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.
December
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 photographer
s, 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 dr
ive.
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.
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