Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “I agree. Don’t kill her, just shake her up.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to slow her down,” Anne Marie said. “She’ll get her platform, but I want your people to hound her all the way to Oslo. Make her know that she’s vulnerable.”

  “Vulnerable people make mistakes.”

  “And if she starts making mistakes — I don’t care what sort of mistakes — everything else that the woman says or does will become suspect.”

  Again Schlagel was silent for a beat, but then he chuckled. “You are one gloriously devious woman, darlin’,” he said. “And I can’t tell you just how much I love you.”

  “Because we’re cut of the same cloth,” she managed to tell him though her gorge was rising. “We’re winners.”

  “Amen.”

  PART TWO

  Through December

  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 hes
itation, 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.