“You’re a hard man to track down,” Eve said when McGarvey got on.
“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” McGarvey said. “You took a tumble yesterday, are you okay?”
“Just fine,” she said dismissively. “I’m here in Washington, and I’d like to buy you lunch if you’re free.”
“I’m busy.”
“This is important, at least to me it is. The Watergate at noon? Then I won’t bother you again.”
McGarvey glanced at his watch. It was just past 11:30 A.M. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”
“Good.”
“NOAA’s Doctor Larsen from Hutchinson Island?” Gail asked when McGarvey hung up.
“Yes. She wants to talk to me.”
“About what?”
“Haven’t a clue,” McGarvey said, and he missed the quick expression of anger on Gail’s face.
TWENTY-FOUR
McGarvey had no real idea why he had agreed to meet Eve Larsen for lunch except for the fact she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday, right in the middle of the attack, and he’d never trusted coincidences.
Last year she’d been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics, her picture on the cover of
Dressed in a charcoal gray pantsuit with flaring legs, and a plain white blouse that practically fluoresced against her deep tan, she was seated at the half-filled bar in the Watergate Hotel, sipping a martini.
She was absorbed with something on the television screen behind the bar and didn’t notice McGarvey until he sat down next to her, and when she looked at him she smiled warmly, though he could see that she was worried, or at the very least had something she considered to be very important on her mind.
“Hi,” McGarvey said.
“Have you seen that?” she motioned toward the television that was tuned to CSPN, a stern-faced woman announcer reporting on something apparently grave. The sound was off, but her words appeared as a crawl at the bottom of the screen. A high-ranking U.S. embassy employee and her driver and bodyguard had been assassinated on the airport highway in Caracas, Venezuela.
An incident like that was bound to happen down there sooner or later, but something about the photograph of the woman, which flashed on the screen, was familiar to McGarvey and when her name came up on the crawl he realized that he knew her.
Eve was looking at him. “Did you know her?”
“I’m not sure. It was several years ago.”
“You were with the CIA?” Eve asked. She glanced up at the television, but the announcer was back to reporting on the Hutchinson Island meltdown, which had dominated every newscast since yesterday.
“Yes, but you called me. What can I do for you?”
“Did she work for the CIA?”
McGarvey had to remind himself that he was dealing with a woman a lot smarter than the average scientist, and by her attitude now and her questions, a lot more aware of her surroundings outside the lab. “Even if I knew that, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you. But if she was working for the Company the media will out her sooner or later.”
“Because if she was a CIA officer, don’t you see a coincidence with what happened at Hutchinson Island?”
“Where are you going with this?”
Eve shrugged, and glanced up at the aerial view of the power plant on the screen. “Anything else going on in the world? You were the director of the Agency, if anyone would know something like that it would be you, right?”
“Not much just now.”
“Well, nothing’s been on CNN in the past twenty-four hours except for the attack on Hutchinson Island, and now this assassination, which was supposedly carried out by something called the Earth Liberation Front. They want to topple the Chavez government so that they can use the oil revenues to fight for a clean environment. They want to put themselves out of business by squeezing the price of oil so sharply they’ll make it impossible to keep using it for gasoline.”
“Where’s the connection?”
“I know about these people, and a thousand other groups like theirs. They’re the ones who want people like me to succeed. They not only want to shut down our consumption of oil, for any purpose, they want to stop the use of coal, reduce our carbon emissions all the way back to preindustrial days.”
“Hutchinson Island isn’t clean enough for them?
“A nuclear plant emits more heat into the atmosphere than just about any other type of power plant. They might consider that just as big a threat to the environment as carbon dioxide.”
“That’s a stretch, isn’t it?” McGarvey asked, though he wasn’t so sure. And it depended on what Lorraine Fritch was doing in Caracas.
Eve was thoughtful. “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t like coincidences and I’m especially suspicious of hidden connections. Hidden motives.”
McGarvey smiled. “You’d make a good detective.”
She returned his smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment, but being a scientist is just about the same thing.”
“I’ll look into it,” he promised her. “But you said you wanted to talk about something that was important to you. Was that it?”
“Related,” she said, even more thoughtful than a moment ago. Worried? McGarvey wondered. “What usually happens when someone or some group goes on the attack?”
“Someone fights back.”
“Right,” Eve said. “And who would have the most to lose by closing down, or at least restricting, Venezuelan oil production?”
She was leading him, but McGarvey didn’t care because he knew where she was going, and why she might be at least concerned for her own safety. “The other oil producers.”
“And who would have the most to gain by making the public believe nuclear energy was so unsafe we might as well shut them down.”
“Big oil.”
“And then there’s my little project. Tapping the sea for energy, so we can get rid of nukes, as well as coal, oil, and gas-fired plants.”
“Something every energy producer would want to fight,” McGarvey said. “They’re all against you.”
“Now that the evil genie is out of the bottle — now that they’ve struck in Venezuela and Florida — maybe the war has begun in earnest, and I might be next.”
“What can I do for you?”
“You must still have connections over at the CIA. Maybe you can find out if something is coming my way.”
“I’m working the Hutchinson Island attack, but I’ll see what I can find,” McGarvey said. “No promises.”
“None expected,” Eve told him. “But I have a hunch something’s just around the corner. And I always like to follow up on my hunches.”
“How long will you be here in Washington?”
“Just for today. I’m giving a speech over at the DOE in a couple of hours. If I can get them on board it’d be a good thing.”
“Not commerce?”
“No.”
