Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “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 s
mile. “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.”