“We slept okay,” he said. “Have you been to Africa?”

“Couple of times. Food sucks. These traders who shorted, any of them named Homeboy? Any of them in Geneva?” Frank did not specialize in transitions.

“The clients’ names aren’t listed,” Rafe said. “Just the companies that executed the trades.”

“Any of those companies in Geneva?”

Rafe scanned the list—JP Morgan Asset Management, BNBP Paribas, Bridgestone Volatility Partners, Banque Carouge, a dozen more.

“Maybe. I’ll have to look them up. Even some that aren’t based here have offices here.”

“Place to start,” said Frank.

Rafe scanned the list of short sales again. “Nobody went big. There’s just a bunch of small bets.”

“So nothing big enough to make it worth getting out of bed and going down to Africa to rig up an explosion?”

“Nothing’s leaping out,” Rafe said. The biggest short position amounted to less than one percent of the company’s shares.

“So,” Frank said, “Homeboy, whoever he is, could have been on a completely different mission having nothing to do with the stock market, and that pipeline explosion could have been caused by some idiot African smoking ganja next to an oil well. Did you see that kind of thing on your safari?”

“No,” said Rafe.

“Or Homeboy could just be some kid in his parents’ basement in Cleveland playing a computer game with the guy who got iced by the SEALs.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said. “Or he could be part of a terrorist network making money while it blows up the world.”

“Could be?” Frank repeated.

“Yeah,” said Rafe. “So we probably ought to check it out.”

Part Two

PART TWO

Big Bang

BIG BANG

His boyhood dream was to be a doctor, but history took care of that. After Assad’s bombs killed his parents and ISIS killed his brother, he made his way to France, where he shared an apartment with five other refugees in a cinder block building on the outskirts of Neydens. Neydens is in France, but it is three kilometers from the Swiss border, just fourteen kilometers from Geneva, and Switzerland, like France, is in the Schengen Area, so there are no border immigration checks. And there is a bus.

There was a bus stop near CERN, the sprawling nuclear research complex that brought scientists from all over the world to Geneva. He had read about CERN’s Large Hadron Collider when he was still in Syria. As a child, he’d been a budding science nerd, and he read a lot of popular science websites, and those sites were filled with hyped-up dire predictions that when CERN finally launched its gigantic new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which would smash elementary particles into one another at nearly the speed of light, the resulting collisions might create a black hole that would swallow the earth.