Free The Emissary by Patricia Cori

flight back to San Francisco.
    Mat studied her reactions, and she studied his. Looking back at him, she was reminded of the expression
“The devil that you know is better than the angel you don’t.”
She thought about the monumental task that lay before her: the battles she would have to face; the resistance she would come up against from private interest groups, politicians, the military. She decided, right then and there, that having Mat Anderson as an ally would be, by far, the better alternative to having him as an enemy.
    “There will be a backlash in the community if I take donations from an oil company—you know that.” She slid the check back across the table. “It may be easy for you to buy souls, Mat Anderson, but this one’s not up for sale. Be sure you get that right—from the start.”
    Mat picked up the check from the table, and put it in his lapel pocket. He looked embarrassed and out of his depth. In his world, nobody walked away from easy money.
    “But I will go out on your ship and see what I can do to help prevent you from ripping the ocean floor apart, like they’ve done in the Gulf.”
    Mat never expected her to agree, especially after she handed back $100,000. Jamie was like no one else he had ever met. Shehad ethics; she had moral integrity. She was clearly not corruptible, at least not for money—that test was over. These were uncharted waters for a guy like him, because he always found a person’s “price.” Always.
    “One month is all I can give you.”
    “One month is all I’ve asked you for.”
    “You’ll help me talk to the right commissioners and subcommittees in Washington?”
    “I can do better than that. I can promise you that they will listen—but I can’t promise that they will hear you.”
    “No matter what happens out there?”
    “No matter what. I know there are no guarantees, and it would be ridiculous to set it up that way. Then again,” he said, wryly, “let’s not forget Pakistan.”
    She said yes. They shook hands and made their deal, and it was more generous than she could have imagined, just as he promised. Whether she liked it or not, Jamie was stepping up into the big leagues, back into the oil world, about to take her work to the next level. She would fly home the next morning, put her house in order, and get the lawyers to work on her PICC Foundation—the Psychic Institute for Cetacean Communications—so that she would be sailing out on the ocean with that intention clearly in place when Mat Anderson’s call to action came in.

6
Political Maneuvers
    Just two weeks after the command performance in New York, Mat was summoned to Washington, DC, where he had been “invited” by a White House insider to dine with some of the corporation’s favored congressmen and -women, and a few of the company’s most important investors.
    The employees knew that, if the CEO of the company was being called to Washington, it meant a shake-up was likely to come when he got back. Everybody wondered what he would be serving up after his return to Houston, particularly his team of executive directors, who had all received an official memo, advising them to make themselves available for a top-level management meeting at eleven o’clock that Monday morning. Rumors flew, fueled by Mat’s secretary, Louise, and her gossip network in the secretarial pool. The word was to keep an extremely low profile while everyone waited for the boss to return. Then, they would have to ride out the storm until after the meeting, where, no doubt, the proverbial shit was going to be hitting the big, giant fan.
    In Washington, biting cold pierced the darkness, entombing the capital in a shroud of wintery gloom. Obstructed by ice and snow, the city streets were in mayhem, with traffic in a virtual gridlock. Mat was late. His limousine pulled into the driveway of theprivate dinner club on the Hill at 7:00 p.m., past the cocktail hour. He was running low on antacid tablets, and the evening