“At some point,” Abrams said, “when, I don’t know—how, I don’t know—and why, I don’t know, Hennessy began to suspect that Ibrahim had been framed.”

“You mean that Hennessy participated in framing him.”

Abrams nodded. “But not knowingly. Or at least that was Hennessy’s claim.”

Gage thought back to the few years after 9/11, and asked, “Was Ibrahim simply deported, or was he flown to a country where a stronger case against him could be developed through torture?”

“I don’t know, but I got the sense that the rendition possibility figured into Hennessy’s desperation. The first time I spoke to him, he seemed to be at the opposite end of the exhilaration he’d displayed after Ibrahim’s arrest. I remember the photo. Him standing behind the director at a press conference in Washington, basking in the glory. It was his career case. He got a promotion to senior special agent and was made second in command of the FBI’s Anti-terrorism Task Force.” “Where was he on the arc the last time you spoke to him?”

“More toward the bottom, but with a feeling of hope. He told me that he had reason to think that Ibrahim was still alive.”

Abrams fell silent. Gage watched his eyes narrow as though he was looking into the tunnel of the past.

“I don’t know about the present condition of Ibrahim’s mind or body,” Abrams finally said, “but his reputation hasn’t suffered much in the long run. I imagine that if the Swedes could find him now, they’d probably give him the Nobel Prize in economics.”

Even though Gage’s practice focused on finance from the perspective of fraud and money laundering, he was familiar with Ibrahim’s work. And in the years since his disappearance, Ibrahim and his quantum theory of finance had achieved mythological, Janus-faced status, with his name either issued as an epithet or whispered in awe. His fame rested on a few papers he’d published twenty years earlier, when he was in his thirties, and on claims by a few large hedge funds, known as chaos funds, that they invested and traded based on his theories.