Viking Bay (10 page)

14
|
Kay wore a badge that allowed her to roam around the United Nations building without an escort. Ara Khan had arrived in New York the night before and Kay had been following her all day. She now watched as Ara left the UN building with three other Muslim women.

Ara had come to the United Nations to attend a symposium on women's issues: equal opportunity, infant mortality rates, birth control, AIDS, education for girls—all the usual things. Many of the attendees were from Muslim countries, and there were women from Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and a host of African nations. Ara was one of two women representing Afghanistan. Kay didn't know if the purpose of the symposium was to simply sit around and bitch about the way things were, or if the intent was to get money from the richer nations to aid their efforts. She suspected the latter.

What Kay needed was a chance to get close to Ara and talk to her, but so far the opportunity hadn't presented itself. Ara had been in meetings and lectures all day, and when she left for lunch, she was accompanied by other people. It was now four p.m. and Kay watched in dismay as she and the other three women jumped into a cab. Kay waved down another cab and followed the group to the Hyatt near Grand Central, where many of the delegates were staying. She watched as Ara walked through the lobby with her friends, glancing once over at the packed lobby bar, and entered an elevator. When Ara had looked over at the bar, Kay got the impression that she wanted to join the noisy crowd in there.

When they'd been prepping her to talk to Ara, Mercer had emphasized that ideally Kay should find a way to approach Ara in a social setting, and somehow get her alone and establish some rapport with her. They didn't want her to go straight at Ara and bluntly lay out the Callahan Group's proposal.

“Why not?” Kay had asked.

“Because if you just walk up to her and say you want to meet with her, she'll ask why. And then you'd have to say you want to talk to her about the lithium reserves in Ghazni Province, and she'll most likely refuse. She won't talk to a stranger about something like that, and she'll suspect that you're trying to use her in some way. So you have to find a way to . . . I don't know, ease
into it, to get her to like you first.”

Kay found the idea of conning Ara into liking her distasteful. It wasn't as if she hadn't conned criminals before—she'd done that fairly often when she worked for the DEA—but Ara Khan wasn't a criminal. Sensing what she was thinking, Mercer had said, “Look. If you have some sort of moral objection to this assignment, you should resign. You're no longer in the black-and-white world of law enforcement, and if you can't handle the . . . the
ambiguities
of this kind of work, we'll find someone else.”

Maybe Kay should have walked out the door right then, but she didn't. And by the way, she'd almost said, law enforcement wasn't all that black and white.

“I thought about staging a mugging,” Mercer had said. “You know, a junkie tries to steal her purse and you save her. But that's just too Hollywood, and Ara would probably see right through it. She's not a dummy. But we need to devise some sort of scenario where you can get next to her.”

In the end, Callahan told Mercer to quit trying to orchestrate the initial meeting and let Kay play it by ear. Mercer didn't like this at all; she was a control freak and she wanted a situation she could control, but Callahan said, “Look, it's a sales job, pure and simple. You walk into a
showroom and the salesman approaches you, and if you don't like him, he couldn't sell you a Cadillac if he was selling them for a buck. But if you
like
the salesman, and even if you don't want a Cadillac, you'll listen to his pitch, and who knows, you might end up buying one. So Hamilton just needs to look for an opportunity to approach Ara, make Ara like her, then pitch her. And don't forget the amount of money we're offering; that'll get Ara's attention even if she doesn't like Hamilton or the pitch.”

—

KAY TOOK A SEAT
in the lobby of the Hyatt, wondering if Ara would venture out again that night. It was only five p.m. She was afraid, however, that if Ara did go out, it would be with her Muslim friends. Fortunately, she turned out to be wrong.

Twenty minutes later, Ara stepped out of the elevator. The Ara who had gone up in the elevator twenty minutes earlier had been wearing a flowing robe with a colorful scarf over her head. She'd looked like a Muslim woman. The Ara who exited the elevator was wearing a short, black leather jacket, tight-fitting blue jeans, and red high heels. Her long black hair flowed down to her shoulders. She looked like any other chic New Yorker who came from money and had excellent taste, except she was better-looking than most New Yorkers. There was something exotic about her.

Kay followed her out of the hotel, relieved that Ara didn't catch a cab. It was rush hour and it was going to be hard to get a cab to tail her. But it appeared as if all Ara wanted to do was stretch her legs and walk around the city where she'd gone to college, and it was a lovely October evening, more like summer than fall.

Kay watched as she went into one shoe store and spent ten minutes looking at the shoes—the expensive ones—but she didn't try anything on. She left the shoe store and walked around Times Square for about ten minutes, ordered a hot dog from a street vendor, and ate it as she
walked, being careful not to spill relish onto her jacket. Kay got the impression she enjoyed the hot dog more than a multicourse dinner at some five-star establishment.

After she finished eating, she surprised Kay when she took the stairs down to a subway station. She was familiar with the MetroCard ticket system and seemed comfortable riding the crowded train. She exited the train in lower Manhattan, and when she was back out on the street she moved with a purpose, not dawdling along, window-shopping, as she'd done earlier. She finally entered a place called the Ulysses Folk House on Pearl Street.

Ara walked past the bar and back toward the restrooms, and Kay guessed she was going there to repair her lipstick after eating the hot dog. As she waited for Ara, Kay looked around. The Ulysses Folk House was near the Financial District and appeared to be filled with Wall Street types: young men and women, mostly men, with expensive haircuts and expensive suits, drinking martinis and bragging—and probably lying—about how well they'd done that day gambling with other people's money.

Ara came back from the restroom and took a seat at the bar. Kay waited until Ara had a drink in front of her, then took a bar stool one seat away from her. She intentionally didn't take the seat next to her.

The bartender came over and asked what Kay wanted, and she said, “Gee, I don't know.” Turning to Ara, she said, “What's that you're having?” Ara's drink was a pale blue color served in a martini glass.

Ara said, “It's called a cool blue martini. It's made with blue curaçao and vodka or gin. I prefer vodka.”

To the bartender Kay said, “One of those, just like hers with vodka.” To Ara she said, “Thanks. Never hurts to try something new. By the way, I love your shoes.” And she did.

“Thank you,” Ara said. “They're Dolce & Gabbanas.”

Kay knew that. She also knew she couldn't afford the seven
hundred bucks they cost. “Well, I love them,” she said. “Why did you decide to stop in here tonight?”

“I love to people-watch,” Ara said. “I used to come here when I was in college. Did you ever read Tom Wolfe's
The Bonfire of the Vanities
?”

“No, I'm not much of a reader. But I saw the movie with Tom Hanks.”

“Then you know what I mean. These are the people Wolfe was writing about, the ones who think they're the masters of the universe.”

“Well, personally, I'd prefer a Mr. Universe type,” Kay said. “You know, a guy with six-pack abs instead of a portfolio.”

Ara laughed.

“And speaking of masters of the universe, I'll buy the next drink if that guy with the slicked-back hair and the suspenders who thinks he's Gordon Gekko . . .”

She'd seen that movie, too.

“. . . doesn't walk over here in the next five minutes and hit on you. He's been looking at you ever since you sat down. No! Don't turn around. Use the mirror.”

Ara looked at the Gekko wannabe in the mirror.

“He's kind of cute,” she said.

“Yeah, he is, but his buddy's not so cute, and I'll bet they both walk over here and I get stuck with the buddy.”

“Yes, the buddy, he's not so cute. But maybe he has a sense of humor.” Then she laughed again, and Kay really liked her laugh. In fact, she couldn't help it, but she genuinely liked Ara Khan. She also felt sorry for her, living an almost cloistered existence in Afghanistan.

Sure enough, two minutes later, Gordon and his pal ambled over to the bar. Kay couldn't help but wonder what Ara might have done if Gordon had had any class. Maybe she would have taken the guy back to her hotel for a roll in the hay in a place far from the prying eyes of her father and his people. Fortunately, Gordon was very drunk, very crude, and very full of himself. He wasn't an Eli Dolan. Ara was polite to him
but finally told him to take a hike, saying that she just wanted to sit with her friend and chat for a bit.

Now Kay was her friend.

“I guess this means I owe you a drink?” she said to Kay.

“Nah, we didn't spit on our hands and shake on the bet.”

They sat there and chatted some more, Kay steering the conversation toward Ara's college days in New York. Partially she did this to subtly remind Ara of her old roommate, Carolyn Harris. But her instincts were telling her it was time to get to the point. If she kept up the pretense any longer of just having bumped into Ara in a bar, Ara wouldn't trust her when she did reveal the real reason she was there. Ara gave her the opening she was looking for when she asked Kay, “And what about you? What do you do in New York?”

“I don't live here,” Kay said. “I came to here to see you.”

This made Ara sit back on her bar stool—increasing the distance between her and Kay—and a guarded look came into her eyes.

“Why?” she asked. “Have you been following me?”

Kay ignored the question. “Ara, I know you came to the UN to promote the kind of causes you believe in, the kind of causes that require money and political influence to make a difference. I work for a company that can help you.”

“Really,” Ara said, her skepticism evident.

Kay plunged ahead. “You may not know this, but you have a very valuable resource in your province—specifically, a very valuable mineral—and if you partner with my company, you can turn that resource to your advantage. I mean, to your country's advantage. I just want a few minutes to talk to you about this.”

Kay realized immediately, in spite of all the hours she'd spent practicing with Eli and Anna, that she'd done a poor job of introducing the subject. She'd been too blunt and her delivery was stilted, and she doubted that Ara Khan was so naïve as to believe that any private company really cared about the people of Afghanistan. She now fully
expected, after the way she'd botched the introduction, that Ara would tell
her
to take a hike. But she didn't. Instead Ara said, “Sure, I'd be happy to talk to you. Let's get a table. We'll order an appetizer to soak up some of the vodka.”

Five minutes later, Kay realized that Callahan had been completely wrong about Ara Khan.

—

ARA KHAN WAS WELL AWARE
of the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey that had identified lithium reserves in the dry lakes of Ghazni Province. She was also well aware of its potential value, as well as the difficulties of extracting minerals from Afghanistan. But where Callahan had really been wrong was thinking that Ara Khan was some starry-eyed idealist who would balk at Callahan's proposal.

Ara Khan may have only been twenty-six years old, but she was a sophisticated young woman, completely immersed in the Machiavellian politics of Afghanistan. She'd spent the last two years, according to Callahan, helping her father govern his wild province and she wasn't the least bit naïve. She also knew, without having to be told, that the only way she and her father would profit from the lithium reserves in Ghazni was if they had some sort of outside help. It was apparent to Kay that Ara had been thinking about the lithium long before Callahan had come creeping along.

So Kay didn't have to sell Ara Khan on the deal at all; she just had to show that what Callahan wanted to do was feasible. She didn't have to convince or persuade Ara that it was in her country's best interest to accept Callahan's proposal, she just had to show that Callahan could really do what he was offering to do. When Kay brought up the fact that the Callahan Group was willing to support her father in a bid to become president of her country, Ara smiled. That wasn't something that had occurred to her or that she'd considered within the realm of possibility.

“We're obviously not doing this out of the goodness of our hearts,” Kay said. “We know if your dad's the guy in charge, we'll have a better chance to accomplish what we want.” Kay was relieved that she could now be honest with Ara; it was much easier for her to be herself and be honest than try to con her.

“That's very good,” Ara said, “but I hope you realize that it will take a substantial, uh . . .”

Kay could see she was looking for the words to bring up the subject of money.

“He'll need a war chest,” Kay said.

“Exactly,” Ara said. “A very large one. A lot of people will have to be . . . persuaded. How much are we talking about?”

“Twenty-five million,” Kay said. “We know it's going to be difficult to make this happen, but since the lithium is potentially worth billions, we're willing to make a substantial investment provided we have documents that spell out the details for the future. But we're not going to move on this unless the terms are clear and our investment is protected.”