The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [11]
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.
3
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