answers about Relative Growth that those at the press conference were searching for might lie concealed before him on the table. He looked at his watch. In another twelve hours he’d know what was in there, Faith would be out of China, and he’d be on his way back to New York and to the beginning of another trailhead.
CNN cut away to the floods in Paris.
Gage turned down the sound, but left the picture on in case coverage continued. He then went into the bathroom and retrieved an electric hair dryer and then returned and focused the streaming heat on the back of the notebook.
The television screen flashed red and white with breaking news: “Mine Collapse in China.”
Gage reached for the remote and increased the volume. An earthquake aftershock in Sichuan Province had triggered the cave-in. Three hundred miners were trapped and feared crushed or asphyxiated. The satellite image on the monitor behind the announcer disappeared, replaced by a grainy and jumpy cell phone video, wives and mothers screaming and weeping on either side of the mine entrance, PLA troops using plastic shields to create barriers to hold them back. The area was gray with mist and low clouds.
It cut to young men rocking a black Land Rover, the bodies of the suited men inside jerking around, shoulders and heads smashing into the windows and against one another. Soldiers stood at the perimeter, not intervening. The SUV went up on two wheels, then back down. Up on two wheels again, then back down, bouncing and rocking when it hit the ground. Then up again on two wheels, hesitating, balancing, then slamming onto its side and mud splattering and men climbing up and stomping on the glass The image was replaced with another. An old woman, tears flowing, staring at the camera as though she knew the world was watching. The voice-over translation failing to capture the fury in her words and tone.
“They all knew… everyone knew it would collapse.” She jabbed her hand at an unseen enemy. “They forced the men to work. Work or starve. Work or die.”
Gage knew from growing up in Southern Arizona that what she really meant was: work and die. The trapped and dead were no different than the Mexican zinc and copper miners in the 1950s, paid cheap wages to keep the white workers’ wages depressed, forced to work unprotected in the dust, their union leaders beaten and murdered, those who chronicled their struggle in print and film arrested Gage reached for his cell phone.
Faith answered his question before he had a chance to ask it. “The van is on its way now.”
“And you?”
“Yes. I’m going, too.”
Gage stifled a sigh. She didn’t need to carry the burden of his worry with her as she fled.
“We’ll be traveling out by way of-“
“Stop,” Gage said, “I think my calls are being intercepted.”
Faith didn’t respond right away. Gage grasped that she was trying to think of a way to communicate something indirectly.
Finally she said, “Maybe mine are, too, but that’s just an amateur’s opinion.”
That was the expression they would use when one of them came up with an idea that would help the other in his work.
“Gotcha,” Gage said. “E-mail me when you get to an area where there’s Internet access. Use the same encryption code that we use to send our financial information.”
After Faith disconnected, Gage noticed a slight corner separation midway through Hennessy’s notebook. He walked into the kitchen and retrieved a fillet knife, then laid the book on its spine. He eased the thin blade in the opening and rocked it back and forth, separating the pages, taking care not to slice into them as he slid along the top edge. As he made the turn, he noticed the sharp-edged corner of what seemed to be a thicker square of paper inside. But as he moved the knife farther, it hit a patch of paper that had disintegrated into pulp, a border at least a quarter of an inch deep. He resisted the urge to push on and force the blade edge through it. He couldn’t take a chance that it would rip away salvageable writing. And for all he knew, it was just a baggage claim check or a train ticket.
He withdrew the point and set the knife down on the table, then once again propped the notebook up, directing the heater toward the inside and hair dryer toward the outside.
Staring at it, he was certain there was something inside that would lead him to Hani Ibrahim and to whatever it was that Hennessy wanted to tell Milton Abrams, but it wasn’t yet ready to reveal itself.
He looked down at Hennessy’s SIM and memory cards. He had less hope for them, for the circuits of both might’ve blown when the rain that soaked through Hennessy’s trench coat had shorted out his phone. And that wasn’t all. Hennessy would’ve encrypted whatever he had stored on the memory card and it might take Alex Z days to break in.
Gage wedged the hair dryer between two serving bowls, then rose and walked to the window. The last of the fishing boats were powering into the harbor, invisible except for their running lights and the winking of glass and chrome against the shore lights and flashing buoys.
Encrypted. The word echoed in his mind. Encrypt. Decrypt. Crypt. Cryptic.
He turned back and stared at the table. If the files on the memory card were encrypted, the notes on those pages would be vague and veiled, their substance concealed in a form that Hennessy would think that only he could understand. And if he had been mentally unstable, or even distraught, they’d be incomprehensible, or worse, misleading and they’d send Gage searching down a trail with no end.
CHAPTER 52
Watching water evaporate,” Gage answered Milton Abrams. His call had come in as Gage was washing his dinner dishes.
“You’re being a little cryptic,” Abrams said.
Gage crooked the phone between his neck and shoulder and dried his hands.
“I have to be for a while,” Gage said. “Is Viz around?”
“He’s in the kitchen cooking chili for lunch. You want to talk to him?”
“Just tell him I’ll call him in half a minute.”
Gage disconnected, then retrieved his encrypted cell phone from his jacket pocket.
Viz answered the first ring.
“How’s Abrams behaving?” Gage asked.
“His sex life seems to be suffering, but otherwise he’s okay.”
“Anybody show up to take Anthony Gilbert’s place?”
“Seems so. One of his gofers has taken over. Davey Hicks. He has a New York PI license, but only subcontracts for others. I learned from a guy I worked with in the DEA who’s now gone private that Hicks is a nose-to-the-ground grunt. Cash up front. No questions asked. Fired from NYPD three years ago for shooting a suspect in the back.”
“How good is he at surveillance?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ve only been going to public places so I haven’t needed to try to evade him.”
“With Gilbert out of the way, this is probably his big break.” Gage thought for a moment. “But that may depend on who hired him. It’s likely that it was Gilbert, but we don’t know for certain. He could’ve been hired by Abrams’s wife, trying to find out who he was sleeping with. The fact that she’s not talking to him doesn’t mean that she’s not watching him.”
Gage heard Abrams’s voice in the background.
“Let me talk to him,” Gage said.
“Here,” Viz said to Abrams.
“Why the Dick Tracy phone? “ Abrams asked.
“My calls are being intercepted. It could be at this end or as they pass through switching stations in the States. And Faith’s are being intercepted at her end by the PLA. She’s been helping the leader of the Chengdu uprising expose corruption in the area.”
“The one the press is calling Old Cat? “
“The PLA is using him to let a hundred thorns bloom.”
