Absolute Risk Read Free Page A

description, but I’m sure it doesn’t include rectifying nine-year-old presumed wrongs committed by the Justice Department.”
    “That assumes that I was Hennessy’s first choice.” Abrams glanced back at Gage. “I wasn’t. He’d already tried the CIA and the head of the European Central Bank and who knows who else. They all turned him away after recommending that he have his head examined. That’s why he wanted to meet with me. He wanted to prove by his manner and his presentation that he wasn’t crazy. He saw on the news that I’d be in Marseilles for a central bankers’ meeting, and called me at home one night and—“
    “How did he get your number?”
    Abrams shrugged again. “I don’t know. Other than my assistant, only the secretary of the treasury and the president were supposed to have it. That’s part of the reason I called the FBI. They promised to do an investigation, but never followed through, or at least didn’t give me the results. In any case, Hennessy said he’d be somewhere along the Mediterranean at the same time as the conference. The deal was that I would give him fifteen minutes in person at a restaurant in the Oliviers District—“
    “That’s crazy. It’s a drug-infested—“
    “But not a place where anyone would recognize the Federal Reserve chairman.”
    Gage shook his head. “It was just substituting one danger for another.”
    Abrams dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand. “No damage done. He promised to lay out his case and then leave it to me whether I wanted to pursue it.”
    “But he didn’t show up. Instead he jumped off a cliff.”
    “Or was spit out.”
    Gage turned toward Abrams. “I don’t understand why you think he’s a modern-day Jonah. He could’ve just as easily decided that he’d made a fool of himself, or that he’d deluded himself for a second time, and couldn’t face going home.”
    “That was the theory of the local police, that he’d come to the end of his rope. Encouraged no doubt in that conclusion by the FBI’s claim that he was crazy and by the fact that diving headfirst onto the rocks along the Côte d’Azur isn’t an unusual way to do yourself in. The area is Marseilles’ version of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
    Gage recognized that the logic also worked the opposite way: What better way to disguise a murder than as a suicide, but there was still the question of motive and whether it had anything to do with Abrams.
    “Did the Marseilles police know that he was there to meet you?” Gage asked.
    Abrams shook his head. “I couldn’t take the risk—the U.S. couldn’t take the risk—of having my name connected with Hennessy’s, at least until I knew whether he had told me the truth.” Abrams spread his hands. “What do you think would happen in the markets if the press put out a story that I had engaged in some sort of mind-meld with a lunatic? “
    Gage looked up to see that they were now heading due west, the midtown skyline and Manhattan rising in the distance against the now graying sky, the city seeming less like a destination than a way station, for he knew that Abrams hadn’t asked him to come to New York just for a talk.
    “Did you contact the FBI again after his body was discovered,” Gage asked, “and try to find out the backstory?”
    “I left a vague message for the deputy director.” Abrams paused, and then glanced over at Gage. “But it was the director himself who returned my call.”

CHAPTER 2
    H e didn’t get on a flight,” the caller spoke into his cell phone. “Just picked up a tall, middle-aged guy near the taxi stand outside of terminal one. I’m about a hundred yards behind him on the Long Island Expressway heading toward the city.”
    Kenyon Arndt hunched over his desk in the fifty-sixth-floor office of Shadden Phillips & Wycovsky. It was an involuntary motion, like his whole being, mind and body, had cringed at the thought of what he was doing. He whispered his response, even though