Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

Turning the phone back toward his ear, Wallace said, “Half of Chengdu is on fire. For all I know even the Spectrum distribution center has already burned. It’s not the fault of the United States government if your people over there are too busy to pick up the telephone to report to you.” He listened for a moment, then said, “I’ll have Paul contact you as soon as we have some information,” and disconnected.

“Why is he so worried?” Nichols asked. “They built the RAID plant to resist the largest earthquakes.”

Wallace shook his head. “They designed it to resist. Whether the Chinese construction company built it to those specifications is a different thing.” He spread his hands. “And at what magnitude? Even the Three Gorges Dam was built only to withstand a seven-point-zero, not an eight-point-one. At least that’s what I was told years ago by the staff of the Commerce Committee.”

Wallace rose and gazed down on Seventeenth Street, already closed to traffic in anticipation of Saturday’s anti-World Bank and International Monetary Fund demonstration. He hummed Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as he surveyed the flak-jacketed D.C. police officers posted at the corners.

Nichols heard the music in his head and recognized that neither of them knew what was really happening outside and what it meant for them or the country. He watched Wallace’s head nod in rhythm as he looked out, as if the images were melding with the words: guns, signs, and songs embodying divisions deeper than mere political disagreement.

He remembered the first time-the exact day-he’d heard the song in 1967. He’d gone to a friend’s house after school where they’d played the record on the stereo over and over, memorizing the words. His father, a police captain who was home on his day off, rose from his chair and glared at Nichols as he walked in through the front door singing:

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you’re always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away Then the man stepped out of the song, walked across the living room, and slapped his son across the face.

Nichols blinked away memory and focused again on Wallace.

“I was right when I warned RAID not to build over there,” Wallace said, then held up his hands. “So Jeshurun waxed fat and spurned the Rock of his salvation.” He lowered them again and turned back toward Nichols. “I guarantee you that Spectrum won’t call today. They couldn’t wait for me to be gone so they could go into China, and now look how they’ve been punished for it.”

Nichols cocked his head toward the reception area where the president and executive officers of the Baptist Missionary Convention waited.

Wallace smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t say that in front of the cameras. The public isn’t quite ready to face the truth without blinders on. When the time comes, they’ll rip them off themselves.” He paused in thought, then snapped his fingers. “This may be a chance for BMC to send some missionaries into China, maybe as relief workers. We should encourage RAID to take a few along when they go over to assess the damage.”

“There’s no way they’ll get visas.”

“We’ll make it a human rights issue. That way-“

“And I’m not sure we should put kids at risk. Things are only going to get worse.”

“Then that’s exactly where they need to be to do the most good. What do the Chinese say about crises creating opportunities? This is one of those times.”

Nichols tensed. Wallace’s central weakness was that he was impulsive. It was a defect Nichols had long ago discovered in the character of boys with strong but loving fathers, like Wallace’s, who forgave mistakes too easily.

“You’ll need to run it by the president’s people before you start down that road,” Nichols said, but knew Wallace wouldn’t.

The last time Wallace had shoved the president in the direction of religious freedom in China, the Chinese maneuvered him into a position where he either had to speak out in support of the anti-Christian Falun Gong or step back. He retreated and was weakened when he went to Beijing to negotiate the terms of a revised trade agreement.

“The president shouldn’t have chickened out last time,” Wallace said. “Anything that encourages instability in China helps us. Combine a hundred million landless laborers rioting in the streets and fifty million Falun Gong members lotusing in the intersections and a bunch of Tibetans and separatist Muslims bombing the power stations, and the whole government will collapse and we’ll get the kind of revolution that should’ve happened the first time.”

Wallace stepped toward the door.

“Anyway,” Wallace said, reaching for the knob, “I’m not going to push the president to do the right thing-these people are.”

Driving north through a snowstorm from New York toward Albany, Gage felt the uncertainty of Faith’s situation, but resisted calling again for fear of turning his worry into interference.

At the same time, he felt as though Milton Abrams had sent him walking on a trampoline.

“Are you asking me to find out whether Hennessy was murdered,” Gage had asked as he rose from the living room couch, “or whether Ibrahim was framed?”

“Neither, exactly. I want you to find out why the possible framing of Ibrahim became a matter of life or death for Hennessy.”

“It didn’t seem all that important to Ibrahim. He’s had nine years to proclaim his innocence, but he’s remained silent and out of sight.”

“Then maybe that’s the answer I’m looking for-assuming that he’s still alive. But I don’t think it’s the one we’ll discover.”

Gage found it hard to make out the Hudson River to his right as he looped over the thruway and headed west toward downtown. The Dunn Memorial Bridge reached into the gray nothingness, looking more like a pier than a span. Only the creeping headlights emerging from the swirling fog confirmed that it was attached to the opposite bank. From there on he let the rental car’s GPS guide him through the blurred intersections to the Adirondack Plaza Hotel along State Street, a few blocks from the capitol.

After checking in, he called his assistant, Alex Z, at the firm’s office in San Francisco. He smiled to himself as he pictured the wild-haired, multitattooed Alex Z perched at his cockpit of a desk, surrounded by computers and monitors, trolling cyberspace for information that allowed Gage and the twenty other investigators in his firm to triangulate their position inside the cases they worked.

“Court records in Albany show that Elaine divorced Hennessy five years ago,” Alex Z said. “She got the house and half his retirement. He got joint custody of the kids, but I don’t think that meant that much in the long run because they were already in their mid-teens.”

“Was it contested?”

“At the start, but he caved in before they got into the juicy details of exactly what their differences were and what made them irreconcilable.”

“How about making a pretext call to the house to see if she’s there. Pretend to be a pollster. Run it through a New York number so she’ll think it’s local.”

“No problem and I’ll hit you with an e-mail of everything I’ve found out about them.”

During the following hour, Gage tried to construct a living human out of the papier-mache of Alex Z’s research, then drove west and walked up the concrete steps to a century-old brick Craftsman two blocks from the frozen Washington Park Lake in the center of town. He was wearing a suit, but left his overcoat in the car, playing the odds that she might let him into the house if only to get him out of the cold-but first he’d have to get past a young woman peeking out from the near edge of the living room drapes as he raised his hand to knock on the door.