The Garden of Betrayal (14 page)

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I hesitated a moment, uncertain how to broach Theresa’s data. It had occurred to me that Rashid might get angry. In all our long acquaintance, he’d never done or said anything that wasn’t in OPEC’s best interest, and having Saudi secrets laid bare wasn’t necessarily in that category. Best just to heave it out, I decided, and let the chips fly.

“A friend of a friend looked me up the other day. The friend knew a person who’d done work for Aramco. The friend gave me a computer hard drive that contained an enormous amount of internal Aramco information. Reprocessed seismic data, production figures, mixture percentages, you name it. Well by well, for every field in the Kingdom.”

I paused, wanting to get a sense of his initial reaction before carrying on.

“Let me see if I have this straight,” he said, steepling his fingers and tipping his head slightly to one side. “You have a friend who has a friend who has a friend. And this person gave your friend’s friend a mass of highly confidential information, and then your friend’s friend came to you out of the blue and gave the information to you. And you think this information might be credible.”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said, coloring a little.

“Not often.”

“True,” I admitted. “Which is why I’m here.”

“You’d like me to vet this stolen data for you?” he asked, leaning forward slightly. “Based on confidential knowledge I may have obtained in my professional capacity as an employee of OPEC?”

It wasn’t exactly how I would have put it, but it pretty much summed things up.

“Yes.”

He tossed his hands skyward.

“Why would I do that?”

It was a question I’d anticipated. I extracted a sheaf of papers from my briefcase and handed them to him.

“What are these?” he demanded.

“Saltwater injection volumes and produced mixture percentages at Ghawar for the last five years. There’s a summary on the last page.”

He flipped to the end of the packet and glanced at the summary.

“So?”

“So, the mixture percentages are much lower than you’d expect, unless the wells were in serious decline.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself. Please. You’re not an engineer. There are any number of technical reasons for low yields. Even if the figures are correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

My head was throbbing slightly, and I wished I’d gotten more sleep. I had only one chance to pitch him. I didn’t want to screw it up.

“I know. But hear me out for a second. The Aramco data I saw—”

“The supposed Aramco data you saw,” he interrupted.

“Fine. The supposed Aramco data I saw contained a bunch of senior-management reports, including a few that had been explicitly written for OPEC. One was addressed to you by name.”

“And?”

“And the numbers in the reports don’t match the field data.”

“Meaning your information is internally inconsistent, and thus inherently suspect,” he said dismissively.

I didn’t answer, giving him time to think about it. Rashid was a long, long way from being stupid. One possibility was that my information was incorrect. The other was that Aramco had lied to him, and lied to their political masters. Which—if true—raised the question of why.

“I’m tired.” He sighed a few moments later, opening a drawer in the desk. He pulled out a handkerchief and used it to blot his forehead. “These pills are worse than my illness.”

“I’ll go,” I volunteered immediately, starting to my feet. “We can talk more after you’ve rested.”

“Stay.” He waved me back into my seat. “It’s nothing. I enjoy the company. You have a copy of this report that was addressed to me?”

I took it out of my briefcase and handed it to him. He flipped through a few pages and handed it back, his expression inscrutable.

“Let me explain something that may be difficult for you to understand,” he said, draping the handkerchief over his head like a kaffiyeh. “The truth is that nobody knows how much oil the Saudis have, or the real condition of their fields. Not me, not the Saudi oil ministry, and not the king. The Saudi government twists OPEC’s arm for the allocation they want, and then orders Aramco to produce that amount. Aramco does whatever they have to do to make it happen. If the minister or the king wants to know how much surplus capacity they have, or the exact quantity of their proved reserves, the head of Aramco reports whatever they want to hear and concludes by saying
‘Inshallah’
—God willing. And who can argue with that? If God wills the oil to come, it will come. If He doesn’t, it won’t.”

“With all due respect, Rashid, I don’t buy it. I’ve spent time with the Aramco people. There are a lot of smart engineers working there. I can’t believe they don’t know what’s going on.”

“Don’t confuse issues of intelligence with issues of culture,” he
rasped irritably. “At the lower levels of the organization, I’m sure the smart engineers you refer to have made all the correct calculations. But it’s not acceptable to pass difficult news up the line at Aramco, particularly in the form of a forecast. Because many of the senior people in the Kingdom—including the king—genuinely believe that there’s a large measure of hubris in trying to predict the future.
Inshallah
. It will be what God wills.”

“Which would be fine if the Saudis weren’t sitting on most of the world’s excess oil reserves,” I said, watching the sweat bead on his forehead again. It was the kind of give-and-take he normally enjoyed, but I continued to worry that I was overtaxing him. “If the peak-oil people are right, and the Saudis are closer to running out of oil than anyone realizes, it means trouble for everyone.”

He smiled grimly, mopping his face with the handkerchief from his head and then tossing it on the desk.

“You want my opinion?”

“Please.”

“Inshallah.”

I half grinned, thinking he’d made another joke. As seconds ticked past without his elaborating, my grin faded.

“You’re not interested in trying to prevent a global energy crisis?”

“Unless it happens in the next few weeks, I doubt it’s going to have much impact on me.”

We stared at each other in silence, and I wondered if I was listening to the drugs.

“I’m kind of at a loss here, Rashid,” I said quietly. “You’ve always gone out of your way to be helpful to people, especially me. It’s hard to believe that you genuinely don’t care about preventing a catastrophe, regardless of whether you think you’re going to be here to see it.”

“There are a lot of things I care about,” he responded gravely. “Some I can affect, and some I can’t.”

“You don’t believe it would make any difference if the Western governments knew there was an oil crunch coming?”

“Frankly, no,” he said, sounding more amused than regretful. “America and her allies are so in love with democracy, but all that really means is never making hard choices. Everyone’s already aware that there’s only so much oil, but the Western economic powers won’t summon the political will to deal with the entirely predictable shortages until lines
begin to form at your gas stations. And by then, as you and I both know, it will be years too late.”

“They’d take the steps if they had definitive warning. We’re talking about the end of the world as we know it. Genuine shortages mean famine and death and war. Those are issues that tend to focus the mind.”

“Famine and death and war for whom?” he riposted sharply. “Not America. America will suffer, but it won’t pay the full price. You’re the only great military power left. You’ll seize the Middle Eastern oil and gas fields and use what’s left of the energy to manage a crash transition. The genuinely bad consequences will be reserved for the Third World—the places where famine and death and war never seem to focus anyone’s mind.”

It was a terse, brutal, and entirely accurate summary of what Senator Simpson’s plan really meant. I wished Rashid had been present yesterday, when Simpson was trying to sell his idea as “energy security.” The world Rashid was describing wasn’t the one I wanted to leave my daughter.

“Is that the prevalent OPEC view?”

“More or less. The heads of the Arab Gulf States understand the danger of their ‘special relationship’ with America, but they’re afraid of Iran and of the extremists in their own populations. The lesson of Kuwait wasn’t lost on anyone. If it wasn’t for Bush forty-one and the U.S. Marines, the emir and his entire clan would be just another group of deposed aristocrats cooling their heels in Paris or London and waiting for their money to run out. The kings and the emirs and the sultans need America for security, so they can continue looting their national treasuries in peace, but they all know they’ve done a deal with the devil. When push comes to shove, America will annex what it needs to annex, and the most the Gulf royalty will be able to hope for is generous severance. The devil always demands his due.”

He was laboring for breath as he finished speaking.

“You’re not well,” I said, furious at myself for letting him become overexcited. No matter how important the issue, I’d been wrong to push him. “I’m sorry. Can I get you something?”

“Just more water,” he muttered, collapsing back into his chair.

I fetched him some and then waited silently until his eyes closed and
he began breathing more easily. I was halfway to the door when I heard his voice behind me.

“Send me your information. I’ll look at it and let you know what I think.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a rush of gratitude. “I appreciate it. I’ll get everything over to you later today.”

I had my hand on the knob when he spoke a second time.

“Would you like some advice?”

I turned to look at him. His eyes were open, and he was smiling at me.

“Please.”

“You should buy a nice piece of land somewhere remote and stock it with goats. Goats are easy to keep and very useful. The meat can be eaten, the hair can be woven into clothing, and the dung can be burned as fuel.”

He was laughing quietly as I left.

Amy wasn’t at her desk when I got back to the office, but my new cellphone battery was on my desk, so I knew she couldn’t be far. I checked my computer while I swapped out the battery, to see if the depletion model had finished running yet. No luck—the progress icon was still flashing. I tapped the top of the CPU a few times to hurry it along. Old habits die hard—tapping had made the TV work better when I was a kid.

I dropped the reassembled phone into the charging cradle and then scanned the news. The Ukrainians were still denying everything loudly, but the Russians and the French had gone ominously quiet. Nothing that required my immediate attention. I was starting to go through messages when I noticed Amy bustling my way, a concerned expression on her face.

“Morning,” I said, stepping out from behind my desk to greet her. “What’s up?”

“Morning.” She glanced over her shoulder and then leaned toward me. “Alex is out again today,” she whispered. “There’s a rumor on the floor that Walter’s closing his positions.”

“What positions?” I asked apprehensively.

“All of them.”

I started to swear, catching myself just in time. Having your positions closed is the trading-desk equivalent of having your epaulets ripped off. It meant Alex was out for good, his trading career over, at Cobra and everywhere else—with his track record, no one would be
hiring. I was upset with him because I suspected he’d tried to mislead me, but I certainly didn’t want to see him hurt. Although maybe it was for the best, I thought, as the initial shock wore off. I’d told him the truth the other day—he was a smart guy, but he wasn’t cut out to be a trader. Relieved of the day-to-day pressure, he might be able to pull himself together, stop drinking, and get back in some kind of decent physical shape. And he’d still have Walter’s political activity to manage. Or at least I hoped he would. There was some chance that he and his father had had a major falling-out, which would be another explanation for why he hadn’t been back to the office.

“Has Lynn talked to him?”

“No. He didn’t call in. She’s on her way over to his place now, to make sure he’s okay.”

I wavered a moment, wondering whether I should get involved, before deciding I didn’t have a choice. Alex was a friend. I had to help if I could.

“I want to talk to Walter. Set something up as soon as possible, please.”

“Will do. And I don’t know if you saw the message yet, but Reggie called a few minutes ago. He’d like you to get back to him on his desk number.”

“Thanks.”

Amy was wearing a bright red Christmas sweater with metallic candy canes embroidered on it, and the shimmering reflections made me feel nauseated. I was too old to get by on three hours of sleep, particularly after a couple of shots of whiskey.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked, sounding concerned. “You look kind of rocky.”

“Maybe later,” I said. The coffee I’d drunk at Rashid’s hadn’t gone down so well. I had enough acid working on my insides. “A little dry toast would be great.”

“I’ll see what I can rustle up.”

I dialed Reggie’s work phone. The cop who answered put me on hold, and Reggie picked up a minute later.

“Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“Any luck with this OPEC buddy of yours on Gallegos?”

“He didn’t know him, but he promised to make a few calls. I should hear back later today or tomorrow. Why?”

“Because the situation’s a lot more complicated than I realized.”

My hand tightened on the receiver.

“Complicated how?”

“The stolen-car report on the BMW is cross-referenced to a murder investigation.”

“Whose murder?” I asked breathlessly.

“Gallegos’s brother-in-law, a guy named Carlos Munoz, also a diplomat. He and Gallegos were married to sisters. Gallegos lent Munoz the car the day it was stolen. This guy Munoz sounds like a real prince. A bunch of complaints about him for sexual harassment, and a girlfriend out on Long Island who he liked to use as a punching bag. According to the file, Munoz drove out to see the girlfriend that afternoon, but she’d skipped town. Could be she finally had enough. So he drove back into the city, picked up a hooker, and took her to a motel on the Lower West Side. That’s where his body was found. He caught three to the chest from a military forty-five. The girl vanished.”