“How are things in Isle de Foree?”
“Poe wants to renegotiate. I told him we’d fight him.”
“Will he fight back?”
“I’m not sure, sir. But I’m afraid it looks like he might.”
The Buddha said, “For the sake of your division of the American Synergy Corporation, you better hope like hell that he doesn’t,” and hung up.
“Fuck!” Helms threw his phone on the chair beside his. He jumped up and stared over the pilots’ shoulders at the
Vulcan Queen
growing large beneath him. Ordinarily, the sight of the thousand-foot Vulcan-class drill ship bristling with derricks and deck cranes filled his heart.
Vulcan Queen
was a completely self-contained explorer capable of steaming to the deepest imaginable oil fields in the world at fifteen knots and drilling two exploratory wells simultaneously in stormy seas when she got there. Satellite-directed one-hundred-ton tunnel thrusters and eight rotating propulsion pods could hold her in position as tightly as if she were welded to the distant sea bottom. Manned by two hundred employees and sending remote submersibles to forage miles below, the drill ship was in her complexity and her mission a thing of powerful beauty, and Kingsman Helms felt all of the pride of the captain of the ship. More, he thought. More like a king in his castle or the admiral of a battle fleet.
Vulcan Queen
’s mere captain worked for him. He could always fire the captain. Which, of course, was what the Buddha had just told him could be done to him, the mere president of one mere division of the American Synergy Corporation. His phone rang. Case again. Helms was too angry to pretend he didn’t hate the cripple’s guts.
“It would have been goddamned helpful had I been informed that doddering old President Poe is fully capable of reaming out a goddamned regiment.”
“Acting President Poe,” said Doug Case.
“Don’t fuck with me, Case.”
“Had you informed me you were calling on Acting President Poe, I would have filled you in with an up-to-the-minute dossier.”
“You should have known I was calling on him.”
“I do not spy on branch presidents,” Case replied blandly, making “branch presidents” sound like shopping mall bank managers. “When they inform me of their travel plans, I inform them exactly what’s waiting for them. In minute, accurate detail.”
“What are you calling about?”
“Paul Janson says come to Singapore.”
“I’m not going to Singapore. You deal with him.”
“I already tried. Janson said, and I quote, ‘Bring Helms. Tell him I’ll blow this thing sky-high if he doesn’t get his ass to Singapore in twenty-four hours.’ What ‘thing’ would this be, Kingsman?”
“I don’t know.”
“The man seems to think he has you by the short hairs. Anything to do with the fact that Dr. Terrence Flannigan was stabbed to death last week?”
“Have you paid Janson, yet?”
“He wouldn’t take the money,” answered Case. “I stay at the American Club in Singapore. Shall I book you a room?”
T
he city-state of Singapore, an equatorial island at the southern end of the Malacca Strait, was as hot and humid as Isle de Foree. But there were no mountains to escape to, only air-conditioned shopping malls. Singapore was flat, with a few low hills, and the city, which occupied much of the island, was densely populated. Development had erased the jungle; streams flowed in concrete ditches between high-rise apartment buildings and glittering hotels; swamps had been drained and dredged to serve commercial shipping with a concrete shoreline. The port was enormous, a transhipment colossus with one foot in the Indian Ocean and the other in the South Pacific.
“
Namaste
,” Paul Janson greeted the Gurkha security officers guarding the entrance to the American Club with a folding-stock Remington shotgun, a Heckler & Koch MP5, pistols, and
khukuri
knives.
I bow to the God in you.
He was glad to see good men getting paying work, but they had to wonder, as he did, whether their employment was overkill: Gurkhas were the fiercest, best-trained fighters in the world and Singapore the safest of nations. Janson’s own club up the street, the Tanglin, whose members were the elite Chinese, Malays, Indians, and English who ran Singapore, made do with doormen who kept the taxis from cluttering the driveway.
Doug Case had left word at the front desk that he was waiting in the Union Bar. It was decorated like a sports bar with a big TV. Janson assumed that homesick American businessmen huddled here Saturday afternoons. It was quiet this morning and Case had the place to himself. He had backed his wheelchair into a corner.
“Welcome to the exotic Orient. May I order you a cheeseburger and fries?”
“Where’s Kingsman Helms?”
“Running late. He’ll be here any minute. Good flight?”
“On time,” said Janson, sitting where he could watch the door. He had dressed for the climate in linen shirt and trousers with a jacket draped over his arm. Case wore a bespoke tropical suit of ultralight 300 wool.
“Where’s Ms. Kincaid?”
“Traveling.”
“I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to laying eyes on her again.”
“She asked you a good question last time: How did you know that the doctor had been kidnapped? You answered that the gunrunners told you.”
“Correct.”
“Still your answer?”
Case had hazel eyes. They offered up a glint of steel. “Why wouldn’t it be? What’s up, Paul? What’s eating you?”
“Did the gunrunners mention what the
Amber Dawn
was doing south of Isle de Foree?”
“Not that I recall. Delivering or picking up something, I presume. That’s what service boats do. If you’re interested, I’m sure it’s in the company records.”
“I’ll wait for Helms. Maybe he knows. How long did Terry Flannigan work for ASC?”
“There’s Helms!”
The tall blond executive bustled into the bar and crossed the room in several long strides. “What,” he demanded of Paul Janson, “were you going to ‘blow sky-high’ if I didn’t travel halfway around the world to humor you?”
“How long did Terry Flannigan work for ASC?”
Kingsman Helms sank into a chair and said, “You could have asked that on the telephone.”
“I don’t think you would have answered it on the telephone. How long did Terry Flannigan work for ASC?”
“Briefly.”
Janson looked at Doug Case. Had Doug known? Hard to tell.
“What do you mean, briefly?”
“He was let go for schtupping some VP’s wife.”
“I don’t understand. Why’d you hire me to save him if he no longer worked for ASC?”
“He had been one of our own. And he was taken from one of our boats. It was agreed that it would be good for company morale to see even a former employee rescued.”
“There’s a lot of fear in foreign oil patches,” Case chimed in. “It’s hard to get top people to work in them.”
Janson kept his focus on Helms. “What was the
Amber Dawn
doing south of Isle de Foree the night it sank?”
“That’s another I could have answered on the telephone. You’re batting two for two.”
“What was the offshore service vessel doing south of Isle de Foree where there were no oil rigs to service?”
“The
Amber Dawn
was completing a secret three-D seismic program for the Isle de Foree deepwater blocks. We had contracted a small Dutch company to conduct a seismic acquisition project, and they jury-rigged the
Amber Dawn
as a streamer three-D seismic vessel.”
A surreptitious glance at Doug Case revealed a minute widening of the corporate security chief’s eyes.
Janson asked, “Why didn’t you just send a real one? What was the big secret?”
“I told you about our pro bono contractors two weeks ago,” Case interrupted.
“You did not tell me
Amber Dawn
served an independent subcontractor.”
Case leveled an angry gaze at Kingsman Helms. “Apparently that loop was above my pay level.”
Janson said, “Why don’t we hear Mr. Helms’s version of the truth?”
Helms shrugged. “The truth is, secrecy is bred in the bone in the oil business. Has been from the start. We’re selling a mysterious commodity. How much oil there appears to be at any given time dictates price, from the gas pump all the way back to reserves imagined in the ground.”
“And how much you’ll pay the nation that owns that ground?”
“I see where you’re going with this and you are dead wrong. It’s not like we were hoodwinking Ferdinand Poe.”
“It’s not? Who were you hoodwinking?”
“Our rivals. Other oil companies. But primarily the Chinese. It behooves us when we’re guessing and hoping for a big find to keep it secret until we know for sure. Keep in mind, we are looking for oil where we are not likely to find it. But we never know. The petrological world is full of surprises.”
“You’re not
guessing
what’s in the Isle de Foree deepwater blocks. You know already.”
Helms shook his head. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I’ll admit—in confidence—we’ve got reason to hope. But nothing is in the bag.”
Paul Janson said, “It was enough in the bag for ASC to support both sides of the Isle de Foree civil war.”
Kingsman Helms did not deny the accusation. Instead, he looked Paul Janson straight in the face and said, “The problem with the supply side of oil is a problem of accessing the resources in the ground. But a purely logistic problem becomes a political problem when governments claim access.”
“That’s a common corporate complaint.”
“Complaining is useless until a corporation admits that governments force us to make choices in order to access the product our customers require.”
“What choices did ASC make to drill for Isle de Foree’s oil?”
“Survival choices,” Helms answered blandly. “We at ASC are on our own in an increasingly competitive and contentious world. Gone are the days that the mere existence of American military might covered our back. We’re a global corporation, but big as we are, we compete with companies that are fronts for the Chinese and Russian governments. They’re not afraid of us anymore.”
Helms fell silent.
Janson asked, “What survival choices did you make?”
“Everywhere we explore, the American Synergy Corporation is whipsawed between anarchistic locals and rapacious Chinese. ASC has no choice but to cover our own back. If our government won’t lead us—and I assure you they won’t—we will lead the government. They don’t mind taxing us, but they won’t protect us. Since our government won’t level the playing field, then ASC must meet the Chinese head-on by doing what we have to do to level the playing field.”
“In other words, if the U.S. government won’t help ASC, ASC will help itself.”
“Without apology!” Helms shot back. “It’s a new world, Janson. It’s passed you by.”
“Dr. Flannigan told me as much.”
Kingsman Helms smiled patiently, as if humoring Janson. “What did the good doctor tell you?”
“He told me that ASC did not know he was aboard the
Amber Dawn
. That’s why he fled. He thought you sent us to kill him.”
Kingsman Helms just stared. “That is ridiculous. The man was a lunatic.”
“He told me that
Amber Dawn
was secretly exploring for oil.”
“I already admitted that to you.”
“Two minutes ago. But since the doctor was killed, I’ve spoken with people who were in the rebel camp. It seems that the FFM fighters who murdered her crew were executed by Ferdinand Poe’s son as punishment for going rogue.”
“The least they deserved.”
“But they swore with their dying breath they had been
ordered
to murder the crew.”
“That’s as bloody and contradictory a story as daily events in the Niger Delta.”
“But if it is also a true story,” said Paul Janson, “then the question is, if the FFM fighters were tricked into murdering your crew, who set them up?”
“Who’s to know?” Helms shrugged. “Poe’s son died in the final battle and our doctor was assassinated in Australia—on your watch. And now, if you’re done telling dead men’s tales, I’m going to bed. I’ve been flying all night.”
“Sleep tight,” said Doug Case.
Kingsman Helms strolled out of the Union Bar without another word.
Paul Janson said, “Doug, you look surprised.”
“I never heard it laid out quite that way before.”
It struck Janson that the last time he had seen Doug Case genuinely surprised—the only time—was in Ogden, Utah, when he kicked a Glock 34 out of his hand before Doug could shoot him. He studied Doug’s face, trying to read him. “You weren’t surprised that Flannigan no longer worked for ASC.”
“I learned it recently.”
“After you hired CatsPaw?”
“After.”
“What about
Amber Dawn
’s mission?”
“That came as fucking news.”
“No wonder you don’t look happy.”
Doug stared. Then he said, “Stop me if I’m wrong, but Helms essentially said, ‘No witness, no crime.’ ”
“That’s how I heard it—Hold on; he’s back.”
Helms rushed into the bar. “Almost forgot. Janson, we’re cutting CatsPaw a check for a million dollars. You didn’t exactly rescue the doctor in the end, but you tried hard. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” said Janson.
Again, Doug Case looked surprised. Janson explained, “It will help with expenses.”
Helms grinned. “Good. That way you won’t feel obliged to overcharge next time we hire you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Janson smiled back.
Helms said, “I wouldn’t want you to take what I said about the new world the wrong way.”
“Passing me by?”
“I may have stated it too forcefully. I’m passionate on the subject of the future. I learned when I was seven years old that leadership is not about now, it’s about then. Not about the present, but the future.”
“That’s a big lesson at seven.”
“I observed a failure of leadership when my dad took me to Greenan Oldsmobile to pick up a new car. Remember that little Olds called a Cutlass?”
“Inspired by an oil crisis.” Janson nodded.