Absolute Risk Read Online Free Page B

him to the problem that had brought them together.
    “I’ll tell you what I’ve really learned and what no one wants to hear.” Abrams pounded the table with his forefinger. “No one. The markets are nothing but a form of gambling driven by fear and greed. And all of the world’s mainframes linked together couldn’t predict when one or the other will lead the charge.”
    Abrams’s voice hardened as if he was arguing with a naïve colleague, or with himself.
    “A science that can’t predict anything isn’t a science. They shouldn’t give a Nobel Prize in economics. They should just make it a subcategory of literature.”
    Abrams’s breath came hard as he ended his unintended speech. He stared at Gage, eyes blank, as if he was looking through him at something in the distance.
    “I don’t understand what this has to do with Ibrahim,” Gage said.
    Abrams didn’t answer for a moment, then blinked and shook his head.
    “It’s just that I feel like I’m trapped in a labyrinth with no way out. People like me oversold ourselves to the public, and now I’m their poster boy even though I stopped selling the fantasy fifteen years ago.” Abrams tapped the folder. “And despite what happened to Ibrahim, I’m pissed at him because he was just another in an endless line of mathematicians and physicists who claimed that they could not only make economics into a hard science, but design real-world models to guide real investments for people to rely on for their retirements.”
    “And you’re certain that he can’t.”
    “When I went up to MIT for a symposium a few months ago, no one in the economics department—not even the ones who recruited him—could tell me what he’d been doing at the time of his arrest, or even for the five years before that. A quarter of a million dollars a year, and for all anyone knew, he could’ve spent the whole time meditating in his office.”
    “Didn’t they examine his work afterward? “
    “Everyone did. FBI. CIA. NSA. The department head told me that his equations read more like poetry than science.”
    Gage flipped open the folder and turned the pages, skimming through a printout of Ibrahim’s old MIT faculty Web page from the Institute of Financial Engineering, his curriculum vitae, and news articles about his terrorist financing arrest and deportation.
    “I don’t see anything here suggesting that he had an academic interest in structuring offshore transactions,” Gage said. “It’s all string theory and entanglements and quantum mechanics. I’m not sure what esoteric route takes a person from MIT, through the space-time continuum, and to the Cayman Islands. It strikes me that they’re in different dimensions.”
    “That was one of the reasons his arrest was so shocking,” Abrams said. “The other was that he was completely apolitical. He was born in Saudi Arabia, but for him it wasn’t a country to which he bore any allegiance, only a position in space defined by latitude and longitude and time, and of no more significance than any other place.”
    Abrams paused, and then smiled and said, “I once ran into Ibrahim at Shaw’s Market in Boston right after he came to MIT. He pointed at a picture of the globe on the side of a crate of fruit from Chile. He said that if there’s no real north and south in the universe, then why don’t we start making maps with what we call north at the bottom, or even lay the globe sideways.”
    “And giving the Middle East the top position?”
    “That was the implication.”
    “That could’ve been religious rather than political,” Gage said. “Islam is transnational.”
    “Except that Mecca is Mecca, the center of the Islamic solar system.” Abrams paused again and then shrugged. “There’s no way of knowing. Later he asked me why the Middle East is called the Middle East. Middle of what? East of what? Why not west? If anywhere can be the center of the universe, there’s no scientific reason why it should’ve been