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.”
CHAPTER 7
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.
She swung it open, but before Gage had a chance to identify himself, she said, “My mother doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
Her features were too soft for the hard look she tried to use to wall Gage off, but he didn’t try to break through it with a smile, for it seemed to be part of an honest attempt to protect her mother.
Reaching out with his business card, Gage said, “I’m a private investigator-“
“For who?” Her voice went from protective to demanding. “Who sent you?”
“Someone who was worried about your father before he died.”
She didn’t accept the card. He lowered it. Her knuckles whitened as she tightened her grip on the door.
“You mean, before he was murdered.”
Gage didn’t yet know whether that was true, but he neither wanted to challenge her nor agree with her and thereby set up a future betrayal if it wasn’t.
“That’s what the man who hired me suspected,” Gage said, “and asked me to find out.”
An older female voice called out from the interior: “Who’s at the door?”
The young woman glanced behind her and said, “A man.”
The voice rose, the tone of an exasperated mother. “What man?”
Footsteps thumped on the hardwood floor, becoming louder as they approached.
The woman who appeared at the door matched the school librarian that Alex Z had described in his e-mail. Slim. Short. Red hair tied back. She looked at Gage, then at her daughter.
“You’re right, Vicky. It’s a man.”
Vicky reddened. “I was just trying to-“
“And she did it very well,” Gage said. He smiled and handed her his card. “I may want to hire her to protect me.”
Elaine examined it as her daughter backed away. “You came all the way out here from California to talk to me?”
“Actually, I came all the way out here to talk to someone who wanted me to talk to you.”
“Who was that?”
