Casher laid his briefcase on the desk, then opened it and handed Wallace a draft indictment.
“This is it,” Casher said, “with all of the blanks filled in.”
Wallace flipped through the twenty pages. “It seems short, given how massive the scheme was.”
“The indictment doesn’t have to outline our entire theory of the case and every act in the conspiracy,” Casher said, “only enough to prove a single count for each defendant. We picked the most provable.”
“You’ve also named some French and German defendants.”
“We don’t want to take the whole blame.”
“But what’s our jurisdiction? They’re not U.S. citizens.”
“But they paid some of the bribes in U.S. dollars. Our currency, our jurisdiction. That’s good enough for the Supreme Court.”
Casher took it back and opened to the overt acts alleged against RAID, then turned it toward Wallace.
“You’ll see that we’ve tracked a single payment from a RAID account in Singapore to a Hong Kong law firm, and then to the offshore account of a coconspirator we’ve identified only as ‘Chinese Official One.'”
Wallace read down the page. “Who is it?”
“The vice mayor of Chengdu, Zhao Wo-li.”
“Why didn’t you name him?”
“It would make things too messy. He’s escaped the PLA encirclement of the city. We don’t want the story to become one about a massive manhunt-“
“Unless we later want to shift the blame onto the Chinese.”
Casher nodded. “We can also lessen the damage to us by orchestrating the announcement of the indictment and the replacement of the officers so they happen simultaneously.”
“I still don’t like it,” Wallace said. “I don’t like us taking the blame for other countries’ problems.” Wallace flipped the indictment closed. “But if it happens, let it not be during the few days of my watch.”
CHAPTER 62
'We’re here,” Gage said to Rahmani, sitting in the driver’s seat of his car. They were parked under an overhanging oak tree along the edge of Chestnut Hill Reservoir north of Brookline. “Now what?”
The angled parking places on either side of them were empty, save for a pickup truck idling seven spaces away, its occupant talking on his phone and turning pages in what looked to Gage to be a map book.
“We wait.” Rahmani waved his finger back and forth as though to mark the extremes of the area. “My friends are watching to make sure you weren’t followed.”
Gage withdrew his cell phone. “How do you know someone isn’t tracking me through this?”
Rahmani smiled. “I asked around. You wouldn’t let that happen.”
“Then why the bungler crack when I walked into the cafe?”
“That was Hani’s word,” Rahmani said. “It didn’t sound quite right when I repeated it.”
Two Indian men in their mid-sixties came into view walking along the wet concrete path between the car and windswept water. They squinted for a long moment at the windshield as they passed, but didn’t interrupt their conversation.
Rahmani pointed at their backs.
“Indians are much healthier than us Muslims. They walk and walk. We sit and sit.” He patted his stomach mounding up under his seat belt. “Fat as a pig without the benefit of pork.”
The buzz of his cell phone drew Rahmani’s eyes away from the men. He answered in Arabic, listened, and then hung up and said, “Let’s go.”
Rahmani started the engine, backed up, and merged onto Chestnut Hill Road. Ten minutes later, they looped through the circular driveway of the redbrick Newton City Hall, then headed north up a tree-lined street and pulled into the driveway of a gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial.
Gage recognized the address. It was Rahmani’s house. The countersurveillance effort now seemed amateurish and idiotic: Anyone who’d been watching Rahmani and had lost him would’ve sent people to his home and office to wait for him to show up.
“I have a communications system in the basement,” Rahmani said as they walked inside. “Let’s see if we can get Hani to respond.”
Rahmani led Gage into the kitchen and opened the door to the basement. He reached around the doorjamb, flipped the light switch, and said, “You first.”
Gage shook his head.
“It’s not like I’m planning to take you prisoner,” Rahmani said. “You’re not so interesting to me.”
Gage pointed at the descending wooden stairs.
Rahmani shrugged, took a couple of steps, ducked under the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and continued down. Gage’s shadow caught up to him at the bottom where Rahmani was waiting. It revealed light emerging from under another door. Rahmani opened it, but didn’t invite Gage to walk in first.
Gage stepped in behind him.
Hani Ibrahim looked over from a wheelchair parked in front of a desk at the far end of the room.
Anger mushroomed within Gage’s feeling of surprise at the unexpected discovery, and at the childish smirk with which Ibrahim greeted Gage.
“Aren’t you supposed to yell tag?” Ibrahim said.
“I didn’t think it was a game.”
“Of course it is. Money is nothing but a game.” Ibrahim pointed toward a chair at the side of his desk. “Have a seat.”
Gage shook his head. He wanted to stay positioned between Rahmani and the door.
“You’ll sit,” Rahmani said, his tone sounding less like an order and more like a declaration of a future state of affairs.
Gage looked over. Rahmani was pointing a small revolver at his chest.
“Let me have your cell phone,” Rahmani said. Gage handed it to him, then Rahmani gestured with the gun barrel toward the chair.
“Suddenly you’re looking a whole lot less like a victim,” Gage said to Ibrahim as he walked the ten feet and sat down.
Gage found himself facing a hospital bed across the room, canopied by an electric-powered patient lift. At its foot stood a small chest of drawers. A door opposite the entrance led to a bathroom.
“I was once a victim,” Ibrahim said, “but now I’m the judge and the executioner.” He looked over at Rahmani and then cocked his head toward the door. Rahmani stepped through it and locked it from the other side. “But not of people.”
Gage surveyed the blank walls and concrete floor. It was as bare and hollow as a monk’s cell.
“You a prisoner in here, too?” Gage asked, looking over at Ibrahim.
“I’ve been deprived of my liberty, as you can see, but that has little to do with my living conditions.”
“And what I’ve been trying to find out is why,” Gage said.
Ibrahim flushed. “Don’t pretend to be naive.” He pointed at the computer monitor centered on his desk. “I’ve had quite a bit of time to research you. You’re not a naive man.”
Ibrahim reached over, touched his mouse, and then pressed the page-down key. The monitor flashed with a series of news articles about Gage, many of them the same ones that Hennessy’s daughter had printed out for her mother. Following those were excerpts of transcripts of old court testimony. The last image on the screen was a twenty-year-old photograph of Orlando Ferrada, the imprisoned and tortured Chilean economist that Gage had rescued on behalf of Milton Abrams.
“I’m certain that you know who put me in this condition,” Ibrahim said, “and I’m certain that you know why.”
Gage shook his head. “I don’t know why. That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to find out.”
“It’s simple. Hennessy framed me to make himself the hero of post-9/11 America and to advance his career.”
