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England that made itself the reference point and then named the parts of the world. He seemedto be saying that the West’s deciding on what the regions of the earth were called was a form of cultural imperialism.”
    “Somehow I don’t expect to see that argument on a jihadist Web site,” Gage said, “along with a map on which north is west and east is south.”
    “And he was in no way anti-Semitic. I would’ve known it, felt it. To him, no one in the economics department was anything more than a brain on legs. Smart or dumb, not Jewish or Muslim.”
    Gage searched through the folder until he found Ibrahim’s indictment and read over the “overt acts” section.
    “This is pretty vague,” Gage said. “It doesn’t detail exactly what he did.”
    Abrams pointed at a tab in the middle of the folder. “You’ll find an excerpt from a congressional hearing in which the U.S. Attorney said that disclosing the details of the scheme would endanger national security because others would be able to imitate it.”
    “That’s silly,” Gage looked up at Abrams. “Anybody who participated in setting it up would know how to replicate it. It’s only the American public that was denied the information.”
    “That embargo may be the reason Hennessy didn’t go to the press or spill everything in a blog. He would’ve had to ask the FBI for permission, they’d have refused and threatened him with jail. Maybe they would’ve even held him incommunicado like they did with that spy Aldridge Ames.”
    “If it was important enough,” Gage said, “he could’ve taken the risk, published it, and hoped a jury would see it his way. He wouldn’t be the first whistle-blower that went that route.”
    Gage closed the folder and then asked, “Did you talk to him on the day you were supposed to meet?”
    Abrams shook his head. “Those conferences are mobbed with intelligence agents, both government and private. He didn’t want to take a chance of the call being intercepted or of either of us being spotted.”
    “Then how did you confirm the meeting?”
    “He said that he would put himself in a position to watch the procession of limousines traveling from the Old Stock Exchange to the French president’s dinner. I told him that if I could get away, I’d break off at the meridian at the east end of the Vieux Port. I assume he was posted there watching, waiting for me to drive by, planning to grab a taxi and follow me to the restaurant.”
    Abrams paused and his eyes clouded with distant thoughts. Finally, he said, “I know it sounds melodramatic—maybe spawned by the mystery of his death—but I have a really creepy feeling that if Hennessy had lived long enough to meet me, I’d now be dead, too.”

CHAPTER 4
    F aith Gage awoke in darkness to Mount Qingcheng quaking beneath her. Dishes shattered against the kitchen linoleum. Bottles exploded against bathroom tile. The metal lamp on the nightstand next to her thunked as it rocked. She grabbed for it, but it spun off and crashed on the floor.
    Her mental Richter scale told her that the earthquake was in the sevens or eights, and exponentially higher than anything she’d felt at home in California. A hundred times, maybe two hundred.
    A distant rumble grew into an avalanche of sound. She imagined the muddy hillside behind her three-room bungalow sliding down and submerging the village around her, and then the distant dam cracking and rupturing under the pressure of the reservoir’s water and sweeping the three thousand villagers down into the farms and fields of the Chengdu valley.
    She rolled to the floor and felt around for her cell phone. Her fingers bumped against it. She gripped it in her hand and then pressed herself against the cinder-block wall and edged her way toward the front door.
    Another ground shake jolted the house. She heard the
pop of mortar bursting from between the brick and the wood-framed windows. She reached for the doorknob and turned and pulled, but the