Absolute Risk Read Free Page B

his door was closed.
    “Did you get a photo?”
    “We’re not amateurs, Mr. Arndt. I’ll e-mail them to you when they get wherever they’re going. Maybe you’ll recognize him.”
    Arndt felt as though he was standing in quicksand just deep enough to trap him, but not deep enough to suck him under. He didn’t know who their client was or why he wanted the chairman of the Federal Reserve followed. And in a sleepless week of nightmares and night sweats, he’d thought of lots of reasons a client might want it done, but none that was legitimate for a law firm to pursue.
    If Abrams had committed a crime, then the FBI should be doing it.
    If Abrams had leaked insider Fed information about interest adjustments or corporate bailouts to the financial community, then the FBI and the SEC should be doing it.
    If he had sold out the country to foreign interests, then the FBI and the CIA and the NSA should be doing it—not Shadden Phillips & Wycovsky. Not three floors of the whitest of white collars and the blackest of three-button suits.
    What Arndt did think of were all the nauseating consequences of public exposure: disbarment, embarrassment, maybe even federal prison. He’d even be disavowed by the rest of the members of his Yale Law School graduating class—not for doing it, he knew, but for getting caught.
    “Are you sure you won’t lose him?” Arndt asked.
    “No chance. We have, shall we say, an electronic means of tracking his car.”
    “Isn’t that—“
    The man laughed. “Creative? “ “I was going to say illegal.”
    “Seems to me that you’re getting paid a bundle to find a way to argue it isn’t.
Capisci?
“
    Arndt felt his palm perspiring against the receiver. He’d known only one other person who’d used the correct Italian for “you understand.” He had been a mafioso who’d lived across the street when Arndt was growing up on Long Island—that is, until the gangster was found sitting in the driver’s seat of his car in his garage with a bullet hole in the back of his head.
    “Yes,” Arndt said. “I understand.”
    Arndt set down the receiver, and then wiped his hands on his pants in what felt like a gesture of cleansing. He leaned forward to rise from his chair, but his childhood nightmare of the neighbor’s chunks of exploded skull and brain crusted on the dashboard rose up in his mind. A wave of nausea rolled his body forward. He rested his forehead on his folded arms, sweat beading and his mouth watering.
    After it passed, he straightened up and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. He then pushed himself to his feet, shrugged on his suit jacket, and made the long walk down the wood-paneled hallway toward the office of Edward Wycovsky, the senior partner in the thirty-two-attorney firm, who was awaiting his report.
    Arndt’s hands dampened again before he reached Wycovsky’s door. They began to vibrate, not just in fear, but in frustration and anger. A cold shockwave shot up his arms and into his chest. He felt his fingers tightening into fists and imagined himself walking around Wycovsky’s desk and flattening the man’s angular nose into his pockmarked face.
    But not yet, Arndt told himself. He needed to stay with the firm and with this assignment long enough to discover what they were up to, and then turn them in.
    A glance at the distant reception station at the center of the two wings of the floor restarted the drama in his mind. Him standing there watching the FBI lead Wycovsky and the others toward the elevators and then down to the lobby where news video cameras would seek out their pale rat faces. He’d follow them and watch them duck their heads behind their cuffed hands and he’d watch people crowded on the sidewalk leaning hard against the police lines and shaking their fists and screaming out their outrage and—
    But he knew these fantasies were nothing but imaginary flight, relative to nothing and anchored to air—for that was his character: honest enough to