officials who are responsible for the school and hospital collapses and the undrinkable water and the birth defects and rampant cancers, but in the Chinese way, it’s only a matter of time before they take revenge against the barbarian invaders.”
“If it wasn’t the mob, then who burned down RAID? Environmental terrorists? Falun Gong? The ghost of Chiang Kai-shek? Who?”
“We don’t know yet, and perhaps we never will. Whoever did it used the chaos that followed the earthquake to disguise who they were, otherwise they would’ve announced something on the Internet.”
“We need to lean on the CIA. What are they for, if not to find out who’s attacking American economic interests? If it happened to a Chinese factory in Nigeria you bet your ass the Chinese intelligence service would be on it.”
“I’ll make a call and see what resources they can put into it,” Nichols said, “but I wouldn’t count on getting definitive results very soon. They’re stretched pretty thin.”
“Then maybe what I need to propose as part of my presidential campaign is that we establish a financial security agency, modeled on the NSA.”
“Not a bad idea. Just make sure you figure out a way to control it better than anyone has been able to control the CIA.”
“Don’t worry, that’ll be on my agenda. For now, lean on them as hard as you can. If you’re not getting anywhere, then send the director to me and I’ll take care of it.”
CHAPTER 21
Finding out whether Relative Growth is a Ponzi scheme is worth the risk,” Gage told Abrams before catching a flight to Boston. “The consequences of not learning the truth could be devastating. If it means locating Hani Ibrahim in order to do it, then let’s give it a try.”
Gage had decided not to tell Abrams that Tony Gilbert was the person that Strubb claimed had hired him. He’d diverted Abrams’s attention away from the television by suggesting that he travel up to Boston to try to retrace Hennessy’s steps from when he first began investigating Ibrahim and try to discover what he learned about the professor and his connection to Relative Growth.
Abrams had finally agreed and gave Gage a debit card that drew on a Federal Reserve bank account to cover his expenses. In order to disguise the trail back to Abrams, Gage decided to use his own and replenish it with the Fed card once the work was done.
The storm that had swept through New York confronted Gage as he drove his rental car from Boston’s Logan Airport toward Back Bay. And by the time he’d reached the Harvard Bridge, he was once again in the midst of a blizzard and in the hands of his GPS. It got him to Memorial Drive along the Charles River and to the front of the Sloan School of Management where Hani Ibrahim had his office when he was on the faculty of MIT during the five years before his arrest.
Professor Goldie Goldstein looked up from behind her desk in the Institute for Islamic Finance when Gage’s knuckles rapped on her open door. She blinked and smiled, and then made a show of rubbing her eyes.
“I must be dreaming. For a second I thought you were Graham Gage, but he doesn’t have that much gray hair.”
Gage smiled back. “He does now.”
Goldie came from behind her desk. Gage met her halfway and gave her a hug. She glanced toward the hallway as they separated.
“No Faith?”
Goldie knew Faith even better than she did Gage. They’d worked together on the Agunah Project to help Orthodox Jewish women reclaim their right to remarry after having been abandoned by husbands who had refused to divorce them. Faith had raised money to help Goldie’s successful attempt to get legislation passed in her home country of Israel.
“She’s in China.”
“Anywhere near-”
“West of Chengdu. But she’s okay. She’s waiting until things settle down before she comes home.”
Goldie took Gage’s coat, then directed him to one of the two chairs facing her desk and then sat in the other.
“You should’ve called ahead,” Goldie said. “My grandson is in town so tonight I’m making noodle kugel with raisins, and tzimmes with potatoes and pineapple.”
“I was just passing through, so I-”
She flashed her palms at him. “Don’t lie to an old lady. You’re up to some kind of cloak-and-dagger and you figured that a busybody like me would know something.”
Gage smiled and shrugged.
“And you want to use me as cover or maybe to help you aim the blade.”
“Was that a question?” Gage asked. Goldie nodded.
“Then how about I’ll answer with someone’s name and you tell me if I’ve come to the right place.”
“Shoot.”
“Hani Ibrahim.”
Goldie jerked to the side as if dodging a blow. “Sheesh. I didn’t see that coming.”
“I’m trying to find out what he was up to.”
“You and everyone else who worked with him, or even brushed his shoulder. Terrorist financing wasn’t something anyone expected would show up on his resume. No one even thought he had an interest in offshore transactions. His head was always in a dimension of the universe that was invisible to the rest of us.”
She reached over to her bookshelf and pulled out an academic journal from her collection and opened it to the table of contents.
“This is that last paper he published.”
Gage read the article title, “String Theory and the Structure of Financial Entanglement,” and then asked, “And that means…”
“It was part of his effort to apply the latest and greatest from the world of physics to financial modeling. Quantum mechanics and all that. The problem was that he painted himself into a corner.” Goldie grinned. “Only portfolio managers had a use for it, but only physicists could understand the math.”
She gestured toward the floors above.
“Even the Newtonian Efficient Market Nobel Prize winners upstairs couldn’t make much sense out of it, but then again, they had a vested interest in pretending they didn’t. The implication of Ibrahim’s work was that everything they’d built their careers on was an intellectual fraud.”
She lowered her hand and spread her arms.
“There was much joy in the corridors of Sloan Hall when he was led out of here in handcuffs.”
She leaned in toward Gage and whispered, “He was right though. What they do up there is dreck, complete and utter bullshit. Intellectual compost.”
Gage sniffed the air. “I don’t smell it.”
“That’s because hot air rises. You’re safe down here. Islamic finance has no need for derivatives, no matter how stringed and entangled. Sharia law requires hard cash.”
“I’m thinking that if Ibrahim was an Islamic radical,” Gage said, “whatever financial gimmick he used had to be something that Muslims would be comfortable investing in.”
“You mean separate from whether or not they knew the money would end up in the hands of terrorists.” Goldie frowned. “Unless they knew the whole thing was a sham from the beginning. After all, jihadist ends can be used to justify nonjihadist means.”
“Except I don’t think that any of the investors were charged with terrorist financing,” Gage said. “I suspect they thought that it was a legitimate investment, or at least made a convincing argument to the prosecutor that they thought it was legitimate.”
Goldie nodded, and then said, “And you want sly little me to explain to you what the argument was.”
