“Actually it’s why I’m here today,” Eve said.
Neither InterOil executive said a thing, and possibly for the first time in her adult life Eve felt out of her depth.
“May I assume that you know of my World Energy Needs project, and its possible significance?” she began.
“We know what you’re trying to do,” Tyrell said.
“I’m here to ask for funding.”
“How much?” Tyrell asked directly.
Eve glanced up at the photographs on the wall. “The cost of an offshore exploration rig,” she said. “Or at least a stripped-down version because we won’t be doing any drilling.”
“Why?” Jane Petersen asked, no curiosity whatsoever in her voice or manner.
And in Eve’s estimation the woman wasn’t even being polite, but she sucked it up. Hat in hand, Caldwell had recommended. “Because InterOil not only has the money, it has the expertise in offshore rigs. And because alternative energy sources are the future for corporations such as yours. Perhaps the
“For the next one hundred years,” Tyrell suggested.
“But the world’s reserves are finite, everyone agrees with at least that much. So why burn oil for power or transportation, when for the foreseeable future we’ll continue to need it for lubrication, for pharmaceuticals, plastics, and host of other manufacturing derivatives?”
“While I may tend to agree with you, Doctor, you’re discounting a fair bit of scientific work that actually stretches how we use oil, especially for transportation. You have to agree that the internal combustion engine is probably in its last days. We’ll go all electric, that’s a foregone conclusion.”
“Exactly my point,” Eve said. She didn’t want to get excited, but maybe they were getting it after all.
“Yes, but you need to see our point as well,” Jane Petersen said. “We have a business to run as profitably as we possibly can make it for the sake of our investors. And InterOil’s primary concern is finding oil reserves and pumping them out of the ground.”
Eve could feel her temper slipping. “That’s so shortsighted.”
“Is it?” Tyrell asked. “Tell us, please, if you were suddenly handed a check for whatever sum you needed, let’s say the one billion dollars we’ve spent to date on Carlton Explorer II and the work she is doing for us, how long before your project would begin to produce energy?”
Within a year, Eve started to say, but Tyrell held her off.
“The same amount of equivalent energy that Carlton Explorer II, which will begin producing next month?”
“Years,” Eve conceded. “But never unless we start now.”
“But you’re still in the experimental stage of your work, isn’t that so?” Jane Petersen asked.
“Yes,” Eve said, and she knew where the discussion was going, and knew that this trip had been a waste of time
“By which you mean to say that you cannot guarantee a steady production of energy — a significant amount of energy — until your experiments are completed.”
“That’s correct. In the meantime you’re running out of places to find oil.”
“That’s not quite true,” Tyrell said. “What we’re finding and pumping now are mostly light sweet crudes — that is oil which has a low API density, which we call light, and oil which has a low sulfur content which we call sweet. These are the oils that are the simplest to distill. And you are perfectly correct when you argue that we are rapidly running out of those benchmark oils. But they represent something less than thirty percent of the known worldwide reserves. We still have Canada’s crude bitumen and Venezuela’s extra-heavy crude, mostly in the form of oil sands. Plus there are oil shales, which actually contain kerogen that can be converted into crude oil. Did you know that the largest reserves occur here in the U.S.?”
“Yes, but producing gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, or heating oil from those sources would be expensive,” Eve countered.
“Fabulously expensive, which is why we are investing considerable sums each year to find new methods of refining those products.”
And it was over. Eve knew it and she could see in the expressions of the two oil executives that they also knew it.
“Coming here asking for help is fine, Doctor,” Jane Petersen said coolly. “But don’t try to tell us our business. We know what we are doing, and contrary to what you apparently think of us, we are keeping our eyes on the future.”
“Shortsighted,” Eve mumbled, but she managed a slight smile as she gathered her laptop and got to her feet. “Thank you for hearing me out.”
The door opened and an older man in a three-piece business suit, a pleasant expression on his square-jawed craggy face, walked in and tossed a thick manila envelope on the table in front of Eve.
“Lawrence Dailey,” the man told Eve. “I’m chairman of the board. Just happened to be in town when I found out you were coming down to ask for our help. Joe Caldwell asked if I could see what could be done.”
“Yes, sir,” Eve said for want of anything else. Tyrell and Jane Petersen had gotten to their feet, but were just about as dumbstruck as she was.
“That’s the deed and specifications for one of our platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, just offshore from Pass Christian, Mississippi. Vanessa Explorer, she’s called. We’re in the process of shutting her down and scrapping her. Just a security detail and small maintenance crew left aboard. I think she should do nicely for your project.”
Hat in hand, indeed, Eve thought. Yet she wasn’t so naive as to believe that something else hadn’t been going on behind the scenes. Something that in all likelihood she would never know. But it didn’t matter. The damned thing works. She would worry about the quid pro quo, if there was to be one, later.
“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll make good use of her.”
Dailey shook her hand. “Congratulations on your prize, and have a safe trip home.”
Peter Tolifson, an InterOil security officer, manning the security suite, watched the closed-circuit image from one of the cameras that monitored the plaza as Eve Larsen exited the building, crossed to the driveway, and got into a cab that had just pulled up.
Using his personal cell phone he called an international number, and when it was answered, he said, “She just left.”
After a moment he nodded. “She was carrying a manila envelope that she did not have when she arrived.”
After another moment he broke the connection and pocketed his phone, wondering why the hell someone in Dubai would want that information.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DeCamp, dressed in faded jeans, a plain T-shirt and sandals, and a large, floppy straw hat, was on his hands and knees tending his flower garden behind his seventeenth-century Italianate villa in the hills above Nice, in the area known as Cimiez. The late morning was lovely, and he was at peace with himself, in a place he loved, with a woman he loved, who was in the rustic kitchen preparing their lunch, and he was on the heels of a reasonably satisfying assignment.
He stopped for a moment to look past his tiny, disorganized grove of orange and lemon trees framed by tall slender cedars of Lebanon and mimosa down into the city, and beyond the hazy blue Mediterranean that disappeared into the horizon, when he spotted a dark blue Mercedes slowly making its way up the hill on the Boulevard de Cimiez.
He watched the car for a couple of minutes until it turned up the Rue de Rivoli that wound its way to the villa, put down his small weeding rake, got up, and went into the house.
Martine looked up from the side board where she was slicing a loaf of her bread, and the smile on her pretty,
