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  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.”

  Matta walked back into his office feeling more than a twinge of guilt. Susana Castillo was usually a highly rational woman—the senator was sure that deep down she understood that he would do whatever he could to help. But in rare emotional moments such as these, he could feel Susana’s desperation pointing in his direction, subconsciously accusing him of not having pulled the right strings or cajoled the right person to get her mother treatment.

  He made a mental note to call the U.S. ambassador to see if there was any way to skirt the costs. He doubted it, but it was worth a try. He would also call some of his campaign’s financial contributors; perhaps he could get a collection going.

  Matta took Susana in his arms. There was little even one of the most powerful politicians in Peru could do to help his trusted advisor’s mother.

  Than
k God he had at least remembered to ask.

  LIMA

  AUGUST 1, 9:00 P.M.

  THE PLAZA DE ARMAS

  Hugo Flores had been the senator’s chauffeur for over ten years. Luis Matta had “stolen” him from his job at the Mercedes-Benz offices in Peru when the German car company’s local, longtime manager retired. A small, dark sixty-year-old with a chiseled aquiline nose and elongated black eyes, Hugo looked like an artist’s rendition of his Incan ancestors.

  Hugo wasn’t family, but his presence was comforting and familiar. He wasn’t a friend, but Matta listened to his advice. Hugo had seen the ups and downs of Senator Luis Matta’s political career.

  As Luis Matta walked through the side door of the Senate building, his pupils adjusted to the spreading darkness outside. Eyes squinting, he finally made out a sparkling Pacific blue Mercedes diesel sedan. The car was not new, but given Hugo’s years of employment with the German car manufacturer, it just seemed to rejuvenate and regenerate under his care. This diminutive Peruvian, with barely a high school education, had even taught himself to speak and read German.

  “I must read the owner’s manual in its original language,” Hugo had reasoned during his job interview with the senator.

  When the senator had offered him the position a decade ago, the question of a Mercedes was an absolute precondition. “I’m honored, Senator, to work for you. But it has to be with a Mercedes. I will not drive anything else,” Hugo Flores had dictated to a younger Luis Matta. Most people would have been turned off by a driver laying down the law. Not Matta. He was amused and impressed; it demonstrated that this was a man who knew what he wanted.

  Hugo was now waiting for the senator beside the Mercedes, the rear passenger door open.

  Luis Matta felt a passing twinge of exasperation. For the last ten years, he had punctually reminded Hugo at least once a week that, when alone, there was no need to stand outside and open the car door. That totaled about 520 reminders to Hugo that Luis Matta was not the type of employer who required that level of fastidiousness.

  Hugo had never paid the slightest attention.

  “Hugo, I may have mentioned this before,” said Matta, with a small grin, denoting the initiation of the well-worn exchange between the two men. “There is no need for you to open—” The senator’s voice of mock seriousness got lost in the baritone of Hugo’s deep, bellowing laugh, which was terminally silenced by the closing car door.

  “Yessir,” he giggled as he slid into the driver’s seat. The “yessir” was meaningless. It was only an acknowledgment that he had heard the senator, not that he would abide by his instructions.

  Hugo slowly advanced the car out of the curving driveway. The Mercedes slid by the building’s main entrance just as two well-dressed men—one pale and blond with elegant European facial features, the other larger, darker, and with an unkempt stare in his dark eyes—walked out from behind the large main doors of the Senate building.

  Luis Matta recognized both immediately. The smaller man was Ludwig Schutz, Manager of Anfang Energie’s Latin American operations. Since registering his company’s official bid for the Humboldt pipeline business, Ludwig had become a regular visitor to Matta’s Senate office. It was part of the game. The senator was the senior player in the Humboldt decision, so it was Schutz’s business to drop in, solicit the senator’s views, and ask if there was anything else he needed. Matta would carefully answer that his support would go to the best and least expensive proposal. They both knew how to dance this jig.

  The larger, dark man now dialing his mobile phone was Oleg Stradius. Matta had met him only once before, with Ludwig, in his office. He had said next to nothing during the entire hour-long meeting. His business card identified him only as Anfang Energie’s head of security.

  Matta felt a creeping irritation. Clearly, the men had been inside the building lobbying other senators. He had no doubt they were offering money and influence to whoever would listen—and he knew that a few of his colleagues were not beyond playing one company against the other to see what they could squeeze out. But, for the most part, Luis Matta was certain that his committee was not on the take; its thirteen senators would decide upon the best and most responsible course for the country.

  Winter had arrived in the southern hemisphere. As Lima’s cold, damp air hit the visitors, Senator Luis Matta could see the weather-driven shudder that crawled across Ludwig Schutz’s nearly translucent skin. Against his better judgment, Matta found himself feeling sorry for the two energy company executives. Foreign visitors seemed to always forget that Lima was a foggy, chilly place.

  “Hugo, pull over. Let’s offer these gentlemen a ride,” Matta ordered.

  Hugo quickly maneuvered the car to the sidewalk. The senator rolled down the window and smiled at the German, trying to raise the collar of his business jacket.

  “Ludwig, you look like you need a rescue.”

  “Senator, it is a pleasure,” he said, snapping to attention with German formality. “I appear to have forgotten that Lima’s winters are nearly as unpleasant as those in Stuttgart.

  “We seem to have lost our driver,” Schutz added, explaining his forlorn situation.

  No surprise. Notwithstanding the capture of the last of the leaders of the Shining Path, Peru’s murderous Maoist terrorist group, ten years ago, the police still did not let any unofficial cars anywhere near the Senate building. Visitors were always in front of the building frantically working their cellular phones to find drivers or taxis parked blocks away.

  “Forget it,” Senator Matta answered. “Jump in, I’ll take you.”

  “Senator, you are too kind. We are going to our hotel, the Miraflores Park Plaza,” said Ludwig Schutz with obvious relief. But the smile did not last. The German’s face quickly stiffened, worried that he was trespassing on unwritten diplomatic lines by inconveniencing a senior senator.

  “Please do not worry yourself, Senator. I’m sure we will find our car,” he said, trying to correct his too-quick initial acceptance of the senatorial ride.

  “Come on, Ludwig. Don’t be silly! My house is right on the way. Hugo can drop me off and then take you to the hotel,” Matta said, getting out of the car to allow the two European energy executives to get in.

  This was too much for Hugo. One thing was his boss’s protestations about his overanxious cares when he was alone. Quite another was seeing the senator open the car door for two foreigners. Hugo was out of his seat like a rocket.

  Matta lived in the posh Miraflores neighborhood, less than fifteen minutes away. The hotel was just ten minutes farther down the road. Though it was late and Matta wanted to let Hugo go home, it would be no more than a short detour. At this time of night, there was no traffic.

  The three men settled uncomfortably in the Mercedes’s backseat. Oleg Stradius took the place of a person and a half. The man was like a celestial black hole—his huge presence created a massive gravitational displacement, but it was impossible to peer inside the dark core. Except for polite pleasantries, he said nothing.

  Ludwig Schutz was clearly accustomed to the larger man’s reticent silence. It did not seem to bother or distract him one bit. Ludwig Schutz and Luis Matta chatted amiably about world news, avoiding any mention of the project. It was a show in elegant restraint, two men brought together by the one thing they were not talking about.

  Hugo got off the highway and entered Miraflores. Traffic tightened up as they passed the neighborhood’s beautiful, large, tree-lined square. Along the streets, the cafés and bars were chock-full of young customers, draped over each other, smiling, smoking, drinking. Matta thought to himself that it was hardly different from what he used to do as a teenager, but somehow young people today exuded a sexual energy that he couldn’t remember from his own youth.

  The streets off the huge plaza led to the hotel and restaurant district. One after the other, elegant cars and well-dressed diners awaited entry into Lima’s restaurants. In the last fifteen years, Lima had become a ga
stronomic mecca.

  A new generation of chefs, graduated from European schools, had thrown off the stranglehold of French gastronomic rigidity. They had reinvented Peruvian cuisine with high-intensity sophistication. The food created by this courageous band of nationalist culinary pioneers in the capital’s ultramodern new restaurants had become increasingly creative, turning traditional Peruvian menus into mouthwatering cascades of foams, reductions, and fusions.

  As Hugo turned right onto the side street that led to Matta’s house, Ludwig straightened out, arched his spine, and twisted his body so that he was nearly face-to-face with the senator. His back squarely blocked his colleague. It was a carefully calibrated gesture of intimacy.

  “Senator, forgive me for ruining your generosity by talking shop,” Ludwig began, with his usual formality. “I must tell you that I am concerned about what is happening in Bolivia and how it will affect our business in your country. As you know, Senator, your countrymen like to believe that the Bolivians will never get their act together quickly enough to pump their gas out of the ground.”

  Matta nodded. There was no doubting how true that statement was. Neighboring Bolivia had considerable reserves of natural gas that could compete with Peru’s exported gas. Furthermore, its gas fields were more accessible, making extraction easier than his own country’s far-off Amazonian resources. This meant that if Bolivia were able to get its gas out and transport it to market, it would be cheaper than Peru’s. If that were to occur, the exciting prospects of Peruvian gas would swivel from opportunity to crisis.

  “You see, Senator, Peruvians rarely give Bolivia a second thought,” Ludwig continued, now warming to his business. “Your newspapers dismiss Bolivia’s landlocked poverty. Your politicians shake their heads disapprovingly at its political mess. Your businessmen are appalled by Bolivia’s constant state of upheaval. And your elites think that the ultranationalist peasant movements next door will never allow the sale of Bolivia’s ‘national resources’ to foreign capitalists.”