Free The Garden of Betrayal by Lee Vance Page A

elaboration would be beyond me. Her qualifications didn’t have a direct bearing on the information she’d given me, but I felt my pulse quicken. Every true thing she said made her more credible.
    “That’s perfect, thanks.” I topped off both our cups and then tapped the iPod through my jacket pocket. “So, what am I going to find on this?”
    “Reprocessed seismic, daily and life-to-date production figures by well, bottom-hole and wellhead pressures from drill date to present, saltwater injection volumes, current and historical produced mixture percentages, well rotation schedules, onsite GOSP capabilities, and some other stuff.”
    “For Ghawar?” I asked, stunned.
    “For every oil field in Saudi Arabia. I gather you were only playing dumb when you said you didn’t know how to analyze this stuff, right? Because the official Saudi depletion estimates are in there, too, but I wouldn’t want you to start with them. They’re pretty much worthless. It’s better if you do your own work.”
    I was speechless. Any single subset of the data she’d mentioned would dramatically enhance understanding of Saudi production capacity. Collectively, it was the intelligence coup of a lifetime, one that would paint a precise picture of the biggest and most secretive oil economy in the world. It was way, way,
way
too good to be true—and I’d been around long enough to know what that meant.
    “And this comes from where?” I demanded.
    “An acquaintance. I can’t tell you any more than that. Alex said you knew a lot of people in the industry, though. You should be able to confirm enough bits and pieces to get yourself comfortable. You can ask clever questions, like the difference between time migration and depth migration.”
    The sarcasm was justifiable. And she was right—I knew people. But only one who might be able to confirm this kind of information: Rashid.
    “Can you at least tell me how your acquaintance got hold of it?”
    “He—we’ll say it’s a he—was hired to do a consulting project for Saudi Aramco. The project required some poking around in their databases, and he found a back door into their confidential data. An administrative password on a server that had never been changed from the default.”
    The Saudis must have monster information security, but it was the kind of mistake that was just prosaic enough to be plausible. I had to be careful, though, because I wanted to believe so badly.
    “Which brings me to my next question,” I said.
    “Why you?”
    “Why anybody? The Saudis are going to go berserk when this information hits the street, and they can hire the best IT people in the world to help them figure out where it came from. This acquaintance of yours is asking for a world of trouble. Why would he do that?”
    “He’s covered his tracks.” She tapped the
Financial Times
on the table in front of her. “And he reads in the newspaper that you’re a guy who knows how to keep his mouth shut. You do know how to keep your mouth shut, don’t you? Because let me be very clear—I don’t want my name mentioned to any third parties in connection with this information. This is between me and you.”
    “And Alex,” I added, wondering if she actually had an acquaintance or if she’d turned up the information herself.
    “And Alex. Speaking of which, I prefer not to give you my contact details. If you need to reach me for any reason, you can go through him.”
    “So, I gather Theresa Roxas isn’t your real name?” I said, realizing why I’d come up empty on Google.
    “Does it matter?”
    “No. But you didn’t answer my question. Why would the guy you know take this kind of chance?”
    Theresa—or whatever her name was—picked up her portfolio and her newspaper and stood.
    “Take a look at the data,” she said. “I think you’ll understand.”

7
    I could tell there was something going on in the market as soon as I stepped out of my office elevator. The din of the trading floor