Absolute Risk Read Online Free Page A

“If all the little wildfires come together, there’ll be a conflagration. I’d hate to see her caught in the middle of it.”
    “Given the places I’ve spent my career,” Gage said, “I’m not in a position to issue warnings.” Even though he knew that there were many times when he wished he was. But that was between him and Faith alone.
    Abrams rose and retrieved the coffeepot and refilled their cups.
    “You’re a tougher man than me.” Abrams paused and gazed out of the window down toward Central Park. “I was afraid even to let Jeanine jog around the reservoir.” He shrugged and offered a weak smile. “Maybe that’s why she ran away altogether.”
    “Have you heard from her lately?”
    “Not since I was appointed chairman. Not even an e-mail after I was confirmed.”
    Gage didn’t have to ask why. He knew Jeanine well enough to understand that for her it was like Abrams had become the high priest of a materialistic religion that, in words she’d written to Faith, reduced hope and fear to matters of cash value. And it wasn’t that Jeanine had become a new age mystic. It was that she could no longer see the man she’d married under the vestments of his office or hear the voice that had once known how to speak in words other than data.
    “Has she filed for a divorce?” Gage asked.
    Abrams shook his head. “And I haven’t either.”
    Gage wondered whether Abrams’s anxiety over the
    twisted life of Michael Hennessy was an unconscious attempt to prove to himself he wasn’t the man his wife believed he’d become.
    Abrams sat down again and slid a file folder across the table.
    “This is all I’ve been able to gather up about the Ibrahim case,” Abrams said. “And there was something screwy about it. If the case was as real as the FBI said it was, he’d be doing life in Leavenworth.” His voice trailed away and his eyebrows furrowed as he stared down at the file. “I don’t get it.”
    “Was Hennessy still trying to figure out whether Ibrahim was guilty of something,” Gage said, “or was he certain that Ibrahim had been framed and decided to go looking for him?”
    “For what?” Abrams spread his hands. “To ask forgiveness? The facts are the facts. Hennessy could’ve just written a blog and posted it for the world to see: Dear Professor Ibrahim. So sorry. Give me a call and we’ll do lunch.”
    Gage imagined Abrams’s wife cringing at Abrams’s drift into sarcasm, his method of protecting himself from experiencing Hennessy’s guilt and Ibrahim’s terror, but Gage chose neither to confront Abrams nor to participate.
    “Maybe Hennessy was the kind of man who needed to do it face-to-face,” Gage said, trying to imagine the strivings of a human being he didn’t yet understand. “A message in a bottle won’t do for some people, they need to touch the hand of the person they’ve wronged.”
    Abrams smiled. “You’re the only investigator in the world who thinks like that.” His smile faded and he squinted at Gage. “Doesn’t that get to you after a while? “
    “What get to me?”
    “Climbing inside other people’s minds.”
    “That’s what you do, but inside hundreds of millions of them at once, instead of one at a time.”
    “Not quite. I mostly see people once removed, out of a limousine window or through economic data.” Abrams’s face reddened. “Except it’s really a kind of self-created distortion. Economics isn’t a science, it’s fantasy adorned in jargon.”
    Gage drew back, stunned and puzzled by the seeming non sequitur, the leap from Hennessy to Abrams’s professional self-doubt. Somehow everything had become wrapped together into a personal crisis, and Gage wasn’t sure why.
    “Even behavioral finance,” Abrams said, “to which I devoted the best part of my life, is just a form of modern voodoo, a collection of anecdotes shrouded in mathematical equations.”
    “I’m not sure what—“
    Abrams elbowed his way past Gage’s attempt to return