Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

“Wait,” Gage yelled back, then took the gun from Benaroun’s hand, laid him down, and pulled him away from the threshold. Holding the gun by his side, Gage opened the door.

Tabari looked down at his uncle and raised his radio to his lips.

Gage reached for his cell phone.

After he disconnected from Gage, Alex Z set his encrypted cell phone down on his desk and made intercom calls to the senior staff of the firm. He then picked up a binder and a folded flowchart and walked up two flights to the conference room next to Gage’s office.

Derrell Williams, Gage’s investigations director, was waiting. Two others entered after Alex Z and sat on either side of Williams.

They all felt the unusual dynamic.

Alex Z, running the meeting. A tattooed computer genius whose authority derived from the trust Gage invested in him.

Williams, in the opposite chair, whose authority derived from his judgment and mastery of investigative technique honed during twenty years with the FBI, the last four as special agent in charge in San Francisco.

Alex Z slid the binder across the rosewood table. Williams flipped it open. The woman on Williams’s right and the man on his left leaned in and scanned the first ten pages as Williams turned them.

Williams pushed the binder toward the woman, then looked up and asked, “How much of this have you verified?”

“I’ve been going at it from another direction,” Alex Z said. “The problem is that we don’t have access to the underlying bank records of the corporations that made the bribes to determine whether they match those that Faith has seen. The result is that I’ve had to focus on what I could prove is false, the kind of data that would show that these officials are lying and that their documents are forgeries.”

Williams nodded. “You mean trying to determine whether or not those who allegedly paid the bribes were in a position to do it-“

“And whether the offshore companies existed and the banks had branches in the relevant places at the relevant time. If we can prove they lied about one thing, we have to doubt the rest of what they’re saying.”

“And have you proved anything false?”

Alex Z shook his head, then unfolded the three-foot-by-three-foot flowchart and turned it toward them.

“This is what it looks like. The boxes on the left are the corporations who paid the most in bribes to officials in Chengdu. The middle boxes are the intermediaries that handled the money. The boxes on the right are the recipients.” Alex Z pointed at the RAID box. “Follow that one.”

Williams traced the alleged money trail from RAID to a company named Tai Hing Consulting in Hong Kong to the bank accounts of Zhao Wo-li in the Cayman Islands and of Zheng Mu-rong in France, and to the accounts of a dozen other Chinese officials.

“Why is there just a dotted line from Tai Hing to Wo-li?” Williams asked. “The rest of the lines are solid.”

“Because the money didn’t travel directly and Wo-li, and his wife didn’t know that part of the route. The RAID money went into the Tai Hing account in Hong Kong, but came out of a numbered account in the Bahamas. Wo-li assumes they’re related entities, maybe two branches of the same company, but he’s not certain.”

Williams nodded.

“Wo-li has now signed an affidavit saying that he negotiated the payment directly with Donald Whitson when he was head of RAID’s Asian operations.”

“That makes both him and RAID guilty of a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

“Violations, plural. These bribes were renegotiated and paid every year.” Alex Z pointed at the corporate names on the left side of the flowchart. “And they were all doing it. And if Wo-li is telling the whole truth, and the Justice Department chooses to act on it, the boards of RAID, Spectrum, and the rest will be holding their semiannual meetings in Leavenworth for the next ten years.”

“And you’re bringing this to us now…”

“Graham. Things have turned a little rough in the thing he’s working on in Marseilles and he’s worried about Faith and about us.”

Williams narrowed his eyes at Alex Z. “Us?”

“As leverage against him and to keep what we’ve put together from becoming public.”

“At this point it’s all unverified.”

“But what will happen to the markets if they fear that the Chinese might act on their own and seize the assets of the largest U.S. and European corporations over there? It’ll start a run on the companies’ stock and the stocks of all of the banks that they borrowed money from to build those factories.”

Williams leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. When he’d been the FBI’s legal attache in Hong Kong eight years earlier, the Economic and Political Section had estimated that China was underreporting foreign investment by at least fifty percent. It was a hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in the manufacturing part of the economy, not seventy-five billion, and of that, twenty-five percent had been paid out in bribes and kickbacks. He opened his eyes and stared down at the flowchart and saw that the method by which the bribes were paid was lying on the table before him.

The investigators to the left and right of Williams stirred in their seats. They’d seen the implication, too.

Williams looked back at Alex Z and said, “And Graham thinks he may have inadvertently set us up.”

“And Faith, too. He’s pretty sure his calls to her have been intercepted, either at his end or hers, and he’s trying to get her out of there.”

Williams spread his hands, pointing at the two sitting next to him. “Let’s lock the place down and guard the perimeter.”

Both got up and left the room.

Then to Alex Z. “Shut down the network. Internet access. E-mails. Everything.”

Alex Z pointed down toward the two floors of investigators below. “What about them? “

“Wipe the hard drives on a couple laptops for them to share for e-mails.”

The conference phone in the middle of the table beeped. Williams pressed the speaker button.

“What?”

“It’s Ray Kaplan downstairs. Is something going on? I’m watching a rising curve of attacks on our system. It started last night and it’s moving exponentially for the last few hours.”

“Have they gotten in?” Williams asked.

“Not yet.”

“Disconnect us.”

Kaplan’s voice rose. “You mean-”

“Unplug anything that connects our computers to the outside world.”

The smoke from Old Cat’s unfiltered cigarette merged with the fog as he walked across the parking lot and away from the generator building. The whispering and snoring and soft lullabies he heard through the thin cloth of the makeshift tents intermingled with memories of the communal life on the collective farm of his youth.

He continued for a hundred yards beyond the last tent and the last guard, until there was only silence, except for his slow drag of air through the tobacco and his long exhale. The low mist separated and he could see stars against the blackness and high clouds side-lit by the moon. He shivered as the mist closed over him again.

His mind drifted back to nights listening to the elderly veterans of the Long March who’d fled the advance of the Nationalists, the long, circling retreat, and he wondered whether a long march of defeat awaited him, too, or whether it would be a short walk with his hands tied behind him that would end with a bullet in the back of his “Don’t move.”

The voice was low and harsh.

Old Cat grabbed for the semiautomatic in his coat pocket. Arms locked on to his.

Warm breath wafted toward him from faces inches away. Cold metal dug into his ear.