It was late, nearly midnight, when DeCamp stopped his rental Peugeot along the side of the narrow D2204 corniche highway above Nice, shut off the lights, and got out. It was a moonless night, but the sky was bright enough with the glow from the city below for him to see the blackened remains of his house.
He’d arrived in Nice late this afternoon, but instead of taking a taxi straight to his house he had rented the car at the airport and driven up to the L’auberge de Col de Braus, a small country inn of six rooms and a good kitchen near the village of L’Escarene ten kilometers up in the hills. He’d been spooked ever since the German had shown up on his doorstep, knowing his real name. And after his encounter with McGarvey on the platform, he was taking nothing for granted.
But this now, what he was seeing, was far worse than he’d feared, and he had to pace back and forth to somehow put a cap on his rage. He expected maybe to see the house dark, and Martine gone to Paris as she’d told him she often did when he was away. But not this. Anything but this, his house destroyed and Martine almost certainly dead, her body in the morgue.
Hutchinson Island had only been a partial success, but the business in the Gulf had ended in disaster. The edition of the
He had failed, and this was Wolfhardt’s demonstration of the client’s displeasure.
DeCamp stopped pacing, and stared at the burned-out ruins. This act was much more than a simple message passed to him; he’d stopped at an Internet cafe in DeGaulle Airport to check his bank balance. The ten million euros had been deposited during the night. The money was meaningless to them, completely trivial.
Go away, hide under a rock, enjoy your money if you can. Or find us and try to take your revenge. Either way Mr. DeCamp you are totally out of the business, superfluous, ineffective, nothing more than a swatted bug whose very existence is nothing more than a minor offense to the larger scheme of things.
And DeCamp had always thought that tales of revenge were stupid, but until this moment he hadn’t realized just how much he’d loved Martine and had come to depend on her presence at his side. He’d always planned on retiring, but with her, not by himself.
He heard her laughter and he suddenly turned and tried to find out where it had come from, but then he realized the sound was nothing more than a siren or car horn in the very far distance, distorted by the light breeze.
Wolfhardt had done this in retaliation for Hutchinson Island and the Gulf, and the man was a professional. He would have made certain that Martine was dead before he’d set fire to the place.
But Colonel Frazer had taught him from the beginning to always go into a battle with dispassion. “Let the other soldier shout his war cries, while you approach from behind and silently slit his throat.”
Be prepared.
Be fearless.
Life without honor is possible, but honor without life is fruitless.
Remembering four thousand days of lessons with the colonel and nearly ten thousand days of experience in the field finally calmed DeCamp down enough so that he could go back to the car and drive away.
In the morning he would take the train to Zurich where he could access one of his bank accounts, and where he could contact his friend in the SADF who had warned him about Wolfhardt and who presumably knew where the man operated from.
Then once he had the information he needed, he would change his appearance, gather his weapons, and make his strike. Clean, surgical, decisive. You have given me your message, now I will give you mine.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Eve had said a few words about her postdoc Lisa Harkness in the stone chapel at the Swan Point Cemetery along the Seekonk River in Providence, Rhode Island, but standing now at the graveside, in the midst of her other postdocs and techs, Gail standing just behind, she wanted to shout what a terrible waste it had been.
She couldn’t, of course. Lisa had been an only child and her parents, who’d sent her off to Princeton to become a famous scientist, someone who would do good in a world that needed mending, were devastated and had hung on every word Eve had said about their daughter.
“Lisa taught us how to text so that she could send us messages many times every day,” her mother, a local high school math teacher, had told Eve before the service. “Once she got into your graduate program, and then began working with you, she couldn’t talk about anything or anyone else.”
“She was a wonderful girl,” Eve said, choking back tears. “Everyone loved her. You couldn’t help not to.”
The funeral was large. More than one hundred of Lisa’s family and friends had shown up, including aunts and uncles and both sets of her grandparents, which brought home hard just how alone Eve had always been. This was the family she’d dreamed about having all of her life.
“Everyone felt that way, Dr. Larsen. So who would want to kill her and why?”
“It wasn’t her, it was me and my project they wanted to stop,” Eve said, not knowing what she could say to offer Lisa’s parents any sort of comfort.
“We know that,” Lisa’s father said, squinting. He taught history of philosophy at Brown University and Lisa had once described him as a gentle bear with clothing. “But what are they so afraid of that would drive them to commit murder — mass murder?”
“Losing money, I’m told.”
“Money,” Mrs. Harkness said, but not as a question.
And after the funeral and the reception on the big back lawn of the Harknesses’ home, during which just about everyone had stared at Eve and her team, but especially Eve as if she were some mysterious goddess who’d stepped down from Mount Olympus, it was a bittersweet relief for all of them to be on their flights home — to Princeton for most, and to Washington for Eve and Gail.
“They’d never met someone who’d won a Nobel Prize,” Gail said. “And for a person like you to come all the way to Rhode Island for the funeral of one of your students was a big honor.”
“I was afraid that I’d say something that would hurt them ever more.”
“But you didn’t, and they loved having you there.”
Eve felt a nearly overwhelming sense of bleakness, as if it were the black of night now and would always stay the black of night for her. “At times like this I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,” she said. “I mean I believe the science is on track, but maybe there are other issues, larger issues, social issues that I just don’t get.” She wanted Gail to reassure her.
“I think the social issues are exactly what your project is all about.”
Eve turned away, a little embarrassed by revealing an inner portion of herself. She’d never become comfortable with such things. British reserve and all that, but mostly what she considered to have been a crappy upbringing. Don had told her once that she should stop blaming her past for what she had become: “For better or worse you are who you made yourself to be. Your parents gave you life. The rest is your doing, so get on with it, and stop complaining.” Good advice, even from a bad man.
“You’re right,” she said after a while. “We just have to make it work, and screw the bastards who want to stop me.”
Gail smiled. “You scared me there for a minute. If you’ve lost confidence I don’t know what the rest of us are supposed to do. After all, you’re the Nobel doc.”
Her boss, Brian Landsberg, had told her essentially the same thing in his office at Princeton the day before. “I can’t speak for Bob Krantz and the other NOAA people the day before in Washington, but despite what happened in the Gulf the science has not changed. The Nobel Prize committees are not composed of idiots — or at least not entirely composed — and like the rest of us they saw that you were right.”
