Absolute Risk Read Online Free

recognize his self-deceptions, but too weak to act on the knowledge. That’s why his wife had once told him that the law was the perfect profession for him. It was all form, and no substance; all talk, and no responsibility. And she was right. Even the bar’s code of ethics had read to him like a permission slip to do evil without shame or guilt.
    As he approached Wycovsky’s office, Arndt steeled himself against the reality of his role and the roles of the other Ivy League graduates with whom Wycovsky had jeweled the firm: They were nothing but gemmed pendants hanging from a whore’s neck.
    Wycovsky raised a forefinger as Arndt entered the office, holding him at attention while he completed his telephone call with a cryptic “Then we understand each other.” He lowered his right hand as he hung up the phone with his left and looked over at Arndt.
    “We don’t accuse the private investigators we retain to assist us of engaging in criminality,” Wycovsky said.
    Arndt reddened.
    “We only hire professionals and we rely on them to act within the law—and we don’t second-guess them.”
    “I didn’t think we’d want to risk—” Arndt caught himself, for he realized that this was exactly the risk Wycovsky had been willing to take.
    Wycovsky didn’t respond, his silence pressuring Arndt to finish the sentence.
    “I mean, I thought we should make sure we were on solid legal ground.”
    Wycovsky waved the argument away. “Do you ask Acme Plumbing whether their corporate filings are in order before you hire them to fix a leak? Do you ask to look at your bank’s cash reserves before you write a check?”
    Arndt clenched his jaw and shook his head.
    Wycovsky never argued facts or law; he crushed his opponents by analogy. It was a form of argumentation ridiculed at Yale, but encouraged at the street fighters’ law school that Wycovsky had attended at night forty years earlier.
    “Don’t question the surveillance people,” Wycovsky said. “Just write down what they tell you and report to me.” He pointed at Arndt’s face. “I don’t want to receive another call like this again.”
    Arndt’s emotions battered at him as he walked back to his office. Anger. Fear. Self-reproach. And him defenseless, straitjacketed by the life he’d chosen. Twenty-eight years old and confined to the debtors prison of Shadden Phillips & Wycovsky by mortgage and credit card balances that he was permitted by his bank to carry only because greed had made him accept the most lucrative offer after law school, not the best.
    And what tore at him most of all as he paused in the doorway to his office was why it hadn’t crossed his mind why Wycovsky had been willing to pay partners’ wages for associates’ work—
    Until right then.

CHAPTER 3
    I was so preoccupied that I forgot to ask about your wife,” Abrams said, sitting across from Gage at the breakfast table in his Central Park West apartment. “Faith is fine. She took a team of students to Sichuan Province to work on an archeological dig.”
    Abrams frowned. “Isn’t that a little dangerous? We’re getting reports of labor riots from Guangzhou all the way up to Mongolia.”
    “They’re in a village way out in the countryside. They only stopped in Shanghai to change planes and in Chengdu just long enough to get on a chartered bus.” Gage tapped the cell phone in his shirt pocket. “She calls every few days.”
    Abrams reached over to the kitchen counter, spread out a stack of Federal Reserve finance and economic discussion papers, and handed one of them to Gage titled “Human Capital in China.”
    “There are a hundred million migrant laborers over there,” Abrams said. “Another ten million added in the last year. Fleeing farms that can’t produce even enough to support the villages around them. An average wage of fifty cents a day, and their life expectancy is dropping as though the Chinese economy was collapsing instead of expanding.” He pointed at the cover.