past thirty years, from 68 percent of gross energy consumption to around 40 percent. But she still imported 1.85 million barrels a day, mostly for road, rail, and air transportation. As a nation she was totally reliant on imported oil, the vast bulk of it coming from Saudi Arabia, with some from Norway and a very small amount from other producers.
France generated 77 percent of her electricity from nuclear power, and she was the second largest exporter of electricity in Europe.
The young Lieutenant Commander actually had other things to do right now, but he put in two routine calls, to the International Petroleum Exchange in London and to NYMEX in New York, leaving messages at both numbers to call back the National Security Agency in Fort Meade.
Ramshawe knew both men at those numbers, having talked with them during various oil crises before. He did not want this to be official. He just wanted someone to mark his card on who was the unexpected major buyer in the world oil market right now, the guy driving up the prices not to earth-shaking levels, but enough to cost a lot of people a great deal of money.
Lt. Commander Ramshawe knew there were always reasons for things. When someone was in any market, buying heavily, there was always a solid reason. Just as when someone was out there selling there was always a reason. And in Jimmy Ramshawe’s global view, those reasons needed to be located and assessed. As his boss Adm. George Morris so often said,
And it did not take him long to find his answers. Roger Smythson, a very senior oil broker in London, said he could not be certain, but the buyer who was unsettling the London market was undoubtedly European. He had already run a few traces, and it looked like France.
Orders, he said, were coming in from brokers based in Le Havre, France’s biggest overseas trading port, which contains the largest of all the French refineries, Gonfreville l’Orcher. In Roger’s view, the fingerprints of TotalFinaElf were all over some huge trades made from that area.
From New York, the suspicion was the same. Frank Carstairs, who worked almost exclusively as a dealer for Exxon, said flatly, “I don’t know who it is, Jimmy, but I’d bet a lot of money it’s France. The orders are all European, and there’s a big broker down in the Marseille area who’s been very busy these past couple of months.”
“That’s a major oil area, right?” said Ramshawe. “TotalFinaElf country, right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Carstairs. “Marseille handles around one-third of all France’s crude oil refining. Terminals at Fos-sur-Mer, that’s us, Exxon. Berre, that’s Shell, Le Mede, TotalFina, and Lavera, BP. They got a damned great methane terminal down there, and an underground LPG depot the size of Yankee Stadium.”
“That’s liquid petroleum gas, right, Frank?”
“You got it, Jimmy. Mostly from Saudi Arabia, like the majority of French oil products.”
“Thanks, Frank. Don’t wanna keep you. Just wondering what’s going on, okay?”
The big Colonial house that stood well back from the road, fronted by a vast lawn and a sweeping blacktop drive, was not an official embassy of the United States. Though no one would have guessed it.
There were two armed Special Agents, one just inside the wrought-iron gates, one in a black government automobile near the front door. There were surveillance cameras set into the gables of the house, laser beams, alarm bells, and God knows what else.
And the visitors were legion. In any one month, the agents at various times waved through cars from foreign embassies, cars from the Pentagon, cars from the National Security Agency, cars from the CIA, and cars from the White House.
When Adm. Arnold Morgan (Ret.) was in residence, there were a lot of people with a lot of problems who needed the advice of the old “Lion of the West Wing.” And since many of those problems had a direct bearing on the health and well-being of the United States of America, the Admiral usually agreed to give people the time of day.
As retirements went, the autumn of the Admiral’s life was full of bright colors. The former National Security Adviser to the President was still in action, unpaid, but still growling…
Admiral Morgan was like a desert sheik dispensing wisdom and guidance to his flock at the weekly
Most of the Admiral’s guests came at their own request. But the guest tonight was there as an old friend, invited for dinner by Admiral and Mrs. Morgan, the beautiful Kathy, who had served as his secretary in the White House with the patience of Mary Magdalene.
Gen. David Gavron, the sixty-two-year-old Israeli ambassador to the United States, was unmarried, though there were at least two Washington hostesses who were nearly certain he might marry them. He loved dinner with Arnold and Kathy, and he always came alone. The three of them met quite often, occasionally at their favorite Georgetown restaurant, sometimes at the Israeli embassy, three miles north of the city, and sometimes here in Chevy Chase.
It was growing cold in Washington, and Admiral Morgan considered he was in the final couple of weeks of his outside barbecue season. On the grill were five gigantic lamb chops — which would be eaten with a couple of bottles of Comtesse Nicholais’s 2002 Corton-Bressandes, a superb Grand Cru from her renowned Domaine Chandon de Briailles, in the heart of the Cote de Beaune.
Morgan was a devotee of the Comtesse’s red burgundy, and considered lamb chops to be utterly incomplete without it. Which meant that the chops were incomplete about a dozen times a year, because Corton-Bressandes cost around fifty dollars a bottle, and Arnold considered that a touch extravagant on a day-to-day basis.
However, he had purchased a couple of cases of the 2002 several years ago, and he took great delight in serving it to special guests, like David Gavron, who had introduced him to the perfect, silky dessert wines of the old Rothschild vineyards fifteen miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Admiral Morgan’s cellar was never without a case of that.
Tonight it was a very relaxed dinner. The wine was perfect and the chops were outstanding. Afterward they each had a slice of Chaume cheese and finished the Burgundy. By 11 P.M. they had retired to the fireside in the timbered book-lined study, and Kathy had served coffee — a dark, strong Turkish blend that Gavron himself had brought as a gift.
They were discussing their usual subject, terrorism and the sheer dimension of the pain-in-the-ass it caused all over the world, the cost and the inconvenience. Which was, after all, what the terrorists intended.
Quite suddenly, General Gavron asked, “Arnold, have you heard anything more about our old friend Maj. Ray Kerman?”
“Plenty,” replied the Admiral. “Too damned much. Volcanoes, power stations, and god knows what. But we never really got a smell of him. He’s an elusive sonofabitch.”
“We nearly had him, you know,” said the General. “Damn nearly had him.”
Morgan looked up sharply. “What do you mean, nearly had him?”
“Darned nearly took him out.”
“You did? Where? When?”
“Couple of months ago. Marseille.”
“Is that right? I never heard anything.”
“I’m not surprised. But do you remember a major gangland killing in a restaurant? Bullets flying. Customers injured, staff dead?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“No. The French police covered it up pretty tight.”
“You’ve lost me, David — what about Kerman?”
“The night before the killings, we picked up Kerman arriving in Paris. On an entirely empty Air France flight,
