The Hadrian Memorandum - Allan Folsom [27]
“Apparently no more than he appears. An American expat visiting Bioko from England doing plant research for clients. He met the priest by happenstance. That’s all we know.”
“That’s all you know?”
“Sy, we’re working on it.”
“I asked you to come here with hard information. You give me ‘as far as I knows’ and ‘maybes.’ And now you add the ‘incidental information’ that the army knows about them, too. Do I have to go over there and take care of this myself? What the fuck do I need you and White for? Shit!”
Abruptly Wirth pushed out of his chair and walked off, trying to digest the reality of what was going on. The information about the existence of the photos had come to them barely twelve hours earlier in Conor White’s urgent e-mail to Truex. That White had known about them earlier and not reported it, and that he had enlisted a special section of the Equatorial Guinea army to help search for them, made things worse because now too many people knew about it. Worse yet, none of it had done any good. The photos were still missing.
Wirth reached the far side of his office, where the AG Striker logo was, then stopped and turned back. “If those photographs become public the whole Bioko field project is dead, and so is this company. If the media doesn’t make certain of it, Washington will.” He pointed his unlit cigar at Moss. “What the fuck do we do, Arnie?”
The New Yorker in him aside, Arnold Moss’s thirty-odd years in the oil business had given him a shrewd appreciation for the complexities of life and a habit of taking the time to think things through. For a long moment he sat there in silence, doing just that.
“When this whole thing came together,” he said finally, “in exchange for protecting our investment and interests in Equatorial Guinea, we agreed to give Mr. Truex and his Hadrian company seven percent of our gross profit from all crude oil pumped from the Bioko field until the year 2050. By our projections and his, that figure is staggering. That means Mr. Truex has considerable interest in making sure the photographs, if indeed they do exist, are not made public. Because if they are, as you correctly implied, Sy, Washington will simply void the contract, make certain our leases are terminated, and put together a new deal elsewhere. And we, along with Mr. Truex, will end up with nothing.” Moss got up and went to the side table to pick up a Styrofoam cup and fill it from the thermos. Holding it, he looked back.
“That said, we have to assume the photographs do exist and will be publicly exposed. We have to act accordingly. Starting immediately the AG Striker and Hadrian companies have to distance themselves from SimCo and Conor White. Build a legal and public relations defense against them and be prepared to sever our relations with White and SimCo the instant the photos show up. How they’re delivered, whether by this Nicholas Marten or by someone else or if they somehow just show up on the Internet, doesn’t matter. Whatever is in them, whatever they reveal about White’s people delivering arms to the rebels, it has to look as if it were SimCo’s doing alone, that it was their agenda entirely and one we knew nothing about.” Moss walked back to his chair and sat down.
“AG Striker is an oil field management and exploration company,” he said, “nothing else. Hadrian is a contractor for us in Iraq only. Should it ever be proven that we and Hadrian were, in any way, involved with SimCo to exploit the revolution in Equatorial Guinea for our own gain, everything we’ve been blessed with and worked so long and hard to protect is over. Not only that, there is every chance the Department of Justice will look into it, with Congressman Joe Ryder hanging over their shoulder. Which means not only very bad publicity and an enormous legal expense to defend us but the stark reality that some or all of us will go to prison. You, Sy, and Mr. Truex included. Should we look to Washington for help, they won’t be anywhere in sight. To them, our agreement will have never existed. That’s the way it is.”
Josiah Wirth stared