then struggled to his knees and fingered the wet ground around him to discern whether anything had fallen from his pockets. After finding nothing, he rose and leaned against a pine and wiped his hands on its needles. He couldn’t risk another fall, so he covered his eyes with his palms and tried to force them to adjust to the dark.
His heavy breath drew in the smell of resin, bringing back memories of where his journey had begun almost a decade earlier, hiding in the Fisher Hill woods in Brookline, Massachusetts, watching his target and the men gathering around him, the professor’s house seeming more like a mosque than a home, and the special agent in charge encouraging him, pressuring him, whispering in his ear, “Get this guy. It’ll make your career.”
When Hennessy opened his eyes again, the blackness around him had grayed and a route reappeared.
A rush of vertigo shook him as he looked down. He grabbed the pine again to steady himself. When it passed, he descended, hoping to arrive on the street below near where he’d parked his car.
Twenty yards farther down, he emerged into a meadow. He covered one eye to protect its night vision, and looked over his shoulder at the glowing Madonna statue. He used it to approximate a path and then angled to his left until he reached the edge of the pavement. He crouched behind a bush and peeked out; first left, then right. A cat hissed at the darkness between him and his car twenty yards away. His body realized his miscalculation before his mind, and it pulled him back. Someone was lying in wait.
Hennessy scanned the rooftop at the near end of the three-story apartment building across the road. A light blinked. Movement against the bright city. He made out the silhouette of a raised head. It rotated like a periscope and then lowered.
The hourglass again began to drain. Thirty minutes left. It was a twenty-five-minute drive and now no car to take him. The nearest taxi would be on Boulevard Notre Dame, two blocks away, but the shortest route wasn’t a straight line. Instead, it was a looping route through woods that would take him only to a connecting street.
Rushed and panicked by the clash of time and distance, he stripped off his trench coat, balled it up, and jammed it into a shrub. Even if it wasn’t muddy, it would’ve served as a bull’s-eye, for it had been his uniform during the last frozen weeks.
He paralleled the curving street, then slipped into the trees on the opposite side and followed a path behind the buildings. Lights cast from the windows above him made a twisted chessboard of the uneven trail. His ankles wobbled and his wrenched back ached. He steadied himself for a few seconds against a stucco wall, then pushed himself forward.
Against the background of kitchen noises and televisions and the distant rumble of traffic, Hennessy heard a couple arguing in Arabic. It seemed to echo, not off other buildings, but rather from across the reflecting surface of the Mediterranean, from Algiers, where he’d spent ten days looking for Ibrahim.
The voices jerked his thoughts out of the present, and for a moment he felt the vertigo of waking up in a hotel room and not knowing what country he was in. Then the mirrored images of the two cities triangulated his position; not fixed, but seeming to move in pace with a receding mirage.
He paused and listened for footsteps behind him, thinking how close he thought he’d come to finding Ibrahim in Algiers, only to discover that he’d followed a false scent, one that had taken him through merchant-mobbed streets and burrowlike alleys, and finally out to the universities in Ben Aknoun, El-Biar, and Bouzareah. Days spent watching the entrances to the faculties of economics, only to be met with the emptiness of failure.
Even now, as he readied himself to emerge from the shadows, he didn’t know who’d dragged that scent through that city, only that it had vanished like windblown smoke.
He glanced at his watch and then shielded his eyes as he stepped into the glare of the light-polished street to hail a cab. A quivering in his chest upwelled into a surge of self-doubt, and with it the dread that the scent he’d followed had been of his own manufacture and that it would now lead him, if not into the crosshairs of an unknown enemy, into an abyss of his own design.
CHAPTER 1
San Francisco private investigator Graham Gage handed his Rollaboard to the chauffeur, and then climbed into the backseat of the Town Car stopped at the slick and frozen curb in front of terminal one at John F. Kennedy Airport.
“Thanks for coming out,” Federal Reserve Chairman Milton Abrams said, the words emerging as a sigh. “Sorry I was so cryptic on the phone. The flight must’ve felt like a red-eye into the unknown.” Abrams made a show of surveying the solid shoulders on Gage’s six-foot-two frame. “And a cramped one at that.”
Gage inspected Abrams’s face. He found it difficult to make out beneath the lined and sagging flesh the academic who’d first sought him out two decades earlier. Back then, as an assistant professor of finance at MIT, Abrams had viewed economics as a form of play, mathematics as a form of poetry, and algorithms as a form of magic. While his days had been spent in intellectual combat and in a struggle for mainframe time, he celebrated his nights in a dream world of weightless possibilities and of ambition without responsibility.
But that game had come to an end six months earlier, with his appointment by the president and his confirmation by the Senate. Now he resided in a nightless world of twenty-four-hour securities markets and currency speculation, of war and terrorism, of human-made and natural disasters, all of which bore down on him at subatomic speed and seemed to have etched away his youth.
As the car accelerated away from the curb, Gage glanced out of the window at the line of just-arrived passengers standing in the taxi queue, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, stark and brilliant in a blue sky that had been unmasked by the overnight passing of a January blizzard.
“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Abrams said. “If the press finds out, I’ll look like an utter lunatic.”
“I’m not sure they’re paying attention to Michael Hennessy anymore,” Gage said, looking over. “He was at the center of only a single news cycle. It was pretty small in diameter and it’s already a week old.”
The only coverage of Hennessy’s death that Gage had found was a local story in Metro Marseilles and in Hennessy’s hometown paper: Former FBI agent found dead. Suicide suspected.
In the Albany Times Union, the special agent in charge had referred to Hennessy’s life as a train wreck that they’d been helpless to stop. It seemed to Gage that he wasn’t at all grief-stricken by the tragedy. His tone had suggested a kind of relief, as though a disturbing episode for Hennessy, for the Bureau, and perhaps for Hennessy’s family, had come to an end.
Abrams mumbled what sounded to Gage like lines from a poem as they drove from the airport grounds and onto the Van Wyck Expressway toward Manhattan.
“Was that intended for me?” Gage asked.
Abrams half smiled and repeated the words. Gage recognized their source in the Old Testament:
” I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you… So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea.”
“Which means that you don’t believe Michael Hennessy killed himself,” Gage said.
Abrams shook his head. “No one works as hard as he did to convince me to meet with him, only to devise a creative way to do himself in.”
Gage had seen too many people flinch or pivot or self-destruct just short of their goal to find the argument convincing. Humans didn’t run on a track like the Staten Island Railway. Decades as a police officer and as a private investigator had taught him that humans were a maze of intersecting thoughts, motives, and fears, any one of which could lead them into the abyss of a life not worth living and then over the edge toward homicide or suicide.
“After Hennessy first contacted me,” Abrams said. “I called the deputy director of the FBI. He told me that Hennessy had been fired because they considered him obsessed and delusional.”
“Then why’d you agree to meet with him? “
“It was something my assistant said. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and did her economics dissertation on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. She told me that delusional people chase phantoms around inside their own heads or within their own neighborhoods, they don’t pursue them overseas. And the first time Hennessy called he said he was in China.”
Gage shrugged. “Unless believing he was there was part of his delusion.”
Abrams shook his head. “Evidence showed up on my cell phone bill as an incoming call from a local Shanghai
