The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [45]
“I have something fairly delicate to discuss with you, but before I do, I was wondering if I could ask you for a small favor,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Do you know a man named Mariano Gallegos? He was a member of the Venezuelan delegation to the United Nations a few years back, and he might or might not still be here in New York.”
He frowned slightly and rubbed his wispy beard.
“I don’t think so.”
“I need to speak with him. No big deal, I just want to ask him a couple of questions. Is there any chance you could arrange an introduction?”
He pulled a pad toward him and scribbled on it.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” I hesitated a moment, uncertain how to broach Theresa’s data. It had occurred to me that Rashid might get angry. In all our long acquaintance, he’d never done or said anything that wasn’t in OPEC’s best interest, and having Saudi secrets laid bare wasn’t necessarily in that category. Best just to heave it out, I decided, and let the chips fly.
“A friend of a friend looked me up the other day. The friend knew a person who’d done work for Aramco. The friend gave me a computer hard drive that contained an enormous amount of internal Aramco information. Reprocessed seismic data, production figures, mixture percentages, you name it. Well by well, for every field in the Kingdom.”
I paused, wanting to get a sense of his initial reaction before carrying on.
“Let me see if I have this straight,” he said, steepling his fingers and tipping his head slightly to one side. “You have a friend who has a friend who has a friend. And this person gave your friend’s friend a mass of highly confidential information, and then your friend’s friend came to you out of the blue and gave the information to you. And you think this information might be credible.”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said, coloring a little.
“Not often.”
“True,” I admitted. “Which is why I’m here.”
“You’d like me to vet this stolen data for you?” he asked, leaning forward slightly. “Based on confidential knowledge I may have obtained in my professional capacity as an employee of OPEC?”
It wasn’t exactly how I would have put it, but it pretty much summed things up.
“Yes.”
He tossed his hands skyward.
“Why would I do that?”
It was a question I’d anticipated. I extracted a sheaf of papers from my briefcase and handed them to him.
“What are these?” he demanded.
“Saltwater injection volumes and produced mixture percentages at Ghawar for the last five years. There’s a summary on the last page.”
He flipped to the end of the packet and glanced at the summary.
“So?”
“So, the mixture percentages are much lower than you’d expect, unless the wells were in serious decline.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself. Please. You’re not an engineer. There are any number of technical reasons for low yields. Even if the figures are correct, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
My head was throbbing slightly, and I wished I’d gotten more sleep. I had only one chance to pitch him. I didn’t want to screw it up.
“I know. But hear me out for a second. The Aramco data I saw—”
“The supposed Aramco data you saw,” he interrupted.
“Fine. The supposed Aramco data I saw contained a bunch of senior-management reports, including a few that had been explicitly written for OPEC. One was addressed to you by name.”
“And?”
“And the numbers in the reports don’t match the field data.”
“Meaning your information is internally inconsistent, and thus inherently suspect,” he said dismissively.
I didn’t answer, giving him time to think about it. Rashid was a long, long way from being stupid. One possibility was that my information was incorrect. The other was that Aramco had lied to him, and lied to their political masters. Which—if true—raised the question of why.
“I’m tired.” He sighed a few moments later, opening a drawer in the desk. He pulled out a handkerchief