“If it was important enough,” Gage said, “he could’ve taken the risk, published it, and hoped a jury would see it his way. He wouldn’t be the first whistle-blower that went that route.”
Gage closed the folder and then asked, “Did you talk to him on the day you were supposed to meet?”
Abrams shook his head. “Those conferences are mobbed with intelligence agents, both government and private. He didn’t want to take a chance of the call being intercepted or of either of us being spotted.”
“Then how did you confirm the meeting?”
“He said that he would put himself in a position to watch the procession of limousines traveling from the Old Stock Exchange to the French president’s dinner. I told him that if I could get away, I’d break off at the meridian at the east end of the Vieux Port. I assume he was posted there watching, waiting for me to drive by, planning to grab a taxi and follow me to the restaurant.”
Abrams paused and his eyes clouded with distant thoughts. Finally, he said, “I know it sounds melodramatic-maybe spawned by the mystery of his death-but I have a really creepy feeling that if Hennessy had lived long enough to meet me, I’d now be dead, too.”
CHAPTER 4
Faith Gage awoke in darkness to Mount Qingcheng quaking beneath her. Dishes shattered against the kitchen linoleum. Bottles exploded against bathroom tile. The metal lamp on the nightstand next to her thunked as it rocked. She grabbed for it, but it spun off and crashed on the floor.
Her mental Richter scale told her that the earthquake was in the sevens or eights, and exponentially higher than anything she’d felt at home in California. A hundred times, maybe two hundred.
A distant rumble grew into an avalanche of sound. She imagined the muddy hillside behind her three-room bungalow sliding down and submerging the village around her, and then the distant dam cracking and rupturing under the pressure of the reservoir’s water and sweeping the three thousand villagers down into the farms and fields of the Chengdu valley.
She rolled to the floor and felt around for her cell phone. Her fingers bumped against it. She gripped it in her hand and then pressed herself against the cinder-block wall and edged her way toward the front door.
Another ground shake jolted the house. She heard the pop of mortar bursting from between the brick and the wood-framed windows. She reached for the doorknob and turned and pulled, but the door was stuck, jammed in place by the fractured walls. Another shake and a twisting window shattered to her right. She reached for a broom and knocked out the remaining glass, then climbed onto a chair and out into the moonlit night.
Swirling smoke and dust and screams in Mandarin met her on the packed dirt front yard. She ran past the collapsed fish and vegetable markets toward the students’ bungalow down the road. She imagined carp gasping and thrashing on concrete floors that were now barbed with the glass of their shattered tanks. She cringed as she approached the house. The clay-tiled roof had fractured and angled down into the living room to the right of the front door.
The earth shook again. An exploding flash of yellow and orange lit the far end of the street, rising upward like an erupting volcano. Then a bang. Sight before sound. Another flash, then another bang.
Flash, then bang, bang, bang.
It took her a moment to realize that they were propane tanks igniting, the town’s gas supply shop now transformed into a weapons dump. She could see figures running toward her in the distance, backlit by flames rising in a firestorm.
She pushed on the door of the students’ house, now strobe lit by the distant explosions, then kicked at it until it gave an inch. Someone pulled from the other side and it scraped open. She called out the students’ names as she entered, taking attendance of the living.
A flashlight beam shot through the dust from the left bedroom, then swept side to side in the hallway.
A male voice yelled Faith’s name, then said, “In here. We’re in here,” followed by coughing and stumbling and moaning.
Another explosion outside lit up the room long enough for her to push aside an upended chair and to skirt around the dining table. As she felt her way toward the bedroom door, shafts of light appeared from behind her and boots sounded on the concrete floor.
A soldier from the garrison who’d been assigned to watch them since their arrival came up behind her and shined his lantern into the bedroom. They stepped inside, then helped a student to his feet and lifted the top bunk off the bottom one on which it had collapsed. A male student lay there, blood oozing from a gash in his forehead. He reached out so Faith could help him up, but she lowered his hand and held him down. Shock had concealed from him that his shinbone had been broken by the falling bed frame.
“Don’t move,” Faith said to him, and then to the soldier in Mandarin, “We’ll use the bunk as a stretcher to carry him outside.”
The three women staggered out of the other bedroom and Faith guided them to the front door. A second soldier followed her back inside. As Faith cleared a path, he helped the first ease the narrow bed through the doorway, and then out the front door and away from the house.
Under the light of flames rising at the end of the street, the pavement looked to Faith like a dry riverbed, winding through stone and rubble, with the collapsed houses and stores along its banks defining its course.
Faith heard villagers’ wails rise up around her, some in pain, others in grief. The flattened warehouse across the street opened a view of fires burning in Chengdu City, spreading to the east from the base of the mountain. With eleven million victims on the plain below, she knew that her village would be the last to receive help. They might be on their own not just for days, but for weeks.
Only then did Faith feel the subfreezing cold and she turned back toward her house. The motion of an elderly neighbor crawling through the dust caught her eye as she approached. She ran over and helped her up, and then steadied her with an arm around her shoulders.
The woman gazed through the swirling dust at the shambles of brick and board that used to be her house and then shook her head and whispered, ” Tian ming. Tian ming.”
The mandate of heaven.
Faith felt a chill shudder through the old woman’s body. She sat the woman down on a low wall and ran back inside her own house and put on a coat. She pulled the blanket from her bed and grabbed sheepskin slippers, then returned to the woman, wrapped the blanket around her shoulders, and slid the slippers onto her feet.
By the time Faith returned to the students’ bungalow, they had bandaged the injured boy’s head and stabilized his leg.
Faith turned away and pressed a button on her mobile phone. The screen lit up. She saw there was a faint signal, and redialed the last call.
CHAPTER 5
Gage smiled when he saw the number appear on his ringing cell phone, and then calculated the time difference. His smile died. It was long past midnight in China.
He connected and asked, “Are you all right?”
Milton Abrams looked over at Gage from across the kitchen table.
“Fine. The kids, too. There was an earthquake. Just a few minutes ago. What phone circuits are left will be jammed in a few minutes, so I thought I better call.”
Gage pointed at Abrams, then at the television on the counter.
“How bad?” Gage asked.
Abrams grabbed the remote and turned it on. It was tuned to CNBC.
“Huge. The worst I’ve ever seen. I can see fires spreading in Chengdu valley. But I think we can hold out for a while. There’s an army garrison nearby.”
“I’ll contact the consulate in Chengdu and let them know you’re all right,” Gage said, “and see what they can
