“I’m erring,” Sykes said, “on the side of inclusivity. If you’d like to give me your definitive guidance on what a worldwide network of terrorists, with communication channels both known and unknown, knows and cares about ahead of time, I’d be happy to consider it.”

The DS man smiled. He always liked to see Sykes and the Treasury preppie go at it. “Do any of those relate to a connection in Geneva?” he asked.

“Well,” said Sykes, “that is the question. What do we have in Geneva?”

“Watches,” said Rafe. “Chocolate. Money.”

“We can probably rule out watches and chocolate,” Sykes said.

The FBI man wasn’t so sure. “Watches,” he said. “Timers for explosives.”

“You don’t need a Patek Philippe,” said Frank. “I like Timex.”

You like Timex for what? Rafe wondered.

“There’s one more event yesterday,” Sykes said. “An oil pipeline blew up off the coast of Nigeria. Cause unknown.”

“Long way from Geneva,” said the DS man.

“Is it?” said Rafe.

“Pretty damn sure,” said the DS man.

“In miles,” Rafe said. “But money. Banks. The other thing we have in Geneva.”

“What about it?” asked the DS man.

“Who owned that pipeline? Was it a public company?”

“What does that matter?”

“Because if it was public,” Rafe said, “and someone knew it was going to blow up . . .”

Helen Sykes, knowing it too, finally answered one of the DS man’s questions: “That someone could have made a very profitable investment.”

Dax

DAX

One of the screens on the wall above Catherine’s desk ran nothing but real-time quotes from the world’s stock exchanges. If Catherine had looked up, she would have seen “SHLH 13.5 -22%” scroll by, and it would have meant nothing to her. She did not know that SHLH was the ticker symbol for Sahel Hydrocarbon, a company she’d never heard of, whose shares were currently tumbling. And, even if she had known that, it would not have mattered to her unless its shares were part of the German DAX index, which they weren’t, because Sahel Hydrocarbon was not a blue chip German company. On reflection, though, if she had known about Sahel Hydrocarbon’s decline, she might have considered it good news. Because the collapse of sketchy Third World stocks would customarily provoke a flight to safety, like to shares in the blue chip German companies that made up the DAX index. Which would make the DAX index rise, which was what Catherine had been counting on when she bought calls on the DAX while neglecting to simultaneously purchase offsetting puts, a countervailing trade that would have completed an arbitrage play that would have generated a solid but small gain or, worst case, an annoying but small loss. Small potatoes either way.

But Catherine had swung big.