StoriesBlog Mr. Cole brightened. “That’s it? A symbolic gesture?”
“Absolutely. We can put that in a memorandum. It’s not even a contractual change.”
Thorn looked at Elena. She was staring, not at Ibrahim, but at her notepad. Her face was pale.
“Ms. Sanchez?” Thorn asked. “Is that acceptable?”
Elena took a deep breath. This was it. This was the moment.
“Mr. Thorn,” she said, her voice low and steady. “May I have a word with you and Mr. Cole in private? For one minute.”
The request was a breach of protocol. The Saudi team looked annoyed. Ibrahim looked nervous.
“It is urgent,” she said.
Thorn, honoring his promise, stood up. “Five minutes, gentlemen. Please excuse us.”
They stepped into the private anteroom. The second the door closed, Thorn grabbed her arm.
“What is it? That was great news. We won.”
“We’re being cheated,” Elena said, her voice shaking with adrenaline. “That translator, Ibrahim, he’s lying.”
“What?” Cole said. “What do you mean, lying?”
“He didn’t translate what the Sheikh said. He didn’t even translate what he said. He’s inserting his own agenda.”
“Explain,” Thorn said, his eyes turning to dark ice.
“Ibrahim proposed a compromise to the Sheikh. He didn’t say ‘local labor.’ He said their ‘preferred local subcontractor.’ Singular. And when he translated it for us, he changed it to ‘local labor, as opportunities allow.’ He softened it.”
“He’s playing both sides,” Elena continued.
“Why?” Cole asked.
“I don’t know,” Elena said. “But a ‘preferred subcontractor’ isn’t a symbolic gesture. It’s a multi-million-dollar kickback. He’s trying to slip it past us and past them. He’s likely getting paid by this subcontractor. He’s sabotaging the deal for his own profit.”
Thorn was silent for a beat. The level of deception was staggering. He had been about to walk right into it.
“He’s betting,” Thorn said, “that you’re just a standard translator. That you wouldn’t catch the difference between local labor and a preferred subcontractor. He’s betting that you’re just like the last ones.”
“What do we do?” Cole asked, panicked. “We can’t accuse him. We’ll insult the Sheikh and blow the whole deal.”
Thorn looked at Elena. The trust in his eyes was absolute.
“What do you do, Ms. Sanchez? This is your room.”
Elena’s mind raced. She couldn’t accuse Ibrahim in English. It would be her word against his. She couldn’t accuse him in front of the Sheikh. It would cause a massive loss of face.
She had to expose him. But she had to do it to him. And let him hang himself.
“I have an idea,” she said. “But you have to follow my lead. Do not react. And Mr. Thorn, I need you to look angry. Not at him. At me.”
Thorn looked confused. “I don’t understand.”
“You’re not supposed to,” she said. “They’re not supposed to. Just trust me.”
They re-entered the boardroom. The atmosphere was expectant. Mr. Ibrahim, the translator, looked smug.
“Our apologies, gentlemen,” Julian Thorn said, his voice hard as steel.
He sat down and didn’t look at the Sheikh. He glared, as requested, at Elena.
“Mr. Ibrahim,” Thorn said in English. “Your translation was a ‘symbolic gesture.’ My… advisor,” he said the word with a slight sneer, “seems to think this is a more binding request. She is… cautious.”
Elena kept her face down, as if she were being reprimanded. Ibrahim smiled, a thin, oily smile.
“It is merely a sign of mutual respect, Mr. Thorn. A cultural necessity. Your advisor is perhaps… unfamiliar with the scale of such deals. It is nothing for your lawyers to worry about.”
He was patronizing her. He too saw her as the help who had gotten lucky.
“I see,” Thorn said. “So you are confirming it is a non-binding request for local labor.”
“Precisely,” Ibrahim said.
“Good.” Thorn leaned back. “Then we have a deal.”
Mr. Cole looked at Elena in panic. What was she doing? She was letting it happen.
The Sheikh looked pleased. “Excellent. We will have the final contracts drawn up.”
Everyone began to gather their papers. The deal was done. Elena waited until the Sheikh had stood up, until Ibrahim was shaking Mr. Cole’s hand, smiling his false smile. Then she spoke.
She did not speak in English. She did not speak in the formal Arabic of the meeting. She spoke directly to Mr. Ibrahim in a sharp, cutting Egyptian dialect, a dialect known in the linguistic world as the language of media, confrontation, and a good intellectual fight.
“Mr. Ibrahim,” she said, her voice clear and carrying across the room.
Ibrahim froze, his hand still holding Cole’s.
“You are a very skilled man,” Elena continued in Arabic, a polite smile on her face. “I was just reading your 2019 paper on ‘Contractual False Friends in Gulf Negotiations.’ It was brilliant. Especially your section on the ‘preferred subcontractor gambit.'”
Ibrahim’s face went from smug to ashen in a fraction of a second. He looked as if she had physically struck him. The Sheikh and his sons, who had been talking among themselves, stopped and turned.
They heard the shift in language. They saw the look on Ibrahim’s face.
“What is this?” the Sheikh asked, his voice sharp. “What did she say?”
“I… I…” Ibrahim stammered, pulling his hand back from Cole.
“I was just telling Mr. Ibrahim how much I admired his academic work,” Elena said, switching back to the formal Gulf dialect, her voice full of false innocence.
“He wrote a fascinating paper on how dishonest translators can attempt to slip kickback clauses into negotiations, specifically by using the term ‘a preferred subcontractor’ when their client simply meant ‘local labor.’ It’s a classic deceitful tactic.”
She held Ibrahim’s gaze, her smile unwavering.
“A lesser translator might have missed it. But you and I, we know the difference, don’t we, Mr. Ibrahim?”
There was a terrible, profound silence in the room. Ibrahim was trapped. He was sweating. The Sheikh was not a stupid man. He looked at Ibrahim and he understood instantly.
He had been played. They had been played.
“Ibrahim,” the Sheikh said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. “Is this true? Did you attempt to deceive me and my guests?”
“Your Excellency, I… It was a misunderstanding, a linguistic nuance,” Ibrahim pleaded, his career evaporating before his eyes.
“A nuance?” the Sheikh roared, his voice bouncing off the glass. “You lied. You used this… this tactic in my negotiation.”
“He did,” Elena said quietly, her voice cutting through the Sheikh’s rage. “He proposed it to you as a compromise. And then he deliberately mistranslated it to us as a symbolic gesture. He was robbing you both.”
The Sheikh’s face was purple with rage. He snapped his fingers. Two large security guards who had been standing by the door entered the room.
“Get this… thief… out of my sight,” the Sheikh commanded. “He is finished in this city. He will be finished in this entire hemisphere.”
Ibrahim, pale and shaking, was physically escorted from the room. The room was silent again. The deal, which had been done, was now in tatters. The trust was broken.
Mr. Cole looked like he was going to be sick. Thorn just stared at the door where Ibrahim had vanished. Elena, her heart hammering, turned to the Sheikh.
“Your Excellency,” she said, bowing her head slightly. “I… we… deeply apologize. This was a violation of your trust.”
“Of our trust?” The Sheikh looked at her, his anger still radiating. “You… you knew… you heard it… and you exposed it.”
“It was my job to protect my client, sir,” Elena said. “And it was my duty to protect the honor of this negotiation.”
The Sheikh stared at her for a long, agonizing moment. Then a slow, deep laugh started in his chest. It was not a happy laugh, but it was not an angry one. It was a laugh of pure, astonished respect.
“Mr. Thorn,” the Sheikh boomed, turning to Julian. “This… this woman… she has the eyes of a hawk and the courage of a lion. Where did you find her?”
Thorn, who had been watching Elena with an expression of sheer awe, finally spoke. “She… found me, Your Excellency.”
“Ha!” The Sheikh slapped the table. “I see. Well, the snake is gone from our garden. Now let us talk. Really talk, with no more lies.”
He looked at Elena. “And you, Ms. Sanchez, you will sit next to me. I am tired of translators. From now on, I will speak to you, and you will speak to him. We will make this deal. Together.”
The deal was signed three days later. It was a better deal than Thorn had ever imagined. The Sheikh, impressed by Elena’s integrity and Thorn’s wisdom in trusting her, had conceded on almost every major point. The two-billion-dollar project was secure.
The flight back to Chicago was quiet. Mr. Cole slept, exhausted. Elena was staring out the window, watching the curve of the earth. Thorn was sitting across from her, a glass of untouched whiskey on the table.
He hadn’t said much since the meeting. As they began their descent over Lake Michigan, he finally spoke.
“How did you know?” he asked. “About the kickback. How did you know to call his bluff with that academic paper?”
Elena turned from the window. “I didn’t,” she said.
“What?”
“I lied. I’ve never read a paper by him. I don’t even know if he’s ever written one. I just knew that a man that arrogant, who was willing to cheat in a room that big, had to have an ego.”
“I gambled that he saw himself as a brilliant strategist, so I quoted his ‘brilliant work’ back to him. It was the only way to expose him without accusing him. I just needed him to believe that I was on his level, and that he’d been caught.”
Julian Thorn stared at her. He wasn’t shocked. He was something else. He started to laugh. It was a low, genuine laugh. The first one she had ever heard from him.