“By all accounts, Mr. Loyal Truex landed his Gulfstream an hour ago,” he said coldly. “Theoretically, he’s on his way here now.” Abruptly he turned from the window to look at Striker’s general counsel, Arnold Moss, a sixty-two-year-old widower and long-ago-transplanted New Yorker, sitting in a chair across from him. “It doesn’t take that long to get from Ellington Field to here. So where the hell is he? Lost? Or did he stop to get laid along the way?” Wirth sat down at his desk and picked up a large unlit cigar from a red, white, and blue ashtray shaped like the state of Texas.
Like his personality, like Texas itself, Wirth’s office was huge, if coldly austere, all chrome and glass with pockets of overstuffed cowhide furniture arranged here and there in tidy groups for simultaneous separate conversations. A long side table held bottles of water, a stack of cheap Styrofoam cups, and a large thermos of coffee; a well-worn mesquite-topped bar stood in a far corner. In front of the window was the room’s centerpiece, Wirth’s enormous desk, ten feet long by four feet wide, its glass top an inch thick. On it were his essentials: an open laptop computer, a hand-tooled leather cigar box, a twelve-inch-high cigar lighter in the form of an oil derrick, the Texas-shaped ashtray, a slate gray telephone console, two lined yellow legal pads, an electric pencil sharpener, and four freshly sharpened number 2 Ticonderoga 1388 pencils lined up perpendicular to each other exactly two inches apart. Other than his executive desk chair and a mesquite credenza behind the desk itself, there was very little else. No photographs of wife and children. No bound volumes of corporate handbooks lining ornate bookshelves. No portraits of company founders on the walls, which, except for a large AG STRIKER company logo stenciled in raised gold leaf across from his polished-steel office door, were wholly bare.
A buzzer sounded on Wirth’s console.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Truex,” a female voice responded.
“Send him in.” Wirth said, then looked at Moss, “He’s here.”
“So I gather,” Moss said as the door opened and Loyal Truex, founder and chief executive of the private security contractor Hadrian Protective Services, entered.
“Finally, the man himself,” Wirth snapped. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Traffic accident. Luckily not mine,” Truex said in a quiet kind of southern drawl.
“Ever think to pick up the phone and call? Or don’t you think this meeting’s important enough?”
“You sound like my mother, Sy.” Truex smiled easily, then plunked down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and made himself at home.
Loyal Truex was forty-three and just over six feet tall. With close-cropped black hair and the muscular build of the former U.S. Army Ranger he was, everything about him—calm, boyish humor, self-made wealth—reflected confidence. His clothes mirrored it: close-fitting, hand-tailored navy suit, open white shirt, plain-toed Italian dress shoes, diamond-studded gold bracelet on one wrist, Rolex watch on the other. That he had spent most of the morning circumventing bad weather while piloting his own Gulfstream jet from Virginia to Texas and after that inching through traffic for nearly an hour seemed to have had no more effect on him than Wirth’s urgent summoning of him to Houston from his Manassas office at six that morning. Still, he was there as promised and ready to go to work.
Wirth got to it quickly. “The Bioko photographs.”
“You want to know where we stand with them.” Truex glanced at Arnold Moss, then looked back to Wirth. “It’s the reason I’m here.”
“I know where the fuck we stand with them. We don’t have them! The reason you’re here is because I want to know what Washington knows. How much you’ve told them or they’ve found out. How closely they’ve been monitoring this.”
“As far as I know, Sy, it’s still all in-house, yours and mine,” Truex said quietly. “Communication with Bioko, with Conor White, is the same as it’s been with you—all done over our own secure lines. The SimCo people in Malabo have been instructed to say nothing to anyone, and they won’t. They’re exceptionally loyal to White and closed-mouth anyway. On the other hand, if Washington has been monitoring the situation in a way we don’t know—which I doubt, for the simple reason that this is a very recent, low-key development that would take time to filter down—I would have heard about it, slick, fast, and hard. As for the photographs themselves, White’s best operators went after them and came up with nothing, so he brought in General Mariano’s army unit.”
“Mariano?” Wirth erupted. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“Easy, Sy.” Truex put up a calming hand. “White’s people were getting nowhere, so he asked Mariano for help. Only his sector knows about them, no one else. His men were told they were looking for unauthorized photographs taken by a village priest and anything found was to be brought directly to Mariano himself. As far as I know, only White and a few villagers have actually seen them. Which is how White got them in the first place, through one of the villagers. The result of it all was that White’s operators and Mariano’s turned over every stone and tree root in the area looking for them, taking down a lot of people in the process. A hundred killed at least. So if the pictures were there they would have been found. But they weren’t. What that means is there’s a very good chance the priest destroyed them himself to avoid being killed.” Truex smiled. “Which is probably why nobody’s found them. Because they no longer exist.”
“And maybe they do exist and are in some fucking place nobody knows about,” Wirth spat, anger, impatience, and displeasure crawling all over him. The next came out of the blue. “Who the hell is this landscape guy, Nicholas Marten?”
“Apparently no more than he appears. An American expat visiting Bioko from England doing plant research for clients. He met the priest by happenstance. That’s all we know.”
“That’s all you know?”
“Sy, we’re working on it.”
“I asked you to come here with hard information. You give me ‘as far as I knows’ and ‘maybes.’ And now you add the ‘incidental information’ that the army knows about them, too. Do I have to go over there and take care of this myself? What the fuck do I need you and White for? Shit!”
Abruptly Wirth pushed out of his chair and walked off, trying to digest the reality of what was going on. The information about the existence of the photos had come to them barely twelve hours earlier in Conor White’s urgent e-mail to Truex. That White had known about them earlier and not reported it, and that he had enlisted a special section of the Equatorial Guinea army to help search for them, made things worse because now too many people knew about it. Worse yet, none of it had done any good. The photos were still missing.
Wirth reached the far side of his office, where the AG Striker logo was, then stopped and turned back. “If those photographs become public the whole Bioko field project is dead, and so is this company. If the media doesn’t make certain of it, Washington will.” He pointed his unlit cigar at Moss. “What the fuck do we do, Arnie?”
The New Yorker in him aside, Arnold Moss’s thirty-odd years in the oil business had given him a shrewd appreciation for the complexities of life and a habit of taking the time to think things through. For a long moment he sat there in silence, doing just that.
“When this whole thing came together,” he said finally, “in exchange for protecting our investment and interests in Equatorial Guinea, we agreed to give Mr. Truex and his Hadrian company seven percent of our gross profit from all crude oil pumped from the Bioko field until the year 2050. By our projections and his, that figure is staggering. That means Mr. Truex has considerable interest in making sure the photographs, if indeed they do exist, are not made public. Because if they are, as you correctly implied, Sy, Washington will simply void the contract, make certain our leases are terminated, and put together a new deal elsewhere. And we, along with Mr. Truex, will end up with nothing.” Moss got up and went to the side table to pick up a Styrofoam cup and fill it from the thermos. Holding it, he looked back.
&
nbsp; “That said, we have to assume the photographs do exist and will be publicly exposed. We have to act accordingly. Starting immediately the AG Striker and Hadrian companies have to distance themselves from SimCo and Conor White. Build a legal and public relations defense against them and be prepared to sever our relations with White and SimCo the instant the photos show up. How they’re delivered, whether by this Nicholas Marten or by someone else or if they somehow just show up on the Internet, doesn’t matter. Whatever is in them, whatever they reveal about White’s people delivering arms to the rebels, it has to look as if it were SimCo’s doing alone, that it was their agenda entirely and one we knew nothing about.” Moss walked back to his chair and sat down.
“AG Striker is an oil field management and exploration company,” he said, “nothing else. Hadrian is a contractor for us in Iraq only. Should it ever be proven that we and Hadrian were, in any way, involved with SimCo to exploit the revolution in Equatorial Guinea for our own gain, everything we’ve been blessed with and worked so long and hard to protect is over. Not only that, there is every chance the Department of Justice will look into it, with Congressman Joe Ryder hanging over their shoulder. Which means not only very bad publicity and an enormous legal expense to defend us but the stark reality that some or all of us will go to prison. You, Sy, and Mr. Truex included. Should we look to Washington for help, they won’t be anywhere in sight. To them, our agreement will have never existed. That’s the way it is.”
Josiah Wirth stared at his chief counsel in silence, then looked to Loyal Truex. “We send Conor White over, then what? Who protects us in E.G.?”
“We do.”
“You?”
Truex nodded. “If it’s done right, and Washington is convinced SimCo will take the fall cleanly, they’ll approve it. They won’t like it, but they’ll approve it because of the sheer scope of the thing and because they won’t dare risk losing what’s there to the maneuverings of a foreign power. Once they do, we’ll bring in a new contractor, one squeaky clean. Maybe Belgian or Dutch. I’ll find out exactly who.”
“That means telling them what’s going on.”
“Yes, it does.”
Wirth stared at Truex, then again looked to Arnold Moss. “Tell him he’s fucking crazy.”
Moss shook his head. “He’s not crazy, Sy, he’s right. They should know what’s happened and what we’re doing to correct it. Despite what Mr. Truex has said, they may already know and wonder why we haven’t told them. If they don’t and find out later, they’ll be understandably upset. Enough so that they might just cancel the contract anyway and make a deal with another oil company even if we’re lucky enough to retrieve the photographs before something happens. Besides, if we include them now, they may be able to help.”
“Arnie.” Wirth’s anger was building. “That’s the same as telling them we can’t control our own goddam business. Contractually we’re in bed with them for years on down the road. We can’t have them wondering what the fuck’s next or they’ll chop us off at the knees. Once that happens, forget ever having them go to bat for us again. And I mean ever! And it won’t make a longhorn’s-fucking-ass difference what party or administration’s in power.”
Moss smiled delicately. “Sy, you pay me for advice. This time I suggest you take it. Washington is not a group we can ignore and then apologize to later. We’re not buying land or oil rigs here, we’re helping facilitate a revolution. They need to know what’s going on and understand that we would very much appreciate their help in resolving the situation. There are times in life when honesty really is the best policy. This is one of them.”
Wirth stared at him. He hated all this. Hated that it had happened. Hated to have anything go this far out of his control. Especially when it revolved around something as simple and stupid as a few photographs snapped by a nosy priest. On the other hand, he knew he had to consider the counsel of Arnie Moss, a man he had known for years and to whom he had entrusted Striker’s legal wrangling ever since he had become chairman of the company.
Finally he looked to Truex. “Get in your Gulfstream and go back to Washington. Call them from the plane, tell them you’re coming and that it’s important they wait for you. You should be in their offices by seven, maybe eight their time. When you get there, tell them what’s happened and make me the bad guy, say that I wanted to go after the photographs on my own. That I hoped we’d retrieve them before anything came of it. But you disagreed and came here to talk me out of it because you felt it was important they know what has happened, not just because we’re all partners in this but because you value who they are and what they believe in and want their muscle and help. You convinced me you were right and went back to meet with them. That will explain the time delay if they already know what’s going on.” Wirth turned to Arnold Moss. “You okay with that?”
“Yes.” Moss nodded.
Wirth looked to Truex. “You?”
“Yes.”
“Call me when it’s done.”
“You bet.” Truex looked from one man to the other, then started for the door.
“Loyal,” Wirth said, and Truex turned back. “Dracula Joe Ryder in is Iraq with a group of other congressmen looking for any dirty crumb he can lay to us.”
“I know.”
“After you’re through with Washington, go there. Find Ryder and hold his hand. Be as gracious as you can be. Kiss his ass without looking like it. Show him anything he wants. Make him feel we have absolutely nothing to hide.”
Truex grinned. “There is no dirt, Sy. No cakes or crumbs, either. Never has been. We all know that, don’t we?” With a glance and a nod at Arnold Moss, he pulled open the door and went out.
15
Sy Wirth and Arnold Moss watched the door close behind Truex. When it had, Wirth looked to his general counsel. “I agree with what you said about SimCo. We set up to distance ourselves from it and Conor White as quickly and quietly as possible. At the same time, we have to distance ourselves from Hadrian and Truex. Even if it means opening the door to Joe Ryder and his congressional commission and inviting them in. Even if it means giving back every penny of the nine-hundred-plus million we’ve made in Iraq. It’s nothing compared to what we stand to make in the future.”
Wirth crossed to the window and looked out at the garish midday brightness of the city. “We needed a private security contractor for our expanded operations in Equatorial Guinea,” he mused out loud. “We felt Hadrian was already stretched too thin in Iraq. Also, there were some questions concerning our partnership there. Still, we trusted Hadrian and asked Loyal Truex to recommend a reliable contractor.”
Wirth turned and looked at Moss directly. “SimCo was a small subcontractor to Hadrian in Iraq. Truex liked the company and its honcho, Conor White, who he’d worked with before and who had outstanding credentials. Because of that he introduced us. We liked what we saw in White and hired his company. How could we know SimCo was a front for Hadrian, which was trying to expand its operations into West Africa without the questionable stigma of Iraq? What Hadrian, through SimCo, was attempting to gain in firing up the insurgency in Equatorial Guinea we had no idea whatsoever. As you said, Arnie, AG Striker is an oil field management and exploration company, nothing else.
“Hadrian could try to deny it by saying we have a contract that says we helped create SimCo and why. But if they did, they would have to produce the contract itself, the hard copy of which, as we all know, is locked in a great big Mosler safe in one of the most secure buildings in the world. If they wanted to produce an electronic copy from Washington’s database, they would have to have Washington’s approval, and that is something that would never happen. If Truex were to complain to them privately later, his going there now, and then on to meet with Ryder in Iraq, would only make it look as if he knew there was trouble all along and was trying to get everyone on his side before it blew up.
“If somehow the photographs are made public before we get them, it won’t be AG Striker that’s under
Joe Ryder and the Justice Department’s laser beam, it will be Hadrian and SimCo.”
Wirth went to the mesquite-topped bar in the corner, poured himself a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue, and drank it in one swallow. Then he locked eyes with Arnold Moss and swore an oath.
“I am not going to lose the Bioko field, Arnie. Not to Hadrian. Not to Conor White or Joe Ryder. Not to Washington. I’m not going to lose it to anyone.”
16
AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 959, MALABO SAINT ISABEL AIRPORT
TO PARIS, CHARLES DE GAULLE AIRPORT.
STILL THURSDAY, JUNE 3. 10:30 P.M.
The seating in the economy cabin of the Airbus 319 was three and three divided by a center aisle, and the four-man army patrol that had escorted Marten and Marita and her people to the airport had commandeered one complete row for them. Window to aisle on the far side were Marita, Rosa, and Ernesto. Window to aisle on the other were Marten, Luis, and Gilberto. The flight had taken off during a lull in the storm, and the cabin lights had been lowered shortly after that. Save for the occasional passenger using an overhead light to read or work, most of the passengers slept, more out of relief to have escaped a long weather-related delay in Malabo than anything else.
Of them all, probably none was more thankful than Marten. Emotionally drained and enormously relieved to be airborne out of the army’s grasp, he only now realized the depth of his exhaustion. He’d been on Bioko for barely five days, but it seemed a lifetime. Still wired and restless, he tried to sleep, but it was impossible. Across the aisle, he could see the red-haired Ernesto awake, too, listening to something over a headset. A deep exhale and he turned to look out the window in time to see the Airbus break through the lingering cloud deck into a clear, moonlit night.
10:38 P.M.
He lay back and closed his eyes once more. They were still hours from Paris, and he wanted to sleep for as many of them as he could. To escape, for a time at least, everything that had happened in the last days.