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By Root 690 0

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.

The camera followed closely as the men trooped across an icy parking lot to a white canvas tent. Inside was a gang of valves, one of which had a gilded control wheel attached to it. The diameter of the attached pipe was way too small to be anything other than some kind of secondary line, but then the entire act of turning a valve by hand was pure theater—everything in the facility was automated. A microphone on a stand stood to the left of the pipe gang. The Russian deputy prime minister tapped on the microphone a few times to settle the crowd, took a sheaf of folded papers from his pocket, and opened his mouth. The screen flared orange for a tenth of a second and then went black.

“Shoot.” I drummed my fingers on my head, trying to think of who else I could call. CNN had frozen the last frame of the footage on the screen, and my attention drifted to the small yellow credit on the bottom-right corner that read courtesy of euronews. I didn’t usually bother with broadcast journalists, but I remembered that someone I knew had gone to work at Euronews a few years back. I willed my mind blank and the name suddenly popped into my head: Gavin Metcalfe. He was a Brit who’d worked at the Economist, but he’d quit to take a job as a producer with Euronews because they were headquartered near the French Alps. He and his wife were big skiers. Typing the name into my address book, I saw two numbers, both with U.K. country codes. I punched the intercom button on my phone.

“Amy, have you got an updated number for Gavin Metcalfe? M-e-t-c-a-l-f-e. Used to be in London, but I think he’s in France now.”

I heard her fingers clicking on her keyboard.

“I have a work and a cell, but they’re both U.K.”

“Same. Do me a favor, please. Call the main switchboard at Euronews in Lyon and ask for him.”

“Will do.”

I hung up and dialed the cell phone number anyway, figuring there was some chance he’d kept it. The call kicked directly into voice mail, a generic prompt suggesting I leave a message. Hoping the number hadn’t been reassigned, I explained why I was getting in touch and then followed up with a quick text from my own cell. My intercom flashed as I pressed the send button.

“It’s weird,” Amy said. “No one’s answering.…”

“Hang on,” I interrupted. My BlackBerry was ringing. I picked it up and checked the display, seeing the London number I’d just tried. “Gotta hop. This might be him.”

I hung up the intercom and lifted the BlackBerry to my ear.

“Mark Wallace.”

“Open a browser window on your computer,” a voice answered. There was a rushing sound in the background that I couldn’t identify.

“Gavin?”

“Don’t interrupt. I’m in a car, and I haven’t got much time. You want to know about Nord Stream, right?”

“Right,” I confirmed, my excitement building.

“So, do what I tell you. Open a browser window and type this in the menu bar: F-T-P colon backslash backslash euronews dot net backslash …”

I pecked carefully at the keyboard as he dictated a URL that was about fifty characters long, interrupting several times when I wasn’t sure what he’d said. Gavin had some kind of impenetrable northern accent that made all his vowels sound the same. He told me