InterOil’s new international headquarters was housed in an impressively modernistic skyscraper rising as a narrow glass and steel pyramid twenty-six stories above the Mississippi River on Business 61 in front of Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. InterOil had made fabulous profits when oil had hit $150 per barrel, and even at less than one half that, the company, rivaled only by ExxonMobil, was raking in good money.
Much of the company’s profits were being invested in oil exploration along Florida’s gulf coast, in Iraq’s new green fields, and in partnership with Octavio Oil, drilling had begun in the Golfo de Venezuela. Permitting applications with the Canadian government for preliminary exploration in the Arctic’s Parry Channel near Cornwallis Island with its settlement and airstrip at Resolute had been going ahead slowly for the past eighteen months, and the Parliament at Ottawa just last week had given its tentative approval, even over massive protests. Oil and oil dollars had become more important than the environment, even after the BP Gulf spill, even in sensitive places like the Arctic wilderness and Florida’s beaches.
But InterOil had not given up its investments, though meager by comparison with exploration and development, in alternative energy sources, mostly solar power in Arizona and New Mexico, but in some wind farms along the Oregon and Washington coasts.
Joseph Caldwell over at Commerce had been as good as his word, and had personally telephoned Eve yesterday that he’d arranged an appointment with InterOil’s Erik Tyrell, vice president of worldwide marketing.
“Can’t promise you anything, Doctor, but Erik will at least hear you out,” Caldwell had told her. “He’s a careful man, and he’ll almost certainly have someone else sitting in on your meeting. My guess would be Jane Petersen, their chief U.S. counsel, who is even more careful and tightfisted than he is.”
“Can you suggest an approach that might work?” Eve had asked, swallowing her stubborn streak, because this stuff was every bit as important as the science. Without the backing, there would be no science.
“May I speak frankly?”
“Of course.”
“You have a chip on your shoulder, Doctor, that is unattractive.”
Eve bridled, and she wanted to protest. Who the hell did he think he was? Nothing other than a bureaucrat, while she was a scientist and had just won the … Nobel Prize. It made her smile, just a little, to realize the bastard was right. And so was Don, who’d tried to warn her to “play nice.” She could blame her attitude on her upbringing in England, something she’d been doing for most of her life, but even when she’d been a kid she’d had the same “screw you” attitude. And now she didn’t know if she liked looking in that sort of a mirror, though maybe it was time she finally did.
“You’re right,” she admitted.
“I’m a politician, which means I know when to push and when to back off, and when to show up at a meeting that’s vitally important with my hat in hand. Every once in a while something like that actually works.”
And this time Eve really did laugh a little, because Caldwell was not only a politician, he was an important man with a little bit of self-deprecating humor. “Thanks, Mr. Secretary. It’s something new for me, but I’ll try.”
“Good luck.”
At noon Eve got out of the cab in front of InterOil, and with her laptop containing a PowerPoint presentation of what she hoped to achieve, and how she wanted to get there, she squared her narrow shoulders and marched across the broad plaza and fountains to the vast, doorless entrance, the inside coolness separated from the sultry heat outside by a sheet of gently blowing air.
People were seated on benches and on the rims of the several fountains eating their lunches, and inside the lobby that soared upward for the entire twenty-six stories, more people were coming and going. InterOil’s headquarters was a busy place. Prosperous, even booming, and bustling 24/7 because the company operated worldwide on Greenwich mean time so that office hours everywhere could be coordinated.
She had been told by Tyrell’s secretary that noon local would be the only time open for her brief presentation. If it had been set for two in the morning she would have agreed without hesitation, though she’d been a little put off by the secretary’s emphasis on
“Bright, cheerful, but businesslike.” She’d laughed when she told Don. “And brief.”
He’d laughed with her. “Just remember to stay out of your lecture mode and you’ll be fine.”
“That’ll be the toughest part.”
The receptionist at the circular counter in the center of the lobby directed Eve to the southwest elevators. “Mr. Tyrell’s office is on the twenty-fifth floor.”
She was the only one in the car so she indulged herself by examining her image in the mirrored back wall. She was dressed in a khaki skirt, a plain white blouse, and a blue blazer, no earrings or necklace, and only a touch of makeup, even that much rare for her. She looked neat, freshly scrubbed, but as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of some outdoor adventure magazine. Queen of the High Seas come ashore to ask for a handout. She’d never thought much about her looks until now, and she felt a little shabby in this setting.
Tyrell’s suite of offices was behind glass doors directly across from the elevator, and his secretary, a stunning blond woman with movie star teeth and a devastating smile, got up from behind her glass desk. “Mr. Tyrell is waiting in the boardroom for you, Doctor,” she said, and she led Eve, who was really feeling shabby now, down a connecting corridor to a smallish room with a long table big enough to seat ten or twelve people.
Photographs of what appeared to be oil-drilling rigs in settings from deserts to frozen tundra and offshore platforms, some of them huge, and in one photograph a gigantic wave had risen as high as the main deck, were arranged on the walls.
Tyrell, seated at the head of the table, didn’t bother to get up. “So good of you to be prompt, Doctor Larsen,” he said. He was a short-torsoed, fat man with thick white hair that framed his perfectly round face like a halo. Except for an extremely stern set to his narrow lips and a harshness in his voice and eyes, he could have easily fit the role of a department store Santa Claus, and Eve’s spirits took a little sag.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” Eve said. She sat down at the opposite end of the table and laid her laptop in front of her.
“I noticed when you came in that your eyes were drawn to our photo gallery, especially the North Sea rig.”
“Impressive.”
“Carlton Explorer II, quite large, in size and in dollars. Built in Norway and dragged out to her present position by six oceangoing tugs, before her legs were extended to the seabed, and work could actually be done. We’ll have invested nearly one billion dollars by the time we ever pump so much as a single barrel of oil.”
Eve had no idea what he was trying to tell her. “It’s good that InterOil has been successful enough to be able to spend that kind of money for exploration.”
“It’s a part of our business, Doctor,” Tyrell said. “Do you know the size of that wave washing over our rig?”
“Probably seventy feet, perhaps higher if it was a rogue. I would assume the rig had been evacuated by then.”
“Actually it hadn’t, and it was a rogue wave measured at slightly higher than one hundred feet.”
“Impressive.”
“Yes, Carlton Explorer II is impressive in every respect,” Tyrell said.
Eve started to open her laptop but Tyrell motioned for her to stop.
“Unfortunately our time is not sufficient to hear your full presentation.” He looked past her. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said.
Eve turned as a handsome woman with short dark hair and a slender, almost boyish frame, dressed in what was obviously an expensive dark blue skirt, silk blouse, and matching blazer, a gold-colored scarf artfully tied around her neck, walked in.
“Jane Petersen,” she told Eve, not bothering to offer her hand. “I’m the company’s general counsel for North America.” She sat down next to Tyrell. “Congratulations on your Nobel Prize. You must feel vindicated.”
Eve decided that she didn’t like the woman, though she wasn’t exactly sure why, except she’d detected insincerity in the remark. Jane Petersen didn’t give a damn about the Nobel Prize, Eve’s or anyone else’s, unless it had a directly positive bearing on InterOil’s continued profitability.
