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  Pradeep had completed his second round of analysis, but then he went back over each step he had taken a third time, making a tiny adjustment or correction here or there, and adding to his exploration notes. By midnight, he was confident that his analysis of the reservoirs was accurate. It was getting late. Now he needed to do a drilling profile for each of the three target sites. He started at the top of the first reservoir. His calculations indicated the zone was 5,456 feet below sea level. He meticulously scanned upward through layer after layer of the ground documenting the type of sediment, estimating the density and possible acidity, and determining the depth and estimated time of drilling through each horizon. Thirty years ago, when he was still in college, he had worked a couple of summers on drilling rigs in West Texas. He knew that eventually a well logger would be comparing the notes he made here, this evening, to the actual results as the well was drilled. This was called taking well cores from drilling and logging the results. The kind of documentation he was providing now would prove incredibly valuable and reassuring to the drilling crew during the many days it would take to drill this well. Some of the horizons were very consistent and hundreds of feet thick so the work went relatively fast. By three a.m. he was nearing the surface level and the layers of sediments and rock were narrow and highly differentiated. Surface casing would have to be driven into the ground more than two hundred feet to get below the water table and make sure the drilling mud and drilling fluids did not leak out into the surrounding ecosystem. Pradeep took his time cataloging each of the detailed layers of soil.

  Then, using some of his spectrographic equipment, he went back to the pay sand. The ratio of sand to shale was an astounding 67%. Pradeep found it extremely odd. Swinging to another area of pay sand, he ran the test again and got 66%. The only way to get a reading this high, is when the oil is under an ocean, or under the Gulf of Mexico. Dying crustaceans, and sedimentary sand, over millions of years, are the only thing that can produce this high a ratio of sand to shale. The highest he had seen onshore was 38%, and that was in southern Louisiana which had once been under an ancient, saltwater sea. It was possible perhaps, that some very large geological event could have created such an unusual fingerprint several thousand years ago. However, it was totally uncharacteristic to maintain such a perfectly even and precise level across a broad expanse of geography. Well-defined formations would run for several hundred yards on his profile and then end abruptly at this line of aberration. He took more than twenty minutes to document this odd piece of geology before continuing. Finally, he went back to the well bore and continued the path upwards, documenting each of the final layers as he had before.

  At 3:30 a.m., Pradeep began his surface work. He set the longitude/latitude coordinates carefully and then analyzed the topography above ground. In his second year with Empire Oil, he had been sitting at his desk one afternoon when one of the senior vice presidents had come storming into the work area looking for Pradeep’s boss. It turned out that his boss had sited a well without checking the topography. When the drilling company headed out to set the well, the coordinates put the well right in the middle of an old cemetery in West Texas. Unable to drill, the rig sat there for three days, at a day rate of thirty thousand a day, while the whole department worked to find an alternate site for the drilling rig. Eight years later, at the guy’s retirement luncheon, they were still giving the guy grief; even presented him with a tombstone commemorating his years of service with the company. Pradeep didn’t need to be reminded to check the topography for the drilling rig. What was on the surface? He scanned the surface level of the seismic maps.

  It was hilly—very hilly. Probably not too steep to drill on, but Pradeep had never realized that northern Wisconsin had such elevations. Some of the hills rose more than thirty-two hundred feet. Pradeep continued his detailed note taking. There might be significant delays while they built a road to the drilling site and leveled it for drilling. For one of his highly rated drill sites, he wondered, is there already a road close to the site? He pulled up the USGS surface maps from Empire’s own digital library. He plugged in the coordinates. The screen popped up in front of him, showing roads and surface elevations. The area was flat as a board. This was a completely different set of data that did not come from the Wisconsin tapes—it was data that Empire owned. This data and these maps showed houses, schools, roads and cemeteries—basically, all of the ownership of private land in the county and any houses or other improvements on the property. He used maps like these all of the time. He double checked the coordinates. The CCC seismic showed very hilly land surface, again, over thirty-two hundred feet of elevation. But on the left side of his screen was the topographic map which showed the area was almost flat. He plugged in his exact drill site coordinates for his preferred well site and pulled it up on his Topo screen. It showed his drill site to be perfectly in the middle of a seven-hundred-acre lake. It was named Canthook Lake. He searched the internet using “highest elevation in Wisconsin,” and got back Timms Hill, elevation 1,951 feet. Then “lowest elevation in Wisconsin,” Lake Michigan, 581 feet. That meant the highest possible elevation in Wisconsin would be about 1400 feet.

  Thinking that perhaps his topographical coordinates could be wrong, he went back to the original digital map, found the top of the reservoir where he planned to position the well, and checked the east-west coordinates. They were exactly as he had recorded them. How could the coordinates be correct on the underground digital map? The topographical map from the CCC data showed mountains, and the USGS data from Empire showed a seven-hundred-acre lake. He slowly rose from his chair in the early morning hours and went to the bathroom. It had been noon when he had eaten the cheese sandwich he had brought from home. 4:30 in the morning. He stopped by the vendomatic and bought a container of dried soup, added some water, and stood idly as it rotated in the microwave. Something was terribly wrong. In thirty years, he had never seen such a thing. He removed the steaming soup, picked up a plastic spoon, and headed back to his desk. He checked the coordinates on the well bore and then slowly moved the cursor up, layer by layer, horizon by horizon. When he got to two hundred feet, he stopped and stared blankly at the screen. Dragging his cursor, he highlighted a rectangle on the map and then clicked on the microscope button to enlarge it the maximum 500%. Tracing along the razor thin line he saw sediment after sediment cut off unnaturally by this strange horizon. For some reason, someone had digitally pasted the two maps together here, two hundred feet below the surface. The quality of the digital map was so good—too good. The odd layer of sediment with the high sand/shale ratio, and then the thin razor line running evenly beneath the surface. Then it came to him. Someone had doctored the CCC maps. Or they were fakes. Oh, they were real digital maps all right, and they showed oil that was really there, but they had been taken from some other oil field somewhere in the world. It would be almost impossible to tell where. Whoever had done this was an excellent geophysicist—maybe a geologist. Pradeep went back over the line where the two maps had been pasted together and noted that the seam had been digitally scrambled using a randomizer to mask the seam. Very nice work. The entire industry had assumed that these old tapes had just been innocently lying in the basement of the Capitol for fifty or sixty years. Certainly, none of his colleagues had suspected anything. They had all left quietly while the evening was still young. Now Pradeep was going to have some fun at the 6:30 a.m. so-called consensus meeting. He captured several digital slices from each of his files and routed them to a high-resolution color printer. Then he took the color pages and stood over the copy machine while it warmed up. He was going to need some overheads to explain himself. Empire Oil and Arbor Energy had just made a huge, public commitment to explore and develop a mammoth oil field in northern Wisconsin, and now there was no oil. Pradeep slid blank transparencies in over the paper drawer and then pushed the copy button. In a moment, he had ten color overhead slides that told his story.

  Sunday morning. He had slept three hour
s in his office. It wasn’t the first time. He was fourth on the list of explorationists to talk. As the meeting began, he quietly asked if he could go first, but the exploration department general manager courteously replied that he wanted to stick to the original agenda. Pradeep sat quietly enjoying himself while the first three geophysicists made total fools of themselves. Each of them outlined and described the size of their three biggest reservoirs and quickly targeted the preferred drilling sites. Everything was very business-like and to the point. Finally, it was Pradeep’s turn.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began. (Last year they had finally hired their first female in the department). “Unfortunately, I believe there is no oil on the section of maps that I was asked to analyze. Or if there is oil, these maps do not reflect that.”

  Pradeep was acting funny. So, there was no oil on his section, fine, that happens all of the time when you divide up a prospect. Still, he was just standing up by the projector smiling. The guy looked like crap. He must have pulled another one of his all-nighters. Hadn’t even shaved. A good geophysicist though—you had to give him that.

  “Now, despite what my three colleagues have just told you, I believe there is no oil on the section of Wisconsin land that they have analyzed, either. While it may be statistically possible that there is some oil, it would certainly be nothing like the oil pictured in the presentations they have just shown you.” The room grew quiet. Where was this headed? Pradeep put his first slide on the projector.

  “Here is a very nice reservoir that I looked at yesterday. My estimates show that, by itself, it holds more than one hundred million barrels of oil. There are two other slightly smaller reservoirs on the section of the tape that I was asked to analyze. The problem is that the tapes are fakes. They are frauds.”

  “Where is this heading, Pradeep?” the department manager’s voice was quivering as he spoke. Maybe from anger, probably from fear.

  “Let me show you what I found,” Pradeep said quickly. “After finding the best point to enter the reservoir I set my coordinates and moved up through the elevations to the surface. Next, I ran two standard checks on the target drill site. I ran the topo check and I found the site to be extremely hilly—elevations to seventeen hundred feet.” He popped the slide up on the overhead. Everyone could see the hilly sections of over the drill site.

  “Next, I checked the USGS surface map, but I found this.” Some squinted at the screen; all of them leaned forward in their chairs to see the well site and coordinates squarely in the middle of a lake. “The land surface is flat. Actually, it’s a lake.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s impossible for a lake of this size to be sitting over an area with this thirty-two hundred feet of change in topography. In fact, the maximum possible topographic change in Wisconsin is about 1500 feet.” He flipped up the slide, with Wisconsin’s highest and lowest elevations. Then he quickly flipped back to the previous slide, and then returned to the lake slide.

  “After retracing my steps, I rechecked all of my coordinates and found them to be correct. As you may recall, I tend to be a bit anal at times…” He drew a small laugh from the crowd. As I retraced the digital map lines, I found this.” He put up an overhead slide which showed the area two hundred feet below the surface. “Unless someone is playing a very bad trick on only me, I am quite sure that all of our digital maps look like this. If you magnify this section at five hundred percent, it will look like this,” and he placed the next slide on the overhead. “Ladies and gentlemen, two separate digital maps from goodness-knows-where have been digitally pieced together to make these tapes from Wisconsin. Additionally, my guess is that the oil reservoirs we are looking at are from an undersea formation somewhere. The sand-to-shale ratio is about 67%. Clearly, a mix we find undersea, but not on land formations. What we have is rubbish. These maps are all frauds.”

  Everyone sat in complete shock and silence. This little man whom they had given so much grief to over the years had made an irrefutable case.

  “Okay,” said the manager, flushed in the face, “fifteen minutes. I’m giving everyone fifteen minutes to go check their sections. Check what Pradeep said, and come back here immediately. I don’t want anyone breathing a word of this. If I see anyone either making a call or answering their phone in the next fifteen minutes, I will personally fire you on the spot. Get out of here.” The room jumped to its feet and people pushed out through the door. When the meeting reconvened fifteen minutes later, the Executive Vice President of Global Exploration was sitting just to the right of the exploration department manager. Dick Jansen was standing just inside the door.

  “I assume that everyone confirmed Pradeep’s findings?” No one spoke, but they all slowly nodded their heads up and down. “Pradeep, maybe I can ask you to take Mr. Jansen here, really all of us, through the little presentation you did for us earlier.”

  CHAPTER 52

  Empire Oil executives were scattered all over the world, but Jansen had immediately called an emergency video conference with the executive committee. It was Sunday afternoon. The Empire President was in London where it was already 4:00 p.m. Jansen laid out the facts. With very little debate, they concluded they had to go public immediately with the findings, no matter the consequences. If word of this got out to the market before they announced it, they would have enough lawsuits filed against them to fill a library. There was some debate over how to involve the state of Wisconsin. At the end of the day, they agreed it was best to make a joint announcement with the governor. In fact, it would be best if they actually had Wisconsin make the announcement on their own.

  Jansen had everyone he knew in Madison looking for the damn governor, and nobody knew where he was. Late Sunday afternoon. Nobody at work had seen him, but they thought he could have stopped at the country club to work out on the treadmill. His assistants weren’t with him, and he did not have either of his cellular phones on. Jansen was frantic. He had to go public with this. Finally, he got the governor on the line. The damn fool had stopped by the driving range to drive some balls and then had a few drinks in the bar. He was enjoying his best standings in the polls since he had taken office.

  “Jerry, this is Jansen. We’ve got a problem.” There was an unusual sense of urgency in Jansen’s voice.

  “What’s the problem?” the governor asked lightly.

  “We spent all Saturday analyzing the tapes we got from you. This morning we had a big meeting. They’re fakes, Jerry. All nine of them. They’ve been doctored.”

  “That’s impossible. We had our guys at the university look those tapes over and they confirmed themselves, the same size oil fields as your guys did.”

  “Oh, the tapes show there’s oil all right, and plenty of it. But I’ve had a dozen of my guys study them, and they’ve been digitally altered. The data is from another oil field somewhere in the world. It’s been made to look like it’s located in Wisconsin.”

  “That’s impossible, I don’t understand,” the governor was dumbstruck. “I can send the tapes back to the geology department down at the university and have them look at them again.”

  “Jerry, listen to me. The tapes are frauds. It took one of my best guys to make the discovery that they are fake, but we’ve confirmed it. We’ve got to go public with this and we don’t have a lot of time.” Jansen was direct.

  “No, no, for God’s sake, we can’t go public with this until we know more.” Conlan sounded frantic.

  “Jerry, listen to me. We need to make a joint announcement. I’ve got a draft of a joint press release we need to release, and we need to release it now. It’s Sunday night. The markets are going to open early Monday and we have to disclose this now. If you want, I will fly up and we can do a press conference first thing Monday morning.” Jansen was pushing.

  “I can’t. I can’t go to the people and tell them this was a mistake. It will ruin me. I’ll be the laughingstock for years to come.” Conlan’s Sunday was suddenly not going so well.


  “How do you think I feel?” said Jansen. “Empire’s going to hang me for this. Our only chance is to back out of it with grace and dignity, and stress the fact that fraudulent activities have occurred that led us to act the way we did.”

  “You are out of your mind, Jansen,” said the governor. “I gave you a copy of the tapes before anyone else had even seen them. I set this up for you guys. Now you’re coming back to me and you want me to take the fall on this. You are out of your damn mind.”

  “Jerry, I don’t want to talk about stuff like this over the phone. We both know how, ah, let’s say, “beneficial” our relationship has been for you over the last three years. I don’t think you’d like it if all of a sudden people started asking questions about how that pitiful little investment company you set up supposedly bought that condominium we got for you in Aspen. That would be embarrassing for you now, wouldn’t it Jerry?” Jansen paused.

  “It’s not going to work Jansen. If you want to expose me, fine, expose me, and I’ll take you and all of Empire Oil and Arbor Energy down with me. I’ll plea bargain my way out of it and you bastards won’t be able to set foot in the Midwest for the next twenty years. I ain’t going to go do some press conference and tell everybody this was my fault. You go do your press conference if you want, and I’ll have my comments later in the day. That’s the best I can do for you.” The governor had called his bluff.