“We’re now not so sure about that.”
“What?” Wallace’s face flushed. “I’m the one who leaned on the FBI to bury that guy.” He thumped the table with his forefinger. “And now you’re telling me he didn’t do it? “
Casher shrugged. “Not yet. We’re pursuing a lead, but we don’t know.”
Wallace lowered his gaze and shook his head. “This is absurd.” Then he sighed and looked up again. “What do we know?”
“We know that Gage is trying to follow a trail through Hennessy to Ibrahim and from Ibrahim to Relative Growth, which Abrams thinks is a multitrillion-dollar fraud.”
“Why don’t you go after Ibrahim yourself?”
“Two reasons. First, we don’t know whether he’s still alive-some things happened to him that it’s better you don’t know about.”
Casher watched Wallace’s eyes widen. He pushed on before Wallace had a chance to form his fears into a question.
“And second, if he’s still alive, we know we’ll spook him. Gage won’t. He’s been able to get the guy who was Ibrahim’s closest friend-Rahmani, a car dealer of sorts-to talk to him when he hasn’t been willing to talk to anyone else. Same thing with Hennessy’s wife and daughter.”
When Wallace looked away and stared at the dark window, opaque but for the reflection of the kitchen against it, Casher feared that he’d dumped too much on him at once, and had provoked the paralysis he had feared.
Casher now felt sorry for the man, wondering what it must feel like to know with certainty that in a matter of hours he would be transformed by events out of his control from a mere appendix to the presidency, to the body and mind of a nation.
And Casher also thought of himself and felt a shudder of self-revelation: He’d always understood himself as a man who’d never been afraid to pull the trigger, as a marine, as a field operative, as deputy director of the CIA, and as director-but now he grasped that someone else had always loaded the gun and either ordered him, or gave him permission, to fire.
Casher found that he was staring at Wallace, wondering who would emerge from Wallace’s reverie: the corporate executive who built an international corporation, the vice president who seemed to become less and less effective over the two terms, or a man cowering in the shadow of responsibility.
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your work,” Wallace finally said, now looking back at Casher. “But have you considered bringing Gage in and grilling him about what he knows?”
Casher nodded.
“We thought about it, but he’s not the kind of guy who’d give in to grilling and we’re not the only ones who are tracking him. Not only are the Chinese intercepting his calls, but somebody-we don’t know who-has added physical surveillance. It would be tricky to haul him in without being noticed.”
“Doesn’t all that suggest that we’re not the only ones trying to use him to find out what’s going on?”
Casher thought for a moment, then said, “The problem for us and for them is that Gage travels fastest on the tiniest of trails. And we’ve lost him. Maybe the other side has, too. We don’t know.”
“Does that mean you have to sit on your hands?”
“No, we’re pursuing our own leads, but because we don’t know everything Gage knows, they may take us into a minefield.”
CHAPTER 57
You want to go after Wycovsky?” Viz asked as they drove south along the Hudson River toward Manhattan.
“I’m not sure yet,” Gage said. “I’m trying to think through the dynamics. Gilbert threatens Strubb with Wycovsky, the guy who Gilbert is afraid of. But it looks like Gilbert was also reporting to Arndt. That means that he’s probably the underling. The gofer.”
Gage withdrew his laptop from his attache case and located the law firm’s Web site. He found Wycovsky’s photo among the partners. Sitting at the far end of a conference table, the five other partners semicircled behind him, Wycovsky looking like a wolf among hounds and terriers. Gage navigated to his personal page. A ten-year gap between when he graduated from Brooklyn College and when he completed Flatbush Evening Law School.
Arndt’s page showed him to be a second-year associate with a Yale Law School degree, wireless glasses, and a haircut like a Chihuahua.
“How does an Ivy Leaguer end up taking orders from a guy like Wycovsky?” Gage asked.
“Maybe bottom of his class and lots of student loans to pay off.”
Gage returned to the home page and looked for a tab for notable cases or firm achievements or recent cases or trial wins. There was none.
Whatever kind of work they did, they didn’t want to advertise it.
“Don’t close it up,” Viz said, then reached into the console and pulled out a memory card reader. He handed it to Gage along with Hennessy’s cards. “The SIM is shot. The other one is okay. It has only one file on it, but I couldn’t open it.”
Gage plugged in the reader and copied the file onto his computer. He tried a few different programs, but none would activate the file.
“I better let the genius give it a try,” Gage said, then forwarded it to Alex Z.
Three hours later, Viz dropped Gage off two blocks away from Milton Abrams’s apartment, then drove over to Shadden Phillips amp; Wycovsky to watch for Arndt.
Gage had just finished filling Abrams in and going over Hennessy’s notebook, when Viz called.
“I spotted Arndt leaving work early. I called his office pretending to be a friend from Yale. His secretary said he had an appointment near his home in Scarsdale, then was going to work out at his club.”
“Did you get the name?”
“I played dumb and she spilled it,” Viz said. “I’ll come by and pick you up.”
Thirty minutes later, Gage was riding with Viz toward Scarsdale, and sixty minutes after that they were looking in through the storefront windows of a 24 Hour Fitness center.
Gage found it easy to spot Kenyon Arndt wiping his face with a towel as he ran on a treadmill in the middle of a line of others.
“I don’t think anyone’s face is supposed to be that red,” Viz said.
Gage nodded as he cracked a window to keep the windshield from fogging. “He’s getting into heart attack territory.”
Arndt reached up and punched at the display. A few seconds later his legs accelerated.
“Should I go in there and stop him before he kills himself?” Viz asked.
“It looks like that’s the point. With debts like Alex Z says he’s got, money from his life insurance may be the only way out for his family.”
A personal trainer wearing a club jersey and shorts walked up to Arndt and pointed at what looked to Gage to be a bruise on Arndt’s forehead, then down at the display.
Arndt stared forward, shaking his head.
She made a football referee’s timeout signal with the fingers of one hand T’d against the palm of the other and held it in front of Arndt’s face.
Arndt shook his head again, and she yanked the safety cord. Arndt’s legs slowed to a stop. He threw his towel against her chest, then turned and marched away.
“Kind of a punk,” Viz said.
“I suspect there’s a lot going on in his head that we don’t know about,” Gage said, then pointed at Arndt’s Volvo parked two spaces away, between two BMWs. “Why don’t you head on over there. When he comes out, pretend you dropped your keys in the slush.”
Viz looked over. “I guess it’s my turn for the cold job.”
“Only because he might’ve seen a photo of me, either from Davey Hicks or somewhere else, and I don’t want
