The Sheikh's Secret

by Knight, Kylie

  Of course she couldn’t admit it to Mr. Gregory right then and there. But on their way back to the headquarters of Rigel Investments, Inc., she realized that everything that he was spewing against the Dr. Tyson was unsubstantiated, a conjecture that the professor had spent five minutes carefully debunking, something that directly contradicted what he’d said earlier. She kept her mouth shut, though: a girl had to eat and her job at Rigel paid well enough to do so.

  Adding to the sensation of irony was that one of Rigel’s biggest clients was Malcolm Raine’s Stone Bridge Oil Company, the largest and arguably most powerful oil conglomerate in the world. As her red-tounged Louboutins clacked across the floor, and she sat down in her pencil skirt and ethereal blouse, she could feel the eyes of the other members of Eco Energy staring at her: Janet, who didn’t shave her legs and was a hardcore vegan; Lindsay, who wore crystal pendants (she didn’t actually believe that they healed, they just suited her); Fred, a silversmith who made custom jewelry and only ever wore Birkenstocks.

  But for all their wariness they knew an ally when they found one. “Why do you want to do this?” Bill Wheaton, the head of Eco Energy, had asked when she’d approached him.

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” she’d said.

  It was a little more complicated than that. There might also have been the fact that her ex-boyfriend, Reid Asher, had also been her manager and their breakup was acrimonious, to say the least. She’d requested and received a transfer to the research department so she wouldn’t have to deal with him, but the need to take revenge on the cheating bastard was too strong to put aside. Joining an environmental group hell-bent on taking down Reid Asher’s biggest source of commission fit into her vague plans as well as anything else.

  And there was the lingering guilt she’d suppressed about her job, in general: in college she’d been a hardcore environmentalist, handing out pamphlets at the cafeteria for Meatless Mondays and going to Washington to protest the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She’d been part of the campuswide anti-litter group. But when she graduated, she quickly discovered that living in an apartment meant paying rent, which meant working a job, and that job was called “account manager” at Rigel, Inc. She’d only intended to work there until she had enough money saved up to join the Peace Corps, except that between rent, business attire, a gym memberhip, visits to the salon, her car, not to mention things like eating and drinking and nights at the movies, it always seemed like she’d never have enough.

  None of which she could articulate at the time, though. But what she did understand, at a level that no other member of Eco Energy did, was how corporations worked and got shit done. In the three months that she’d been on the board at Eco Energy she’d managed put together a script for their volunteers in order to convince people to switch to clean energy that actually worked, and she’d put in several grant applications so that they could do more community outreach. One of them had just come through last week, and now they were hiring people to go out and gather information before they sent out their next offensive for clean energy. It felt good to change things around.

  And yet she still felt like a fraud as she sat down at the meeting. “Hi” and “How’re you?” went around the room like discombobulated moths, until Bill Wheaton finally came in.

  Bill was a mixed bag; his eyes were mismatched and his hair was cut in a surfer’s shag which might have looked all right if he’d dye out the gray streaks in it. But either he was clueless about this or too lazy to do it. His nose was a fraction too large and his eyes were a fraction too narrow and his jaw was just pointed enough not to be masculine—he would have been handsome if his body had just gone that little extra step, and his eyes would have been charming rather than uncomfortably odd. But he was a passionate activist, well-versed in the language of viral videos and stirring people’s blood, and as he sat down the small-talk died and all eyes focused on him, and Jane could feel their devotion and earnestness in the air.

  “Right,” Bill said. “I called this meeting because it turns out that several well-known oil lobbyists will be schmoozing with members of Congress next week. I mean, there are always lobbyists, as we know, but next week Congress gets to vote on the Matrix.”

  The Matrix was a set of pipelines that would criss-cross the Midwest, ensuring that nobody, anywhere would ever be without oil. The scale was both impressive and horrifying—the horrifying part from the fact that the plans contained no redundancies in case of a leak and the builders objected to any oversight into the project, arguing that checks for accountability would only slow them down. “Well, if they’re going to be spending a quarter of a billion dollars on it over ten years, then Congress ought to be able to spare a few hundred thousand to make sure it’ll be finished when it’s supposed to be,” Bill had snorted when he’d found out.

  “So basically,” he said, now, “I need someone to take a few vacation days to wine and dine, schmooze and booze, platter and flatter some key members of Congress.”

  “We tried that two years ago,” said Janet. “That was a big waste of time and money.”

  “It’s true, it’ll be harder,” Bill said, “but last year was mid-term election, and twenty seats in the House changed sides—albeit not for environmental reasons. These are the twenty seats we’ll need to target.”

  He was looking at her as he spoke, and Jane knew what he was hoping not to have to ask: whether she could use her corporate chops to help them wheedle a few more votes against the Matrix. She glanced through her calender. Now that she worked in research there were entire weeks when she didn’t have client meetings to attend to; all her manager expected of her was a weekly report every Friday. An incredibly-detailed, annoying-to-write report, but that was it.

  She did a little math in her head—she had a week’s worth of vacation days that she needed to use before April, otherwise it would vanish with the end of the fiscal year, and it’d been two years since she’d last used more than three days. “I can do it,” she said, looking up from her phone. “But I’ll need an excuse to be in Washington.”

  “I have just the thing,” Bill said, grinning. He handed her a flyer. It was for a business writing seminar. “You could probably even expense this,” he added.

  “I suppose I could okay this with my boss,” she said, wondering if her boss would take the bait. “Assuming that he doesn’t actually demand proof that I went.”

  “He won’t,” Bill said. “At least, he probably won’t. But you should probably pick up the badge and post a few selfies at the dinner just to be sure.”

  She had to smile at that. The thought would have never occurred to her. In Reid’s words, she was “too innocent”. “You gotta learn how to game the system,” he’d told her when they were still dating. Gaming the system was one thing. Getting away with it was another.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “I could use a vacation anyway.”

  “Great,” he said, smiling at her.

  She felt a blush start on her face for some reason. It happened whenever he looked at her, and she couldn’t understand why. He wasn’t Fabio-level attractive. They only had a few conversations with each other, and those were anything except personal. And yet here she was, crushing on him like he was Justin Timberlake and she was fifteen.

  Happily, he’d quickly moved on to the other things that Eco Energy was getting involved in: lobbying for waste-to-energy power, and fundraising at the Food-Truck Fair, which was a staple of the Los Angeles food scene. Fred asked some pointed questions, and Lindsay was put in charge of organizing a booth. “I don’t care what it is,” said Bill. “Just make sure people remember it.”

  At the end of the meeting Jane gathered her things together and began to head back to her apartment. She was just out the door when Bill called her back in. “Jane, why don’t you join us for a beer?”

  “I—I can’t,” she began.

  “Oh come on,” said Lindsay. “You gotta have a little fun. We’re all friends, rig
ht? And they can’t expect you to be working all the time, right?”

  Jane felt her cheeks go red again as she realized that she was out of excuses, unless she wanted to start lying—and she was a terrible liar. “I guess I can,” she said. “But I don’t hold my liquor very well—”

  “It’s beer,” Bill said. “We’re not asking you to down a fifth or anything.”

  Don’t look at him, she thought, as they briefly discussed which bar to go to. “Lando’s,” said Fred, and that was that.

  “Lando?” Jane asked, wondering if the name really did refer to the character out of Star Wars. “Is that—”

  “Of course,” said Janet. “But they make the best curly fries.”

  “Amen to that,” said Lindsay.

  “You want the address for your GPS, or do you just want to follow us?” asked Bill.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, taking out her phone. “There can’t be that many—”

  Five-hundred places with “Lando” in the name popped up in her search.

  “Seventeen and Ash,” said Bill, tossing a wink at her.

  Meeting Malcolm

  Her boss didn’t even think about her request to attend the seminar, just nodded when she put in the request and reminded her to tell HR so that her vacation days could be docked appropriately. Just remember, nobody has to know I didn’t go. Bill had been ecstatic when he found out that it’d worked. They’d had a celebratory drink, where they’d arranged to meet for coffee so that he could give her the lobbying information.

  It was hard to sort out just how she felt about Bill. Objectively she knew that nothing he’d said or done suggested anything other than cooperation towards a common end. And yet part of her kept going over each and every “Hi,” and “So are you clear about this?” looking for something—anything—that could possible suggest something more. She didn’t know what to think anymore. Leaving Los Angeles felt like a relief.

  The following Monday she was on a flight to Washington DC, full of nervy excitement. She’d flown a lot when she was an account manager, and each time it was the same. It didn’t matter that the plane was freezing cold, the food simultaneously bland and repulsive, the cabin crew grumpy, or that she was invariably seated next to someone who should have paid for two seats. For some reason air travel had never lost its glamor to her, and while it’d been six months since her last flight she still found an odd kind of satisfaction as the plane taxied out onto the runway, and the cabin crew gave their safety demonstrations.

  She’d taken a room at the Sheraton—rooms were twenty-five percent off for people attending the seminar, and while the money saved wasn’t very much, it was what she’d do if she were attending. Plus, as Bill had said, she could add it to her expense account. She felt like some kind of covert agent as she put her clothes away.

  Her first order of business was to make sure that she got her badge. At the very least it would cover drinks and hors d’oveurs every night, and that ought to be enough in terms of dinner for the week. And anyway, it couldn’t hurt to make contacts. She wasn’t planning to stay with Rigel forever, after all, and there was probably someone who knew someone who knew someone who was hiring.

  The seminar was in a part of the convention center. It was the middle of the afternoon by the time she got there, but the woman at the check-in still had four rows of ID badges in front of her. “Make sure you wear this at all times,” she admonished, as she handed Jane her card: MY NAME IS JANE, with a picture on the front, and a square UPC symbol on the back. “It’ll get you into the venues, but you’ll have to pay for your own food—all at a 20% discount,” the woman reminded her. “Have a good meeting!”

  Jane walked past the desk. It was a snack-and-coffee break, apparently, because everybody was mingling with the tentative uncertainty that people had when they were randomly thrown together. She stayed away from the other single men: experience had taught her that they were likely to be desperate and the conversations could get very, very weird. Better to stick with the people in clusters, chatting about last night’s game or someone’s Maker project, even if she had no idea what they were talking about.

  She went up to a mixed group of people; there were introductions all around. “Hi, I just got in. When does the next seminar begin?” she asked.

  “New to these sort of things, are ya?” asked a goofy-looking guy, hair unkempt. His name label told her that his name was Dan.

  “Not really,” she said, smiling politely. “It’s my first writing seminar, though.”

  “Are you a writer?” he asked.

  Thankfully the next seminar began at that moment. She wouldn’t have known what to say. The people who were there all seemed very nice, but “off” in a way, as if they’d never actually worked for the companies they were writing for. Still, they were a nice enough bunch, and she actually found the seminar topic, usage, interesting. It was with a pang of guilt that she parted ways with them at five, saying that she’d be back tomorrow when she knew full well that she’d be lobbying members of Congress. She’d come back in the afternoon, she decided. She could say that she’d been taken with traveler’s diarrhea. It was strange, stretching the truth like so many fiddles. It didn’t feel wrong, just odd, as if she was discovering something about herself that she’d never known before.

  ***

  Bill had arranged for her to meet with four members of the House and one senator that day. She’d practiced her talk until she was blue in the face—she knew the entire alphabet-soup of organizations that were on board with their mission—she could cite statistics until she was blue in the face, and yet she still felt a twinge of nervousness as she joined the other lobbyists going through Capitol Hill. She had a few vials of contaminated ground water to make her point, and a bunch of flyers from the various organizations that Eco Energy worked with.

  The first few House members she spoke with were polite, but it was clear that none of them were persuaded by her speech. With the third one, she tossed the script, and argued from the stand point of, “What will voters be looking at in the next election?” She might not have convinced the third and fourth that sustainable energy was important, but at the very least she was able to persuade them that voters cared about their drinking water and that the groups she represented would be sure to punish them at the ballot.

  It was lunchtime, now: the halls suddenly flooded with staffers, all of them, it seemed yapping on their phones, or texting furiously. Most of them, she divined, were placing lunch orders for the their offices: meatball sandwiches, diet cokes, that sort of thing.

  She eschewed the crowded elevator and took the stairs. She wasn’t the only one—the stairwell was full of the echoes of tapping shoes and clicking heels, and when she reached the ground floor she glanced behind her to check how far the person behind her was—

  And walked right into Malcolm Raines—who’d been carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees—and they were both summarily covered with coffee. He wore his hair longer than it had been in the press release pictures that she’d seen, but she’d know those soulful brown eyes and patrician nose anywhere.

  She blanched, as Bill’s statistics about Malcolm Raines rushed back to her: he’d made his first billion in tech before he was eighteen, his next billion coding and designing AI systems for Amazon. As far as oil billionaires went, he was far from the worst—his companies did go through extra measures to minimize their impact, but there was no getting around the fact that deep-core drilling was incredibly destructive and the machinery needed had to be moved through once-pristine wilderness. And, like all oil billionaires, he had Congress eating out of his hand. The suit he was wearing was probably worth more than her life. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him—sure, he gave away a lot of his fortune to good causes, but he still made money by the bucketful doing serious damage to the environment.

  “Well, my dry cleaner will earn every cent of her thirty dollars this time,” he said mildly, pulling her over to the side so that they wou
ldn’t get run over by the masses that were milling around them. Nobody was even looking at them—coffee must be spilled all the time in these halls. He dabbed at the spots with a napkin, but then he shrugged out of the jacket

  “I’m so sorry,” she finally managed.

  “No, it’s my fault. I’d probably have spilled it on myself anyway, taking the stairs. I’m such a klutz.”

  “You?” She couldn’t help cracking a smile. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing, anyway, getting the coffee? Aren’t you a billionaire or something?”

  “Believe it or not I don’t have much staff, and I only travel with my personal assistant,” he said, “though I might change that in the future if I’m planning on making any more coffee runs.”

  “Let me get it,” she said. She could afford an extra dry-cleaning bill, and it was at least as much her fault as it was his.

  “I couldn’t,” he said, brushing aside her offer. “It’s just a suit, and it’s just coffee. It’s not the end of the world, and odds are I’d have spilled it on myself anyway. So, you know me?”

  “I’ve heard a lot about the companies you control, Mr. Raines,” she said modestly. “I wouldn’t say that I know you. I don’t think anybody can.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.