The Garden of Betrayal

2

I was reading an industry rag at my desk when Amy stopped in to say good morning. She was holding a manila envelope in her hand and smiling.

“Guess what I have?”

“Hmm…” I said, tapping my finger against my chin. Amy’s forty, married, and on the vestry of her church. She was wearing a simple navy dress and had her auburn hair done up in a prim bun. “A ticket to Vegas. You’re leaving me to take a job dealing blackjack at the Bellagio.”

“As if,” she scoffed. “The only job I’d be willing to take in Las Vegas would be at a mission.”

“Like what’s-her-name in Guys and Dolls. The one who ends up with Marlon Brando.”

“Jean Simmons,” she said, reddening slightly. Amy was a big fan of old movies. “I liked her better in Elmer Gantry. And Guys and Dolls was set in New York. None of which has anything to do with anything.” She reached into the envelope and extracted a BlackBerry with a dramatic flourish. “Ta-da!”

“My new phone?” I asked, puzzled by the flourish.

“Better. Your old phone.”

I’d been feeling like a dope all weekend because a bike messenger had half knocked me down outside my office on Friday as I returned from a late-afternoon meeting, and a stranger had caught my arm to steady me. It hadn’t occurred to me to check my pockets until I was riding the elevator upstairs. I figured the stranger had mistaken the bulky device for my wallet and lifted it.

“You’re kidding. Where’d it come from?”

“Lobby guard gave it to me on my way in. Some guy came in off the street Saturday afternoon and turned it in. Said he spotted it under the newspaper machine on the corner and saw your business card taped to the back.”

I took the BlackBerry from her and examined it. It looked fine. I pressed the power button. The screen lit up for a moment, flashed a low-battery warning, and then went dark again.

“Amazing,” I said, snugging the unit into its charging cradle. “Maybe it just fell out of my pocket when I stumbled. Hard to believe someone actually returned it.”

“Not so hard to believe,” Amy chided. “New York is full of nice people.”

“You get the guy’s name?” I asked, thinking I should send him a bottle of scotch.

“Guard said he didn’t leave it.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice to a husky whisper. “This is when you thank your assistant for having remembered to tape your business card to the back of your three-hundred-dollar phone.”

“Geez,” I said loudly. “It sure is lucky that I have an assistant terrific enough to remember to tape my business card to the back of my three-hundred-dollar phone. Thanks so much, Amy. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Waste half a day trying to load your contacts onto a new phone before losing your temper and yelling at me to call the tech guys.” She sniffed. “I’ll call AT amp;T for you and get it reactivated. You need anything from the storage room?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

She left, head shaking in mock disapproval. I made a mental note to buy her some flowers when I went out to get lunch, thinking I could pick up something for Claire at the same time. Claire loved flowers.

I’d settled back in with my magazine when my desk phone rang. Amy wasn’t back yet, so I picked it up and said hello.

“As-Salamu ‘Alaykum,” a reedy voice said. Peace be upon you.

“Wa ‘Alaykum As-Salam,” I responded, recognizing the caller immediately. And on you be peace. It was Rashid.

“You’re well?” he asked.

We’d spoken less than twelve hours previously, but Arabs are big on ritual. The first lesson of doing business with Middle Easterners is that nothing can ever be rushed.

“Very. And you?”

“Alive, al-Hamdulillah.”

It was the answer I expected. Rashid was in acute renal failure, the result of a lifelong battle with diabetes and lingering complications from a kidney and pancreas transplant a few years back. He was being treated as an outpatient at New York-Presbyterian. His Viennese doctor’s first suggestion had been a hospital in Houston, but Rashid was uncomfortable taking up residence in the first city of the American energy industry. He’d been head of the office of the secretary-general of OPEC for going on twenty years before his recent medical leave, and there was no love lost between his employer and the Texas oil and gas tycoons whose overseas reserves had been nationalized by OPEC’s membership. New York had been the obvious second choice.

“Praise God,” I said, echoing him.

“I’m hearing word of a problem at Nord Stream.”

Nord Stream was a pipeline that was being built beneath the Baltic Sea to deliver Russian natural gas to Germany. I checked my news screen and didn’t see anything.

“What kind of problem?”

“I don’t know.”

I hesitated, wondering if he was being completely honest. Rashid was my oldest and best source, as well as a close friend, but he routinely held back more than he shared. He usually let me know when he had information he couldn’t discuss, though. I was about to press him when a sudden beeping caught my attention. A headline had scrolled up on my screen: explosion reported at nord stream pipeline terminus. The terminus was in Russia, near Saint Petersburg.

“Reuters just now posted a story saying there was some kind of explosion,” I said.

“I see it.”

I clicked on the headline, but there weren’t any details yet.

“Let me make a few calls. I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

“Thanks. Me salama.”

“Alla y’salmak.”

I punched another line on my phone and called Dieter Thybold, a friend at Reuters in London.

“It’s Mark,” I said when he answered. “What’s up with this pipeline explosion?”

“No idea yet,” he replied tersely. “I can’t even confirm that there was an explosion. But something strange is going on.”

“Strange how?”

“Today’s the day of the terminus construction completion ceremony. A lot of reporters and dignitaries are visiting. The whole site went quiet twenty minutes ago. Nobody can get hold of their people. And we just got word a moment ago that the Russians have closed their airspace between Saint Petersburg and the Finnish border, and that there’s been a huge increase in encrypted radio traffic out of their military bases at Pribilovo and Kronstadt.”

“So, how do your people know there was an explosion?” I asked, my adrenaline beginning to pump.

“There was a camera crew shooting the ceremony. The footage should be on air any minute. You can see the tiniest hint of a flash in the last frame of the video before it goes dark.”

“Satellite views?”

“Too cloudy. I’ve got to go.”

“Wait. You’re thinking terrorism?”

“It’s hard not to, isn’t it? But we haven’t got any facts yet.”

“Stay in touch.”

I turned on CNN after I hung up, listening for updates as I speed-typed an e-mail to my clients and Rashid. The newly completed terminus was doing only light duty while the attached pipeline was still under construction, a bare fraction of the capacity used to route gas locally, but an attack there would rattle the markets, an ominous portent for the future. Energy infrastructure was a soft target. A systematic campaign against refineries or pipelines or storage facilities could do an enormous amount of economic damage. The likely reactions were a knee-jerk spike in energy prices, weakening global equity markets, a steeping yield curve, and a declining euro. I wrote urgent in the subject line and hit the send button. Alex Coleman was in my office thirty seconds later.

“You think this is serious?” he demanded.

Alex looked terrible, rough patches of psoriasis visible on his hairline and bluish circles beneath his eyes. He’d had a difficult time during the recent market turmoil. In truth, he’d been having a difficult time for years. I could guess what his positions were from the sweat soaking his shirt beneath his arms.

“I don’t know anything more than what I put in my e-mail.”

“You have a hunch?”

“Half the countries that used to make up the Soviet Union are furious about this pipeline, and they’d all like to see Russia take it in the neck. I think this is bad.”

“Shit.”

He rushed out just as CNN cut to a special report. It took only a few seconds to figure out that they didn’t know anything more than I did. I grabbed my phone and started dialing.

Two hours later I was holding my phone to my ear impatiently, waiting for Dieter to pick up again. Equity markets were tanking and oil prices had gapped higher, but nobody knew a damned thing. Rashid was unavailable, having responded to my original e-mail with a note of his own saying that he’d be at the hospital all day and asking to be kept up to speed electronically. My phone turret was lit up like a Christmas tree, every one of my clients frantic for information, and I had nothing to tell them.

I stood to relieve my cramped muscles and turned to face the window. It was snowing, fat, lazy flakes drifting from a gunmetal sky and melting as they touched down. I’d come to hate the snow, just as I’d come to hate everything else about New York, the occasional cell phone-returning Good Samaritan regardless. But Claire and I could never move. Our apartment on Riverside Drive was the only home Kyle had ever known-the only home he’d know to come back to.

“Mark,” Dieter said into my ear, sounding rushed. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t have anything else to tell you.”

“Don’t hold out on me,” I insisted. “You must have twenty guys working on this. You’ve got to know something.”

“The Russians have everything shut down, but the prevailing wind is from the west, and we were able to get a stringer south of Vyborg before he hit a police roadblock. There’s a lot of smoke in the air. That’s all I’ve got.”

I started to ask another question, but he was already gone. I hung up and smacked one hand down on my desk in frustration.

CNN had obtained the footage Dieter referred to in his first call. I watched on one of my desktop monitors as they began running it for the twentieth time. It opened with an establishing shot: frozen marshes, snow, and the bleak gray waters of the Gulf of Finland. The shot tightened as it panned to the terminus. It was nothing much to look at-squat scrubbing and absorption towers, low brown buildings to house the compressor equipment, an antennae-festooned central control station on tall stilts, and endless miles of dull blue pipe and valves. There was no housing-according to the CNN commentator, the workers commuted from Vyborg, thirty miles to the east, or from Hamina, in Finland, thirty miles to the west. The shot tightened further as a group of heavily bundled dignitaries began emerging from a building that was probably a dining hall. Jacques Pripaud, the head of Banque Paribas, was one of the first out the door. His expression seemed consistent with having eaten at a Russian cafeteria. He was closely followed by his counterpart at Deutsche Bank. I pulled my yellow pad closer and turned the volume up a little, hoping the commentator might identify more of the unknown faces this time around. I already had twenty-two names written down, including the chairmen of four of the largest banks in Europe, a Russian deputy prime minister, the mayor of Saint Petersburg, and the German foreign minister. The pipeline had been hugely controversial in Europe, implying an energy dependence on Russia that made people old enough to remember the Cold War queasy. All the businessmen and politicians who’d supported it had turned out to wave the flag.

The camera followed closely as the men trooped across an icy parking lot to a white canvas tent. Inside was a gang of valves, one of which had a gilded control wheel attached to it. The diameter of the attached pipe was way too small to be anything other than some kind of secondary line, but then the entire act of turning a valve by hand was pure theater-everything in the facility was automated. A microphone on a stand stood to the left of the pipe gang. The Russian deputy prime minister tapped on the microphone a few times to settle the crowd, took a sheaf of folded papers from his pocket, and opened his mouth. The screen flared orange for a tenth of a second and then went black.

“Shoot.” I drummed my fingers on my head, trying to think of who else I could call. CNN had frozen the last frame of the footage on the screen, and my attention drifted to the small yellow credit on the bottom-right corner that read courtesy of euronews. I didn’t usually bother with broadcast journalists, but I remembered that someone I knew had gone to work at Euronews a few years back. I willed my mind blank and the name suddenly popped into my head: Gavin Metcalfe. He was a Brit who’d worked at the Economist, but he’d quit to take a job as a producer with Euronews because they were headquartered near the French Alps. He and his wife were big skiers. Typing the name into my address book, I saw two numbers, both with U.K. country codes. I punched the intercom button on my phone.

“Amy, have you got an updated number for Gavin Metcalfe? M-e-t-c-a-l-f-e. Used to be in London, but I think he’s in France now.”

I heard her fingers clicking on her keyboard.

“I have a work and a cell, but they’re both U.K.”

“Same. Do me a favor, please. Call the main switchboard at Euronews in Lyon and ask for him.”

“Will do.”

I hung up and dialed the cell phone number anyway, figuring there was some chance he’d kept it. The call kicked directly into voice mail, a generic prompt suggesting I leave a message. Hoping the number hadn’t been reassigned, I explained why I was getting in touch and then followed up with a quick text from my own cell. My intercom flashed as I pressed the send button.

“It’s weird,” Amy said. “No one’s answering…”

“Hang on,” I interrupted. My BlackBerry was ringing. I picked it up and checked the display, seeing the London number I’d just tried. “Gotta hop. This might be him.”

I hung up the intercom and lifted the BlackBerry to my ear.

“Mark Wallace.”

“Open a browser window on your computer,” a voice answered. There was a rushing sound in the background that I couldn’t identify.

“Gavin?”

“Don’t interrupt. I’m in a car, and I haven’t got much time. You want to know about Nord Stream, right?”

“Right,” I confirmed, my excitement building.

“So, do what I tell you. Open a browser window and type this in the menu bar: F-T-P colon backslash backslash euronews dot net backslash…”

I pecked carefully at the keyboard as he dictated a URL that was about fifty characters long, interrupting several times when I wasn’t sure what he’d said. Gavin had some kind of impenetrable northern accent that made all his vowels sound the same. He told me to press enter, and I did.

“It wants a username and password,” I said.

“The username is exterieur, all lowercase. Password baiselareine . Bloody frogs having a go at me every time I turn around.”

I entered both, my high school French sufficient to translate the juvenile slur. I heard someone else on his end of the line as I pressed the enter key. It sounded like a child.

“I see a bunch of folders. You’re with your family?”

“On our way to the airport. Click the folder labeled archive, and then click the one inside that with today’s date, and then click the one inside that named Nord Stream.”

“Done.”

“You’ll see two files-EsatIIB135542 and EsatIIC141346. Clicking on either will download it to your desktop. They’re big files, but our server’s hooked directly to the Internet backbone, so the limitation will likely be on your side.”

“What are they?”

“Video. The first is the raw footage you’ve been seeing on television. The second is something else entirely.”

I clicked the second. We were connected to a dedicated fiber-optic cable as well. A dialogue box indicated that I had ten minutes to wait, the file transfer speed a number I’d never seen before.

“Give me a hint,” I said, wondering what the hell was going on. “I’m under a lot of pressure here.”

“You?” he sneered. “I’ve had the effing DGSE in my face all afternoon.”

“Remind me who the DGSE are?”

“French foreign intelligence creeps. Jackbooters. They turned up just after we released the first footage and put a lid on us. I went out for a cigarette and kept going. If I wanted to work for fascists, I would have taken a job with Murdoch.”

“So, what’s the second file?”

“It’s what it isn’t that bears thinking about. It isn’t our footage. We had one cameraman and one reporter on the ground, and we lost them both in the initial blast. I’m inside the airport now, on the ring road. I’m going to have to hang up in a moment.”

I scribbled the words “initial blast” on my yellow pad. I had to stay focused.

“Who shot the footage, then?”

“Our satellite truck kept running after our lads went off the air. Someone pirated one of the frequencies, and their feed uploaded automatically. We didn’t even realize we’d received it until an hour ago.”

“Does it show what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Is it bad?”

“It makes the guys who did 9/11 look like a bunch of shit-arsed kids. Be sure to watch the whole thing.”

“Will do,” I agreed, wondering fearfully what I was about to see. There was just one more question I had to ask. “Has anyone else got this yet?”

“No. I hadn’t figured out who to give it to. I want it distributed, but I don’t want my name mentioned. You understand?”

“You’re fleeing the country, Gavin,” I said, feeling obliged to point out the obvious. “It’s not like they aren’t going to figure it out.”

“There’s a difference between suspecting and knowing. I have your word?”

“Of course.”

“Fine, then. And listen, Mark-I’m going to need a job. Something in Dubai might be nice. I’m sick of the bloody winters. You know people there?”

“I do. Give me a shout when you want me to make some calls. And thanks.”

He hung up without saying good-bye. The dialogue box indicated that I had seven minutes to wait. I typed another urgent e-mail, warning my clients and Rashid that I’d had tentative confirmation of a major terrorist action and that full details were to follow shortly. The Dow was down one hundred points when I hit the send key. By the time Alex and Walter showed up in my office, it was down two hundred and fifty, and my phone turret was pulsing like it was going to explode.

“What the hell is going on?” Walter demanded. He had a raptor’s profile-aquiline nose, deep-set eyes, and short-cropped white hair. Part of his legend was that pressure only ever made him meaner. Alex looked as if he’d been run over.

“Two minutes,” I said, bristling at Walter’s tone. Gratitude for his professional help had never reconciled me to his habit of acting as if the entire world should jump when he spoke. I nodded toward my screen. “I have video of what happened. The guy who gave it to me said that it’s bad. He mentioned an ‘initial explosion,’ implying there’s been more than one.”

Amy stuck her head in again.

“Sorry,” I said, before she could open her mouth. “I can’t speak to anyone right now. E-mail bulletins only for another half hour at least. Hang on.”

The file completed downloading, and I dragged a copy to the folder where I kept documents for client access.

“I’m writing a big video file to the public drive. As soon as it finishes, e-mail the address to Rashid and then to everyone else on the prime distribution list.”

“Right,” she said, closing the door.

“Can we get on with this?” Walter snarled.

I clicked on the file irritably. My media player opened, and a second later the screen filled with an image I couldn’t identify, the lower half shiny gray metal and the upper a blurry blue tube. The field of view began shifting smoothly upward, and suddenly I got oriented.

“The camera’s mounted on one of the scrubbing towers,” I said. “It was pointed straight down, maybe so nobody would notice it.”

“Whose camera?” Walter asked.

“My contact didn’t know. Pirates, he said.”

The camera scrolled up until the Gulf of Finland was just visible at the top of the screen and then began tracking to the right. Alex pointed to the screen.

“What’s that?”

Four metal struts reached skyward, the ends blackened and twisted. Dark smoke was spewing up between them.

“The control tower,” I replied, horrified. Even with the terminus performing only minimal duty, there would have been at least three or four guys in the control tower.

The camera kept panning, and the white marquee where I’d last seen the Russian deputy prime minister about to speak-or what was left of it-came into view.

“Jesus Christ.” Alex gasped.

Flaming scraps of canvas surrounded a charred rectangular area that looked like an airplane crash site. Burned corpses and scattered body parts became distinguishable as the camera zoomed in. A few survivors crawled on the ground, blood seeping from appalling wounds. Alex grabbed hold of my garbage can and threw up. I felt I wouldn’t be far behind him. Walter started to leave.

“Wait,” I managed to say. “My contact said I should watch until the end.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you speed it up?” Walter asked impatiently.

“I think so.”

I clicked my mouse on the appropriate button and the video began playing at ten-times speed. Walter lifted my phone without asking, reeling off a litany of crisp orders while I tapped out yet another urgent e-mail with trembling fingers. Six minutes later-an hour of elapsed real time-the Russians had four military helicopters and fifteen or twenty fire trucks and ambulances on the ground, and another pair of helicopters circling overhead. The parking lot I’d seen earlier had been converted into an emergency triage zone, with dozens of coveralled medics working on the injured.

“Stop,” Walter ordered.

I’d already moved my mouse to the pause button. A pale red X had suddenly appeared in the center of the screen, a column of similarly colored numbers superimposed to the far left.

“Play,” Walter said. “Half speed.”

I watched curiously as he bent closer to the screen. The camera swung slowly toward the helicopters and the emergency vehicles. Walter tapped the changing column of numbers on the left with one finger.

“Distance and azimuth,” he declared crisply. Walter had been an army officer in Vietnam. I hadn’t, but I had a sudden dread of what to expect. “Speed it up again.”

The camera lingered fractionally on each of the landed helicopters and on the larger pieces of emergency equipment, the central X blinking repeatedly. Each time the X blinked, it left behind a red dot. The camera pulled back for a wide view, and I felt my heart in my throat. The blow wasn’t long coming.

Every one of the emergency vehicles and helicopters exploded simultaneously. A fraction of a second later a rolling wave of synchronized explosions took out the triage zone. No one on the ground had a chance. Alex retched again.

“Mortars,” Walter announced. “Some targeted, some pre-positioned. Probably on the roof of one of the buildings. They must’ve anticipated where the emergency workers would set up. Who the hell are these guys?”

I shook my head numbly as the camera rose higher, pointing at the sky. The pale red X changed to blue, as did the column of numbers on the left. It panned left until it located a hovering helicopter and then zoomed in. The blue X began flashing.

“I don’t believe it,” Walter said, sounding amazed for the first time since I’d known him.

A streak of white smoke appeared on the lower-right side of the screen. The helicopter burst into flames, heeled over onto its side, and fell from the sky. The camera swung left again with the same terrible mechanical precision. A second helicopter came into view, fleeing to the east. A second later, it too fell out of the sky in flames, taken down by a second missile. Walter rapped his knuckles on my desk, and I looked up at him, stunned.

“There’s nothing we can do from here. We need to focus. What’s the opportunity?”

I forced myself to look at my market screens. The Dow was down five hundred points, oil was up eight dollars a barrel in the front month, the long bond was getting crushed, and the euro had fallen three percent against the dollar.

“Short second month oil and buy back two-year,” I said, surprised to discover that my brain was still functioning. “This has no immediate impact on energy supply, and short-term demand’s only going to be forecast weaker if the market keeps tanking this hard.”

“Good,” he said, turning to Alex. “What are your exposures?”

Alex didn’t respond. He was still staring at my computer screen. The camera had zoomed all the way out and was doing a slow pan. The horizon was empty, save for bellowing plumes of black smoke, and the ground was a sea of fire.

“Alex,” Walter repeated sharply.

“I’m the wrong way around,” Alex confessed dazedly, running one hand through his hair. “I was positioned long the market and I’m short volatility.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“I see.” Walter turned on his heel and walked out. Alex hesitated a moment and then followed him.

I began typing another e-mail, searching for words to describe what I’d just seen.