The Garden of Betrayal (4 page)

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.

I was on a conference call with a group of fund managers late that afternoon, going over pretty much the same points I’d been covering all day. My voice was hoarse, and I was scanning headlines while half listening to repetitive questions, struggling to stay in front of the news. Everything I knew was already in my written bulletins, but I’d learned long ago that people are more likely to believe things if they hear you say them.

“It depends,” I said, in response to a question about who might be responsible. “If the completion ceremony was just a target of opportunity, with the primary intent of killing a bunch of diplomats, then your guess is as good as mine. It could have been Islamic fundamentalists seizing the moment, Chechens working off old grievances, or some other terrorist organization. But if the goal was to make a statement about the pipeline per se, then it seems reasonable to ask who has motive. The countries most unhappy about the Nord Stream pipeline are Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Slovakia. They all stand to lose the transit fees they’ve been earning from the existing pipelines that pass through their territory, and—more to the point—they all become significantly more vulnerable to energy blackmail from Russia.”

“Natural gas is cheap now,” one of the listeners interrupted. “Why can’t the Ukrainians and the Poles and the rest of them just buy from someone else?”

I stifled a sigh. My clients were financiers, accustomed to moving money and securities around the world at the tap of a computer key.
Logistics was as esoteric a subject to them as mortgage-backed securities had been to everyone else prior to the housing meltdown.

“First,” I said, intent on correcting as many misapprehensions as possible, “natural gas is only cheap now because the economy tanked. And because it’s cheap now, a lot of companies have canceled exploration and development projects. All of which means that prices are likely to go to the moon as soon as demand picks up again.”

“Is that a prediction, mate?” an Australian voice asked.

“Absolutely. Second, the ex–Eastern Bloc countries can’t buy from someone else, because gas moves most economically through pipelines, and the only producer their pipelines connect with is Russia. Nobody’s going to invest the money to change that anytime soon, because pipelines are expensive, and eastern Europe isn’t that big a market. The Russians have been over a barrel for the last decade, because the routing of the existing pipelines meant that they couldn’t interrupt delivery of gas to eastern Europe without also interrupting delivery to western Europe. The Nord Stream pipeline changes that by making a direct connection to Germany under the Baltic Sea. And the Ukrainians and the Poles and all the other former Soviet clients and republics that have been trying to put distance between themselves and their former master are keenly aware of the fact that it’s difficult to ignore a neighbor who can turn off your lights and heat.”

“The speaker of the Russian Duma accused the Ukrainians on Moscow radio,” someone else said. “How likely does that seem to you?”

“Russia bit the bullet on western exports and turned off Ukraine’s gas twice in the last five years, once in January 2006 and once in March 2008, because of arguments over subsidized pricing. The ultranationalists in the Ukrainian coalition government made some ugly threats at the time. That puts them at the top of everyone’s suspect list.”

“So, you think they did it?” the same voice demanded.

“My opinion is that who actually did it isn’t important in the short run. What matters is how the Russians react. They’re going to be under enormous pressure to hit back hard and fast, and as the United States learned to its detriment in Iraq, intelligence has a way of providing the answers politicians want. Which raises the question of how NATO will respond if Russia threatens military action against one of the former Soviet republics.”

A message from Alex popped up on my screen as two callers began
arguing with each other about the likelihood of the Ukrainians having sponsored the attack.
Drink?
it read. I checked my watch. It was only a little past four, and I still had a huge amount of work to do. I hadn’t been out with Alex in a while, though, and I knew how he must be feeling. There are no secrets on trading floors—Alex had gotten creamed. I wavered a moment and then typed back:
Fifteen minutes
.

“I have time for two more questions.”

“What’s your best trade?” another voice asked.

“The slope of the forward price curve. Let’s take a look at the ICE closing prices for Brent …”

Alex was at his desk in his office, typing something on his computer. I tapped on his door and then took a seat, waiting for him to finish. He’d changed his shirt, but he still looked like hell. I was always taken aback to notice how worn and bloated he’d become—in my mind’s eye, I always saw the skinny, engaging kid I’d first met a decade ago, a kinetic-market wonk with short-cropped hair and black-framed glasses who bore a passing likeness to Buddy Holly and wore his khaki pants too short. I’d been a top-ranked Wall Street analyst at the time, and Alex had been a recent college grad trying to make a go of his own small fund. Walter, a major client, had leaned on me, insisting that I spend time with him. Alex overcame my initial reluctance by being smart and entertaining. We fell into the habit of talking regularly—about work, and other things. Protective of my constrained time with Claire and the kids, I rarely invited professional acquaintances home, but I liked Alex enough to extend an invitation. He’d been a hit, charming Claire with his interest in the arts, and Kate and Kyle with a repertoire of simple card tricks and a willingness to play hide-and-seek. I remember thinking that he was exactly the kind of vivacious, intellectually curious young adult I hoped my own children would become. Claire insisted that I invite him back so she could fatten him up a little, but his luck had already begun to turn bad, and the return visit had been postponed and eventually abandoned.

“Tough day,” I said.

“For lots of people.” Alex pushed his glasses up with one hand to massage raw-looking indentations on either side of his nose. “What’s the death count now?”

“North of three hundred.” The only good news I’d received all day was a follow-up text from Gavin, saying that he and his family had made it back to England safely.

He winced.

“And here I am feeling sorry for myself because I got my socks blown off by the market. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”

Yes and no. Tragedy put unimportant things in perspective, but genuine pain was tougher to mitigate. Alex had been born with enough money to support any lifestyle he chose, but the only thing he really wanted was his father’s approval. He’d been working at it as long as I knew him, and the harder he worked, the more it eluded him.

“How bad did you get hurt?” I inquired, thinking it was marginally less awkward than not asking.

“Drink first,” he said.

We rode the elevator down together and walked around the corner to Pagliacci, an upscale restaurant-cum-lounge that was usually deserted at this time of day. The wallpaper, the cocktail napkins, and the bar menu were all decorated with clowns; even the light fixtures had clown faces stamped on the brass escutcheons. The place gave me the creeps, but Alex liked it for some reason. The barman saw us come in and reached for a bottle of Stoli. He settled a half-full highball glass in front of Alex as we took stools at the empty bar, then tipped his chin at me.

“Amstel.”

Alex gulped at his glass three times, and the barman hit him again.

“You want to talk about it?” I ventured.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said, staring down at the bar. “I’ve been hearing guys in the office call me Eddie behind my back. What’s that about?”

Walter had named his firm after a classic American muscle car, the Ford AC Cobra. His first few apprentices who’d spun out on their own had followed suit, calling their funds Mustang and Charger. It caught on. When Alex briefly ran his own fund, he’d named it Torino. Like the Cobra, the Torino was a Ford.

“No idea,” I said.

“You could do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“You could not lie to me.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Five years back, when I’d
been foundering, Alex was the one who’d persuaded his father to throw me a lifeline. I was indebted to him. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I didn’t see that I had any choice.

“Eddie comes from Edsel.”

He nodded and took another swallow of his drink. The Ford Edsel was Detroit’s most infamous mistake, a hugely touted vehicle that had failed utterly.

“That’s funny,” he said. “The Edsel was named after Henry Ford’s kid, right?”

I nodded.

“Who came up with that?”

“I don’t know.”