Why am I doing this?
She forced a smile as she neared the front of the room. The woman behind the microphone didn’t smile back. In fact, she seemed to look more pissed off.
“Sorry I’m late. The elevator took forever,” Kate whispered, setting her computer bag on the small table next to the podium.
“Are you ready?” the woman replied in a voice nothing close to a whisper. It seemed to reverberate off the flocked wallpaper, and Kate had to restrain herself from looking up to see if the faux crystals in the chandelier were swaying.
On the verge of apologizing again to the gorgon in lime green linen, Kate remembered that not only was she the speaker, but she was from Brooklyn. She stopped what she was doing for a minute and glanced at the woman meaningfully.
“Not quite,” she answered at nearly the same volume.
The glare she received in return flash-froze the sweat that had started to dampen her hairline. Kate straightened up and returned to setting up her computer. A moment later she turned to the woman and raised an eyebrow above a painfully artificial smile. “So, are you going to introduce me, or do I do that myself?”
Friday, July 20, 8:36 A.M., Washington, D.C.
The thunderstorms that Simone was throwing off had finally begun to hit the area and driving had been an absolute bitch as Jake came in from Reston on the same roads as the rest of the population of Northern Virginia. A few trees were down at strategic intersections on the Maryland side of the Beltway, and that had caused ripple-effect backups all the way around in no time. After ten years in the D.C. area, he was all too familiar with the drill. Even one or two minor problems on some feeder routes and the Beltway entrance and exit ramps started backing up. Annoyed drivers were forced to break the habits of a lifetime and remove themselves from autopilot in order to actually drive and make decisions instead of shaving or putting on their mascara or hosting conference calls while maneuvering across six lanes of heavy traffic at 80 miles an hour—
He took another sip of the acrid hotel coffee and grimaced. All in all, the trip hadn’t left him in a very good mood. Not to mention the fact that the speaker, who’d probably had to negotiate nothing more than a few hallways and an elevator, hadn’t shown up yet.
Good thing I got here early.
He was just feeling his face settle into a deeper scowl when he saw a woman glide with speed down the narrow aisle of the room with her hair sort of flowing behind her in its own jet stream. The scowl was replaced by a choked-back laugh as he overheard her brief exchange with the moderator.
Looking more than a little pissed off, the moderator stepped to the microphone. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the presentation titled ‘Extreme Anomalies in Local Weather.’ The presenter is Ms. Katharine Sherman, chief meteorologist for Coriolis Management. When you sat down, you found a brief questionnaire on your chairs. If you would please take a moment after the presentation to—”
Jake tuned out the battle-ax with the wicked-witch demeanor and professorial tone and studied the speaker. She had sandy blond hair and dark eyes, a good figure, and a nervous habit of playing with her watch. Not bad for a meteorologist, especially one who wasn’t on television. He glanced down at the program. Coriolis Management. That fuddy-dud billionaire’s company. He looked back at Katharine Sherman, who was smiling nervously at the polite applause that followed her introduction as she stepped up to the podium. Pushing a lock of blond hair behind her ear, she launched straight into her presentation. Her words, delivered in a voice that shook and moved a little too fast, immediately pushed all thoughts of bad traffic and worse coffee from Jake’s mind.
She was talking about his storms.
Friday, July 20, 9:23 A.M., Washington, D.C.
Thank God that’s over.
Kate pushed a trembling hand through her hair, a gesture she knew she’d made too many times during the course of her talk and the question-and-answer period that had followed. The faint applause faded quickly and a low hum picked up in the room as people stood and began gathering their belongings and talking with one another.
She was keeping her head down deliberately as she packed up her computer, because she had a strong feeling that the guy in the middle of the back of the room was going to come up and talk to her and she didn’t want to appear too eager. He’d seemed to be paying close attention. Really close attention. She’d managed to avoid any direct eye contact, and she’d tried almost as hard not to look at him at all. It hadn’t been easy, though. He was really good-looking, if sort of intense and scowly. The bottom line was that you never knew who some of these people were and, given the topic, he could be some conspiracy nut. Of course, the odds were that he was just another meteorologist, but still—
“Ms. Sherman?”
It was a nice voice. She looked up and met his eyes—they were a greeny-brown that she’d always been somewhat partial to—and waited a beat before replying. “Yes?”
He smiled. He had a nice smile. It was nicer than his scowl.
She smiled back and kept her eyes on his. This was a business conference and there was no reason for her to assess how well he filled out his faded jeans and golf shirt.
“That was a great talk.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you enjoyed it.” She glanced down after a second and continued to organize her notes in their manila folder. After a moment, she looked up and met his eyes again with a polite hint of a smile and waited for him to tell her why he was there.
He cleared his throat. “My name is Jake Baxter and I’ve been researching some similar questions about a few other storms. I was wondering if you have time to talk about them. I mean the ones you wrote about. You know, give me a little more background on them. We might be able to help each other find some answers.”
She slid her laptop into her computer bag. “I’d be happy to. Did you want to talk now?”
He smiled again. “If you have time now, that would be great. Are you here for the weekend?”
Well, aren’t you clever? She felt a small flush of pleasure at the implication that he might want the answer to be “yes,” then straightened up and slung the bag over her shoulder. The audience for her talk had disappeared. People were drifting in for the next session and the moderator was glaring at her again. Kate smiled and gave her a waggle-finger wave before returning her attention to Jake.
“Actually, I’m only in town for this talk. I’m heading back to the city this afternoon.”
“The city?”
“New York.”
“Then now is fine.”
The tone in his voice was more decisive than accommodating, and to make a point of her own, Kate glanced at her watch again. “I’m supposed to meet someone for coffee at ten,” she lied. She could handle a half hour with him, no problem. After that, she’d wing it.
“Not a problem.”
He let her precede him out of the room and made idle small talk as they walked through the crowds milling outside the suite of meeting rooms set aside for the conference.
“Is the coffee shop okay?” she asked.
“How about the lobby? Right over there. There are two chairs and a table on the other side of that pillar. I’ll go get some coffee. How do you take it?”
Hmm. A nook. Out of sight, out of earshot. “Plain, thanks.”
“Does that mean black?”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll be right back. See you over there.”
Kate made her way to the small alcove set off the front of the lobby. Well away from any traffic pattern, the seating area was three small steps higher than the rest of the lobby and had an unobstructed, monarch’s view of the entire atrium. Sitting down, she wondered how many political deals had been hammered out in that very seat.
Jake returned a few minutes later with two coffees. “Here you go. So, how was your trip down?”
Kate took the cup he offered her and set it on the table. “Thanks. Not bad. I took the train so I didn’t have to deal with
the rain or the traffic. So, what are you working on that involves weird little storms?”
He paused, halfway into his seat, and laughed. “You’re very direct.”
She laughed and shrugged. “Just pressed for time. Typical New Yorker.”
He got comfortable, then reached for his coffee. “Would you mind if I call you Katharine?”
“Actually, I would,” she replied, and watched his eyebrows rise. “I’d prefer that you call me Kate.”
He laughed politely. “Done. I appreciate you giving me some of your time, Kate. What I’m working on is—I’m just doing some analysis of small-scale systems to see why and how anomalies happen.”
You really do just want to talk about the weather. Not sure if she was relieved or disappointed, Kate attempted to take a sip from her cup and somehow refrained from swearing as pain flared through her upper lip. She set the cup back on the table and took off the lid to let it cool. “You said you’ve been looking at storms other than the ones I mentioned. Are there a lot of them? I mean storms with weird commencement or escalation parameters? That’s what caught my attention about these.”
He nodded, managing to swallow the coffee. Kate was impressed, until she saw two ice cubes bobbing in his cup. Wimp.
“I found thirty-six.”
She stared at him. “Thirty-six? In what time frame?”
“Nine years, but I searched globally.”
“You went looking for them?” she asked, more than a little incredulous. “How? What did you start looking for? I mean, there aren’t any commonalities among them except for the fact that they all lie outside the standard deviations.”
He smiled at her again and she realized that her reaction was probably a little too enthusiastic. Then again, it was probably just a research question for him, but for her these storms represented job security.
“Well, how did you find yours?” he asked.
“The first three sort of landed in my lap. I was tracking them for—well, it’s what I do for a living.” She brushed away her own interruption with a wave of her hand. “I was tracking the first three as they were evolving, and when they went off the charts they blew my forecasts and got me into some trouble. The other three, Barbados, Death Valley, and Simone, were sort of gimmes. Last-minute add-ons in case I didn’t have enough to talk about for an hour.” She paused for a moment, not wanting to sound too bold. “So, who do you work for that you’re allowed to do all this research into obscure atmospheric phenomena? It sounds like a great job, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Not at all. I work for the government,” he said, taking another sip of his coffee. It was at least a third gone, which meant that either she was talking too much or he was seriously caffeine deprived.
Being vague is not allowed. You know who I work for, so we’ll try that again, Jakester. “Which agency? What do you do?”
He gave her the briefest, pointed pause, which she chose to ignore. “Mostly forensic analysis. Some predictive analysis.”
She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs with more grace than she normally would, and noticed that the movement wasn’t lost on him. Then she wondered what the hell she was doing, flirting with him. “So which of the storms I discussed have you looked at?”
“Minnesota, Barbados, Death Valley, and Simone.”
She nodded. “That Death Valley storm gives me the whim-whams. It literally came out of nowhere. When I first saw the radar, I would have bet money that it was a false reading.” She hesitated then, wanting to continue but not wanting to give him any idea that she was inclined toward the whack-job end of the research spectrum. All that discussion with Richard had made her paranoid about it.
But, damn it, the facts are what they are and can’t be ignored.
She leaned forward slightly and lowered her voice, looking straight into his eyes. “Jake, don’t read anything into this, but even if I hadn’t been looking so hard at the other ones, that one would have sent my woo-woo detectors into overdrive.”
He stayed silent for a few seconds. “Why?”
“Because it just happened. For no reason. It defies most of what we know about the regional climate, about the atmosphere, about weather.” She paused. “I zeroed in on it and got the tightest set of readings I could get my hands on. A tiny cloud appeared for no logical reason and exploded into a storm a little while later. There are no records of any planes being in the area; there’s no record of any company doing cloud seeding. I mean, I turned into Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. I looked into everything I could think of.”
He stared straight back at her, no hint of amusement in his eyes. If anything, his expression might have gotten a little cautious. “What made you think of cloud seeding?”
A shiver raced down her back and she gave a small laugh that she didn’t really feel, then picked up her coffee. “Well, it happened in California. They’re always doing stuff like that out west. I mean, people are growing vegetables in Arizona, in greenhouses out in the desert. Why wouldn’t some doofus decide to try to make it rain on demand in the desert? It can’t be more expensive than putting hundreds of acres under glass.”
“It’s Death Valley, Kate. It’s a National Park, not an undeveloped lot.”
“Yeah, I know, but the entire desert isn’t a park. Someone owns the rest of it. And it’s just sitting there, doing nothing. Why not put it to use?”
There was no mistaking the amusement in his look. “That’s kind of a stretch, don’t you think?”
She leaned back in her chair, recrossed her legs without flirting this time, and raised both eyebrows. “No, I don’t,” she said flatly. “I work on Wall Street, Jake. The betting that goes on there—we call it speculating or investing, but between you and me, those are just ten-dollar words for gambling—what goes on there would make you doubt your own sanity. Chronic gamblers, every one of them, but they have money, so nobody talks about it.”
“Does that make you an enabler?”
She laughed and unbuttoned her suit jacket. The sun was beating through the windows behind her, making her warm. At least that was what she hoped was making her warm. “Of course I am, but it’s what I get paid to do, so I’m not about to stop any time soon. But there are firms that actually deal in weather derivatives.” As if on cue, his eyebrows went up. “Yes. You heard me right. Weather derivatives. Like the stock market isn’t unpredictable enough. Betting on the weather must be the ultimate rush. The crack of the investment world.”
He put his cup on the table and leaned forward. “Wait a minute. You have to explain that to me. What the hell is a weather derivative and what do you do with it?”
She hesitated with a smile. “Explaining it is a little weird, sort of like describing how to swim. It may not make much sense. But to put it simply, a trader places bets on the weather, like options. Do you know what an option is? Like a stock option?”
“Like the ones everyone got in the nineties from the Internet start-ups? I had a few of those.”
“Didn’t we all. Except these you wouldn’t use as wallpaper in the bathroom. They have some value. Companies that can make or lose money based on the weather place bets on what’s going to happen over the course of a season or some other period of time in a specific locality, and that could be anywhere from one city to a region of the country. Power companies started doing it about ten years ago. I think Enron was the first, not that that has much to do with anything.” She shrugged. “Creative thinkers, though. I have to give them that.”
“I’m sure they’ll thank you from their jail cells.”
“Whatever. It’s about a ten-billion-dollar industry now and growing. The energy companies basically started it by betting on the number of heating-degree and cooling-degree days there would be in a city where they operated. They placed options on the outcome and then made or lost money based on what actually happened. Then insurance companies got on the bandwagon by trying to anticipate things like hurricanes and floods, and now even theme parks and ski l
odge operators and beer companies get in on it, and large-scale farmers—anyone whose business can be affected by local or regional weather. So they—”
“So is this what you do? I mean, your company? You bet on storm strikes?”
She stopped and met his eyes as a small warning dinged in her head. “No. We work with commodities. More unusual ones.”
“Do you mean there are more unusual things to trade than the weather?”
She swallowed a sip of coffee, which had cooled, and set the cup back on the table. “I see your point. Anyway, no, we don’t deal in weather derivatives.” She paused and lifted an eyebrow. “Who did you say you worked for? The SEC?”
He laughed. “I said I worked for the government, but it’s not the SEC. If I did, I wouldn’t need the explanation.”
“Maybe,” she replied dryly.
He laughed again. “Okay. Maybe I wouldn’t need the explanation. But I still don’t work there.”
She let a long pause build, then folded her arms across her chest and looked straight at him. “Okay, the time for being cagey has ended, Jake. So far you’ve been doing most of the questioning and I’ve been doing most of the answering. Are you fishing?”
He relaxed into his chair and met her eyes. “No. And I’m not being cagey, either. I’m curious. I’m a meteorologist. And after fifteen years in the industry, I just found out that weather is a product.”
“More like a commodity.”
“See, I don’t even know the terminology. But I’m still curious. Isn’t one of your companies into reconstruction? You go in after storms and rebuild?”
As his question registered, she had the sensation of a spider scurrying along her spine and she sat up abruptly, shaking off the sudden commotion it caused in her brain. She wasn’t imagining it. He was fishing and he was being cagey.
She cleared her throat to cover her pause. “Well, yes, Coriolis Engineering has pretty much made its name by rebuilding disaster-stricken areas, but my side, the investment side, is Coriolis Management. We’re a separate company and we don’t deal in weather derivatives,” she repeated firmly.
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