Drew focused on Sarah next. “But the gravest risk, in my opinion, may rest with you, Sarah. If what we’ve heard is true—that questions about criminal negligence are about to surface and that you and your office will be prosecuting what could become the largest such case in years—you’ll have to make an exceedingly difficult decision. Do you take on that case, one that could involve discussions and decisions made at the American Frontier board level by your brother? Do you take part in some sort of a challenge that drags in your own family? How do you separate yourself, the prosecutor, from the little sister and member of the Worthington family? The press will eat you alive if they suspect you might play or grant any favors to either your older brother or your family.”
Drew straightened his shoulders. “I wanted to make absolutely certain each of you understands what’s at stake. Please take this fight seriously. Ignore what it means for the family business. That will all play itself out, one way or another. AF’s stock price and Worthington Shares’ holdings will go up or down. But none of that matters nearly as much as how all of this may play out for each of you personally. Given that, I want to make some recommendations. I fully expect that you’ll ignore them.” A smile flickered across the older man’s face. “But I still want to make them—if only so you have them in front of you as you deal with this.
“First, I’d encourage you, Will, to stop trying to become the CEO of American Frontier. Give it up. I know it seems like the pinnacle of your career, something that makes perfect sense to you and that you’ve worked toward for much of your adult life. Yes, there is great prestige and honor in leading the largest company in the world. But there may be a bigger prize at hand someday, one that no Worthington has ever aspired to, and you would be placing all of that in jeopardy if you take AF’s considerable troubles on board in your own professional life. You’ll need to make a decision about that, whether you’re ready to or not.
“Second, Sean, I’d ask you to stand down from your effort to sail to the Arctic. I don’t say this lightly, knowing your passion for that fight. But there’s almost no way you can win this thing in the public’s mind. So let others take on that fight. Give them the ship if you must, but don’t take the fight on board yourself. There is no peace to be had here.
“And finally, Sarah, recuse yourself. I know you’ve always wanted to prove yourself, and you see this as a worthy fight where you can do that. But it’s the wrong fight. And it can cost you dearly. For that reason, I’d urge you in the strongest possible terms to get out of it now, before it’s too late to do so.”
Drew sat back in his chair, and Will had to close his gaping mouth. It was by far the longest single speech he’d ever heard Drew give in his life. And it had been given only to an audience of four.
Sarah was the first to react. “I didn’t think you had that in you, Drew. So how do you really feel?”
They all laughed. It broke the ice.
“Yeah, Drew,” Sean chimed in, “I can’t believe you delivered all that in one fell swoop. What’s the deal? You been saving that up all these years?”
“It’s how I feel,” Drew stated matter-of-factly, “and someone needed to say it. Might as well be me.”
“Well, thank you,” Sean said. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I’ll certainly consider what you’ve said.” He looked over at his brother and sister. “And I’ll bet that Will and Sarah will take everything you’ve told us seriously as well.”
“Absolutely,” Sarah replied.
Only Will hadn’t yet spoken. At last, when Sarah gave him the eagle eye, he said, “I’ve heard what you said, and I do indeed take it seriously. But what we each decide is something else entirely. I may not have a choice, whether I like it or not. I get the feeling that Sandstrom is going to fight for his job, which puts me in a vastly different place.”
“And I don’t have a choice either,” Sarah reported. “The head of Justice’s Criminal Division told me today that his job is on the line on this, and he wants me involved. I’d have to come up with an awfully good reason to walk away from the fight altogether. But I will consider the risks you’ve explained. I really will.”
“And I will too,” Sean added. “The last thing in the world I want is to be perceived as some Don Quixote type tilting at windmills—although I feel that way sometimes.” He laughed. “That isn’t my style or my wish. If I don’t think I can make a genuine difference in the fight, I’ll walk away. I promise.”
Drew seemed to relax now that his thoughts were out in the open. “That’s all I’m asking. Go into this with your eyes wide open. The business and financial side will take care of itself. What I care about is how this affects each of you.”
Will stared at his brother and sister. “Trust me, Drew,” he said slowly, “we’re all wide awake right now. We get it.”
He’d been at the bar for nearly 30 minutes and had managed to avoid anything other than a casual conversation with the guy on the stool next to him when he got a second text, directing him to another address. The money would be delivered to him once he’d dumped the suit, the text said. He still wanted the money, but he wanted to get rid of the suit as fast as he could.
He carried the brown plastic bag with him over his shoulder and walked the entire 30 blocks to the address displayed on the text message. When he got there, he heaved the bag into the dumpster out behind the dilapidated office building, looked around to make sure no one had followed him there, and then ambled away.
He hung around a bit, hoping that yet a third text would arrive, telling him where he could go to pick up his pay for his gig. When it didn’t arrive, he left and walked aimlessly back in the direction from which he’d come. He wasn’t sure where he’d wind up for the night. But at least he didn’t have the suit with him any longer.
It never occurred to him to take even a peek at the names of any of the nonprofit environmental, social justice, and civil liberties organizations that all shared the office complex by the dumpster. It wasn’t like he’d know even one of the names anyway.
19
Sarah had gone right back to the office after the family dinner, without even going to her penthouse suite first. She’d already felt the conflict between her job and her family in the American Frontier crisis, but now, after Drew’s speech, the even greater dangers to her pressed in. Now that she, Will, and Sean had discussed all the angles of the American Frontier situation—though she was certain Sean, per usual, was holding back—she had calls to make.
The first was to Darcy Wiggins, a feisty Department of Homeland Security field agent. There was no doubt in Sarah’s mind that her friend would still be in the office. If anyone had started to figure out what really happened during that explosion, it would be Darcy. After 15 years with the ATF and then as a DHS field agent for more than a decade, she had seen it all. And she was a bloodhound on the trail.
Enough to scare all the guys in her unit. Sarah smiled to herself. Nobody messed with Darcy. She got a job done and done right, even in the midst of a male mecca. A long time ago Darcy had learned that law enforcement, whether you liked it or not, was still a good ol’ boys’ club. It wasn’t going to change anytime soon, she’d told Sarah. So Darcy went out of her way to outdo them when it suited her. For that reason, the club left her alone, to her work.
Sarah knew what that felt like. It was one of the things that had connected them as friends and fellow crusaders. She too wanted to prove herself—not only to the men in her office but to her father and to the world.
The domestic terrorism unit at the Department of Homeland Security had certainly been busy in recent years. People naturally assumed all would be well in the world when Osama bin Laden had finally been killed at the top of his private home complex in a city in Pakistan. Hardly. If anything, things had gotten a whole lot more complicated for the DHS domestic terrorism unit.
First, there had been the online magazine created by a couple of al-Qaeda zealots in Yemen who had taught lone jihadists how to make
homemade bombs anywhere in the world with tools and materials that were commonly available. That was what had inspired the Boston Marathon bombers.
The truth was that the Homeland Security domestic terrorism unit had a vastly more complicated job than the international terrorism experts at Langley and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Most of the al-Qaeda leaders had been killed over the years. Iran’s Shia leadership had, after considerable pressure from both Russia and China, chosen to stop sheltering al-Qaeda leaders within Iran. Once that decision had been made, ODNI and the CIA had found that their efforts to track and kill al-Qaeda leaders with unmanned drone strikes became vastly easier.
But inside the United States, the situation was murky. Unlike the international counterterrorism effort that had grudgingly forced several agencies to share resources, people, and information on a regular, real-time basis, the agencies with authority over acts of domestic terrorism had not learned to play nicely with each other in the sandbox.
Sarah had heard Darcy complain about it all nonstop. The federal ATF agency did its own thing. The FBI likewise pursued its own agenda, its own suspects, and its own leads. And to complicate matters, the INS had its hands full at the borders and generally chose not to cooperate with cross-border threats that might feed domestic terror operations and cells.
Homeland Security did its best to try to coordinate among ATF, INS, the FBI, and other assorted agencies that all had a hand in efforts to ferret out domestic terror plots. But some of the groups that they tracked were, well, “just this side of complete and utter crazy town,” Darcy was known to say. And when you didn’t know if someone was operating off an agenda or merely mentally unstable, it made it truly difficult to know when to intercede and when to only sit, listen, and wait.
Now that Darcy was assigned to the New York office, where everyone always seemed to think they could just show up in Times Square and set off bombs, her life was even more insane.
“It doesn’t add up,” Darcy told Sarah over the phone. “I’ve reviewed the security footage until I’m blue in the face.”
“Any suspects—beyond the guy in the polar bear suit with his face covered?” Sarah asked.
“Not a one,” Darcy declared.
“And the video from that CNN field producer?”
“Englewood? Yeah, I’ve looked at that, matched it up with all the other security and cell phone videos we have from the scene. And . . .”
“And?”
“Nothing. That’s what’s bugging me.”
“But isn’t that standard? Finding nothing, until something pops and you can start to connect a few dots?”
“That’s the thing,” Darcy fired back. “We have all the dots in front of us right now. We don’t have to search that hard for them. We have this guy in the polar bear suit, with a protest clearly and publicly displayed. He hangs around the bombing scene long enough to guarantee almost everyone around remembers something about him and connects him with the environmental protest. We have the backpack he was carrying in a whole bunch of the videos that we can cross-match, and we can easily link it to the bomb that went off. It’s the guy. We know it’s the guy, and he did his level best to telegraph his motives for the bombing.”
Sarah leaned back in her office chair. “So what’s the problem? You have a suspect, a motive, and a weapon. Now you just need to find the guy and put him away for good before he does something like that again and actually kills people.”
“See,” Darcy said in her gravelly voice, “that’s what’s bothering me. I don’t like someone else doing my job for me. I prefer it when I have to go find it—not when someone hands it all to me like it’s my birthday, and I only have to rip off the wrapping paper.”
Sarah laughed out loud. “So you’re complaining that you haven’t worked hard enough to put the pieces of this case together?”
“Not complaining.” Darcy exhaled. “Just wondering. Unless the guy shoots off his mouth to someone about his role in it, or we get lucky and someone remembers seeing something about the guy getting ready to blow up the AF building and calls us, we aren’t going to find this guy. He’ll be a ghost. We don’t have DNA matches on anything. We don’t have a face to hunt for. We don’t have a group to tie him to. Yet we have the guy, his motive, and the weapon in full view. We know who he is, sort of, and why he did what he did. We have plenty to go on at the center of the investigation . . . but nowhere really to go with it. Honestly, it seems like it was created for the TV cameras.”
“Isn’t that why all these nutjobs do what they do?” Sarah asked. “At the end of the day—whether they’re shooting through the fence at the White House, trying to blow people up at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, or bringing down an oil company—isn’t the thought lodged in their pea brains that this is their one and only chance at infamy? Isn’t that what drives most of them?”
“Yeah, I guess.” But Darcy didn’t sound convinced. “But I’ve looked at a lot of footage of this guy in the polar bear suit. He was awfully deliberate about where he was walking. He made sure lots of folks in the crowd saw him wandering around, like he was some kinda street actor. But when it came time to plant the bomb, he didn’t case the building. He knew right where to go, like he’d either cased it before or somebody told him. Left his bag and exited off the stage.”
Sarah was thinking hard. “You’re right. That is weird.”
“And it also wasn’t near any office in the building. That section of the building was on the other side of an old storage area that no one ever visited, except to drop off used furniture or boxes. It’s why no one was hurt in the blast. That, and the fact the explosives in it were self-contained and the bag didn’t have other stuff, like nails, in it to spray into the crowd. And the place where he planted that bag wasn’t anywhere near the crowds or the protesters. It’s like the guy wanted some attention but went out of his way to make certain no one got hurt.”
“So we’ve got a terrorist with a conscience. Or maybe he’s really just a do-gooder. Maybe he’s precisely what he seems to be—an environmental activist who crossed the line, wanted to make a statement against the fossil fuel industry and this particular oil company, but didn’t want to inflict any actual harm. Make the statement, get some TV coverage for the cause, and move on.”
“You mean like Green Justice? Or one of those groups that likes to go after other groups physically and isn’t shy about confrontation?”
As soon as Darcy mentioned Green Justice, Sarah’s thoughts flicked back to Sean. He was in deep with Green Justice, and she had been certain he was hiding something at the family dinner. Could Sean know something about the explosion? Or did one of his Green Justice buddies?
“Hey, you still there?” Darcy barked.
“Yes, just thinking.”
“Well, I still don’t buy it. I’ll certainly pursue that angle hard, as fast as I can. But things aren’t matching up.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Sarah said. “You always do.”
20
Sean checked his messages as he left Drew and Jean’s. Elizabeth’s message from the USS Cantor was cryptic:
The CEO of AF is here to inspect the drilling platform for himself. His helo landed right on the platform, and he was hustled below to their operational room.
“Wow,” Sean muttered. It was highly unusual for the CEO of a major multinational company to go out in the field to oversee a disaster such as this firsthand, but Sandstrom wasn’t an ordinary CEO, and likely he didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the CEO of BP after the Deepwater Horizon incident. Sandstrom had been a wildcatter at the start of his career, and he was used to taking risks. He was known for hating to sit behind a desk when there was work to get done. Though Sean had no love for any of the oil magnate CEOs, he could identify with wanting to be actively in the field.
Will had told him it was widely known at AF that staff needed to be prepared for two types of meetings: the 15-minute senior staff meeting where every
one was required to stand and deliver reports to the CEO in a minute or less and then answer questions in rapid-fire fashion, and the “walking” meeting through the halls of AF’s corporate headquarters. This second type of meeting was a Sandstrom favorite. It was rumored he’d sometimes put in 10 miles or more a day just walking and talking through a series of rolling meetings.
He has a lawyer with him. Jason Carson. I get the feeling he’s not to be trusted. Maybe it’s just my bad experience with lawyers, or maybe there’s something there. If you listened to him for a minute, you’d think this “leak” is a really small thing and easily fixed. But we both know that’s far from the truth.
Carson, Sean thought with disgust. Will had spoken of the man rather heatedly on more than one occasion, saying he’d brownnosed his way into rising quickly through the corporate ranks at AF. Rumors flew that he did things Sandstrom didn’t want anyone else to know about. It was Carson’s specialty, and he was very good at it.
Will needs to know Carson and Sandstrom are on the Cantor. Sean’s hand moved toward his cell phone, then halted.
He liked being a lone warrior, on the front lines. He couldn’t and wouldn’t stand down from sailing back to the Arctic, even though Drew had suggested it. Sean had never backed down from a fight and wasn’t about to now. But after Drew’s long-winded speech, Sean realized anew a critical truth: his siblings were also on the front lines, and this war that involved all three of them could best be fought together.
A Perfect Ambition Page 10
