Abyss

PROLOGUE

Of course for a long time our central dilemma hasn’t been humanity’s survival. Since the advent of agriculture, people have striven for advancement; huts instead of caves, horses to help with plowing and transportation — particularly after the wheel and axle were invented — and then the internal combustion engine and electricity, but this brought us up against the need for oil. And the explosion began. In a very real way, however, our quest for the good life could well push us back to the horse-and-buggy days — if not extinction itself — given the greenhouse effects generated by the combustion of petrochemicals. In the race between climatic destruction and fossil fuel depletion, the outcome will be apocalyptic no matter which side of the coin comes up. Still the solution has always been around us. In the major sea currents, in the endless winds that roam the land, and in sunshine from the sky. The battle lines are being drawn for what could be the largest, most important struggle in human history.

The last day of the experiment was bright and warm on the Atlantic twenty-five miles off Florida’s east coast, and Dr. Evelyn Larsen, who was thirty-six, slender, with short-cropped, sun-bleached blond hair, and overly tanned skin, was in a good enough mood now to grant the interview with Fox News after all. George Szucs, the young producer and his camera crew had choppered out to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel Gordon Gunther in the early afternoon and they’d set up on the afterdeck, manned at that moment by only two crewmen operating the winch off the fantail. The sea was flat calm, and Eve, along with the other ten techs and three postdocs up in the main electronics compartment, was in high spirits.

“The damned thing works,” Dr. Don Price, her chief assistant in his third postdoc year, said when the Big G ’s generators were shut down and the ship’s power came entirely from the sea — just one tiny impeller only three feet across placed forty feet down in the middle of the Gulf Stream.

Eve had smiled. “You had doubts?”

Price, who was tall, husky, handsome, and bright, nodded. “Sure, didn’t you?”

“Not really,” Eve said.

Eve found him attractive except for his ego, which Price could not control or acknowledge, no matter how much his colleagues complained.

He had not been supportive when Eve’s paper was published in Nature eighteen months ago. Her conclusions were so controversial she was amazed NOAA had actually sprung for two weeks aboard the ship, and funding for the ship’s crew as well as for her lab, postdocs, and techs. Someone brought out a couple of bottles of good champagne and toasted the Queen of the High Seas, because all of her postdocs and techies loved her easygoing nature, sometimes self-mocking sense of humor, and her absolute devotion to them and the project.

Eve had raised her glass, a tickle deep in her stomach, and a little dose of smugness just at the tip of her tongue. The damned thing works, she thought.

Growing up in Birmingham, England, with a father, three brothers, and assorted uncles and cousins, the public houses and markets and the fields of the Midland Plain had shaped her in some respects that she had tried to grow out of all her life. All the men in the family worked in the mills, leaving the women at home to do the washing, the mending, the babysitting, the cooking, and at night, briefly, the telly for some comfort, unless a soccer match was playing and money was so short the men couldn’t watch the match at the pub.

Eve’s destiny was to marry one of the mill-bound boys in her class, or perhaps one or two forms ahead of her, and settle into the domestic routine of her clan. Each evening before bed her mother would slowly read a few passages from the Bible, her finger tracing each sentence word by word, and Eve, sitting on her lap, following her finger and listening to the sounds of the language, had learned how to read.

By the time she got to school, she thought that she had died and gone to heaven because of the library and all the new books for her to read. The only books in her house were the Holy Bible and the union handbook. At first no one believed that she could read — and upside down and backwards at that — so her parents had been called to school to explain why their daughter was nothing but a liar who had learned some parlor trick that they had to work hard to undo.

That’s when the verbal abuse began at home, at family gatherings, and especially at school, so that no place had seemed safe to her, and she’d rebelled, pushing herself to learn science, mathematics, philosophy, and languages, to superachieve.

The worst day of her life had been at church when she’d told the Anglican priest that the notion of some god with long hair and a beard, who walked on water, brought dead people back to life, and whose mother had conceived him through immaculate parthenogenesis was silly. She’d been sent home in disgrace, her father had beat her with his belt, and she’d been sent to a boarding school for recalcitrant girls in the country outside Penrith in the north.

And because of her brilliance, she had excelled for a time until the other girls became jealous. Her troubles and misery increased fourfold, pushing her into withdrawal, forcing her to hide her talent as best as she could, making her sometimes ashamed that she was smarter than the other girls, and even smarter, by the age of eleven, than her instructors.

At fifteen, graduating three years early, she had applied to Princeton in the U.S. on a lark, and she’d been accepted with a full scholarship after she’d passed the entrance examinations sent to her boarding school. The headmistress was so delighted to be rid of the girl that the school even helped with the money to get her to the States.

No one from her family came to see her off at the train station, or went down to Heathrow. After boarding the airplane she had not looked back.

In England she’d been considered a freak, but at Princeton she found herself in a community of students and teachers, many of them just as smart as she was. And she’d blossomed.

The low Florida coastline was nothing more than a smudge on the horizon marking the boundary between the gray-green Atlantic and the cloudless blue sky. The Big G rocked gently in the calm swell. Eve, dressed in white coveralls, NOAA’s insignia on the breast, hesitated for just a moment before she turned back to the Fox News producer. Her mind had wandered, now that they had come this far. This was just the beginning. And before long the crap would truly hit the fan.

Eve to her friends, or Doc to her assistants, was NOAA’s most brilliant climatologist and oceanographer. At this moment she was in her element and yet she felt as if she were trapped, because when they were done with this stage of the experiment she would have to search for funding. It was her least favorite part of real science. God, how she hated asking — begging — for money.

They stood on the work deck on the fantail of the 264-foot research ship that Eve’s department at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory had borrowed from NOAA’s Marine and Aviations Operations. At 2,328 tons the ship had been originally built as a T-AGOS spy ship for the CIA, but that work was better done these days by satellite. Most of the sophisticated electronic instruments had been left aboard and the stubby ship bristled with antennas, radar, and GPS domes. Tomorrow morning she and the thirteen techs and scientists would be dropped off in Miami and the crew would take the ship back to her homeport of Pascagoula, Mississippi.

She’d been at it with the Fox News crew for the better part of an hour, and she was ready to get back to work, finalizing the week’s data set, and getting the generator back aboard.

“Okay, Dr. Larsen, I’d love for you to sum up what you’re doing out here,” Szucs asked. “What you hope to accomplish and where it goes next? Maybe something of the long-term implications you told us about.”

“By 2050 the world’s energy needs are going to be double what they are today,” she began. “But the fact is we’ll run out of relatively clean fossil fuels to generate the electricity that we need long before that. There’s only a finite supply. We have enough coal to last well into the next century, but if we went that route the air would become unbreathable. The entire planet would turn into Beijing on a bad day.”

She pointed toward the coast. “Twenty-five miles away is the Hutchinson Island nuclear generating plant. In the next year permits will be given for at least thirty-four more facilities like that here in the U.S. and maybe several dozen more worldwide. That helps, but what are we supposed to do with the radioactive waste — thousands, eventually millions, of tons of the stuff?”

She shrugged and managed a slight smile. “And yet we need to go all electric. Electric cars, ships, and airplanes, electrically heated homes, electrically operated factories. If coal is out and nukes are too dangerous we’ll have to look someplace else.”

She was lecturing, but in the end she supposed it wouldn’t matter. They’d either listen or they would trivialize her like her ex had, which in the end was why he’d become her ex. “Of course wind farms are helping, and so are solar cells, but those technologies have a long way to go before they become commercially viable — and they’re not without their problems.”

“How about T. Boone Pickens’s suggestion that we switch to natural gas?” Szucs asked.

“It’s marginally okay as an interim measure, but burning gas still produces carbon dioxide. We’re in the middle of the Gulf Stream, which is a thirty-mile-wide ocean current that runs all the way up the U.S. coast and across the Atlantic to the UK as the Atlantic Drift. It’s warm water, so there are palm trees in southwestern England, which is at the same latitude as Newfoundland. It never slows down — thirty million cubic meters per second in the Florida Straits and eighty million cubic meters per second by the time it passes Cape Hatteras.”

“That’s a lot of water.”

“And that’s a lot of energy,” Eve said. “One-point-four petawatts — one-point-four followed by fourteen zeroes — of equivalent heat energy. More than one hundred times the energy demand of the entire world.

“If we can harness just a tiny fraction of that power, along with energy from the Humboldt Current along the west coasts of South America and North America and the Agulhas Current around Africa, our energy problems would be at an end. We’d have cheap, clean, renewable energy. All the electricity we’d need for centuries, maybe millennia.”

“But the energy from the Gulf Stream has to be brought ashore,” Szucs said.

She hesitated for just a moment, the toughest part yet to come. The part that she had been sharply criticized for not only by her fellow scientists, and especially environmentalists, but by senators and congressmen from states where coal or uranium provided the economic backbone, and of course by big oil.

“We’ve placed a small water generator fifty feet beneath us,” Eve said. “A Pax Scientific impeller shaped almost like the agitator in a top-loading washing machine, or an auger, three feet in diameter. The Gulf Stream turns the impeller, which is connected to a shaft that runs an electrical generator. In our experiment the electrical current is brought aboard where it’s used to run all of our electronics, air-conditioning, and even the bow and stern thrusters that keep us in place.

“When we get funding we’ll place much larger impellers in the Stream with blades twenty-five feet in diameter, and run the electrical current generated ashore where it can be plugged directly into the already existing power grid — the high voltage lines you see leading away from power plants like Hutchinson Island. When the first few are up and running, Hutchinson Island can be shut down and dismantled.”

“How many impellers?”

“Eventually thousands, maybe tens of thousands around the world,” Eve said. “It’d be the biggest project ever undertaken in the history of the world. Thirty, maybe forty, trillions of dollars over a fifty-year period.”

Szucs whistled in spite of himself. “What you’re talking about could bankrupt us all.”

“We can’t afford not to do it,” Eve said. “But there’s more, something we haven’t covered yet.” The something her boss Bob Krantz, NOAA’s chief of special projects, had expressly forbidden her to bring up.

“Make so much as a hint, and your career will be over,” he’d told her more than two years ago ago. He was a large man who’d played football for Notre Dame and had not gotten too badly out of shape yet. When he wanted he could be physically intimidating.

They were in his book-lined Silver Spring, Maryland, office and although Eve had been standing while he was sitting behind his desk, she’d felt as if he were towering over her. She remembered her anger at that moment. Blind, frustrating. He had her paper in front of him, and she knew that he’d read it. The science was sound, and her results good, yet he was dismissing her.

“It’s my career, Bob,” she’d shot back.

“Not with NOAA if you persist.”

“Are you threatening to fire me?”

“You won’t have a lab and you won’t have the funding to be on the water,” he said, sidestepping the question, which was his style. He’d been a fair scientist who, in Eve’s estimation, had risen to his level of incompetence.

“Then I’ll get my own funding.”

Krantz nodded sadly. “You’re a brilliant scientist, Eve. Too brilliant to go off half-cocked. Power generation is an attainable goal, but not on the scale you want to achieve.”

“We’re not talking about that!” Eve had shouted, but immediately got control of herself.

“Let me finish,” Krantz said. “Even Sunshine State Power and Light agrees that your water generators might be able to supply thirty-five percent of Florida’s needs. Which is a good thing.”

“One hundred percent,” Eve said. “But that’s still not the issue.”

“No,” Krantz said. He handed Eve’s paper back to her. “Send this to Nature without convincing data, and at least two other climatologists who’re willing to put themselves on the firing line, and you’re done.”

Eve focused again on Szucs. “We can control the planet’s climate.” It was the same thing she’d told Krantz that day.

“If you generate enough power so that coal- and oil-fired electrical plants can be shut down, it should have some effect on global warming.”

“No, I mean control .”

Szucs looked at her as if she were an alien from outer space who’d just landed.

She would be sending her research to Nature once she had the final data set from this experiment. Everything she’d seen so far verified her approach. Her peers might call her a lunatic, but they wouldn’t be able to dispute the facts.

“The Gulf Stream is a closed system,” she told the camera. “The sun powers it, and the Stream distributes the energy around the Atlantic Basin. Take enough energy out of the system and redistribute it as electricity and the transfer, if it’s big enough, will have an effect on weather in this hemisphere. Take enough energy out of the Humboldt Current along the east side of the Pacific, and weather will be modified there. Balance the two, along with Africa’s Agulhas Current, and others in the Arctic and Antarctic and we’ll stop or diminish hurricanes and typhoons, whose main purpose anyway is the distribution of energy.”

Don barged out of the electronics bay forward and two decks up and raced to the aft rail that looked down on the winch deck. “Eve!” he shouted.

She looked over her shoulder.

“We’ve lost it!”

“What are you talking about?” she called up to him. Even from here she could see that he was extremely agitated, which was completely out of character.

“The power spiked and then went to zero!”

Something at the main winch let go with a loud bang that instantly slid up into a sickening twanging noise as if a string on a huge guitar had suddenly snapped, and Eve knew exactly what it was. The eight-millimeter titanium-sheathed cable that held the impeller-generator in place and brought the power up to the ship had somehow snapped. But that was impossible.

“Get down!” she screamed, turning back in time to see the suddenly slack cable come rocketing back aboard like a deadly cobra. One of the crewmen was struck in the chest, ripping his upper torso in half, and flinging him back against the base of the derrick in a geyser of blood.

In the blink of an eye a loop of the cable tangled in the other deckhand’s legs and recoiled, lifting the man up over the stern rail and into the ocean.

“Launch the tender!” Eve screamed. Unzipping her coveralls and peeling them off, she went to the rail where she pulled off her deck shoes, and, mindless of the Fox camera trained on her nearly naked body, dove overboard.

Don had been shouting something she couldn’t quite make out as she plunged into the warm water of the Stream. She spotted the deckhand about ten feet below, moving incredibly fast to the north along the starboard side of the ship’s hull. He was frantically trying to untangle himself from the cable that was dragging him toward the sea bottom two hundred feet down.

Kicking hard toward him Eve was caught up in the powerful Gulf Stream, moving in excess of four knots, understanding that if she missed him the first time she would be swept away with no possibility of getting back to him against the current.

She was a strong swimmer, and had free dived in the U.S. Virgin Islands to the pilothouse of the Rhone in sixty feet of water. But trying to make the angle to reach the deckhand was sapping her strength, tiring her faster than anything she could ever imagine, and for a moment she was frightened for her own survival and nearly hesitated.

The deckhand looked up toward the surface, a resigned expression on his face, as he stopped struggling and allowed the cable and current to drag him farther down.

Eve got to the man and grabbed him by the collar of his coveralls. Suddenly he came alive and tried to reach for her, but she pulled out of his grasp and went to where the cable was wrapped around his knees. As the deckhand desperately clutched at her hair, her neck, her arms, she managed to undo the slack cable, and a second later they were rocketing toward the surface, her lungs burning.

The deckhand convulsed once and then went slack just before they surfaced, and Eve was able to breathe, dark spots in front of her eyes, pinpricks of light flashing off in her brain as her cerebral cortex began to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation.

Don and a pair of crewmen, as well as Stewart Melvin, their medical officer, had launched the eighteen-foot RIB, the smaller of the Big G ’s tenders, and they were alongside within ninety seconds, the Honda four-stroke holding them against the Stream until the deckhand could be pulled aboard.

Melvin immediately began CPR as Don hauled Eve aboard. She’d lost her bra and the nipples of her small breasts were so erect they ached, another effect of near drowning.

Don put a blanket over her shoulders and she looked up. “Thanks,” she said, and then she looked over as the man she’d saved suddenly coughed up a lot of seawater, his eyes fluttering.

“He belongs to you now,” Don said.

“No thanks, I’m handful enough for myself,” she said. “What the hell happened?”

“We’ll know as soon as we haul the cable in, but the impeller and generator are gone. No way we’re going to find them. And Parks is dead.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed. “He didn’t have a chance. But the cable didn’t snap from the strain.”

“Manufacturing defect?”

“I don’t think so, and neither do you.”

They approached the boat, circling around to the port side davits, which would lift the tender back aboard. The Fox crew was at the rail.

Don managed a thin smile. “You’ll make the national news. The Queen of the High Seas to the rescue. Maybe it’ll divert their attention from our failure.”

“Setback,” Eve said under her breath.

Eve had debated sending the Fox crew ashore before the cable was brought aboard and they began their search for the generator set and the answers to what had gone wrong. But science was about openness, not secrets, a creed she had lived by her entire professional career. She wasn’t about to start a cover-up now.

Bob Taylor, the rescued deckhand, was immediately hustled to the ship’s infirmary. The body of Stan Parks, the other deckhand, had been covered but not moved on the Coast Guard’s instructions. A crewman was hosing down the blood and gruesome bits of viscera, washing all of it overboard through the scuppers.

Eve hurried to her cabin to dry off and get dressed and when she got back to the winch deck the cable had been brought aboard. Hugh Banyon, the Gunther ’s captain, was holding the mangled end in one of his meaty paws. It was blackened, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it.

“That wasn’t cut,” Eve said.

“No,” Banyon said, looking up.

“We had a power spike in the system just before it went down,” Don said.

“It’d take a hell of a power surge to fry the cable,” Banyon said.

“A direct short could have done it,” Eve said. She was sick at heart about this, especially about Parks’s death. But there was no way the system could have shorted out naturally. They’d designed too many safeguards, much like fuses, against just such an overload. But unless they could recover the impeller-generator they had no way of knowing what had failed, and why.

She stared toward the west and the smudge of Florida’s coastline. Finding the unit would be next to impossible. The Stream could have sent it almost anywhere to the north along a track that was thirty miles wide.

The thought struck her that someone had planned it that way.

She was supposed to fail here. Afterwards what little funding and support she was getting from NOAA would dry up, and it would be over.

“What do we do now?” Don asked.

The Fox camera was close, and a boom mike was just above them.

“Prove that this was sabotage, which makes Stan Parks’s death murder, and look for the money to go all the way.”

Don was shaking his head. “If you’re right, this thing is out of control. We’re done.”

“We’re just getting started,” Eve countered.

Anne Marie Marinaccio and her mob had been cruising southwest along the European Mediterranean coast for the past two weeks, pulling in and docking at places like Iráklion, Palermo, Sassari, Cagliari, then Palma de Majorca. Except for her homeport of Monaco, where her motor yacht Felicity was nothing more than a bit over average, the stunning 402-foot German-built Blohm & Voss was the belle of the ball in just about every marina from Cyprus off the Turkish Coast to Spain’s Costa del Sol. Every player’s dream.

Finally, two days ago at Alicante she’d gotten tired of the endless, meaningless vacation, the drinking, the outrageous gourmet meals on deck, the stream of business wannabes with their investment schemes — hands outstretched, confidential whispers in her ear, portfolios, facts, figures, projections — and then the string of pretty girls — topless or nude, flawless bodies flouncing around, seemingly everywhere aboard, mindlessly giggling from bed to bed — so she’d sent them all ashore.

Except for Captain Panagiotopolous and the crew of nine plus two bodyguards, she was alone now with her thoughts, and mostly her gut-gnawing worries. Everything she’d worked for was starting to fall apart, and she’d been like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Anne Marie was a player. Her Marinaccio Group, known simply as the MG, was run from offices in Dubai, but domiciled primarily as a discretionary macro oil futures hedge fund in Mauritius. The MG was valued at $498 billion, but heavily leveraged with actual investments, some through derivatives, of something under $50 billion, which was about three times the amount she’d taken from her investors in a mammoth U.S. real estate scheme six years ago. She’d been forced to leave her estates in the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and the Sonoma wine country to the feds and take her private jet to Dubai, whose sheikhs greeted her and her money — despite her gender — with open arms. She was their kind of wheeler-dealer.

Tall and fit-looking for a woman of fifty-two, Marinaccio’s undyed salt-and-pepper hair, deep, expressive eyes, and somewhat chiseled features reminiscent of the Redgrave actresses, lent her the aura of success. Heads turned when she entered a room; men were intrigued and their women were instantly on guard, even if they didn’t exactly know who or what she was. And it pleased her. It was in her nature.

She was a fighter, too, with a track record to prove it. But the world had gotten much smaller since her days stateside, when she had half a dozen senators in her pocket, along with twice as many representatives, all in on her mortgage-flipping schemes that had racked up some fabulous profits. She’d funded five top-ranked lobbyists who worked both sides of the aisle along with the Americans for Tax Reform to head off increasing scrutiny of the commercial banking industry that was making questionable loans, billions of which Marinaccio Group arranged through dozens of partnerships, mostly in the two prime housing markets — Florida and California.

She had figured that the boom had to end sooner or later and when it did banks would fail and a lot of important people, who had trusted her to continue making them even richer than they already were, would be seriously hurt. And when she saw it coming, smelled it in the wind on Wall Street, knew it in her gut, she had made one final push — leap, actually — and when she walked she was a multibillionaire, her money safe in the Saudi-run International Bank of Commerce in Prague, in Syria, and, of course, in Dubai, and lately MG’s fortune in Mauritius.

It was those important people stateside who wanted to get to her. Which meant that for the past six years her travel had been restricted, and lately she had begun to chafe at the bit, thus this trip to test the waters in a way. And to take her mind off her latest set of troubles, because if her oil ventures failed — and there was a more than even chance now that they would, especially because of the money she’d poured into Iraq — the Middle East would be gone for her, leaving her Russia or China, in a worst-case scenario Cuba, or with her friend in Venezuela.

The Med was calm this afternoon. Standing in the ultramodern and expensively furnished Italian-designed saloon with a glass of Krug in hand, she could see the Marseille skyline far to the hazy north. This morning the captain had asked if they were returning to their berth at Monaco, but Anne Marie had merely shaken her head. She figured she would need at least a few more days to work out her next moves.

Run? If she did that she would be out of the business, possibly for good. On the surface it wouldn’t be so bad to retire somewhere. She had plenty of money, and when she got back she would begin siphoning even more cash from the fund into a few untouchable private offshore accounts. Her investors, especially some of the Saudis, would send someone after her naturally. But she had the means to fight back, and if need be it’s exactly what she would do, fight fire with fire. But her strike would be harsh beyond measure. It was something her father, one of the original hedge fund managers back in the late fifties and early sixties, would have done.

“The whole notion of minimizing risk at the expense of reducing profits is a load of pure horseshit,” Thomas Senior stated flatly at his daughter’s graduation from Harvard Business School. Anne Marie had inherited her dad’s tall, slender frame and good looks, along with a few million when the old man had put a 1911A1 Military Colt .45 to his temple and blew his brains out. When he had been alive though the old man had never been shy about offering his opinions whether they’d been asked for or not. Anne Marie, who had followed in his footsteps, first with a BA in accounting from Loyola, her CPA from DePauw, and finally a Harvard MBA, had also inherited that trait.

“Al Jones got it wrong,” Senior had told the group of MBA graduates gathered around him and his daughter on the Yard. Jones had been the financial wizard who’d created the first hedge fund in 1949, buying assets he thought would go up and selling those that he expected to fall. The man was hedging his bets. “That’s the way the market works when pansies weak in the knees make their trades.”

“And now?” one of the newly minted MBAs asked politely, even though they all knew what the answer would be.

Senior looked at them as if he were seeing a bunch of English lit majors who wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between a high-water mark and a hurdle rate or a discretionary macro strategy versus a systematic macro — which in his opinion was no strategy at all. Letting computer software direct your buy-sells was for idiots and cowards.

“Profits!” the old man roared.

“At all costs?” the same young man asked.

And then Senior, realizing that his leg was being good-naturedly pulled, smiled. “Is there any other way?”

Anne Marie had been proud of her father that afternoon. Senior had been a player right up to the end when the markets crashed in ’87, and although his funds had lost only 10 percent of their NAVs, or net asset values, it was enough because they’d all been leveraged to 90 percent. For every dollar his funds had lost, they’d wiped out nine. And it was over.

Anne Marie took the bottle of Krug out to the aft sundeck and sat back in one of the chaise lounges, a dark scowl on her features. She was dressed in a white lounging suit and she was aware that she looked good. But she couldn’t keep her mind away from her troubles. Her situation was a lot more complicated, but she was heading toward the same net effect that her father had faced. This cruise had been meant to recharge her batteries, figure a way out, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to put a pistol to her head. But she was lonely now. She’d had three high-profile marriages, the last one to a Hollywood star that had ended six years ago when she had to get out of Dodge and he refused to leave with her. She had her staff, but they couldn’t be counted on to share a confidence; most of them would see it as a sign of weakness, typical for a female, and jump ship.

The only man she could count on was Gunther Wolfhardt, a former German intelligence officer who Anne Marie had been introduced to by a high-ranking assistant to the UAE’s minister of finance, Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, as a good man to have in one’s employ. Especially in the sort of business ventures that Anne Marie might be interested in pursuing and, of course, because she was a woman in a man’s world.

As a young KGB lieutenant, Wolfhardt had been a killer for the East when the Germanys were separate countries, and after they’d united, he’d headed farther east, ending up in Prague, where he somehow came to the attention of the Saudis.

The exact details of why Wolfhardt had suddenly fled the Czech Republic and turned up in the UAE, where he did the royal family favors from time to time, were fuzzy. Nor was Anne Marie interested in finding out. Instead she’d created what she called the special projects division of the MG, and gave Wolfhardt a healthy budget and free reign. Her orders were to fix things that needed fixing. If some investor somewhere got cold feet and wanted to back out, Wolfhardt and his string of freelancers would arrange an unfortunate accident, or perhaps a stroke or heart attack, and even the occasional home or business fire or terrorist suicide bomber.

Anne Marie had immediately connected with the German because they were of like minds; they were survivors, and nothing else mattered, though there was no love between them.

But Gunther wasn’t here now, only the two bodyguards he’d arranged for were, so there was no one to talk to. No one to confide in.

Primarily the Marinaccio Group, with Anne Marie as the sole manager, dealt in oil futures, a lot of the risk propped up by derivatives among the oil suppliers, mostly OPEC and the refineries in the U.S., India, and China. It was nothing more than insider deals between the producers and the users who agreed to set a price and deliver a set amount of oil. The people who pumped the oil were assured of a market, the refiners were assured of a steady supply, and cash could be made on the promises.

All that had been fine, especially when oil had approached the $150 per barrel mark. But she’d made a few side deals, pumping a lot of the fund’s money into China’s industrial revolution. The higher China’s per capita income rose, because of farmers coming into the cities to work in the factories, the more automobiles and trucks they would need, ergo an increased demand for oil.

The problems came one after the other: Americans reduced their driving when gasoline hit $4 a gallon and they vastly scaled back their discretionary spending when trips to the mall got too expensive, which sharply cut back the need for inexpensive Chinese products that were increasingly more expensive to ship to the U.S. Although oil dropped to under $100, then $50 per barrel — simple supply and demand — Americans were not returning to their gas-guzzling SUVs, nor were they returning to the malls, and China had to cut back its manufacturing outputs, and curtail building new factories.

The Marinaccio Group was hemorrhaging money, and Anne Marie had no real idea what to do about it.

“Be bold,” her father would have advised. “Make an end run.”

But look where that had gotten him. It was depressing.

Carlos Ramirez, one of her bodyguards, came from the saloon with a sat phone. He was a small, wiry man with a star soccer player’s physique and the dark complexion of Pelé. He moved with the grace of a jungle cat and never raised his voice. “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Marinaccio, but you have a call.”

“No calls,” Anne Marie said.

“I think you need to take this one, ma’am. It’s Abdullah al-Naimi.”

Anne Marie hesitated for just a beat. Al-Naimi was the deputy director of Saudi Arabia’s chief spy agency, the General Intelligence Presidency or GIP, and first cousin to the Saudi minster of petroleum and mineral resources. The shit was about to hit the fan much sooner than she’d thought it would. The Saudis were not interested in developing Iraq’s oil fields. They didn’t want the competition when the oil began to flow, principally to the U.S. They wanted to squeeze the market as hard as they could for as long as they could. And they definitely did not trust women in business.

She took the phone and Ramirez retreated back through the saloon. “Mr. al-Naimi, good afternoon. Where are you calling from?”

“If you look to the northwest you will see my helicopter,” al-Naimi said. “Stop your vessel and prepare for me.”

Anne Marie looked, and she could see it low in the distance. “We’re at minimal staff, at the moment. And actually we’re on the way back to—”

The connection was broken and for a moment Anne Marie considered ordering the captain to speed up and change course directly for Monaco, because for whatever reason the Saudi was coming out here to speak with her would not be pleasant. It was even possible that some of the important Saudi princes who’d secretly invested in the MG were getting pressure from the king to bail out, which would destroy the fund so that the remaining power hitters would be coming to Anne Marie for answers.

She’d sent Felicity ’s helicopter back to Monaco with the last of her guests, so the ship’s landing pad was empty and she couldn’t make that excuse.

Make an end run, Senior had advised. Well, if ever there was the time for something so dramatic it was now.

She picked up the ship’s phone lying on the table beside her and ordered the captain to come into the wind, slow to idle, and prepare to board a helicopter.

Almost immediately the ship turned toward the southeast and slowed down. One of the crewmen came out of a hatch onto the landing pad two decks up and just aft of the bridge, and Anne Marie followed him up.

Within just a couple of minutes the sleek Bell 429 twin-tailed corporate helicopter with the Saudi coat of arms, a palm tree above crossed scimitars, flared opposite Felicity ’s starboard quarter and the pilot slid to a hover a few feet above the helipad and set down. It was a slick bit of flying, but the royals had the money to hire the best.

A rear door opened and al-Naimi, dark, sleek, slightly built, but with the characteristically large Saudi nose, dressed in Western business clothes, beckoned Anne Marie to join him.

“Tell the captain to hold here,” she told the crewman, and ducking low she hurried across to the helicopter and climbed aboard. As soon as the door was closed and she’d secured her seat belt, the pilot took off and headed south.

Al-Naimi was a cautious man who never spoke about anything of consequence if he were in an environment that wasn’t directly under his control. There could be, and in fact were, microphones and video cameras concealed in every compartment of the yacht. Sometimes Anne Marie found that it was in her best interest to see and hear what was going on with her guests. The surveillance and recording equipment had come in handy on several occasions, and Anne Marie knew al-Naimi well enough to figure that the man had to know, or at least suspect as much.

They’d first met five years ago in Dubai when Anne Marie had begun to attract the interest of several Saudi princes. The GIP had vetted her and the fund, and al-Naimi had come around to introduce himself. They’d met on several other occasions, at cocktail parties, and once in Monaco aboard a yacht owned by one of the royals. And their meetings had never really been friendly, nor had al-Naimi ever been cold, just neutral. But Anne Marie had been warned a couple of years before by her friend in the UAE’s Ministry of Finance that she should always be on guard against al-Naimi’s wrath.

“Do nothing to anger this man,” she’d been told.

Now it was impossible to tell from al-Naimi’s expression what his mood was. And Anne Marie thought that was an ominous sign. The professional poker player who held a straight flush had the same impenetrable look in his eyes.

“I’ll not keep you long, Ms. Marinaccio,” al-Naimi said conversationally. “I’ve just come to make a trade with you. One that you may not refuse, and the details of which are not negotiable.”

Anne Marie just nodded. She had no idea where this was heading, except that she felt as if she were in the biggest danger of her life.

“I want no denials from you, no excuses, no explanations. We know about your Iraq oil development fund, and the names of our royal family members who have invested in the fund. For the moment we will take no action to stop you, though officially we cannot approve. You understand.”

Anne Marie started to say yes, but al-Naimi gestured for silence.

“We also know of your investments in certain Chinese business ventures, and we approve. In time these will bring a good return. But we also know that your fund is heading for trouble because of the problems in the American mortgage market — some of which you helped create. High gasoline and diesel prices at the pump stopped people from driving, airlines raised their rates, and the cost to ship a standard container of products across the Pacific went from three thousand to nine thousand dollars, eliminating profits.”

“One hundred and fifty dollars per barrel was the breaking point,” Anne Marie said.

“Which is why you will help us raise the light sweet crude to three hundred dollars, perhaps four hundred per barrel.”

Anne Marie almost laughed, but she thought better of it.

“We want you to make gasoline and diesel fuel far too expensive to use merely for transportation,” al-Naimi said. “You will do this in such a way that my government cannot do, even with the help of the new al-Quaeda.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The U.S. and eventually China will switch to electrically driven means of transportation, and your fund will encourage this.”

Anne Marie spread her hands. “It’s already happening. There’ll be more nuclear power plants, solar farms, and T. Boone Pickens is pushing wind farms and natural gas.”

“You will make those efforts unpalatable to the public, first in America and then elsewhere. Electricity will be generated by oil, which will be purchased from us, and from your Iraqi oil fields.”

“I don’t have that power.”

“Perhaps not alone, but you will find a way. Make nuclear power unsafe. Another Three Mile Island could be arranged. Our trade will begin there. Later you’ll concentrate on coal.”

“It will take time.”

“I’ve spoken with certain investors who will give you the time you need. We understand such things.”

“In trade for what?” Anne Marie asked.

Al-Naimi picked up a handset and ordered the pilot to return to the yacht. He looked at Anne Marie as he might have looked at a child. “For your life, of course, Ms. Marinaccio. Could there be any better medium of exchange?”

Felicity put in at Monaco and Anne Marie took her Gulfstream IV back to Dubai that evening, landing at the Dubai International Airport at dawn where she was picked up by her limo and brought to her in-town residence, the penthouse at the Marina.

After she’d dismissed her bodyguards, she went out to the balcony where one of the house staff brought her a pot of Earl Grey with lemon, and she looked out over the waterfront, starting to get busy now. She’d gotten a few hours sleep on the airplane, but she was still dead tired, only she couldn’t shut down her mind. She was three thousand miles from the Med where al-Naimi had issued his warning, and it seemed like a lifetime.

Her decision would pit her either against the Saudi intelligence apparatus, in which case the MG would almost certainly go under and her life be put in jeopardy, or against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which case she would need plausible deniability. Nothing could point in her direction. Though what the Saudis wanted would probably still be impossible — four hundred dollar oil for electrical generation would put an untenable burden on the American economy. It was something that al-Naimi and whoever was directing him did not understand. Of course China and a rapidly emerging India could soon take over from the Americans, but it was the transition period that bothered Anne Marie.

In the end, there was no decision. Not really. Once she’d started down this path there’d never been the possibility of getting out cleanly, no matter how much she’d talked herself into believing she could. It was oil, after all, which had its tendrils in just about every corner of the planet. Almost no place on earth was free of needing it.

At noon, she finally telephoned Wolfhardt. “I’m back.”

“I heard. Trouble?”

News traveled fast, and her chief of special projects had ears everywhere, including a satellite feed from the surveillance equipment on Felicity, aboard the Gulfstream, and inside her penthouse here, in Monaco, and her house on the Palm Jebel Ali man-made islands in the bay. He would know about al-Naimi’s brief visit to the ship, but not what they had talked about in the air, though he knew what was going on more than anyone else in the fund, and was putting two and two together.

“I have a job for you, this one could be the biggest yet,” Anne Marie said. “Get us a tee time.”

“Already have. Two o’clock.”

The Majlis eighteen at the Emirates Golf Club was the best in Dubai, green fairways snaking in and around the desert sand dunes, and it was the first grass course in the Middle East. Before then golfers played in what amounted to eighteen-hole sand traps.

Wolfhardt was waiting outside the pro shop with a cart on which he’d already loaded his own and Anne Marie’s clubs. He was a short, stocky man of fifty-six, with broad, powerful shoulders and a round, almost cherubic face that had fooled more than one person who wanted to believe a man’s smile was a mirror to his soul. In fact Wolfhardt was as ruthless as he was brilliant; driven, he’d once admitted, by some inner demon. He was a sociopath by birth, a killer who only valued money as a way of keeping score on his “jobs,” as he called his assignments.

Since joining the MG he’d seldom pulled the trigger himself. Instead he’d arranged the hits, and sabotage and suicide bombings, with an exquisite precision he’d learned from the Russians at the KGB’s School One outside of Moscow, from years of direct experience in the field, and from retraining at the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School and the Red Banner Yuri Andropov KGB Institute, both in Moscow.

He’d never been married, so far as Anne Marie knew, though from time to time he would disappear to somewhere in Europe, usually for no more than one week, and each time he came back it was clear he’d shed a little of his tension. But Anne Marie never asked about Wolfhardt’s personal life or where he went and why.

“Good afternoon, Gunther,” Anne Marie said, sitting down on the passenger side.

“Good afternoon,” Wolfhardt replied, very little German accent in his deep bass voice.

He drove down to the first tee where they had to wait five minutes before the foursome ahead of them chipped on to the green. Play today would be slow, but Anne Marie didn’t mind. Wolfhardt would either accept the assignment or he’d refuse. It wouldn’t be about money, it would be about personal consequences, and before he agreed he would first have to see the entire operation as well as its aftermath in one seamless piece, with nothing reaching back here. Not simply plausible deniability, but complete and total distance, not so much as the hint of any connection, and Anne Marie thought it might take some time to bring Wolfhardt to that point.

The afternoon was desert hot and airless, but the golf cart was air-conditioned, and the small cooler just behind the seats held an ice-cold bottle of Krug and one crystal glass for Anne Marie and a bottle of Evian for Wolfhardt.

Both of them were indifferent golfers, though no matter how poorly Anne Marie played, she always managed to beat Wolfhardt, though they never actually kept score.

And Wolfhardt always kept his silence at times like these when it was obvious Anne Marie had something important on her mind. Nor did Anne Marie ever speak until she had worked out her approach. No cocktail party small talk, no banter between friends. This was strictly business.

Until the difficult 434-yard par-4 eighth hole, which required a long but precise drive uphill if there was to be any chance of reaching the tiny, sharply sloped green in two. Most golfers were happy to walk away with a double bogey, because even in two strokes it often took four putts to put it in.

They had to wait again for the foursome ahead of them, and Anne Marie poured a glass of champagne. “The job I have for you will be difficult,” she began. “There will be consequences even more far-reaching than nine/eleven.”

“The Saudis?”

Anne Marie looked at him, and for the first time wondered if the East German had become too powerful, too all-knowing, maybe omnipotent. But there was no way out now.

“Al-Naimi came out to see me. They want four hundred dollars per barrel.”

“They’d lose the American market,” Wolfhardt said. “Anyway what do they think we could do about it? You said another nine/eleven.”

“The U.S. is switching to an electrical economy, or at least one that’s hybrid, and eventually it’ll catch on elsewhere. Europe first, eventually China and India.”

“Nukes are back in, and wind and solar power are getting the press. What do the Saudis have in mind, because crashing airplanes into places like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon wouldn’t help. Even if they destroyed the White House or—” Wolfhardt stopped in midsentence and an odd, calculating, even thoughtful look came into his round face. “Impossible to stop all that. There’s plenty of natural gas, especially in the U.S. for the interim until the new nuclear plants come online. That’ll be their main source.”

“They want oil-fired power plants.”

Wolfhardt smiled, obviously knowing what had been suggested to Anne Marie, and appreciating the grand sweep of the project. “Consequences indeed.”

“We’ll start with the nukes. Make them even more unpalatable then they were after Three Mile Island.”

“Or Chernobyl.”

“Can it be done on a large enough scale to make a difference?” Anne Marie asked, hopeful for the first time since she’d left Felicity in Monaco.

Wolfhardt shrugged, most of his attention elsewhere, planning, looking ahead, balancing odds, risk management. His concentration was one of the traits, besides his intelligence, experience, and ruthlessness, that had attracted Anne Marie.

“Nuclear power stations are vulnerable, especially in the States,” he said, almost dreamily. “A nuclear accident would be difficult but certainly not impossible. Their Homeland Security is a joke. Even though they have some good people working for them, no one takes anything seriously. Their eyes are in the sky, not on the front door.”

“Americans are leery of nuclear power. We need to make them frightened enough to be willing to shut them down, even when they know they need more electricity.”

Wolfhardt focused. “It’ll take more than an accident.”

“Two, or three.”

“Public sentiment. The public has to be swayed in a very large way by someone who is very good. Someone trusted to tell the truth.”

Anne Marie didn’t understand, and Wolfhardt could see it because he went on.

“Within a couple of years after nine/eleven Americans had already begun to resent security measures at the airports. They’d forgotten. You’ll need to find someone with the means to keep in everyone’s mind that nuclear power means death. Someone who can make it a cause. Someone charismatic, because if all you convince are the Greenpeacers and not the man and woman on Main Street, you will lose.”

Anne Marie didn’t need to give the suggestion any thought: she knew who was right for that job. The man who had the power, the connections, the means, the will, and the ability — as well as the motivation.

The golfers ahead of them had taken their second shots and were heading up to the green.

Anne Marie nodded, confident finally that she had found the means for her salvation, or at least the end run that would give her time to work her way free and escape with her money and her life intact. “I have just the man for that part. Can you manage yours?”

“Of course,” Wolfhardt said. “Like you, I have just the man. But as you warned, there will be consequences.”

“There are consequences to everything we do.”