Flipping into research mode, she started reading. The first dozen articles identified Karima as the wife of Ambassador Raheem Sahadi. But one piece, a seven-year-old New York Times Magazine profile, described her as a member of the Mifsud family. The Mifsud family? That’s new information. A quick Google search confirmed that the Mifsuds owned controlling shares in GlobalCom, a massive multinational corporation.

“I definitely missed that,” Natalie murmured.

Toggling to her email, Natalie pulled up all the EarlyBirds from the last two weeks and double-checked. Yep. GlobalCom had sponsored the newsletter every day. No wonder Karima was their favorite boldface name. There were GlobalCom spots endorsing the oil summit and peace in the Middle East. Also ads for the Union of Latin American Nations and an airline with a flight to Caracas. A Middle Eastern oil corporation is boasting about investments in Venezuela. Am I crazy or is Karima trying to send a message?

It was a small thing, maybe just a coincidence. But it seemed like an awful lot of these threads led to South America.

You’re a stairs person, Natalie thought. You can figure this out.

Natalie assumed that with Karima in the mix, this had to be about oil. With a little digging, she hit on a trove of articles that breathlessly described a “massive new oil field” geologists discovered in northern Colombia. According to the articles, that Magdalena oil field was worth hundreds of billions of dollars to Colombia. Colombia wanted to use something called the Trans-Caribbean Pipeline to move all that oil to the sea for export. But Venezuela controlled the pipeline and insisted on using it for natural gas.

A cold awareness shimmered through Natalie’s body. Venezuela’s resistance was costing Colombia billions of dollars.

Is that the real reason Lystra and Venezuela are fueding? If so, why is the US inserting itself in this fight?

She checked the clock: 2 a.m. It was too early to make calls and too late to admit defeat. She considered the information she’d just learned. It was at least possible that the White House was taking sides in a regional power struggle that would upend the international oil market and destabilize the western hemisphere. She had to know why.

But it was also possible she was spinning into a conspiracy-theory black hole. A few more hours of this and she’d probably start finding connections between her sad cowboy and Sonia Barbaro’s Venezuelan hairstylist.

She felt eyes on her and reluctantly looked over at the cowboy. “I know,” she said to his challenging gaze. “I can’t find a White House connection, and I don’t work at ATN, so it doesn’t matter anyway,” she murmured and lay back on the couch imagining how she could break this story—without a job—when she passed out, laptop open on her chest.