Free The Trojan Sea by Richard Herman Page B

course, all were billed to RayTex Oil. Steiner hated being alone.
    “I’m much better,” he replied. “Thank you.”
    Marsten played the affable host, and the three were soon seated in a little circle drinking tea and coffee. L.J. gently tapped Steiner’s knee. “The results you’ve obtained with Seismic Double Reflection are absolutely amazing. But I must admit I don’t understand how you did it.” Steiner puffed up at the adulation in her voice and gave her a few bombastic simplifications about wave-propagation characteristics. “Ah, yes,” she replied before going into a detailed discussion of how he had used multiple seismic explosions to reflect off the leading signal the moment it hit a reflecting surface. The initial result had been a lot of “noise,” or confused signals, and she wanted to know how Steiner had filtered, and then modulated, the “noise” into meaningful signals.
    Steiner was no fool. The price of entry into the oil industry was technical expertise and hard field experience. L.J. obviously had the first. “May I ask where you studied?”
    “I studied petroleum engineering at the University of Texas.” She batted her eyelashes at him.
    “Their program is much better than I thought,” Steiner said. L.J. beamed at his praise and gave her hair a little toss. His hand crept out and rested on her right knee. He was not above being sweet-talked by a very pretty woman, but there was a price to be paid. Marsten watched with fascination, wondering how much of his hand Steiner would get back. Perhaps a warning was in order. “L.J.,” Marsten said, “also worked for seven years in the field, until her father died and she inherited the company.”
    Steiner understood and snatched his hand back. Field work was the rough-and-tumble side of the oil industry, and to survive for seven years took a special kind of toughness that few men had. “May I ask where?”
    Again the adoring eyes that he should ask such a perceptive question. “Where the action was. Siberia, the Kalahari, the Grand Banks.” She saved the worst for last. “Eritrea.”
    Steiner shot Marsten a quick look. Eritrea was on the Red Sea coast of Africa and had been part of Ethiopia until 1993, when it declared independence. In 1998 a border war with Ethiopia erupted, and an oil-prospecting team had been taken hostage by a local warlord. “L.J.,” Marsten said, “was the one who negotiated our release.”
    “You were one of the hostages?” Steiner asked Marsten.
    “We were all hostages,” Marsten replied in a low voice. The memories and the tension were back, still unresolved issues. “If L.J. hadn’t been there, they would have killed us.”
    Steiner’s breath came fast. “The rumors about torture, were they true?”
    Marsten pulled into himself, and a fragile, half-pathetic look spread across his face. L.J. recognized the symptoms and changed the subject, leading them away from that traumatic time. “Emil, you’re not going to tell us where the elephant is, are you?”
    Steiner didn’t answer.
    She gazed into his eyes and appealed to his sense of loyalty. “We’ve had such a productive relationship in the past. All the grants for your research when no one else shared your vision, our support when the university wanted to fire you…” She let her voice trail off. RayTex had saved Steiner’s job, not to mention his reputation, by buying the silence of four young women students and his university’s forgiveness with an endowment. It was a large endowment because there was much to forgive: the misappropriated funds, the sexual harassment, the four girls, the faculty wives.
    “And I have delivered as promised,” Steiner said.
    Appeals to Steiner’s loyalty weren’t going to work. L.J. gave a little nod, accepting the challenge. Marsten caught it and felt sorry for the scientist.
    “We need to find a common ground,” L.J. said, starting the hard negotiations.
    “I was thinking of a percentage of the