by David Lender
Daniel forced himself to appear nonchalant, then decided he might as well be candid. “True, but Dontol has weak market share in its region and there might be a better play if you want to build some gas station operations in the United States.”
“I’m not concerned.”
Daniel felt some of the tension go out of his shoulders. Fine with me if you know what you’re letting yourself in for.
“Only thing is,” Yassar said, “you have to deliver all three, or it’s not worth doing.”
Daniel felt it like a slug in his stomach. “That’s tricky,” he managed. He made eye contact to get his point across. “As you know, deals are unpredictable, and we could invest months…” That is, I could invest months. “…and come up empty-handed because we couldn’t put the pieces of the puzzle together at the same time.”
Yassar returned his gaze without blinking. “I know that. But that’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely.” Okay. Message received. Figure it out later. Take the assignment and run.
Yassar flipped perfunctorily through the remaining pages of the presentation, then stood to indicate the meeting was over. “Thank you for coming, Daniel. I apologize for rushing you off, for not being a better host.” He smiled. “But now you have a lot of work to do. And I have other obligations. I’ll show you to the door.” He stopped, then said, “Oh, and I almost forgot this,” and handed Daniel an envelope. “Your engagement letter, signed, and a check for your first retainer.”
Daniel extended his hand. “Thank you, Prince Yassar. I won’t let you down.” A smile was frozen on his face. Why is it I feel like ‘Be careful what you wish for, you might get it’ just bit me in the ass?
Daniel’s stomach was gnawing at him when he got to his room on the second floor of the Sacher. He looked at the executed original of the engagement letter Yassar had handed him. A signed engagement letter. And a check for two-fifty. And a million bucks payable from the firm upon signing Yassar up. And Dieudonne can’t wriggle out of this one, he thought, remembering the deal he’d struck—in writing—with the senior partner in his year-end bonus negotiation. But it rang hollow.
He thought about the deals Yassar just told him to go ahead with. Looks like total transaction value of five to six billion. Probably twenty-five to thirty million in fees. He didn’t need a calculator to figure out what his 25% of that was. Still, all or nothing, and because of it, I could burn through a good six months trying to get all three, and then if one falls apart, I’ve got zilch.
“It certainly puts the pressure on,” he said aloud to the empty room. Something else was still bothering him. He’d seen clients make decisions on half-baked information before, and plenty of great ideas dismissed virtually out of hand, but Yassar had just authorized him to spend five to six billion dollars in less than fifteen minutes.
Yassar sure was in a hurry. If I’d served him up cat food he would have eaten it.
CHAPTER 21
AUGUST, THIS YEAR. VIENNA, AUSTRIA. After Daniel left his suite, Yassar felt the jitters, anxious to get back to Riyadh. One more thing to do first, he thought again for the fifth time. He glanced at the phone, then his watch, and drummed his fingers on the end table, turning his mind back to the business at hand. The phone rang. He checked his watch. 11:59:32. “Hello, my dear, you are twenty-eight seconds early,” he said without asking who it was.
“You know how risky this is?” Alica said at the other end of the phone.
“I know, but I thought it critical we talk directly. You sound like you’re a middle-aged man stuck in a wind tunnel.”
“I’m using a voice scrambler. Can we make this quick? This line could very possibly be traced—or tapped.”
“As you wish, but please dispense with the scrambler. I need to hear your voice, to know that it is really you. Things are heating up and I am not sure who I can trust without confirmation.” Yassar settled into his chair, listening.
“Okay.” She switched off the device. Her voice sounded strained, but he was almost certain it was her.
“What have you got for me?”
She began speaking hurriedly. “It’s like this…God, this is crazy over the phone…Sheik bin Abdur has hired us to hack into Saudi Aramco’s main refinery as a test run, and we now know he wants us to plant logic bombs.” Her voice slowed down, as if caught up in the romance of the technicalities she was describing. “Logic bombs, in case you don’t know, are specifically tailored programs designed to attack software that controls systems. In this case, mechanical processes—automated oil pipelines, refineries, drilling rigs and so on. And at the coordinated time, they all go ‘boom,’ or such as it is.”
No question. It was her. “What other targets?”
The staccato nature of Yassar’s question seemed to remind Alica of her urgency over being overheard. She paused. “I’ll call you back from a different phone.”
“Extraordinary,” Yassar said, looking at the receiver. Two minutes later the phone rang again.
“This is making me really uncomfortable,” Alica said.
“What other targets?” Yassar repeated.
She readopted her blitzkreig. “I don’t fully know yet. That comes after we get into Saudi Aramco. It’s complicated, that much I know. Bin Abdur wants us to hack into the computer programs of the oil and gas industry’s dominant computer service providers. I don’t know who they all are yet, but the biggest is called Intelligent Recovery Systems. The company’s programs do everything you can imagine in the oil service sector, ranging from refinery control, drilling rig control, secondary and tertiary recovery, everything. The company does routine online updates of its software programs every two weeks. We plant our logic bombs in the company’s software as it’s being sent out online to its customers’ computers with the routine updates.”
“When is the ‘boom’?”
“I don’t know.”
Yassar heard the tension in her voice again. “Anything else for me, my dear?”
“Isn’t that enough?” Yassar heard a rasp of static on the line, then it cut off.
He felt a burst of adrenaline. “Are you there, my dear?” Nothing. He wondered if their call had been intercepted, or worse, if someone had grabbed her. He hadn’t counted on anything like that.
CHAPTER 22
AUGUST, THIS YEAR. NEW YORK City. Daniel still hadn’t shaken the kinks out of his legs when he arrived at his apartment at 6:00 p.m. the day following his meeting with Yassar. He’d had an opportunity to stretch them during his brief layover in Heathrow, but the next eight hours on the final segment into JFK always wreaked havoc on him. His nostrils still curled with the cocktail of garbage, street grit and exhaust fumes from his cross-town ride that only a sweltering August day in New York could concoct. The glamorous life of business travel. He stepped out of the elevator to the private landing to his apartment, bedraggled but at least comforted by the familiar sheen of the ivory-painted woodwork, the walnut door, and the secure feeling of parquet under his feet. He turned the doorknob, the nagging sense of something wrong supported by the continued churning of his stomach.
The sight of Lydia’s suitcases in the entrance foyer dwarfed the ill-defined sensation of discomfort. Finally I get to end it. Closure. He exhaled heavily and felt his stomach turn over. He dropped his mail. A dozen rehearsed lines flooded into his consciousness. He became aware of his pulse thumping in his ears. Then his mind went stiff, a practiced monologue stuck there, like concrete setting before it was properly smoothed over. He sensed Lydia’s presence, smelled her perfume. His eyes darted around the foyer.
Then he heard Lydia talking on the phone in the living room, and froze. It was unquestionably Lydia’s voice, but he’d never heard her speaking…what was it?…Arabic. Her back was to him in the living room when he entered. She was gesturing, waving her arms and pouring words intensely into the phone. She shot an arm toward the ceiling emphasizing a point and spun, her jaw slackening and eyes like saucers as sh
e saw Daniel. She turned back toward the wall, said another few sentences in measured tones and hurriedly hung up.
Daniel’s pulse was racing. What the hell was that? “I didn’t know you spoke Arabic.” He felt a rumble in his chest. “This gets more and more weird.”
Lydia stood in the center of the living room, wearing a modest cotton blouse and jeans. The curve of her waist, the lithe strength of her legs crashed over him in a wave. God, so beautiful. He felt the sensation of holding her in his arms as an ache in his chest. The soft moisture of her eyes warmed him. A lump coursed up his throat. How’d I get myself in so deep so fast? He struggled against the emotion and conjured a firm tone in his voice, full of the resolve that wasn’t really there.
Lydia walked toward him, a smile changed instantly into openmouthed alarm. Looking at her now and asking her to lie to him, talk him out of it. Feeling that swimmy feeling, like falling, in his stomach.
He got his nerve back. “I trusted you, believed in you, let you into my life. Opened my home to you.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”
His gaze was locked on her eyes. They drew him into their vulnerability. “I was completely open. And you were running some kind of ruse…”
“I can explain…” she interrupted.
“…whatever it was, I don’t even care at this point.” He knew that was nonsense. Of course he cared, even if he was going to break it off, he was itching with curiosity. No, the airy hope she’d explain it all away.
He saw her eyes grow large, the color drain from her face.
Daniel’s heart softened. This isn’t going to be easy.
Her eyes now implored him. “I know you feel betrayed. I know you’re angry…”
His anger flared. “You’re damn right I’m angry.”
“…I know that stunt I pulled in the dining room was childish…”
“Stunt? Childish? Christ, you tried to burn my goddamn house down.”
“Daniel, please.” Lydia moved toward him, her lower lip trembling.
Don’t start anything with me now.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “If I’d wanted to burn the house down don’t you think I’d have managed?” She paused, took a deep breath. When she spoke again it was softly. “Please. Won’t you let me at least try to explain?”
Daniel glared at her. “Okay.” But this better be good. In the same moment he felt the resurgent hope her explanation would satisfy him.
“Won’t you come sit?” She walked back into the living room, choosing a seat at one end of the sofa, leaving room for him to join her.
Daniel didn’t move. The brief flurry of his anger had spent any desire to harangue her. Now, for his as well as her sake, he wanted it over with. Nothing to be served by sitting and talking it through. His trust was violated. She’d misrepresented who she was—whoever that was—and whatever she was up to, and he wanted out and needed them both to face it.
Daniel reluctantly chose a Queen Anne chair facing the couch. Lydia’s hands were clasped contritely in her lap, her knees together. “Let me start by explaining that I reacted emotionally. I felt my privacy had been violated. You entered my room in the Milford house without my permission. You upset me, then angered me, and it just escalated.”
“That doesn’t justify your behavior,” Daniel said, feeling sadly distant from her.
“I’m not making excuses. I’m only trying to explain. And I know my reaction was harsh, but you did, after all, say that room was mine. My private space.”
Daniel moved in his seat, wondering what difference it made. And yet he responded. “And what about all that cash? And the passports?” He heard the resignation in his voice. He was going to follow through with it, insist she leave. Wondering if he was supposed to feel good about winning the internal struggle to stick to his objective. But now he saw how much it was going to hurt him. And he found himself worrying about Lydia.
“It’s not as bad as it might seem.” She appealed to him with her eyes, leaning toward him. “All right, I’m not a photographer. I’m an exporter. The passports and cash are part of how I operate to get around government restrictions.” She probed his face for a reaction. He offered her no encouragement. “Sometimes I do work for foreign governments. Nothing illegal, not like arms or anything of that sort, but I export machinery and equipment, computers. Sensitive things.”
“So why the lies? What was such a major issue you couldn’t talk to me about it?” He watched her closely now. Come on. Get this over with.
“Sometimes I’m being watched. I was afraid if I told you everything I’d scare you off. It’s that simple. I would have told you eventually.”
“This isn’t making sense.” Why would she concoct such a story? The explanations he’d coursed through in his mind in the last few days—none of them good—turned back on him again. Drugs. Some scam, even espionage. The thought made his insides cringe at ever sleeping next to her. He sat up straight, as if shaking off the bad dreams twisting in his mind. Then: “I love you.” He paused, not believing he’d chosen that moment to say it, even to say it at all. “But you lied to me. I don’t trust you. I don’t even know who you are.” He looked at her detachedly, feeling the bittersweet ache of the ended affair. Lydia’s eyes were brimming with tears.
“There isn’t much I can say except to tell you how much you mean to me, how sorry I am, to try and explain.”
Daniel wanted her to stop. Why was she still going on? Insisting on explaining?
“Sometimes the truth sounds a little strange,” she said, leaning further forward.
Strange isn’t the word.
Lydia inhaled deeply. “If I told you all the times I had to skirt around that IRA nonsense—for example.” She looked up at him. “Have you ever tried to get into Northern Ireland with a British passport—or get into and out of an Arab country with visas to Israel stamped on your papers?” She sighed. “It simply isn’t worth dealing with those kinds of complications if you have a way around it. Believe me, that’s all it is.” She looked up at him again, her eyes showing pain.
“Why are you going on like this?” Daniel finally said. She opened her mouth to reply but he continued. “Can’t you see I don’t believe you?”
She stopped, leaned back in her chair, as if never considering that was a possibility. After a pause she lowered her head and looked him in the eye, uncompromisingly. “I’m going on like this because I know I screwed up and I don’t want to lose you. And I’m staying here until you believe in me again. Or throw me out.”
Daniel saw her leaning forward there, the little dancer, the force, and wondered if he could say no to her. But that made it into an almost philosophical discourse. Something to prove? He leaned forward toward her, as if to stress a winning point in a negotiation. “Uh huh. And what about my computer?”
Lydia froze. He saw her look into his eyes, her cheeks hollow. She seemed to be turning the question over in her mind.
Daniel eyed her with detachment again. He wondered what she was thinking, why she was taking so long to answer.
Still she hesitated. She drew in a breath and he knew it was a moment in his life coming, held in her answer. “I’m sorry I violated your trust,” she said. “But it was nothing, really.” Daniel heard the words as an afterthought. He’d already concluded he wasn’t going to believe her response. That look and the long pause mean something. And immediately after that he’d decided there was an explanation that made sense, because his gut told him she was trying to tell him but for some reason wouldn’t let herself, all calculated and rejected in her pause. And he wasn’t going to ask her to leave until he figured it out because his feelings for her were real. He remembered the old adage, that if you had to ask, you weren’t really in love. He wasn’t asking, because that wasn’t the question. The question was what was she up to, and what was the explanation that would let him make sense of it and not lose her.
His stomach was now turning over.
Daniel opened hi
s mouth to speak, but the words escaped him before he could seize them, like marbles scattering on a tilted table. “Maybe you should just go,” he said. He saw her look of suppressed horror. He was glad for it: at least she was reacting, instead of displaying the dead eyes of a liar.
Lydia put her hands up as if to stop him. Tears hovered in her eyes. “You just told me you loved me. Do you think I’m going to walk off after hearing that?”
Why is it I feel like she’s playing me again? First alarm, then on the verge of tears. Daniel’s eyes narrowed. But she’s damned good at it. “What am I, some dupe in a scam?”
“Daniel, please. I need to talk this out with you.”
Daniel heard the nervousness, no, panic, in her voice and stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“What would you say if I told you I’m being watched? That you’re being watched.” Her face showed fear. “I did some wild, stupid things when I was young.” She leaned back into the sofa. “The things I told you about my background. When I met you, and even just now. They’re not true. Well, some of it was, but the facts weren’t all there; basically I was abandoned by Sophie, let’s still call the woman who raised me. Her name doesn’t matter. I got into a difficult situation I’d rather not tell you about.” Her gaze was exploring his eyes, his face. He could see her urgency. “I got involved in a political situation. And then everything exploded. That’s not the half of it. Oh, God,” she continued in an emotion-clogged voice, “people are chasing me, have been ever since. For years. Religious zealots, they’re fanatics. I’ve been living by my wits. Odd jobs. And as I’m sure you’ve feared, espionage.”
Daniel again felt the sense of falling, deeper and deeper into that pit he’d entered upon returning home, unsure where the bottom was. “This is all so vague.” Daniel wondered who “they” were, wondered what “everything exploded” meant.