“One-thirty,” Claire read. “Mac Bunce.”
It was past midnight. We’d worked our way through two and a half months of entirely routine calls, meetings, and meals, not finding anything particularly promising to follow up on. We were up to late November, only three weeks before Kyle had been kidnapped. We were all feeling tired and down, but none of us wanted to stop.
“Mac,” I said. “Nice guy. Good old boy. Was head of E and P at Chevron forever.” I pulled his file and checked the date, seeing a three-line summary of our chat. “We talked about the sale of some offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico by Pemex to a company named Petronuevo. I made a note to myself to follow up with Petronuevo and filed details of the conversation under both Petronuevo and Pemex.”
The table with the B files was directly behind where Claire and Kate were working. I tossed Mac’s file on the table between them and put my hands on Claire’s shoulders. She leaned forward, resting her head on her arms, as I began kneading her muscles.
“Petronuevo.” Kate snorted. “Oil people have no imagination. Every other company I’ve looked up is named Petro-something.”
“Lot of foreign oil companies started off as government monopolies. Governments tend to call things what they are. U.S. Postal Service. British Airways. Deutsche Telekom. Pemex, by the way, stands for Petroleos Mexicanos.”
“Boring,” she muttered. “If I had an oil company I’d call it Fred. Visit Fred’s to get rid of that empty feeling. Fred will keep you warm at night. Let Fred lubricate you.”
“Enough,” Claire protested, sounding half asleep. “You’re going to make your father blush.”
“Fred’s slick,” I offered, sensing her need to blow off steam. “Fred’s rich. Fred can be hot.”
“Exactly.” Kate laughed. “Who wouldn’t want Fred?” She clicked a key on her keyboard and her expression changed. “This is weird.”
“What?” I asked, as Claire lifted her head.
Kate rotated the laptop toward us.
“Look,” she said, touching the screen with the tip of a pencil. “Petronuevo. First trade was on the Madrid Stock Exchange on November seventeenth, opening at one point three euros. Hung around between one and one point three for six months, and suddenly took off like a rocket. Last trade eight point seven, on June twenty-fifth. Then it vanishes.”
“Must have been acquired,” I said tersely. “Pull the news stories.”
She switched to a LexisNexis window and typed in “Petronuevo.” Most of what came back was in Spanish. I reached for her trackpad, and she pushed my hand away.
“Just give me a second. I know how to do this.”
She filtered the articles by language and began scrolling through the English headlines. The bones of the story were simple. Petronuevo had been a privately funded start-up that had bought some offshore oil leases from Pemex and then done an initial public offering to raise the capital they needed to dig exploratory wells. The IPO had brought in about ten million dollars. Six months later, three of the wells had come back as gushers. Repsol, the biggest oil company in Spain, had announced a tender for the company a month later that was worth almost three hundred million dollars, giving all the initial investors in Petronuevo a thirty-to-one return in less than a year. The story Gallegos had told me at breakfast rang in my ears-Carlos and his associates had been offered shares in an oil company that owned fields that were worth more than the market knew. Carlos declined, but his associates accepted. I hustled over to grab Petronuevo’s file, Claire and Kate right behind me. The folder contained eight or ten sheets of yellow paper covered with my handwriting.
“What does it say?” Claire demanded.
“Mac, my friend at Chevron, had an opportunity to bid on the leases that Petronuevo bought,” I said, summarizing as I read. “He declined, because the geology didn’t look encouraging, but he passed the offering documents along to one of their analysts. Chevron has some kind of proprietary mapping software that they use to collate all the information they receive. The analyst input the data, and the software kicked out an exception report.”
“What kind of exception?”
“Each lease was for a block of around five thousand acres. The geology at the edges of one block should match the geology at the edges of the blocks around it. One of the Pemex blocks didn’t match. The analyst checked it out and discovered that the information for the block had been rotated ninety degrees. Mac thought something funny was going on, but he didn’t want to ask questions because Chevron does a lot of business with Pemex, and he didn’t want to risk pissing them off.”
Kate looked dubious.
“So, someone screwed up the numbers. It sounds like an easy mistake to make.”
I remembered thinking about it at the time.
“No. Absolutely not. The whole point of the geological data is to generate a detailed seismic map of the ocean floor. To do that, you take dozens of individual observations and stitch them together with the help of really precise GPS fixes, working from the bottom up. You can’t rotate the composite map without making the exact same mistake with every single observation.”
“But if you were faking the data…” Kate began.
“Then you’d probably do it the other way around,” I said. “Figure out what you wanted the big picture to be, and then manufacture the individual observations to suit. And if you were working top-down instead of bottom-up, then it would be easy to rotate one of the blocks, because it would only involve a single mistake.”
“But why would Pemex fake data?” Claire asked.
I continued scanning my notes.
“That’s what I was trying to understand at the time. Pemex is a government company. Given what we know now about Petronuevo, my guess is that there were Mexican officials invested in it as well. Maybe the entire transaction was originally designed to put money in the pocket of some corrupt Mexican officials, and someone invited the Venezuelans along for the ride.”
“So, what did you do?” Claire whispered.
“Two things. I put a call in to Pemex and spoke to a guy in their leasing group named Ernesto Guttero. He said he was busy with another project and asked me to give him a couple of weeks to look into it. And I phoned Petronuevo directly, but I never got past some PR flack.” I cast myself backward in time, trying to remember the conversation with Guttero. He’d been friendly, accommodating. We’d shared a laugh about something. I looked at Kate, a half-formed fear rising within me. “Check Guttero, please. See if there are any news stories from around that time.”
She dashed back to her computer.
“Ernesto Guttero from Pemex,” she announced a moment later. “News item in La Prensa dated two weeks later. I’m running it through Google Translate…” She looked up, the color drained from her face. “He was hit by a car while he was crossing a street and killed instantly. The driver didn’t stop.”
I put a hand on the trestle table to support myself.
“What next?” Claire said, her voice fierce. “Try to find out who Guttero talked to?”
I shook my head as I gathered my thoughts.
“No. Pemex is a huge organization. We could dig around there forever without really figuring out who did what. The key here is Petronuevo. Petronuevo was the conduit for the bribe. Whoever funded the company originally was the one who set this whole thing up.”
“How do we find out who that was?”
“Petronuevo did an IPO, which means they had to prepare a prospectus. The prospectus will identify all the original investors.”
“Can I pull that up online?” Kate asked.
“A prospectus for a Spanish issue? I’m not sure. But there’s an easier way.” I took my phone from my pocket and dialed Morgan Stanley’s New York switchboard. “The big investment banks keep copies of domestic and international prospectuses in their in-house libraries.”
“Morgan Stanley,” the night operator answered.
“Peter McKenzie in Hong Kong, please.”
The phone clicked twice and then began ringing.
“Research.”
“Peter,” I said, recognizing his voice. “Mark Wallace.”
“Mark. Long time. How’ve you been?”
“Can’t complain. Listen, I’m sorry to ring up out of the blue, but I need a small favor…”