Pipeline (20 page)

Anne-Sophie started to protest. “Blaise, I don’t care about the Russian government—”

“Damnit, Annie.” Blaise’s voice thundered through the dining room. “Wake up. You are in real danger, Anne-Sophie. This isn’t about your marriage anymore. Daniel’s superiors are tough people. If you reveal what you know, they will squash you like an insect. If you say something, if you let on to any knowledge at all, you are putting your life at risk.”

Blaise paused for a split second.

“And you’re endangering your children.”

Right then and there, Blaise could see that Anne-Sophie finally understood. She was caught. Trapped between a man she no longer respected and a knowledge that she could not reveal.

“What do you want me to do, Blaise?” pleaded Anne-Sophie. “What am I supposed to do?”

Blaise knew that there was one road open that would not endan
ger Anne-Sophie. Only one option. It made Blaise shudder in disgust to even consider it, but it was clear that there was no other choice.

“I have one idea,” whispered Blaise. “But I need a few days to make it happen. Meanwhile, can you go back to Kursk and pretend nothing has happened? You will have to act, lie and play a part. You will have to tell Daniel that you’ve thought about his offer and agree to move to Moscow. You have to go back and just be the same wife. Annie, this has got to be the biggest performance of your life.

“Can you do it? Answer me.”

Anne-Sophie’s head slowly fashioned an up-and-down movement. “What do you have in mind, Blaise? Can you really help?”

Blaise formulated her proposal over the next half hour. It took considerable explanation to make Anne-Sophie understand the connections. The timing. The more she described it, the more convinced she became that it could really work.

It would create just the right distance from Anne-Sophie to guarantee that nobody in Russia would ever suspect her involvement.

LIMA
SEPTEMBER 1, 10:00 A.M.
THE SENATE COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND
NATURAL RESOURCES

Senator Luis Matta let his weight fall back into the deep brown leather chair. He was a very tired man. Still, as he relaxed into the high back, Matta allowed himself a moment of satisfaction. It was the first day of September and Humboldt’s hearings were beginning right on time.

Matta swiveled around to take in the panoramic perspective of the packed hearing room. All thirteen committee members were present—no surprise; none of Senator Matta’s media-hungry political colleagues would dare skip this circus. Crammed in the back third of the hall, Susana Castillo was hushing eleven television camera operators and dozens of reporters and photographers into silence.

Luis Matta took in the view. It was hard to remember a similar scene in his fifteen years in politics. The hearing room was a large, ceremonial area with an imposing curved ceiling. Usually, the
committee’s deliberations were far less interesting—the room was accustomed to feeling empty, with only a couple of lobbyists and interested spectators thinly spread around the twelve rows of chairs.

Not today.

For this event, the chairman’s staff had ordered extra chairs that now spilled into crowded aisles. At least two hundred people were crammed into the chamber. Against the glare of hot camera lights, Matta strained to focus his eyes on the faces in the audience. Once his vision penetrated the halogen onslaught’s white heat, he noticed the remarkable tendency of constituency groups to always sit together. Indeed, all parties—even those who were ferocious competitors—sat in interest-group clusters.

Matta’s eyes scanned the seats. Senior government officials and their staffs—there must have been two dozen representatives of the administration, he thought to himself, raising his hand in a friendly wave to the minister of the economy and the minister of energy and mines—were in the first row. Impeccably dressed bankers, who would soon be scrambling over each other to broker the enormous project’s loans, clustered together elegantly on Matta’s left. Representatives of international organizations—the chairman recognized the resident heads of the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme—were squirreled away in the back, desperate not to be noticed. Oil and gas executives from the private sector—he immediately recognized Ludwig Schutz and Arnie Constable from the United States—were cramped together six rows back, in the center.

Matta moved quickly over these groups. He was missing one and squinted hard to search. His eyes finally moved to the front of the room and caught the sullen stares of the environmental organizations. They sat in the front rows to ensure that none of the politicians would miss their glowering disapproval.

Matta’s heart skipped a beat as he made out Blaise Ryan’s sparkling dark red hair among the environmentalists. She was there, second row, fourth seat from the left aisle, dressed in dark brown
pants, a perfectly starched, flawlessly white cotton tunic with a Nehru collar and retro-Chinese Cultural Revolution sleeves with oversize cuffs. Assisted by two well-disguised pleats, the tunic bloomed outward as it passed the waistline, elegantly accenting the curves of her hips. It was hard to see through the reflection of lights pointed toward the senators on the dais, but he could literally feel the gray eyes boring their way into him.

Matta was exhausted. The work schedule of the previous weeks had been harrowing. His every step had been covered by a bevy of reporters assigned to stick to him throughout the project’s decision-making process. When he had walked into the committee room a few moments earlier, he had been uncertain of lasting through the day-long hearings.

Seeing Blaise Ryan now provided him with a precise response to his exhaustion. Very few persons on the planet aroused in Matta’s balanced and rational soul such a profound feeling of animosity. She was at the top of the list. Just a few weeks ago, in his office, Susana had warned him to thicken his skin. Today, he was glad this horrendous woman was here and that his skin was thin. Her presence jolted him back to attention.

Matta had always been uncomfortable with the deep controversies sparked by the gas project. It was an issue that had no middle ground. Environmental groups detested the idea of a gas-extraction facility and a pipeline thrust into the middle of the Amazon jungle. All precautions and risk-mitigation measures the government of Peru would force upon Humboldt’s managers would make no difference. The environmentalists’ opposition was philosophical, not practical.

Luis Matta was a politician in the best sense. He understood that heated disagreements were part and parcel of hot issues. He enjoyed the intellectual challenge of serious debate. But what he would not—could not—ever forgive was what had happened in this very room nearly eighteen months earlier during the hearings to authorize Humboldt’s first phase.

During those first hearings, he had personally done everything possible to ensure that the project would meet or exceed every known international standard to mitigate negative environmental consequences. Matta’s committee had legislated compensation for villagers along the pipeline’s path. A special group of agronomists had been impaneled to provide advice on reseeding the delicate Andean soils to alleviate construction-related erosion. Matta had personally negotiated the creation of a social fund to help the Andean peasants in the communities along the pipeline route.

Last and perhaps most important, Matta had aroused howls of disapproval from the project’s bidders when he had ruled that the Amazon would have to be treated like an offshore-drilling platform. To avoid the massive movement of job seekers and squatters into the precious rain forest, Matta had inserted language into the law that prohibited the construction of any roads to the extraction facility.

If the companies wanted Peru’s gas, they would have to helicopter all their materials, equipment, and manpower to the site.

Matta recalled the huge sense of pride he had felt when he had entered into the hearing room a year and a half ago. Newspapers in Peru had heralded the tough negotiating skills of the young chairman. He had done the impossible. His committee had been on the cusp of approving a project that would assure Peru decades of energy independence, yet it would do so with world-class environmental and social guarantees for its citizens. Three days earlier, an editorial in the
Miami Herald
had called Peru’s imminent approval of the Humboldt project “a case study in how to do things right.”

Matta had taken his time walking to the dais on that day. Basking in accolades as he strolled down his committee room’s right-hand aisle, the chairman had shaken hands with journalists, exchanged knowing words with economists from the World Bank, and embraced ambassadors who had just cabled their home governments about the Peruvian Congress’s impressive work.

Yet Luis Matta’s day in the sun had never materialized.

As the chairman moved slowly down the crowded aisles, a very
attractive, foreign-looking woman had been awaiting her turn to greet the successful politician. Her red hair had been pulled sharply backward into a ponytail that wound its way back over her left shoulder. She had worn tight blue jeans and high heels, a starched white shirt, and a necklace of blue lapis lazuli stones that played off the translucent gray of her eyes. She had smiled placidly as he came toward her.

It had been impossible not to notice her.

“Hello,” he had said in English; clearly she wasn’t local. “My name is Luis Matta.” He should have known instantaneously that something was amiss because she never took his outstretched hand.

“Mr. Matta, I’m Blaise Ryan with the World Environmental Trust. I’m very happy that today you’ll get the results you so richly deserve for all your efforts on this project.”

Matta had begun to mouth a grateful acknowledgment for her kind compliment when he saw her right hand—the one that had never taken his own hand in greeting—rise up. In her palm was a large plastic Tupperware container filled with an oozing brown substance.

He had no time to stop it.

The shit from her container had landed right on his face, the warm, wet cow feces dripping down onto his suit from his eyelashes and nose. Three other environmental activists had, without his knowledge, edged through the crowd and were now standing close by. They too emptied their own brown containers onto his head and shoulders.

The commotion had been instantaneous. People had run to help him but had skidded to a dead halt a few feet away, unsure of how or where to touch the fecally impregnated committee chairman. The sound of snapping cameras had filled the room. Television crews had disconnected cameras from their tripods and scrambled over rows of seats to get a clear angle, sending chairs tumbling onto the floor. Producers were screaming into cellular phones, demanding immediate live airtime from their newsrooms. Police had poured
into the elegant hall, shoving spectators aside, desperate to arrest the perpetrators and protect the senator.

At the center of the mayhem, Matta had just stood there, stunned, entirely covered in putrid manure. The picture of the senator, utterly alone, with nobody daring to touch him, had been the lead on the evening news, the focus of the newspapers’ front pages, and the cover of every weekly magazine.

As horrible as it had been, Matta’s committee had reconvened a few weeks later in a closed session to push through its approval of the Humboldt project. The press had quickly moved on to the next story. Normalcy had returned. Blaise Ryan’s attack had been a circus act, entirely devoid of permanence.

But still, he remembered that moment as the darkest of his political life. And today, there she was again, right in front of him. Taunting him with her presence. The gray eyes looking right at him.

He had known she would be there today. A few days prior to the hearings, a stern-looking captain from the Peruvian Judicial Police, the arm of the justice ministry charged with the protection of all federal elected officials, had appeared in Matta’s office. The captain had strongly urged him to bar Blaise Ryan from the coming proceedings.

But Susana, ever the contrarian, had argued to ignore the police captain’s advice. “If you prohibit her entry, rest assured that this will be the press story. Coverage will be all about her. On the other hand, if you just ignore her, the press will file stories about your orderly and efficient hearings on Humboldt’s second phase, all with her sitting right there!”

He tried to calm his feelings of ire and hatred. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, he said to himself. I am up here to move the new Humboldt project. She is down there, in the audience, with nothing to do but watch.

Luis Matta pulled twice on the cord attached to the small bell next to his chair, signaling the committee to session. As the commit
tee room slowly hushed, he began to read his short opening statement. In Peru, by law and tradition, the chairman had to provide a short, concise explanation of the committee’s business.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are in session over the next few days to consider the expansion of the Humboldt gas project begun a year and a half ago. As you know, the government of Peru has agreed to allow gas exploration in certain restricted areas of its departments in the Amazon lowlands. Based on geological surveys, the ministry of mines five years ago divided these areas into numbered lots, each extending approximately three hundred thousand square kilometers in size, with the intent of leasing these numbered lots to private companies interested in partnering with Peru to exploit our large gas reserves.

“This committee will now hold hearings to consider approval of a liquefied natural gas pipeline which will transport gas not consumed in Peru to a coastal terminal for the purpose of exporting the gas. The gas will travel one thousand three hundred and fifty-two kilometers from the extraction sites in lots eighty-six, eighty-two, and fifty-three. The committee will also consider at this time a further lease of lot seventy-nine.

“This committee will now come to order.” Matta again rang the bell twice.

That was it. Short and sweet. Unlike lots of other parliaments around the world, the Peruvian Congress adhered to strict legal formats. Big political speeches and hot rhetoric were reserved for plenary sessions on the floor of the Senate. Committees were expected to conduct business in an orderly fashion.

The rest of the day went smoothly. The morning was reserved for the two government ministers. Both expounded in huge detail on the project’s benefits. The minister of the economy was the country’s most powerful political personality after the president and was one of Matta’s potential election rivals in a future presidential bid. Never one to lose an opportunity to campaign, the minister spent
over an hour enumerating the social investments that would suddenly become affordable thanks to the large pool of new cash generated by the dollars from gas exports.

The testimony of the minister of mines went over two hours. He tediously reviewed the available geological data in each of the leased lots in order to clearly prove that Peru had the gas reserves necessary to support a project of such magnitude. Christ, thought Matta irritably, he could have shortened his presentation to less than a half hour. We all know the country is full of gas.

In the afternoon, the committee heard from private consulting experts on the engineering of the pipeline itself. The details were many and excruciatingly boring. The consultants went into the minutiae of pipe thickness, welding requirements, slope angles. It was withering stuff.

There were no questions from any of the committee members when the consultants finished their testimony. Thank God. At 4:30
P.M.
Luis Matta closed the session.

Luis Matta took a moment to pause and look straight at Blaise Ryan. He wanted to look into her eyes to see the inevitable flicker of regret upon realizing that Humboldt’s forward motion was unstoppable. A quick twinge of disappointment ran through his mind when he saw she was no longer in her seat.