Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “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 R
ose 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 relati
ons, 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.