Gage had seen too many people flinch or pivot or self-destruct just short of their goal to find the argument convincing. Humans didn’t run on a track like the Staten Island Railway. Decades as a police officer and as a private investigator had taught him that humans were a maze of intersecting thoughts, motives, and fears, any one of which could lead them into the abyss of a life not worth living and then over the edge toward homicide or suicide.

“After Hennessy first contacted me,” Abrams said. “I called the deputy director of the FBI. He told me that Hennessy had been fired because they considered him obsessed and delusional.”

“Then why’d you agree to meet with him?”

“It was something my assistant said. She has an undergraduate degree in psychology and did her economics dissertation on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. She told me that delusional people chase phantoms around inside their own heads or within their own neighborhoods, they don’t pursue them overseas. And the first time Hennessy called he said he was in China.”

Gage shrugged. “Unless believing he was there was part of his delusion.”

Abrams shook his head. “Evidence showed up on my cell phone bill as an incoming call from a local Shanghai number. And the second time it was from Dubai, and the third from Algeria. And he never sounded nuts. Not paranoid. Not thinking that people were out to get him—”

“Or at least shrewd enough not to say it aloud.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Abrams said. “He just sounded guilty, genuinely ashamed of himself. Desperate for my help in making up for what he’d done to Hani Ibrahim.”

Although Gage hadn’t remembered Michael Hennessy’s name when Abrams called the day before, he did recall the FBI’s arrest of Ibrahim for a terrorist financing conspiracy. Ibrahim had been a financial mathematician who’d come to MIT a few years before Abrams had moved on to Harvard. He masterminded a scheme for funneling money from within the U.S. to foreign terrorist groups by using offshore trusts and charities. No criminal case was ever proven, but he was nonetheless deported.