Abyss

TWENTY-FIVE

When McGarvey showed up at the CIA’s front gate, a pass was ready for him, and although normally visitors to the Agency had to be met here by someone authorized to act as an escort, he’d been the DCI. His was a special case.

“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” one of the security officers said pleasantly.

“Just here for a visit,” McGarvey said, and he drove up to the parking area in front of the Old Headquarters Building, the morning sunny and warm, nothing like his mood.

Rencke was waiting for him in the main lobby, and he was hopping from one foot to the other as he usually did when he was excited about something, or was in the middle of some important project. He was a man of medium height whose head seemed too large for his body; his red frizzy hair was always out of control, flowing out in every direction lending him the air of an Einstein, a genius, which in fact he was. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans, an old T-shirt with the logo of the KGB on the breast, and unlaced tennis shoes. Even a successful marriage hadn’t made him clean up his act, which every boss he’d ever work for thought was an act designed to irritate them, which it wasn’t. He was just Otto, and had been this way since McGarvey had first met him years ago.

“Oh, wow, that was something not in the playbook,” he said, giving McGarvey a massive hug. “Louise wants to know if you can you come over for dinner tonight. You haven’t seen Audie in a long time.”

“Not until this business is over,” McGarvey said.

Otto gave him a sharp look, but said nothing until they were passed through security and headed down the busy first-floor corridor filled with displays from the early days of American intelligence efforts beginning with the OSS during World War II. The entire corridor served as the CIA’s museum of its own artifacts.

“Eric Yablonski clued me in with what you guys are up to. We’ve been sharing files. He doesn’t think Hutchinson Island was an isolated incident.”

“Neither do I.”

“What’d you find out about the schoolteacher in San Francisco?”

“His neck was broken, and his body wrapped in a plastic sheet and stuffed in a closet. Means our guy was in the apartment.”

“Did you have someone dust the place?”

“The Bureau sent over a couple of people, but they came up with nothing, which is about what I expected,” McGarvey said. “Points to this guy being a pro, which means he got his training from somewhere, and for now I’m betting South African intelligence, or maybe a paramilitary unit. A SSP&L clerk who talked to him said he had some kind of a British accent.”

“Buffalo Battalion?” Rencke asked.

“It would fit. He lost his job and instead of letting all of his training go to waste he turned freelance.”

“But why San Francisco?” Rencke wanted to know. “And why that particular schoolteacher? I’m coming up blank and so is Eric.”

That had puzzled McGarvey as well, and it was one of the reasons he’d taken the time to go out to California to see if he could find any answers. And he had. “Benson was a homosexual, and he lived alone.”

Rencke got it immediately. “Lots of gay men in San Francisco, lots of gay bars, meat factories. He might have started with any database, but he ended up with single males working for the school system who had the same general build. Sooner or later he was bound to get lucky, and he did with Benson, and picked up the poor bastard at a bar and went home with him.”

“It gives up a couple of facts,” McGarvey said. “Our man’s smart, and we have a fair idea that he’s slightly built, which matches what the parking lot camera picked up.”

They got off the elevator on the third floor, and went down the hall to Rencke’s suite of offices, which was a cluttered mess: maps, books, atlases, magazines, and newspapers in a half-dozen languages, scattered on tables, on the floor, on chairs. Most of the world’s knowledge still wasn’t digitized, and sometimes information had to be found the old-fashioned way. A long table in the shape of a big letter C was filled with computer monitors, all of them large, some of them touch screens. Images showed on all of the screens, a couple of them with lavender backgrounds, which was one of Rencke’s coded systems that warned of some sort of trouble possibly heading our way.

There was room for a secretary and a couple of assistants, but he’d never felt the need to have someone work with him. “We all have our little secrets, ya know,” he’d once confided to McGarvey. “And I don’t want anyone prying into mine.”

“What’s coming up lavender, Hutchinson Island?” McGarvey asked.

“Nothing important yet, but I expect the threat level to rise, especially once we find out who the contractor was, because it looks like he was working for al-Quaeda. These are chewing on the Lorraine Fritch situation.”

“She was one of ours.”

“Yeah, COS Caracas. She and her number two were putting something together on Miguel Octavio and his connection with the UAE International Bank of Commerce, and she must have come up with something important. She called Marty Bambridge and said she was coming here with something too big to trust to the Internet or even encrypted phones. Had to be done in person. Anyway a couple of guys dressed as cops took her out along with her driver and bodyguard within sight of the airport.”

“No briefcase or computer disk?”

“Nada. Whoever made the hit took whatever she was carrying with her.”

“What about her number two?”

“Don Morton. One of the good ones, sharp as they come. But he didn’t have a clue what she’d found. He didn’t even know she was heading out of the country. The only one she told besides Marty was the ambassador.”

“Do you know Eve Larsen?”

Rencke grinned. “Everybody does. She’s a bright lady. Just won the Nobel Peace Prize, though I figured her for physics in ten or twenty years.”

“She was at Hutchinson Island talking to some SSP and L bigwigs when the attack occurred. And she thinks that Lorraine’s assassination and Hutchinson Island are related.”

Rencke was intrigued; it showed on his face. “That’s a stretch.”

“That’s what I told her. But she had a pretty convincing argument that Lorraine was taken down by people who want to topple the Chávez government and take over oil production, so that they could eventually shut it down.”

“Never happen,” Rencke said.

“No. And I don’t think this anti-oil group killed her. It was probably Octavio because of something Lorraine dug up. And the timing is the thing that Dr. Larsen picked up on, the assassination coming on the heels of the Hutchinson Island attack.”

“None of the oil companies would be crazy enough to pull off stunts like those,” Rencke said. “That just won’t wash, Mac. You might argue that most of them didn’t give a damn about anything except profits and the hell with the environment. But the same can be said of a lot of countries — China among them. Us. We’re building coal-fired plants that pollute a hell of a lot more than nukes or natural gas, or even cars on the road.”

“I’m just fishing here. But you just said that Don Morton and Lorraine had come up with a connection that linked Octavio to the UAE bank. Those people are probably just as dirty as the guys who ran the BCCI were.”

“Whoa, wait a minute, kemo sabe,” Rencke said, suddenly very excited. “Shit, it’s al-Quaeda, supported by the UAE IBC.” He dropped into a chair in front of one of the touch screen monitors and brought up Forcier’s image data to the right. “This is your suicide bomber. Real name Achmed bin Helbawi, from Sadda, a little town on the Afghan border south of Peshawar. Al-Quaeda recruited him when he was just a kid, and sent him to Saudi Arabia to study nuclear engineering. We found out that he was a standout at King Abdul Aziz University, and then he suddenly disappeared for about a year, until he turned up at a couple of French nuclear power training facilities in Saclay and Montigny under a Saudi passport. Then last year sometime he shows up on the doorstep of a headhunter in New York who got him the Hutchinson Island job under the name Thomas Forcier with a legitimate French passport.”

“Did the same bank that Octavio is connected with fund Helbawi’s education?”

“I don’t know that yet,” Rencke admitted. “But it’s an interesting thought. Maybe Dr. Larsen wasn’t making much of a stretch after all.”

“If we can make that connection it would be a common point between Lorraine and Hutchinson Island.”

“And your pro,” Rencke said. “An operation like that had to have a tight plan. Helbawi on the inside pumping info back out. I assume the Bureau has tossed his apartment. Have you been told anything?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll put it on my shopping list,” Rencke said. “But for now, job one is finding out who the contractor is.”

“And where he’s gone to ground. I’d like to have a chat with him.”

Rencke laughed. “I bet you would.”

And McGarvey was brought back to his conversation with Eve at the Watergate, and her speculations and fear that someone might be coming after her next. “The IBC has to be getting some of its money from the Saudis and some other oil interests,” he said. “Octavio, for one. Who’d have the most to lose if Venezuela’s oil production were to be interrupted?”

“Well, not Exxon, or BP or any of the others. But it might play havoc with some of the hedge fund guys and derivatives people.”

“And who would have the most to gain, if the American public began to believe that nuclear energy was too risky, maybe deny any new permits or licenses?”

“The same people,” Rencke said. And he’d gotten McGarvey’s point. “Eve Larsen and her project could be on the firing line, especially now that she’s won the Nobel Prize, because it’s a safe bet she’ll get the funding, and probably from some company like BP. Would be great publicity for them. Investing in alternative energy.”

“Have you heard anything?”

Rencke started to shake his head, but then turned to one of his computer monitors connected to a keyboard and pulled up a media search engine. “I remember something on Fox News maybe a year or two ago. An accident.”

A minute later he found the program with George Szucs and Eve Larsen aboard the Gordon Gunther in the Gulf Stream offshore from the Hutchinson Island nuclear power plant, and fast-forwarded the interview to where she took off her clothes and dove into the water, and then to the point where the cable had been brought aboard, and the question, an accident or sabotage was left hanging.

“If it was sabotage, someone was after her more than a year ago,” Rencke said.

Left unsaid, because it wasn’t necessary, was that the Nobel Prize had just made Eve Larsen the biggest target on the block. Coal, gas, nukes, oil, and everyone connected with the big four would be gunning for her.

“See what you can dredge up,” McGarvey said. “But the contractor’s identity is still primary.”

“I’m on it,” Rencke said.

TWENTY-SIX

InterOil’s new international headquarters was housed in an impressively modernistic skyscraper rising as a narrow glass and steel pyramid twenty-six stories above the Mississippi River on Business 61 in front of Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. InterOil had made fabulous profits when oil had hit $150 per barrel, and even at less than one half that, the company, rivaled only by ExxonMobil, was raking in good money.

Much of the company’s profits were being invested in oil exploration along Florida’s gulf coast, in Iraq’s new green fields, and in partnership with Octavio Oil, drilling had begun in the Golfo de Venezuela. Permitting applications with the Canadian government for preliminary exploration in the Arctic’s Parry Channel near Cornwallis Island with its settlement and airstrip at Resolute had been going ahead slowly for the past eighteen months, and the Parliament at Ottawa just last week had given its tentative approval, even over massive protests. Oil and oil dollars had become more important than the environment, even after the BP Gulf spill, even in sensitive places like the Arctic wilderness and Florida’s beaches.

But InterOil had not given up its investments, though meager by comparison with exploration and development, in alternative energy sources, mostly solar power in Arizona and New Mexico, but in some wind farms along the Oregon and Washington coasts.

Joseph Caldwell over at Commerce had been as good as his word, and had personally telephoned Eve yesterday that he’d arranged an appointment with InterOil’s Erik Tyrell, vice president of worldwide marketing.

“Can’t promise you anything, Doctor, but Erik will at least hear you out,” Caldwell had told her. “He’s a careful man, and he’ll almost certainly have someone else sitting in on your meeting. My guess would be Jane Petersen, their chief U.S. counsel, who is even more careful and tightfisted than he is.”

“Can you suggest an approach that might work?” Eve had asked, swallowing her stubborn streak, because this stuff was every bit as important as the science. Without the backing, there would be no science.

“May I speak frankly?”

“Of course.”

“You have a chip on your shoulder, Doctor, that is unattractive.”

Eve bridled, and she wanted to protest. Who the hell did he think he was? Nothing other than a bureaucrat, while she was a scientist and had just won the … Nobel Prize. It made her smile, just a little, to realize the bastard was right. And so was Don, who’d tried to warn her to “play nice.” She could blame her attitude on her upbringing in England, something she’d been doing for most of her life, but even when she’d been a kid she’d had the same “screw you” attitude. And now she didn’t know if she liked looking in that sort of a mirror, though maybe it was time she finally did.

“You’re right,” she admitted.

“I’m a politician, which means I know when to push and when to back off, and when to show up at a meeting that’s vitally important with my hat in hand. Every once in a while something like that actually works.”

And this time Eve really did laugh a little, because Caldwell was not only a politician, he was an important man with a little bit of self-deprecating humor. “Thanks, Mr. Secretary. It’s something new for me, but I’ll try.”

“Good luck.”

At noon Eve got out of the cab in front of InterOil, and with her laptop containing a PowerPoint presentation of what she hoped to achieve, and how she wanted to get there, she squared her narrow shoulders and marched across the broad plaza and fountains to the vast, doorless entrance, the inside coolness separated from the sultry heat outside by a sheet of gently blowing air.

People were seated on benches and on the rims of the several fountains eating their lunches, and inside the lobby that soared upward for the entire twenty-six stories, more people were coming and going. InterOil’s headquarters was a busy place. Prosperous, even booming, and bustling 24/7 because the company operated worldwide on Greenwich mean time so that office hours everywhere could be coordinated.

She had been told by Tyrell’s secretary that noon local would be the only time open for her brief presentation. If it had been set for two in the morning she would have agreed without hesitation, though she’d been a little put off by the secretary’s emphasis on brief . She’d had time on the flight from Washington to pare down the forty-minute fund-raising presentation she’d been giving.

“Bright, cheerful, but businesslike.” She’d laughed when she told Don. “And brief.”

He’d laughed with her. “Just remember to stay out of your lecture mode and you’ll be fine.”

“That’ll be the toughest part.”

The receptionist at the circular counter in the center of the lobby directed Eve to the southwest elevators. “Mr. Tyrell’s office is on the twenty-fifth floor.”

She was the only one in the car so she indulged herself by examining her image in the mirrored back wall. She was dressed in a khaki skirt, a plain white blouse, and a blue blazer, no earrings or necklace, and only a touch of makeup, even that much rare for her. She looked neat, freshly scrubbed, but as if she’d just stepped out of the pages of some outdoor adventure magazine. Queen of the High Seas come ashore to ask for a handout. She’d never thought much about her looks until now, and she felt a little shabby in this setting.

Tyrell’s suite of offices was behind glass doors directly across from the elevator, and his secretary, a stunning blond woman with movie star teeth and a devastating smile, got up from behind her glass desk. “Mr. Tyrell is waiting in the boardroom for you, Doctor,” she said, and she led Eve, who was really feeling shabby now, down a connecting corridor to a smallish room with a long table big enough to seat ten or twelve people.

Photographs of what appeared to be oil-drilling rigs in settings from deserts to frozen tundra and offshore platforms, some of them huge, and in one photograph a gigantic wave had risen as high as the main deck, were arranged on the walls.

Tyrell, seated at the head of the table, didn’t bother to get up. “So good of you to be prompt, Doctor Larsen,” he said. He was a short-torsoed, fat man with thick white hair that framed his perfectly round face like a halo. Except for an extremely stern set to his narrow lips and a harshness in his voice and eyes, he could have easily fit the role of a department store Santa Claus, and Eve’s spirits took a little sag.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” Eve said. She sat down at the opposite end of the table and laid her laptop in front of her.

“I noticed when you came in that your eyes were drawn to our photo gallery, especially the North Sea rig.”

“Impressive.”

“Carlton Explorer II, quite large, in size and in dollars. Built in Norway and dragged out to her present position by six oceangoing tugs, before her legs were extended to the seabed, and work could actually be done. We’ll have invested nearly one billion dollars by the time we ever pump so much as a single barrel of oil.”

Eve had no idea what he was trying to tell her. “It’s good that InterOil has been successful enough to be able to spend that kind of money for exploration.”

“It’s a part of our business, Doctor,” Tyrell said. “Do you know the size of that wave washing over our rig?”

“Probably seventy feet, perhaps higher if it was a rogue. I would assume the rig had been evacuated by then.”

“Actually it hadn’t, and it was a rogue wave measured at slightly higher than one hundred feet.”

“Impressive.”

“Yes, Carlton Explorer II is impressive in every respect,” Tyrell said.

Eve started to open her laptop but Tyrell motioned for her to stop.

“Unfortunately our time is not sufficient to hear your full presentation.” He looked past her. “I’m glad you could make it,” he said.

Eve turned as a handsome woman with short dark hair and a slender, almost boyish frame, dressed in what was obviously an expensive dark blue skirt, silk blouse, and matching blazer, a gold-colored scarf artfully tied around her neck, walked in.

“Jane Petersen,” she told Eve, not bothering to offer her hand. “I’m the company’s general counsel for North America.” She sat down next to Tyrell. “Congratulations on your Nobel Prize. You must feel vindicated.”

Eve decided that she didn’t like the woman, though she wasn’t exactly sure why, except she’d detected insincerity in the remark. Jane Petersen didn’t give a damn about the Nobel Prize, Eve’s or anyone else’s, unless it had a directly positive bearing on InterOil’s continued profitability.

“Actually it’s why I’m here today,” Eve said.

Neither InterOil executive said a thing, and possibly for the first time in her adult life Eve felt out of her depth.

“May I assume that you know of my World Energy Needs project, and its possible significance?” she began.

“We know what you’re trying to do,” Tyrell said.

“I’m here to ask for funding.”

“How much?” Tyrell asked directly.

Eve glanced up at the photographs on the wall. “The cost of an offshore exploration rig,” she said. “Or at least a stripped-down version because we won’t be doing any drilling.”

“Why?” Jane Petersen asked, no curiosity whatsoever in her voice or manner.

And in Eve’s estimation the woman wasn’t even being polite, but she sucked it up. Hat in hand, Caldwell had recommended. “Because InterOil not only has the money, it has the expertise in offshore rigs. And because alternative energy sources are the future for corporations such as yours. Perhaps the only future, unless you believe that you’ll forever continue to find new oil pools.”

“For the next one hundred years,” Tyrell suggested.

“But the world’s reserves are finite, everyone agrees with at least that much. So why burn oil for power or transportation, when for the foreseeable future we’ll continue to need it for lubrication, for pharmaceuticals, plastics, and host of other manufacturing derivatives?”

“While I may tend to agree with you, Doctor, you’re discounting a fair bit of scientific work that actually stretches how we use oil, especially for transportation. You have to agree that the internal combustion engine is probably in its last days. We’ll go all electric, that’s a foregone conclusion.”

“Exactly my point,” Eve said. She didn’t want to get excited, but maybe they were getting it after all.

“Yes, but you need to see our point as well,” Jane Petersen said. “We have a business to run as profitably as we possibly can make it for the sake of our investors. And InterOil’s primary concern is finding oil reserves and pumping them out of the ground.”

Eve could feel her temper slipping. “That’s so shortsighted.”

“Is it?” Tyrell asked. “Tell us, please, if you were suddenly handed a check for whatever sum you needed, let’s say the one billion dollars we’ve spent to date on Carlton Explorer II and the work she is doing for us, how long before your project would begin to produce energy?”

Within a year, Eve started to say, but Tyrell held her off.

“The same amount of equivalent energy that Carlton Explorer II, which will begin producing next month?”

“Years,” Eve conceded. “But never unless we start now.”

“But you’re still in the experimental stage of your work, isn’t that so?” Jane Petersen asked.

“Yes,” Eve said, and she knew where the discussion was going, and knew that this trip had been a waste of time

“By which you mean to say that you cannot guarantee a steady production of energy — a significant amount of energy — until your experiments are completed.”

“That’s correct. In the meantime you’re running out of places to find oil.”

“That’s not quite true,” Tyrell said. “What we’re finding and pumping now are mostly light sweet crudes — that is oil which has a low API density, which we call light, and oil which has a low sulfur content which we call sweet. These are the oils that are the simplest to distill. And you are perfectly correct when you argue that we are rapidly running out of those benchmark oils. But they represent something less than thirty percent of the known worldwide reserves. We still have Canada’s crude bitumen and Venezuela’s extra-heavy crude, mostly in the form of oil sands. Plus there are oil shales, which actually contain kerogen that can be converted into crude oil. Did you know that the largest reserves occur here in the U.S.?”

“Yes, but producing gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, or heating oil from those sources would be expensive,” Eve countered.

“Fabulously expensive, which is why we are investing considerable sums each year to find new methods of refining those products.”

And it was over. Eve knew it and she could see in the expressions of the two oil executives that they also knew it.

“Coming here asking for help is fine, Doctor,” Jane Petersen said coolly. “But don’t try to tell us our business. We know what we are doing, and contrary to what you apparently think of us, we are keeping our eyes on the future.”

“Shortsighted,” Eve mumbled, but she managed a slight smile as she gathered her laptop and got to her feet. “Thank you for hearing me out.”

The door opened and an older man in a three-piece business suit, a pleasant expression on his square-jawed craggy face, walked in and tossed a thick manila envelope on the table in front of Eve.

“Lawrence Dailey,” the man told Eve. “I’m chairman of the board. Just happened to be in town when I found out you were coming down to ask for our help. Joe Caldwell asked if I could see what could be done.”

“Yes, sir,” Eve said for want of anything else. Tyrell and Jane Petersen had gotten to their feet, but were just about as dumbstruck as she was.

“That’s the deed and specifications for one of our platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, just offshore from Pass Christian, Mississippi. Vanessa Explorer, she’s called. We’re in the process of shutting her down and scrapping her. Just a security detail and small maintenance crew left aboard. I think she should do nicely for your project.”

Hat in hand, indeed, Eve thought. Yet she wasn’t so naïve as to believe that something else hadn’t been going on behind the scenes. Something that in all likelihood she would never know. But it didn’t matter. The damned thing works. She would worry about the quid pro quo, if there was to be one, later.

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll make good use of her.”

Dailey shook her hand. “Congratulations on your prize, and have a safe trip home.”

Peter Tolifson, an InterOil security officer, manning the security suite, watched the closed-circuit image from one of the cameras that monitored the plaza as Eve Larsen exited the building, crossed to the driveway, and got into a cab that had just pulled up.

Using his personal cell phone he called an international number, and when it was answered, he said, “She just left.”

After a moment he nodded. “She was carrying a manila envelope that she did not have when she arrived.”

After another moment he broke the connection and pocketed his phone, wondering why the hell someone in Dubai would want that information.

TWENTY-SEVEN

DeCamp, dressed in faded jeans, a plain T-shirt and sandals, and a large, floppy straw hat, was on his hands and knees tending his flower garden behind his seventeenth-century Italianate villa in the hills above Nice, in the area known as Cimiez. The late morning was lovely, and he was at peace with himself, in a place he loved, with a woman he loved, who was in the rustic kitchen preparing their lunch, and he was on the heels of a reasonably satisfying assignment.

He stopped for a moment to look past his tiny, disorganized grove of orange and lemon trees framed by tall slender cedars of Lebanon and mimosa down into the city, and beyond the hazy blue Mediterranean that disappeared into the horizon, when he spotted a dark blue Mercedes slowly making its way up the hill on the Boulevard de Cimiez.

He watched the car for a couple of minutes until it turned up the Rue de Rivoli that wound its way to the villa, put down his small weeding rake, got up, and went into the house.

Martine looked up from the side board where she was slicing a loaf of her bread, and the smile on her pretty, always expressive, French Algerian face faded. “What is it?”

“Someone is coming here, I think,” he told her.

They spoke in French, which he’d always thought was one of the greatest gifts Colonel Frazier had given him. “It’s a far more civil and civilized language than English,” the colonel had lectured. “The language of poetry, and of love.”

“For lunch?” Martine asked hopefully. She was in love with DeCamp as he was with her; her only two complaints ever were his absences from time to time, and their lack of friends.

“It’s possible,” he told her, and he went into the front vestibule where he got his front-of-the-house pistol, a 9 mm Steyr GB, and stuffed it in the waistband of his jeans, beneath his shirt. When he turned, Martine was there at the end of the hall at the kitchen door.

She was slender with small breasts, a boyish bottom, and straight legs with knobby knees that he’d always liked, and that sometimes he kidded her about. She in return would give him one of her large, goofy smiles and mention his thinning hair: “I live with a bald man. Mon Dieu. ”

Only now she was serious, and a little angry and perhaps frightened, too. “ Q’est-ce que c’est, Brian? ” she asked. “Are we in trouble?”

“Go back into the kitchen, please.”

“Why have you armed yourself? I demand to know.”

“In case we are in trouble,” he told her. “Now, please, Martine, return to the kitchen and remain there until I call for you.”

She wanted to argue, he could see that from her expression, but it was the one part of their lives together that he’d made perfectly clear to her at the beginning. “There are certain aspects of my business that we will never discuss, that you will never ask me about, that you will never try to discover. It is just this one thing, ma chérie, that I ask you do for me.”

She hesitated, but then nodded with a sad, weary expression and went back into the kitchen.

DeCamp felt sorry for her, but right now he had something more important to deal with. No one in the business, none of his contacts, no one he’d ever worked with, spoken to, or dealt with knew this place. Whenever he returned from a contract, he took great care to make absolutely certain that he hadn’t been followed. Here he lived with Martine as Brian Palma, an ex-pat originally from Australia with the identification to prove it. Not even Martine knew or suspected anything different.

But now someone was on the way here, because no other houses existed on the Rue de Rivoli, a dirt track actually, this far up into the hills. And he didn’t think that someone showing up here was a coincidence so soon after Florida.

He went outside and positioned himself at the end of the long covered veranda, the roof supported by Romanesque columns that he’d added a few years ago. The shade was nice in the mornings and sometimes he and Martine had their coffee and croissants out here, and watched the birds play in the thermals above them along the hilltops and ridges. Pleasant, but when the Mercedes topped the last rise and came around the tight curve, his gut tightened a little and he could think only of what was about to happen, rather than what had happened.

The German car pulled up, and Gunther Wolfhardt got out, coatless, his long-sleeved white shirt tucked in the waistband of his dress slacks, the sleeves rolled up. He spotted DeCamp in the shade, and slowly turned completely around. Next he lifted both pant legs one at a time and let them drop. He’d come here unarmed, and he wanted that bit of business on the table from the beginning.

“You may have compromised me by coming here,” DeCamp said.

“You’ll have to trust my tradecraft.”

“Or kill you and dispose of your body,” DeCamp said. “Not so difficult.”

Wolfhardt shrugged indifferently. “I’ve come with another assignment,” he said. “And time is a critical factor, which is why I came here today instead of arranging our usual meeting in Paris. I brought everything for you to look at, including an advice of deposit for one million euros.”

DeCamp’s curiosity was piqued, he supposed because at some point he’d unconsciously made a sort of Faustian bargain, only instead of his soul for knowledge, he’d traded his future for money and for the almost sexual rush of battle that had been a part of him since he was a kid on the streets of Durban and then the glory days of the Buffalo Battalion. But now, no matter what happened, he had the melancholy feeling that he would have to give up this haven, give up Martine and their pastoral lives together.

And in the end, no matter what happened, he would kill Wolfhardt and then go to ground.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, stepping down from the porch. “And you can tell me about this new assignment. I’m guessing it will somehow relate to Florida.”

“As a direct result, partly because you took so long with it.”

“Couldn’t be helped. It was the nature of the thing. Nothing more.”

The dirt road narrowed to what once might have been a goat path that wound its way farther up into the stony hills, and DeCamp and Wolfhardt headed up away from the house.

“Have you heard the name Eve Larsen?” Wolfhardt asked.

The name was familiar. “In what context?”

“She’s a scientist working on alternative means of producing electricity.”

DeCamp had seen something about her on CNN. “She’s just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Do you want me to assassinate her?”

“Yes,” Wolfhardt said. “She’s just been given an old oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere down around Mississippi. Are you familiar with the geography?”

“Not intimately, but I have a working knowledge.”

“Dr. Larsen’s plan is to refurbish the platform and have it towed to the Atlantic side of the Florida peninsula where it would be anchored in the Gulf Stream about forty kilometers directly opposite the Hutchinson Island nuclear station. She means to start generating electricity from the ocean currents and plug it into the U.S. grid, the Eastern Interconnect. And it looks as if she has more than a fair chance of doing just that.”

All of it suddenly came to DeCamp in one piece, and he suppressed a smile. “What happened to the facility is already beginning to attract a certain type of negative attention, which I think is exactly what your people wanted to happen. Sway public sentiment away from nuclear energy. And if, as you say you want to stop Dr. Larsen from achieving her goal, it must mean that you’re working for one of the major oil corporations, or perhaps OPEC, or even Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela whose interests would be most hurt by more nuclear plants and by Dr. Larsen’s project.”

Wolfhardt did not smile, nor did he rise to the bait.

“You, or whoever you work for, arranged to give Dr.Larsen the platform, and probably money for her experiment, which you’ve come to hire me to stop,” DeCamp said, nearly everything clear to him to that point. And suddenly he knew, or could guess the rest, and he thought it was ingenious, risky, and expensive.

“Go on,” Wolfhardt prompted, not at all pleased.

“You think that her science is sound, that she has a chance of succeeding, but the blame must never hit your oil interest principals.”

They walked a little farther up the hill in silence, until Wolfhardt stopped. “You’re a very capable man. Bright. Perhaps too bright. But what you have guessed is precisely why we’re commissioning you to kill her, the blame going to the Reverend Schlagel. Have you heard this name as well?”

DeCamp got no satisfaction from being right. But he took a few moments to work out at least some of the broad strokes of such an operation. He smiled. “I know the name. Question is do you have any direct influence over him? Enough, say, to get him involved in a public campaign against her?”

“It’s already begun, in part because of the incident at Hutchinson Island, but in part because he means to use Dr. Larsen’s project as his cause célèbre. He means to run for president.”

DeCamp had deduced as much. “All eyes will be on both of them, which makes the hit all the more problematic.”

“There’s more. Schlagel’s followers will be in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony. Kill her there, the blame will be easy to assign to them.”

“It may ruin his chances.”

“No,” Wolfhardt said, but did not explain.

And DeCamp did not care, but with the world’s attention focused on Oslo, the assignment had less than a fifty-fifty chance of succeeding in such a way that he could take her out and then manage to get away. “I’ll take your one million euros as an opening bid, but I’ll need a further one million when it is done.”

“No.”

“Then go home, Herr Wolfhardt,” DeCamp said, satisfied by the quick expression of surprise and dismay in the German’s eyes. They’d never given each other their real names, and DeCamp didn’t know exactly who the ex-German spy worked for after Prague, but he knew at least some of the man’s prior history. A friend in South African intelligence had gotten the information for him a couple of years ago. “Be careful of this bastard, mate, he could turn around and bite you on the arse.”

Wolfhardt nodded. “I’ll go now and present your proposal to my principals. I’m sure some accommodations can be made.” He held out the manila envelope. “May I leave this with you?”

“Of course,” DeCamp said, taking it.

“The material is quite sensitive, and included is the name and background of an ally who is almost always with her.”

“Is this person to be trusted?”

“Implicitly,” Wolfhardt replied.

After a quiet lunch in the garden, during which the appearance of the man in the dark Mercedes wasn’t brought up, DeCamp led Martine into the high-ceilinged bedroom where they made slow, passionate love. It was something they always did before he left on one of his assignments, and as always this afternoon their lovemaking was bittersweet, for Martine because it signaled another period of being alone, and for DeCamp because he could see the end of his life here with her.

“Must you leave?” she whispered afterwards. She was lying in his arms, and she looked at him, her dark eyes wide and already filled with loneliness.

“This will be the last time,” he told her.

And she smiled, not knowing the entire meaning of what he had promised. “Then bon, ” she said.

That evening Wolfhardt telephoned with the news that the one million would be paid within twenty-four hours, and an additional million when the assignment was successfully completed. DeCamp had expected his offer would be accepted.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Director of Central Intelligence Walter Page had a lot on his mind, most of it troubling, as his armored Cadillac limo was admitted through the West Gate onto the White House grounds, where it pulled up under the portico a few minutes before one in the afternoon. He was a man of medium build, totally undistinguished looking, with a pleasant face and calm demeanor who’d been president of IBM before being tapped to head the CIA.

Don Morton, the assistant chief of Caracas station, had flown up and together with Marty Bambridge, the Deputy Director of Operations, had gone over everything that he and his boss Lorraine Fritch had put together about Miguel Octavio and his connection with the Marinaccio woman and their shared business ventures, including ties to the UAE International Bank of Commerce.

On the surface none of that should have risen to the level of ordering the assassination of a high-ranking embassy officer, especially not the CIA’s chief of station, nor was her death some random act of robbery, or even a hit by one of the terrorist groups down there.

Morton and Bambridge, but especially Morton, were convinced that whatever Ms. Fritch had learned at the end, which caused her to charter a private jet to bring her to Langley to speak with her boss, was the reason she was killed.

“She sounded excited on the phone,” Bambridge said. “What she was bringing was too important to trust, even to one of our encrypted Internet circuits.” He was a narrow-shouldered man with a perpetual look of surprise on his dark features, as if he could never quite believe what he’d just heard.

But neither he nor Morton had the slightest idea what it might be except that it probably had something to do with Octavio and the rest of what they had dug up.

“But there had to be a catalyst of some sort to send her running for headquarters,” Morton had suggested.

And Page had sent him back to Caracas to do a full court press on the problem. After he walked out Page had ordered word be sent to as many of their field agents working under nonofficial cover as they could reach without causing a stir. But Bambridge was doubtful much would be turned up.

“It could come down to a matter of burning some serious assets we’ve been cultivating over the long haul.”

“Do it,” Page had ordered.

And the question that hung in the air, that still hung in Page’s mind and perhaps the reason for the president’s call, was a possible connection between Octavio, Marinaccio, the UAE IBC, and Hutchinson Island. It had to do with the timing; Ms. Fritch dropping everything to fly up to Langley immediately after the nuclear power plant attack was simply too coincidental for Page not to speculate.

He was met at the door by one of the president’s security detail who led him down the West Wing corridor to the Oval Office where Lord’s secretary told him that the president and his National Security Adviser Eduardo Estevez were expecting him. No one smiled when he walked in. The president, seated behind his desk, motioned for the door to be closed, picked up the phone, told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed, and then gave Page a hard look.

“Thanks for coming over, Walter. You have your hands full.”

Estevez, seated on one of the couches, was watching a newscast on a laptop about the aftermath of the Hutchinson Island disaster. He looked up, the same hard expression in his eyes as the president’s.

“I assumed you wanted an update on the situation in Caracas, Mr. President,” Page said. He sat down on one of the chairs in front of the president’s desk. “No one has come forward claiming responsibility for her assassination, but we think her death may have been a result of an investigation she was conducting on Miguel Octavio, and his connections with the IBC in Dubai.”

Estevez looked up and laughed, but without humor. “That’s not possible,” he said, coolly. “In the first place he’d have no need to involve himself with those people, and neither would the Saudis. We’ve covered that ground already.”

Page shrugged. He was getting boxed in just like every other DCI had when they tried to tell a president something the administration simply did not want to hear. Anything involving the Saudis, and now especially the Venezuelans, was tricky. The oil-producing nations had us by the short hairs, and policy planners and threat assessors over at the Department of Defense had been warning for years that our dependence on oil posed a real national security problem.

No administration, including this one, had cared to listen to that warning. The problem with facing the issue head-on was one of interims. Switching to alternative sources of energy, or even talking about going that way — if such talk were at the diplomatic level — could create a terrible ripple effect. Especially from the Saudis who had threatened to severely restrict OPEC’s output, putting a squeeze on the economy like had happened in the seventies that would all but drive the U.S. into bankruptcy. We wouldn’t have the money in the interim to wean ourselves from fossil fuels.

No president wanted to risk that happening, and people like Octavio were off-limits. Only this time it wasn’t going to be so easy.

“Ms. Fritch was a highly thought of station chief,” Page said, careful to keep any hint of confrontation out of his tone. He was reporting facts. “Bright, steady, experienced. She would not have wasted the agency’s time on something that wasn’t worthwhile.”

“She was wrong,” Estevez said. “Goddamnit, Walter, you know where this could lead if we’re not careful.”

Page remembered his swearing in ceremony in the Rose Garden behind the Oval Office. Afterwards the president had leaned in close so that his words would not be heard by anyone else, or picked up by the microphones. “I want the truth, Walter. It’s why I hired you, because I think you can handle it, even if the truth is not what we want to hear.”

“Yes, I know where this could lead,” he said. “The truth, even if it’s something none of us wants to hear.”

If the president remembered his own words coming back at him, it didn’t show in his expression. “The truth is one thing, but manipulating a delicate situation is something else altogether. And I want to make myself clear, none of this speculation will appear in the media. Not so much of a hint of it.”

“I’m not sure I understand, Mr. President,” Page said, though he understood perfectly. But he wanted the administration’s position stated plainly so that months or years from now the president, and especially Estevez, a man Page had never liked, would not be able to deny what had been said.

“Do you have any reason to believe that Mr. Octavio, or better yet, Venezuelan intelligence, has any idea what Ms. Fritch was up to?” Estevez asked. “She wasn’t under deep cover, everyone down there knew who she was. So, how careful was she?”

“She knew what she was doing,” Page said tightly. He’d served on a number of boards and he had learned to spot the CEO or an adviser who was running scared. He could almost smell it, then as now. But this was different, this was the Oval Office and he was dealing with the president of the United States.

“I think the Chávez government would not have taken kindly to the CIA prying into the life of one of their most prominent citizens,” Estevez said.

“He’s almost certainly a crook, and it’s possible that Ms. Fritch may have uncovered a connection to Hutchinson Island.”

The president was suddenly angry, and it showed. “That’s nuts, Walter,” he snapped. “And you damn well know it.”

Page spread his hands. “The Agency is doing what it’s mandated to do, protect U.S. interests. But if you’re telling me now to back off and look elsewhere, that’s exactly the course I’ll take.”

“Is there any proof of this connection?”

“We’re assuming that Ms. Fritch was bringing just that when she was assassinated.”

“Assuming,” Estevez said.

Page ignored him. “We can prove that Octavio is connected with the IBC. And we have high confidence that the bank is being used to funnel money from the Saudis and other oil-producing nations, especially Iran, to a number of terrorist cells, among them al-Quaeda.”

“Bin Laden is old news,” Estevez snapped. “You reported six months ago that you also had high confidence that he was dead.”

“Al-Quaeda in the Islamic Maghred,” Page said, keeping his cool, which had been his hallmark for his entire career. No one had ever witnessed his anger, it was one emotion he would never let show. His was the demeanor of the ideal public servant, calm, cool, and above all competent — a man in charge. “The group was formed originally to create an Islamic state in Algeria, but we’re sure that they’re taking part in al-Quaeda’s broader jihad. And there are others receiving IBC money. The Hizbul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed in Pakistan and to some extent in Kashmir. Not to mention Hamas, Hizballah, and a dozen other groups — some operating locally, some globally.”

“And according to you, Octavio is somehow involved?” Estevez asked.

“Yes, by association.”

“Good God, man, what would he have to gain?”

“We don’t know that yet,” Page admitted. “But the accident will have an effect on the thirty permit applications for new nuclear plants.”

“Thirty-four,” Estevez corrected. “And Hutchinson Island was no accident, that cat is out of the bag, which’ll have a devastating effect on the permitting process. Especially with the Reverend Schlagel weighing in.”

CNN had covered one of Schlagel’s incendiary speeches about the evils of nuclear energy, and although Page had only caught a tail end of the report, the FBI had sent its file over to Dick Hanson, the Company’s deputy director of intelligence as an FYI, considering the likelihood that the attack on Hutchinson Island had been planned and conducted by non-Americans. Page had seen the DDI’s précis of the document, and just now the intriguing thought came into his head that if Schlagel were somehow connected with the IBC — no matter how far-fetched that idea might be — the Hutchinson Island attack might seem inevitable.

“Can’t do anything but help fossil fuel interests,” he said.

“Coal and natural gas.”

“Oil, too.”

“What is it that you want to do?” the president asked.

And Page sighed inwardly. He’d achieved what he’d wanted to achieve today: convince the president to let him pursue whatever Lorraine Fritch had begun. “Follow the leads we’ve already established.”

“And?”

“Take them wherever they go.”

Estevez started to object, but the president held his NSA off. “Do you think it’s possible we may be attacked again?”

“Yes, sir.”

The president nodded, a bleak expression in his eyes, in the set of his mouth. He suddenly seemed old beyond his years. But then at some point every president seemed to suddenly age overnight. “After you were sworn in I told you I wanted the truth, and I thought that you were the man to handle it. Do you remember?”

“Yes, Mr. President. I remember.”

“Then find us the truth, Walter. But with care.”

TWENTY-NINE

In the eight days after Louisiana, Eve never seemed to manage a full night’s sleep, she was so filled with the possibilities open to her now. The Nobel Prize actually meant something concrete, and when she got back to her lab at Princeton to put together the reconfiguration project for the oil rig — her oil rig — Don had told her just that. And there’d been another celebration that even Bob Krantz had shown up for via video on someone’s laptop to offer his congratulations and four million in NOAA funds. GE had promised to match that amount because the four impellers the company was building — if the thing worked — would only be the beginning of what could lead to contracts totaling in the trillions over several decades. Her project, if it ever fully developed, would be the largest single engineering job in history — larger than the Panama Canal and every nation’s space programs and military budgets combined.

And the floodgates had opened even wider when, in a second dramatic turnaround, InterOil had agreed to not only pick up the entire tab for refurbishing Vanessa Explorer to Eve’s specifications, but to supply the crew for the job, as well as the crew and offshore tug to tow the rig the southern length of the Gulf, thence up into the Straits of Florida all the way to a position offshore from Hutchinson Island — a distance of nearly nine hundred nautical miles.

It had been the oil giant’s U.S. counsel, Jane Petersen, who’d made the call, and she’d sounded friendly, even cheerful to Eve. “I want you to know that InterOil is committed to this stage of your project. Anything we can do, aside from further funding, just ask.”

“I’m overwhelmed,” Eve had told the corporate lawyer and she’d meant it.

“Believe me, Dr. Larsen, this is not about altruism. InterOil is in the business of making money, and we believe we’ll do just that with your project. We want it to succeed as much as you do.”

“For different reasons,” Eve had been unable to stop herself from taking the shot, and Don, seated across the desk from her, had been listening in and winced. But the woman had been so condescending in Baton Rouge that Eve had felt belittled.

“Of course,” the lawyer said. “But to the same ends, and I hope that you can see that. InterOil is not your enemy, Doctor.”

She hadn’t seen it, of course, unless InterOil’s executives were a lot broader minded, with their focus more tightly on the future than just about everyone else she’d talked to — lectured — in the past year and a half. It was all about public relations, because for a long time big oil had been leaving a sour taste in the public’s mouth.

But Don’s homily had been not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “The money and the rig have landed in our laps. So now let’s do it.”

She’d hugged him that morning in her office, felt his warmth and strength, and knew that she could count on him as she needed to count on him, and also knew in her heart of hearts that he would be there for her.

And he’d been there for her, literally, on the flight down from Trenton-Mercer Airport through Atlanta, talking about the probable state of the oil rig, and how much had to be done in how little time — because she’d set impossible timetables, something she’d done all of her life. He was just as excited as she was, and a little intimidated too, because if there was any sort of accident at this stage of the game the project would be all but over. The money would dry up, and certainly any further cooperation from InterOil would go away.

“So we make sure that there are no accidents,” Don told her as the small Delta regional jet touched down at Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport.

“Or sabotage,” Eve had said darkly.

“This time we check everything twice. We take nothing for granted.”

Then why did she feel so nervous? Eve had to ask herself. Her ex had told her that she wasn’t happy unless she was putting out fires — his euphemism for problem solving. “When everything’s going fine your default mode is to think that the axe is going to drop any second.”

But something was just over the horizon, something had always been just over the horizon for her, and the sabotage at Hutchinson Island on the very day she was giving her presentation struck her as an unlikely coincidence. She’d never been able to count on anything or anyone her entire life; not her parents, not her few friends at school, certainly not the headmistress, not her husband, and yet here she was with a man, younger than her, but just as smart, handsome, steady, reliable, and she had come to trust him, rely on him, and that frightened her the most. It was a weakness.

They had been so absorbed that they were the last off the airplane, carrying only small shoulder bags with notes, drawings, and specification lists, plus small video cameras, because their visit to the rig would only be for a couple of hours. Afterwards they were flying directly back to Princeton to gather and brief the same eleven techs who’d been with them on the Big G, and who would be installing and testing their scientific gear on the way down the Gulf.

A very large man, even taller and huskier than Bob Krantz, was waiting for them in the baggage claim and car rentals hall. Dressed in khaki slacks, a light blue business shirt, and a dark blue windbreaker with InterOil’s logo, a four-pointed star on the breast, he was the most serious-looking man Eve had ever seen. And he did not seem pleased to see them.

“Doctor Larsen, Doctor Price, welcome to Biloxi,” he said, his voice deep-pitched and southern. They shook hands. “I’m Justin Defloria, Vanessa Explorer’s OIM — offshore installation manager. I’ll be running the rig for you across the Gulf.”

“We’re happy to be here,” Eve said. “Can you take us out there now, or do we need to be briefed first?”

“I have a helicopter standing by over at the general aviation terminal. Vanessa is about twenty-five miles offshore, so the flight out takes about twenty minutes, plenty of time for me to go over a couple of things. We’ve pulled most of the exploration and pumping equipment off, and we’ve already started work on getting her ready for your people and their gear, plus the tow. But a lot is going on, and a rig in this kind of transition can be a dangerous environment.”

“Have there been any accidents?” Don asked.

“Not yet,” Defloria said tersely. “As I understand it you have a flight to catch this evening, so if you’ll follow me we’ll get started.”

Outside they got into a big Cadillac Escalade SUV and Defloria drove them around to the general aviation terminal where a very large Sikorsky S-61N helicopter capable of carrying thirty passengers plus two pilots was warming up on the tarmac. The machine looked old and banged up, the paint on its fuselage deeply pitted and the interior shabby, most of the upholstered seats worn and dirty. But Defloria didn’t seem to notice, nor did the pilot who lifted off as soon as the hatch was closed and everyone was buckled in.

The chopper swung around to the west as it gained altitude, and once over Highway 49, it headed south over the port of Gulfport, across the Mississippi Sound and the barrier islands, and they were out over the open Gulf of Mexico, nothing but water dotted with ships and farther out to the horizon what looked like the edge of a forest of oil rigs.

It was noisy in the helicopter, but once the pilot throttled back to cruising speed of 120 knots, they were able to talk.

“Do you have a timetable?” Eve asked Defloria.

“That depends somewhat on you, Doctor,” he said. “And the tolerance level of your people.”

“Tolerance for what?”

“Discomfort,” the rig manager replied, baiting her as so many men did.

“We’ll manage as long as we have something to eat, a place to sleep, bathroom facilities, and space to install our monitoring equipment as well as the cable heads for the four impellers.” She smiled. “Hopefully you won’t have us camped out on deck in tents.”

“No, but we’d ask that your scientists and technicians remain below decks as much of the time as feasible. There’ll be a lot of welding and cutting, mostly getting rid of the last of the oil exploration systems and structures, and even a hard hat wouldn’t be much protection if a fifty-pound piece of steel girder fell on someone’s head.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” Eve said. “Besides Dr. Price and myself, I’m bringing a crew of eleven people, all of them accustomed to working while at sea.”

“Will you need separate dormitories?”

And Eve smiled inwardly. The man was old-school southern, maybe even a gentleman ordered to do a disagreeable job, but he was concerned that he could provide propriety and decorum aboard the rig. “That won’t be necessary, though separate showers would be nice.”

“I think if you can give me until you return from Oslo, the rig will be ready for your people to come aboard and we can start the tow.”

That was more than a month out and Eve was brought up against the simple fact that she would have to actually travel to Norway to pick up the Prize, which meant more dealing with the media, rounds of cocktails parties and dinners, that just about every Nobel laureate before her had detested. She’d gone online and looked up something of the frenetic ceremonies that led up to the presentation at Oslo’s city hall, and then had put all of that out of her mind until this moment. To her the Prize had become a separate thing from the ceremony. And although she’d endured the half-dozen news conferences in Washington and Princeton, she hadn’t enjoyed them. They’d interfered with her work. And Oslo would be the biggest intrusion of all.

She’d tried to explain something of her discomfort to Don, but he’d laughed at her.

“You know what you’re doing, of course,” he’d said.

They were in the computer lab on a CAD program with Vanessa Explorer’s blueprints up on the big tabletop monitor. “What do you mean?”

He was exasperated with her. “For Christ’s sake, Eve, you’ve won the goddamned Nobel Prize and it sounds like you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

She wanted to smile just then, she wanted to laugh but she shook her head. “I’m frightened,” she admitted.

“Of what?” Don had practically shouted.

They were alone in the lab, otherwise she wouldn’t have said anything. “I might be wrong.”

For a moment Don had been struck dumb. But he too shook his head. “Trust the data, isn’t that what you’ve been telling us all along, drumming it into our heads? But look for the anomalies, the errors will show up in the odd bits. But we’ve seen nothing like that.”

Just after three, Defloria pointed out the rig standing by itself, its nearest neighbor at least ten miles away. Two barges were tied up alongside, and as they approached from the southeast a crane on the platform’s main deck swung out over one of the barges and lowered a section of steel as big around as an oil barrel and perhaps twenty feet long. As they got closer Eve could pick out workmen on deck dressed in dark coveralls with white hard hats. She counted at least a dozen, and at various other parts on the rig, above and below the main deck, points of light from cutting torches were bright even in the daylight.

From a quarter mile out the rig looked like nothing more than a pile of rusted-out junk in someone’s backyard pond, nothing like the blueprints, and especially not the photographs InterOil had sent her to study, and her heart sunk a little. Discomfort, indeed.

“She’s a semisubmersible rig, which means when she’s in position her four legs are lowed to a depth of fifty meters and partially filled with ballast water to keep her stable,” Defloria said. “If the sea gets up we can pump out some of the ballast water to raise the level of the main deck above the highest waves.”

“Wouldn’t that make it less stable?” Eve asked.

“If it gets too bad we evacuate the rig,” Defloria conceded “But understand that this isn’t the same as a North Sea platform where it’s always rough. And its primary use was for exploration, not product extraction.”

“What about hurricanes?”

“Every rig — no matter how large — is evacuated. Most survive, tattered but afloat; still we lost two during Katrina. Expensive hardware.”

“Once we get to the other coast how do we keep her in place?”

“For the short term we can use dynamic positioning, a lot like bow and stern thrusters on a ship. For the long term she’ll be anchored to the seabed.”

Don had taken out his video camera and was recording images as the helicopter pilot came in just above the level of the main deck and slowly circled the platform until he flared and touched down on the landing pad at the opposite corner from the crane.

Now that they were actually aboard, and seeing the rig up close, not from a quarter mile out, Eve was even more disappointed in its condition, but excited too. Some rust and trash wouldn’t detract from the real technology that was going to happen from this piece of equipment. And the real science of actually modifying the planet’s weather for the good.

“We’ll make this work,” she said, mostly for her own benefit.

“Is the Ping-Pong table still aboard?” Don asked.

“It’s still here, along with the pool table and a pretty good library — mostly of video games,” Defloria said.

“Princeton cafeteria food is horrible, any chance of hiring your chef?”

“One of our catering staffs will come aboard, and we’ll even stock the pantry. At some point we’ll contract your project manager to find out if any of your people have any special dietary needs.”

Eve was surprised again and it showed.

“This will be a turnkey operation for your people until we get you settled off Hutchinson Island,” Defloria said. “At that point you’ll need to hire an OIM and a half-dozen other platform crew plus your own stewards, and I’m assuming electrical engineers. Once there InterOil will turn the operation over to you.”

“We may need help finding the right people,” Don said.

“In this job climate the word will spread. You’ll have no problem.”

Defloria handed Eve and Don hard hats before the chopper’s hatch was opened and they stepped out onto the deck, and instantly Eve was struck by the sheer volume of noise — whining cutting tools, heavy pieces of metal clanging against each other, other tools that sounded like jackhammers and buzz saws and drills, plus the waves against the four buoyancy control legs, the wind that had gotten up to at least twenty-five knots, and men shouting, and here and there the sounds of music, mostly country and western, blaring from boom boxes.

Another impression that struck her the moment her feet hit the deck was the size of the platform. This was no 225-foot research ship; the platform measured more than 600 feet from the bases of the fully extended legs to the helicopter deck, and during drilling or exploration operations the drilling towers, which had already been partially dismantled and barged to shore, might rise another 200 feet. Bigger than a football field, the platform’s three decks were crammed with living and working structures, stacked like some fantastic building blocks at one end of the platform, while gigantic tanks and hundreds of miles of color-coded piping and electrical cables snaked in and around an incomprehensible maze of individual pedestals, rising sometimes from the main deck and in other places from one of the lower decks, which held pieces of machinery, some that looked like pumps, others that looked like electrical generators and still others whose purpose Eve could only guess.

And everywhere, it seemed, rough-looking men were working at what seemed at first to Eve to be a measured, even indolently slow pace, until she realized that they were simply being careful. This indeed was a dangerous place.

“By the time your people come aboard we’ll be finished with all the heavy lifting,” Defloria said, and he had to shout. He led them down steep metal stairs and through a hatch into a corridor that seemed to run the width of the platform. Suddenly they were out of most of the noise, though the clatter of metal on metal rang out as if they were inside a giant bell.

“Is it always this noisy?” Eve asked.

“Sometimes worse during a drilling operation. But it shouldn’t be as bad when your crew are aboard, though I don’t know what noise level your impellers and gensets will transmit up the cables.”

“There wasn’t much noise aboard the Gordon Gunther. ”

“Those were small impellers by comparison to the ones you’ll be testing from this platform. You might want to ask GE’s chief project engineer to study the issue. Probably come up with some damping mechanism.”

Eve hadn’t thought of it, and she admitted as much to Defloria, who nodded.

“Engineering and science aren’t always on the same page.”

“We learned that on the Big G ,” Don said.

“Yes, I expect you did,” Defloria said.

At the far end of the pipe- and cable-lined corridor, Defloria led them through another hatch and up five flights of stairs to a large space with wraparound windows and consoles and empty racks that had once contained the electronic equipment for oil exploration activities. They were at the highest point on the rig, not counting the drilling derricks, and the view was spectacular. From here they could see just about everything happening on the main deck, and out to sea other platforms on the horizon as well as ship traffic.

“This was the chief geologist’s work space,” Defloria explained. “He and his people directed operations from here, and I think it will suit your purposes.”

“During the research phase,” Eve said, the rig in not as bad a shape in her mind as before. This would work.

“What about the housekeeping infrastructure?” Don asked.

“Everything will be up and running by the time your people come aboard. Right now one of the electrical generators is online, while the second unit is being overhauled. The desalination system, which provides fresh water, is just about on its last legs, but it’ll be as good as new within the week. We’re waiting for some spare parts from the mainland.”

“From the mainland?” Eve asked.

“You live and work on these things long enough you get to think of them as islands, versus the mainland where you get your supplies and take your vacations.”

“What about waste disposal?” Don asked, and Eve was glad he was being the practical thinker just now.

“Normally these rigs have sewage processing plants, but we’ve dismantled the system on this platform, too much wrong with it. For now we’re storing our wastewater in tanks that normally would be used for oil storage. Lot of capacity. Once a week it’s pumped into a small tanker and sent ashore. It’s something you’ll have to consider once you get to Florida, though with only a dozen people aboard you won’t generate very much.”

“How about bunks, linens, towels, stuff like that?”

“Your people will have to bring their personal items, of course, but InterOil will supply everything else — as we do aboard all of our platforms.”

“Where will you go afterwards?” Eve asked, suddenly curious about the man who would be in charge of getting her rig to Florida.

“An exploration platform in the Arctic, once we get permission from Canada.”

“You’d rather be there now.”

Defloria laughed humorlessly. “I’m an InterOil employee, Dr. Larsen. I do what the company tells me to do.”

“Fair enough,” Eve said.

“Would you like to see the rest of the rig?”

“Just our living quarters and then you can take us back to the airport.”

THIRTY

The day after the Reverend Schlagel’s fire-and-brimstone speech about Eve Larsen and her God Project and her Nobel Prize, Billy Jenkins, thirty-four, and Terrence Langsdorf, thirty-two, had gathered a few things from their bungalow in McPherson and headed east. Driving nonstop, except to gas up, grab sandwiches and coffee, and make pit stops, they made it to Princeton’s Forrestal campus at eleven the next evening in a high state of excitement and agitation.

“God’s meth formula,” the reverend had said once, referring to his sermons. “A natural high for the work of the just.”

Terry had downloaded a map that pinpointed the GFDL building and Dr. Larsen’s office and lab. And they hoped with all their might that the bitch would be there, working late, so that they would have the blessed opportunity to teach her the real meaning of finding Jesus in your heart; the real meaning of salvation.

McPherson was simply not proactive enough for Billy or Terry, especially not for Billy who’d done three years as an Indiana Army National Guard at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The reverend’s sermons were exciting, no doubt about it, but that wasn’t enough for either man who’d worked the antiabortion Christian circuit for three years, blowing up abortion clinics, and coming within inches of killing one of the hateful, baby-killing doctors, at which time they had to go deep. Upper Peninsula Michigan at first, then Montana, and finally McPherson.

God had been talking to Billy since he was eight years old in Indianapolis. He supposed it was a defense mechanism against his drunken father who started physically and sexually abusing him about that time, and his mother who cared more about the soap operas on television and gin and tonics then her son’s well-being. But talking with God made him feel good about himself. If Jesus had been able to stand His betrayal and mock trial and torture and the horrible march up Calvary Hill hauling that terrible heavy cross and the crown of thorns and the crucifixion and even the wound in His side not to mention the nails — spikes actually — in His hands and feet, then Billy Jenkins could put up with a little abuse. Because, like Jesus, he figured that one day he too would be resurrected and take his rightful place at the right hand of God Almighty, though sometimes he got a little confused in which order and just where those blessed events might take place.

Terry was just about of the same mind, because he’d come from a very similar background, except that his drunken abusive fathers were the ones he’d encountered on his journey through the Georgia foster home system, and his military service was with the regular army in Afghanistan. He’d received an other than honorable discharge for the use of excessive force against civilian targets. Even his gung ho platoon sergeant compared it to what his old man had told him about a place in Nam called Mai Lai. He’d met Billy on the antiabortion circuit and the two had gone to ground together. Billy was called Bo Peep because wherever he went Terry was sure to follow.

Billy backed into a slot in the rear of the lab, only a few lights showing in the three-story building, and only a handful of cars in the lot. They’d spotted no campus security or local pigs and the ten-year-old Volvo they were driving fit right in.

“In and out in five,” Billy said. “Ten at the most. We’re just sending a message tonight.”

“Yessir, just a righteous message,” Terry agreed.

And sometimes Billy thought that his friend was just a few bricks short of a load. But he was loyal.

They took a crowbar and a five-pound sledgehammer from the trunk, and moving silently went to the glass door which luck would have it was not locked, something that surprised them. But then scientists had the reputation of being absentminded.

Dr. Larsen’s office was in the west corner of the ground floor, but her lab and wave tank, where they figured they could cause the most damage in the shortest amount of time, took up most of the basement. Places like this were always controlled by a computer or computers, easy targets.

The main hall was deserted, all the office doors closed, only the corridor lights showing. They’d brought balaclavas just in case they ran into someone, and they pulled them on as they started down the stairs. Terry was a short, but stocky ordinary-looking guy, but Billy looked like a linebacker, with broad shoulders and a thick, beefy neck, and a full head of thick blond hair that since the service he’d kept long as a source of pride. But it was dead giveaway in operations like these, so whenever possible he went in with at least a lid.

A long unadorned corridor, dimly lit, ran the length of the basement. Doors with frosted glass panels lined the hall, some marked only with numbers, but near the end, one was marked DR. EVELYN LARSEN, NOAA.

They stopped and Billy put his ear to the door to listen. Some machinery was running inside, barely audible, but he couldn’t hear anyone talking or moving around and he looked over his shoulder and gave Terry a nod.

“In and out in five.”

“Righteous.”

For just an instant Billy wanted to stop and ask his friend what he thought God was all about, at least in terms of what they’d been doing with the abortion clinics and now this. But he let it go and tried the door, which was unlocked. Stupid, the fleeting thought crossed his mind, but then he pushed the door open and went inside.

The lab was large, at least big enough for a dozen or more people to work at what were computer stations each at the heads of or in the middle of benches on which sat a myriad of strange-looking equipment, some of it mechanical, but most of it electrical or electronic, or in three cases on small tables in the middle of the tiled floor in front of large pieces of complicated equipment that rose to the ceiling. At the far end of the room, which measured at least one hundred feet in length, a large plate-glass window looked out on the wave pool.

“The computers first,” Billy said, and he started forward, when a young woman seated at one of the terminals halfway across the room suddenly jumped up. He’d completely missed her.

“Who are you?” the woman said, a girl actually in Billy’s estimation. Early twenties at the most.

“We’re here to set things right, in the Lord’s name, darlin’,” Billy said, striding directly toward her.

But she stood there, rooted like a deer in the middle of a highway, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, until at the last moment she shrieked something, turned on her heel, and sprinted to the end of the room and out a door Billy hadn’t noticed into the wave pool room.

His military career and later his abortion clinic operations had taught him to beware of loose ends that could unravel the most carefully laid plan. The young woman surely fit that bill, but she stopped at the edge of the wave pool and looked through the window at him. Stared at him, and he had to sort of admire her courage, stupid or not.

He took a step forward, raising the sledgehammer, but she didn’t budge. It was as if she was taking pictures of him, and he was of a mind to say the hell with the lab and go after her. Girls like that needed lessons in humility; it’s what his dad had tried to teach his mother.

But something crashed behind him, and he turned in time to see Terry swing his crowbar into a computer CPU sitting on the floor beneath its station, then giggle like a girl. When he turned back, the young woman at the side of the wave pool was gone.

Terry smashed another computer, and Billy turned to his part of the work. “In and out in five,” he said.

“Righteous,” Terry agreed.

But in Billy’s mind it surely could have been more than righteous, it would have been fine to lay his hands on the young woman.

THIRTY-ONE

McGarvey accompanied Gail back down to Hutchinson Island for the simple fact that there was little else he could do in Washington until Otto and Yablonski came up with an ID on the contractor. But so far both men had drawn blanks.

“If we can get back inside the South Service Building, I want to take a look at the rest of the recordings for that day,” she’d said. “Larry told me that the feeds from some of the cameras came up blank, on some sort of a loop that just showed the same frame over and over again.”

“Maybe he missed one,” McGarvey suggested.

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

They rented a car at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and as they came to the south bridge over to Hutchinson Island, a few miles from the power plant, they encountered the first of the media trucks with satellite dishes on the roofs. “Like hyenas to a fresh kill,” Gail said.

“They’re doing their jobs,” McGarvey said, though he’d never had any particular fondness for newspeople, especially not after he’d faced the Senate when he’d been nominated as director of the CIA.

“They did a number on my father when he was killed,” Gail said bitterly. “Called him a misplaced cop with a hero complex and a pathological need for recognition that could have got some innocent people hurt.”

“I know. I read the stories.”

Gail glanced at him, a hurt look on her face. “They were damned unfair. And I’m next, only I don’t understand why.”

“For the most part they’re just trying to figure out whatever it is they’re covering, so that they can explain it to their audience.”

“In an ideal world I might believe you, Kirk. But a lot of these people are less interested in the truth than they are about increasing their fame, so they can demand bigger salaries.”

But McGarvey had wanted to believe differently after the storm of media coverage when his wife and daughter had been slaughtered by an IED at Arlington Cemetery, because he didn’t want to vent his rage on the press. They had been insensitive, but they had not pulled the trigger. The deaths were not their fault. It was like apologizing for being Americans after 9/11. No, the cause had been radical terrorist hatreds under the guise of the Islamic jihad, which was supposed to spread the true faith. And in turn it was really about power; who had it and who wanted to take it from them.

“Sensationalism,” McGarvey said, seeing her point.

“Voyeurism,” she said. “People driving past a bad accident and slowing down so they can see the blood and gore. There but for the grace of God, go I.”

“Worrying about it isn’t going to help our investigation,” McGarvey said, and he felt like a hypocrite, because that’s exactly how he had operated throughout his career. When he was in the field he worried about everything; in the end it was oftentimes the minor, overlooked detail that cost the agent his or her life.

And across the bridge and onto the island when they were stopped by the first Army National Guard checkpoint, beyond which they could see the fringes of the crowd lining A1A the last five miles to the power plant, his gut reaction was that the media was being manipulated by the Reverend Jerry Schlagel. Many of the people streaming past the checkpoint carried signs with the theme: LEAVE GOD ’ S WORK TO GOD!

McGarvey powered down the window and he and Gail held up their NNSA identity cards for the armed solider. “What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the soldier said. “They started showing up around midnight, and we were ordered to let them through.”

A National Guard lieutenant dressed in BDUs came over and glanced at the ID cards. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked. He looked a little green.

“We’re working on it,” McGarvey said.

“Any TV people up there?” Gail asked.

“Yes, ma’am. From all over the place. England, Germany, even Japan. It’s like a rock concert.”

There was no need in McGarvey’s mind to ask who the star would be. “How far out is the perimeter?”

“Post One is five hundred meters, sir. But you’ll want to drive up to the staging area just outside the main gate. The on-site commander is up there along with a first aid station and decontamination tent.”

“How about A1A north?”

“It’s closed.”

“Can we get inside the South Service Building?” McGarvey asked.

“I don’t know, sir. But they’ve already started evaluation work, and some cleanup. We’ve been told that it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been.”

“Call ahead and let them know we’re on the way,” McGarvey said

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said and he waved them through.

Driving the five miles north they passed a nearly continuous mob heading toward the power plant. Most of the people were dressed plainly in jeans or shorts, some with baseball caps, others with straw hats; men and women of all ages, children, some in their mothers’ arms, some in strollers, even buggies, and tiny carriages that were towed by bicycles. None of them drove, except for the few bikes, all of them were on foot, and nearly everyone carried backpacks or big shoulder bags, as if they planned on staying at least overnight, and many of them carried the God signs.

“There has to be twenty thousand people here,” McGarvey said.

“Probably more,” Gail said. “But look at their faces. They’re happy.”

“These have to be Schlagel’s people. Looks like they’re going to a tent revival meeting.”

“Yeah, but why, Kirk?” Gail asked. “What’s the point of calling his flock to a sabotaged nuclear power plant?”

A pair of National Guard Humvees came up the highway and McGarvey had to move over to let them pass. The crowds were spilling out on to the roadway and he had to be careful not to run over anyone, until finally the highway was completely blocked and he had to slow to a crawl, the mob parting in front and surging back behind. It was like being in the middle of a low fog, nothing visible except overhead, until in the distance, finally, the plant’s containment domes came into sight.

Gail sat forward. “They’ve already started to cap the north dome,” she said.

A wall of what at this distance looked like large concrete panels rose nearly halfway to the top of the damaged containment dome. At least three large cranes surrounded the perimeter and as they continued north one of the cranes slowly lowered another concrete slab in place. They could see scaffolding, but they were still too far to see the workmen.

The outer perimeter of Post One was a hundred yards farther, and here the big crowd was spreading out on both sides of the road, some of the people all the way down on the beach, others on the fringes of a swampy area to the west. A pair of National Guard trucks was set up as a negotiable barrier, the first one parked halfway across the road from the right, and the other a few yards away parked halfway across the road from the left. In order to pass the barrier it was necessary to drive around the first truck, then make a sharp turn to the right to get past the second truck. None of the mob was being allowed beyond the barrier. National Guard troops formed a line from the water’s edge to the swamp. And for now, at least, it seemed as if the people were content to come this far and stop, as if they were waiting for something to happen.

McGarvey pulled up at the barrier and he and Gail showed their IDs to a nervous first lieutenant.

“Colonel Scofield is expecting you,” he said. “The CP is in the first trailer.”

A lot of television vans had been allowed through and they were parked on either side of the road, nearly all the way up to the main gate area, where the command post trailer was parked. Several tents had been set up on either side of the highway, and just now there seemed to be a lot of activity inside the main gate. Even from here McGarvey could see that people coming out of the South Service Building were wearing bright silver hazmat suits, bulky hoods covering their heads. The building was evidently still hot.

“Where do we park?” McGarvey asked.

“This side of the CP,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll need to be briefed before you’ll be allowed to go any farther.” He stepped aside and waved McGarvey through.

A number of people in the crowd were watching them. They were not smiling.

McGarvey drove slowly through the barrier. “They’re probably blaming us for all this.”

“Haven’t you seen Schlagel on TV?” Gail asked. “He’s telling his flock that nuclear power plants are like having atomic bombs in your backyards. According to him it’s just a matter of time before something will happen at every nuclear facility. We’re playing with something that belongs only to God.”

“Looks like they’re buying the message.”

“Not only his congregation is buying it, lots of other people are coming around to his message, pointing at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. No one wants something like that in their backyard, and there’s a hundred-plus nuclear plants in the U.S. with plans for maybe three dozen more.”

McGarvey had a sudden, vicious thought. “Does Schlagel have any money? Serious money?”

Gail gave him an odd look. “He’s raking in plenty from his ministry and television and radio stations. He’s at least a multimillionaire. Why?”

“He wants to run for president.”

“Yes, so?”

“He needs a cause, and what better than playing into the people’s fear of nukes?”

“Are you serious?”

“I think it’s worth looking into,” McGarvey said.

THIRTY-TWO

The assignments had finally begun to lose their luster for Brian DeCamp. Wolfhardt showing up in Nice had been a stark reminder of how fragile his life was — had always been. In general, assassins did not live to retirement age, a fact that loomed large in his mind as he sat sipping an aquavit with a very good espresso at the sidewalk café in front of the Grand Hotel.

Oslo’s fall weather was mild, though on the cool side compared to southern France, and the long-range forecast for the December Nobel Prize week was for continued moderate temperatures. It would make for an easier hit, though a heavy snowstorm, just like an overcast night or a fogbound morning, would help mask an escape.

But this was the situation he would have to deal with, and on reflection he remembered worse conditions from which he’d walked away, and coming here to spend a couple of days in Oslo as an ordinary tourist under false papers was the first step of four: the plan, the equipment, the hit, and the following ninety minutes, which always were the most crucial. If you weren’t out of the immediate detection and arrest zone by then, it meant that the authorities probably had the upper hand and the odds against escape began to rise exponentially.

As he saw it now after touring the downtown area, there were three possibilities. The first was here at the Grand Hotel where he had booked a standard room. The Nobel Prize recipients and their guests and most of the attending dignitaries always stayed here, which opened a host of possibilities, all of them involving either the import of a silenced weapon to Norway, or a purchase here. The former, he’d concluded from the start, would present the smallest risk of detection. Unlike the U.S. and most of Europe, especially Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries had reacted the least to the attacks of 9/11, so getting a disassembled pistol, suppressor, and ammunition disguised in some way in his checked on luggage would be fairly straightforward. It was obvious that he wasn’t a Muslim, and beyond that consideration the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians had little interest.

So finding what suite she was staying in, arranging for a room key, slipping inside in the middle of the night and killing her, was the first and simplest plan, especially if any of Schlagel’s people were staying at the Grand.

The second would be a long-range shot either just before or immediately following the ceremony at the Radhuset, city hall, a few blocks from the harbor. The crowds would be large, though not very noisy according to what he’d read and learned from talking to people yesterday and today. But again Schlagel’s people would be on site, making their noises. Walking through the hall and across the broad boulevard to the harbor, he’d found no suitable shooting position from which blame could be directed toward the reverend’s crazies. So again he considered the possibilities of loading only two rounds into an untraceable silenced pistol, taking his shots from inside the crowd, immediately dropping the weapon in the middle of Schlagel’s group, and then melting away as the crowd began to react.

And the third, and in many respects the least problematic, would be making the hit while she took a horse-driven carriage tour of Oslo’s old town. It would take the importation of a silenced long gun, something only slightly more difficult than a pistol, and finding the right spot from a rooftop, hotel room, or apartment somewhere along the route of her tour.

The next consideration was his appearance. His disguise at Hutchinson Island had been slight, consisting mostly of a change in hairstyle and color, tinted contact lenses, lifts in his shoes, and a studied shift in his demeanor — a different walk, a different tilt of his head, downcast eyes, compressed lips. But on the off chance that photographs had been taken from the power plant’s security cameras, or a computer-assisted likeness of his face had been distributed to bodyguards assigned to Dr. Larsen, or to the Norwegian federal security police, he would need to do more this time. A wig, different clothing, a different eye color, different complexion, possibly even some minor plastic surgery, though he wasn’t sure that would be necessary because when he came back here he certainly wouldn’t be announcing his presence. He would remain in the background, anonymous in the polite Norwegian crowds.

And for some reason just now he thought about Martine’s flat bottom and knobby knees, and he looked away momentarily to watch the orderly traffic moving along the broad, cobblestoned Karl Johansgate, and the people on foot. The Norwegians were an orderly people. But hardy for all of that because of the northern climate, and a very long history of war, mostly with Sweden against the Russians. And he was inestimably sad for just that moment, thinking that he might never see her again, because of Gunther Wolfhardt and the German’s principal. And that led to an instant of intense hate, so that when the waiter came to ask if he would like another espresso or aquavit, DeCamp had to make a conscious effort of will to force a pleasant smile and look up.

“No, thank you. Just the check, please.”

The waiter handed him the bill, and DeCamp laid an American twenty dollar bill on the table, and got up, and headed the few blocks past the parliament building and city park back to the Radhuset for a final look before he returned to his pied-à-terre in Paris to make his final preparations and wait until it was time to strike.

That early evening, his work done, DeCamp was sitting at the bar drinking a dark Martini & Rossi with an orange peel when he happened to glance up at the television tuned to CNN, in Norwegian but with an English crawl at the bottom of the screen. The Princeton laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Evelyn Larsen had been vandalized in the early morning hours. There were no injuries, though one of the laboratory assistants had witnessed the attack by two men armed with metal bars and sledgehammers.

And he came to the same conclusion that the news reader suggested: The attack must have been inspired by the Reverend Jerimiah Schlagel’s recent sermons against what he called, “Dr. Larsen’s God Project — an abomination against the Almighty’s plan for us all.”

Schlagel’s denial came from his pulpit in McPherson, but DeCamp had to smile inwardly. Gunther Wolfhardt knew what he was doing.

THIRTY-THREE

Everything was the same and yet eerily different as McGarvey parked at the end of a row of military and civilian vehicles, and as he and Gail got out of the rental car she said so. They had driven into a war zone, and across the street and through the main gates the damaged containment dome loomed up like a mushroom cloud after an atomic explosion. The operators in the cabs of the three giant cranes lifting concrete slabs in place wore hazmat suits, as did the workmen on the scaffolding, who were careful to keep the rising concrete wall between them and the dome as they troweled mortar into the joints.

Other people dressed in hazmat suits came and went from the South Service Building, which just now seemed to be a beehive of activity. The thickness of the building’s north wall had apparently taken the brunt of the radioactive steam, but most of the outflow had blown directly out to sea.

Bob Townsend and Chris Strasser, dressed in spotless white coveralls, came out of the decontamination tent and walked over to the Command Post trailer, their hair wet and their faces red. Neither of them looked happy, but when they spotted McGarvey and Gail coming along the road they held up.

“What are you two doing here?” the plant manager asked, his mood and manner brusque. He had a lot on his mind; it was his power station on his watch that had been damaged. And it was obvious that he was placing a lot of the blame on Gail’s shoulders.

“We’d like to get up to security and pull out the digital records from the surveillance cameras,” she said.

“You can look at them, but nothing’s coming out of there until we’ve finished the decontamination process,” Strasser said. “We’ll have to tear down every piece of equipment, strip the ceilings and walls and floors, everything, before we can start to put the place back together and get reactor one online.”

“That’ll take at least a year,” Townsend said.

“How about the damaged reactor?” McGarvey asked.

“It’ll never come online,” Townsend said. “But it could have been a hell of a lot worse if you and your people hadn’t shown up. They were heroes. You were.”

“We were doing our jobs,” McGarvey said, his gut tightening. “But this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, so instead of beating up on anybody, we’ll find out who did it and why, so just maybe we’ll have a shot at preventing a next time.”

“Any ideas?”

“A few.”

“Is there electricity in the building?” Gail asked. “We’ll need it to power up one of the computers and send whatever images we come up with back to Washington.”

“Portable generators,” Strasser said disgustedly. “But the hard disks may have been fried, and even if they weren’t it’s possible that the digital records were corrupted.”

“How bad is it?”

“Better than we expected, less than one hundredth of a sievert per hour,” Strasser said. “Less inside the suits, of course, but we’re limiting exposure to four hours per shift just to be on the safe side. There was a pretty strong electromagnetic pulse — that was the blue tinge we saw from the air — which may have caused some damage to the data circuits. We just don’t know yet. Right now our primary concern is to clean up so that we can put our crews in there to rebuild everything.”

“Do we need to be briefed before we go inside?” McGarvey asked.

“Essentially it’s don’t take your suit off for any reason, don’t eat or drink anything inside the building, no souvenirs, stay no more than four hours, and if you tear a hole in your suit, no matter how small, get the hell out of there on the double. There’s a pretty good team of National Guard people helping ours in the tent, so just do what they tell you. Suits are inside.”

“What about the bodies?” Gail asked.

“They’ve been buried,” Townsend said, his jaw tight.

“Where?”

“Nevada.”

The hazmat suits were bright reflective silver, large clear Lexan faceplates giving them nearly unrestricted vision straight forward and ninety degrees to either side, but they were hot and the bottled air was so dry it parched their mouths and throats after the first five minutes.

They walked across the street through the main gate and into the parking lot. Several cars had been left behind, including, McGarvey presumed, the rental car Eve Larsen had used. He’d promised her that if it wasn’t glowing in the dark she could come back and get it, but all the cars here would be transported out and buried with the other nuclear waste.

Gail pointed to a Volvo convertible. “If I stop payments do you suppose the repo man will take it?” she shouted.

“Yours?”

“Yeah, I bought it two months ago. Hell of a waste.”

Two large semis were backed up to the front entrance, and workmen were trundling out irradiated material from inside the building: desks, chairs, lockers from the break area, coveralls and hardhats, doors, windows, light fixtures, and acoustical ceiling tiles, plus the monitors and panel electronics from the control room.

The cleanup crews hadn’t started on the second floor yet, but when they did the entire place would be stripped bare so the reconstruction could begin if the basic structure was radiation free. Otherwise the entire building would have to be razed.

Just inside the entry hall they stopped at the foot of the stairs, and Gail shook her head. “They’ll never put this place back together.”

“They’re trying to save money,” McGarvey told her.

“Shutting down has put a huge strain on the state’s energy needs.”

“It could have been worse.”

“You’ve already said so, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Gail said. “When they start to pass out the blame, a ton of it will come my way, which I don’t give a damn about. But what frosts me is that they’ll stay so shortsighted they won’t beef up security the way they know they should.”

And she was right, of course, McGarvey thought. Nothing much had been done so far to harden security procedures at the other 103 nuclear plants, except to temporarily cancel public tours. Homeland Security was still looking for attacks from the sky. Airliners were not allowed to fly through exclusion zones around any nuclear facility.

But increased security measures were expensive. And in these troubled times money was tight.

Upstairs they went down the corridor to the blasted-out observation window. The glass had been swept up and the blood cleaned from the floor and wall, nevertheless they walked with care lest they step on a stray shard and cut a hole in their booties.

The bodies had been removed from the corridor as well as from the control room below where workers were busy disassembling the control panels for both reactors and carting them away. The supervisor’s desk and the two control consoles had already been removed and Gail shivered.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

“It never does from the outside looking in,” McGarvey told her, and she turned to look at him.

“It makes sense to someone?”

McGarvey nodded, the gesture mostly lost inside the hood. “It’s up to us to find out who,” he shouted.

“Does it always work that way for you?”

McGarvey felt a short, sharp stab of pain for what he had lost and how he had lost it. But in the end he had found the who and the why. “Yes,” he told her.

She read something of that from the expression on his face. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. She glanced down at the work being done in what was left of the control room and then headed back down the corridor to the security suite.

Nothing seemed to have been disturbed in Gail’s or Wager’s offices, her purse was where she had left it behind her desk and Wager’s jacket was still draped over his chair. Everything here would eventually wind up in a nuclear waste dump somewhere.

The light switches worked, and she powered up the computer in the monitoring room, but it wouldn’t boot up, and neither would any of the monitors that had displayed the closed-circuit television images from around the power plant.

“Your engineer was right, the computers are fried,” McGarvey said.

“It means even if the DVDs stayed intact we have no way of accessing any of them, unless we come back with a laptop,” Gail said bitterly. “This was a wasted effort.”

“It was worth the try,” McGarvey said, just as disappointed as she was.

Gail walked back out to her office and took a photograph out of the wallet in her purse.

“No souvenirs,” McGarvey warned her.

“This is my favorite picture of my father,” Gail said. “I just wanted a last look.” She put the photo and wallet back in her purse and went back downstairs and outside with McGarvey.

The noise of the angry crowd that was pressing its way past the barricades hit them at once. People were chanting, “God’s work is for God.”

At least a dozen TV broadcast trucks had moved up as well, nearly to the command post trailer, and the cameras and microphones were trained on Reverend Schlagel, who stood in the bed of a pickup truck, preaching to the crowd with a bullhorn.

“Nuclear energy is death!” he shouted. “God’s work. He created the sun and the stars — nuclear furnaces — and men whose only faith is technology have presumed to duplicate His work.”

“No! No! No!” the crowd screamed.

“What will happen at the one hundred and three remaining nuclear hellholes in operation in this country alone? More accidents? More disasters? More death and destruction? People displaced from their homes by rude beasts slinking out of Bethlehem?”

In just a few minutes he had whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

He pointed over his shoulder at the heavily damaged containment dome. “The devil’s handiwork. Is this what you want in your backyard? The sure and certain sign of the evil that walks the earth?”

“No! No! No!”

He gestured toward the National Guard troops standing by at the fringes of the crowd. “They couldn’t even protect this one hellish installation. Should the idolaters of technology, the shortsighted men and women in our nation’s capital, the fat cats at companies like Westinghouse and Mitsubishi whose only interest is that profits be allowed to build even more insults to God Almighty’s mysterious purpose for us? Construction of more than thirty of them will start this year unless we stop them. Will we allow this to happen?”

“No! No! No!” The crowd chanted. “God’s work is for God!”

“Do you think they’ll try to get inside the plant?” Gail asked. None of Schilling’s security people had come back to work yet, and even with the National Guard standing by she felt vulnerable.

“Schlagel’s not that stupid,” McGarvey said, leaning closer so that she could hear him over the roar of the crowd. “He’s here to make his point.”

“And he’s doing a fine job of it.”

Otto called McGarvey’s cell phone. “Oh, wow, Mac, they hit Dr. Larsen’s Princeton lab in the middle of the night. Trashed the place.”

Listening to the crowd it came as no surprise. “Anyone hurt?”

“No. Two guys, in and out in under ten minutes. Wiped out a bunch of computers and other equipment. One of the techies was there but she managed to stay out of their way.”

“Descriptions?”

“Nada.”

“What about Eve?”

“She and Dr. Price went out to take a look at their oil platform.”

“Has she been informed?”

“Presumably,” Otto said. “When are you coming back?”

“Tonight.”

“Talk to you in the morning.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Eve arrived with Don Price on campus that evening after missing their connection in Atlanta where they’d spent an anxious few hours in the terminal on the phone with Lisa and the rest of the team. The FBI had sent a couple of agents to the airport to ask a few questions, and provide a little security until she got on the plane, though no one was suggesting that Eve’s safety was in any doubt.

They’d cabbed it in from the airport, and standing in the doorway to her laboratory, surrounded by campus security, Princeton cops and the FBI, and her techies, Lisa on one side and Don on the other, Eve was all but overwhelmed at first by the destruction. Someone had invaded her personal space with violence and she felt physically ill, almost the same as when one of her first papers for publication had failed a peer review — for being too fringe, in the words of one of the docs who thought she was a little nutso, in addition to being a female in a man’s profession.

Lisa was physically okay, but she’d been traumatized witnessing the attack. “It made no sense,” she’d said first thing. “I mean why smash up some computers? We’ll pull the hard drives and retrieve the data. Maybe lose a half day, tops. Were they dumb, or what?”

But she’d been shaking and Eve had held her for a long moment. “Dumb.”

Aldo Bertonelli, the FBI special agent in charge from the Bureau’s Trenton office, was pleasant enough except he wanted only to ask questions but not give any answers. “I’d like you to take an inventory, if you would, Doctor.”

Eve wasn’t sure that she understood him. “Nothing’s going to be missing,” she said. “They weren’t here to steal anything from us. Hell, they could have asked and we would have shared any of the data they wanted.” She looked at the mess. “They came here to send us — send me — a message.”

“And what message would that be?”

“They call this the God Project.”

“Who are they?”

“Schlagel,” Eve said.

Bertonelli shrugged. “It’s a theory, but have you received any threatening phone calls, e-mails, or text messages that would lead you to believe such thing?”

“Bloody hell,” Eve said half under her breath. “Do you watch television at all, Agent Bertonelli? The son of a bitch is gunning for me, and he’s all but ordered his crazies to pull the trigger.”

“He’s denied any involvement, Doctor.”

“Of course he has,” Eve said, disgusted, and she was finished with the authorities, who in her estimation spent more of their time covering their own asses than actually doing real investigative work when sensitive issues were involved.

When Bertonelli and the others had gone, she shared her opinion with Don, who disagreed. “They’re doing their jobs, and you have to cut them some slack.”

“Like you did with Defloria about Vanessa?” she shot back, knowing they were two different things, not related to each other, and she immediately apologized. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Now that the police had finished their investigation, taking photographs, presumably looking for fingerprints or DNA evidence, Lisa and the others had started the data retrieval and cleanup work, which would be finished by morning.

“From their standpoint it might,” Don said, meaning, of course, Schlagel and his people.

But Eve had been looking at her techies, especially Lisa, and she was startled, almost as if she’d seen a vision of all of them lying in bloody heaps, smashed like their equipment. Only humans had no hard drives to retrieve, and she was frightened.

“I feel like we’re in the Dark Ages,” she said. “The Inquisition.”

“It’ll pass,” he said.

“Promise?”

Don nodded and smiled. “You bet,” he said, and he hugged her.

THIRTY-FIVE

It was late by the time they got back to Washington and cabbed it to McGarvey’s small third-floor apartment in Georgetown. The front bowed windows of the brownstone looked down on Rock Creek, and last fall the changing leaves had been restful for his nerves, which at that point had still been shattered.

“Nice view,” Gail said putting down her bag.

“When you have the time to look,” he said. “Take the bedroom, I’ll sleep out here.”

She looked at him. “Wouldn’t it be better if I got a hotel room after tonight?”

“No,” McGarvey said, although it was difficult for him to let anyone inside his circle of comfort. But just now it was necessary. “I don’t know how long this will take, so for now we’ll work out of here. At some point we’ll probably go in separate directions. And this place is reasonably safe. My lease, phone, and computer accounts are all under different work names. So just keep your eyes open.”

“Are you expecting someone?”

He shrugged. Not a day had gone by for the last twenty years plus when he hadn’t expected someone to show up. It had been one of the overriding facts of his existence. “It depends on what we turn up and how close we get. They weren’t afraid to attack Hutchinson Island, so it’d be no stretch for them to come after us, especially if we hit a nerve.”

“What’s next?”

“I’m going to talk to some friends about Schlagel. In the meantime, you can get Eric and Otto pointed that way.”

Gail was skeptical. “Do you really think he’s somehow connected?”

“After the attack on Eve’s lab?” he asked rhetorically. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. But he was quick off the mark to take advantage of the Hutchinson Island, and now this. And I don’t think it’s going to end there.”

“More to come?”

McGarvey had been giving that idea a lot of thought. Hutchinson Island could have been much more spectacular than 9/11, and vandalism at the lab was little more than a pinprick, maybe a warning. But if another strike of some sort had been planned it would almost certainly be much stronger. After the trade towers and the Pentagon, al-Quaeda’s next target had most likely been the White House; one-two-three hammer blows at the purveyors of free trade, the planners of war and the leadership of the satan government. If Hutchinson Island and Princeton were indeed just the opening shots, whatever was coming next would depend entirely on who was behind it. “The contractor who walked away, and the engineer inside the control room were first-rate, and that sort of expertise does not come cheap.”

“It wasn’t just another terrorist bombing, nor was Princeton unrelated.”

“No,” McGarvey said. “They have a larger plan. Had it all along.”

“That’s a cheery thought to end the day on,” Gail said. “I’m going to get some sleep.” She picked up her bag and headed to the bedroom, but hesitated, suddenly shy for just a moment. “You don’t have to sleep out here, you know.”

A lot of old wounds — though not all — came back at McGarvey, and he too hesitated for a moment. “No.”

“As in not tonight, not yet, not ever?”

“Not tonight.”

“Okay,” Gail said. “I’ll let you know when I’m out of the shower and it’s safe to come in.” And she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Gail made breakfast in the morning, and it was just after nine before they were finished and went downstairs to grab separate cabs. Schlagel’s diatribe on Hutchinson Island was getting a lot of airtime on all the major networks, especially Good Morning America , whose news anchor called it “the Sermon on the Isle.” But Schlagel had planned on the publicity. Whatever could be said of the man did not include incompetence; he was the consummate showman, though so far there’d been no mention of the attack on the lab. And from what little McGarvey had noticed of the preacher’s rise to national prominence, his visits to the White House stood out like beacons. Fox News had dubbed him the spiritual adviser to the president — and the two before Howard Lord.

“I expect you’ll be at it all day,” Gail said. “How about dinner somewhere tonight?”

“I’ll let you know,” McGarvey said, and she pecked him on the cheek and then ran out to a cab that had pulled over, leaving him to wonder if it had been such a good idea after all to have her stay with him, knowing how she still felt.

On the way into town McGarvey called Otto on his cell phone and asked him to set up a meeting with Walter Page sometime later this morning, and fending off his friend’s questions, telephoned William Callahan, who right after 9/11 had been appointed as the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism. They’d known each other briefly a couple of years ago when McGarvey had been working the operation in Mexico City. The Bureau had helped search for the missing Polonium 210 that had supposedly been smuggled into the U.S. Nothing to date had come of the investigation, but McGarvey had been impressed by Callahan’s intelligence and professionalism. He wasn’t simply a desk jockey, he was the real deal, coming up the ranks as a special agent.

“Mac, it’s good to hear from you,” Callahan said, after his secretary had put the call through. And he sounded genuinely pleased.

“Do you have a few minutes to spare this morning?”

“Absolutely,” Callahan said without an instant’s hesitation. “You’re with the NNSA, so I’m assuming this has something to do with Hutchinson Island.”

“Actually Reverend Schlagel.”

This time Callahan did hesitate. “I see,” he said. “How soon can you be here?”

“Twenty minutes,” McGarvey said, and he told the cabbie to take him to FBI headquarters.

It was a weekday and downtown Washington was as busy as usual. The receptionist in the lobby checked his identification and telephoned Callahan’s office. “Your guest is here, sir,” she said, and she directed McGarvey to wait in the visitors’ lounge. “Mr. Callahan will be with you shortly.”

McGarvey was the only one in the nicely furnished lounge this morning, aware that he was being watched, as all visitors were, by agents behind a two-way mirror. Guests of assistant directors and above were not required to sign in nor were they subjected to the normal security checks.

Callahan, a large, fit-looking man in his midforties with salt-and-pepper hair and broad shoulders, showed up a couple of minutes later. He’d played tight end for the Green Bay Packers for two years right out of college, but had been sidelined with a torn rotator cuff and had gone back to school to get his MA in criminal justice, and from there had been hired by the Bureau. He was a seriously steady man, with a wife and a couple of kids, who nevertheless liked to crack jokes. This morning he wasn’t smiling, though his greeting and handshake were friendly.

“Joan and I were very sad about your loss. I can’t imagine how bad it must have been,” he said.

“It wasn’t a good year.”

Even though Callahan was only in charge of one section of the Bureau’s Division of Counter Terrorism, and technically was only a deputy assistant director, he was senior in line for that promotion when the current division assistant director was bumped farther up the ladder, therefore his ID pass had the gold background of an associate director with all the privileges.

When they were settled in Callahan’s unimpressive office on the ninth floor in the rear part of the building McGarvey came straight to the point about his suspicions.

“I see your point,” Callahan said. “But so far we’ve come up with nothing that would make a possible link between him and Hutchinson Island or Princeton.”

“He’s using Hutchinson Island as his soapbox.”

“I’ll give you that much, but I think it’d be a stretch to believe that he would have funded something like that merely to create an issue that he could use. The man wants to be president, and he’s smart enough to understand that if he did run he would be subject to more scrutiny than anyone could imagine. Every eye in the world would be looking his way. Every investigative reporter worth his or her salt would be taking his background apart. Every move he ever made since childhood would be gone over with a fine-toothed comb. And a lot of that would happen even before he got the nomination. And he certainly wouldn’t have directed an attack on Dr. Larsen’s lab.”

“It got her attention.”

“It accomplished nothing.”

Callahan was right, of course. Yet McGarvey couldn’t shake the premonition that Schlagel was somehow involved. “I assume that you’ve seen the material that we’ve come up with,” he said.

“On the contractor who walked away?” Callahan asked. “We don’t have him in any of our files, nor do I think you have any solid evidence he was involved.”

“He killed the teacher in San Francisco to use his identity to take a tour of the facility.”

“Sorry, but any defense lawyer would throw that out as circumstantial evidence. He’d be stuck with a suspicion of murder, but not an act of terrorism.”

“I agree,” McGarvey said. “But assuming the man who walked away from the tour was the pro who was hired along with the control room engineer, you’d have to admit that he’s damned good. You have no record of him, and neither does the Company. Hell, even Rencke is having a tough time finding anything.”

“Could mean he’s innocent,” Callahan suggested. He was playing devil’s advocate; disprove all the possibilities you could, until you were left with one ironclad lead.

“Innocent men leave tracks. Passports, driver’s licenses, bank accounts, things like that. But we’re all coming up with blanks. This guy simply doesn’t exist. Add his behavior at the power plant and that makes him my prime suspect.”

“I’ll give you that,” Callahan said. “We’ve certainly begun investigations on slimmer leads. But where does it lead if you can’t find him, can’t even learn who he is?”

“If he was the contractor, we at least know that he’s a pro. He’d have to be to leave absolutely no trace.”

“Interpol, MI5, MI6, BND, anybody?”

“All blanks so far.”

Callahan spread his hands. “Okay, you’re here, Mac, and you put the reverend’s name on the table. Where are you going with this? You certainly don’t think he’d be involved in the Princeton thing?”

“No, that’s a separate issue. Almost certainly Schlagel’s crazies. For an operation like Hutchinson Island a pro, like our contractor, would not come cheap. Whoever hired him had deep pockets.”

“According to your people al-Quaeda was behind educating the engineer.”

“But we think it’s possible that someone else got the engineer into contact with the contractor who then managed to get him to the States and inside the plant,” McGarvey said. “More money. A lot more.”

“And you don’t think the New al-Quaeda is that well-heeled these days?”

“We have to ask who’s got that kind of money — millions — to spend on an act of terrorism, and who has the reason for it — something to gain, something worth the money and the risk?”

Callahan sat back and shook his head. “Schlagel has the motive, and we think he probably has the means, but going after him could be dicey. He has a lot of powerful friends, including some in the White House, he has a very large and at times fanatical following, he has a media empire three times the size of Pat Robertson’s, and he has some top-notch lawyers, and I mean first-class lawyers, who’ve managed to create a wall of nearly impenetrable interlocking organizations, a lot of them supposed charities, plus at least three dozen corporations, most of them offshore.”

“So he has the means and the motive,” McGarvey said. “And a lot of guys like that think that they’re invincible, above the law, nobody’s smart enough to catch them. Makes him a suspect. And he sure came out of the chute in big hurry with his antinuclear movement.”

Callahan hesitated for just a second, and he shook his head again. “Knowing what you’re capable of doing, I’m not sure if I should tell you the rest of it.”

“We won’t catch these guys keeping shit from each other,” McGarvey said. “Those are the old days. No interagency rivalry now. Won’t do us any good.”

“It’d be nice if that were actually the truth, but nothing much has changed,” Callahan said. “Look, it’s possible that Schlagel may have some connection with Anne Marie Marinaccio and her financial group out of Dubai. We’ve had her under investigation ever since the dot-com boom days, but we couldn’t prove a thing that would hold up in a court of law. She’s damned good, and at that time she had a half-dozen senators in her pocket one way or another. When she got out of the technology stocks she wound up in real estate, mostly Florida and California, and when she walked she took several billions of dollars with her and set up in the UAE, which took her in with open arms.”

“Has she been indicted?”

“No, but we’ve classified her as a person of interest who we’d very much like to talk to. And there’s more.”

“There always is,” McGarvey said. He’d been down this path many times before, gathering information, gearing up for the opening moves. He sometimes thought of his work as an elaborate dance, in which very often one or more of the partners ended up dead.

“Marinnacio may have a connection to the United Arab Emirates International Bank of Commerce, which is almost certainly involved in the funding of a number of terrorist organizations, funneling money from dozens if not hundreds of charities around the world, including here in the States.”

“Don’t tell me that Schlagel is connected?”

“We don’t know about any ties with IBC, but he’s almost certainly done business with the Marinaccio Group.”

“Put it to a grand jury,” McGarvey said, but Callahan shook his head.

“Wouldn’t fly, Mac. We don’t have the proof.”

“Maybe I can help,” McGarvey said. “I’ve been given a free hand to take a closer look, see where this all leads.”

“For God’s sake don’t shoot the man.”

McGarvey had to smile despite himself. “Leastways not immediately. But I think there’s more coming.”

Callahan escorted him back downstairs to the lobby. “Keep me posted,” he said before they parted.

McGarvey nodded. “It’s a two-way street.”

THIRTY-SIX

McGarvey had turned off his cell phone at the FBI, and outside he switched it back on to find that Otto had sent him a message. He called back. “What do you have?”

“Page will see you anytime you want,” Otto said. “The sooner the better. He’s got something on his mind.”

“I’ll bet he does.”

“You get anything from Callahan?”

Switching off the cell phone hadn’t disabled the GPS memory, but all the sensitive areas in the J. Edgar Hoover Building were shielded from any kind of electronic transmissions. Callahan was just a guess on Rencke’s part, typical of his genius at figuring things out.

“The Bureau’s going to help.”

“That’s a comfort,” Rencke said with a touch of sarcasm.

“Looking a little closer at the Reverend Schlagel and his possible ties to the UAEIBC.”

“Yeah, Eric called a little while ago. We both got a strong tie between Schlagel and the bank, and possibly to a derivative fund’s manager setup in Dubai.”

“The Marinaccio Group.”

“Callahan give that to you?”

“Yes, he did, but he thinks it’s a stretch that Schlagel had anything to do with Hutchinson Island. Maybe his people at Princeton, but not Florida.”

“Run it by Page,” Otto said. “We’ll talk afterwards.”

Word had been left at the front gate that McGarvey was coming in, and the cabbie was given a dashboard pass that allowed him to drive up to the Old Headquarters Building and drop off his passenger. But he had to return immediately and hand in the pass, which was date and time stamped.

Each time McGarvey came back like this, he was sharply reminded of his history there, some of it extremely painful, but most of what he had done in the name of his country had been necessary. Or at least it’d always been so in his mind. And now he was in the middle of it again, something he’d been expecting for months. He’d been getting the old sensations at the nape of his neck and somewhere deep in his head that something was heading his way. Something out of the darkness, something that he would have to deal with. And it was at times like these over the past few years when he’d become a little tired of the game. Yet that’s who he was; it’s who he’d always been.

Marty Bambridge met McGarvey in the main hall to escort him up to the director’s office on the seventh floor. He was an odd-looking man with a hawk nose that hung over a large mouth, and thinning black hair that he combed straight back, held in place by a lot of hair spray. He was dressed in a sloppy suit and tie, and although he didn’t seem to take any care with his appearance he was reputed to be an outstanding DDO with a lot of imagination and a great deal of empathy for his people, both on campus and out in the field, including his NOCs.

“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” he said, giving McGarvey a VIP visitor’s pass. “Mr. Page is expecting you.” They shook hands.

“My friends call me Mac.”

“Yes, sir,” Bambridge said.

Page was waiting for them in his office along with Carleton Patterson, now in his early seventies, who had been the Company’s general counsel during McGarvey’s days, a post he still held. Where Page seemed nondescript, Patterson was tall, slender, and patrician-looking. Before he’d taken the temporary post with the CIA, he’d been a top-flight corporate attorney in New York.

They all shook hands and sat down on the couch and a couple of easy chairs grouped around a large coffee table. The room hadn’t changed much since McGarvey had sat behind the desk.

“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” McGarvey said.

“I was going to ask you to come over in any event,” Page said. “And may I assume you want to discuss the Hutchinson Island event? I’m told that Mr. Rencke has been providing you with some assistance, and I approve.”

McGarvey couldn’t decide if he liked or trusted the man. But according to Otto, morale at the Agency had picked up since his appointment; among the reasons were Page’s ability to handle Congress, where he’d developed some real bipartisan support. He’d built a reputation as a straight shooter by freely admitting, when it was necessary, that certain of the CIA’s operations had to be withheld from the public for security reasons, delicately sidestepping the fact that Congress, especially the House, sometimes ran a little fast and loose with classified information that had some political benefit.

“Ultimately yes,” McGarvey said. “The DOE has asked me to help find out who was behind the attack.”

A look of satisfaction passed between Page and Bambridge. “The president ordered me to do exactly the same thing, and I promised that I would have someone in the field who’d be our point man.”

“Me?”

“Sounds as if you’re already in the middle of it,” Bambridge said. “I’m assuming that you’ll share product with us?”

“Through Rencke.”

Bambridge wanted to object but Page held him off. “Fair enough,” the DCI said. “But you asked for this meeting. What do you have on your mind?”

“What was Lorraine Fritch working on in Caracas that got her killed?”

“She was investigating a connection between Miguel Octavio and a derivative fund manager in Dubai.”

“The Marinaccio Group.”

Page showed no surprise. “Yes.”

“Not enough motivation for her assassination,” McGarvey said. “There had to be something else.”

Bambridge spread his hands. “She was on her way up with something she told me was too important to trust even through encrypted channels. Had to be done in person.”

“Hutchinson Island,” McGarvey said, dropping the bombshell, and he saw by a quickening expression on Page’s face that he had hit the mark. “You had the same thought?”

“The timing was coincidental,” the DCI said. “She’d been working on this connection between Octavio and Marinaccio for some time, but within hours after she’d gotten word through the usual channels about the attack, she called and said she was on her way here.”

“My dear boy, what makes you think a connection exists?” Patterson asked.

“Too many leads go back to Marinaccio, including the Reverend Schlagel, who’s using the attack to lash out at nuclear power plants.”

“He’s looking for a campaign issue,” Patterson said.

“That’s right,” McGarvey said. “But doesn’t it strike you that Marinaccio’s prime interest is in oil derivatives?”

“If that’s his motivation then he’ll be against a hell of a lot more than just nukes,” Bambridge said.

“Something like that,” McGarvey said. “I think that Hutchinson Island was just the opening move. There’s more to come. Coal-fired plants — and we have some big ones — for a start. Schlagel could just as well go on his soapbox about carbon dioxide emissions killing us.”

“But oil — diesel, gasoline, or jet fuel — is bad too,” Bambridge pointed out.

“People will give up nuclear and coal-produced electricity, but not their cars,” Patterson suggested.

“If you’re right, and I think you are, they’ll go after whatever would hurt us the most,” Page said. “Coal, because it won’t be wind farms or solar centers. At least not yet.”

McGarvey had come to the same conclusion. A big coal-fired plant would be a likely target. A lot of environmental damage could be done depending on how sophisticated the attack was. But he’d been thinking about something else. “I expect that you’ve all heard of Eve Larsen. If what she’s trying to do actually works she could be a prime target.”

“Some people in Oslo think she’s on the right track,” Patterson said. “And her laboratory in Princeton was vandalized last night. Did you hear about it?”

“Yes.”

Page sat back, a sudden thoughtful expression on his face, and he and Bambridge exchanged a look. “Do you know the woman?”

“She was at Hutchinson Island when the plant was evacuated. I helped get her out.”

“Erling Hansen telephoned me yesterday afternoon,” Page said. Hansen was the director of the Norwegian Intelligence Service. “Asked for a back-channel favor.”

“The Nobel ceremony?”

“The NIS got an anonymous tip that something might happen to her either on the way to Norway or sometime shortly after she arrives in Oslo.”

“Anything specific?” McGarvey asked.

“No,” Page replied. “But he said the way the warning was stated struck one of their analysts as religious in nature.”

“Schlagel,” McGarvey said.

“Since you brought it up, yes, the thought has crossed my mind.”

“What’d you tell Hansen?”

“That we’d look into it. But I don’t think it would be politically wise to send someone over with her. She can hire her own bodyguards if she — or you — think it’s necessary.”

“I’ll ask her,” McGarvey said.

Bambridge called down to Rencke’s office for McGarvey, but a recorded message merely stated that he was out of the building for a couple of hours.

“He doesn’t punch a time clock,” Bambridge said. “But he spends a lot of nights here when he’s on to something.”

“Has that been happening lately?”

“Yes.”

“Before Hutchinson Island?”

Bambridge hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know what he’s been working on. Nobody here does. But he’s been at it for a couple of months now. Just before Hutchinson Island one of his computers showed a lavender background, which I’m told means some sort of trouble is coming our way. But he wouldn’t talk about it.”

It had struck McGarvey as odd at the time that Otto had not confided in him, and again he felt slightly depressed.

THIRTY-SEVEN

DeCamp carried no photographs of Martine in his wallet, relying instead on his almost photographic memory to see her. But pulling on his jacket and getting set to leave his tiny apartment in the working-class Twentieth Arrondissement in the late afternoon, he stopped for a moment to remember her face in his mind’s eye, and he couldn’t. As often was the case when he was on assignment, his concentration was elsewhere.

“It’s not the stray bullet that kills you or your lads,” his sergeant instructor had taught in his officers combat training course. “It’s the stray thought. Keep your heads out of your arses, gentlemen.”

The early afternoon was mellow as he headed downstairs and south through the Menilmontant neighborhood with its nightclubs, strip joints, and occasional whorehouse, not yet alive for the evening, and before he got ten meters he’d already forgotten about his vexation over Martine. Thinking about her would come later, because he’d made the decision that when he went to ground — very soon — he would take her with him.

She would understand the necessity. He would make her understand.

He carried a dark blue ripstop nylon duffle bag over his shoulder, his head up, his step confident; to do otherwise was to invite attack. This was a tough neighborhood where the strong preyed on the weak. Even the Paris metro police presence here was minimal; it had always been a perfect place for DeCamp’s needs.

The streets were heavy with traffic, as were the mostly narrow sidewalks, and although he was noticed he remained anonymous. The trouble was that although he operated best on his own, he never fancied himself a loner — at least not in his heart of hearts. When his father had been killed and his mother had abandoned him he’d felt an almost overwhelming crushing sense not only of loneliness, but of defeat. To this day, this moment, he remembered his feelings very clearly, and they were just about akin to what he was feeling now.

But first things first, he told himself, allowing a slight smile to show at the corners of his mouth. And for a moment he could see Martine clearly in his mind’s eye, before he clamped off that line of thought. Business.

The Père-Lachaise Cemetery, a couple of blocks down the hill from his apartment, established by Napoleon in 1804, was actually the largest cemetery in all of Paris. Other than the nightclubs and strip joints, it was the most popular tourist attraction in the arrondissement. Chopin was buried here, as were Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Bizet, Proust, Balzac, and most curiously, to DeCamp, the American rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors.

DeCamp entered through the gate in the tall white stone wall and made his way slowly up a series of winding paths and lanes to the upper end of the cemetery near Oscar Wilde’s grave. At this hour, just before early cocktails, the place was nowhere near as busy as it was in the early morning openings just after nine on Sundays and holidays. But still it was anonymous; he was just one visitor among many.

He stopped at the grave of some Frenchman and waited a minute or so until a party of middle-aged men passed him. He stepped off the path and made his way to a small mausoleum a few meters away with a centopath of a winged warrior outside an ornate bronze door.

Bowing his head for a second, and looking back to make sure he was not being observed, DeCamp opened the door, slipped inside, and closed it after him.

He had a clear line of sight through the filigreed panel at eye height, and so far as he could tell no one had taken notice.

The chamber was divided into two sections: the first was a small chapel designed for six or eight people to kneel and pray at one time, and the second was a smaller, innerchamber that held niches for the cremated remains of the French-Catholic family, beginning in 1898, with two niches remaining.

Putting his nylon bag down, DeCamp went to the small altar at the front of the chapel and muscled the one-meter-long stone countertop aside to reveal a dusty space a half-meter square by one-and-a-half meters deep. It contained two canvas rucksacks that he pulled out. From the first he removed a plastic-wrapped package that held an Austrian-made 9 mm Steyr GB semiautomatic pistol with two eighteen-round box magazines, a suppressor, and a cleaning kit.

Next he took out a package containing several passports, from which he selected one of Canadian and one of U.S. issue, with matching American Express platinum credit cards and supporting credentials including valid driver’s licenses, social security and national IDs, health insurance cards and photos of wives and families, along with several thousand in euros and Canadian dollars.

He’d decided that importing a long rifle and associated equipment to Norway was not worth the risk. Whichever scenario he selected in the end — a hit in the hotel, a hit while Eve was taking a buggy tour of the old city, or a hit just before or just after the Nobel ceremony — the Steyr, which was a favorite of his, would be adequate.

He loaded his choices into his nylon bag, replaced the two rucksacks into the space beneath the altar top, and slid the stone back into place.

He remained at the door for a full ten minutes before a family of four lingering at one of the graves across the lane finally moved off then slipped outside, and shouldering the nylon duffle bag reached the street and headed back to his apartment.

He would remain in Paris for a few more days before shipping a parcel to himself at the Grand Hotel in Oslo and then flying there to arrive the day before the package arrived. The cargo-sniffing dogs would not detect the odor of gunpowder in the bullets because they would be packed in two containers of mentholated spirits — Vicks VapoRub.

The TGV could get him to Nice in a few hours where he could rent a car and do a drive by on the corniche highway above his house. Just to see if all was well. To reassure himself that because Wolfhardt had found him nothing had happened.

But not yet. There would be time later.

THIRTY-EIGHT

In a cab on the way back into town, McGarvey left a message on Otto’s cell to call him, and then phoned Gail who had been working with Yablonski all morning, but she had no news for him. Everyone was coming up short, and they were all frustrated. It was like knowing the sword of Damocles was about to fall but not when it would happen or from what direction it would be falling, except that the thread holding it above their heads was getting thinner by the minute.

There’d been no arrests yet over the Princeton attack, and one of Eve’s techies who was the only witness hadn’t been of much help except to describe their approximate build and the clothing they wore — including the balaclavas.

“Are you coming into the office?” Gail asked.

“No,” McGarvey told her. “But if something turns up, anything, call me.”

“Okay,” Gail said, and she sounded a little hurt. “I’ll see you back at your apartment this evening. Maybe we’ll go someplace for a bite to eat.”

“Maybe,” McGarvey said, and he broke the connection and telephoned Eve Larsen’s cell, and she answered after three rings.

“Speaking of déjà vu all over again,” she said. “I was just thinking about calling you. Are you here in town?”

“If you mean Washington, yes, I am.”

“How about dinner tonight after the show,” she said. “I could use an escort. Someone who knows his way around.”

“Sorry, Doc, but I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” McGarvey said. “What show?”

“I thought you knew. Fox News is doing a special on my energy program tonight at seven. They did some of the taping last year aboard the ship I was using for the first in-water experiment, and more aboard the oil rig and up at GE’s Stamford facility where they’re building my impeller-generator sets. Anyway they want me live at their studio on North Capitol Street. I’ll be out of there by seven thirty.”

Then he knew what she was talking about, and he could hear a little bit of concern in her voice. “Are you expecting trouble?”

“After last night, sure. But you should watch TV sometime,” she said. “Reverend Schlagel and his bunch are planning a demonstration in front of the studio. I’m told that the police will be there, and the network’s own security people won’t let any of them into the building.” She hesitated.

“Where are you staying?”

“I have a small apartment at Watergate East.”

“I’ll pick you up at six.”

And he could hear her relief now. “Thanks. I’ll be waiting in the lobby. And if we’re going to dinner tonight, you’d better start calling me Eve. My friends do.”

McGarvey was back at his apartment around noon where he had a quick sandwich and bottle of beer before he changed into sweats and Nikes and headed across the street into the park for his run.

Five miles used to be his daily routine, and when he was in Florida on the beach, he would swim that far in the Gulf. But since Katy’s death and the deaths of his daughter and son-in-law he’d slacked off a little. Training NNSA field officers hadn’t been much of a strain.

But running now, alternating his pace from easy to occasionally flat out, he felt as if he needed to get in good shape as quickly as possible. And after the first couple of miles, his shirt soaked, he was gratified that he hadn’t lost as much of his edge as he thought he had, and getting past the first burn when his body finally started to process the energy demands being placed on it, he felt good. At least physically good.

He’d lost a good man at Hutchinson Island, and at Lundgren’s funeral he’d met his wife who’d wanted assurance that Alan’s death hadn’t been in vain. What he gave his life for was worth something. Her two teenaged sons, who were totally devastated by their father’s death, hung on every word.

“What he did down there saved a lot of lives,” McGarvey told them. “And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

“Other people were killed trying to help out. Did they know my husband?”

“One of them did. Her name was Marsha Littlejohn and she was sitting next to him trying to defuse the explosives the same as he was.”

Lundgren’s wife was a sturdy, no-nonsense woman from somewhere in the Midwest, and she looked up into McGarvey’s eyes. “No lies?”

“No,” McGarvey told her.

Before she walked away, she touched McGarvey’s arm, and managed a tiny smile. “Thank you,” she said. “Alan said that you were the best man he’d ever worked with.”

The boys shook his hand, and mumbled their thanks, and went with their mother back to the limousine.

And it was Arlington and the same kind of limo that Katy and Liz had driven away in, and running now along Rock Creek he’d remembered that he’d almost lost it at that point. But he’d taken a deep breath and sucked it up as he’d been told to do when he was training at the Farm.

The afternoon was pleasantly cool, and a lot of people were out jogging or biking, and though lost in thought McGarvey was completely aware of his surroundings, of the people on both sides of the narrow, winding creek, others seated at park benches or picnic tables, cars and the occasional taxi passing on the road, the rooflines of the buildings in the distance, even the woods where a lone man with a silenced sniper rifle could be concealed. That too was a part of who he was.

A call to arms, he thought. At last. And he welcomed it.

Most of the time when McGarvey was in Washington in the past year and a half he’d found no need to drive his own car, but this evening was different. If there was trouble, he didn’t want to rely on getting out of there in a cab. He kept his metallic blue-gray Porsche Cayenne SUV in a concierge garage a block and a half from his apartment. It was always kept washed and gassed, and once a week the service took it up the GW Memorial Parkway past the CIA, and before turning back the driver looked for incipient problems that would immediately be tended to.

At three he called to ask that the car be delivered and parked as close to the apartment as possible. The concierge rep, an older man in a dark blue blazer, showed up fifteen minutes later with the key, and had McGarvey sign for the car. “We managed to get you a spot right outside the front door.”

“That’s lucky for this neighborhood.”

“Yes, sir. Will you be needing your vehicle picked up later this evening?”

“Not till first thing in the morning,” McGarvey said. “I’ll call first.”

Gail got back to the apartment shortly after five just as McGarvey finished cleaning and loading his pistol at the kitchen counter and she pulled up short, dropping her purse on the chair, a quizzical expression on her face.

“Are we expecting some trouble that you haven’t mentioned?” she said.

“Schlagel’s in town.”

“Did he follow us here from Hutchinson Island?”

McGarvey shook his head. “I don’t think he knows we exist yet. He’s evidently got a permit to stage a demonstration outside the Fox News television studio downtown, and I was asked to provide a little backup security.”

It suddenly dawned on Gail what McGarvey was talking about. “Dr. Larsen asked,” she said, an odd set to her mouth.

“I think that she and her project could be the next target. Norwegian intelligence asked the CIA to watch out for her. Apparently there’ve been threats against her safety, maybe from a religious group or groups who might show up in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony.”

Gail was intrigued. “Schlagel?”

McGarvey shrugged. “Unknown. But if he was somehow connected with Hutchinson Island and Princeton he might be taking another step tonight.”

“He’s not going to be that open about it,” Gail said. “I mean if he makes himself so visible like this, and then something happens to the lady scientist it’d be all over for him.”

“Not if he didn’t strike the blow himself. It’s like the crazies who bomb abortion clinics and kill the doctors and nurses because they’re whipped up by the rhetoric. When it happens, which is inevitable, the same people who ranted and raved about the baby killers deny any knowledge or responsibility. They make a big public show of deploring the bombings and killings.”

“I see what you mean. But what’s your part?”

“I got her off Hutchinson Island before the meltdown, and she thought she’d like to have me around after the TV show, just to get her past the crowd.”

Gail started to say something, but then shook her head. She went into the kitchen and poured a glass of Merlot. “Do you want some?” she asked.

“No.”

She came back to the counter and sipped the wine, an intensely thoughtful expression in her eyes. “What about Oslo? Are you going with her?”

“I’m thinking about it,” McGarvey said, knowing that’s exactly what he was going to do, because Eve Larsen was the key.

“You’re going to use her as bait,” Gail said in wonder. “And you’re going to put yourself directly on the firing line.”

McGarvey got up and holstered his pistol at the small of his back. “It’s the only game in town until we find out who the contractor is.”

“Rain check on dinner?” Gail asked.

“Yes.”

THIRTY-NINE

McGarvey’s cell phone rang as he was passing the Kennedy Center on his way over to pick up Eve Larsen at the Watergate. It was Otto. “How’d it go with Page?”

“He wants me to be the unofficial point man on the investigation,” McGarvey said. “They said you’d left the building. Anything I need to know?”

“Sorry, Mac, but we didn’t want to worry you until we were sure. It’s about Audie. We took her to the doctor this afternoon.”

Something so cold, so alien, so completely beyond understanding flashed through McGarvey’s body, nearly causing him to run off the street. But then he got hold of himself. “What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing, honest injun. It’s just an ear infection. The doc gave her some antibiotics and eardrops and said she’ll be fine.” Rencke was talking in a rush. “But she had a fever last night so Louise stayed home with her, and she called me this morning. Anyway, it’s okay now.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Otto said. “Raising a kid isn’t as easy as Louise and I thought it would be. But I’m not complaining. We love her, and there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for her. And not a day goes by when I don’t think about Todd and Liz who should be here with her.”

McGarvey settled down and it was like starting to hear again after being temporarily deafened by a sudden loud noise, and things seemed to be just slightly out of focus. “I’m on my way over to pick up Eve Larsen and take her to the Fox studio on North Capitol. Get into the D.C. police system and see if Reverend Schlagel has a permit to stage a demonstration on the street.”

“Just a sec,” Otto said.

McGarvey turned off New Hampshire Avenue at the parking entrance for the Watergate Mall and the East and South buildings, and drove around to the lobby of Eve’s building.

Otto came back. “Yup. Leonard Sackman, who’s the Soldiers of Salvation Ministry special events coordinator, if you can believe that, arranged for the permit. It’s been limited to one thousand people, for ninety minutes from six thirty to eight. So if you’re on the way you’ll definitely run into them. But there’ll be plenty of cops, and none of those people will be allowed inside.”

“Have you tried to get anything from the computers in Schlagel’s organization?”

“Yeah, and it was easy, but nothing important’s there. It looks like all the major decisions are made face-to-face. Probably paper records at their McPherson headquarters. I suppose we could find someone willing to break in and give it a try.”

McGarvey had been born and raised on a ranch in western Kansas and he knew the state well. Most of the towns out on the plains, well away from Kansas City and Wichita, were small. Just about everybody knew just about everybody else. Strangers tended to stand out. It was one of the reasons the FBI had such a tough time getting any in-depth information on the reverend. “Take a look at their security measures. If you can get inside the system without attracting any attention, do it. And find out about the local and county cops. See what sort of a relationship they have with the church.”

“Or if any of them happen to be on the payroll.”

“It’s worth a shot,” McGarvey said, pulling up under the sweeping portico of the East Watergate building. “I’m at the Watergate now, I’ll talk to you later.”

Eve, dressed in a stylish charcoal gray pin-striped suit and a white blouse with long collar points under a jacket with turned-up sleeves that showed off the white, came out of the lobby as McGarvey got out of his car and came around to her. She seemed tense, understandably so.

“Thanks for this,” she said, and they shook hands. “Anyway, it’s my treat for dinner.”

“It’s a deal,” McGarvey said. He started to help her into the SUV but she looked at him as if she wondered what he was doing, and he just smiled. The message was clear: she was a capable, self-sufficient woman. Modern. A scientist, not fluff. She was accustomed to opening her own doors.

Heading down Virginia Avenue to Constitution, traffic reasonable at this hour, McGarvey decided to wait until after the program to bring up the security concerns for her at the Nobel ceremonies. And for her part she kept her silence, her thoughts elsewhere, probably a combination of how many of Schlagel’s people would be in front of the studio and what their mood would be and how she would come across in the live segments of the program.

Fifteen minutes later, after turning left at Louisiana Avenue onto North Capitol Street, they got the answers to one of the questions: there were a great many more than one thousand people in the crowd, and Schlagel himself, standing in the bed of a pickup truck, was using a bullhorn to exhort his flock about the extreme danger of allowing someone, anyone, to play God.

Police were everywhere, many of them on horseback, others dressed in riot gear with shields, batons, and helmets with Lexan facemasks, trying to keep the mob to one side of the street. But Schlagel’s people completely ignored them, their attention totally riveted on their reverend.

A half-dozen television vans had gathered at the fringes covering what was turning out to be a major media event, three helicopters circled overhead, and cameramen were shooting the scene from the roof of the building that Fox shared with NBC and C-SPAN.

McGarvey pulled up short. “We’re not getting through this way,” he said.

Eve’s cell phone rang. It was Jeff Meyers, the Fox producer for the special, who told her to stay away from the main entrance and use the E Street doors.

“Someone will meet us there,” she told McGarvey, who made a U-turn onto D Street, up to New Jersey Avenue, and then went east on E Street where he found a parking spot not too far from the side entrance.

Traffic was nearly normal here, but some of the mob had spilled out beyond the intersection a half a block away, and as they hurried up the street they could hear Schlagel’s amplified voice, loud but distorted, echoing and reechoing off the buildings.

A tall, muscular man in a dark blue blazer unlocked the door for them, as a slender man in his late twenties came down the corridor, and introduced himself as the show’s producer.

He and Eve shook hands after she’d stepped through the security arch.

McGarvey held back. He pulled out his NNSA identification wallet and held it up. “I’m carrying a weapon.”

The guard in the blazer stiffened. “You can’t come in here armed.”

“Do you know what’s going on in front of this building?”

“The police are handling it.”

“Mr. McGarvey is providing security for me,” Eve told Meyers.

“He’ll have to leave his gun down here,” the security guard said. “No need for it past this point.”

“Do you know who he is?” Eve said, her voice rising a little in anger.

“Ma’am, I know who he is and I have a great deal of respect for him. But he’s not coming any farther carrying a weapon,”

“Do your interview,” McGarvey told Eve. “I’ll be here when you’re finished.”

“I’d like you to see it,” she said, and from what McGarvey already knew of her, he figured it had to have been tough for her to ask.

“I’ll give you a couple of disks of the program,” Meyers said.

“Fair enough,” McGarvey said, and he gave Eve a smile. “Break a leg, this is the easy part.”

She gave him an odd look as if she didn’t understand what he’d meant, yet she thought she should have, but then she nodded, and headed down the corridor with the producer.

“Sorry, Mr. McGarvey, but I don’t know of any television studio anywhere that allows armed men,” the security guard said.

McGarvey shrugged, because it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be needed upstairs, not until later when Eve was finished. “No exceptions?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even for the president’s Secret Service detail?” McGarvey asked, and the guard, caught out, was suddenly angry.

“Either surrender your weapon or leave the building.”

Or what? McGarvey wondered irascibly. But it was not worth the effort to find out. Instead he went outside and walked to the end of the block to where a couple of plainclothes cops were leaning against a beat-up Chevy Impala across the street from the outer edges of the crowd, which had grown considerably in the past couple of minutes.

McGarvey pulled out his NNSA identification and held it up for them to see, and when they realized the full import of who he worked for and what it might mean right now, he had their attention.

“I hope you’re not here to tell us something bad,” one cop said nervously.

Schlagel had just said something and the crowd roared its approval.

“No,” McGarvey said. “I thought they had a permit for only a thousand people.”

“Nobody’s counting. What are you doing here?”

“I’m riding shotgun for the woman they’re here to protest,” McGarvey said.

The cop glanced back the way McGarvey had come. “She inside already?”

McGarvey nodded. “If they have a television monitor they’ll know she made it, and it won’t take long for them to figure out she came in through the rear door. Can your people keep the crowd back?”

“Not a chance in hell. It’s a peaceful demonstration and they have a permit. Where’s your car?”

“Around the corner on E Street.”

“When is she coming out?”

“The program ends at seven thirty,” McGarvey said. “I’m assuming she’ll be at the door a few minutes after that.”

“Okay, bring your car up to the door and we’ll make a path for her. It’s the best we can do.”

“Good enough,” McGarvey said. He glanced at his watch. It was coming up on seven, and Schlagel’s mob was about to find out that Eve had gotten past them.

He walked back to the side entrance and pressed the buzzer beside the keypad. The security guard looked up from behind his desk, and shook his head.

“I can’t let you in unless you’re willing to give up your weapon,” the man’s voice came from the speaker grille.

“When Dr. Larsen comes downstairs, some of the crowd will probably be just outside,” McGarvey said. “I’ll be parked on the street, and the police will provide her with an escort. Tell her that it’ll be okay.”

The guard looked a little worried. “Do I need to call for backup in case they try to get inside?”

“No,” McGarvey told the man. “They’re just here to make their point.”

A half-dozen uniformed cops came around the corner just ahead of the first of mob, and hustled to where McGarvey stood waiting. The Fox special had started.

“You McGarvey?” one of them demanded.

McGarvey nodded.

“Bring your car up now.”

McGarvey went to where he’d parked, and drove back to the Fox building and pulled up in front of the door as Schlagel’s pickup truck rounded the corner and slowly eased its way through the growing crowd, the reverend not missing a beat.

“Leave God’s business to God,” Schlagel’s amplified voice boomed.

And the crowd responded, “Amen!”

“First it’s nuclear reactors that will poison the earth for a million years, now this work by a godless woman who proposes to change the very air we breathe! We’re not ready! More work needs to be done before it’s too late. Close nuclear power across the country. And put an immediate stop to Larsen’s God Project.”

“Amen! Amen!” the crowd chanted.

“Now,” Schlagel shouted. “Now, before it’s too late!”

“Amen! Amen!”

Some of the television remote broadcast trucks had managed to make their way closer, even as more people filled the streets, and within minutes McGarvey was parked in the middle of a sea of humanity, the six uniformed cops just holding a path open from the door across the sidewalk to the curb.

By the time Eve showed up, E Street was completely jammed with people, and McGarvey had to push his way around to the passenger side of his SUV and open the door.

“The high priestess of evil is among us!” Schlagel shouted, his amplified voice hammering off the side of the building. He was about thirty feet away and he pointed a biblical finger at her. “God’s word is writ in all things in heaven and on earth! Stop your meddling! Stop your God Project now, before you doom humanity!”

“Amen! Amen!” the crowd was chanting.

Sheltering Eve among them, four of the cops hustled her across the sidewalk as a large blond man in jeans and a Midwest Christian College sweatshirt standing between her and curb suddenly lunged at her, his right arm cocked as if he was getting ready to punch her.

McGarvey stepped forward, brought the man’s arm back, breaking it at the wrist, and slammed a quick jab into the man’s throat just below his Adam’s apple, sending him to his knees.

Before anyone could react, McGarvey hustled Eve into the SUV, made his way back to the driver’s side, and eased his way slowly through the crowd that reluctantly parted.

“I didn’t expect it would be this bad,” Eve said.

“I don’t think the reverend and his people like you,” McGarvey said.

FORTY

Eve picked the 1789 Restaurant on Thirty-sixth Street just off the Georgetown University campus — one of her favorites, she told him. Driving over past Mount Vernon Square and taking K Street, McGarvey could see that she was still shook up. “Would they really have tried to hurt me?” she asked.

“I think some of them would,” McGarvey said. “And I have an idea that the number will grow as long as Schlagel keeps pushing his message.”

“The God Project,” she said in genuine wonder. “It makes no sense. I’m offering them cheap, renewable energy and the possibility of making the weather a little better. And he’s fighting it.”

“They don’t give a damn about your work, most of them probably don’t even understand what you’re doing. They’re just following the reverend.”

“And what about him? He was down at Hutchinson Island making trouble, and now this. What does he want?”

“The White House,” McGarvey said. “He wants to be president, and he thinks that you and Hutchinson Island are causes that will get him there.”

“You can’t be serious,” Eve said. “And he’s actually willing to have his people hurt me?”

In her world, scientists didn’t usually get physical with each other or with their critics. Some of them might shout or bluster, but mostly they’d go to their offices and fire off a critical letter to Nature or Scientific American or Smithsonian or some other scientific journal. In her world that and being right were striking the blows.

“That’s exactly what he wants.”

Eve was trying to understand. “The media would be all over him if something happened to me.”

“He’d be the first one to stand up at your funeral and praise your pioneering spirit, and damn the people who brought you down. He’s coming after you, Eve, and he believes that he’ll come out on top no matter what happens.”

She sat back. “I think I need a drink,” she said. Then she looked at him and smiled. “You’re a pretty good man to have around in a pinch. This is the second time you were there when I needed you.”

They used the restaurant’s valet service, and when they were seated Eve ordered a martini straight up with a twist and McGarvey a cognac. And now that she was calming down, he told her the rest of it. “The Norwegian authorities think that you may be in some danger during the Nobel ceremonies, and they asked for our help with security. I’m coming to Oslo with you.”

Her eyes were large. “My God, he’d actually try to get to me over there? That’s more than crazy.”

“Not him specifically, but one or more of his followers.”

She thought about that for a long moment. “To do what?”

“Kill you,” McGarvey told her. He didn’t think there was any use sugarcoating the possibility that someone might want to more than just hurt her because of her project. And if she knew what could be coming at her, she would take her personal safety a little more seriously, at the very least until Schlagel was neutralized, if ever.

“Are you telling me that I need to hire bodyguards for the rest of my life?” she demanded. She was even more shook up than she had been leaving the television studio and encountering the mob and the man who’d tried to reach her. “Goddamnit, that’s not the way science works. You pose questions and then search for answers that make sense. Free and open exchanges. Not billy clubs and knives and guns and bombs.”

“You need to think about it, at least until your project is in place and you can prove that it works.”

She looked away. “Galileo and Giordano Bruno should have had bodyguards to save them from the church. I thought we were past that.”

“It’s not just religion, like the antiabortion activists claim it is, or the Islamic fundamentalists who’re waging war against the rest of us, or even Schlagel. It’s about power. And for the moment you’re a means to Schalgel’s end.”

Eve shook her head. “It’s so unfair.”

McGarvey felt sorry for her. Living in an ivory tower had apparently blinded her to the realities of the present-day world, just as Bruno had been blinded into believing that teaching the truth about astronomy as it was known in the sixteenth century would protect him from the Inquisition. But it hadn’t and he’d been burned at the stake in Rome. “Yes, it is,” he told her.

“Do you want the job?” Eve asked.

McGarvey nodded. “At least as far as Oslo, and we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, try to keep a low profile.”

“Winning a Nobel Prize tends to make that difficult,” she said pensively.

It was ten when McGarvey finally made it back to his apartment after dropping Eve off at the Watergate. She’d asked him to come up and have a drink, but he’d declined, telling her that he had a full day tomorrow. She’d handed him a copy of the disk. “This will explain what I’m trying to do,” she’d said. And before she’d walked away she’d given him an odd, thoughtful look, as if she knew something and wanted to say it but then decided against it.

Gail was in bed reading. “I caught your lady scientist’s special on Fox. She’s an impressive woman.”

“She’s in trouble and she didn’t see it coming,” McGarvey said, hanging up his jacket and removing his holster and pistol.

“All the networks covered Schlagel’s little circus word-for-word, move-for-move. The guy is good.”

“Was my name mentioned?”

“Front and center. Former director of the CIA squiring the lady scientist, protecting her from the zealots who the reverend blasted for trying to take the situation too far. It’ll make the front pages by morning.”

“Exactly what he wanted,” McGarvey said.

“And it puts you in the crosshairs, exactly what you wanted,” Gail said, and she smiled wistfully. “I suppose it would be dumb of me to tell you to take care.”

McGarvey stopped and looked at her, really looked at her. She was an attractive woman, always had been in his estimation, though with her dark eyes and hair she was almost the complete opposite of his wife Kathleen. And she was young, fourteen years younger than he was, and he felt a little guilty about feeling something for her.

“What?” she asked after a moment.

He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s just been a long day and I’m tired.”

“Are you still planning on going to Oslo?” Gail asked.

“I’m pretty sure that they’re going to come after her.”

“From what I saw on Fox there’s no doubt about it. And I can even see a little of why Schlagel might be genuinely frightened. If her project develops on the scale she’s talking about there just might be some unintended consequences. Something that even she can’t see. Consequences that might affect us all.”

“It’s the oil people who want to stop her,” McGarvey said.

“InterOil gave her a seagoing oil platform for the next step of her experiment, along with the money to fix it up and tow it to Florida’s east coast.”

“Good PR,” McGarvey said. “Even if the rig doesn’t get that far. But I think the same people who did Hutchinson Island will come after her for the same reasons. It’s oil, but it has more to do with propping up the oil derivatives and hedge funds. From what I’m told if you added up all the oil derivatives you’d come up with a number that is seven — maybe even ten — times larger than all the actual oil in the ground. They’re all betting on the same horse. The system is like a house of cards, one misstep and everything comes crashing down around us. And those consequences would be even worse than our mortgage meltdown or the Great Depression. Countries have gone to war for a lot less.”

“Oil,” Gail said. “In the end the hedge funds don’t really matter as much as what’s in the barrel and where it’s shipped to.”

“That’s right,” McGarvey said.

“And that kind of thinking puts your lady scientist right in the middle, and the rest of us could be just as well damned whatever happens; if her project is stopped we’ll be at the mercy of OPEC, and if she succeeds we could be facing another depression and maybe a war for oil. With China?”

“We’re not there yet,” McGarvey said, and he went into the bathroom to take a shower, his thoughts alternating from Eve Larsen falling into the center of a growing storm, to Gail Newby and his relationship or lack thereof with her. And he couldn’t sort out his feelings, which he decided was stupid. He was a decisive man, always had been. When Katy had given him the ultimatum early in their marriage, it had taken him less than a split second to turn around and run to Switzerland. But now he felt like an emotional cripple.

When he was done, he pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went back into the bedroom.

Gail had put her book aside, and had turned off the bedside lamp. “It’s been two years since your wife was killed,” she said. “It’s time for you to rejoin the world, don’t you think?”

And he thought about Katy and their life together. A photograph of the two of them standing on the Eiffel Tower was on the nightstand. Lately he’d been having a little trouble seeing her face and every night that he was in the apartment he would stare at her picture, study it, remembering how the corners of her eyes would wrinkle when she was really happy and smiling or laughing. But when he was away on assignment those details were still in his memory, but not in his mind’s eye. And even at this minute he couldn’t remember her laugh, not exactly; he couldn’t hear it in his ears, but he knew intellectually that she would chuckle at the back of her throat when all was right in her world.

“It’s all right, Kirk,” Gail said, her voice soothing, gentling, sensing something of what was going through his mind. “No commitments, not ever unless it’s something you want. Just two people comforting each other. We need it. I need it.”

McGarvey was about to say no, but the word died on his lips.

Gail tossed the covers aside. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, one leg bent at the knee. And she smiled shyly

He went to her finally, and for a long time they just held each other until in the end they made slow, gentle love. He didn’t feel guilty because there was no reason for it, and he knew that Katy would approve.

Assassinating someone, even in the light of day when the subject is surrounded by a mob, guarded by security types, including the local and federal police, and whose every move is documented in real time by television cameras and for posterity by press photographers, is relatively simple. Get into the correct position with the correct weapon and pull the trigger.

Na’ef Radwan, a twenty-one-year-old kid from Lod, walked up behind Menachem Begin and put a bullet into the man’s head. Easy. But the kid had been arrested on the spot.

The tough part about an assassination is the escape in the confusion immediately following. That takes planning. And luck.

DeCamp arrived in Oslo four days before the Nobel ceremony, checking into a small suite at the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans Gate just across the street from the Parliament at four on a cool overcast afternoon. He’d booked the room within the hour after Wolfhardt had left him in Nice, and even that far in advance he’d been lucky.

The hotel was full because of the ceremony, the lobby bustling with former Nobel laureates and VIPs from around the world. In many circles this was the biggest game of the year, anywhere. The world’s best and brightest, honored and on display for their feats.

Dressed in faded jeans, a white shirt, and an expensive black blazer, DeCamp used the Canadian passport that identified him as Edward Grecinger, with an American Express card, which showed a billing address in Quebec. He’d changed his eye color to bright green with contact lenses, wore an expensive wig of salt-and-pepper hair, longish in the back, and with lifts in his shoes was nearly two inches taller than at Hutchinson Island.

His wallet open on the counter, the pretty young clerk glanced at the photo of his wife and two children and she smiled.

“You have a lovely family, sir,” she said.

“I miss them already.”

He signed the check-in card and upstairs declined the bellman’s offer to help unpack his single suitcase, but tipped well.

A half hour later, satisfied that there were no bugs in the suite. DeCamp, still wearing the jeans and blazer, added a sweater to the outfit and a soft gray scarf around his neck, and went outside for a walk down to the town hall where the ceremony would be held. He would be remembered as the quiet Canadian with a lovely family who tipped well.

Eve Larsen would forever remember the three days in Oslo mostly as a blur of images: press conferences in the morning of the ninth, followed by lunch with dignitaries, followed by dinner with more dignitaries including former vice president Al Gore, himself a Nobel laureate, and finally her two bedroom suite at the Grand Hotel, her chastely in one room and McGarvey in the other. And the ceremony, of course, and the attack on her life.

That first night she’d come out of her room shortly after midnight, too keyed up about the next day’s speech — lecture, as the Norwegians called it — to sleep and she found McGarvey staring out one of the balcony windows that looked down on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s main drag. His back was slightly hunched, his head down, and looking at him from behind Eve thought he was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet the only trouble they’d encountered to that point had come from her postdoc Don Price, who’d been genuinely put out that McGarvey had not only accompanied them, but that it was McGarvey who stayed in the suite with her, while he had to accept a room of his own, two floors down.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said softly.

Startled, he turned around suddenly, and for just an instant his face was a mask of agony and maybe regret. But then the look was gone and he shrugged. “So far so good,” he said. “Worried about tomorrow?”

“I hate giving speeches, but Don’s read it and says it’s good.”

“He’s in love with you,” McGarvey said. “And a little jealous of me and of your work.”

She smiled. “All of the above. And sometimes I think there might be something between us, but beyond that he’s a damned good scientist, and I trust his judgment.”

“That’s a good thing.”

He was still dressed though he’d taken off his jacket and she’d seen the pistol in its holster at the small of his back, and she was just a little thrilled as well as frightened by the danger and immense power the man radiated. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Just change the batteries now and then.”

She’d wanted to ask him what he’d been thinking about, staring out the window, but she respected his space, as she wanted others to respect hers. Yet she was curious, in part because he’d rescued her twice, and because he’d come to Oslo with her, but mostly because he was a complicated man and she wanted to understand him, though she couldn’t say why. The silence between them suddenly became awkward.

“You should try to get some sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow will be even busier than today.”

“I’ve looked at the itinerary. By the time we actually get around to the ceremony in the evening, I don’t know if I’ll have to energy to make my lecture.”

“You’ll do just fine,” McGarvey said. “If you get some rest.”

She was practically dead on her feet, but she’d managed the day because she was pumped up and felt a little fear. She nodded, and started to return to her bedroom, but then turned back. “If there’s going to be trouble, when and where will it happen?”

“Maybe first thing in the morning in front of the hotel, or during one of your press conferences,” McGarvey said. “But your afternoon is free, so you’re going to stay put here.”

“Don wanted to do some sightseeing, just the two of us,” Eve said, but McGarvey shook his head.

“The cops here are good, but not that good.”

“What about outside town hall just before the ceremony?”

“The royal family will be there, and security will be tight,” McGarvey said. “So I’m guessing that if nothing has happened by then you’ll be in the clear.”

She had another thought, something she had pondered all afternoon and even during cocktails and dinner with Gore and a lot of the Nobel Prize committee members including its chairman Leif Jacobsen, a thoroughly enjoyable gentleman of the old school. And because she’d been so distracted she guessed that she must have seemed aloof to everyone at the table. “No one at the press conferences brought up Schlagel’s name. Didn’t you find that odd?”

“They were being polite,” McGarvey said. “You’ve won the Nobel, which is a very big deal, and you’ll get a lot of respect for it wherever you go, but no more so than here.”

“But you think that it’s going to happen,” she said, more as a question than a statement.

“That’s why I’m here,” McGarvey said.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Eve said and she went back to her bedroom. But still she couldn’t sleep, nor could she concentrate on her written speech, so just like McGarvey had done she went to the window and stared out at the city. It had begun to snow again lightly, lending an almost heavenly air to the scene, complete with ice crystal halos around the streetlights. For the first time in years she thought about Birmingham when she was a child, before she realized that she was different than everyone else. There’d been one Christmas in particular that stuck in her mind. She could see the snow-covered Midland Plains the morning she’d ridden out into the countryside with her father and her brothers to find a tree. The weather was cold, her coat threadbare, and she was a little hungry, but she remembered being excited and happy. Happier, she thought just now staring out at the streets of Oslo, than she’d ever been except for maybe at this moment.

“The damned thing works,” Don had told her, and she was here because of it.

When sleep finally came she dreamed about Schlagel racing after her in the middle of the night, a horrible grimace on his face, his mouth filled with fangs that dripped with blood. He meant to kill her and her happiness was gone, replaced by fear.

The package with DeCamp’s pistol, the ammunition, silencer, and cleaning kit arrived the day after he’d checked in to the hotel. None of his telltales had been tampered with; neither the customs authorities nor FedEx had bothered to look inside to make sure that the small international air box from Paris actually contained a notebook computer, battery charger, and external hard drive.

He’d signed for it at the desk and back in his suite had loaded the Steyr and put everything into the wall safe. No need to run the risk of carrying it around the city until he needed it.

That night, seated at the lobby bar, he’d spotted Eve Larsen dressed in evening wear emerging from the elevator with a man and crossing to the street door. He’d only got a fleeting glimpse but he was sure the man was Kirk McGarvey, the former director of the CIA. And he’d sat back in his bar stool to consider his options with this new piece of information.

Every intelligence officer on the planet, every contractor who’d ever been in the business for the past twenty years, knew or at least had heard of McGarvey. The man was a legend, and legitimately a legend if only half of what was said about him was only half true.

Formidable, the thought crossed DeCamp’s mind. A professional who would be bound by his training and experience to follow certain procedures — modi operandi that had worked in the past. It was a weakness that DeCamp thought would work to his advantage. And a plan had begun to form in his mind that by morning had solidified so strongly that he had walked back to the town hall to watch the preparations for the ceremony.

The hall was closed for now, but a small crowd of curious Norwegians had gathered outside and he had mingled with them, looking for sight lines, judging angles. He dropped his wallet and turned and made his way through the crowd to the street where he stopped and looked back to see what would happen.

No one had paid him any attention, their eyes focused on the workmen and media coming and going. After the ceremony, when Dr. Larsen and the others came outside, the people waiting would be even more mesmerized.

He walked back to retrieve his wallet that had lain undisturbed where he’d dropped it, made something of a small show finding it and picking it up, even excusing himself twice, and still no one really noticed him.

Just before lunch, strolling in the city park across the street from the Grand, he’d used his Nokia encrypted cell phone to place a call to Wolfhardt in Dubai. When he got through he explained how he meant to carry out the kill.

And the German had understood at once. “You need a plausible diversion,” he’d said.

“One of Schlagel’s admirers.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Someone with a history,” DeCamp said. “A police history.”

“I have just the man. In fact he is already there in Oslo. I’ll overnight his dossier to you.”

“At the Grand, under the name Edward Grecinger.”

“Yes,” Wolfhardt said. “Suite four-oh-seven.”

And DeCamp held his anger and vulnerability with the German in check. For now. “I’ll look for it.”

Eve’s fear, which had turned into a vague sense of unease, stayed with her through breakfast and the last of the news conferences before the ceremony, these mostly with Norwegian and Swedish television and radio stations. Halfway through one of them the reporter motioned for her cameraman to interrupt filming for a moment.

“Are you feeling well, Doctor?” the reporter asked, obviously concerned.

Eve knew what the woman meant and she shook her head. “Just a little tired,” she said. “The past few weeks have been chaotic, and I think maybe I’m feeling a little jet-lagged. Sorry.”

The woman reporter smiled. “No need to apologize, Doctor. Nearly every Nobel laureate I’ve interviewed on the day of the ceremony was in the same shape. Except, of course, for Mr. Gore. But then he was a politician and quite used to the pace. May we continue?”

“Yes.” Eve had nodded, and she concentrated not only on what she was saying, but how she was speaking.

The worst part so far, she’d confided to McGarvey, was the constant stream of people wanting to meet with her, and fellow environmental scientists were even worse than the politicians and businessmen because they insisted on talking shop, mostly about new carbon dioxide capture technologies. She wanted to tell them that when her water turbines began to come online, carbon dioxide would cease to be an issue. Any trends toward global warming would come mostly from naturally occurring cyclical events. But scientists were specialists and had trouble seeing beyond their own disciplines.

The ballroom on the mezzanine had been partitioned for the last three news conferences, and Don had remained at the rear of the ornate hall during all of them, avoiding any contact with McGarvey who stood to one side where he could watch not only Eve but the closed door and, she supposed, the faces of the reporters and technicians. He was dressed in a light-colored sport coat and knowing that he carried a gun in a holster beneath the jacket didn’t help her uneasy mood. The mere fact that he needed to be here with her was bothersome. And some of that mood, she guessed, had shown on her face

An older man in a leather jacket raised his hand. Eve pointed at him and he got to his feet, his cameraman focusing on him at first.

“Thank you, Doctor Larsen. I’m Arvid Morkum, TV 2, and I would like to add my congratulations.”

Eve nodded. “Thank you,” she said. She had been introduced by Jacobsen, who’d withdrawn to the side leaving her seated alone at a small table, a single microphone in front of her.

“As I’m sure many of my colleagues were, I was impressed watching the special program on the Fox network for its succinct explanation of exactly how your World Energy Needs project will not only produce electricity but, according to your work, reduce the number and severity of tropical cyclones around the globe, as well as have a decisive effect on global warming.”

Eve forced a smile even though she suspected what was coming next. “Is there a question in there, Mr. Morkum?”

A few of the reporters twittered.

“The televangelist Jeremiah Schlagel led a demonstration outside of the television studio even while you were inside, claiming that what you are trying to accomplish goes against — the reverend’s words — God’s will. How do you feel about his crusade?”

“His is a point of view apparently not shared by the Nobel Prize committee.”

Several of the people in the audience laughed out loud, but Morkum was not amused. “Aren’t you taking the man and his message seriously?”

“Not at all.”

“Then can you explain why you have hired a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency to act as your personal bodyguard? And my follow-up question is, are we to see a repeat of the strong-arm tactics used by Mr. McGarvey at the Fox studios in Washington?”

Jacobsen, who’d been standing to one side, spoke up. “Pardon me, Mr. Morkum, but I do not believe that is a relevant question at this news conference.”

The TV 2 camera swung toward him, and then panned to McGarvey.

“I believe it is,” Morkum said. “Outside the hotel at this very moment, a small group of the Reverend Schlagel’s followers are preparing to wage a demonstration against Dr. Larsen the moment she steps out the door.” He turned to McGarvey. “Would you care to comment, sir?”

McGarvey shook his head. “No.”

“Is it true that you entered Norway on a diplomatic passport and that you carry a firearm?”

McGarvey held his silence. Everyone’s attention was on him now, and Eve had to admire his control.

“Isn’t it also true, Mr. McGarvey, that you and Dr. Larsen were together during the attack on the Hutchinson Island nuclear facility in Florida? And can you explain your presence there? Certainly it was not a coincidence.”

Jacobsen stepped forward. “This concludes today’s final news conference. I’m sure that you will all understand Dr. Larsen’s need to prepare for this evening’s ceremonies and her lecture. Press kits have been provided for your information. You will find them on a table just outside of this room. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”

Morkum was protesting, but the doors were opening and most of the other reporters, rather out of politeness or not, were getting to their feet and heading away.

“I’m terribly sorry, Dr. Larsen,” Jacobsen said.

Eve looked up as McGarvey came over. “I didn’t expect anything like that,” she said.

“There will be no further trouble, I would hope,” Jacobsen said to McGarvey.

“More protest demonstrations probably,” McGarvey assured him. “But your police will keep the peace.”

“Dreadful.”

As the newspeople, including Morkum and his cameraman, were clearing out, Don came forward, scowling. “That was good,” he said.

“Dr. Larsen will remain in her suite until it’s time to leave for city hall,” McGarvey told the Nobel committee chairman. “I assume a car will pick her up.”

“Yes, of course,” Jacobsen said. He turned back to Eve. “Again, my sincerest apologies, Dr. Larsen. If there is anything else that I or the committee or the staff of this hotel can do for you, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

“Thank you,” Eve said, and she felt a little sorry for the man.

“Until this evening then,” Jacobsen said with a half bow and he left.

Don was agitated, all the muscles in his face tense. “You coming here has ruined everything,” he told McGarvey.

“That’s not true, Don,” Eve said. She’d seen him like this before, not often, but when he got like this it usually ended up with him stalking off and staying away until she could find him and talk him down. Sometimes he was like a spoiled kid.

“Yes, it is. This afternoon was supposed to be ours to enjoy. But now this incident will be all over Norwegian television, and will probably be picked up by CNN or someone like that. All the networks are here.” He turned back to McGarvey. “Are you really carrying a gun?”

Eve put a hand on Don’s sleeve. “I asked him to come here with me.”

Don gave her a bleak look. “Christ,” he said, and he stalked off.

“He’ll get over it,” Eve said.

McGarvey nodded. “Will you?”

The afternoon had turned chilly, especially for DeCamp who had spent most of his life in the southern portions of the African continent or Mediterranean France, so in the afternoon of the ceremony he’d purchased a warm, fur-lined jacket from the upscale department store Bertoni Byportenshopping.

He’d returned to his suite where he’d had a light snack of pickled herring, small toasts, and two bottles of Ringnes beer, and had watched the Nobel news conferences, especially the one on TV 2. Dr. Larsen had come across as a tired woman who’d rather be in her lab, or soon aboard the oil exploration platform en route to Florida’s Atlantic coast. The TV journalist had been an ass, but he’d focused on McGarvey with a couple of pointed questions, giving DeCamp at least a small measure of the man. Impressive, the thought came to mind. In control.

Afterwards he’d taken a shower, got dressed and cleaned, and loaded his Steyr and attached the suppressor. When he was finished he packed his single suitcase, for his early morning departure on the six fifteen flight to Berlin, and packed the second magazine of 9mm ammunition and cleaning kit in a FedEx package and addressed it to William Jenkins, SOS Ministries, McPherson, Kansas, USA.

Downstairs at the desk, he settled his bill, arranged for the package to be sent out in the morning, and asked for a wake-up call.

“Early flight, sir?” the clerk asked.

“Unfortunately business in Berlin first thing in the morning. You know how that can be.”

“Yes, sir.” She smiled.

By the time the first dignitaries began showing up at city hall, and along with them the growing crowd, DeCamp took a quick pass once through the hundred or so onlookers satisfying himself that Billy Jenkins, the abortion clinic bomber, whose dossier, including photographs, that Wolfhardt had sent him, had not shown up yet. The man was blond and had the physique of a rugby player, hard to miss. But best of all the FBI considered him a man of interest who’d shown a propensity for religious intolerance and violence.

Wolfhardt had written a note on a second dossier, that of Terrance Langdorf, warning that the two men often worked together. Almost certainly both of them had been involved in the act of vandalism against Dr. Larsen’s Princeton lab, and they’d both been in front of the Fox television studio the evening she’d been interviewed. In fact it had been Jenkins whose arm McGarvey had broken.

The ceremony was held at Oslo’s city hall a short distance from the Grand Hotel. Eve rode over in the back of a Mercedes limousine with McGarvey and Jacobsen, Don in the front with the driver. Already a big crowd of onlookers lined the street outside the north doors that led to the ornate central hall where the medallion, certificate, and a document that confirmed the prize amount set since 2001 at more than one million U.S. would be presented in the presence of Norway’s King Harald V. The Prize was a point of great national pride for the Norwegians. Jacobsen had explained on the way over that when Alfred Nobel bequeathed his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes in 1895, Norway and Sweden were a confederation. Since Sweden was responsible for all the foreign policies of the two countries, it awarded the prizes in the sciences and economics, but left the Peace Prize to Norway to avoid any hint of political corruption.

Police had kept a path from where the limousines were pulling in to the entry doors up two broad ramps that flanked a fountain and cascading waterfall. McGarvey, wearing a tuxedo, handed Eve out of the car, his attention on the people waving Norwegian and American flags. None of the religious demonstrators were evident.

Jacobsen and Don, also dressed in tuxedoes, got out of the car, and followed behind McGarvey and Eve, who was wearing a long, flowing white gown beneath a borrowed mink wrap, elbow-length gloves, her short hair done up that afternoon in her room by a stylist the Nobel committee had arranged for, and a diamond tiara, looked stunning. She was a completely different woman, in McGarvey’s estimation, from the one yesterday and this morning at the news conference. She finally had confidence.

“I think I belong here,” she said to McGarvey, her voice low enough so that no one else could hear her. “Is that too vain of me?”

McGarvey smiled for her. “Like you told that television reporter, the Nobel Prize committee thinks that you’ve earned this. Enjoy.”

“Not until I’m aboard Vanessa Explorer,” she said.

But then they were inside the fabulous Grand Hall that had been decked out for the ceremony with a stage and podium at one end and rows of chairs facing it. The hall soared three stories, the walls covered with elaborate frescoes, a line of windows at the ceiling level, which during the short northern days would practically flood the space with the oddly slanting natural light.

Already most of the seats were filled with dignitaries, everyone here strictly by invitation, and almost all the seats on the stage were occupied by members of the royal family, along with the prize selection committee. Eve handed her mink wrap to Don, and Jacobsen led her and McGarvey to their places. Don had been assigned a seat at the rear of the hall.

People got to their feet and applauded politely, and on stage Eve shook everyone’s hand, smiling and nodding.

When everyone was finally settled, Jacobsen went to the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen, His Majesty Harald V, king of Norway, and his consort, Her Majesty Sonja Haraldsen.”

Everyone rose, and moments later the king and queen in formal state dress entered from a rear door and came onto the stage. Everyone in the hall applauded.

Harald was a tall man, thin white hair at the sides of his head, his face long, his eyes kind. He’d been a chain-smoker but after a bout with cancer had quit. Jacobsen introduced him to Eve, who curtsied, which seemed to take the king by surprise and he smiled.

“I’m so pleased to finally meet you, Dr. Larsen,” he said, still smiling. “I’ve followed your work with great interest.” And he winked. “Perhaps this evening’s affairs will help quiet your critics.”

“I hope you’re right, Your Majesty,” Eve said.

The king turned to McGarvey. “We’ve never met, but I’ve heard a great deal about you, and your service to your country. We’re most pleased that you’re here with Dr. Larsen.”

They shook hands. “Thank you, sir, but I hope that my being here remains totally unnecessary.”

“But you don’t think so,” the king said. “Not here and not later after she leaves.”

“No, sir,” McGarvey said.

“No,” the king said, and he and the queen moved down the line, and when they had finally taken their seats and everyone else in the Grand Hall were seated, Jacobsen began the ceremony, introducing the honored guests on stage, including McGarvey, giving a short history of Alfred Nobel and the prizes, and finally the citation detailing Eve’s work to solve the world’s energy needs and calm violent weather around the world for which reasons she had been selected to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

On cue the king got up and Eve remained in her seat until he reached the podium, then got up and went to where he and Jacobsen and an aide, who’d spent an hour coaching her on the etiquette and choreography of the awards ceremony, waited.

The hall was silent, and Eve would remember this solemn moment for the rest of her life. Every Nobel laureate did.

“On behalf of the Nobel Foundation, and of a grateful Norway for your contributions, I am happy to present you with a this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace,” Jacobsen said. He took an open velvet box containing the Peace Prize medal cast in eighteen-carat green gold and plated with twenty-four-carat gold the aide handed him, and presented it to Eve. The medal was heavy, nearly a half a pound, and she hadn’t expected that. Nobel’s profile was cast on both sides.

Jacobsen took the ornately decorated diploma in a leather folder, embossed with Nobel’s profile, and handed it to Eve along with the document confirming the prize amount.

The audience got to its feet and applause rolled through the hall, and Eve fought a nearly overwhelming urge to cry. She found Don on his feet at the back, applauding, and she nodded. The damn thing works, he’d told her that morning on the Big G in the Gulf Stream, and now nothing would stop her, stop them actually because he’d worked just as hard as she had, in some ways even harder. She would make this up to him, because at this moment she felt in her heart of hearts that he should be up here with her as a corecipient.

Television cameras were, according to Jacobsen, broadcasting the ceremony around the world to 450 million households in 150 countries, and Eve was allowed to savor the thing for only a few moments before she handed the medal, diploma, and document to the aide. Jacobsen and the king stepped aside for Eve to come to the podium where her speech, leather-bound, had been placed for her, and then they withdrew and took their seats.

She took a moment until everyone was seated and silence returned before she opened the leather folder. And she waited for another beat, the words on the first page suddenly meaningless to her, as if they’d been written in Chinese characters or Arabic script and she panicked. But just for an instant. She could only think for that moment of the banquet immediately following her speech, and tomorrow night’s concert hosted by Harrison Ford and Oprah Winfrey, and starring among others Andrea Bocelli. She wanted this and all of the rest to be done so that she could return to her work.

But then she began in much the same way Al Gore had begun in 2007. “Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.

“More than thirty years ago a young scientist by the name of Amory Lovins raised the important argument that the United States had reached a critical crossroads. Down the path we were taking guaranteed an ever-increasing demand for and a reliance on nuclear fission and dirty fossil fuels.

“He warned that burning coal to produce electricity would double the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations early in the next century. This century. Unless something was done soon we were headed for a possible change in global climate that could become irreversible.”

Eve looked up and paused for a moment.

“Lovins called this road the ‘hard path,’ but he proposed an alternative. His ‘soft path.’ He called for renewable energy sources from the sun and the wind that along with conservation and new efficient technologies would bring about a cleaner, healthier environment in which the energy wars of the near future could be eliminated.

“An important article that appeared in 1977 in the magazine The Atlantic outlined Lovins’s ideas and warnings, and went on to explore other emerging technologies. The message was very clear, yet we continued on the hard path.”

Again Eve paused. The damn thing works.

A woman in formal dress seated at the rear of the hall suddenly jumped up. “Stop this evil before it is too late!” she screeched at the top of her lungs.

The king’s two bodyguards suddenly appeared at the side of the stage, and McGarvey got to his feet.

“You are an affront to our Holy Father’s plan for us!” the woman screamed.

A pair of metro policemen reached the woman and bodily dragged her to the doors as she shouted, “Repent now, apostate, before it is too late for your mortal soul!” And then she was outside, and as the doors opened and closed Eve could hear people on the street actually cheering.

Jacobsen was on his feet and he started for the podium, but Eve waved him back and turned to the audience and smiled. “Actually I’m quite glad to see that Norway honors freedom of speech as well as America does.”

The king behind her applauded and then so did everyone in the hall, and it took a long time to die down before she could continue.

“In actuality, Lovins was speaking not merely for the U.S., but for the entire world, which is why I’m here today to tell you about my vision for taking the soft path.”

The streetlights switched on about the same time Jenkins and Langsdorf came sauntering up the street from the direction of the harbor. They were dressed almost identically in jeans, leather bomber jackets, and dark blue knit watch caps, Jenkins’s right arm was in a cloth sling that fit over his jacket. They both wore gloves.

DeCamp had positioned himself a few feet back from the front of the crowd that pressed the walkway from the main doors to the hall. Oslo police had erected barriers and held people back. But Eve’s speech had been piped outside to loudspeakers and the crowd, probably more than three-quarters of them Schlagel’s people, in his estimation, had become restive, and the cops nervous.

The two men passed within a few feet of DeCamp, stopping nearly at the barriers, and he gently shouldered his way through the crowd until he was within touching distance directly behind them. He had a very good sight line on the walkway from the hall out to where the limos had pulled up, the chauffeurs waiting at the rear passenger doors.

A burst of applause came from the loudspeakers and minutes later the city hall doors opened and the first of the dignitaries who’d been up on stage began coming out, all of them stopping on either side of the walk, forming a tunnel of well-wishers that Eve Larsen, and presumably Kirk McGarvey, would have to pass through.

The problem as he saw it was twofold. First he had to get a clear shot, preferably two. If he hit the woman center mass, the explosive bullets he’d loaded would be fatal. There was little doubt of it. The second was convincing the onlookers that it was Jenkins or Langsdorf who’d fired the shots in such a way that the crowd would become hysterical, leaving the police no option but to return fire.

To solve both problems, DeCamp had removed the suppressor. In the first place shooting without the silencer vastly improved the pistol’s accuracy. And in the second, the noise would startle the crowd, and like a flock of birds they would almost immediately spread out.

He’d put a little Vaseline on his fingertips and the pad of his thumb on his right hand, and he reached for the Steyr inside his jacket pocket, cocking the hammer so that it would take only a light pull to fire.

More people were streaming out of the hall, taking up their places in the reception line, until finally Eve Larsen, flanked by McGarvey on her right, and Leif Jacobsen on her left, came out and began moving slowly through the line. More applause began from the people on the walkway and some in the crowd, but most began booing and chanting something about going against God’s will. The Oslo police stiffened up and McGarvey’s head was on a swivel, but his attention was directed toward the people nearest to Eve, those in the reception line.

DeCamp moved closer to a position directly between Jenkins and Langsdorf, almost touching them, from where he had a clear sight line and their bodies would effectively shield his gun hand from the people on either side.

Eve would pass within twenty feet of him and as she shook hands with a woman dressed in furs, DeCamp pulled out his pistol, holding it in front of his chest.

She leaned over and said something, then moved closer. DeCamp raised his pistol and fired one shot at the same moment Jacobsen moved in front of Eve to speak to McGarvey. The bullet caught the Nobel Prize committee chairman in his shoulder, slamming him backwards off his feet into the line of people.

McGarvey shoved Eve to her knees as he pulled out his own weapon, and the crowd reacted, going wild, women screaming, everyone trying to get away.

Jenkins was turning toward DeCamp, who thrust the pistol into his hands.

“My God, my God!” DeCamp cried. “The reverend knows!” He backed off.

Jenkins took a step toward him.

But DeCamp melded with the crowd. “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!”

Both Jenkins and Langsdorf, confused, turned back toward the police. Suddenly they were out in the open, all alone, the people moving away from them.

One of the cops shouted something, and Jenkins tried to answer back, raising the pistol over his head.

DeCamp turned and watched from the fringes of the still-moving crowd as the police opened fire, Jenkins and Langsdorf falling back to the pavement, each hit more than a half-dozen times.

Back in Paris, DeCamp waited at noon for the first two days since Oslo just within the entrance to the Saint-Germain-de-Près church where he had a straight line view of the Deux Maggots café across the boulevard. He was armed. Although he was certain that Wolfhardt would come to him, he wasn’t sure of the reception because the second half of his payment for assassinating Eve Larsen had been deposited into his account.

It was a mixed message the German and his employer had sent him; the woman had not been hurt and the assignment had been a failure except that the blame had gone to the two men shot to death by the Oslo police. They were wanted by the FBI for questioning about a series of abortion clinic bombings a few years ago, and their names were being linked to the Reverend Schlagel’s ministry.

Schlagel had gone on his SOS television network the morning of the very next day and on Fox News that evening, saying in effect that although he vehemently disagreed with what Dr. Larsen had set out to do, he would defend to his death her right to practice science as she saw it. He would fight her godless research with everything in his body and mind, including his hourly prayers to Jesus Christ his Savior, but he would also thank God for her miraculous escape, and for the souls of his poor lost sheep, shot to death in Oslo.

A priest in a cassock and wide-brimmed hat, head lowered so that his eyes were not visible, came out of the nave. “You failed,” he said. “Again.”

DeCamp turned suddenly, reaching for his pistol, but then stayed his hand. “The vagaries of these sorts of assignments,” he said. He willed himself to remain calm. This meeting was expected. “Yet you paid my fee. Why? Do you want me to try again?”

“Yes, but in a different fashion. This time the assignment will be much larger, more complex, and it will require additional personnel.”

“I work alone.”

“Not this time.”

“If I refuse?” DeCamp asked.

“That’s not an option, something you know, otherwise you would not have waited for me to show up here.”

“I will need additional funds.”

“Under ordinary circumstances I would have told you to pay for this one out of the profits you’ve earned from the monies you have already received for two failed assignments. But my employer is generous. An additional two million euros will be deposited to your Prague account within twenty-four hours.”

On the surface of it the offer was more than fair, it was generous. Afterwards, no matter the outcome, DeCamp would fetch Martine and they would disappear. Perhaps to Australia. An outback sheep station. Anonymous, safe, where a man could see for miles if an enemy were to approach.

“Am I to be told the details?” he asked.

Wolfhardt reached beneath his cassock for something, and DeCamp almost pulled out his pistol, but it was a thick manila envelope.

“Here are the details. And I sincerely wish you luck, for all of our sakes, including yours, of course.”

“Of course,” DeCamp said, and he turned and walked away.

Wolfhardt had come back from France with assurances that DeCamp would accept the new assignment, and Anne Marie busied herself talking to investors, reassuring them actually, telling them that their hundreds of millions were safe in the dozen MG funds. “We make money on the way down as well as on the way up,” she explained. Though no one asked how, because they all knew that making profits from a declining market meant only that the MG was essentially stealing money from investors in other funds. And she’d always made sure, in those cases, that she never raided any fund in which some of her investors held positions.

The American Securities and Exchange Commission, which in Anne Marie’s estimation had always been run by idiots who had risen to their levels of incompetence, were working to put a stop to what was called high-frequency trading, which amounted to nothing more than letting computers buy stocks and a millisecond later, before the results showed up on the big board, and before mere humans on the floor could make their orders, the machines would automatically make a sale. In those brief millisecond bursts, profits that totaled in the billions each year were made. Of course the SEC thought it gave the high-frequency traders an unfair advantage, which was why the practice was under fire. Supposedly. But she had her own cadre of highly paid computer friends working out of Amsterdam who’d managed over the past several months to do some trading on the side, so far without detection.

Making money was so easy this way that sometimes Anne Marie felt a stab of guilt, or even boredom, because she agreed with her father’s original philosophy that systematic macro trading, which was what this amounted to, was only for idiots and cowards. But then no profit held any shame. Nor could it ever, by definition.

Even though it was winter and a series of cold fronts had marched across the Mediterranean since November, Anne Marie had gone back to her yacht to get away for a few days or weeks, however long it took to refresh her batteries. And everything seemed to be on track. Her investors were content, al-Naimi was off her back for the moment, DeCamp was presumably in the process of bringing the next operation together, and Schlagel’s God Project campaign was in full swing, especially now that Eve Larsen had been presented with the Nobel Prize and had survived an assassination attempt. The woman was blessed, and she was in the clear for the moment.

And it was more grist for Schlagel’s well-oiled mill. People in the U.S. were already putting a lot of pressure on Congress to rethink the permitting process for new nuclear power stations, along with a growing call for immediate inspections of every nuclear plant. The inspections would probably result in closures, or in repair orders that would be so expensive to complete that the utility companies would be forced to take the matter to their boards. The conservative ones, faced with gigantic repair bills and the growing tide of fear and distrust among the general public, would likely decide on even further shutdowns.

People in the southeast, especially in places like rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama were actually knocking down power lines by shooting out the insulators because they were convinced the electricity coming from nuclear power plants was itself radioactive and using electrical appliances inside their homes would give them radiation poisoning. It was Schlagel’s doing, of course, and in Anne Marie’s estimation the man was nothing short of brilliant, and in a Machiavellian sort of way he might make an interesting president after all.

Her thoughts had been flitting around like that ever since Hutchinson Island, and even out here in the Med she hadn’t been able to settle down. Her mood, like the weather, had varied from cold and damp, during which she was too depressed to work or even think, or to cold and blustery, during which she had sudden bursts of energy even though she felt somehow scattered, not together. And all of it was disconcerting.

Yesterday they’d been slowly cruising east to Athens to pick up a few people she’d considered inviting aboard because she’d started out with just her crew and two bodyguards and she’d thought that some of her depression might be plain loneliness, but she’d been spooked for no good reason she could think of, and she’d ordered the captain to turn south toward the African coast where the weather might be a little warmer. She was more tired of the cold than of her loneliness.

She sat at the bar in the main saloon drinking a glass of champagne. Dinner had been tasteless, and now that it was fully dark outside, no lights on any horizon, not even those of a passing ship, no moon, no stars under an overcast sky, the thought of going to bed alone was so dreary at this moment, she was almost frightened. So frightened that when her encrypted sat phone buzzed, the caller ID showing al-Naimi’s number, she was almost relieved, even though his call probably meant trouble of some kind.

“Mr. al-Naimi, good evening,” she said.

“Are you alone at this moment?” the Saudi intelligence officer asked.

Anne Marie felt a slight tingle of fear. “Yes.”

“You are doing a good job with the antinuclear power movement in the United States. We’re pleased — the royal family, unofficially, of course — but if the next phase of your operation goes as well as the first we will allow even more money to be placed in your fund.”

“Thank you. But you must understand that the timing is critical. We cannot make a move until the oil platform is in the middle of the Gulf.”

“Yes, I understand everything,” al-Naimi said impatiently. “Tell me, where you are at this moment, exactly.”

Anne Marie was puzzled. “If you want the exact latitude and longitude, I’ll have to get that from Captain Panagiotopolous. But I think we’re about one hundred kilometers off the Libyan coast, running parallel.”

“Who are your guests aboard?”

“No guests. Just my crew and bodyguards.”

“Where is Wolfhardt?”

“In Dubai,” Anne Marie said, truly alarmed now. Al-Naimi never called to simply chat. “What’s this all about?”

“You have a crew member by the name of Walter Glass.”

It was a statement, not a question, and Anne Marie had to think for a moment if such a man were indeed aboard, but then she remembered. “He’s an engineer’s mate. We took him on sometime this summer. Gunther vetted him, and he came up clean.”

“I’ve learned otherwise,” al-Naimi said. “In fact his real name is Dieter Schey and he works for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The security division. He’s aboard your ship to spy on you.”

“Good heavens why,” she said, but then she knew not only why he’d been sent to spy on her, but why al-Naimi had called.

“There’ve been some tax dealings with a number of your German investors that have raised a red flag.”

He was talking about what were called partnership flip structures and inverted pass-through leases, in which the MG had helped fund a couple of infrastructure deals in Germany — one for the rebuilding of ten bridges along the autobahn, and the other the construction of a water treatment plant outside Munich. The construction companies were given healthy tax credits, which they used in return to shelter income gained by investing money back into the MG. Technically it meant that the German government was investing with Anne Marie, and someone smart in Frankfurt had sat up and taken notice.

“It’s not a problem,” Anne Marie said. “He couldn’t have learned anything aboard ship. And soon as we dock I’ll get rid of him.”

“There’s more to it,” al-Naimi said.

Anne Marie girded herself. “I’m listening.”

“Herr Schey is a clever man, but he’d have to be because of his excellent training with the KGB in Moscow. He is ex-Stasi.”

Stasi had been the old East German secret police, and what al-Naimi had left unsaid, the most disturbing message he’d given to her, was that Gunther, himself ex-Stasi, should have caught it. He’d dropped the ball. If it had been unintentional his worth to her was diminished. But if he’d vetted Schey on purpose, for whatever purpose, something would have to be done.

All of that passed through her thoughts in a beat. “Thank you for the information,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“All of it.”

“Yes,” Anne Marie said.

She poured more champagne and sat at the bar for twenty minutes thinking about her chief of security; thinking that it was nearly impossible to know someone so completely that trust was inviolable. Something like a mother’s unconditional love for her child, even if the child turned out to be a mass murderer. She’d never trusted anyone to that extent. It was another lesson she’d learned from her father. Yet she’d allowed Gunther inside her very inner circle, to such an extent that in some ways he knew more about her business dealings and associates than she did. Where the skeletons were buried.

She didn’t know whether to curse or cry, but finally she reined in her emotions and called her bodyguard, Carlos Ramirez, on the ship’s phone. “We have a crewman by the name of Walter Glass.”

“He’s an engineering mate.”

“Bring him to the main salon in ten minutes,” Anne Marie said. “And bring a flashlight, a pair of kitchen shears, and your pistol. With your silencer, I don’t necessarily want to alert the crew.”

“Will we need Willy?” Ramirez asked. William Harcourt was Anne Marie’s other bodyguard.

“No. This won’t amount to much.”

“Ten minutes.”

She finished her champagne then went forward to her stateroom where she changed into an old pair of blue jeans and a Harvard sweatshirt she wore when she worked out in the fitness room. Barefoot, she went back to the salon, and was just finishing another glass of champagne when Ramirez showed up with a wary engineer’s mate.

“Good evening, Mr. Glass,” she said.

“Ma’am,” the man said. He was of medium build with a solid square face, thinning light hair, and just a hint of worry at the corners of his mouth and in his eyes.

“Actually your name is Dieter Schey, you once worked for the Stasi, and now work for the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. What are you doing aboard my ship?”

Schey hesitated for just a second, but then he shrugged. “Investigating your business practices. It’s believed that you may have broken some German financial laws. I was asked to gather evidence.”

“Have you?” Anne Marie asked. “Gathered evidence.”

“Not yet.”

“Have you ever heard the name Gunther Wolfhardt?” she asked, watching the investigator’s eyes.

He shook his head. “No.”

So far as she could tell he’d told the truth. “Let’s go out to the after deck,” she told Ramirez.

“What are you going to do?”

“What we do with all of our trash. We throw it overboard.”

Schey started to back away, but Ramirez pulled his Glock 17. “Outside,” he said.

They went out the sliding doors from the salon and all the way to the aftermost deck from where swimmers could reach the water down a half-dozen broad stairs to the rear platform at the water’s edge.

“Take off your clothes,” Anne Marie said dispassionately. She was not in a hurry, nor did she have much of any emotion for what was about to be done to the spy. It was simply a job that needed attending to.

“The water is damned cold,” Schey protested. “And no matter what happens, as soon as my body is found it will get back to you.”

“Do as you’re told,” Ramirez said.

It was bitterly cold, a sharp wind blowing across the deck as Schey slowly removed his clothes. His body was solid with very little fat. A long scar on his right leg just above his knee looked old, as did what was probably a bullet wound in his left shoulder.

“Now you want me to jump?” Schey asked.

Anne Marie took the pistol from her bodyguard. “No,” she said. “I want you to die.”

She fired one shot into the middle of the man’s face, killing him instantly, and driving his body backward against the rail, a spray of blood going overboard and lost in the wind.

“Hold him up,” Anne Marie told Ramirez. “Head above the top of the rail. I don’t want to damage the deck.”

Ramirez did as he was told, and Anne Marie methodically fired several more shots at close range into the man’s face, destroying his features and his dental work.

“Fingertips?” Ramirez asked. This was the kind of work he understood, and he wasn’t squeamish about it. He’d never been squeamish about anything he’d been asked to do.

He eased the body on to the deck and using the kitchen shears snipped off the ends of Schey’s fingers and thumbs and tossed them overboard, making it nearly impossible for a quick identification if and when the body was ever found.

When Ramierz was finished, he lifted the body up over the rail and let it fall into the sea. “He’ll be missed by morning.”

“Have the ship searched. You saw him drunk on deck around three in the morning, and the dumb bastard probably fell overboard.”

“Very well.”

“Get rid of his clothes, and clean the blood off the deck, please,” Anne Marie said, and she went back into the salon where she poured another glass of Krug. She was no longer bored.

In the morning she would call Lt. Col. Mustapha Amrusi, chief of Libya’s External Security Organization and ask if she would be welcome in Tripoli first thing in the morning, merely in transit for a flight to Dubai, which considering the amount of money Amrusi and others had made from the MG, would not pose a problem. She would call for her private jet to pick her up and the ship would return to Monaco. For the moment she felt that it would be best to stay away from Europe.

But then her mood darkened as her thoughts turned to Wolfhardt. She would miss him.