The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [46]
“I’ll go,” I volunteered immediately, starting to my feet. “We can talk more after you’ve rested.”
“Stay.” He waved me back into my seat. “It’s nothing. I enjoy the company. You have a copy of this report that was addressed to me?”
I took it out of my briefcase and handed it to him. He flipped through a few pages and handed it back, his expression inscrutable.
“Let me explain something that may be difficult for you to understand,” he said, draping the handkerchief over his head like a kaffiyeh. “The truth is that nobody knows how much oil the Saudis have, or the real condition of their fields. Not me, not the Saudi oil ministry, and not the king. The Saudi government twists OPEC’s arm for the allocation they want, and then orders Aramco to produce that amount. Aramco does whatever they have to do to make it happen. If the minister or the king wants to know how much surplus capacity they have, or the exact quantity of their proved reserves, the head of Aramco reports whatever they want to hear and concludes by saying ‘Inshallah’—God willing. And who can argue with that? If God wills the oil to come, it will come. If He doesn’t, it won’t.”
“With all due respect, Rashid, I don’t buy it. I’ve spent time with the Aramco people. There are a lot of smart engineers working there. I can’t believe they don’t know what’s going on.”
“Don’t confuse issues of intelligence with issues of culture,” he rasped irritably. “At the lower levels of the organization, I’m sure the smart engineers you refer to have made all the correct calculations. But it’s not acceptable to pass difficult news up the line at Aramco, particularly in the form of a forecast. Because many of the senior people in the Kingdom—including the king—genuinely believe that there’s a large measure of hubris in trying to predict the future. Inshallah. It will be what God wills.”
“Which would be fine if the Saudis weren’t sitting on most of the world’s excess oil reserves,” I said, watching the sweat bead on his forehead again. It was the kind of give-and-take he normally enjoyed, but I continued to worry that I was overtaxing him. “If the peak-oil people are right, and the Saudis are closer to running out of oil than anyone realizes, it means trouble for everyone.”
He smiled grimly, mopping his face with the handkerchief from his head and then tossing it on the desk.
“You want my opinion?”
“Please.”
“Inshallah.”
I half grinned, thinking he’d made another joke. As seconds ticked past without his elaborating, my grin faded.
“You’re not interested in trying to prevent a global energy crisis?”
“Unless it happens in the next few weeks, I doubt it’s going to have much impact on me.”
We stared at each other in silence, and I wondered if I was listening to the drugs.
“I’m kind of at a loss here, Rashid,” I said quietly. “You’ve always gone out of your way to be helpful to people, especially me. It’s hard to believe that you genuinely don’t care about preventing a catastrophe, regardless of whether you think you’re going to be here to see it.”
“There are a lot of things I care about,” he responded gravely. “Some I can affect, and some I can’t.”
“You don’t believe it would make any difference if the Western governments knew there was an oil crunch coming?”
“Frankly, no,” he said, sounding more amused than regretful. “America and her allies are so in love with democracy, but all that really means is never making hard choices. Everyone’s already aware that there’s only so much oil, but the Western economic powers won’t summon the political will to deal with the entirely predictable shortages until lines begin to form at your gas stations. And by then, as you and I both know, it will be years too late.”
“They’d take the steps if they had definitive warning. We’re talking about the end of the world as we know it. Genuine shortages mean famine and death and war. Those are issues that tend to focus the mind.”
“Famine and death and war for whom?” he riposted sharply. “Not America. America will suffer,