The Garden of Betrayal (8 page)

She held my gaze for another long moment, sipping from her cup. Setting the coffee down, she bent and retrieved her portfolio from the floor. One of the side pockets contained a clunky white iPod without headphones. She took it out and put it on the table in front of me.

“There’s no backup copy of this data,” she said. “You need to be careful.”

I lifted the iPod and turned it over, seeing a fun-house version of myself reflected on the silvered back. Flipping it faceup again, I tentatively pressed the central button on the front. I wasn’t even aware you could put data on an iPod—I thought they were only for music.

“You need to connect it to a computer.”

“Right.” I dropped the iPod into my pocket, hoping I wasn’t blushing. “I have a couple of questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Such as?”

I hesitated, unsure where to begin. Everything about our encounter felt wrong. The vast majority of unsolicited tips I’d collected in my career had been from drunk guys bragging about their importance or from disgruntled staff looking to nail their employers. Outside of the movies, beautiful women didn’t disclose confidential information in fancy restaurants.

“I’m still interested in knowing how you and Alex are acquainted.”

“I lived in New York briefly when I first got out of college. I was taking graduate classes at Columbia. Alex and I met at a party and became friends.”

Her tone was cool, but I got the sense she was suggesting they’d been more than just friends. It was possible. Alex had been a very different person ten years ago, and the Buddy Holly look had been surprisingly effective with the ladies. He always seemed to have a good-looking girl hanging around back then.

“Graduate classes in what?”

“Operations research.”

She’d surprised me again. OR was a complex branch of math that
dealt with decision making, usually the exclusive purview of the pocket-protector set. Based on her appearance, I would have pegged Theresa as a French lit major.

“Is that your field?”

“No. I took an MS in petroleum engineering from Texas Tech and then went to work for Halliburton. They sent me to Columbia for six months to brush up my analytic skills.”

“Which would make you an expert in reprocessed seismic analysis.”

She shrugged. It was an impressive résumé, if it was true. Alex could presumably vouch for her later, but I figured there was no harm in a quick test.

“Maybe you can help me out. I’ve had to skim through a number of seismic studies, and I’ve never been completely clear on the difference between pre-stack time migration and depth migration.”

“Because you’re not an engineer.”

It was my turn to shrug. Not being an engineer didn’t mean I hadn’t picked up a few things.

She shook her head, looking put-upon, and took a sip from her cup.

“It’s a question of the vertical axis and the traveltime approximation. Any assumption of rays within a vertical plane qualifies as time migration. Is that good enough for you, or would you like me to elaborate?”

Any elaboration would be beyond me. Her qualifications didn’t have a direct bearing on the information she’d given me, but I felt my pulse quicken. Every true thing she said made her more credible.

“That’s perfect, thanks.” I topped off both our cups and then tapped the iPod through my jacket pocket. “So, what am I going to find on this?”

“Reprocessed seismic, daily and life-to-date production figures by well, bottom-hole and wellhead pressures from drill date to present, saltwater injection volumes, current and historical produced mixture percentages, well rotation schedules, onsite GOSP capabilities, and some other stuff.”

“For Ghawar?” I asked, stunned.

“For every oil field in Saudi Arabia. I gather you were only playing dumb when you said you didn’t know how to analyze this stuff, right? Because the official Saudi depletion estimates are in there, too, but I wouldn’t want you to start with them. They’re pretty much worthless. It’s better if you do your own work.”

I was speechless. Any single subset of the data she’d mentioned would dramatically enhance understanding of Saudi production capacity. Collectively, it was the intelligence coup of a lifetime, one that would paint a precise picture of the biggest and most secretive oil economy in the world. It was way, way,
way
too good to be true—and I’d been around long enough to know what that meant.

“And this comes from where?” I demanded.

“An acquaintance. I can’t tell you any more than that. Alex said you knew a lot of people in the industry, though. You should be able to confirm enough bits and pieces to get yourself comfortable. You can ask clever questions, like the difference between time migration and depth migration.”

The sarcasm was justifiable. And she was right—I knew people. But only one who might be able to confirm this kind of information: Rashid.

“Can you at least tell me how your acquaintance got hold of it?”

“He—we’ll say it’s a he—was hired to do a consulting project for Saudi Aramco. The project required some poking around in their databases, and he found a back door into their confidential data. An administrative password on a server that had never been changed from the default.”

The Saudis must have monster information security, but it was the kind of mistake that was just prosaic enough to be plausible. I had to be careful, though, because I wanted to believe so badly.

“Which brings me to my next question,” I said.

“Why you?”

“Why anybody? The Saudis are going to go berserk when this information hits the street, and they can hire the best IT people in the world to help them figure out where it came from. This acquaintance of yours is asking for a world of trouble. Why would he do that?”

“He’s covered his tracks.” She tapped the
Financial Times
on the table in front of her. “And he reads in the newspaper that you’re a guy who knows how to keep his mouth shut. You do know how to keep your mouth shut, don’t you? Because let me be very clear—I don’t want my name mentioned to any third parties in connection with this information. This is between me and you.”

“And Alex,” I added, wondering if she actually had an acquaintance or if she’d turned up the information herself.

“And Alex. Speaking of which, I prefer not to give you my contact details. If you need to reach me for any reason, you can go through him.”

“So, I gather Theresa Roxas isn’t your real name?” I said, realizing why I’d come up empty on Google.

“Does it matter?”

“No. But you didn’t answer my question. Why would the guy you know take this kind of chance?”

Theresa—or whatever her name was—picked up her portfolio and her newspaper and stood.

“Take a look at the data,” she said. “I think you’ll understand.”

I could tell there was something going on in the market as soon as I stepped out of my office elevator. The din of the trading floor rises and falls in pitch with the level of tension, like the sound of the wind in the rigging of a ship. There wasn’t enough urgency for whatever storm was looming to have hit yet, but the clipped expectancy in the voices suggested that everyone was fixed on the horizon. I turned toward the noise automatically and then reversed myself. The iPod was burning a hole in my jacket, and I had only an hour before lunch with Senator Simpson. Whatever was happening—or about to happen—in the market would have to wait.

Amy hung up the phone as I approached, looking harried.

“Did Alex call you?”

“No. Did you speak to him?”

“No. But he sent Lynn a text confirming that he’d be at lunch.”

I pulled my phone from my jacket pocket and checked it, thinking maybe he’d contacted me directly. Another two dozen e-mails and a single text, but from Kate, not Alex:
library freezing chaucer boring buy me sushi and hot green tea?

Kate had been spending a few hours a week at the main midtown library, on Forty-second and Fifth, working on her senior English project.

“Nothing yet,” I said, simultaneously thumb-typing
sorry can’t today stay warm love xox
to Kate. “Is there some kind of news out?”

“The French and the Russians issued a joint statement announcing that they’re going to work together to catch the terrorists. Your phone’s been ringing off the hook. Everybody wants to know what you think.”

It figured. The NATO allies, led by the United States, had issued a communiqué overnight, condemning the Nord Stream attack but urging Russia to exercise restraint. The Russians had responded predictably, suggesting that NATO piss up a rope and pointing out that the United States hadn’t exercised restraint when it invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, or when it mustered up a transparently flimsy “coalition of the willing” to take out Saddam. Confronted with an opportunity to knife the United States and suck up to Russia—where French companies were bidding on a number of enormous oil and gas construction projects—the Palais de l’Élysée had also responded predictably. The irritating thing was that Bush had so tainted us internationally that we’d ceded the moral high ground. It hurt not to feel superior to the French.

“All right. I’ll read through the news and then try to get something out ASAP. Do me a favor and get in touch with Rashid, please. Tell him I’d like to meet with him in person—tomorrow morning, if possible.” I turned toward my door and then spun on my heel. “You don’t know how to get data off an iPod, do you?”

“An iPod?” Amy asked, looking confused.

“Yeah.” I took it out of my pocket and showed it to her.

“No idea. You want me to call Frick and Frack?”

Frick and Frack were tech support for the floor, a pair of chubby, balding fifty-year-olds with identical ratty ponytails who’d worked for the National Security Agency before joining Cobra. Walter had been a demon on security ever since a guerrilla financial Web site hacked his positions and published them. He’d been short a bunch of illiquid biotechs, and his competitors had squeezed him mercilessly. Frick and Frack—actually Fred Ricker and Frank Ackerman—had been hired shortly after the debacle to implement new security protocols.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Theresa” had made me a little paranoid about security myself. I didn’t want anyone to see the data she’d given to me until I’d decided when—and whether—to release it. I thought for a moment, trying to figure out who else might be able to help.

“Do me a favor?” I said to Amy.

“What’s that?”

“Find a Japanese take-out menu and order in a bunch of tuna rolls and some green tea.”

•  •  •

I’d just finished an e-mail suggesting that my clients buy French oil services companies and short the German and English when Kate showed up. She was wearing blue jeans and a navy peacoat over an ivory Shetland sweater, and her nose was red with cold. I pressed the send key and got to my feet.

“Hey,” I said, leaning over my desk to give her a kiss. “You have the cable?”

She pulled a hard plastic clamshell container from her coat pocket and held it out of reach.

“You have my sushi?”

“Amy ordered. It should be here any minute.”

“Excellent.” She stripped off fleece gloves, lifted a pair of scissors from my desk, and set to work on the package. “This is a seriously high-rent district. I had to pay twenty-nine ninety-five for a stupid piece of wire. That’s almost thirty-three bucks with tax.”

I took three tens and three singles from my wallet and laid them in front of her.

“So, how do we do this?”

“Simple,” she said, setting down the scissors and deftly extracting the cable from the mutilated plastic. “Give me the iPod.”

I handed it to her, and she snorted derisively, flipping the unit over to study the microscopic printing on the back.

“Second- or third-generation,” she said, fitting one end of the cable to an attachment point on the bottom. “At least five years old. It’ll be a miracle if it still functions. The half-life of these things is only about six months, which—surprise, surprise—is about as long as it takes Apple to roll out a new model.”

I smiled mechanically as she attached the other end of the cable to a concealed port on the side of my monitor, thinking she seemed a little too bright and sarcastic. Whenever Kate got hyper and sharp-tongued, it meant something was bothering her. Maybe that was why she’d wanted to have lunch with me.

“Hmmm,” she said, touching the iPod’s face. “It powered up at least. That’s good.” Pocketing the cash I’d set out for her, she came around the desk and took hold of my mouse, clicking first on the Windows start button and then on the My Computer icon. “Even better,” she said, using the pointer to highlight a rectangular gray drive symbol on the screen. “For a second there, I was afraid that we might have to mount it
on a Mac. Some early iPods weren’t natively compatible with Windows.” She double-clicked the drive symbol and an Explorer window opened, revealing dozens of folder icons with cartoon zippers running down their left side.

“So, what’ve we got?” I asked.

“About nine gig of compressed files,” she said, clicking on folders randomly. “Mainly Excel spreadsheets and a handful of PDFs. The best thing would be if I copied everything to your computer and then extracted it. That way you’d have a backup in case the iPod bricks.”

I hesitated. My computer was attached to Cobra’s network, which meant—what? I was in the business of publishing information, not concealing it. I’d never particularly had to worry about security before.

“Can I get it backed up on CDs instead?”

Kate shook her head.

“Not easily. The files are going to be, like, twelve to fifteen gig when they’re inflated, which would be twenty to twenty-five CDs. You could get it on two or three DVDs maybe, but I’m guessing you don’t have a dual-layer burner here?”

“Not that I know of.”

“You want to move the information around with you, or you’re worried about somebody snooping?”

“More snooping,” I admitted.

“I could encrypt everything.”

“Is that effective?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “There’s a lot of excellent military-grade encryption software out there. You’ll have to deal with a really long, random password, but I can write it down for you so you don’t have to remember it. Just don’t leave it taped to the underside of your keyboard.”