Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

“I take it he got a little excited.”

“How’d you guess?”

“Because Abrams knows that Ibrahim’s argument wasn’t just a word game, playing with definitions. Ibrahim’s argument was that what people have always considered to be unpredictable isn’t.”

“You mean that it’s predictable that I’ll get a raise once we get back to San Francisco.”

It was Gage’s turn to smile. “That depends on whether you can lead me to Davey Hicks.”

Viz looked at his watch. “That’s easy. In a couple of minutes, right after Abrams climbs out of his limousine in front of his apartment building, Hicks will drive into Central Park, pull off the road, and hide his car in a thicket. After that, he’ll layer-up like an Eskimo and sneak in among some evergreens and relieve the lookout he’s had sitting there all day-does that mean I get my raise? “

“Probably.”

“Why’s he so important?”

“I found his name in Hennessy’s notebook. Along with Anthony Gilbert’s.”

Viz’s head snapped toward Gage. “You mean Hennessy knew they were on to him? “

“But I don’t know whether he acted on the knowledge.”

Viz pointed at the flowchart. “What about the rest of the acronyms? “

“I can’t even guess what HA, CU and G12 are,” Gage said. “I think INV stands for investors and the lines are transfers of money, but I can’t be sure of that.”

Gage reached into his attache for another sheet.

“The words and phrases I found scattered among the pages, like bond derivative and strike date, were intermingled with nonsense telephone numbers and ramblings and self-accusations like ‘I’m an idiot’ or ‘I had it backward’ or ‘financial Armageddon,’ as if every time he learned something it made him doubt himself. And some were just crazy. There was half a page devoted to the sound of a motorcycle engine: buffeta-buffeta-buffeta.”

“Sounds like he’s a Honda man,” Viz said. “A Harley-Davidson guy would’ve written potato-potato-potato.”

“We’ll never find out.”

Gage turned off the overhead lamp and stared past the slow sweeping windshield wipers and through wisping snowfall at the New York skyline advancing toward them, the city lights haloed by moisture and reflecting off low clouds. He then took out his laptop to check his e-mail. The one he had been waiting for had finally arrived. He decrypted it and then read it to himself.

We’re in Chongqing. Things are calm. Mark Fong is holding on to Wo-li and Mu-rong. He said you wouldn’t mind if he made them pay their own way. I thought a snakehead would look more gangsterlike, but he made me think of Bartleby the Scrivener. He has the face of a nineteenth-century bookkeeper. I sent all of the kids home except the one with the broken leg. He suffered some swelling on the drive down and I didn’t want to risk making it worse. A doctor will give him a blood thinner for the trip. We’ll catch a flight within the next 48 hours. Love.

A new message arrived in his office e-mail folder. It was from Alex Z.

I was able to decode some of Hennessy’s telephone numbers. The first was once assigned to the University of Hydraulic amp; Electric Engineering in Yichang City in Hubei Province. The line is disconnected.

The university was merged with a couple of others in 2002 and is now called Three Gorges University. We checked their Web site and no one with the name Ibadat Ibrahim is on the faculty there.

The second number is a disconnected cell phone in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The third number is an unlisted fax machine in Beijing.

“I don’t get it,” Gage said. “The only telephone numbers I found in Hennessy’s notebook are either disconnected or a fax number.” Gage stared at the numbers. “Unless they were coded a second time. But by only one or two digits. Something Hennessy could figure out in his head.”

Gage sent an encrypted e-mail back:

Alex: See what happens if you keep increasing the last digit of each telephone number by one. Call Annie Ng and ask her to come up with a Chinese name that sounds a little like Ibadat. Maybe something like Yei bao-dai, then have her call. It may provoke Ibadat to say her name if we get a hit. It’s 8 a.m. over there now.

He then did a search on the Three Gorges University Web site, then sent an e-mail back to Faith.

Hennessy was convinced that Hani Ibrahim was murdered, and the evidence is strong, but the road leading to the answers I need will pass by his body, whether he’s dead or alive. Any chance you could fly up to Yichang and check at the Three Gorges University for his wife? Alex Z is working on some leads. Press reports are saying that things are calm there. They have a Culture Research Center in the College of Arts. Maybe you know someone from an anthropology conference.

Gage closed his laptop, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder.

“What do you think? Anyone behind us?”

Viz shook his head. “Can’t tell, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll lose them once I get into Manhattan.” He looked over. “That’s where you want to go, right? After Hicks?”

“I’m thinking, maybe not. If we corner Hicks and then he runs to whoever hired him, they’ll be ready for us. I’m thinking we go after somebody who’s got nobody to run to.”

“And that means?”

“Shake whoever may be tailing us, and head north.”

Why isn’t Strubb hiding out?” Viz wondered aloud as he pulled to the curb across the street and half a block away from the Jupiter Club at the edge of downtown Albany.

“Because if the police could’ve made him for the murder of Gilbert,” Gage said, “they would’ve already.”

Viz looked over at Gage. “I hope his apartment manager didn’t drop a dime on us and tell him we came looking for him.”

Gage stared ahead at the broken neon sign tacked to the brick facade of the bar, the J burned out and “upiter” flashing in red.

“He probably didn’t,” Gage said. “There’s too many people coming by looking for Strubb-probation officers and parole agents and cops-that he doesn’t bother anymore.”

Two leather-chapped men walked into the recessed entrance. Muted light flooded the shadow as they opened the door and was eclipsed as it swung closed behind them.

Opening the SUV door, Gage said, “I’ll go around to the back of the building just in case he tries to slip out that way.” He stepped down in the slush mounding up from the street and over the curb and then looked back into the cab. “On second thought, if you’re getting a raise, maybe you should be the one to chill your bones out here instead of me.”

“That’s fine with me. I’d rather do that than what you have in mind for me.” Viz smiled. “If he doesn’t come out of there in the next half hour, you’re gonna want me to go inside and dance with somebody.”

“Shoot,” Gage said, smiling back. “I was going to make that a surprise.”

Viz reached into his jacket and pulled out Hennessy’s SIM and memory card, then said, “I’ll try to do some work on these while we’re waiting.”

Gage closed the door, made his way down the sidewalk, turned left at a corner store, and then looped around to the alley. The far streetlight backlit two men smoking next to a dumpster by the rear door to the Jupiter Club. They stamped their feet as they smoked, their wool-capped heads clouded in gray swirls. Even in puff jackets they seemed too thin to be Strubb, and although wearing motorcycle boots, they seemed too short. One after the other, they flicked their cigarettes in high arcs like single streams of fireworks that exploded when they hit the rear wall of the building across the alley.

Just after the men reentered the bar, Gage angled to the other side, then worked his way along the trash cans and delivery trucks until he obtained a straight-on view of the back door through the muck-splattered passenger and driver’s windows of a cargo van.