Benaroun’s face flushed. “But I need-“
“Rest. You need rest.” She adjusted Benaroun’s pillow, then looked at Gage and asked, “Can you return later? “
Gage rose to his feet and glanced at his watch as though he intended to suggest a time. But he knew that he wouldn’t be coming back. His flight to New York was leaving in two hours.
A siren wailed outside, its blare muted by the double-paned windows and heavy drapes.
When Gage looked back at Benaroun, he found that the exertion of his protest had drained him and he’d fallen asleep.
Gage noticed that he’d been holding his breath. He released it. At least now he wouldn’t have to lie to his friend.
CHAPTER 54
Where is he?” Gage asked as he stepped into Viz’s rented SUV next to the curb at John F. Kennedy Airport. “He should be on his way back to a Fed Governors meeting in D.C. I recruited a retired FBI friend who does executive security to stay with him.”
Viz handed Gage a new cell phone. “This will probably be good for a day or two until the bad guys catch on to it.” He then pointed at the leather attache case on Gage’s lap. “That have the stuff?”
Gage nodded. “I didn’t try the SIM or memory cards. I was afraid there might still be moisture inside.” “No problem. I’ll take care of it.” Viz turned the ignition. His headlights reflected off the limousine in front of them and enveloped it in swirling snow as if in a globe.
“What about the rest?” Viz asked as he merged into the passing traffic.
“A lot of his notebook was pulped by soaking in water, so I wasn’t able to recover much, and what I did find is so cryptic that I don’t know what to make of it. Parts of it read like the stream-of-consciousness rambling of those homeless guys who hang out in public libraries scribbling in spiral notebooks. And flowcharts, or at least pieces of them.”
Gage turned on an overhead light, and then opened the briefcase and removed a sheet of paper.
“I tried to piece them together, but there was only one box common to all.” Gage tapped it with his finger. “RGF.”
“Relative Growth Funds.”
“I assume so.”
Viz glanced over as Gage held up one of the flowcharts he’d recovered.
“And HI is Hani Ibrahim?”
“It was always in the biggest letters and always framed by an input box as though he was the mastermind behind Relative Growth Funds. But if Abrams is right, that Ibrahim’s theories were just beautiful nonsense, it can’t be true. No one could build an investment strategy on them.”
Viz smiled. “He gave me that speech a few times. Hell, I didn’t know what the uncertainty principle was, or entanglement, or fractals. I’m not sure Abrams even noticed that I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.” Viz laughed. “I understood what he said about it being impossible to predict the unpredictable only because I learned what a tautology was when I took sociology.”
“I take it he got a little excited.”
“How’d you guess?”
“Because Abrams knows that Ibrahim’s argument wasn’t just a word game, playing with definitions. Ibrahim’s argument was that what people have always considered to be unpredictable isn’t.”
“You mean that it’s predictable that I’ll get a raise once we get back to San Francisco.”
It was Gage’s turn to smile. “That depends on whether you can lead me to Davey Hicks.”
Viz looked at his watch. “That’s easy. In a couple of minutes, right after Abrams climbs out of his limousine in front of his apartment building, Hicks will drive into Central Park, pull off the road, and hide his car in a thicket. After that, he’ll layer-up like an Eskimo and sneak in among some evergreens and relieve the lookout he’s had sitting there all day-does that mean I get my raise? “
“Probably.”
“Why’s he so important?”
“I found his name in Hennessy’s notebook. Along with Anthony Gilbert’s.”
Viz’s head snapped toward Gage. “You mean Hennessy knew they were on to him? “
“But I don’t know whether he acted on the knowledge.”
Viz pointed at the flowchart. “What about the rest of the acronyms? “
“I can’t even guess what HA, CU and G12 are,” Gage said. “I think INV stands for investors and the lines are transfers of money, but I can’t be sure of that.”
Gage reached into his attache for another sheet.
“The words and phrases I found scattered among the pages, like bond derivative and strike date, were intermingled with nonsense telephone numbers and ramblings and self-accusations like ‘I’m an idiot’ or ‘I had it backward’ or ‘financial Armageddon,’ as if every time he learned something it made him doubt himself. And some were just crazy. There was half a page devoted to the sound of a motorcycle engine: buffeta-buffeta-buffeta.”
“Sounds like he’s a Honda man,” Viz said. “A Harley-Davidson guy would’ve written potato-potato- potato.”
“We’ll never find out.”
Gage turned off the overhead lamp and stared past the slow sweeping windshield wipers and through wisping snowfall at the New York skyline advancing toward them, the city lights haloed by moisture and reflecting off low clouds. He then took out his laptop to check his e-mail. The one he had been waiting for had finally arrived. He decrypted it and then read it to himself.
We’re in Chongqing. Things are calm. Mark Fong is holding on to Wo-li and Mu-rong. He said you wouldn’t mind if he made them pay their own way. I thought a snakehead would look more gangsterlike, but he made me think of Bartleby the Scrivener. He has the face of a nineteenth-century bookkeeper. I sent all of the kids home except the one with the broken leg. He suffered some swelling on the drive down and I didn’t want to risk making it worse. A doctor will give him a blood thinner for the trip. We’ll catch a flight within the next 48 hours. Love.
A new message arrived in his office e-mail folder. It was from Alex Z.
I was able to decode some of Hennessy’s telephone numbers. The first was once assigned to the University of Hydraulic amp; Electric Engineering in Yichang City in Hubei Province. The line is disconnected.
The university was merged with a couple of others in 2002 and is now called Three Gorges University. We checked their Web site and no one with the name Ibadat Ibrahim is on the faculty there.
The second number is a disconnected cell phone in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The third number is an unlisted fax machine in Beijing.
“I don’t get it,” Gage said. “The only telephone numbers I found in Hennessy’s notebook are either disconnected or a fax number.” Gage stared at the numbers. “Unless they were coded a second time. But by only one or two digits. Something Hennessy could figure out in his head.”
Gage sent an encrypted e-mail back:
Alex: See what happens if you keep increasing the last digit of each telephone number by one. Call Annie Ng and ask her to come up with a Chinese name that sounds a little like Ibadat. Maybe something like Yei bao-dai, then have her call. It may provoke Ibadat to say her name if we get a hit. It’s 8 a.m. over there now.
He then did a search on the Three Gorges University Web site, then sent an e-mail back to Faith.
Hennessy was convinced that Hani Ibrahim was murdered, and the evidence is strong, but the road leading to the answers I need will pass by his body, whether he’s dead or alive. Any chance you could fly up to Yichang and check at the Three Gorges University for his wife? Alex Z is working on some leads. Press reports are saying that things are calm there. They have a Culture Research Center in the College of Arts. Maybe you know someone from an anthropology conference.
Gage closed his laptop, then pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
“What do you think? Anyone behind us?”
