“Won’t you be seated,” Prince Ali bin Tariq requested with a commanding flourish of his right hand. Ali was the forty-third son of the Saudi king, formerly, and for an amazingly long eighteen years, the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, he was highly westernized, an accomplished diplomat, a drunk, a womanizer, and a flamboyant rascal who had once treated D.C. as his own playground.
During his long tenure as ambassador he had helped fix three presidential elections, bought enough congressmen and senators to stuff two Rolodexes, fathered countless illegitimate children, purchased six fabulous homes from Palm Beach to Vail, along with three luxury jets to shuttle him around his real estate empire, and along the way became the senior and most esteemed member of Washington’s diplomatic corps.
Eighteen years away from his stuffed-shirt kingdom, eighteen years of sin and frolic, and all the pleasures and contentment unlimited wealth could buy.
During many of those years, Bellweather had been his frequent partner in bar-hopping and whoring around town. They shared women, they drank an ocean of booze, and on one amazing occasion they christened Ali’s newest Boeing 737 with a wild, fantasy, around-the-world orgy. Just Bellweather and Ali, and thirty women chosen for their physical variety and amorous skills.
That exhausting but remarkable trip had been the cause of Bellweather’s second divorce, the ugliest of the three. Definitely the most enthusiastic and sexually imaginative of the ladies, it turned out, was a very determined PI hired by his wife. The PI returned from the trip with a thick photo album showing Daniel in an assortment of insane poses.
After one glance at the album, he offered wife two a swift, uncontested divorce with a “fair settlement.” When she then mentioned her ambition to open a public photo gallery, he collapsed completely; whatever she wanted, she could have it. She took him at his word and looted him for all he was worth. The house, the cars, all of his cash that she knew about.
It was worth every penny. The thought of those terrifying photos in the public eye was nauseating.
Then, three years ago, after a series of media articles about the prince’s outrageous lifestyle became too ugly to ignore, his father called him home. It was one thing for a Saudi prince to bribe, corrupt, fix, and blackmail in a foreign land. Infidels, after all, were born incorrigibly corrupted; what was wrong with squirting a little more fuel on the fire?
His father, however, drew the line over a photograph of Ali in Entertainment Weekly, a leering smile on his lips, a bubbling flute of champagne in one hand, the other planted firmly on the rather skinny fanny of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated sluts, which said something. The girl was only sixteen. Worse, she was made up to look only thirteen. Ali was crushed. For eighteen years he had lived the life of dreams. The idea of returning home, to a hot, sandy, dry country, to give up his American mansions, his powerful dedication to scotch, to live in a barren land without booze or blonde women-he’d developed a particular longing for golden hair-sickened him. He sent a long letter home, an elegantly worded missive telling his father to screw off.
But after the king threatened to cut off not only his inheritance and lifestyle emoluments, but also his head, Ali decided his affection for his family was calling him.
Bellweather and Walters had by now fallen onto their rear ends. Emitting a series of loud grunts, they were trying their damnedest to wrench their legs and knees into the same cross-legged stance as the Saudis.
His features twisted with pain, Bellweather asked, “You got a call from President Cantor?”
“Yes, yes,” Ali said with a quick wave. “Billy mentioned you have something interesting for us. Something quite lucrative.”
The moment Ali returned home, he had begged his father for a position in the Kingdom’s Ministry of Finance. High, low, didn’t matter. With his contacts and unscrupulous friends, he swore he could do a world of good for Saudi investments overseas. The king had a different idea and instead threw him in a Wahhabi-run rehab facility to dry out. A prison would’ve been more merciful, and less dreadful. Ali found himself in a small, unadorned room with only a bed and prayer mat, trapped in the middle of the desert with nobody but other spoiled and depraved reprobates for company.
He nearly went mad. It was such a steep drop from his former life. After a long, horrible two years of staring at white walls, of interminable sermons on faith and abstinence, of prostrating himself in prayer throughout the day, while he secretly dreamed of booze and blondes, Ali finally got his chance. He wrote a long rambling letter to his father swearing he was cured. A newly purified servant of Allah, he was now anxious to get out and make serious amends for his many sins. His timing couldn’t have been better. With oil prices shooting through the ceiling, the royal family was suddenly awash with cash. Gobs of it, many, many billions of Western money, was flooding the small kingdom. Black stuff was pumped out, rivers of green stuff flowed in.
Finding safe places to park all that cash had become a mammoth problem.
But at long last, after two horrible years of unmitigated misery, his father gave Ali the chance he had dreamed of, an opportunity to escape and make frequent trips to the West.
Over the wretched course of those two pathetic years, the only thing that had kept Ali from hanging himself in his cell were all the wild fantasies he stored in his head and replayed over and over. He developed a mental catalog; things he had done, things he would like to do again, new things he’d like to try. The time had come, at last, to indulge every last one of his preserved fantasies.
However, the man seated to Ali’s right, Bellweather knew, was a former imam and an iron-willed zealot, dispatched by the king to keep a tight rein on his forty-third son and be sure he didn’t lapse back into his nasty old habits. The temptations of the West were strong, and Ali obviously had a few willpower issues.
“How much did Cantor tell you?” Bellweather asked.
“A little. Something about a liquid you will squirt on your tanks and jeeps.”
“He told you what the polymer does?”
“More or less.”
“Are you interested?”
“More or less,” he repeated in that maddeningly opaque Middle Eastern way. In Arabland, apparently the words “yes” and “no” would draw a lightning bolt from the heavens.
“Then let me update you,” Bellweather suggested. He quickly proceeded through an energetic explanation of the polymer, a hilarious story about the dashed hopes of the GT 400, and the state of play in getting a defense contract. He made it sound like a gold mine-which it was-and a sure thing-which was drawing closer to reality every day.
Ali and his watchdog made loud slurping noises as they pulled tokes from the hookah. Ali listened politely but appeared only mildly interested.
Walters sat quietly and let Bellweather handle the pitch. Walters secretly loathed Arabs. His family name had been Wallerstein before he got it legally changed. He had aunts and uncles in Israel. A few cousins in the IDF. He wanted nothing to do with these Bedouin schlemiels, except for their money; about that he had absolutely no qualms.
“So now you want to sell us a piece,” Ali suggested the moment Bellweather finished.
“That’s the general idea, yes.” No fuller explanation was asked for, or indeed necessary. CG never put its own money on the line. They developed a project or takeover target, then quickly invited others to share the financial burden and gains. The financial term was “leverage,” shorthand for accumulating capital and spreading the risks of failure across multiple parties. In this case it meant buying all the influence that CG’s powerful group of insiders and power-peddlers could muster in the hunt for profit.