He’d offered them a sedative, but Eve had refused, and lying in bed alone with her thoughts, listening to one side of Gail’s sat phone conversation in the sitting room with McGarvey, still working with the Coast Guard on scene, she wondered if her refusal had been such a good idea after all.
She was having a lot of trouble, for some reason, seeing an image of Don’s face in her head, or to remember what his voice sounded like or feel his arms around her. But she could remember the times he’d been there for her, his steady presence, his precise work; he was a better mathematician than her, and she thought he’d been proud to check her calculations, especially so when he told her that she’d been spot-on, no errors.
But it had all been a horrible mistake on her part, and she felt like a complete fool. She had failed as completely, probably even more so, with Don than she had with her husband, father, and brothers.
And with Kirk, she thought, hearing Gail say his name.
But her science was sound, despite what Don had said to her on Vanessa. And if the rig could be salvaged, which McGarvey had told her was a real possibility, and if she could somehow come up with the money for the salvage operation, and if she could stay out of Schlagel’s sights long enough to get back on track, the damn thing might work.
Nor could she dredge up Lisa’s face or hear her voice, though she could remember some of the kid’s quips, calling Eve the boss lady, slave driver, or taskmaster, and it bothered her tremendously. It was as if all the lights that had brightened her work had gone out of her head, leaving her with nothing but the cold, hard calculations of her theories, and she was more afraid that she was losing, not her mind, but her interest, her enthusiasm. Which after all, she reminded herself, was all she’d ever really had since she’d fully understood that her family in Birmingham genuinely did not like her. In fact they had been afraid of her, as had the kids and the teachers in school.
She thought about Krantz and what he would say to her when she got back to Washington. NOAA was just another governmental agency that could be and often had been swayed by public opinion. It was more than possible that Schlagel’s followers could do just that, especially after their partial triumph in the Gulf. They would be calling the incident God’s will, and it made her skin crawl.
But it hadn’t been the hand of some God-directed group of terrorists or whatever they were, that had come aboard Vanessa, killed her crew and attempted to destroy the platform and send it to the bottom. They were men, according to Kirk, who did such things for a fee; it’s what they did for a living. Someone had paid them to destroy Vanessa and stop work on the project. Not Schlagel, but someone with a strong financial purpose, for whom Eve’s work was a threat.
Gail came to the partially open door and knocked softly. “Eve?”
“I’m awake,” Eve said, sitting up and switching on the bedside lamp.
“Kirk wants to talk to you,” Gail said, coming and handing the sat phone she’d borrowed from one of the officers to Eve. She smiled and went back out.
“Hello?”
“How are you doing?” McGarvey asked.
“I’ve been better,” Eve said. “I don’t have any idea what comes next, though.”
“InterOil is sending out a salvage crew, and the Coast Guard people say that it looks like the rig can be repaired.”
“Back to fund-raising,” Eve said with a little measure of bitterness, though she knew that she should be grateful.
“The company is picking up the tab,” McGarvey said. “It may take a little longer than you wanted, but your rig will make it to Hutchinson Island.”
“How?” was all Eve could think to ask.
“Something about towing a spare leg structure out here, filling it with water so that it can be positioned under the rig and then slowly pumping the water out so that it’ll rise up into the correct position.”
“They’re smarter than me,” Eve said, and she could hear Stefanato holding his own against Don and the other eggheads.
“Me, too,” McGarvey said.
“When will I see you?”
“Not for a bit, but I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can.”
Eve suddenly panicked. “What if he comes after us again?”
“That’s what I’m going to try to prevent. But Gail will hang around to see that you’re okay. She’s good at what she does.”
“Yes, I think that you’re right,” Eve said. “I’ll miss you.”
“Not a chance, Doc, you’ve got work to do,” McGarvey told her. “And besides, the media is already all over this thing. The Nobel laureate versus the preacher’s flock. You’ll have a reception committee when you get to Tampa, so I suggest you try to get a couple hours of sleep.”
“It doesn’t seem real to me. None of it.”
Anne Marie’s hand shook as she set down her teacup, Parkinson’s the first thought in her head, absolutely terrifying her, all the more because she’d been expecting the first symptoms for years. It was a fear she’d harbored in secret — in secret most of the time even from herself — since a couple of months after she’d buried her father and had lunch with Bob Calhoun, the old man’s longtime personal physician and friend.
They’d met at the downtown Boston Harvard Club on his suggestion, a bright sunny fall day, Anne Marie’s hedge fund roaring along at the start of the dot-com buildup, the world completely her oyster, and she’d simply not been prepared for what he’d had to say to her.
“You’ll need to watch for the symptoms, of course,” he’d told her after their second martini and after they’d ordered the boeuf bourguignon.
“I don’t understand.”
Calhoun was an old man on the verge of retirement from his GP practice and he gave Anne Marie a patient smile. “Do you know why your father chose to end his own life?”
“Business reverses.”
“He was losing his shirt, he and I talked about it. But it wasn’t the real reason he decided to go out that way. He had developed Parkinson’s and he was damned if he was going to end up some doddering old son of a bitch strapped to a wheelchair and drooling. ‘I’m not going to spend my last days with a bedpan strapped to my ass so I won’t shit in my pants,’ his exact words.”
Anne Marie could hear the old man’s voice as if he’d been sitting right there with them at the window table looking out across the city’s financial district. “Do you think that the disease affected his judgment?”
“Not directly. But I suspect he was distracted by it.”
“Enough to make mistakes?”
“Possibly,” Dr. Calhoun had told her.
“And realize that he was making mistakes?” Anne Marie had wanted to know, but the doctor had been unable to answer that question exactly except to say that the disease had probably disgusted him.
“Your father never accepted failures in others, and I expect that he thought his body was failing him, so he would have been upset.” Dr. Calhoun spread his hands. “It had been three months since I’d seen him before he killed himself, so I don’t know his state of mind. But you need to start keeping track of your own health.”
Her own doctor had told her what she had was nothing more than benign essential tremors, a common condition. But she hadn’t believed him six months ago when she’d first noticed she was developing the shakes, or now this afternoon in her penthouse apartment waiting for Wolfhardt to show up.
She was convinced that rather than face an uncertain future with the disease her father had put the pistol to his head and blew his brains out, an option she would never consider. Anyway if she had Parkinson’s, it was in the early stages, which left her plenty of time to plan her next move, stay and fight or run. But it was fast becoming crunch time now; she could feel it viscerally just as she had felt when it was time to bail out of the dot-com bubble and a few years later the real estate boom and get out of Dodge.
The television behind her, tuned to Fox, had been covering two stories all morning, one they called “the Tragedy in the Gulf,” and the other the Reverend Schlagel’s take from his headquarters in McPherson, Kansas, in his sermon, “God Has Spoken, Are We Ready to Listen?”
DeCamp had failed again. For the third time. The oil platform had been crippled, but not sunk, and Dr. Larsen
