Monday morning. Munich, Germany.

"There's new movement in natural gas."

Johanna looked up from her monitor. Stefan checked his tablet and went on with the report.

"Sell orders are coming in through American trading desks."

"How big?"

"It's still hard to estimate the whole. They're splitting the orders, so we need to confirm whether it's the same money."

"They're not unwinding existing positions?"

"The trading team over there thinks they're most likely new shorts."

Johanna switched screens. Trade records came up beside the natural gas futures chart.

These weren't orders that visibly crashed the price.

When buyers stepped in, the seller took them on; when the price moved, the seller waited, then sold again. It was selling that didn't rush, and didn't back off either.

"Any chance it's Korea or London?"

"For now, it looks like American money. But we can't pin down the end investor from the trading desk alone."

Johanna moved the mouse and zoomed in on the recent action. It wasn't strange in itself for someone else to be looking the same way.

She wasn't the only one watching natural gas, and besides, the market wasn't anyone's private property.

But the timing bothered her. Why now?

People were still saying it had fallen far enough and they should wait for a rebound.

To come in fresh on the sell side, you needed both the judgment that it would fall further and the stomach to ride out a rebound. It was as if someone had handed them the confidence.

"Several sources?"

"We're seeing orders from desks of different kinds."

Johanna's hand stopped. It wasn't just one.

They could each have looked at the same data and made their own call. But a different possibility came to her mind first.

New York. Emilia Lorenz.

And the young Korean who'd gone to see her.

"Bear……."

The name slipped out softly, and Stefan looked up. Instead of answering, Johanna looked at the phone lying beside her chair.

When she'd gotten Saturday's report, the meeting with Emilia had been what bothered her first.

Emilia was the woman who'd shown up with a…