Lee Vance: The Garden of Betrayal

“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.