The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [22]
It wasn’t notably terse by trading-desk standards, and it certainly seemed lucid, but the late hour and indistinct mention of “important information” made me a little suspicious. The energy markets attract all sorts of lunatic conspiracy theorists, and I was constantly getting calls from people anxious to persuade me that international Zionists secretly controlled OPEC, or some similarly paranoid nonsense. I didn’t have time to waste on a crazy woman Alex had met in a bar.
“I’ll pick up,” I said reluctantly. “And yes, please try to get hold of Alex for me. I’d like to speak to him.”
“Will do.”
I switched to my direct line.
“Ms. Roxas? This is Mark Wallace.”
“Theresa,” she said, pronouncing it the Spanish way. I could hear voices in the background, as if she was calling from a public place.
“Theresa,” I repeated. “Thanks for calling. Alex sent an e-mail saying you have something to tell me.”
“Yes. But I don’t want to talk on the phone. I’d prefer to meet in person.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose wearily. There aren’t that many things you can’t talk about on the phone. Maybe she was still at the bar and needed someone to come settle the check.
“Do you mind my asking how you and Alex know each other?”
“We’re old friends.”
I waited, but it was all she had to say on the subject.
“My schedule’s really very difficult right now,” I said, doing my best to sound regretful. “Are you sure you can’t give me a preview?”
“You’re familiar with seismic reprocessing?”
The question caught me off guard. Energy companies had been using seismic studies—effectively, terrestrial sonar—since the early 1930s, to help them find oil and gas. Seismic reprocessing was a more recently developed technique that took advantage of computational advances to reanalyze old data, revealing originally unobtainable detail. It wasn’t a subject many people knew about.
“Generally,” I admitted cautiously.
“And you’re aware that Aramco did extensive seismic work at Ghawar in the 1950s, and again in the 1970s?”
Aramco had been the original name of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state oil company. And Ghawar was Saudi’s largest oil field—the largest oil field in the world. Now she had my complete attention.
“Yes.”
“So, we should meet.”
I felt a little dizzy, exhaustion vanquished by excitement. Ghawar’s geology was the most fiercely guarded secret in the energy markets, because the Saudis didn’t want the market to know how much oil they were capable of producing. Information was power—if prices were low, the Saudis could hint at shortages. If prices were high, they could talk about bringing more capacity on-line. Reprocessed seismic data would go a long way toward shedding light on the truth of their situation, by revealing how much oil they’d started with. I counted to three, willing myself to calm down. The chances that someone I’d never heard of had gotten hold of Saudi secrets and picked me to share them with were slim to none.
“I’m not an engineer,” I cautioned, making another stab at drawing her out. Experience had taught me that people tended to talk more freely when they thought you didn’t understand them. “If you have technical data, I’ll need help interpreting it.”
“Interpretation won’t be a problem,” she said flatly. “Are we getting together or not?”
I realized I wasn’t going to learn anything more on the phone. I glanced at my in-box unhappily—another four e-mails had arrived while we’d been speaking. But I couldn’t risk missing out on a scoop of this magnitude. I had to hear what she had to say.
“Absolutely. When and where?”
“Now would be good. I’m at Café Centro, in the MetLife Building.”
“Fifteen minutes,” I said, abandoning any pretense of reserve.
“I’ll be seated. The table’s in your name.”
The line clicked and went dead. I shouted for Amy and then grabbed my keyboard. Better I knew who Theresa was before we spoke. Google returned eight hits for “Theresa Roxas,” four of them a MySpace page for a sultry Philippina baton twirler.