had told the man’s representative in Madrid, we were the best chance he had.
The man nodded. How much would it cost? he wanted to know.
Alexander had said that it would take at least $3 million.
The man balked, and countered with $1.8 million. And: would I mind if he filled a private jet with cash and sent it our way? Or, if that wasn’t suitable, they could line the interior walls of a car with the cash instead, and deliver it to a secret, prearranged set of coordinates, removing its doors and slitting its tires so that no one else could steal it, he added. It was in this way that contracts were settled in his country, he said. Shocked and out of my depth, I frantically called Alexander.
When I reached him, he casually explained that we did not accept cash, as if he were often offered that option, and he demanded a wire transfer. It wasn’t an issue—by the time I arrived back in England, on January 2, the money had hit the account whose number Alexander had provided. He was over the moon. The $1.8 million deal was the largest SCL had ever achieved in so short a time. He said he knew that I was going to continue to show him amazing things. The deal with the Nigerians hadn’t been just beginner’s luck, he was sure of it.
I was thrilled as well. I presumed I’d make a healthy commission or a split of the profits, maybe even enough to save my parents’ home from the banks and set them up comfortably for a time. I called my sister to share the good news.
But Alexander had other ideas. We hadn’t talked about a commission for me, and Prince Idris was expecting one, too, because he’d made the introduction. Also, it was Alexander who had chosen the team to work in-country, and had set the budget, which was going to be expensive.
I was crestfallen. Here I had made an enormous deal for the company, and the only compensation I’d be getting was my per diem. It didn’t seem fair.
I called Chester to vent.
I don’t know precisely when in our friendship it had dawned on me that Chester was more privileged than I would ever have imagined being myself. I knew he’d gone to boarding school in Switzerland. I knew he’d traveled everywhere—but then I learned that, some of the time, it was in a private jet. He didn’t have access to his family funds, so he had to work for his own money and live on whatever he made, but because the family he came from was a cushion he could rely on if anything went wrong, he was clearly in an entirely different class.
Still, every now and then, he would say or do something that reminded me of the stratum he was a part of, the experiences he’d had, and I would suddenly realize just how different we were. As he sat on the phone listening to me vent, he agreed that what I’d done for SCL was remarkable, that I deserved better than that. And that was when he said he had an idea for an opportunity to make even more connections and possibly drum up additional business for myself that would lead to an actual commission from SCL: together, he and I could go to Davos for the annual conference of the World Economic Forum, slated for late January, only a few weeks away.
His merely suggesting that we attend Davos was one of those things that made me realize at a much deeper level that Chester was extremely well connected. I knew he’d attended the conference before, but I had had no idea what that meant. I’d certainly read about “Davos.” Since 1971, the mountain resort town in the Swiss Alps had hosted a world-famous international conference of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a nonprofit organization whose members were the world’s billionaires and executives of the most valuable companies on the planet. Attending the conference each year along with the uber rich were public intellectuals, journalists, and the heads of state from the top seventy nations ranked by GDP. They came to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,”1 in sessions that focused on everything from artificial intelligence to solving economic crises. Davos attendees that year were to include Angela Merkel of Germany; the premier of China, Li Keqiang; U.S. secretary of state John Kerry; and business leaders from a number of Fortune 200 companies.2
For all its good intentions, Davos had in recent years become known for its decadence—the partying, the hijinks, the poseurs and movie stars who had begun to crash it. In 2011 in Davos, Anthony Scaramucci, who would go on to become Donald Trump’s spokesman for the briefest time in history, held a wine tasting that devolved, as one reporter wrote, into “a drunken mess.” There were rumors of orgies, but Chester said that that was ridiculous, as no one would risk that kind of reputational damage on the world stage.3
No, he assured me. Davos was mostly a place where people did a year’s worth of business in one week, and it was important to keep as low a profile there as possible.
How could you not go? Chester said. It wasn’t really a question.
But “be prepared,” he said. “The people are vultures. Don’t let them take advantage of you. Don’t drink too much, and don’t talk to people that you don’t need to.”
His last piece of advice? There was no use bringing heels, he warned. Davos was high in the mountains, and the streets of the village were precipitous. The Swiss, Chester said, were so persnickety about their wooden floors that they refused to salt the sidewalks, and in January, the ground was so slippery that it had become a pastime for residents and forum attendees alike to watch passersby, from presidents to prime ministers, fall on their rear ends.
One didn’t want to do that, Chester said. Best to be prepared.
Alexander had chosen his team for Nigeria in the early days of January. It included Pere, Harris, and James Greeley, SCL’s jack-of-all-trades. Alexander had thought of sending me, but because I had done so well wrapping up the contract itself, he felt it better that I stay behind and pursue other leads. You have a knack for sales, he would say, buttering me up and making me overlook my interest in working on the campaign in-country.
Anyway, a knack for sales? It didn’t sound like me just yet, although I could tell I was getting the hang of it.
“Stick with me,” he said. “You have a future here. You might even become CEO someday.”
I thought he was joking at first, but he said it often enough for me to believe that he actually saw that level of potential in me.
Codirecting the Nigerian team were Ceris and a man I had never met before. His name, Alexander said, was Sam Patten. A senior adviser to the SCL Group, he was one of the most experienced consultants on our global roster for running campaigns on the ground in foreign countries. Sam had worked on the 2014 parliamentary election in Iraq, and in 2012, he had played a critical role in the election of the opposition government in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. He had also served as a senior adviser to President George W. Bush.4 Unfortunately, though we couldn’t know it in 2015, Sam Patten would become an infamous figure in the Robert Mueller investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His business partner, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, would come to be of interest to Mueller with regard to Donald Trump’s connection to the Russians, and would be accused of being a spy for the Russian intelligence services.
At the time I met him, though, Sam struck me as a consummate professional, trustworthy and serious, the kind of person who looked you dead in the eye and told it like it was. He arrived at the Mayfair office on January 3, 2015, dressed in a proper suit, but wearing a polo shirt and carrying a worn laptop bag that made it clear he was distinctly American and that he had likely carried the bag around the world for years.
I brought Sam up to date on my limited experience with the Nigerians and then handed off control. The plan was basically “crisis comms,” or crisis communications: getting out as much material as possible and as fast as possible
