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“I can’t ask you to do this,” said Anne-Sophie. Her green eyes were drier, but sadness made them glassy and opaque.

“You haven’t asked. I’m telling you what is going to happen tomorrow. I’m doing this. Not you.

“We’re not discussing it anymore,” Blaise Ryan added, her voice jagged with unmistakable finality.

FRANKFURT
LATER THAT DAY, 12:05 P.M.
HOTEL HESSISCHER HOF

It was midday when Blaise again gave the Hessischer Hof’s porter another two euros for hailing a taxi.

Blaise had awakened early that morning in her hotel room, filled with doubts. The instant her eyes opened, she had begun to regret her promise of a stupid sleuthing investigation of her best friend’s husband. In the early light of day, Blaise had wondered if she was
getting involved in something that was none of her business—even after last night’s blowup.

But, regrets or not, she had gone through with her detective work. One thing Blaise Ryan’s friends and enemies both agreed on was that she was loyal to a fault. There was next to nothing Blaise Ryan wouldn’t do for a friend.

As she gave the taxi driver the Perlmutters’ street address, she thought about what she had discovered. Thank God her heart habitually overrode her brain. The past four hours had completely changed her mind; she was now certain that Anne-Sophie’s suspicions were well grounded.

Blaise should have known better than to doubt Anne-Sophie. Too often in the history of their friendship, Blaise had been the one to request help. Over a decade ago, Anne-Sophie had closed her eyes and figuratively jumped off a cliff for Blaise. It had been both a physical and a mental leap into a void. Blaise had recognized always that her friend’s participation in her flamboyant plan had cut deeply against the natural grain of Anne-Sophie’s quiet character.

Yes, she was glad to now be the one offering assistance to Anne-Sophie.

Blaise tilted her head back and smiled inwardly as she thought back to Anne-Sophie’s role in the best day of her career in the environmental movement.

It had been thirteen years ago. In Madrid.

She replayed the headlines in the
International Herald Tribune
with a grin: “Protesters Take Over the Madrid Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.” There had been a picture—front page, above the broadsheet’s fold—of Blaise, Anne-Sophie, and four other women hanging from the sparkling ceiling of Madrid’s conference center. The photograph had spoken a thousand words.

The six female bodies had hovered in midair, immobile and twisting at the midpoint between the convention center’s floor and ceiling. Suddenly a whooshing sound had filled the room and a huge
canvas had fallen from the ceiling and had remained suspended aboveground, held aloft by the rope each airborne body held in her hand.

The speech by the World Bank president had skidded to a midsentence stop. Not even the farthest person in the room could have failed to read the huge banner as the sun shone on its gigantic print.

THE WORLD BANK DOESN’T ERADICATE POVERTY
IT CREATES INEQUALITY
HARMS THE ENVIRONMENT
AND MAKES PEOPLE POORER

Blaise remembered the bedlam that had ensued. Security personnel had run back and forth in the conference hall, but nobody had seemed to know how to get up to the ceiling. Police had poured in. Some of the ministers, fearing a terrorist attack, had gotten up from their chairs and started moving toward the door. But the sight of the suspended bodies and banner was like a magnet. People moved, but nobody left.

The World Bank president had stuttered, trying to continue his address. The words had come out of his mouth, but were no longer being projected into the hall’s audio system. His voice had become a barely audible whisper. And yet suddenly another voice, that of a woman, had begun projecting loudly into the hall.

The protesters had cut him off and taken over the loudspeakers.

“My name is Blaise Ryan and I am one of the directors of the World Environmental Trust.”

People around the room had looked left and right, desperately seeking the speaker. Accustomed to polished presentations, all eyes had gone to the podium, but all they could see was a small man tapping pathetically into a silent microphone.

Suddenly, the governors and ministers had realized that the voice belonged to one of the bodies hanging in midair above them. All eyes had zoomed upward.

“We are here today not to interrupt your meeting, but to use your meeting as a megaphone to address the citizens of the world’s wealthier countries. Forgive us the intrusion, but we had no choice.

“Our fight is with an international institution financed principally by taxpayers from wealthy countries. By espousing policies that destroy the social fabric of many countries, this institution has failed. By aligning with corporations that profit from development by destroying the environment, this institution has failed. By fomenting a torrent of debt that countries cannot service, this institution has failed.

“We call on European, American, and Japanese voters to demand that their governments cease supporting the IMF and the World Bank.”

The next day’s
International Herald Tribune
report on the event had begun with the following sentence: “Today World Bank President Anthony Wolfberg must be asking himself, who in God’s name is Blaise Ryan?”

Blaise smiled in nostalgia. Her eyes were closed and her head rested against the taxi’s leather seat back. Of all her protests and marches, of all the press releases and television appearances, of all the polemics she had created throughout her life, that morning, hanging on the rope in Madrid with Anne-Sophie, was one of her fondest memories.

Right now, those reminiscences felt like a long time ago. Reality was not so warm. Blaise shuddered as she thought about what she would soon have to tell Anne-Sophie.

The taxi arrived in front of the Perlmutters’ home just after 1:00
P.M.
Her friend was waiting at the door. Blaise could tell that Anne-Sophie was anxious for news.

“Look, I started out by doing a favor for you, a favor I did not really believe in. And now, to my amazement, there is a connection with something I know a lot about. It’s a very weird coincidence.”

Anne-Sophie looked at her in astonishment. She had literally no idea what Blaise was talking about.

“Okay, okay. I know I’m not making sense. I’ll start at the beginning.”

Blaise took a breath. She was dressed in her trademark tight blue jeans and an open-necked azure linen shirt. The choker of small blue stones around her neck rose and fell with her respiration.

“As of nine this morning, I waited on your street in a taxi,” said Blaise, pointing to the spot a hundred or so feet down the tree-lined road. “Unless you were dead wrong and he was just headed to the shops on Schweizer Strasse, I figured that I would need to have ready transportation. I asked the bellhop to find me a woman driver on the hotel’s taxi line. She was Turkish. I handed her a hundred dollars and said that we were going to follow my husband because he was having an affair. She went on for five minutes about how all men should be stoned to death.

“Anyway, as you know, Daniel left home around nine forty-five and walked the two blocks to Schweizer Strasse and turned right. For a moment, it occurred to me that we were pathetically paranoid women. Here he was, ambling past the boutiques just as they were opening up. But, after a block, he looked around and raised his hand for a cab.

“Here’s where it becomes just factual. He drove the twenty minutes into the city. He got out on Hanoverweg 12. It’s a four-story building. There was no doubt about where he was going because the whole building is the corporate headquarters of Anfang Energie. There was a guard at the door, so I didn’t go in.”

“What else?” Anne-Sophie asked breathlessly.

“Nothing else. I didn’t wait for him because I figured that he would want to get back quickly from his ‘present-buying’ expedition.

“But I found out something that is pretty important,” Blaise added with staccato precision. She felt sorry for her friend; none of this could be easy. After all, she was reporting on the results of a detective enterprise that centered on Anne-Sophie’s husband.

“I went back to the hotel, said good-bye to my Turkish lady, and walked to the Hessicher Hof’s business center. I got on a computer
and Googled Anfang Energie. They have a decent, but restrained, Web site. Pieter Schmidt, whose number Daniel called yesterday, is the CEO of Anfang. The company was started by his grandfather and it remains a private company.

“They have a long history of oil-exploration activities; they specialize in the former Soviet Union. Big investments in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan. Those projects look to be years old, so they must have had pretty good contacts in Moscow or they would never have gotten into those places during Soviet times.

“But here is the clincher, Annie. Anfang’s site is very proud of the fact that they are in the midst of their first large bid in Latin America. They are tendering an offer for a large project in Peru, called Humboldt.”

She saw the recognition on her friend’s face.

“Yes, the same Humboldt project that dominated my professional life for so many years. The same Humboldt project that got me into trouble after my stupid mistake in Peru. I had stopped following it closely when we lost the fight over the first phase. Don’t you think it’s a weird coincidence that this company is working on Humboldt?”

Anne-Sophie’s eyes were a blank. Besides the odd connection with a project that had been near and dear to Blaise’s heart, Anne-Sophie could not see what was so interesting about the Peruvian link.

“Come on, think about it. Your husband is a natural-gas engineer with a visa to go to Bolivia. I worked on Humboldt long enough to know that Peru and Bolivia are competitors in gas production. Why has your husband gone to see Anfang Energie? If they’re the people who want to get Peru’s gas to market, the Bolivians would be their diametrically opposed competitors.”

Neither woman had any more answers. They were at the end of the line. Neither knew what to do or even what questions to ask.

But both were left with the overwhelming feeling that Anne-Sophie’s marital difficulties had caused them to inadvertently discover something very important.

LIMA
AUGUST 1, 8:30 P.M.
THE PLAZA DE ARMAS

Senator Luis Matta’s office was already streaked in darkness when Susana Castillo, the senator’s thirty-four-year-old press secretary, walked into it for the second time in a half hour. Her message was the same. This time it was delivered with unusual terseness.

“Senator, it’s eight thirty
P.M.
already, go home. You’ve had a week of this crazy pace—in at the crack of dawn and out in the dark of night. I know this is an important time, but it won’t help if you get sick.”

His suit jacket was off, the tie loose around his neck. But even after a twelve-hour day, the senator still cut a striking figure.

Luis Matta smiled a tired grin of appreciation. In addition to Susana, a few other loyal staff would be at their desks. He knew they would not leave until he left. This was loyalty at its very best. He was honored by it.

The senator got up. Slowly. Every day, a new ache seemed to spring up in his still-good-looking four-decade-old body. The pains
were like garden weeds. One day here, another day there. None was serious, all were irritating. Now it was this weird pounding around the balls of his feet.

He shrugged off all the throbbing and knotting, attributing it to stress. He did not need a medical specialist to figure this out.

“What is the latest news from California?” Over the last month and a half, Matta had kept the television in his office on throughout the day. He had been transfixed by the California meltdown. Understandably so. The natural gas from his country could one day go a long way toward avoiding a recurrence of that tragedy.

“Our ambassador in Washington flew out there the day before yesterday. I was copied on his report to the foreign ministry. He was in shock. It’s been six weeks. But signs of the calamity were everywhere. Burned-down houses from people who tried to cook with flammable liquids inside their homes. Cars still abandoned on the side of the freeway. Entire neighborhoods ransacked by looting. More dead than in the World Trade Center bombing.”

Susana paused. “It’s hard to imagine that this occurred in the world’s richest country.”

“Yes, I know,” Matta whispered. “It makes what we are doing all the more important. I had wished that what happened in California would be a uniting factor. Something that would make all Peruvians understand how necessary Humboldt is.”

Matta paused, a dejected smile on his lips. “That hope lasted about thirty seconds. Instead, it’s all happening again, all the accusations, the name-calling, the hatred.”

She was the only person on his staff to whom he opened up. She was his alter ego, sounding board, complaint department, personnel advisor, and coffee companion. All those assets came in a package that also exuded a dark-eyed passion and a deep sense of humor that gurgled out in flashes of laughter and smiles.

Matta knew how lucky he was and winced whenever the occasional panicked thought of Susana’s departure crept through his mind. He knew she might have to leave soon. Susana Castillo was
an only child; her father had died a decade ago. Now her mother was sick with cancer. It would be only a matter of months before Susana would depart to take full-time care of her parent.

Matta ordered his brain to refocus back into the room.

“It’s hard to believe this issue is so divisive. This is a big moment for Peru. Decision time is close. My meeting tomorrow with President Garzón kicks off the legally required thirty-day period. Next week the minister of justice submits the law to Congress. Our hearings start in one month. Seven days after that, we choose the operator. God, the next weeks will be a killer.” Senator Matta was pulling his hand through his hair.

Matta got up from behind his desk and ambled over to look out his third-floor window to the wide plaza below. In the window’s darkened reflection, his jet black hair, combed and fixed back with expensive sculpting foam, juxtaposed loudly with his broad white teeth.

The Senatorial Office Building was located just off Lima’s famous Plaza de Armas. A cocktail of sights and smells, the imposing three-block square was a World Heritage Site. Much of Lima’s history pulsated through the huge plaza. Inca temples had stood here. Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro had been assassinated on the square’s southern corner.

Yet today, the Plaza de Armas was a mixture of colonial grandeur and lowly poverty. Among the magnificent cathedral and the imposing government buildings, thousands of dark-skinned, indigenous salespeople milled about, hocking sticks of gum, shoes, pots, underwear—anything. At the square’s center, congregating around the fifteenth-century bronze statue of a trumpeting angel, women wearing the traditional ponchos of highland Indians to protect themselves against Lima’s August chill stood over huge vats of boiling water, cooking fresh corn on the cob.

The Plaza de Armas was a vast Wal-Mart for the poor, set on the stage of pompous architecture.

The Congress buildings were off to the left. Sixty-four million
dollars had been spent to renovate the massive structures. Public reaction to the investment in heritage preservation was, as almost everything else in Peru, highly polarized. On the one hand, the work had been beautifully done, restoring the colonial grandeur of the buildings, to the delight of architects, historians, tourists, and, of course, its elected officials. On the other hand, the rebuilding had produced endless column inches of populist criticism about erroneous spending priorities.

Stop whining about the press, thought Matta to himself. Journalists couldn’t help themselves. After all, they had had their fairness genes surgically removed at birth.

He walked over to the handcrafted, tropical-wood coffee table to collect some stray papers he would just have to finish at home. There were no photos in the room other than the photograph of Alicia and the girls at a playground. Unlike many of his colleagues, his office did not boast a collection of pictures of himself with other senators, presidents, actors, and sports figures. He hated the pavilions of narcissism so common in most politicians’ offices; they were little more than dark caverns filled with pictures of them with this or that important person. Luis Matta found the spectacle grotesque.

Susana looked at him in admiration. She was keenly aware that she was working for a politician skyrocketing to the top. Already editorials and commentaries in the newspapers were speculating as to whether Luis Matta would run for president in a year and a half. She also knew that next month’s hearings on the second phase of the Humboldt project were a key inflection point for Luis Matta’s political career.

“It’s exhausting to even think about another round of Humboldt hearings,” said Susana. “I’ve hardly recovered from the fight about phase one two years ago.” She regretted engaging him in conversation, but it was just one of those things that staff working for powerful politicians the world over could not resist. They knew the boss had to go home, had to rest, had to disengage. Yet an important
politician’s senior staff was psychologically unable to pass up an opportunity for one-on-one political engagement.

Luis Matta stopped on the way to the office door. Susana was right. The first round of hearings had been controversial enough. Humboldt was Peru’s biggest-ever infrastructure scheme. Named after the meandering German explorer of the nineteenth century, Humboldt’s first phase had been an engineering feat—a twisting and winding pipeline designed to pump and transport millions of cubic meters of natural gas from an extraction point in the pristine Amazon jungle, across thirteen-thousand-foot Andean peaks, through a desert, and into the capital.

And a few months ago, the gas had begun to flow. At Lima’s gates, Humboldt’s natural gas was now being converted to electricity that switched on the lights and turned over the machinery of the majority of Peru’s homes and factories. Humboldt had been one of the most polarizing issues Matta had ever worked on. But it was already proving to be a success.

“Twenty-four months have gone by and the feeling of irreparable polarization still sticks in my gut,” grimaced Luis Matta. “I have never seen two sides of any issue—environmentalists and social activists in one corner, business and government in another—ripping each other apart with such hatred and venom. Now it’s going to start all over again.”

Phase two was Humboldt’s second pipeline, this one leading northeast. Two companies—Constable Oil from Oklahoma and Anfang Energie from Frankfurt—had prequalified to bid on the construction of a line to bring Peru’s leftover gas to a spanking-new, modern port. There, next to the Pacific Ocean, the companies would liquefy and load the gas on ships headed straight north, up the continent’s coastline, to quench California’s unending thirst for energy.

It would mean billions in income for Peru.

Like the last time, Matta’s job would be to ensure that the new Humboldt pipeline had the best possible technology and used the
most modern practices. His duty would be to slow down the coalition of ministers, bankers, and investors who sought to build as fast as possible, while accelerating the environmentalists and social activists who wanted to slow the project under an avalanche of impact studies and analyses.

That meant moving forward with all deliberate speed, marrying the project’s implementation schedule with world-class experts to ensure that the work would be completed safely and with the greatest possible respect for the environment.

Essentially, an impossible task.

Susana wished that she hadn’t engaged the senator in a rehashing of the project and its poisoned atmospherics. She knew now where he was going. She recognized it from a mile away. Once he got started, he could not be stopped. The recriminations always ended up with a frenzied and furious assault on the American woman.

“And then there was Blaise Ryan,” said Matta, right on cue. “I felt the wrath of the proponents and the detractors; both were horrible to each other. But, of the four billion citizens on this planet, none is more unreasonable and unpleasant than Blaise Ryan.

“I saw Ryan last night on CNN with that excellent Los Angeles correspondent who reported during the California crisis,” Matta continued, referring to Anna Hardaway. “At least I’m not the only one in her crosshairs. Ryan was laying into the Laurence administration, saying that this president was following in the timid footsteps of past governments and refusing to take measures to move the economy to alternative fuels. As usual, her criticism was devastating.”

Matta paused and pursed his lips in a wry smile. “I felt sorry for Laurence. But at least Ryan was taking a break from attacking me. It won’t last long. I’ll soon have to face her again.”

His frustration was rhetorical. He had no choice but to oversee the divisive process again. There was no way to avoid it; the gas held too many promises for his country.

Susana took his elbow and moved him closer to the office’s door
in the hope of whisking him out. Wisps of her black hair were swishing and swinging against her neckline. Her smile revealed perfect teeth.

“Senator, how is it possible that somebody with such thin skin has been so successful in politics? You can’t allow yourself to be dragged into a psychological funk every time somebody calls you a name. You are doing your job—making sure that Peru takes advantage of its huge natural resources. Don’t pay attention to all the noise.”

Matta felt a rise of irritation. She wasn’t out there—in front of cameras and reporters, staring at the packed, cavernous hearing room. He locked in on her dark eyes.

“Susana, I know you mean well, but telling a politician not to pay attention to what others think is silly advice,” Matta said, immediately regretting the acerbic, icy tone. She didn’t deserve this. Back off, he told himself.

Astonishingly, the thirty-four-year-old Susana kept Matta’s cold stare at center keel of her pupils. She did not back down an inch.

“Senator, I was there. I was at the hearings. I saw how they treated you. And I know what that woman did. We all know that Blaise Ryan will stop at nothing to get what she wants. I know that she offended you deeply. I know you don’t deserve that type of animosity.”

Susana sucked in a mouthful of air. “But it’s high time you got over it.”

Senator Luis Matta was taken aback by her bluntness. Ever since her mother had become sick, Susana’s usually reserved recommendations to her boss had occasionally become laced with an acerbic, sour quality. Her criticism bothered him. Damnit, he did not want to get over his resentment toward Blaise Ryan. He enjoyed being angry and hurt about it. In a peculiar and perverse way, hating Blaise Ryan gave him even greater determination.

He decided not to engage. “Come on, let’s go home. We’ll have too much of the real thing tomorrow. Do me a favor, call Hugo downstairs and tell him to bring the car to the side door.”

As he walked out into the darkened hallway, Matta stopped short. He chastised himself for having forgotten to ask about Susana’s mother. Matta regretted how the crushing press of political life tended to drain away his ability to connect on a personal level.

“How is she?” Matta asked, turning around.

“The same, Luis. Thanks for remembering.” Susana didn’t have to ask who the senator was referring to. Her mother had been sick with lymphoma for over a year. The doctors had tried all the obvious chemotherapies, but nothing had worked.

“Her only hope is still the bone marrow transplant.”

“When can that be done?”

Susana shrugged and turned away, not wanting him to see the lump in her throat. Her welling emotions were equal parts sadness and anger.

“It can’t be done safely here; we just don’t have the technology in Peru. And I don’t have a spare million dollars. Believe it or not, that is what the bone marrow transplant and a three-month hospital stay would cost a foreigner without U.S. health insurance to do in Houston.

She looked straight toward him now, her eyes flashing anger. “It’s so unfair, Luis. I love working for you—it’s the most interesting job anybody could ask for. But do I need to remind you of the salary of a Peruvian senator’s communications director? If I had gone to work for a Spanish bank or an American oil company, I might have had the money to pay for my mother’s treatment. Or they might have helped me get my mother to treatment at their headquarters.”