PART THREE
Fast and Loose
TWENTY-EIGHT
2°2' N, 45°21' E
Mogadishu
Video conference in ten minutes, Mr. Helms,” came the call from Houston, eight and a half thousand miles and ten time zones behind Mogadishu.
“What for?” Of all the goddamned time-wasting.
“He was heard to say,” answered Helms’s assistant, and he being the Buddha, “that he wants to finish the meeting you left early due to—please understand that I am quoting him—‘family trouble.’”
“I understand,” said Helms. When goading staff to excel, there was a line between constructive abuse and malicious abuse. The Buddha had galloped across it.
Helms set up the mobile components of ASC’s customized Cisco TelePresence TX9990 videoconference system, and tightened his camera’s field of view to show only his face and a white wall behind him. From what his enemy division presidents back at the Silo would see on their sixty-five-inch screens, the president of the Petroleum Division could be in London’s Ritz or a North Dakota Motel 6.
No sign of a commandeered office in Home Boy Gutaale’s marble villa on the Lido, bought and paid for by ASC. No view of the gorgeous beach. No hint of stylish 1930s Italian architecture lovingly refurbished by craftsmen retiling bombed roofs and smoothing stucco over bullet holes in the city’s best neighborhoods. Nothing to indicate the building boom sweeping Mogadishu. (Blame videoconferencing software glitches for a rhythmic tremor from the incessant thump of pile drivers sinking piers nearby for a Radisson Hotel.) And certainly no sign of China’s instantly famous Red Hotel that had beaten Radisson and all the others to the punch with bombproof, reinforced concrete modules assembled straight off the freighters—already the hottest location in town for the global crowd who could afford it. But most important, no glimpse of Gutaale’s tanks guarding the four corners of his enclave’s whitewashed walls, spewing blue exhaust day and night, burning diesel like oil was free.
He tweaked the camera and checked the monitor: five minutes.
“Who knew your wife would be aboard Tarantula?”
* * *
HELMS JUMPED.
He had thought he was alone, except for the servants and the guards. But suddenly Paul Janson was stepping into Gutaale’s office, closing the door and standing with his back to the wall.
“I said, ‘Who knew your wife would be sailing on Tarantula?’”
“How the hell did you get in here?”
Janson was dressed like a Mogadishu businessman, tieless in a white shirt, Western slacks, polished shoes, even the stubble of beard affected by the pious and those who wanted to appear pious. A jacket slung over his arm concealed whatever he was holding in his right hand.
“Who knew your wife would be aboard Tarantula?”
“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“We’ve been wondering about the coincidence of Somali pirates kidnapping your wife on that yacht while you’re swinging a big deal in Somalia? Who did you tell?”
“No one.”
Paul Janson motioned for Helms to sit in a chair where he could see him, and cast his eye on the big map of the Horn of Africa that covered an entire wall. On Gutaale’s map, Somalia bled over the borders of Ethiopia and Kenya, and swallowed most of the Horn of Africa—Djibouti, the Ogaden of Ethiopia, and the North Eastern Province of Kenya—into a bright-red Soomaaliweyn.
“I see why he has tanks outside. Your man dreams big.”
Helms nodded carefully, trying to figure out what Janson wanted.
Home Boy had rhapsodized about Pan Somaliaism in a khat-fueled monologue. When Helms pressed him, he had blithely admitted that the first consequence of attempting to establish Greater Somalia would be war with its neighbors.
Helms said to Janson, “I am reasonably sure that if anyone can control, save, and consolidate Somalia, and turn it back into a functioning state, it is Gutaale with his personal links to so many clans.”
“Your challenge,” said Janson, “will be to encourage him just enough to stabilize present-day Somalia and secure its borders without blowing up the entire region.”
“Can you tell me anything about my wife?”
“She’s alive and she looks like she’s holding up pretty well.”
“You saw her?”
“Only from a distance. Who else knew she was on that yacht?”
“I have no idea who she told.”
“I mean in your circle.”
“The first I knew was a text message asking to meet up with me in Mombasa. She’d been working in the Seychelles.”
“Who else saw the text?”
“No one.”
“Not even your assistant?”
“Personal phone. Personal text.”
“Have you ever been hacked?”
“No. All my stuff is swept regularly.”
“By whom? ASC Global Security?”
Helms smiled thinly. “You would not ask that if you knew my world. No, I contract with a private company that has no ties to ASC. Janson, I want her back. I truly, deeply want her back.”
“Even though her family tried to kill you in New York?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Come on, Kingsman. You knew the Camorra connection. Knew it all along.”
Helms looked at his watch and nodded at the monitor. “I have a teleconference with Houston in three minutes.”
“We can discuss your Camorra connection with Houston or you can answer my question.”
“All right, Janson. You didn’t expect me to admit it to the police. I’d still be answering questions in New York.”
That answered that, thought Janson. It would have saved time if Helms had admitted it up front. He said, “Kingsman, riddle me this…”
Helms nodded warily.
“Is your wife Camorra?”
“What? No. She ran like hell to get away from them. Thanks to her mother, she did, almost.”
“Then why are they pissed off at you?” Janson asked. Kincaid had found out why in Naples. Now he wanted Helms’s take on the prenup.
The oilman said, “I don’t expect you to understand this. But sometimes big life plans go wrong. The truth is, I married Allegra for her money.”
“Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“Because sometimes big life plans go wrong. Before long I was doing so well I was richer than she was.”
“And sorry you married her?”
“Just the opposite. By then I loved looking at her. And there is something about Allegra you wouldn’t understand.”
“How could I understand? I’ve never met her.”
“It is as if she is poised to jump from a diving board. No, wrong word. Not dive, but fly into the sky. Like what she can be she is just becoming.”
Janson half believed that he loved her. Maybe more than half. But he challenged him, saying, “Cut the crap, Kingsman. I’m asking you, did you set up your wife to get killed by pirates?”
“Fuck you!”
“You’re telling me you were the only outsider who knew she was on that yacht?”
“I was. It’s coincidence. Just a lousy coincidence.”
“How about Home Boy Gutaale?”
“Gutaale?”
“Did you tell Gutaale?”
“No. Why are you asking this?”
“Because your friend Home Boy is about to land outside this house in a helicopter.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“A gold helicopter. They’re refueling at the airport.”
“He’s a business associate. He’s not a friend. What do you mean, ‘friend’?”
“You’ll ask yourself that same question when you see his helicopter.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Did you talk to her from here? From this house?”
“Yes.”
“Could Gutaale have overheard you talking to Allegra on the telephone? Could he have known she
would be on that boat?”
Helms whispered, “Jesus Christ.”
The phone chirped.
Janson pointed at the screen. “Your conference is starting.”
Up came the Buddha. High def gave him a face like a storm drain.
His voice was thinner than Janson recalled, though that could be the fault of the monitor’s built-in speakers. It was still clear and direct. “If you think oil money is easy money, you aren’t making enough of it.”
Janson went out the door as quietly as he had come in.
* * *
HEAD SPINNING, Kingsman Helms faced the TelePresence camera and made a Herculean effort to shift his head from Janson’s suggestion that Gutaale had set him up.
“Three of us are on video,” said the Buddha. “Kingsman, at an ‘undisclosed location,’ Doug airborne, and me at one of my ranches.”
Helms pegged it for his Montana ranch, based on the big-horn sheep skulls on the wooden wall behind him.
But where the hell was Doug Case flying? His share of the split-screen monitor showed only that he was on one of ASC’s Bombardiers, which had the range to take him anywhere in the world. The window shades behind him were drawn. For all Helms knew, Case could be sitting on the tarmac eight miles away at Mogadishu International. If he were, with any luck al-Shabaab would blow him up.
“The remaining six are in the Silo. I will now ask what I intended to ask at our last meeting, and this time if anyone answers a phone they will be fired and sued for their pension…Clear? Good. Where does ASC stand with natural gas?”
Natural gas? Helms’s split screen showed division presidents exchanging mystified glances. Was the old man finally losing his mind? Under the Buddha’s iron rule, ASC had led the oil and coal industries’ campaign to suppress natural gas for thirty years. Had he forgotten that nimble smaller producers like Susquehanna Gas and Binghamton Energy had scooped up scores of bankrupt drillers when prices collapsed to less than two dollars per thousand cubic feet—betting, correctly, that the government would make any environmental consequences of fracking the next generation’s problem?
“Natural gas,” Bruce Danforth repeated, explicating the obvious. “Feedstock for the chemical industry and fire source for refineries, factories, and power plants. Not to mention a stake in the heart of the renewable-energy greens.”
No way Petroleum Division could dodge the question and the blame for stopping the suppression campaign too late.
“ASC has always regarded natural gas as a ‘bridge’ fuel to carry us over to the ‘glorious day’ of a renewable-energy future,” said Helms. “But the bridge is looking longer and longer, spanning fifty years or even a hundred years into the future. Time for environmentalists to rewrite the laws of physics,” he concluded with an old Buddha joke and a smile that Danforth did not return.
“Kingsman, while you ponder whether natural gas is a bridge or a detour, or the main road, abundant natural gas is sparking an American industrial renaissance. Asian labor costs are up. Oil prices are up. Ocean transport and airfreight costs are way up. What’s down? US labor costs are down. And US natural gas prices are down.”
“There’s a glut,” said Helms.
“Such a glut,” the Buddha fired back, “that medium-size producers were on the market cheap three months ago.”
Helms knew that he had dropped the ball on those producers while he concentrated on Somalia.
“I looked into purchasing both Binghamton and Susquehanna. They’d already been snapped up. And with the price of gas—”
“Any idea who snapped them up?”
“Hedge funds, probably. Or possibly the Bartle Group, fronting for the Chinese.”
“How about ASC?”
“ASC?” Helms felt a cold chill creep from vertebra to vertebra. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
The faces beaming at Helms’s discomfort swiveled as if puzzled toward Chairman Danforth. Something was going on, and no one but the Buddha knew what. Even in HD it was impossible to read a smile in all his wrinkles, but Kingsman Helms felt with grim certainty that the old man was smiling.
“I bought them,” said the Buddha.
Jesus Christ, no wonder he was smiling, Kingsman thought. The cunning old bastard had just established a new profit center that would entrench him even more solidly. All six division presidents had stopped breathing.
Helms heard his own voice echo stupidly, “How?”
Who the hell cared how? The Buddha had done it. Turned out, Bruce Danforth explained offhandedly, he had reactivated an old but cash-rich ASC division with headquarters in Nome, Alaska, that no one had heard from since 1980, and had offered the Bartle Group a nonequity position. Susquehanna Gas and Binghamton Energy, locked into ruinous drilling contracts that falling gas prices made economically impossible, practically begged Bruce Danforth to save them.
“In five years,” he crowed, “the United States of America can say the hell with OPEC, and thank you ASC.”
The chorused congratulations were strained. The Buddha, Helms realized with the dry dust of defeat in his mouth, had bet big and won.
“We’re going to have to find someone to run the gas division,” the old man said.
“It falls under Petroleum,” said Helms.
“It might. Or it might warrant a dedicated manager who is not busy in ‘undisclosed locations.’”
Why is he screwing me? Helms wondered. Somalia was Danforth’s idea in the first place. And the old man gave me every encouragement to run with it. Now I’m stuck in Mogadishu and he’s going to hand a major new division to somebody else.
“Until I decide, I’m putting Doug Case temporarily in charge.”
“Can we risk taking Doug’s eye off the global security ball?” Helms asked.
Doug Case gave his camera a grin of unabashed triumph. “I will budget the time to manage both for as long as Mr. Danforth directs me to.”
“Budget some time to learn about natural gas, which is more complicated than hiring gunmen to protect oil rigs,” said Helms. “While you’re at it, you might want to pick up graduate degrees in engineering like the rest of us.”
The smirk on Case’s face and the amused smile on Danforth’s told Kingsman Helms that he had one second to regain the initiative. He hit back with all he had, leveling his gaze at Danforth instead of Doug Case.
“Achieving American energy self-sufficiency is a game changer only for America. On the international oil picture, it’s barely a blip. Yes, energy independence is hugely important to the United States, but the rest of the planet could not care less. It won’t even be noticed in the larger world, where ASC must compete to survive.”
The Buddha stirred. Helms pressed.
“The more India, Southeast Asia, and China prosper, the more they’ll need oil. ASC’s real markets—the expanding markets—are east. East African oil and gas is worth a fortune for its proximity to those markets.”
“Saudi oil is even closer to China,” said Doug Case.
“The sheiks drive the Chinese nuts,” Helms shot back. “They want their own oil.”
“They’ve already got tons of oil in South Sudan.”
“Which must pass through a pipeline controlled by South Sudan’s mortal enemies.”
Danforth said, “Go on, Kingsman.”
“ASC will sell China oil shipped cheaply from Somalia.”
Case cut to the flip side of Helms’s argument. “But if you can’t produce the oil you promise from your ‘undisclosed location,’ we are fucked.”
Helms smiled. The cripple had fallen into his trap. ASC was in the production catbird seat. Petroleum Division had established beyond doubt that massive Somali oil reserves were waiting to be tapped. But before Helms could open his mouth to demolish Case, a helicopter thumped in the distance.
* * *
KINGSMAN HELMS lost his train of thought. Was this the helicopter Janson had mentioned? The damn thing was getting close.
The last thing he expected wa
s Bruce Danforth to come to his rescue. But the CEO did, with a Buddha-esque proclamation: “ASC will be the bulwark between China and world domination. It’s in our power to rein ’em in.”
Helms said, “Well put, sir.”
The Buddha said, “That’s all, everybody. Back to work.”
The screen went blank.
Helms ran to the window and searched the sky. He had staved off disaster, but only briefly. Which made Somalia not only his most important project but his only project.
Rotor blades rattled the glass. A ten-passenger Sikorsky thundered over the house and swooped down onto the beach, blowing sand. Painted gold, it was not a standard-issue oilfield workhorse for ferrying labor offshore, but a rich man’s toy, like ASC’s executive S-76D Pluses.
Helms hurried outside and down to the beach. Up close, when the rotors stopped and the sand ceased flying, he could see that the ID numbers had been painted over with new ones and a logo of some sort covered up.
Home Boy Gutaale trotted down the boarding steps, grinning triumphantly through his bushy red beard.
“Now, what do I need you for, Mr. Helms?” The warlord laughed.
“Where’d you get it?”
“I bought it from a pirate. Come inside, have a look.”
“I’ve been in helicopters.”
“Not like this one.”
Helms stepped into the passenger cabin and stopped short.
“What is this?” Embossed in gold on the leather seats were the initials “AA.”
“AA,” said Gutaale. “The logo of Allen Adler.”
“The man who owns Tarantula.”
“Dead men don’t own—Relax, my friend. I bought it to soften up the pirate who has your wife.”
“You spoke to him?”
“No, no, no. Through intermediaries. Many intermediaries. But this is a first step. Maxammed will trust negotiating with me, if I can get through to him.”
“When?”
Gutaale shrugged. “It’s Maxammed’s timetable. We have to wait. Perhaps by the time you and I conclude our arrangements, he will be ready to talk turkey.”
In that instant, standing on burning sand in the hot sun, moments after getting royally screwed by the boss he was supposed to succeed at ASC, and now seeing the expression on Gutaale’s face that proved the warlord was convinced the whip was in his hand, Kingsman Helms suddenly saw the world in a new light. It was a darker place, even more twisted, than he had imagined. The warlord, the partner whom ASC had anointed to manage Somalia, was threatening him, implying that he could at least influence negotiations, if not dictate terms, to ransom Allegra.
Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) Page 20