“And he shorted the stock two days ago?”

“Yes,” said Majid. “I told you when he did it. He said he had doubts about its fundamentals.”

Ron pointed to the television screen. Flaming oil. Charred wreckage washing up on a beach. “That’s pretty fucking fundamental,” he said.

“It is a haphazard part of the world,” said Majid.

“Sure,” said Ron. “But two days, then fucking boom?”

“So . . . what? You think Mister Stavro, our client, did that?” Majid looked at the screen. “Made the investment, flew to Lagos, took a boat to wherever the fuck that is, carried dynamite in his suitcase . . .”

“I don’t know,” said Ron. “Maybe he has friends. Who is this guy? What do we know about him? Is his name even Stavro?”

“After 9/11,” Majid said, “it came out that somebody had shorted airline stocks right before and made a fortune. The SEC investigated. The FBI investigated. Was it Osama bin Laden playing the market? No. Turned out it was an orthodontist from Omaha. Or something. Total coincidence. On any given day every stock in the world is being shorted by someone.”

Ron looked out the office window. He could see Stavro walking away down the Quai des Bergues. A salesgirl standing in front of a cosmetics boutique offered him a sample of expensive soap. Stavro brushed by her.

“Does he look like an orthodontist from Omaha?” Ron said.

“I don’t know,” said Majid. “I’ve never been to Nebraska.” And he turned back to look at the TV, where a shattered dugout canoe and the body of a woman, bloated and black, was washing up on a mangrove-choked shore.

Thursday

THURSDAY

A driver in a stolen milk truck had run down pedestrians at an outdoor market in Rotterdam.

A small bomb had exploded by the track of the TGV running from Paris to Lyon.

Two American missionaries in Mali had been kidnapped.

It was Thursday and, inside the SCIF, Helen Sykes was running down a list of things that had happened on Wednesday. The day by which the deceased ISIS operative had commanded Homeboy to make a connection in Lake City.

“Are any of these connected to Geneva?” asked Frank.

“Not in any obvious way,” said Sykes, and she continued:

Bomb threats had been called in to four synagogues in California.

An ISIS sympathizer had been arrested while making nail bombs in his garage in Schenectady, New York. Date and site of planned detonations unknown.

A confused teenager from Liverpool had been stopped at Heathrow trying to book a ticket to the Islamic State, to which no flights were scheduled.

“Lot of things happen on a Wednesday,” observed the FBI man. “Any Wednesday. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“ISIS wouldn’t have known about that teenager ahead of time,” said Rafe. “And it wouldn’t matter if it did. Same with a lot of those things.”