The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [95]
“Perhaps.”
“I’ll see what I can find out. Get back to me when you can.”
The line went dead. I dropped my phone back into my pocket uneasily. Five bucks was a big move to miss, and my relationship with Narimanov was too recent for him to have complete confidence in my integrity. Claire and Kate were still absorbed in ordering food, so I sidled over to the Bloomberg machine and punched up a market summary. Longer-term oil futures had been up on heavy volume, just as Narimanov had told me, but I noticed that the equity markets had finished roughly unchanged. It didn’t make sense. If the hedge-fund guys were expecting an oil spike, they should have been hammering the stock market.
“Food will be here in twenty minutes,” Claire announced. “Shall we get back to Kutigi?”
I opened the folder I was carrying and did my best to put Walter out of my mind.
33
“One-thirty,” Claire read. “Mac Bunce.”
It was past midnight. We’d worked our way through two and a half months of entirely routine calls, meetings, and meals, not finding anything particularly promising to follow up on. We were up to late November, only three weeks before Kyle had been kidnapped. We were all feeling tired and down, but none of us wanted to stop.
“Mac,” I said. “Nice guy. Good old boy. Was head of E and P at Chevron forever.” I pulled his file and checked the date, seeing a three-line summary of our chat. “We talked about the sale of some offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico by Pemex to a company named Petronuevo. I made a note to myself to follow up with Petronuevo and filed details of the conversation under both Petronuevo and Pemex.”
The table with the B files was directly behind where Claire and Kate were working. I tossed Mac’s file on the table between them and put my hands on Claire’s shoulders. She leaned forward, resting her head on her arms, as I began kneading her muscles.
“Petronuevo.” Kate snorted. “Oil people have no imagination. Every other company I’ve looked up is named Petro-something.”
“Lot of foreign oil companies started off as government monopolies. Governments tend to call things what they are. U.S. Postal Service. British Airways. Deutsche Telekom. Pemex, by the way, stands for Petróleos Mexicanos.”
“Boring,” she muttered. “If I had an oil company I’d call it Fred. Visit Fred’s to get rid of that empty feeling. Fred will keep you warm at night. Let Fred lubricate you.”
“Enough,” Claire protested, sounding half asleep. “You’re going to make your father blush.”
“Fred’s slick,” I offered, sensing her need to blow off steam. “Fred’s rich. Fred can be hot.”
“Exactly.” Kate laughed. “Who wouldn’t want Fred?” She clicked a key on her keyboard and her expression changed. “This is weird.”
“What?” I asked, as Claire lifted her head.
Kate rotated the laptop toward us.
“Look,” she said, touching the screen with the tip of a pencil. “Petronuevo. First trade was on the Madrid Stock Exchange on November seventeenth, opening at one point three euros. Hung around between one and one point three for six months, and suddenly took off like a rocket. Last trade eight point seven, on June twenty-fifth. Then it vanishes.”
“Must have been acquired,” I said tersely. “Pull the news stories.”
She switched to a LexisNexis window and typed in “Petronuevo.” Most of what came back was in Spanish. I reached for her trackpad, and she pushed my hand away.
“Just give me a second. I know how to do this.”
She filtered the articles by language and began scrolling through the English headlines. The bones of the story were simple. Petronuevo had been a privately funded start-up that had bought some offshore oil leases from Pemex and then done an initial public offering to raise the capital they needed to dig exploratory wells. The IPO had brought in about ten million dollars. Six months later, three of the wells had come back as gushers. Repsol, the biggest oil company in Spain, had announced a tender for the company a month later that was worth almost three hundred million dollars, giving all the initial investors in