Steven Gore: Absolute Risk

“And giving the Middle East the top position?”

“That was the implication.”

“That could’ve been religious rather than political,” Gage said. “Islam is transnational.”

“Except that Mecca is Mecca, the center of the Islamic solar system.” Abrams paused again and then shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. Later he asked me why the Middle East is called the Middle East. Middle of what? East of what? Why not west? If anywhere can be the center of the universe, there’s no scientific reason why it should’ve been England that made itself the reference point and then named the parts of the world. He seemedto be saying that the West’s deciding on what the regions of the earth were called was a form of cultural imperialism.”

“Somehow I don’t expect to see that argument on a jihadist Web site,” Gage said, “along with a map on which north is west and east is south.”

“And he was in no way anti-Semitic. I would’ve known it, felt it. To him, no one in the economics department was anything more than a brain on legs. Smart or dumb, not Jewish or Muslim.”

Gage searched through the folder until he found Ibrahim’s indictment and read over the “overt acts” section.

“This is pretty vague,” Gage said. “It doesn’t detail exactly what he did.”

Abrams pointed at a tab in the middle of the folder. “You’ll find an excerpt from a congressional hearing in which the U.S. Attorney said that disclosing the details of the scheme would endanger national security because others would be able to imitate it.”

“That’s silly,” Gage looked up at Abrams. “Anybody who participated in setting it up would know how to replicate it. It’s only the American public that was denied the information.”

“That embargo may be the reason Hennessy didn’t go to the press or spill everything in a blog. He would’ve had to ask the FBI for permission, they’d have refused and threatened him with jail. Maybe they would’ve even held him incommunicado like they did with that spy Aldridge Ames.”

“If it was important enough,” Gage said, “he could’ve taken the risk, published it, and hoped a jury would see it his way. He wouldn’t be the first whistle-blower that went that route.”

Gage closed the folder and then asked, “Did you talk to him on the day you were supposed to meet?”

Abrams shook his head. “Those conferences are mobbed with intelligence agents, both government and private. He didn’t want to take a chance of the call being intercepted or of either of us being spotted.”

“Then how did you confirm the meeting?”

“He said that he would put himself in a position to watch the procession of limousines traveling from the Old Stock Exchange to the French president’s dinner. I told him that if I could get away, I’d break off at the meridian at the east end of the Vieux Port. I assume he was posted there watching, waiting for me to drive by, planning to grab a taxi and follow me to the restaurant.”

Abrams paused and his eyes clouded with distant thoughts. Finally, he said, “I know it sounds melodramatic-maybe spawned by the mystery of his death-but I have a really creepy feeling that if Hennessy had lived long enough to meet me, I’d now be dead, too.”

Faith Gage awoke in darkness to Mount Qingcheng quaking beneath her. Dishes shattered against the kitchen linoleum. Bottles exploded against bathroom tile. The metal lamp on the nightstand next to her thunked as it rocked. She grabbed for it, but it spun off and crashed on the floor.

Her mental Richter scale told her that the earthquake was in the sevens or eights, and exponentially higher than anything she’d felt at home in California. A hundred times, maybe two hundred.

A distant rumble grew into an avalanche of sound. She imagined the muddy hillside behind her three-room bungalow sliding down and submerging the village around her, and then the distant dam cracking and rupturing under the pressure of the reservoir’s water and sweeping the three thousand villagers down into the farms and fields of the Chengdu valley.

She rolled to the floor and felt around for her cell phone. Her fingers bumped against it. She gripped it in her hand and then pressed herself against the cinder-block wall and edged her way toward the front door.

Another ground shake jolted the house. She heard the pop of mortar bursting from between the brick and the wood-framed windows. She reached for the doorknob and turned and pulled, but the door was stuck, jammed in place by the fractured walls. Another shake and a twisting window shattered to her right. She reached for a broom and knocked out the remaining glass, then climbed onto a chair and out into the moonlit night.

Swirling smoke and dust and screams in Mandarin met her on the packed dirt front yard. She ran past the collapsed fish and vegetable markets toward the students’ bungalow down the road. She imagined carp gasping and thrashing on concrete floors that were now barbed with the glass of their shattered tanks. She cringed as she approached the house. The clay-tiled roof had fractured and angled down into the living room to the right of the front door.

The earth shook again. An exploding flash of yellow and orange lit the far end of the street, rising upward like an erupting volcano. Then a bang. Sight before sound. Another flash, then another bang.

Flash, then bang, bang, bang.

It took her a moment to realize that they were propane tanks igniting, the town’s gas supply shop now transformed into a weapons dump. She could see figures running toward her in the distance, backlit by flames rising in a firestorm.

She pushed on the door of the students’ house, now strobe lit by the distant explosions, then kicked at it until it gave an inch. Someone pulled from the other side and it scraped open. She called out the students’ names as she entered, taking attendance of the living.

A flashlight beam shot through the dust from the left bedroom, then swept side to side in the hallway.

A male voice yelled Faith’s name, then said, “In here. We’re in here,” followed by coughing and stumbling and moaning.

Another explosion outside lit up the room long enough for her to push aside an upended chair and to skirt around the dining table. As she felt her way toward the bedroom door, shafts of light appeared from behind her and boots sounded on the concrete floor.

A soldier from the garrison who’d been assigned to watch them since their arrival came up behind her and shined his lantern into the bedroom. They stepped inside, then helped a student to his feet and lifted the top bunk off the bottom one on which it had collapsed. A male student lay there, blood oozing from a gash in his forehead. He reached out so Faith could help him up, but she lowered his hand and held him down. Shock had concealed from him that his shinbone had been broken by the falling bed frame.

“Don’t move,” Faith said to him, and then to the soldier in Mandarin, “We’ll use the bunk as a stretcher to carry him outside.”

The three women staggered out of the other bedroom and Faith guided them to the front door. A second soldier followed her back inside. As Faith cleared a path, he helped the first ease the narrow bed through the doorway, and then out the front door and away from the house.

Under the light of flames rising at the end of the street, the pavement looked to Faith like a dry riverbed, winding through stone and rubble, with the collapsed houses and stores along its banks defining its course.

Faith heard villagers’ wails rise up around her, some in pain, others in grief. The flattened warehouse across the street opened a view of fires burning in Chengdu City, spreading to the east from the base of the mountain. With eleven million victims on the plain below, she knew that her village would be the last to receive help. They might be on their own not just for days, but for weeks.