Sea of Greed

“I’m not sure. Yet,” she said. “But I will. Your job is to be ready when he resists, as he most certainly will.”

Silence followed. She knew what she had in Volke. He was easy to motivate. He would do anything to get the payout he’d been waiting for two years. Her other problem would be Woods. He would have to be dealt with, too.

“I’ll be ready,” Volke said. “But you should know Buran is not our only problem. Austin and his crew have survived.”

“How could they?”

“I have no idea,” Volke said. “But according to an update in the NUMA location system, they’re heading west at high speed.”

“I’d have preferred to hear that they were dead, but if they’re running for cover, at least that’s something.”

“They’re not running for cover,” Volke said. “They’re looking for the Minerve.”

She tilted her head as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “The Minerve? Are you telling me they’ve learned in three days what took us three years to put together?”

“They live up to their reputation,” he said. “Regrettably.”

“They cannot be allowed to find that submarine,” she said. “If they pull the antidote off that ship, it will destroy everything we’ve done.”

“I’m not sure we can stop them,” Volke said. “All the more reason we need to close this deal and get out of here.”

“I’m not settling for a pittance,” she said.

“Better than nothing.”

Tessa had a feeling it wouldn’t be quite that easy.

She looked out the window as the sound of helicopters approaching reached them. Shading her eyes against the sun, she looked across the base. From out of the northwest, a pair of helicopters came in low, crossing slowly above the rusted-metal bones of their ancestors.

“We’ll have to worry about Austin later,” she said. “Buran and his people are here.”

She and Volke left the high ground and descended the tower. By the time they reached the ground floor, the helicopters had landed in a swirl of dust. As the dust dissipated, Arat Buran and his honor guard stepped from the lead helicopter and strode toward the base of the tower.

Tessa studied Buran as he approached. Muscular and strong beneath his dark blue overcoat, he appeared much as he had when Tessa had first met him years before. The same eyes that drooped slightly at the corners, giving him a serious, glum look that she had found so appealing. His thick, dark mustache brought Stalin to mind, but Buran was no communist. In the years since Kazakhstan had gained its independence, he’d gone from a roughneck working on a leaking oil rig to one of the richest men in Central Asia.

Using a combination of guile, brute force and military contacts, he’d slowly cornered the market on Kazakhstan’s oil, before branching out into other countries. He now controlled seventy percent of everything produced in the region. His friends, members of a group he called the Consortium, controlled the West.

That kind of power didn’t remain confined to the business world, it extended to the political realm. At Buran’s urging, ties with the West had soured, foreign diplomats and military personnel had been sent packing and Kazakhstan had turned inward, with Buran and a few of his allies living in the shadows and controlling the government.

They were profiting now, but when all the infected fields stopped producing, these men would control half of the world’s remaining untouched oil.

Another woman might have looked upon a wealthy, handsome ex-lover like Buran and wondered what could have been. Tessa felt nothing of the sort. Buran had been an interesting plaything and an avenue of assistance, nothing more.

Buran stepped toward her and kissed her hand. “My Tessa,” he said in broken English. “You have exceeded even my expectations.”

“I’ve exceeded everyone’s expectations,” she replied. “And yet the funds I was promised have not been released.”

“Always straight to business,” he said. “You miss out on the beauty of life.”

From the pocket of his overcoat Buran produced a small box and opened the lid. Inside lay a walnut-sized emerald set in a ring of sapphires and held by a delicately wrought gold chain.

“Twenty carats,” he said. “Worth a million dollars. It is a thing of beauty like you.”

Tessa smiled politely, closed the box and pushed it back toward him. “Thank you, I’m flattered, but you know I don’t get out of bed for anything less than a billion these days. Now I would like my money. I’ve done my part.”

Buran’s eyes smoldered with a hint of indignation, but he placed the box back in his pocket and shrugged. “Let’s go inside, shall we?”

The meeting moved into the bottom level of the air traffic control tower. They were joined by several of Tessa’s men, who stood there beside a multitude of computers. The machines were networked, powered by one of her fuel cells and linked to a satellite dish.

Before Tessa could speak, Woods unexpectedly walked in. But before he could speak, Volke quickly moved next to him and drew a gun, placing it in the small of Woods’s back.