11

 

Jerusalem, Israel

Abe Zeffren wasn’t easily fooled. He’d seen far too much during his years inside Israel’s government bureaucracy to be easily taken in. He’d learned over the years that quiet persistence nearly always paid off and that questions asked in a benign fashion were more likely to produce results than bluster and confrontation.

But none of that had seemed to work with his Russian visitor. His questions had largely been parried. And his attempts to get to the bottom of what the Russian truly knew—and what his intentions were with Israel’s National Oil Company and the Dead Sea—had gotten him nowhere.

Abe hadn’t paid much attention to the nature of the visit when he’d gotten the initial e-mail. Exploring for oil in Israel was such a ridiculous, colossal waste of time that he hadn’t been required to pay much attention to inquiries during his entire stint as deputy oil commissioner.

The visit had actually been set up by an assistant at INOC—not by someone from Russia. He hadn’t even bothered to write the man’s name down. He’d simply logged the meeting on his calendar and promptly forgotten about it until today.

But now Abe was intrigued. Something didn’t add up. So shortly after his visitor had dropped off the check and the signed papers, Abe decided to do a little exploring of his own. He pulled the battered oil register held together by electrical tape down from the shelf and opened it to the section where the visitor had filed the paperwork.

Abe looked it over quickly. Every signature on it was from INOC, save the one signed by the visitor. Sadly, the signature was nearly illegible. He wondered vaguely if that was by design.

He pushed his chair back, ran his fingers through his gray hair, and sauntered back out to the lobby. The front desk clerk didn’t bother to look up.

“I was wondering if you logged my visitor in when he arrived this morning,” Abe asked.

The clerk glanced up at him then. “You checking up on me?”

“No, I’m looking for his name,” Abe said with an easy smile.

The clerk appeared surprised. “He was your meeting. You didn’t get his name?”

“He didn’t offer it. And I didn’t ask. He had proper papers and maps—and a certified check.”

The clerk grunted and pushed the visitor log book forward so Abe could see it for himself.

“This is your handwriting?” Abe asked. The man’s name still wasn’t quite legible.

The clerk looked down at the log book. “It is.”

“Perhaps you can help me out with the name. I can’t make it out.”

The clerk peered at it briefly. “Nicolai Petrov.”

“And did he present a government passport?”

“No, a personal one.”

Abe nodded. “Thanks,” he said and began to saunter back to his office. He stopped, though, and turned back to the clerk. “By the way, I’ll be going out in the field for the next two or three days, should any one ask or need me.”

“I’ll be sure to let anyone who asks know that,” the clerk said.

Abe had to laugh. No one would ask. He doubted anyone would even realize he’d gone—not even the oil commissioner, who was almost never in the office himself.

He tried to place the name as he walked back to his cluttered office. But it was no good. The name was vaguely familiar but not so much that he could place it. And a Google search revealed a number of Nicolai Petrovs. It could be any one of them.

Abe clicked through several of the links, but none made much sense. The closest match seemed to be a patent attorney in Moscow, but he doubted that was the right Petrov.

“I wonder. Maybe you’re with the government, too,” Abe muttered aloud to himself. He found himself doing that more and more lately. Perhaps it was a sign of growing senility… Probably not. More likely he was spending far too much time by himself.

He started to search on different government Web sites, clicking through names that showed up. It seemed hopeless. Russia was an enormous place.

He was about to give up to pack for his field trip when he found it. He’d been staring at a picture from the International Herald Tribune— a picture from an event with Russia’s well-known prime minister, Andrei Rowan—and the answer was staring back at him. The man was in the picture with Rowan, in the background.

“Which means you are government,” Abe said to himself. He started a search on articles about Andrei Rowan. There were thousands of them, from his many publicized adventures. But after a couple of dozen, he discovered what he was looking for.

Nicolai Petrov was Andrei Rowan’s chief of staff. He’d been with Rowan for years, always in the background. His name rarely showed up in the press.

Well, I’ll be, Abe thought. Why in the world would the prime minister of Russia send his chief of staff down here to sign a partnership agreement with our national oil company? What do they know that we don’t—or, perhaps, want?

Abe pulled the oil register out and studied the INOC oil license again. Nowhere did it say that their new funding partner was the government of Russia. He thumbed through the preliminary geological survey maps and findings.

It was impossible to know for certain, but it appeared as if they were going to commit some serious dollars to looking at the formations around the Dead Sea. Their scientists planned to conduct detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology—and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry—throughout the area. They also planned to work with an American university to generate 3D maps and algorithms of the area.

But the last two paragraphs of the preliminary report struck him as odd. They expressed an interest in experimenting with research on oil shale extraction technology in partnership with INOC. That was indeed strange. There had been a flurry of trade reports recently about interest in the previously worthless oil shale in the barren Shfela Basin south and west of Jerusalem.

Abe had heard promises of “new” technology to extract oil safely from shale for nearly as long as he’d been deputy oil commissioner. Almost none of it seemed to work, most of it was farfetched, and the technology that did actually work was both environmentally ruinous and much more expensive than drilling for crude oil in proven deposits.

But Abe also knew that hope always springs eternal. And should someone develop safe, inexpensive ways to extract oil from shale, well, then Israel was certainly sitting on one of the biggest deposits the world had ever seen in the Shfela Basin. That sort of scientific advance—combined with what the scientists were saying about the natural gas deposits in the Levant basin off the coast of Haifa—would make Israel an oil and gas superpower within a decade.

It was all very strange to Abe. Hunting for oil in Israel had always been a loser’s preoccupation. To be honest, the Russian interest made no sense. Israel had no oil—at least not any that was worth the cost of recovering. There were more than four hundred dry wells in northern Israel alone. So perhaps the Russians know something we don’t, Abe thought. Either that, or there’s some serious misdirection going on. Once the camel has its nose under the tent, it eventually makes its way inside.

Either way, Abe figured, now was a good time to take a firsthand look at that area around the north end of the Dead Sea. It was a short drive. And while he was out, he figured he might pay a visit to the Shfela Basin, then take a drive south in the Negev to see the Ashkelon-Eilat pipeline work he’d been hearing about.