The Emissary Read Online Free PDF Page A

Emissary.

3
USOIL
    By January 2012, USOIL stock had tumbled for the tenth week in a row, despite the chokehold the oil companies held over the economy, and the power they wielded over the global political scene. The constant downward slide was inexplicable. All the other oil giants were showing billion-dollar quarterly profits, but Houston’s own, USOIL, was apparently taking more gas than it was pumping, while draining the corporate tank through outrageous overspending and mismanagement. After year-end closing figures confirmed the tenth quarter of losses in a row, the CEO, Mat Anderson, had all but run out of time to pull a rabbit out of his corporate cowboy hat.
    At sixty-four, he still carried himself like a Marine. He was in remarkable shape and was every bit as commanding now as he had been back in what he always referred to as “the glory days” of service. His suits had to be tailor-made to fit his muscular torso and trim waist, while his executives, a few of whom were twenty years his junior, were already folding over the belt line, from what Mat called the “soft” life. He was a man’s man: an expert on the golf course, a force to be dealt with in business, and a Texan through and through—and proud of it. He could drink any man under the table, ride faster and farther than anyone he knew, and outrun people half his age out on the track. Above all, he was an unrelenting businessman—always working deals with big money players.And when he wanted to be, he was quite the lady’s man as well: a regular J. R. Ewing.
    You just didn’t want to cross him: man or woman, friend or foe.
    Gray now, he still wore his hair shaved to less than a half inch; he ran five miles every morning; he worked out in the gym for hours each day—but suffered, despite all his physical prowess, from high blood pressure and an almost chronic state of acid reflux.
    This day, the acid had climbed all the way up into his throat. Along with the official financials from headquarters had come orders for him to report to the top brass in New York the next morning: no prep time; no guidelines. Just show up. He knew that meant one of two things: either USOIL, one small, but important cog on a huge multinational wheel, was about to be sold … or the “powers that be” were bringing him in to negotiate what it would take to get him out.
    In the ten years he had served as chief executive officer for the company, he consolidated a formidable network of power players like himself—people who had their own reasons to want him to hold his position at the top of the corporation. “Interested” people. At that level, the strings of corruption become so entangled and the people who dangle them so entwined in each other’s affairs that unraveling them—enough to extract one person from the web—becomes downright messy, if not impossible.
    He knew who he had behind him, and he also knew all kinds of secrets and dirty deals that had to “stay in Vegas,” as he loved to say. If they wanted him to go quietly into the night, they were going to have to make the parting nice and sweet … way too sweet to refuse.
    There were still three years left to his mandate, which he was sure were turnaround years for the company—and he knew what he had to do. And then, he had his people in high places, pulling on those strings. He needed just a little more time to get the job done, so that he could step out of the corporate world and into retirementa hero—or at the very least, a winner. He wasn’t about to go out in a trough, after a career of surfing the high waves.
    That just was not his style.
    He left for New York with these thoughts racing through his head, swinging like a pendulum … left to right and back again. He couldn’t seem to stop his mind from jumping back and forth, between the trepidation of being thrown into a pit of Wall Street vipers, and a certain self-assured complacency, knowing that he still had three years to reverse the