The Last Days

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  The mood was casual. Both sides were slowly beginning to warm up to each other. And once everyone had finished eating, Bennett began his second presentation of the day. It was aimed primarily at Doron, who was hearing the details of Bennett’s oil-for-peace proposal for the first time. He’d been briefed by his Foreign Ministry officials, of course, and he’d read various

  tidbits about the plan in the papers. But Doron was looking forward to finally getting the full presentation directly from its chief architect.

  “Gentlemen,” Bennett began, “as you know, there’s long been a common misperception that the Holy Land is the only place in the Middle East that isn’t blessed with petroleum. Most people don’t realize that since 1948, more than four hundred wells have been drilled in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. To be sure, many have come up dry, or haven’t proven to possess commercial quantities of oil and natural gas. Some, on the other hand, have proven to be quite valuable. But until recently, most people have had absolutely no idea exactly how much black gold is actually there.”

  Bennett reached for his glass, took another sip of water, and continued.

  “In part, of course, this was because the political and military climate made venture capital resources scarce, and thus serious exploration difficult, to say the least. In part, it was because until very recently the technology simply wasn’t available to do sophisticated exploration from space and using smaller, more advanced drilling equipment. And in part, there simply wasn’t the entrepreneurial spirit to hunt for buried treasure. Most of the Israeli gas and oil industry was owned by the government and run by bureaucrats without any imagination and without any incentive to hunt for such treasure because they had no stake in the cause. They weren’t going to make a single extra shekel if the Israeli government struck oil, so why bother?

  “But all that began to change in 1988. As you of course know, Mr. Prime Minister, your government began privatizing the exploration, drilling, and production companies at the time, a process that continued throughout much of the 1990s. At the same time, the Gulf War seemed to neutralize—at least for a while—the Iraqi threat. The Israeli-Palestinian peace process picked up speed. Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan. The world economy was growing. An explosion of new technology came onto the market making petroleum exploration easier and cheaper. A confluence of many different events meant suddenly, everything was changing. And one man who saw these changes and decided to take advantage of them became a friend of mine.

  “Now, that said, I must tell you, Prime Minister Doron, that one of the few men in the world who knows what treasures lie beneath is right here at this table. Ibrahim Sa’id has shown tremendous foresight and true entrepreneurial moxie to get where he is today. And one of the central questions we’ve gathered here to answer is whether or not his unexpected rise to leadership of the Palestinian people—offers a window of opportunity for both sides to find a measure of peace and prosperity never before imagined.” Bennett paused to let his rhetorical flourish sink in.

  “It is Ibrahim Sa’id and his company—the Palestinian Petroleum Group, known more commonly as PPG—who have partnered with the Israeli company Medexco, run by Dmitri Galishnikov. They’ve formed an extraordinary joint venture that crosses racial, religious, and national bounds, a joint venture my government believes could literally change the course of history. As you know, Mr. Prime Minister, Erin and I, in our previous nongovernment lives as senior executives at Global Strategix, Inc.—GSX—and the Joshua Fund, one of the world’s largest and most successful global growth mutual funds, got to know Mr. Sa’id and Mr. Galishnikov. We learned their remarkable stories. We vetted them. And we chose to invest one billion dollars into their joint venture to turn a dream into a reality. We’ve crunched the numbers a thousand times from a thousand different angles, and I daresay every fact and figure is now part of our very souls.”

  McCoy caught Bennett’s eye. She could see he was finally in his element, and enjoying every minute of it, no matter how anxious he’d been leading into the luncheon.

  “Prime Minister Doron, some of this, I suspect, will be new for you. All of it is in the briefing book Erin just handed to you. But let me just say, sir, that the figures are almost unimaginable. Let me take some time to walk you through them.”

  Something was wrong.

  It was just after 2:00 P.M. Gibraltar time, just after 9:00 A.M. in D.C. FBI director Scott Harris stepped back into his office after briefing the president at the White House with Homeland Security Secretary Lee James. Harris’s chief of staff, Larry Kirstoff, was waiting for him.

  “What is it now?” Harris asked, seeing the anxiety in his colleague’s face.

  “We just got a hit.”

  “On what?”

  “Ruth Bennett’s ATM card,” said Kirstoff.

  Harris swallowed hard.

  “Where? Just now?”

  “Eighteen minutes ago. At a bank near Radio City Music Hall.”

  “New York? You’re sure?”

  “I just got the call from the ELINT unit a few seconds ago. They’re sure.”

  “You think it was her?”

  “We’ve got no idea. Not yet. But the cops aren’t taking any chances, especially if we’re dealing with suicide bombers.”

  “Oh my God. Eighteen minutes—why’d it take so long?”

  “Some glitch in the system. Can’t say for sure yet. We’re checking on that. But for now NYPD is flooding the area—uniformed officers, SWAT teams, helicopters, the works. They’re shutting down a twenty-square-block radius and all points in and out of the city. We’ve got our own units on the way. We’d like to put the Hostage Rescue Team on standby in New York, just in case.”

  “Do it—whatever you need. And get me the president—now.”

  Bennett had no idea what was unfolding back home.

  The entire country was glued to breaking television news coverage of the manhunt in Manhattan. It wasn’t just cable. All four major broadcast networks broke into regular programming with a story in their own backyard.

  The images were riveting. Every car, every taxicab, every truck and bus was being stopped at gunpoint. Local and federal agents dressed in black and armed with automatic weapons were taking people out of vehicles and searching them one by one. But who or what were they looking for? Ruth Bennett? Was she still alive? Had someone forced her PIN number out of her before …

  Before what? No one wanted to say out loud the worst-case scenario. Especially not network anchors. But the thought was on everyone’s mind.

  If Ruth Bennett were dead—or held hostage somewhere in New York, or anywhere on the eastern seaboard, for that matter—how exactly were they going to find her? And who else might they be looking for? Faces on the federal terrorist watch list, to be sure. Anyone of Arab or Middle East descent or looks? Anyone some law enforcement official deemed “suspicious”? It had the potential to be a civil liberties nightmare. But in the adrenaline of the moment, that wasn’t the first worry on most people’s minds.

  Additional security was rushed to protect the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. The Empire State Building was shut down. Heavily armed police officers stood watch outside city hall, One Police Plaza, and all local, state, and federal government buildings. Every tunnel was sealed by the Port Authority. All bridges were being shut down. Scott Harris briefed the mayor while Lee James briefed the president. On top of everything else, there was another question to decide. It was New Year’s Eve. A quarter of a million people were expected to descend upon Times Square as night fell. It would be the perfect target for a suicide bomber—high profile, high security, but almost impossible to fully defend. Should everything be canceled?

  Bennett turned on a Power Point projector and continued.

  “When they first secured exploration licenses from the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority and began doing some preliminary test wells off the coast of Gaza, Ashdod, and Ashkelon, Medexco and PPG thought they were getting themselves into a natur
al gas deal. So did we, to be honest. And, as our friend Dmitri might say, dayenu—that alone would have been enough. But that, it turned out, was just the beginning.”

  Bennett clicked to the first slide, revealing a satellite photograph of the coast of Israel and Gaza.

  “Tracts of natural gas were actually discovered back in 1999, by accident. A marine geologist working for National Geographic—the same one who’d actually located the sunken Titanic in the North Atlantic—was trolling the floor of the Mediterranean with high-tech sonar equipment near Ashdod, just north of Gaza. He was looking for the shipwrecks of ancient Phoenician vessels, and he’d found them—two of them—dating back to seven hundred and fifty years before the time of Christ.”

  The next slide showed underwater images of both vessels.

  “But this geologist hadn’t just found sunken ships. He’d found buried treasure. He’d unknowingly found the most spectacular energy discovery in the history of modern Israel and Palestine—hidden underwater reserves capable of producing millions of cubic feet of natural gas per day, every day, for decades, perhaps centuries.”

  Bennett now had Doron’s full attention, and he could see Sa’id warming as well, excited to see his counterpart becoming engaged.

  “But it turned out there was more,” Bennett added, carefully building the drama. “Last year, a team of Medexco and PPG geologists—paid for by GSX—discovered oil as well. Unbelievable amounts of oil. Perhaps enough oil to make Israel and Palestine—if they were to work together to drill it, pump it, and refine it—the second-largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia.”

  A new slide showed the top ten oil producing and exporting countries in order of their annual production. The next slide showed the top ten list in order of annual sales. The next showed Israel and Palestine in the number two position.

  “Now, the Saudis have about a quarter of the world’s known petroleum reserves, and they pump about eight and a half million barrels a day. When the price of oil is between twenty-five and thirty dollars a barrel, they gross somewhere north of two hundred million dollars a day—nearly eighty to ninety billion dollars a year. Iraq also has tremendous potential, and we

  believe they are going to become a very aggressive new player in the international oil markets. By aggressive, I mean in the competitive business sense, not the military, nuclear sense, of course.”

  That got a laugh from all of them, and bought Bennett more goodwill.

  “Now, Prime Minister Doron, I’d be happy to get into Iraq’s potential if you’d like. But the details aren’t particularly important. What’s essential to understand is that they’ve got a huge head start on you both. Their equipment is substandard. It’s old. It’s poorly maintained. It needs to be replaced, and that’s going to take time and a lot of money. But they’ve got the whole world hoping the U.S. will secure order, the new provisional government will get the country functioning again, and the U.N. will lift the sanctions and allow Iraqi oil to be sold on the open market.

  “Once that happens—and I believe it will happen relatively soon, Iraq’s oil industry is poised for explosive growth. If they accept foreign direct investment, they will have the opportunity to begin dealing with their technology problems fairly quickly. And, of course, they already have quite a bit of infrastructure already in place, regardless of its quality. You don’t. All this oil and gas is sitting off your coastlines. But no one can start getting it out of the ground and into refineries and into the world markets until there’s some kind of political agreement, some real assurances that there’s going to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians—and that there will be enforceable property rights and legal mechanisms necessary for the proper functioning of a free market.”

  “Sir, we’ve got a body. “

  FBI director Scott Harris heard the words but couldn’t believe them.

  He was in one of the Bureau’s black-and-gold jet helicopters heading to New York from Washington on orders from the president. He and Chief of Staff Larry Kirstoff and three bodyguards were three thousand feet above the coast of New Jersey. They were inbound for a press conference with the mayor and police commissioner at city hall. Thus far, the manhunt hadn’t turned up anything. Now he feared the worst.

  “This is Harris, talk to me—what have you got?” he told the Bureau’s lead investigator on the ground.

  “Sir, one of the NYPD ‘s search-and-rescue units just found a floater in the East River. Probably been there twenty-four to thirty-six hours, best they can tell. “

  “And?” pressed Harris, hesitant to ask the obvious question on a frequency that was probably being monitored by the media.

  “Hard to say, sir. The body’s badly disfigured. The ME is on the way—but my guys tell me it’s definitely a woman, somewhere between the ages of forty and sixty.”

  Harris didn’t know what to make of that. The age range was a bit young. But in the fog of war, first reports were often wrong.

  Investigators had also just positively confirmed that it was indeed Ruth Bennett’s ATM card used to withdraw $300 at a Chase Manhattan branch near Radio City Music Hall. But the ATM’s security camera apparently had malfunctioned. There was no video of the transaction. Fingerprints were useless. At least eight other people had used the same ATM before the police could secure the scene.

  No one remembered anyone matching Ruth Bennett’s photograph being seen in the area. But no one could positively say they hadn’t seen her either. It was too early in the morning. Too much was going on.

  THIRTY EIGHT

  Prime Minister Doron had questions.

  “Assuming Prime Minister Sa’id and I and our respective governments and countries can come to some agreement—that’s a big assumption, I understand—but let’s just make it for the purpose of this portion of our discussions.”

  “Fair enough,” said Bennett.

  “How long would it take for the oil and gas to start flowing? And, more to the point, how long would it take for the money to start flowing?”

  “It’s a good question, and, of course, there are all kinds of variables. The first and foremost being that the Medexco joint venture currently has exploration licenses, but not drilling and production licenses. Before the oil, gas, and money start flowing, Medexco needs to be granted such licenses.

  “This could take several forms. One way would be to grant a concession to Medexco, whereby the company essentially leases the drilling rights, does all the work, and pays the Israeli and Palestinian governments a certain dollar amount each year, or a certain agreed-upon percentage of gross revenues. The government could then put these revenues in public trust, and distribute them annually by way of royalty checks.

  “The State of Alaska does this. It leases petroleum and mineral rights to private companies. It collects about twenty-five billion dollars a year in fees, aside from corporate taxes. It puts all that money into what it calls the Permanent Fund, which it made part of its constitution back in the ’70s when they struck black gold on the North Slope. At the end of the year, every official resident of Alaska gets a royalty check of more than fifteen hundred American dollars. It’s not the only route, of course. But it’s a relatively clean and simple process, and it would put hard, cold cash directly in the hands of every Israeli and Palestinian adult every single year of their lives.”

  “And the other routes?”

  “Well, there are lots of them, actually. But the most attractive would be , some form of direct ownership.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning Israel and Palestine would basically grant Medexco drilling and production rights for a nominal fee, and the right to tax its profits at a low, flat rate. In exchange, Medexco would hold an initial public offering—an IPO—and become a publicly traded company. It would distribute shares of its common stock to every adult Israeli and Palestinian, as well as to its employees, venture capital partners, et cetera. Rather than receive an annual royalty check, Israelis and Palestinians would simultaneously be creatin
g wealth in two different ways. First, each shareholder would, of course, receive dividend checks. The size of those checks would depend on how many shares a person held and the profits generated by Medexco that quarter or year. Second, each person would in all probability see the value of their stock rise—perhaps exponentially—overnight and then over the long haul. There would be a holding period of course, during which you couldn’t sell the stock.”

  “How long?” asked Doron.

  “Depends. It’s really up to you two, whatever you negotiate. But I’d say anywhere from eighteen months to three years would be a reasonable time frame. The idea is to prevent people from flooding the markets with their stock instantly. Create some stability. Give people a chance to see the company growing, maturing. Give people a stake in its security, and the security of the region. And, quite frankly, give people the chance to see the value of their stock increase dramatically in a relatively short period of time. The longer people hold on to their stock, the more wealth they’ll have, the more they’ll see the value of this joint venture, and peace between these two peoples.

  “OK,” said Doron, “so, again, assuming for a moment that all these details—and all the political details—could be worked out. Licenses. Concessions or IPOs, or whatever. How much time would it take to get drilling platforms and pipes and refineries and all that in place?”

  “Well, again, there’s lots of variables. But I think it’s fair to say—and Erin, please correct me if I’m wrong—that the first oil and gas could begin coming out of the ground within one year of the signing of a peace agreement.”

  McCoy nodded.

  “That’s about right,” she said. “The drilling platforms will be the quickest items to get into place, and we can begin building pumping and storage facilities simultaneously. What you won’t have at first is much refining capacity. There’s some in Israel by private companies. The rest would have to be outsourced. And of course, you don’t have a deep-water port in Gaza, so there’d be some challenges there, as well. But all of these are manageable.”