Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

Old Cat didn’t trust Shi enough to dismiss from his mind the fear that beneath the general’s observation was a threat: Cooperate with us, for we know where your friends live and where your ancestors are buried.

Shi’s softening eyes suggested that he realized that his gesture of common cause had backfired.

“I, too,” Shi said, “have climbed to the Golden Summit. It was years ago, to visit my son.” He smiled again. “Now I take the tram.”

The air around Old Cat thickened with meaning. Shi’s son must be a monk who lived on the mountain.

“What do you want from me?” Old Cat asked.

“Only what China needs from you.”

“China? There is no China in the way you mean,” Old Cat said, his voice strengthening. “There are only people pursuing money. China is merely the land on which they do it.”

Shi shook his head. “The Chengdu rebellion is evidence that you’re wrong.”

Old Cat wasn’t so sure.

“How do you know that the people aren’t motivated by greed,” Old Cat finally said. “To take from the rich and distribute it among themselves?”

“Is that your aim?”

“I don’t know what my aim is. I can’t imagine a future that’s any different from the past.” Old Cat looked hard at General Shi. “Can you?”

Shi shrugged. “We Chinese have never been good at political theory. We replicate. We pirate. Sometimes well. Sometimes badly. We are masters, not of invention, but of improvisation, of living without a past or a future, with neither a history nor a script to guide us.”

Old Cat felt rage blossom in his chest. He now understood Shi’s intentions.

“For you Chengdu is merely an experiment, like grafting a shoot onto a persimmon tree or a new heart into a dying man. If it takes, fine. If not, you’ll rip it out.”

Shi shook his head again. “It’s more than that.” He leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table. “Look what you’ve done with your courts. Look at how you’ve controlled the violence. You’ve created fair institutions in the place of corrupt ones. And did it in just days. We want to see what grows in the time it has.”

“And then?”

“We’ll find out together.”

Shi paused and gazed into Old Cat’s eyes and realized that he owed the farmer not just part of the truth, but all of it.

“But don’t think that you’ll come out of this alive,” Shi said. “I don’t see how that can happen.”

Gage nodded at Tabari, then slipped out of the hospital after Batkoun Benaroun was moved from surgery to the recovery room in Hospital St. Joseph. A platoon of retired police officers guarded the hallway. Gage wasn’t sure that any of them believed the mistaken-identity story that Tabari and the bar owner had told the detectives, but Gage knew that they were all men and women who’d spent careers suspending disbelief in the hope of eventually learning the truth. If they had any doubts, they left them unspoken.

But Gage had to ask himself whether Benaroun was the target, not himself.

Once seated at the bar of an empty cafe, Gage removed Benaroun’s blood-smeared envelope. In it was a business card-sized piece of paper with three numbers on it: B-3001, B-3020, and B-3134. The envelope itself was unmarked.

It didn’t make sense to him that these numbers could provide a motive for murder, for Benaroun could’ve passed them on to another person in a five-second telephone call or memorized them and put it into an e-mail or text message.

The waiter came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel and took Gage’s order for a cappuccino and a water.

Gage reached for his encrypted cell phone and called Alex Z.

“You set up again?” Gage asked.

“We’re running things through a series of proxy servers,” Alex Z said. “What do you need?”

“Benaroun had been trying to find out the identification numbers of the planes that have been smuggling platinum out of South Africa. I think I have them.”

Gage read them off. He heard Alex Z’s keyboard click.

“If they’re really aircraft registration numbers,” Alex Z said, “and not model or part numbers for something, then they’re all Boeing 737s owned by North China Cargo Airlines.”

“For how long?”

“A year. The first was originally owned by China Eastern… and the second… and the third by China Southern. That’s assuming the Air Registration Database is accurate.”

“I may have more information later,” Gage said. “I’ll call you back.”

Gage disconnected, now wondering whether the planes were involved in the smuggling of platinum from South Africa or were somehow connected to Hennessy and Ibrahim, or even whether they were plane registration numbers at all.

As the waiter delivered the order, Tabari walked in and climbed onto the stool next to Gage, who slid the cappuccino over to him.

“My father is with my uncle,” Tabari said. “He’ll call as soon as he wakes up.”

“When will his wife arrive? I’d like to see her.”

Tabari glanced at his watch. “Another couple of hours.”

“But I don’t want to be in the room when Batkoun comes to. In his drugged state, he may look at me and say something he shouldn’t within the hearing of people who shouldn’t hear it.”

“I thought of suggesting that,” Tabari said as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into the cappuccino, “but I was afraid I’d be misunderstood and you’d think I was blaming you for what happened.”

“One way or another,” Gage said, “I suspect that I am to blame. Either because in my preoccupation with Hennessy, I made us too easy for people watching him to follow us, or because the people who were following me in the States had caught up with me here and I hadn’t spotted them.”

They ceased speaking as the waiter passed behind them to greet two customers at the door, then Tabari said, “You want us to move around Marseilles for an hour and leave a wide scent to see if anyone follows?”

Gage thought for a moment. He didn’t like the feel of it. “I don’t want there to be two Benarouns in the ICU.”

Tabari reached up and squeezed Gage’s shoulder.

“Look on the bright side,” Tabari said, now smiling, “there could be a Gage and a Benaroun up there instead. You and my uncle could even share a room.”

Gage shook his head and smiled back. “No way. I learned when we worked together in Milan that he snores.”

“How about this,” Tabari said. “You need to get your stuff out of your hotel room anyway and-“

“And I need to go back to the bar and collect something.”

Tabari drew back. “What thing? “

“A gun that the shooter dropped. I hid it and in the rush to get your uncle to the hospital, forgot to retrieve it. Maybe you can trace it to someone or to some other crime and figure out who shot your uncle.”

Tabari narrowed his eyes at Gage. “Anything else? “

Gage changed the subject by removing Benaroun’s envelope from his pocket and handing it to Tabari.

“This may have been what they were after. I think they’re airplane registration numbers.”

Tabari’s jaw clenched and his face reddened as he looked at the numbers inside.

“I knew this would happen.” He turned and glared at Gage. “Did you-“

Gage held up his hands. “We hadn’t even talked about South Africa since we were at your uncle’s house the day before yesterday.” He lowered his arms. “I had no idea that one of his errands this morning before he picked me up had anything to do with this-and I still don’t know for certain.” He pointed at the envelope. “And he didn’t say anything about it until after he was shot.”

Tabari fell silent, then shook his head.