They shared a smile. This was a constant argument between the two of them, all of it polite and friendly. Stapleton didn’t think much of the “loony left,” as he liked to refer to it, or to the progressive environmental left either. Will argued with him every chance he could find, echoing information fed to him by his brother.
There were always political overtones in that friendly banter. Stapleton, a true kingmaker in GOP circles, had financed more than one Republican presidential campaign. And everyone knew that Will’s family had been a left-of-center core of the Democratic Party for generations. Most assumed it was inevitable that a Worthington would become president. But the press and the kingmakers could never pin Will down. Was he a Democrat, like all generations of his family had been? Or could he be turned toward the Republican Party, as Stapleton and others hoped? When it came to politics, Will kept his heart and sympathies secret from everyone except Drew, Laura, and Paul.
“I’m not talking about the oil-covered whales. I don’t give a rat’s tail about them, as you know.” Stapleton looked around, as if to make certain no one else heard that. “What I’m talking about is something else entirely. When you deliberately lie—to the board, to the White House, to Congress, to shareholders—that’s criminal negligence. It doesn’t matter who or what gets harmed.”
Will hadn’t thought about any of that. He would definitely need to connect again with his sister when things settled down. For now he said, “We’ve had immense fights and major disagreements over the Arctic policy, yes, but I’ve never seen deception.”
Stapleton lifted his chin. “We’ll see.”
The room suddenly grew quiet. Every cell phone that Sandstrom and his executive staff had appeared. All stared down at their mobiles, trying to decipher the news.
The American Frontier CEO looked up from his own mobile device, conferred quickly with a nearby aide, and then pivoted to face the boardroom. “I’m sorry,” Sandstrom announced to the gathering. “I fully realize that the board has called this meeting and that we have much to discuss. But we just received a command to meet with the president’s chief of staff at the White House within the hour. I must leave immediately, though you all can meet, of course.”
Well, that will make any sort of a board decision much more difficult, Will thought.
Sandstrom strode across the room, spoke briefly to the board’s chairman, and then exited with his entourage.
He could feel it. This was his lucky day. The day his destiny was going to change.
Since his mama’s death, he’d drifted into other pursuits that he’d pretended were somehow related to acting: appearances at seedy clubs, more appearances at private parties—his favorites were children’s ones, where he wore costumes—and then personal, paid-escort gigs. He’d somehow managed to hang on to a semblance of his once-good looks, unless anyone took the time to peer closely.
His agent, who’d once lined up his appearances and gigs, seemingly had quite a decent network. He’d found himself partying on yachts and in penthouses—at least until he’d started spending most of his extra money on recreational activities that weren’t all that healthy or productive.
In his lucid moments, he knew his mama wouldn’t approve. But he couldn’t stop. The recreational drugs made the dark haziness go away, if only for a while.
Then, at some point, the high-end work started to disappear, and his agent started referring him to fewer and fewer appearances. Not long after, his agent stopped calling and wouldn’t take his calls anymore.
It had been more than two years since he’d gone to an audition, and even longer since he’d bothered to try his hand at real acting. He’d been living on and off the streets for most of that time, but he wasn’t like the other bums, who wandered around with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He still had plans, goals, things to accomplish in life.
He had a little Brooklyn flat where he crashed when the street got to be too much. It belonged to someone else.
He hadn’t been able to afford any of the prescription medication that had been useful once. So now he was paying for his habits and hobbies with anything that came his way, including highly unusual underground shows that involved metal bars on windows and bulletproof glass.
The previous night, he’d been at one of those shows when someone had gotten his ear and asked if he was interested in a two-hour gig that paid well. All he had to do, they said, was dress up in a polar bear suit, drop a backpack at a designated spot near a building, walk away, and then wait for instructions about where to drop the suit off after the gig was up.
No names had been exchanged. There were no business cards, no email addresses, no addresses of any kind. The young, slick-looking lawyer type who’d contacted him would be in touch if he was interested. When he’d found out how much it paid, he’d been interested. It was more money than he’d made in the past few months.
Now he saw the same guy walking toward him. The lawyer type handed him the polar bear suit and one of those off-the-rack cell phones. He received instructions about where to go once he’d dressed up. There was a backpack along with the suit, complete with some walking-around money.
“You’ll be paid later for the gig,” he was told.
Seemed easy enough. Strange, but easy.
Then again, in his line of work, he was smart enough not to ask any questions.
7
Sarah Katherine Worthington had gone to Harvard Law School on a lark. Truth was, she didn’t have anything better to do. It wasn’t like she had to earn money—not when her trust fund topped a billion dollars at least—or even pay all that much attention to what she was doing. She’d spent her entire undergraduate days at Harvard playing madam social butterfly. She’d thought nothing of running up 10,000 dollars in shopping debt at a mall in only one trip.
“Why worry? It’ll just cause lines on my face,” she would say half seriously to friends.
There was some truth to it, especially since she was 34. Her father had groomed Will to take care of all the big decisions for the family at Worthington Shares. Will was serious, thinking through every angle before making a decision. Then, once he’d decided, he was immovable. Sean, the Worthington entrepreneur, kept the company expanding and moving forward. Even while he finished one deal, his brain was already spinning out into the universe of his next one. Sean was smart, really smart, but understated . . . until he went public. Then he became the most sought-after and photographed Worthington, because he was doing something interesting or had a hot model on his arm.
So what was she supposed to do? What was her job, really?
Sarah had always been the baby of the family. The family still called her by her pet name—SB for Sarah Baby or Sugar Baby or Social Butterfly, depending on which family history you believed. It didn’t seem like anyone would ever take her seriously. Sure, everyone cooed over her. Her curly chestnut hair, compliments of her father, and arresting green eyes, compliments of her mother, had garnered attention as far back as she could remember. First she was “cute,” and then somewhere the transition to “beautiful” happened—at least in the eyes of the media. She was the life of every black-tie party and the entertainer at all of the family gatherings.
Sarah excelled at meeting and drawing in people. She’d been to every red-carpet gathering she could manage. But what was she supposed to actually do with her life? That was the question that had nagged her a bit, when she chose to think about it at all.
Which is how she’d ended up at Harvard Law School. Her dad had donated enough money to create a new wing at the law school library, and she was admitted to the school after graduating from the university. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. Other folks had to work hard to apply to such a prestigious law school. But who cared? Money buys all sorts of things, she’d reasoned. So why not go with the flow and try it out?
Yet a strange thing had happened at law school. Sarah liked it. Flickers of a time she’d bested a bully and championed an underdog when she was young ros
e to the surface. Even more, she discovered she was actually good at law. She had always been a charmer and, she admitted, a little manipulative. She had wangled ways over the years to bend each of her family members around her little finger. She’d even charmed Drew, although he occasionally lifted a brow at her antics, especially in public. But his chiding expression never lasted long.
The dual traits of charm and manipulation served her in good stead in law. Arguing persuasively was something Sarah reveled in. And to be honest, she loved the limelight. After her first year, she’d interned at a big, influential law firm in lower Manhattan and discovered that every one of her natural skills made sense in the practice of law.
So she’d made a deal with herself. She’d play around with law school and whatever came after that for however long she felt like. If she got bored and wanted to take a year off and hang out in the south of France, well, that was what she would do.
It wasn’t like she had to work. She could spend her inheritance on everything and anything, and there would still be many more fortunes left.
But she’d felt driven to work at law and graduated at the top of her class. Her last year she’d served as the editor of Harvard Law Review—and not because it had been handed to her. She’d earned it.
Upon graduation, she’d shocked everyone in her family and taken a position as an assistant district attorney. The pay was lousy—far less than what she gave away to charitable causes each year. After a few years in the DA’s office in Manhattan, she’d shocked her friends and family yet again right after her twenty-eighth birthday by taking a career government position as the deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.
Justice created the position and based her in New York. Her boss, the head of the Justice’s Criminal Division, was a political appointee in a Republican administration, but he’d grown to trust Sarah and her instincts—despite her family connections and wealth. She earned $159,712 a year, which she donated to Goodwill charities.
Her family was a bit confused by it all.
But Sarah knew something no one else knew. Finally, at 34 years old, she had a life plan. Even saying life plan made her laugh. Drew’s wife, Jean, a spunky lady Sarah admired, had a wonderful saying: “We make plans, and God laughs.” Well, Sarah was sure God had laughed at her many times in her life, especially when she had lived in the moment.
Of course, Sarah didn’t share her secret life plan with anyone. Not her boss and especially not her family. They were still waiting for her to “grow up.” Still, it was a plan. And according to the deal with herself, she could bail at any moment . . . whenever she felt like it. In that deal was freedom. She could work as hard as she wanted, with no risk. She could quit at any time and jump off the treadmill.
With that freedom came the ability to try things that might be career limiting or risky for others. She could challenge principalities and powers. She could take on those in charge without fear. After all, what did she have to lose? She didn’t have to worry about who she angered or who might try to stop her. She could always just quit the path she was on, if need be.
Sarah had learned quickly in the prosecutor’s office in New York that all manner of interesting cases walked through the door, and she’d started to develop a specialty in prosecuting bank, securities, and corporate fraud. It was that specialty that had gotten her the career criminal prosecutor’s job, overseeing those same sorts of cases for the Department of Justice. Now, though, Sarah could see that her life was about to intersect with not only her big brother but her middle brother as well.
In the BP deepwater oil spill, Sarah’s division at Justice had prosecuted a case against the giant oil company for criminal negligence charges related to obstruction of justice and lying to Congress. BP had settled with her division for 4.5 billion dollars. Their case had been first out the door.
A similar effort, which Sarah would spearhead, would emerge with this latest fiasco with American Frontier. But there might also be a massive shareholder lawsuit, which could include Will and Worthington Shares. And an environmental NGO that Sean contributed to and served as board chair for—the Center for Ecological Biodiversity—had led every NGO lawsuit on oil spills for more than a decade. Sean’s NGO would likely sue to collect penalties based on the amount of oil that spilled into the Arctic Ocean and potentially harmed the species that made the Arctic their home. All of which meant that each of the Worthington siblings would, in some fashion, become entangled in the American Frontier spill in the Arctic shortly.
As soon as she saw the direction the legal disputes were heading, Sarah knew she had to try to recuse herself.
She stopped by her boss’s office first thing that morning. “I can’t do this,” she told him. “My brother is on the board. He might become the CEO. Our family’s fund has a great deal of stock in American Frontier. It’s a massive conflict of interest.”
“But he’s not the CEO right now,” John Barnhill, the Criminal Division chief, replied. “He won’t be the target. He might even be the negligence remedy, in a manner of speaking. Where’s the conflict of interest in that?”
Sarah was quick with her comeback. “What about the substantial minority holdings Worthington has in American Frontier?”
John stuck to his guns. “Immaterial. You’ll hear material information about any shareholder suits, of course, but your job will be to prosecute criminal negligence. Shareholder value isn’t in your purview, and it isn’t your concern.” He paused. “What’s more, if I recall, didn’t you remove any and all of your legal obligations to Worthington Shares when you took this job? You don’t make any of the decisions. You’re not involved in any of the financial decisions it makes or where money is invested, right?”
Sarah sighed. Her boss was right. She had extracted herself from Worthington Shares’ decisions, precisely because she’d wanted to avoid any sort of complications, like the one she was faced with now. “Come on, John. You can’t believe the press will let me get away with this, do you?”
“You let me worry about that,” John said. “After all, it will be my neck on the line if we aren’t serious about our criminal negligence efforts. I’ll be the one in front of the cameras—especially if it gets ugly—not you. What I need to know is that we have the best information at hand . . .”
“And I can get that for you,” Sarah said quietly.
“Yes, you can.”
Sarah was silent for a moment. Truthfully, she’d been looking for this sort of opportunity. It might make or break her boss’s career, but it could do a whole lot more for her ultimate life plan if she could manipulate events in her favor. She wanted to sink her teeth into something big. Now she had that opportunity.
“Okay, I’m all in.”
He gave only a brief nod, but the twinkle in his eyes revealed he’d already known what her answer would be.
8
Will was stunned as he and Drew exited the American Frontier headquarters. How could Sandstrom leave his own board meeting like that, even for a meeting with the president’s chief of staff? It made no sense—unless he meant to use the White House as an excuse to delay any sort of board call on the question of his leadership. It was an interesting gambit, if that was what he was pursuing. And what was President Rich up to?
The current American president, Spencer Rich, had been elected to office only a few months earlier. This was his first big crisis, and he’d inherited it, though he had championed energy independence and Arctic drilling specifically in his presidential campaign. Like Will, Spencer Rich was the firstborn from a prominent, wealthy family that had long ago made its mark in presidential politics after a successful run in business—specifically the oil business. His father, Thomas Rich, had taken the presidential office when Will was a toddler.
The Worthington and Rich families went way back and shared some Irish roots. Thomas and Will’s mother had been friends in their Harvard days. A common Irish heritage and their blue-blood lineages had
drawn them together. Even though they were poles apart politically, the two continued their friendship after both had married and moved on to their respective circles. The two families had enjoyed each other’s company until life had driven them apart—at least that was what his mother had once told Will wistfully.
By the time Sean was born and Will started his schooling, the two families were no longer spending time together. Will hadn’t minded. He’d been quite a bit younger than Spencer and remembered him only as a hotheaded bully. The last time they were together was at Camp David, when Thomas Rich, midway into his first term as president of the United States, had invited the Worthingtons to spend a week with his family. Spencer’s mom, Victoria, had arrived in a huff where the boys were playing baseball, whisked Spencer into a limo, and evidently took him back to the White House.
Being the only child at Camp David was preferable to having to spend time with Spencer. The days spent there were hazy in Will’s mind, as he’d been only three or four, but he remembered feeling lonely. His father had been there just one evening before he was called back to New York City.
Now Spencer Rich was a strong, aggressive leader who naturally took charge and ran things. His father had paved the way for him, handing him a plum CEO job, followed by a successful run for governor in Texas, and finally his full support in the presidential primaries. Spencer was a lousy public speaker and survived a terrific hazing by the press, but in the end it hadn’t mattered. He’d won by the slimmest margin.
The Republicans also won back the Senate, thanks to a nearly bottomless pit of spending from all of the major industrial, mining, agribusiness, and oil companies, including American Frontier, which had been frustrated by regulatory schemes in Washington for years and years. That meant the Republicans owned the nation’s capital again, in more ways than one. Nothing was beyond their reach any longer in Washington, but they were much more careful, thorough, and discreet in their governance this time around. With little or no fanfare, they ratcheted back the reach of agencies and departments like the EPA, DOE, and DOI through the exceedingly boring budget process, while boosting the budgets of the Pentagon and Commerce. Meanwhile, K Street was fully employed with hundreds of business-oriented lobbyists, all working the appropriations process seamlessly.
A Perfect Ambition Page 5
