The Garden of Betrayal Page 2

  At about eight, I banged out a two-page market update to my client base, telling them what they should be watching out for. I stood, stretched, and gave myself fifteen minutes to stare out the window next to my desk. The window was what made me decide to co-locate with Alex and Walter. It might even have been what persuaded me to try life as an independent analyst. It faces due south onto Park Avenue, and at almost any time of day I can see hundreds of people on the street below.

  I was on a plane to London the night Kyle vanished. As we taxied to the gate at Heathrow, a stewardess bent forward and told me that a customer service manager would be meeting me on the jetway. I was too groggy to suspect anything other than the faux-warm handshake and stilted chitchat that airline management occasionally bestow on frequent business travelers. I recall hoping he’d brought a courtesy cart so I wouldn’t have to make the long walk to Immigration.

  The next twelve hours are pretty much a blur. I remember the physical impact of hearing that Kyle was missing, as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me and couldn’t recover. I remember sitting hunched in my seat on the long flight back to New York, feeling as if I were falling and falling, with the ground nowhere in sight. Most of all, I remember the look on Claire’s face when we met at the police station-the grief that persuaded me the nightmare was true, and the guilt that’s never vanished. It wasn’t until later that I began wondering what might have happened differently if I’d been home.

  Amy, my assistant, walks in on me occasionally when I’m staring out my office window and makes gentle fun of me for being so entranced. It helps me think, I tell her, feeling bad about the lie. The truth is something I can only just bear to admit to myself. Claire and I never discussed the evening Kyle vanished in any detail, but I read the statement she made to the police and the description she gave of the clothes he was wearing. Despite all the years that have passed, I’m still searching the crowd below for a tall twelve-year-old in an oversized parka and a green knit school hat.

  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 c
omputer,” 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.”