Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

Faith answered his question before he had a chance to ask it. “The van is on its way now.”

“And you?”

“Yes. I’m going, too.”

Gage stifled a sigh. She didn’t need to carry the burden of his worry with her as she fled.

“We’ll be traveling out by way of-“

“Stop,” Gage said, “I think my calls are being intercepted.”

Faith didn’t respond right away. Gage grasped that she was trying to think of a way to communicate something indirectly.

Finally she said, “Maybe mine are, too, but that’s just an amateur’s opinion.”

That was the expression they would use when one of them came up with an idea that would help the other in his work.

“Gotcha,” Gage said. “E-mail me when you get to an area where there’s Internet access. Use the same encryption code that we use to send our financial information.”

After Faith disconnected, Gage noticed a slight corner separation midway through Hennessy’s notebook. He walked into the kitchen and retrieved a fillet knife, then laid the book on its spine. He eased the thin blade in the opening and rocked it back and forth, separating the pages, taking care not to slice into them as he slid along the top edge. As he made the turn, he noticed the sharp-edged corner of what seemed to be a thicker square of paper inside. But as he moved the knife farther, it hit a patch of paper that had disintegrated into pulp, a border at least a quarter of an inch deep. He resisted the urge to push on and force the blade edge through it. He couldn’t take a chance that it would rip away salvageable writing. And for all he knew, it was just a baggage claim check or a train ticket.

He withdrew the point and set the knife down on the table, then once again propped the notebook up, directing the heater toward the inside and hair dryer toward the outside.

Staring at it, he was certain there was something inside that would lead him to Hani Ibrahim and to whatever it was that Hennessy wanted to tell Milton Abrams, but it wasn’t yet ready to reveal itself.

He looked down at Hennessy’s SIM and memory cards. He had less hope for them, for the circuits of both might’ve blown when the rain that soaked through Hennessy’s trench coat had shorted out his phone. And that wasn’t all. Hennessy would’ve encrypted whatever he had stored on the memory card and it might take Alex Z days to break in.

Gage wedged the hair dryer between two serving bowls, then rose and walked to the window. The last of the fishing boats were powering into the harbor, invisible except for their running lights and the winking of glass and chrome against the shore lights and flashing buoys.

Encrypted. The word echoed in his mind. Encrypt. Decrypt. Crypt. Cryptic.

He turned back and stared at the table. If the files on the memory card were encrypted, the notes on those pages would be vague and veiled, their substance concealed in a form that Hennessy would think that only he could understand. And if he had been mentally unstable, or even distraught, they’d be incomprehensible, or worse, misleading and they’d send Gage searching down a trail with no end.

Watching water evaporate,” Gage answered Milton Abrams. His call had come in as Gage was washing his dinner dishes.

“You’re being a little cryptic,” Abrams said.

Gage crooked the phone between his neck and shoulder and dried his hands.

“I have to be for a while,” Gage said. “Is Viz around?”

“He’s in the kitchen cooking chili for lunch. You want to talk to him?”

“Just tell him I’ll call him in half a minute.”

Gage disconnected, then retrieved his encrypted cell phone from his jacket pocket.

Viz answered the first ring.

“How’s Abrams behaving?” Gage asked.

“His sex life seems to be suffering, but otherwise he’s okay.”

“Anybody show up to take Anthony Gilbert’s place?”

“Seems so. One of his gofers has taken over. Davey Hicks. He has a New York PI license, but only subcontracts for others. I learned from a guy I worked with in the DEA who’s now gone private that Hicks is a nose-to-the-ground grunt. Cash up front. No questions asked. Fired from NYPD three years ago for shooting a suspect in the back.”

“How good is he at surveillance?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ve only been going to public places so I haven’t needed to try to evade him.”

“With Gilbert out of the way, this is probably his big break.” Gage thought for a moment. “But that may depend on who hired him. It’s likely that it was Gilbert, but we don’t know for certain. He could’ve been hired by Abrams’s wife, trying to find out who he was sleeping with. The fact that she’s not talking to him doesn’t mean that she’s not watching him.”

Gage heard Abrams’s voice in the background.

“Let me talk to him,” Gage said.

“Here,” Viz said to Abrams.

“Why the Dick Tracy phone? “ Abrams asked.

“My calls are being intercepted. It could be at this end or as they pass through switching stations in the States. And Faith’s are being intercepted at her end by the PLA. She’s been helping the leader of the Chengdu uprising expose corruption in the area.”

“The one the press is calling Old Cat? “

“The PLA is using him to let a hundred thorns bloom.”

“Now it makes sense,” Abrams said. “I get it.”

“Now what makes sense?”

“I got a call from CIA Director Casher yesterday. He’d also called the vice president and the secretary of state saying we may want to respond to the big Chinese media blitz at the Davos World Economic Forum this week, accusing the U.S. of trying to undermine their economy. He’s calling it their Whine, with a ‘wh,’ and Dine Strategy.”

Gage now wondered whether it was the CIA that was intercepting Faith’s calls and if they’d gotten on to her because they’d been listening in on him. He stared out of the kitchen window at telephone and power lines illuminated by a streetlight and swaying in the breeze, and imagined the air around him crisscrossed with signals, some intersecting, some dodging and bending and fighting off attacks.

“I don’t think it’s entirely whine,” Gage said. “We’ve gathered almost enough information to get the CEOs of RAID and Spectrum and a dozen others indicted for violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and I suspect the CIA has filled in the empty boxes on our flowchart.”

“With the underlying threat that we better make some trade concessions or they’ll start painting bull’s-eyes on all of the corporate heads in the U.S.”

“And Europe.”

“If they start naming names and banks and accounts and amounts,” Abrams said, “the Hong Kong stock market will crash the next morning, followed by the rest of the exchanges one time zone at a time.”

“I take it that Casher didn’t mention that part.”

“No. He just said to stand by for an update.”

“Why was he talking to Wallace instead of the president?”

“I wondered the same thing, then I saw on the news that today is the president’s annual physical. After that he’ll be exercising with schoolkids and then giving a speech announcing a new commission on obesity.” Abrams snorted. “If I was him I’d worry more about our gorging on debt rather than our gorging on fried chicken.”

Gage didn’t respond. He wasn’t in the mood for either an economic tirade or sarcasm, not with Batkoun Benaroun lying in a Marseilles hospital with a bullet lodged next to his spine, the latest in a trail of casualties that might lead to Abrams’s doorstep.

Might lead.

Now Gage wasn’t so certain. He looked through the kitchen door at the dining room table. Only then did he hear the hum of the heater and the hair dryer.