The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [192]
Only when the slope of the profits graph started taking on the look of a downhill slalom did Sir Hamish become worried. One night, while brooding over the company’s profit-and-loss account for the previous three years, and realizing that he was losing contracts even in his native Scotland, Sir Hamish reluctantly came to the conclusion that he must tender for less established work, and perhaps even consider the odd gamble.
His brightest young executive, David Heath, a stocky, middle-aged bachelor, whom he did not entirely trust—after all, the man had been educated south of the border and, worse, some extraordinary place in the United States called the Wharton Business School—wanted Sir Hamish to put a toe into Mexican waters. Mexico, as Heath was not slow to point out, had discovered vast reserves of oil off its eastern coast and had overnight become rich with American dollars. The construction business in Mexico was suddenly proving most lucrative, and contracts were coming up for tender with figures as high as thirty to forty million dollars attached to them. Heath urged Sir Hamish to go after one such contract that had recently been announced in a full-page advertisement in The Economist. The Mexican government was issuing tender documents for a proposed ring road around their capital, Mexico City. In an article in the business section of The Observer, detailed arguments were put forward as to why established British companies should try to fulfill the ring-road tender. Heath had offered shrewd advice on overseas contracts in the past that Sir Hamish had let slip through his fingers.
The next morning Sir Hamish sat at his desk listening attentively to David Heath, who felt that as Graham Construction had already built the Glasgow and Edinburgh ring roads, any application they made to the Mexican government had to be taken seriously. To Heath’s surprise, Sir Hamish agreed with his project manager and allowed a team of six men to travel to Mexico to obtain the tender documents and research the project.
The research team was led by David Heath, and consisted of three other engineers, a geologist, and an accountant. When the team arrived in Mexico they obtained the tender documents from the minister of works and settled down to study them minutely. Having pinpointed the major problems, they walked around Mexico City with their ears open and their mouths shut and made a list of the problems they were clearly going to encounter: the impossibility of unloading anything at Vera Cruz and then transporting the cargo to Mexico City without half of the original consignment being stolen, the lack of communications between ministries, and worst of all the attitude of the Mexicans to work. But David Heath’s most positive contribution to the list was the discovery that each minister had his own outside man, and that man had better be well disposed to Graham Construction if the firm were even to be considered for the shortlist. Heath immediately sought out the minister of works’ man, one Victor Perez, and took him to an extravagant lunch at the Fonda el Refugio, where both of them nearly ended up drunk, although Heath remained sober enough to settle all the necessary terms, conditional upon Sir Hamish’s approval. Having taken every possible precaution, Heath agreed on a tender figure with Perez that was to include the minister’s percentage. Once he had completed the report for his chairman, he flew back to England with his team.
On the evening of David Heath’s returns, Sir Hamish retired to bed early to study his project manager’s conclusions. He read the report through the night as others might read a spy story, and was left in no doubt that this was the opportunity he had been looking for to overcome the temporary setbacks Graham Construction was now suffering. Although Sir Hamish would