Doing Dangerously Well (50 page)

Photographers gathered at the base of the rock, clicking their cameras as Kolo shook hands with the PM. Then the torture began. They ascended.

After ten minutes, Kolo could no longer hold back the sound of his puffing. Thankfully, the Canadian prime minister had climbed on ahead. Surreptitiously, Kolo sat down on a small rock to regain his breath.

One of the prime minister’s entourage attempted to take a photograph. A stern military sentry impounded the camera and almost arrested the culprit. The incident allowed Kolo a few extra minutes of rest.

Just as he recommenced climbing, a wheezing and aggrieved minister of finance caught up with him.

“Hey!” the Canadian prime minister shouted from his position higher up the rock. “Glad you could join us.”

The minister shot him a look of profound disdain.

“News is bad today, Excellency,” he said.

“What this time?”

“Em … Something to do with purchase of shares, insider trading, tapping of funds,” the minister rolled his eyes heavenward in disbelief that these issues should cause any untoward coverage, “and other details of the contract with TransAqua.”

“Details? Of the contract?” Kolo’s heartbeat, already pounding and erratic, doubled in speed. He searched his minister’s face to see if he could spot any mention of the renaming of the Niger River, but the minister’s emotions were still roiling with condemnation of the media.

“Follow them up the rock,” Kolo commanded. “I’ll go back to the office and join all of you later. Apparently, they’d like a game of golf.” He slipped down the precipitous granite back to the level corridors of the governmental complex.

Once he had slammed the door to his office, Kolo loped to
his desk. A letter lay there, and he recognized its logo. In exquisite language, the World Bank informed him of their intent to pull out of the Kainji deal. Kolo had to act quickly before the World Bank’s intentions made their way to TransAqua.

He turned on the television news with trembling fingers. Corruption, water pricing, trading irregularities: he could explain all these concerns away. In countries like Nigeria, these were everyday offences that plagued every regime, whether military or democratic. Only one item could bury him—the most damaging discovery of all: the renaming of the Niger River. He would get Glass to deal with it. He reread the article. She would definitely need his help—another game of tit for tat.

As Mary scrolled through the website, she mentally ticked off the problems. The World Bank could deal with its issues regarding privatization and stipulations on the use of American contractors. Price, ownership of water and cost of doing business in Nigeria—the newspapers’ word for which was “corruption”—these terms and conditions differed little from other water contracts, save for their excess and audacity. PR would handle that.

The most damaging allegations, from which it was unlikely TransAqua could recover concerned Kolo’s purchase of shares—insider trading. For this, TransAqua staff could technically go to prison, lose their jobs or even relinquish their bonuses.

She braced for another phone call. “President Kolo?”

“Yes?” he whispered. The phone crackled.

“Insider trading? You purchased shares prior to the signing of the contract?”

“It is almost impossible, Ms. Glass, beyond the bounds of any game theory matrix,” his voice grew louder, “that anyone could have traced such shares back to my enterprises! It’s insulting!”

“A forensic—”

“Even the greatest forensic accountant, assisted by Hercules Poirot himself, would have to spend years … This is Nigeria, Ms. Glass. Our systems are not crude!”

Mary grew defensive. “I can assure you, with all due respect, Mr. President, that American companies also have intricate systems to conceal—”

“Not in the elaborate, complex manner that … Let me explain, Ms. Glass. In Nigeria, we have perfected this to an art form. It bewitches us. It gives us aesthetic pleasure. To us, this is the ultimate in hedonistic gratification. Talk to a mathematician. He will explain to you the crystalline beauty of a theoretical proposition of pure abstraction.”

“We’re in the realm of applied maths now, I think,” Mary said flatly. “The theoretical construct has been verified.”

“Who could have done this?” Kolo sounded awed. “He’d be worth hiring.”

“We don’t have time to find out. We need a way out of this problem. It could sink us.”

“I have my own little quandary, Ms. Glass, which could get me killed. If you state publicly that you needed to change the name of—”

“Done. I’ll give the job to Beano Bates. The ambassador will be forced to back him on it.”

“Bates?”

“Yeah, he’s the US ambassador’s son. Might have to train him to read first. He hasn’t got beyond comic books.”

“Hereditary affliction, then.”

Speaking of such afflictions, Mary wondered how the papers had got hold of her photograph, which she remembered Barbara taking during some adult education course in photography. She shook herself free of these musings. “And the other problem, sir?”

“None of the shares are in my name. The purchase must have been an initiative by some overzealous executive here. I’ll publicly fire him, with appropriate compensation, of course. By a strange quirk of fate, all my VPs are from small villages, so payoffs aren’t astronomical.”

“You’ll make a statement?”

“Both written and verbal, with the VP responsible for such an atrocity by my side.”

“Thank you, President Kolo.”

Mary cut off the call before he had the chance to sign off and trotted to Beano’s office. She swung his door open, catching him on the phone. He immediately slammed it down. His blush did not start from his neck and rise upwards, nor fan out from his cheeks, but most bizarrely dropped downwards from his forehead, like blinds. It deepened into a pleasing scarlet as she delegated Kolo’s task to him.

Only moments after Mary got back to her desk, Janet entered—new hairstyle, blonder, skirt tighter. “Cheeseman wants to see you.”

The eyes of the office were on Mary as she descended from her exhibit and made her way to Cheeseman’s office. Although she looked directly at her boss as he threw the contents of his desk at her, her concentration flew to the periphery, to the faces outside the glass walls, witnessing the mime of her disgrace. Later, she could not even recall what he had screamed at her. Only when she walked out of his office did her full senses return to her. Her colleagues’ eyes followed her back to her glass case, her footsteps echoing in the hushed silence, her head high, jagged face set in rigid despair.

Cheeseman expected her to sort out the insider trading fiasco before the end of the week. Worse still, he posted security outside her door. In effect, he had fired her, references contingent on
her completing a public relations reversal. She wanted to collapse into tears, to crawl under her desk in a ball. Instead, she turned her unproductive shame into a more productive emotion-an explosive rage that wished to vent its power.

“Janet! In. Now.”

Janet scurried in, concern in her eyes but pleasure in her body language. “Hey, Mary!”

“Hey, Janet!” Mary mocked her assistant’s merry tones. “How are you doing?” She kicked the door shut with her foot.

“Uh …” Janet appeared to ponder, then made the fatal mistake. She aimed for a therapy-soft voice. “I dunno. How’s it going for you, Mary?”

“Fine.” Mary smiled a barracuda smile. “You’re fired. I want you out by the end of the day.”

“What? Why?”

Mary brought out a file, her tight knot of biceps bulging. “Here’s a dossier I have completed, dating back one year. It details the confidential information you have passed on to third parties.” Always precise, Mary had listed all of Janet’s known exchanges with Sinclair.

“Oh God! You knew?”

“Of course I knew, you idiot!” Mary threw the file at Janet, who was able to dodge it as a result of her work on core strength.

“Please, Mary,” Janet begged. “I didn’t know she was a spy. She just kept buying me drinks. I didn’t know it would be published.”

As if a bolt of electricity had been applied to her dying body, Mary surged back to life. Janet had passed on company information to someone outside the company? This small fact would save her hide. This involved more than just the slug Sinclair.

“You signed a confidentiality agreement before you were hired.” Mary licked the skin around her thin lips. “Which I’m
sure you remember. I would suggest that you provide us with full disclosure before you leave. Or you’ll be prosecuted.”

Janet began to cry.

“And we’ll need full details of your affair with Sinclair—both work-related and personal.”

“Personal? But—”

“Everything.”

News of Janet’s betrayal of information to the media spread immediately, while details concerning Sinclair’s disastrous sex life circulated even more rapidly. Relieved, Mary found that the debacle granted her the kiss of life within TransAqua, now that others knew how the vultures had acquired such dangerous facts—a terrifying occurrence, as such transactions were not exactly atypical of corporate life. The condemnation about to attach to her instead transferred to Janet. A pariah in the industry, Janet left without references, severance or a goodbye party, escorted off the premises by armed security guards.

Mary kept a wary eye on Kolo, trusting little in their pact, but he acquitted himself magnificently. The virtuosity of his performance captivated a contrite Western press corps.

“We are a Third World, developing, backward nation, with little knowledge of the minute intricacies hidden within the financial small print inflicted on us by the great institutions of the Western world.” Kolo grabbed a battered and makeshift lectern to contain his emotion. “This poor man,” pointing to the unfortunate VP, “does not even have an MBA! He is barely literate. Yet he wanted to advance his career in the water business. Is that such a crime?”

In return, Beano Bates’s dimples explained that the renaming of the Niger River was a mere “contractual technicality” (secured his hair behind his ears at this point) to distinguish it from the
Niger River in Niger for internal purposes only. This in no way betokened (who taught him that word?) an actual change to the name of the great Niger River. TransAqua certainly had too great a respect for the great cultural wealth of the great nation of Nigeria to entertain such an idea! Four “great”s in two sentences, Mary noted-the most you could expect from Beano’s vocabulary.

Wow!
magazine requested a lifestyle interview with Bates, while Kolo appeared in voluminous agbadas in numerous television and Internet interviews. After a further week of press sniffing, the trail grew cold, public interest waned. Mary’s intestines relaxed and her job was reinstated. All augured well for April.

In a glass office within TransAqua’s desert palace, one of the regular readers of the
International Post
issued a smile that stretched into a slash. The front page of its business section bore a rather becoming photograph of the Associate Director of Acquisitions for the Sub-Sahara at TransAqua. Mary Glass flushed with pride, hoping that her parents, Barbara and Sinclair had already come across the article. If a picture tells a thousand words, she could not wait to read the words themselves. Flattery, adulation, tales of masterful machinations-even the font promised as much. Goosebumps shot up her arm, raised hairs attached to high, conical peaks. What a wonderful surprise! The publicity department had not mentioned that they were running a feature on her.

Finally, she could put all the nonsense about insider trading, corruption and so forth behind her. She readied herself for promotion and gulped down some water.

The headline was even more flattering: “The Reign of Bloody Mary.” She settled back to find out why she had been selected for such a prominent and comprehensive article.

Mary froze. There, in black and white, every minute detail concerning the elimination of Kolo’s adversaries. The article oozed contempt: assassination never played well in the Western press. Perhaps more damaging, however, she had been characterized as brainless, an easy foil for an African’s scheming.

Using her peripheral vision, she scanned the office through thin slits. A slow reader, Beano had not finished skimming through the article, but he had lowered the paper sufficiently to reveal the shock that had released the muscles around his jaw, leaving his mouth hanging open. Sinclair unclipped his headset and gazed dreamily at Cheeseman’s south-facing office, no doubt considering how to adjust its lighting to ensure a less vivid environment for his reflection should Mary’s mess pull the boss down with her.

The phone rang. Mary jumped. Her nerves, often frayed, were now in tatters. A number of red lights blinked. She wanted to avoid the calls, but did not know whether any were important—one of them might be Kolo, or Cheeseman. On the other hand, perhaps the calls were just from the press or the police.

Mary phoned reception and instructed them to forward calls from the media straight to Publicity. A moment later she redialled. “I forgot,” she said. “Forward all calls from the police to Publicity as well.”

The minute she put down the receiver, the phone rang again.

She exploded. Reception had not understood these basic instructions. Morons.

“Mary Glass,” she screamed. “What the fuck is it?”

“How
dare
you speak to your parents like that!” her mother shouted. “Well, I never.” She turned away from the phone. “It’s Mary! I’ve finally got through! Pick up the other phone!” She
turned back to Mary. “Well, I’ve got to say, young lady, that you’ve got …” The other phone clicked. “… a real cheek.”

“What is it?” Father asked.

“She answered the phone ‘Mary Glass,’” her mother spoke in a shocked hush, “with the ‘F’ word in the same sentence!”

“How dare you use our name!” Father yelled. “It’s time you got married. Use someone else’s name for once.”

“As if it isn’t bad enough to have a terrorist in our midst, now we have a killer.” Mother started blubbering. Her sobs caught, and she struggled for breath.