“Whoa,” David said. It was one hell of a run-on sentence to digest, especially after so many beers. He was surprised to see this side of Harriet—there was nothing about her that seemed even remotely weak-skinned. “Let’s just work together on this. I’m sure we can get it done in no time.”
David knew he was fucking up his own evening by helping her, but what the hell, he was no stranger to all-nighters. Harriet finally nodded, and together they went to work on the binders. It was the sort of detail-oriented crap that David had gotten good at in his brief stint at Merrill, and by ten they were already moving through the last few files. All the while, Harriet talked and David listened. She told him about her sisters, who were both
married with four kids apiece. About her father, a former priest turned scrap-metal salesman, who still lived in the same house he had first moved into when he’d immigrated from Italy. And about her boyfriend, who sounded like a real piece of work. He had failed out of cop school twice and was now a security guard in a bank in Midtown. Harriet stayed with him because she was pushing forty-five, and she didn’t really mind being the bigger earner, because Giovanni treated her real well. As he should, considering she’d been with the Merc for fifteen years.
By the time they finished with the last binder, David felt like they were old friends. After putting the stack back on her desk, she leaned forward, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and hurried toward the elevators. When the elevator doors opened, she was moving so fast, she nearly ran headlong into Reston. Reston sidestepped her, then saw David still straightening the binders on her desk. He sidled over, arms crossed against his chest.
“Well, look at you. Helping out, way past your bedtime, eh, Harvard boy?”
Reston’s Texas accent was really coming out; David smelled whiskey on his breath and assumed he had just come from the lounge upstairs.
“I try to do the right thing,” David said. “Once in a while you have to at least pretend to be human.”
Reston snorted, about to respond, when muffled drunken voices came out of the elevator behind him. They both turned just in time to see Vitzi and Rosa wrestling to see who could get through the open elevator doors first—the effect being that neither one of them was likely to make it before the doors reclosed on them.
“Hey, David,” Vitzi yelled through the few inches of space between the shutting doors. “We came back for you. You still owe us a pitcher.”
David quickly thought through the work he had left, then sighed. “Maybe in a few hours, if you’re still at the bar. Otherwise, you jackasses are on your own.”
Before they could respond, the elevator had shut. David turned and realized Reston was staring at him.
“A few days ago, these guys are calling you my girlfriend and putting enemas in your hospital room. Now they’re inviting you out to drink with them?”
David shrugged.
“My report cards always said I make friends easily.”
“Maybe you’re not as pathetic as I’d thought. You keep getting in good with the meatheads, and I’ll get some use out of you yet. Hell, you’re going to be my goddamn guinea translator!”
Now David knew Reston was drunk. But to tell the truth, he kind of liked the designation. That’s exactly what he was, a guinea translator. One foot in the traders’ world, one foot in Reston’s.
Then Reston said something that pricked at David’s thoughts.
“You know, the time’s gonna come when I’m going to have the power to make some real changes around here. Giovanni has tried—but he’s got too much to lose to really do things right. But me—I’ve got nothing to lose. And Giovanni isn’t going to be here forever. When he leaves, who do you think is going to be running this place? And if you somehow manage to last long enough to be here when that happens, you might just luck out yourself, Harvard boy.”
David opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. He wasn’t sure if Reston was talking out of his ass or, in his inebriated state, really trying to tell David something.
Either way, it was kind of a scary thought: the most powerful exchange on earth in the hands of a thirty-five-year-old Texan and his Guinea translator.
S
EPTEMBER
21, 2002
I
f one were to choose a place in which to have an existential dilemma, one could do a lot worse than a two-story penthouse suite in the Burj Al Arab Hotel.
Khaled leaned back against a luxurious leather couch in the center of one of the suite’s huge, glass-walled living rooms, while he watched two European men unroll blueprint after blueprint across the raised, circular glass coffee table in front of him. The two men were well dressed—both in tailored blue suits with crisply ironed ties—but their sartorial splendor paled in comparison to the magnificent decor surrounding them. Polished marble floors, multiple flat-screen TVs, Impressionist art on the walls, a redwood bar running the length of the room that would have rivaled the bar in most watering holes in Cambridge—and this was just one of two living rooms in the suite. Khaled had been given a full tour before the meeting began, and he knew that behind the bar a Plexiglas spiral staircase led upward to a second living room that contained a free-standing, smoked-glass wet room, a media center, two Jacuzzis, and a full-scale model of the ever-changing city down below.
Still, the decor of the place was secondary; it was the glass walls and the 360-degree views they provided that justified the thirty-thousand-dollar-a-night rate the hotel was charging the Europeans. The view was fitting, of course, considering the reason the Europeans had invited Khaled to their suite—and the reason he had accepted their invitation on his eighth day of work with the Finance Ministry. Even from his sunken position on the plush leather he could see the forest of cranes, the framework of constant construction clawing upward into the monumental work in progress that was the city’s skyline.
Madness.
He could think of no other word for it, though of course even that choice of word was not sufficient. Madness had a negative connotation; what was going on around Khaled was not wrong—it was simply
mad.
He could honestly say that the past eight days had negated everything he had ever learned in business school. Because what was going on outside that window, every day, was so unique in human history that no business textbook or lauded professor could possibly hope to explain it.
The Europeans were a case in point. Khaled shifted his gaze from the windows to the closer of the two men. He had introduced himself as Evin Mcdonough; to Khaled, he was a wild-eyed Irishman with a crown of bright red hair and shiny gold rings on all ten of his fingers. At the moment, he was fighting with one of the blueprints, trying to get the corners to stay flat against the glass table.
The second European was leaning over the Irishman’s shoulder, watching the battle with a mixture of bemusement and concern. He had called himself Nigel Barrett, but to Khaled he was an officious Englishman with wire-rimmed glasses and a thin, almost lipless smile.
It was a trick Khaled’s uncle had taught him: names were never as good labels as images, which is why people often forgot names but never forgot first impressions. Khaled doubted he would ever forget this meeting in the Al Arab’s lavish penthouse suite. Because it wasn’t just a first impression of the two men he
was witnessing, but a first impression of what his new role in life would be.
Thus, the existential dilemma.
He watched, silently, as the wild-eyed Irishman finally got the blueprint to behave, then stood back, a wide smile on his triangular face. The Englishman looked expectantly toward Khaled, waiting for his response.
Khaled simply could not find the words.
It would have been easier to respond if the two men really were mad—but if anyone deserved to be in a suite such as this, it was these two. The wild-eyed Irishman controlled a seven-billion-dollar real estate fund. The lipless Englishman ran one of the biggest architectural engineering firms in the world. Together, they had built many of the world’s most impressive hotels, skyscrapers, museums, and shopping malls. Still, nothing they had ever done before came close to the projects that were represented by the blueprints they had laid out in front of Khaled.
And these blueprints were just the tip of the iceberg. All week long Khaled had been taking meetings like this. Indeed, dealing with this sort of insanity was the bulk of his job at the ministry. Looking out the windows at the cranes that stretched for miles and miles in every direction, what else could he have expected?
Madness.
Even though the entire city-state around him had a population of only 1.4 million people, the relative level of construction dwarfed that of the entire Asian continent, China included. By creating an economic free-zone—unique in the region—and vigorously pursuing foreign partners, the great emir had turned the city into the fastest-growing metropolis on earth. But Sheik Maktoum and his brother Muhammed had not been content to build just another Arab city in a remarkably free corner of the Arab world—each construct had to be
remarkable
in its own right.
You couldn’t simply build a hotel; it had to be the Burj Al Arab, the tallest hotel in the world, with a huge sail spanning its entire thousand-foot facade.
You couldn’t simply build an island: the Palm Islands, when finished, would be the world’s largest man-made island structure—built from a staggering billion cubic meters of sand. And even that was not sufficient for the sheiks: plans were already in place to build an even
bigger
set of islands, designed to resemble the entire world when seen from the air.
You couldn’t simply build a shopping mall. The planned supermall that was soon to break ground had to be the largest shopping mall in the world. Twelve million square feet, containing fifteen mini-malls, an ice skating rink, an aquarium, and the world’s largest Arab souk.
You couldn’t simply build a skyscraper. The emir would soon announce the construction of what would become the world’s tallest structure—the final height of which would be a closely guarded secret, an indication of his resolve to attain and hold the title for years to come. Estimates that Khaled had seen in the finance minister’s office called for a height upward of twenty-five hundred feet.
And the list continued, on and on:
The world’s largest indoor ski slope.
The world’s largest museum.
The world’s largest—and only—underwater hotel. Completely submerged, accessible only by submarine.
And then there was what the two Europeans were now proposing. If Khaled had not been staring at the blueprints with his very own eyes, he would have thought it was some sort of bizarre joke.
“Of course, some of the technology is still in development,” the Englishman finally said, to break the silence. “But I assure you by the time we near completion—2010, we believe—it will be fully operational.”
Fully operational.
Khaled stared at the blueprint, but still could think of nothing to say.
A fully operational space port, where one day tourists would book trips to the stars. Khaled would have laughed out loud—except it wasn’t a joke. It was utter madness—but it was all real.
Khaled had been listening to men like the two Europeans all week long—architects, developers, money managers, urban visionaries—and by now his brain was overflowing with images of a country transforming so fast that it simply did not exist in the present tense.
By the year 2010, when this space port would be completed, the emir’s goal was to have fifteen million annual tourists—to a country of one and a half million people. A country whose outdoor temperature regularly reached over 120 degrees. A country that happened to be located smack dab in the center of the war-torn Arab world.
A noble, region-changing goal, magnificent and on a scale almost unimaginable. And Khaled was proud to now be a part of the emir’s vision. But at the same time he knew that his role as an agent of tourism—even on the scale that the sheiks hoped to achieve—would not ultimately be fulfilling. He believed he was destined for something more.
Khaled had to believe that for him there were more important things ahead than ski slopes and underwater hotels. He knew, from his own studies, that the emir’s goal of turning the country into the ultimate tourist destination was more than simply impressive—it was actually a matter of survival. Unlike other sheiks in the region, the emir’s source of wealth had an expiration date—because, simply put, unlike other sheiks in the region, he was facing a situation unique in the Arab world: his oil reserves were going to run out—perhaps within the next fifteen years. So he had come up with a plan to use the wealth he had now to create a new source of wealth for the future.
Tourism to replace oil.
But to Khaled—and assuredly to the emir—this was only the beginning. Tourism and oil were very different beasts. To Khaled, raised in part by a sheik whose seemingly limitless fortune and power were based on what the Arab street had long called “the Black Blood of Allah,” oil was much more than just a source of wealth. A nation built on oil was not the same as a nation built
on tourism. Khaled, and certainly the emir, knew that tourism alone would simply turn the city-state into a curiosity, an amusement park of sorts.
A huge Arab Disney World.
There had to be more. And Khaled was determined to use all his faculties to find that next, magnificent leap forward—whatever form it took.
“So,” said the wild-eyed Irishman, coughing, his fierce energy finally overcoming his patience, “what do you think?”
Khaled took a deep breath, then pressed his hands together, resting his chin against his fingers. “A space port. Very intriguing. Maybe we could also add some layers to the project. Maybe find some prehistoric DNA. Build an amusement park next door, filled with giant dinosaurs.”
The Irishman looked at him for a full beat, then rubbed his angled jaw. “I’m not sure that’s something we’ve figured out yet, is it?”
There was a brief pause, and then the Europeans finally realized Khaled was joking. The Englishman let out a little laugh, then took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with a sleeve. “Seriously, Mr. Aziz, let’s get down to business. The space port is just one idea. We’ve got plenty more.” Undeterred, he pulled another blueprint out from behind the coffee table and placed it on top of the space port plan. “Now this is something really cool, a ten-million-square-foot water park that rotates three hundred sixty degrees every six hours. And get this—
the entire thing is actually one hundred feet underground
.”
Somewhere between the man’s description of an inverted waterfall that ran up instead of down and the longest man-made lazy river in existence, Khaled’s mind began to wander. If he had all the money and power of a sheik, and he really wanted to change the world, where would he look for inspiration?