The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [39]
My news screen beeped, and I glanced at the flashing headline. A German wire service was reporting that the French and Russians were mobilizing special forces troops. There wasn’t any detail, and no one else had reported it. The markets gapped lower on the story and began trading skittishly on light volume. I picked up my phone, tempted to call Narimanov and ask him if he’d heard anything. I tapped the handset against my palm, hesitant. I hated to call as a supplicant. Better I have something of value to share with him first—which brought me right back to the Saudi data. The French and the Russians would have to wait, I decided. There was nothing more important than figuring out exactly what Theresa had really given me.
“I’ll be in Alex’s office,” I told Amy, as I walked by her desk.
“You’ll be alone. I heard from Lynn that he called to say he was taking the afternoon off.” She lowered her voice meaningfully. “Evidently, he’s not feeling well.”
I sighed. Nothing shy of a kidney transplant was supposed to keep you out of the office when the market was moving. Holing up with a hangover was an invitation to an ass-kicking from Walter, or worse.
“Try him on his cell again, please.”
“Will do. You’ve been getting a lot of calls. Do you want me to start putting people through?”
The core dilemma of my business was that my clients paid me to be responsive, but the more time I spent talking to them, the less time I had to work, and hence the less I had to say of value.
“No, but let me know if anyone’s really insistent and I’ll try to get back to them. Were you able to get in touch with Rashid?”
“I just heard back. You’re on for breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel tomorrow morning. His room at eight-thirty.”
“Thanks.”
I headed back to my desk and sat down again, half wishing I could curl up in the knee space and hide. I had too much going on, and too much to worry about. The best cure for anxiety was to stay busy, I reminded myself. Pulling Kate’s note from my pocket, I set to work decrypting the files she’d copied from the iPod. Absent a conversation with Alex, my sole option was to slog through the information as best I could, and to hope like hell I wasn’t on a snipe hunt.
• • •
Seven hours later, I’d just about managed to assemble the data into an intelligible order. The sheer quantity was overwhelming, let alone the complexity, and a handful of the key technical reports were written in French. Alex hadn’t called back. It was lucky that Claire and Kate were out at the concert—it meant I could work through dinner without feeling guilty. Amy had ordered in some pizza for me before she left, and the cold remains were sitting in a box on my credenza.
Theresa had cautioned me not to believe any of the management information, and the raw data were way too granular for me to reach any off-the-cuff conclusions, so my next step was to employ a multivariate model of oil field decline that an acquaintance at the Colorado School of Mines had written a few years back. Loading the model was tricky, painstaking work that involved a number of easy-to-screw-up volume and density conversions. I was copying figures between spreadsheets when my cell phone rang, the caller ID blocked. I ignored it. My office phone flashed a few seconds later, and then the cell phone rang again. I picked up, thinking it might be Alex calling from the bar at Pagliacci.
“Mark Wallace.”
“It’s Reggie. How you doing?”
“Not bad,” I said, taking off my reading glasses and rubbing my eyes. Reggie Kinnard was the NYPD detective who’d been working with us on Kyle’s disappearance since day one. He checked in every couple of months to let me know that he’d updated this or that database, but mainly, I suspected, simply to let me know that he hadn’t forgotten.