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Bill had arranged for her to meet with four members of the House and one senator that day. She’d practiced her talk until she was blue in the face—she knew the entire alphabet-soup of organizations that were on board with their mission—she could cite statistics until she was blue in the face, and yet she still felt a twinge of nervousness as she joined the other lobbyists going through Capitol Hill. She had a few vials of contaminated ground water to make her point, and a bunch of flyers from the various organizations that Eco Energy worked with.
The first few House members she spoke with were polite, but it was clear that none of them were persuaded by her speech. With the third one, she tossed the script, and argued from the stand point of, “What will voters be looking at in the next election?” She might not have convinced the third and fourth that sustainable energy was important, but at the very least she was able to persuade them that voters cared about their drinking water and that the groups she represented would be sure to punish them at the ballot.
It was lunchtime, now: the halls suddenly flooded with staffers, all of them, it seemed yapping on their phones, or texting furiously. Most of them, she divined, were placing lunch orders for the their offices: meatball sandwiches, diet cokes, that sort of thing.
She eschewed the crowded elevator and took the stairs. She wasn’t the only one—the stairwell was full of the echoes of tapping shoes and clicking heels, and when she reached the ground floor she glanced behind her to check how far the person behind her was—
And walked right into Malcolm Raines—who’d been carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees—and they were both summarily covered with coffee. He wore his hair longer than it had been in the press release pictures that she’d seen, but she’d know those soulful brown eyes and patrician nose anywhere.
She blanched, as Bill’s statistics about Malcolm Raines rushed back to her: he’d made his first billion in tech before he was eighteen, his next billion coding and designing AI systems for Amazon. As far as oil billionaires went, he was far from the worst—his companies did go through extra measures to minimize their impact, but there was no getting around the fact that deep-core drilling was incredibly destructive and the machinery needed had to be moved through once-pristine wilderness. And, like all oil billionaires, he had Congress eating out of his hand. The suit he was wearing was probably worth more than her life. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him—sure, he gave away a lot of his fortune to good causes, but he still made money by the bucketful doing serious damage to the environment.
“Well, my dry cleaner will earn every cent of her thirty dollars this time,” he said mildly, pulling her over to the side so that they wouldn’t get run over by the masses that were milling around them. Nobody was even looking at them—coffee must be spilled all the time in these halls. He dabbed at the spots with a napkin, but then he shrugged out of the jacket
“I’m so sorry,” she finally managed.
“No, it’s my fault. I’d probably have spilled it on myself anyway, taking the stairs. I’m such a klutz.”
“You?” She couldn’t help cracking a smile. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing, anyway, getting the coffee? Aren’t you a billionaire or something?”
“Believe it or not I don’t have much staff, and I only travel with my personal assistant,” he said, “though I might change that in the future if I’m planning on making any more coffee runs.”
“Let me get it,” she said. She could afford an extra dry-cleaning bill, and it was at least as much her fault as it was his.
“I couldn’t,” he said, brushing aside her offer. “It’s just a suit, and it’s just coffee. It’s not the end of the world, and odds are I’d have spilled it on myself anyway. So, you know me?”
“I’ve heard a lot about the companies you control, Mr. Raines,” she said modestly. “I wouldn’t say that I know you. I don’t think anybody can.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
Yes, you idiot, what was that supposed to mean? She did the only thing that made sense: she shrugged and said, “Just that someone with your means must find it very hard to meet someone who’s really into you and not your money.”
“Are you offering?” he asked, smiling playfully.
Oh shit, he thinks I’m flirting!
Well, you kind of were.
“Mr. Raines, I’m here as a lobbyist on behalf of the groups trying to shut you down.”
“All the more reason to ask you to dinner, then,” he said.
“I’m not for sale,” she said, “unlike the Congressmen you’re probably bribing.”
“Oh, I’m not here to bribe them,” he said. “I’m helping them to refine their solar policy.”
She stopped, taken aback by this glib admission of his. “You’re—you’re here to help sustainability?”
He sighed and smiled, as if he’d given this lecture a thousand times before. “I’m not an idiot,” he said. “It takes hundreds of millions years to make one barrel of oil that we burn just to get from here to there. Eventually we’re going to run out, or else it’ll cost too much to tap. Solar is getting cheaper, better—it’s just a question of math.”
She frowned, puzzled. “So you don’t really care if the world burns and goes to hell?”
“The world doesn’t care if I burn,” he said. “Why should I care if the world does?”
“Because—because it’s the right thing to do!” she sputtered.
They’d been heading up the stairs, to his meeting, and now she opened the door for him. One accident a day was enough for her.
