We contacted Ben Smith, then media columnist for the New York Times. Here was an oddity: giving an exclusive interview of a NASCAR racer to a publication that does not exactly have a NASCAR beat reporter. I cannot swear on a stack whose idea it was for the interview to take place inside a race car, on a racetrack, but I do remember our firm’s advice to Brown: “If you don’t like the question, just speed up. He’ll either get sick or pass out.”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better headline, “Brandon Just Wants to Drive His Racecar.” “But with this meme going viral,” Brown told the reporter, “it was more of, I had to stay more silent, because everybody wanted it to go on to the political side. I’m about the racing side.” The column demystified Brown as a conservative icon. It showed him to be exactly what he is: a damn good race car driver. We took his image out of the hands of the social media mob.

  * * *

  I’ve won the crowd for Antigua. Now I need to make sure they don’t turn on us. I pitch USA Today, a paper with one of the largest circulations in the United States, to publish an op-ed by Antigua’s minister of finance. The headline reads, “A Fed Up Antigua Opens Its Doors to Megavideo.” I didn’t request a shout-out to Kim Dotcom, but I’m happy to see it. The finance minister’s piece concludes, “For why should, for example, the U.S. motion picture industry suffer just so the federal government can continue to protect the monopolies of the big American gambling interests?”

  The USA Today piece lights off another media storm.

  This is the appropriate use for an op-ed. Done right, a piece in the opinion pages of a newspaper can operate as a form of track-two diplomacy, one the American media provide free of charge. In an op-ed, heads of state or high-ranking government officials can communicate with each other when other lines of communication are compromised. Unfortunately, most of the op-eds pitched to newspapers are bullshit. People submitting op-eds generally do not know the difference between an op-ed and a “letter to the editor.” And many PR clients think that their idea, which might make for a good comment on a social media platform, deserves 650 words in the New York Times.

  Stop asking your PR people to pitch your op-ed. It won’t do any good. It might make you feel better, but unless you are a head of state or a CEO of something massive, the opinion page editors won’t give you the time of day. You’ll end up published somewhere inconsequential, and you’ll be swapping your cash for low-impact billable hours. Remember, an op-ed is you saying stuff about you. The goal of PR, the brass ring, is to get “earned media,” to get a reporter to say the right thing about you. That way, people actually believe it.

  * * *

  The Jet d’Eau explodes over Lake Geneva. The water spurt makes me think of the Bellagio fountains when I was babysitting the Doctor. Every time they went off, I jumped a foot. I’ve come a long way since then. Unlike at BLJ, I now have agency and direction. After ten years in the PR game, I’ve become an expert at building machines that create useful illusions. I’ve come to Switzerland to do it again.

  Antigua’s lawyer waits for me at Mr. Pickwick Pub, just off rue Butini. Tomorrow, he will file legal paperwork at the World Trade Organization headquarters, getting the WTO’s blessing to start infringing on U.S. copyrights. The lawyer is an Irishman and an idealist. He can’t help but fight for the underdog.

  “Going to tell the WTO that, in addition to our website, Antigua will also start selling Manchester United T-shirts,” he says.

  “Nice touch. Tell that to the reporters,” I say. “It will get the attention of the Glazer family.”

  “Anything else you want me to emphasize to this Reuters lad?”

  “Right now, we’ve created a Mexican standoff between the U.S., Antigua, and Hollywood,” I say. “It’s time to add a fourth gun.”

  “Someone who could potentially copycat Antigua’s strategy?”

  “Who makes the best counterfeit goods in the world?” I ask.

  “Ah,” the lawyer says. “Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.”

  “Winston Churchill?”

  “Don’t be thick. I’d never quote a Brit. Napoleon.”

  A few pints later, Reuters’s Tom Miles enters the bar and shakes hands around the table. “This is the most interesting story to come across my desk in months,” he says. “Usually my beat is ‘China complains about the U.S. The U.S. complains about China.’”

  “This is a ‘Man Bites Dog’ story,” I say.

  “More like a ‘Fly Lands on Dog’ story,” Miles says. “Do you think the U.S. will really be worried about Antigua?”

  “If they aren’t worried enough about Antigua, they should be worried about someone else coming along. If we do something inventive that could pose a lot of problems for intellectual property holders, if we create that precedent, the consequences could be enormous,” the lawyer says, launching into a showman routine. “With Antigua, it’s twenty-one million. Maybe with China it’s going to be twenty-one billion.”

  “Can I quote those numbers?”

  “Please do,” I say.

  The next day, I go with the lawyer to the WTO. I wait in the hall while he files the paperwork for the sanctions. After an hour, he reappears and adjusts his bow tie.

  “It’s official,” he says. “If they didn’t think we were serious, they will now.”

  Days later, we have the blessing of the WTO, and the New York Times’s Annie Lowrey declares that the trade dispute between the United States and Antigua is “boiling over.”

  * * *

  At a roadside restaurant in Beirut, I watch a bus pull up to the edge of the sidewalk. Families with their entire lives strapped to their bodies step off and wander out to the street where other refugees sit begging for coins. The civil war being waged by my old client Bashar al-Assad has flooded Lebanon with fleeing Syrians. As I wait for Homadi, my driver and fixer, cars whiz by at ninety miles per hour. A wayward van might swerve wrong and end my story right here.

  I’ve come to Lebanon on a mercy mission. One of Levick’s pro bono clients is in trouble and needs help. At the demand of Richard Levick, as well as my own conscience, I’m going boots on the ground to help in any way I can. I’m on my own today, as my client has a meeting at the U.S. embassy, a forty-five-minute drive from Beirut. The embassy used to be closer to the city, but on April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber packed over 2,000 pounds of explosives into a truck and crashed the gates. Hezbollah killed sixty-three people and blew one hell of a hole in the building. Since then, the United States has placed its new embassy in a more isolated and defensible position.

  Homadi picks me up in a Volkswagen van, and we thunder down Hamra Street until he skids to a stop in front of an apartment complex in Achrafieh, a neighborhood in East Beirut. War reporter Nancy Youssef climbs into the car and starts speaking in Arabic with Homadi. Youssef flew in from Cairo last week; we’ve shared a bathroom as we’ve worked our way through Beirut.

  Youssef has been lending her investigative efforts to our work, using her network of contacts and fixers like Homadi. Fixers are journalistic Sherpas and are often journalists themselves in their home country. They help reporters navigate social customs, arrange interviews, translate between languages, and keep their eyes and ears open for trends and stories. They always speak English and often come from prominent upper-class families. Like PR pros, fixers often operate behind the scenes. Unlike us, they help uncover stories people in power don’t want told.

  “They hold your life in their hands, especially someplace like Iraq,” Youssef said to me last night at a hookah bar. As she smoked shisha, she told me that when IEDs went off in Baghdad, fixers knew how to move quickly to safe cover. When we reconvene at a Washington, DC, hookah bar a few months later, Youssef will tell me about reporting on Egypt’s Rab’a Massacre. She was at the site with her fixer, a Muslim woman, when forces of the Muslim Brotherhood and military police opened fire on protesters in Cairo. Youssef and her fixer fled from the bullets to the gate of the nearest apartment complex, where a man stood guard, refusing to let them inside.

  “We’re not Brotherhood!” Youssef’s fixer implored. “I am a Muslim. You are a Muslim. How can you just let two women sit here and die?”

  The man opened the gate, granting them refuge.

  “And then we heard the thump of bodies dropping for an hour,” Youssef told me. “At the end of the day, I get to leave. And they don’t. You want to feel like a coward? Talk to a fixer that’s doing this work in the face of jail time.”

  In Beirut, Youssef and I hound the local media all over town for leads. Some pay off, but we have not yet achieved our goal. At sunset, Homadi drives us back to the apartment complex. Each time I enter this building, there is the debate: stairs or elevator? The elevator, we are told, often breaks down when the power goes out. For my busted hip, seven flights of stairs are an issue. I roll the dice with the elevator. You might ask, why are we on the seventh floor? An FBI agent once advised me, “You want to stay on floor seven or above in places like Beirut. Most car bombs only have the tonnage to hit the sixth floor or below.”

  Youssef and I drop our bags on the marble floor of the sparsely furnished apartment. She changes into pajamas, and I dig a few Almazas, Lebanon’s national beer, out of the fridge. After days filled with fixers and roadside checkpoints, we steal a moment of normalcy. We head out to the balcony, and I start to spin tales about my days at BLJ. But then I find myself talking about Lindsay.

  The next afternoon, I’m having a plate of lahme bi ajeen, a flatbread meat pie, when WhatsApp beeps with a call from a writer from the New York Times editorial board. He wants to speak to the prime minister of Antigua. I remember that I am a well-paid flak, not a brave war reporter like Youssef. So, I do my job. When I get through to Baldwin Spencer, I hear calypso music blaring in the background.

  “I’m judging a steel drum competition,” Spencer says.

  “Can you step outside?” I ask. “I’ve got the New York Times on the phone.”

  After interviewing Spencer, the Times editorial board writes a piece titled “A New Front in Global Trade Wars.” “Both sides need to return to the negotiating table and come up with a deal that does not rely on legally approved piracy,” they write. I’m still in Beirut when I get a WhatsApp call from Vincent.

  “Good news, bad news,” he says.

  “Good news first.”

  “Vice President Biden called the prime minister. He says if we make this pain stop, they will settle by the end of the Obama administration.”

  “How big is the number?”

  “Big enough.”

  “So, what’s the bad news?”

  “You’re fired. You did your job. Antigua doesn’t need you anymore. There goes your contract.”

  * * *

  In the northern Nigerian village of Chibok, hundreds of girls lie on iron-framed bunk beds in their school dormitory. It is a Monday night in April 2014; tomorrow they will sit for their final math exam. The girls study their textbooks. Go over equations. Some kneel in a prayer room and chant Christian hymns under the light of a full moon. If they pass, they will graduate.

  From outside, the girls hear gunfire. Explosions. The school’s security guard flees, leaving them alone. Motorcycles and Toyota trucks stop in front of the gate. Men dressed in fatigues and wielding Kalashnikov rifles order the girls to come outside. The girls debate whether they should run. Or pray. They know about Boko Haram. Every girl in Nigeria knows about Boko Haram. The fighters load the girls onto the beds of the trucks, and the trucks drive off into the dark.

  I learn about the kidnappings while lounging poolside at a luxury hotel in Dubai where I’m working with a new client. Richard Levick, again clad in swim trunks, has just gotten off the phone with a contact who works closely with Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan. President Jonathan has been bungling the crisis, getting manhandled by the media. Time for a PR firm to help clean up the mess.

  “Well, Phil,” Levick says. “Ever been to Africa?”

  “I think I’m more useful in DC,” I protest.

  “They’ve just transferred us one-point-two million. Do you have all your shots?”

  The thought of parachuting into Nigeria in the middle of the Boko Haram kidnappings makes me very thirsty. I approach the poolside bar and ask a man in a linen robe for a bourbon.

  “We cannot serve alcohol,” he says. “It’s a holy day.”

  “But I’m an infidel.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Goodluck, Phil

  Lindsay never cries. Today she can’t stop.

  “You don’t have to go,” she says, pulling the car up to the drop-off at Dulles International Airport.

  Yesterday, Boko Haram bombed the Banex Plaza shopping mall in Abuja as Nigerians gathered to watch the World Cup. Twenty-two people are dead, and the news is reporting on body parts scattered all over the street. Last night, I received a “heat map” of the district; my hotel is across the street from the blast site. I’ve had to fill out a “Kidnapping and Ransom” insurance form and make Lindsay the beneficiary of my life insurance policy. I’m not sure how the payout is impacted if I die in a beheading video posted to LiveLeak.

  “I’ll call you every day,” I promise Lindsay. “We have a security detail.”

  “You don’t have to go,” Lindsay repeats.

  In the boarding queue, I spot Patrick, my flak-in-crime for the next three weeks. He’s stammering into his cell phone. “Yes, love, I know. I know,” he says in his hard-to-place accent. Patrick hails from the island of Guernsey, a tax shelter in the English Channel. He ends his call with a hangdog expression.

  “I’m going to be a father again,” he says. “I just found out this moment.”

  “Congratulations. You still coming?”

  “What’s our strategy? My missus will kill me if I come home dead.”

  “We hop on a plane. Hit duty-free to buy ‘gifts’ for our clients. See where the job takes us. And get home alive.”

  * * *

  You feel Nigeria’s heat the minute you step off the plane. It gets under your clothes. Makes itself at home. At the customs desk, four men in black blazers wait in a tight huddle. Our security detail, locals trained by an Israeli security firm with ties to Mossad. A hulk of a man with a shotgun shell–shaped head breaks away from the group. He flashes his fingers over his palms like a blinking traffic light.

  “What’s your favorite cartoon character?” he asks me.

  “Opus,” I say, giving my code word.

  “Abebi,” he says. “Follow.”

  Patrick grabs my backpack and holds on as we are Sherpa’d at a brisk clip through the steaming airport and into an Isuzu Trooper. In Nigeria, everyone drives fast. Abebi drives faster. Abuja is a blur out the window: street vendors selling vegetables, green-and-white soccer jerseys, kids dodging three-wheeled Keke taxis dusted red. The only object that remains still is the dome of Aso Rock, a four-hundred-meter-tall monolith meditating over the bedlam.

  Our Isuzu is slowed by a traffic jam. Abebi lays on the horn as one of our security detail rolls down his window and points an MP5 submachine gun at a hatchback pulled up too close for his liking. The hatchback makes way, and we zip past a complex cordoned off by barriers and surrounded by motorcycle cops guarding blown-out windows boarded up with plywood. Banex Plaza. Looks like they’ve just finished hosing the blood off the concrete.

  “Don’t worry,” Abebi says. “This part of the city has been pre-bombed. Very rarely do you see two bombings in the same place.”

  “Pre-bombed,” I say. “I’ve never heard that term before. It’s reassuring.”

  The Abuja Hilton is a fortress. Guards at a checkpoint search our Isuzu for explosives. Another gate, another checkpoint. You quickly get used to seeing guns, noticing them so frequently under jackets and tucked into cargo pants that you forget they are there, that they are everywhere. The Hilton’s lobby reminds me of the cantina from Star Wars where Han Solo pops Greedo.* Petroleum CEOs chat up arms dealers. It’s easy to tell them apart. The arms dealers don’t have bodyguards.

  Patrick and I hit the bar, where World Cup coverage plays on decade-old televisions. Here waits Noble, a crisis comms mercenary who specializes in parachuting into clusterfucks in Libya, Kenya, and now the Abuja Hilton. The man on the ground for the powers that be.

  “My security threw me a handgun when I got in the car,” Noble says. “He told me, ‘If a car drives up too close, point it out the window. If they don’t move within five seconds, unload the clip.’ Asked him if I should aim for the tires. ‘The windshield,’ he told me, the damn windshield.”

  “Our team had a similar philosophy,” Patrick says, gulping a neat whiskey.

  “I still have the gun,” Noble says. “He never asked for it back.”

  We’re seated beside a group of men from Idaho, potato-fed boys with mustaches and Wrangler jeans. “We’ve been hired by the Nigerian government to build shooting ranges,” says a guy sipping a Bud Heavy. “Train the local military to fight these fucking jihadists.”

  “How’s that going?” I ask.

  “These Boko Haram boys play dirty,” he says. “But you put a gun in a man’s hand. Teach him how to aim it. You give him a chance.”

  “You’d get along with my friend Preston,” I say.

  * * *

  In the waiting room of a Nigerian government building that might as well be called the Ministry of Truth, a series of public service announcements play on a screen. Images of an exploded oil pipeline with dead bodies strewn all about. The words on the screen read, “Pipeline Terrorism Kills.” A little different from trying to deter teen smoking, but there you go. Another PSA proclaims: “Corruption Is Wrong” above a giant stack of cash. A bit of a mixed message.

  At a security check, a teenager holding an AK-47 demands my backpack. An Opus plush toy, my lifelong traveling companion, falls onto the folding table. The kid steps back. Points the rifle at my chest.