Restitution

by Lee Vance

  I grabbed some coffee from the pantry and settled in at my desk. I was reading an industry rag half an hour later when my news screen suddenly began to beep. Glancing up, I saw the headline, “Explosion Reported at Nord Stream Pipeline Terminus,” the keywords “Nord Stream” and “pipeline” highlighted in yellow. The terminus was in Russia, near St. Petersburg. I picked up my phone and called Dieter Thybold, a friend at Reuters in London.

  “It’s Mark,” I said when he answered. “What’s up with this pipeline explosion?”

  “No idea yet,” he replied tersely. “I can’t even confirm that there was an explosion. But something strange is going on.”

  “Strange how?”

  “Today’s the day they’re holding the construction completion ceremony for the terminus. A lot of reporters and dignitaries are visiting. The whole site went quiet twenty minutes ago. Nobody can get hold of their people. And we just got word a moment ago that the Russians have closed their airspace between St. Petersburg and the Finnish border, and that there’s been a huge increase in encrypted radio traffic out of their military bases at Pribilovo and Kronshtadt.”

  “So how do your people know there was an explosion?” I asked, my adrenaline beginning to pump.

  “There was a camera crew shooting the ceremony. The footage should be on air any minute. You can see the tiniest hint of a flash in the last frame of the video before it goes dark.”

  “Satellite views?”

  “Too cloudy. I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait. You’re thinking terrorism?”

  “It’s hard not to, isn’t it? But we haven’t got many facts yet. I’ll e-mail you a partial list of the attendees that we cobbled together. That’s about it right now.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. Stay in touch.”

  I hung up and turned on CNN, watching the screen out of the corner of one eye while I speed-typed an e-mail to my clients. The gas pipeline the terminus was supposed to serve wouldn’t be finished for three years yet, but the market impact of any kind of incident there—much less a terrorist attack—would be instantaneous. The immediate risks were a knee-jerk spike in energy prices, weakening global equity markets, a steeping yield curve, and a declining euro. Dieter’s e-mail arrived. I copied the list of names at the bottom of my own e-mail, wrote URGENT in the subject line and hit the send button. Alex Coleman, Andrew’s son, was in my office thirty seconds later.

  “You think this is serious?” he demanded.

  Alex looked terrible, rough patches of psoriasis visible in his hairline and bluish circles beneath his eyes. He’d been having a bad time with the market for months. In truth, he’d been having a bad time with the market for years. I could guess what his positions were today from the sweat soaking his shirt beneath his arms.

  “I don’t know anything more than what I wrote.”

  “You have a hunch?”

  “Half the countries that used to make up the Soviet Union are furious about this pipeline, and they’d all like to see Russia take it in the neck. I think this is bad.”

  “Shit.”

  He rushed out just as CNN cut to a special report. They had obtained the footage Dieter referred to. It opened with an establishing shot: frozen marshes, snow, and the bleak gray waters of the Bay of Finland. The shot tightened as it panned to the terminus. It was nothing much to look at—squat scrubbing and absorption towers, low brown buildings to house the compressor equipment, an antennae-festooned central control station on tall stilts, and endless miles of dull blue pipe and valves. There was no housing—according to the CNN commentator, the workers commuted from Vyborg, thirty miles to the east, or from Hamina, in Finland, thirty miles to the west. The shot tightened further as a group of heavily bundled dignitaries began emerging from a building that was probably a dining hall. I recognized Jacques Pripaud, the head of Banque BNP Paribas, as the first out the door. His expression seemed consistent with a meal at a Russian cafeteria. He was closely followed by his counterpart at Deutsche Bank. I pulled a copy of Dieter’s list closer and turned the volume up a little, hoping the commentator might identify more of the faces I didn’t know. Dieter had sent me twenty-two names, including the chairmen of four of the largest banks in Europe, a Russian deputy prime minister, the mayor of St. Petersburg, and the German foreign minister. The pipeline had been hugely controversial in Europe, implying an energy dependence on Russia that made people old enough to remember the cold war queasy. All the businessmen and politicians who’d supported it had turned out to wave the flag.

  The camera followed closely as the men trooped across an icy parking lot to a white canvas tent. Inside was a gang of valves, one of which had a gilded control wheel attached to it. The diameter of the attached pipe was way too small to be anything other than some kind of secondary line, but then the entire act of turning a valve by hand was pure theater—everything in the facility was automated. A microphone on a stand stood to the left of the pipe gang. The Russian deputy prime minister tapped on the microphone a few times to settle the crowd, took a sheaf of folded papers from his pocket, and opened his mouth. The screen flared orange for a tenth of a second and then went black.

  “Shoot.” I drummed my fingers on my head, trying to think of who else I could call. CNN had frozen the last frame of the footage on the screen, and my attention drifted to a small yellow credit on the bottom right corner that read Courtesy of EuroNews. Someone I knew had gone to work at EuroNews a few years back. I willed my mind blank and the name suddenly popped into my head: Gavin Metcalfe. He was a Brit who’d worked at the Economist, but he’d left London to take a job as a producer with EuroNews because they were headquartered near the French Alps. He and his wife were big skiers. I punched the intercom button on my phone.

  “Amy, have we got a number on Gavin Metcalfe? M-e-t-c-a-l-f-e.”

  “Two,” she answered a second later. “A work and a cell. Both U.K.”

  “No good. He’s in France now. Or at least I think he is. Call the main switchboard at EuroNews in Lyons and ask for him please. And give me the cell number,” I added as an afterthought. There was some chance he’d kept it.

  The cell kicked directly into voicemail, a generic prompt suggesting I leave a message. Hoping the number hadn’t been reassigned, I explained why I was calling and then followed up with a text from my own cell. My intercom flashed as I pressed the send button.

  “It’s weird,” Amy said. “No one’s answering …”

  “Hang on,” I interrupted. My cell was ringing. I picked it up and checked the display, seeing the London number I’d just dialed. “Gotta hop. This might be him.”

  I lifted the cell to my ear.

  “Mark Wallace.”

  “Open a browser window on your computer,” a voice answered. There was a rushing sound in the background that I couldn’t identify.

  “Gavin?”

  “Don’t interrupt. I’m in a car, and I haven’t got much time. You’re interested in Nord Stream, right?”

  “Right,” I said, my excitement building.

  “So do what I tell you. Open a browser window and type this in the menu bar: F-T-P-colon-backslash-backslash-euronews-dot-net-backslash …”

  I pecked carefully at the keyboard as he dictated a URL that was about fifty characters long, interrupting several times when I wasn’t sure what he’d said. Gavin had some kind of impenetrable northern accent that made all his vowels sound the same. He told me to press enter and I did.

  “It wants a username and password,” I said.

  “The username is ‘batailledepatay,’ one word, all lowercase. Password 18061429. Bloody frogs having a go at me every time I turn around.”

  I could hear someone speaking in the background. It sounded like a child.

  “I see a bunch of folders. You’re with your family?”

  “On our way to the airport. Click the folder labeled archive, and then click the one inside that with today’s date, and then click the one inside that named NordStream.”
/>   “Done.”

  “You’ll see two files—EsatIIB135542 and EsatIIC141346. Click on either to download it to your desktop. They’re big files, but the server’s hooked directly into the Internet backbone, so the limitation will likely be on your side.”

  “What are they?”

  “Video. The first is the raw footage you’ve been seeing on television. The second is something else entirely.”

  I clicked the second. We were connected to a dedicated fiber optic cable as well. A dialogue box indicated that I had ten minutes to wait, the file transfer speed a number I’d never seen before.

  “Give me a hint,” I said, wondering what the hell was going on. “I’m under a lot of pressure here.”

  “You?” he sneered. “I’ve had the effing DGSE in my face all afternoon.”

  “Remind me who the DGSE are?”

  “Bloody French foreign intelligence creeps. Jackbooters. They turned up just after we released the first footage and put a lid on us. I went out for a cigarette and kept going. If I wanted to work for fascists I would have taken a job with Murdoch.”

  “So what’s the second file?”

  “It’s what it isn’t that bears thinking about. It isn’t our footage. We had one cameraman and one reporter on the ground, and we lost them both in the initial blast. I’m inside the airport now, on the ring road. I’m going to have to hang up in a moment.”

  I scribbled the words “initial blast” on a yellow pad. I had to stay focused.

  “Who shot the footage, then?”

  “Our satellite truck kept running after our lads went off the air. Someone pirated one of our frequencies and the feed was automatically uploaded. We didn’t even realize we’d received it until an hour ago.”

  “Does it show what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “It makes the guys who did 9/11 look like a bunch of shitarsed teenagers. Make sure you watch the whole thing.”

  “Will do,” I said, wondering fearfully what I was about to see. There was just one more question I had to ask. “Has anyone else got this yet?”

  “No. I hadn’t figured out who to give it to. I want it distributed, but I don’t want my name mentioned. You understand?”

  “You’re fleeing the country, Gavin,” I said, feeling obliged to point out the obvious. “It’s not like they aren’t going to figure it out.”

  “There’s a difference between suspecting and knowing. I have your word?”

  “Of course.”

  He hung up without saying good-bye. The dialogue box indicated that I had seven minutes to wait. I typed another urgent email, alerting my clients that I had tentative confirmation of a major terrorist action and that full details would follow shortly. The Dow was down 100 points when I hit the send key. By the time Andrew and Alex showed up in my office, it was down 250, and my phone turret was pulsing like it was going to explode.

  “What the hell is going on?” Andrew demanded. He had a raptor’s profile—an aquiline nose, deep-set eyes, and short-cropped white hair. Part of his legend was that pressure only ever made him meaner. Alex looked as if he’d been run over by a car.

  I rotated my screen sideways and touched the download box with a finger.

  “We’ll know in a minute. I have video.”

  Andrew paced irritably as Alex slumped into a chair. The file completed downloading and I clicked on it. My media player opened and a second later the screen filled with an image I couldn’t identify, the lower half shiny gray metal and the upper a blurry blue tube. The field of view began shifting smoothly upward and suddenly I got oriented.

  “The camera’s mounted on one of the scrubbing towers,” I said. “It was pointing straight down, maybe so nobody would notice it.”

  “Whose camera?” Andrew demanded.

  “My contact didn’t know. Pirates, he said.”

  The picture scrolled higher until the Bay of Finland was just visible at the top of the screen, and then began tracking to the right.

  “What’s that?” Alex said, pointing at the screen.

  Four metal struts reached skyward, the ends blackened and twisted. Dark smoke was spewing up between them.

  “The control tower,” I replied, horrified. Even with the terminus only performing minimal duty, there would have been at least three or four guys in the control tower.

  The camera kept panning and the white marquee where I’d last seen the Russian deputy prime minister about to speak—or what was left of it—came into view.

  “Jesus Christ,” Alex said.

  Flaming scraps of canvas surrounded a charred, rectangular area that looked like an airplane crash site. Burned corpses and scattered body parts became distinguishable as the camera zoomed in. A few survivors crawled on the ground, blood seeping from appalling wounds. Alex grabbed hold of my garbage can and threw up. I felt that I wouldn’t be far behind him. Andrew started to leave.

  “Wait,” I managed to say. “My contact said I should watch until the end.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you speed it up?” Andrew asked impatiently.

  “I think so.”

  I clicked my mouse on the appropriate button and the video began playing at ten times speed. Andrew lifted my phone and entered a handful of crisp orders while I tapped out yet another urgent email with trembling fingers. Six minutes later—an hour of elapsed real time—the Russians had four military helicopters and fifteen or twenty fire trucks and ambulances on the ground, and another couple of helicopters circling overhead. The parking lot I’d seen earlier had been converted into an emergency triage zone, with dozens of coveralled medics working on the injured.

  “Stop,” Andrew said.

  I pressed the pause button. A pale red X had suddenly appeared in the center of the screen, a column of similarly colored numbers superimposed to the far left.

  “Play,” Andrew said. “Half speed.”

  I fumbled with the mouse. The camera swung slowly toward the helicopters and the emergency vehicles. Andrew touched the changing column of numbers on the left with one finger.

  “Distance and azimuth,” he said. Andrew had been an army officer in Vietnam. I hadn’t, but I had a sudden dread of what to expect. “Speed it up again.”

  The camera lingered fractionally on each of the landed helicopters and on the larger pieces of emergency equipment, the central X blinking repeatedly. Each time the X blinked, it left behind a red dot. The camera pulled back for a wide view and I felt my heart in my throat. The blow wasn’t long coming.

  Every one of the emergency vehicles and helicopters exploded simultaneously. A fraction of a second later a rolling wave of synchronized explosions took out the triage zone. No one on the ground had a chance. Alex retched again.

  “Mortars,” Andrew announced softly. “Some targeted, some pre-positioned. Probably on the roof of one of the buildings. They must’ve anticipated where the emergency workers would set up. Who the hell are these guys?”

  I shook my head numbly as the camera rose higher, pointing at the sky. The pale red X changed to blue, as did the column of numbers on the left. It panned left until it located a hovering helicopter and then zoomed in. The blue X began flashing.

  “I don’t believe it,” Andrew said.

  A white streak appeared on the lower right of the screen. The helicopter burst into flames, heeled over onto its side, and fell from the sky. The camera swung left again with the same terrible mechanical precision. A second helicopter came into view, fleeing to the east. A second later, it too fell out of the sky in flames, taken down by a second missile. The camera did a final slow pan. The horizon was empty save for bellowing plumes of black smoke, and the ground was a sea of fire.

 

 

 
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