my call.”

Gore, Steven

Absolute Risk

H e didn’t get on a flight,” the caller spoke into his cell phone. “Just picked up a tall, middle-aged guy near the taxi stand outside of terminal one. I’m about a hundred yards behind him on the Long Island Expressway heading toward the city.”