Kiki was well known for recruiting more diversity into the Democratic Party single-handedly than almost anyone, ever. Nearly every Latino in either the House or the Senate had Kiki to thank for something memorable in their campaign life. In only six short months at the DSCC, she already had six strong female Senate candidates lined up. That kind of record was unheard of.
Kiki really only needed four good candidates who could flip incumbent seats to take a good run at winning back control of the Senate, and Will was near the top of her wish list. A Senate campaign in New York was as expensive as they came, and very few candidates could challenge an entrenched incumbent and raise the money necessary to run a credible campaign. That certainly wouldn’t be a problem for a Worthington.
Even more, right now there were a couple of third-tier candidates with no money, no name recognition, and no chance whatsoever in the general running in the Democratic primary. Will knew in his gut that he, with his immense wealth, connections, and network, was their best hope to unseat James Loughlin. So it made sense that Kiki was determined to do whatever it took to get him at least interested in the possibility. If that agenda didn’t work, she’d try to lock in his financial interest for their efforts to take back control of the Senate.
“You’re more interested in running American Frontier? Some giant oil company? Seriously?” She sounded skeptical.
Will had heard all the arguments before, and he wasn’t inclined to go through them again with Kiki. Big Oil was every bit as evil to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party as Big Tobacco. Except that he believed they weren’t. For years, until it had become apparent that burning fossil fuels was killing the planet, nearly everyone respected the American oil companies that strove for new, creative ways to make the United States energy independent. The demonization of the big oil companies was a relatively new phenomenon, and Will had never bought into it.
He could do a great deal more good from inside the oil and gas industry than he ever could from outside it—at least, that was what he rationalized. Part of his plan as CEO of American Frontier, should that come to pass, was to put an end to the company’s longtime anti-environmental stance and bring it fully into the twenty-first century. He would create a highly entrepreneurial venture group inside the company with a mission to find and develop a broad, efficient renewable energy portfolio.
AF was already aggressively pursuing natural gas development and was now making a considerable sum from natural gas to go along with their oil exploration. Will fully intended to accelerate that progress and make certain they were researching and developing new technologies to capture and sell methane that leaked in the natural gas mining and development process. That would also help out with environmental questions.
Though he had never shared his vision with anyone outside his own family and advisors, Will fully planned to define American Frontier as a whole energy company—not simply a big oil company that made money drilling for expensive oil in hard-to-reach places like the bottom of the ocean floor. The world needed lots of cheap energy, and Will was convinced that American Frontier could lead the way toward solutions for providing cheap, abundant energy that didn’t rely solely on burning fossil fuels.
“Look, Kiki,” Will said, trying not to sound exasperated. He came to a complete halt in Central Park. He looked up, a bit disoriented about where he was until he saw the tennis courts on the north side of the park through the trees. “Don’t you start in on me too about how evil the big oil companies are. I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to hear it. Not right now. It won’t help you in your arguments with me.”
“I wasn’t, actually,” Kiki said. “I admire American Frontier, if you want to know the honest truth. I’ve always liked them. You don’t become the biggest, baddest, toughest kid on the block without learning how to win a street fight. And AF pretty much wins every street fight they get in. No, what I was going to say is that I don’t know why you’d want to be their CEO when you don’t have to. You’re already their largest shareholder. You can tell them to jump, and they have to ask you how high.”
“Right.” Will laughed. “You and I know it doesn’t work that way.”
“Maybe. But you have more to say about their direction as their largest institutional shareholder than you ever would as their CEO. You don’t need the money or their salary. You’re on the board of directors right now—you tell the executives what to do. Why would you ever want the job that Eric Sandstrom has—so that your peers on the board can tell you what to do and how high to jump? That’s what I was going to say.”
Will couldn’t help but grin. The woman was good. “That’s not bad, Kiki. But tell me this. Why would I want to win a job as just one of 100 senators, all of whom believe they’re the single greatest gift to humanity? Who have egos as large as the Grand Canyon, yet virtually no real power in a dysfunctional town that has no knowledge any longer of what actual bipartisanship looks like?”
“Because I said so? That works with my kids, by the way.” She chuckled.
“That’s nice. It never works with mine.”
“Look, how about this?”
Will rolled his eyes as Kiki tried one more direction.
“Don’t turn me down right now,” she cajoled. “See how this American Frontier thing plays out. See how you feel about all of it after this situation in the Arctic has had a chance to play itself out on the evening news for a bit. But keep your options open. You may decide you’d like to be a United States senator after all, if they don’t give you a chance to run AF. Because—and this is the only real incentive I can ever offer someone like you who doesn’t need the money, fame, or power that comes from being in the Senate—it may be the right thing for you to do for the good of the country. And it also may be the right stepping-stone for you to consider if you’d ever like to consider running for that place on Pennsylvania Avenue. So think about it. Okay?”
“I have no plans to ever run for president,” Will replied.
“Said like a true candidate who’d like to keep his options open.”
“I’m not keeping my options open. I am genuinely not interested in running for public office—any public office.” Will had thought about running from time to time, but he’d always been too focused on the AF CEO position to explore the idea fully. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t really a Democrat. Not in any meaningful way. His heart and sympathies actually lay with the values of the Republican Party. He simply didn’t like big government solutions. Instead he trusted corporations to create wealth and employ people. He was an entrepreneur and a calculated risk taker, as well as fairly conservative in his moral outlook. So he didn’t fit fully with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
“That may be,” she fired back. “But circumstances change. From everything I’m hearing, this thing with AF is likely to get really ugly really fast. It’s going to get everyone associated with it dirty. Not even someone like you, Will—who has a pure heart, no ulterior motives, and nothing more than a sense of duty to run a great company correctly—could keep from getting dirty when mud is flying from one corner of the room to the other.”
“I’m interested in running American Frontier,” Will said firmly. “I believe in its mission and what it stands for. I believe I can make a difference while running it. That’s where my focus is.”
“Fine,” she said. “I acknowledge that and respect it. But if it doesn’t happen, for whatever reason, can we talk then? Can you give me at least that much?”
Will smiled. He knew Kiki wasn’t going to give up. But this was as good a stopping place as he could manage right now. “All right, sure, I’ll give you that. If it becomes apparent I’m not going to be running American Frontier as its next CEO, we can talk again. But you really are wasting your time. No Worthington has ever run for public office in New York, and I seriously doubt that the first one to do so in six generations is going to be yours truly.”
“There’s a first time for everything, Will�
�even for the Worthingtons. So, go do your thing. We’ll talk soon.”
“I have to hand it to Kiki,” Will told his wife later that day as they sipped decaf coffee at the kitchen table. “She’s determined. She doesn’t give up. She goes after what she wants.”
“But what do you want, Will?” Laura asked, her expression thoughtful. “That’s what matters to me. You’ve spent your whole life doing what you think you ought to do. To uphold the Worthington name. To make your dad proud. But what do you really want? If you could go after anything?”
She sure knew how to hit the nail on the head. He grinned weakly. “I’m thinking about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sounds like a way of avoiding the issue.”
He sighed. “Okay, you got me. I can’t help but think about what Drew said—about the risk, especially right now, not only for me but for all of us. The entire family. I—we—could be caught in a firestorm.”
She lifted a brow. “So? You have before. It’s one of the costs of being a Worthington. What makes this one different?”
“Ironic, isn’t it?” He frowned. “I’m the one who opposed the board decision to drill in the Arctic. Now I might be the one who has to clean the mess up.”
“You’re a pro at cleaning messes up. But that’s not the real issue here, is it? Is it because you’re not sure if you should pursue the CEO, or you’re wondering, as Drew stated, if there’s a ‘bigger prize’?”
In that moment his resolve solidified. He would follow the trajectory his life had been on, rather than sidetracking himself with what-ifs. “I believe I can make a difference right here, right now, as the CEO of American Frontier,” he said slowly. “But Sandstrom isn’t going to go down without a fight.”
“So,” she replied, aiming a one-two fist move in his direction, “give it right back.”
He laughed. It was so Laura.
25
EN ROUTE TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN
Elizabeth’s message to Sean was pointed. He could hear her frustration through her words.
We’ve cross-checked everything we’re receiving from the buoys and correlated it with what NASA’s satellites long confirmed about what the Arctic connects to. That, along with the visual confirmations from the infrared camera, leaves only one conclusion. The amount of oil in the water is growing thicker by the hour. And you know what that means.
Sean knew the oil spill itself wasn’t what worried Elizabeth and her father. The truth, not widely known truth but that Sean had learned through Will’s work at AF and through the Shapiros, was that even truly bad oil spills and accidents like the Exxon Valdez and BP represented only about a tenth of the amount of crude oil that regularly seeped into the world’s ocean systems from millions of places. But accidents got headlines. A massive oil spill concentrated in a critical marine system like the Arctic Ocean, which was not only pristine but linked to nearly every other ocean and marine system in the world—that was unknown and largely unstudied.
Because no one had ever considered that there might be massive amounts of oil under the Arctic or that anyone could get at it, there had never been a need or demand to study or model its effects on the ecosystem. It was hard enough to get research money to study climate change in the Arctic, where global warming temperatures were two to three times higher than the rest of the planet. People had scoffed at researchers predicting an ice-free summer in the Arctic, until it had actually happened less than 20 years after the start of the twenty-first century. Then the rush to extract oil in the Arctic began, and AF got involved.
What happens in the Arctic could have repercussions almost anywhere on the planet. If critical food chain elements are damaged, the effects will ripple throughout most ocean species. Just as coal ash and soot from China substantially reduced the albedo effect in Greenland, causing the entire sheet of ice to nearly completely melt one year, the same sort of thing might happen if oil changed the Arctic. There’s no way to predict what might happen or how bad it could get. The world has a right to know what’s going on. Marine scientists, geologists, and others could then offer advice and research so we can get answers as swiftly as possible. The longer anyone waits to get the word out, the more dire the effects will be.
That was one of the reasons Sean was there. To see and hear the facts for himself so he could figure out a way to make a difference for good in this situation.
But the instant we write up anything like this that’s different from the official line coming from either AF or the White House, they’ll yank those buoys and the infrared camera right out of the water.
Our team is torn. After all, we’re not here to study oil. We’re here to study water, which now has oil in it. We have data, even though it’s limited. What is science supposed to do when that happens? It reports what it observes. Discoveries can be happy—or unhappy—accidents.
So we’ve decided to simply email a bunch of science friends with some very specific questions before we write and post a single word on our research blogs. The first one I’m going to ask is what anyone happens to know about methane hydrates in this part of the Arctic Ocean.
But with social media, as soon as they penned their first questions, the top would be off Pandora’s box.
Was Drew right—was there no winning this thing?
Still, Sean hated bullies. Especially government bullies. He’d never back down in doing what he knew was right.
26
NEW YORK CITY
Right before lunchtime, Sarah received a call from Darcy Wiggins and immediately dashed out of her office building. She hurried down the street into a sub sandwich shop to grab two of their specials and Diet Cokes, then hailed a taxi.
Darcy, looking as intense as ever, was pacing on the sidewalk in front of the Homeland Security Midtown office. She didn’t even say hello. She just peered around briefly as if ensuring no one was in earshot, tugged Sarah farther down the block, then plunged in. “My colleagues think I’m the luckiest agent in the history of Homeland Security.”
Sarah handed her a sub. Darcy ripped the paper open and took a big bite. “Mmm, haven’t eaten anything since midafternoon yesterday. Things have been too wild.”
“So why the luckiest?”
“Let’s put it this way. For the two Boston Marathon bombers, my colleagues had to go through over 100,000 pictures and then 1,000 more security camera videos and pictures once they knew what the bombers looked like so we could put them at both bombs and find the backpacks. And then DHS had to interview dozens of potential eyewitnesses who may or may not have seen those two in the crowd. They did nothing but that for almost two days. After that, some homeowner found one of the guys hanging out in his boat, right under our noses, and did all our work for us. But at least we had to work for it.” Darcy huffed and looked Sarah straight in the eye. “But I got the American Frontier bombing handed to me on a platter. The guy was even wandering around in everyone’s cell phone videos for a couple of hours so no one could miss him.”
She took another big bite of her sub and chewed for a second. “Then, like a bolt from the blue, a social worker finds the polar bear suit in a plastic bag out behind a set of wacko progressive offices, including at least three of the more radical environmental activist groups that like to go after oil companies.” Darcy waved her sandwich around, frowning. “I mean, come on. The next thing I know, the guy’s gonna walk in the front door and handcuff himself to my desk.”
“So the case is wrapping itself up with a big bow, and you’re not falling for it,” Sarah said.
“Exactly. I haven’t been able to sleep for two nights running. It’s driving me more than a little crazy.” Darcy leaned her back against the cement of the nearby building, set her now-empty sandwich wrapper on the ledge, and scrubbed both hands through her close-cropped blonde hair.
“I get it. I feel the same way. Something is wrong about all of this.”
“No one would be so stupid to ditch such a suit where they worked. Not even radical eco-fascists, as m
y Republican friends like to call them, would be that boneheaded.” She grinned.
Sarah laughed. Darcy had been spouting off on that subject over the long years they’d been friends. It bothered Darcy that so many people felt like they had to be either Republicans or Democrats because, well, that was who they felt most comfortable with and who so many of their friends and neighbors were. She said once she wished that people would stop equating their religious beliefs with their political beliefs. After all, Billy Graham, the most revered pastor in America, had been a lifelong Democrat. “Then again,” she’d say, “no one cares what I think, and that particular ship sailed in America quite a while ago.”
Darcy slumped. “I spend my days chasing down leads that invariably dead-end at white extremist ‘Christian’ groups who have some sort of a grievance against the FBI, the ATF, or another federal entity. I have to separate out my own biases and focus instead on the underlying psychology. What are these extremist groups doing, thinking, and plotting?” She narrowed her eyes. “Whenever anyone starts talking about God’s wrath and judgment, then mixes that in with guns and hatred aimed at this agency or another group, I know I have to at least pay attention. If I can’t anticipate and understand their psyches, I can’t get ahead of potential domestic terror plots.”
Sarah nodded, patiently waiting. She knew Darcy needed to process and blow off a little steam first before presenting her case.
“This particular case is so baffling. It doesn’t fit any pattern I’ve ever seen. No note about why the bomb went off. No group has taken credit. No group is even a likely candidate. People generally don’t like big corporations, but the corporations are rarely the focus of domestic terror plots—that’s reserved for the government. Some lone environmental activists have committed fraud against oil companies or disrupted commercial activities on occasion, but none fits this profile.”
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