energy and climate change.”
Eve was rocked back on her heels. The physics prize she had expected, though not for several more years, perhaps even a decade or more — because most Nobel laureates were a hell of a lot older than her. But the Peace Prize, and just now?
For just a few seconds no one moved, no one said a thing, until Krantz got to his feet and began to clap, which started everyone else applauding, some with more enthusiasm than others.
Whenever Don wore a tie, it was almost always loose; some sort of a rebel statement he was making, but for some reason she noticed that he had snugged it up.
The applause didn’t last long, and when it died down, Don continued.
“She’ll be presented with the gold medal and diploma at Oslo’s city hall, on December tenth,” he said, and he turned to her again, and held out his hand. “Let me be the first to congratulate you,” he said, loudly enough for those in the front row to hear.
And then they shook hands, hugged, and he kissed her on the cheek.
“You beat the bastards after all,” he said in her ear.
She didn’t know how she felt, except that she was on the verge of tears, which she would not allow to happen. Not here and now. So she grinned. “Not yet,” she told him. “But it’s a start.”
“Yeah, the damn thing works.”
Although Department of Energy’s Deputy Secretary Joseph Caldwell had not attended Eve’s presentation, someone from his staff who was there, had called him with the Nobel Prize news, and he showed up as Eve was making her way up the aisle accepting congratulations and handshakes from just about everyone within reach. He was at the back of the hall, smiling broadly.
“Congratulations, Doctor,” he said, shaking her hand. “This must be a wonderful vindication for your work.”
“And a surprise, Mr. Secretary,” she said gracefully. She hadn’t met him before, although of course she knew of him, because he had given his initial blessing to approach SSP&L with her project. He was one of the Washington insiders who was on his way up.
“You were mentioned a couple of years ago for the Prize,” he said.
“Physics,” she said. “But thank you, and thanks for the use of your auditorium.”
“Yours is an important project, and I suspect that the Peace Prize will stand you in greater stead than a scientific prize, especially with the people who you’ll want to help with funding.”
“You were one of the first people I was going to approach, after my boss at NOAA.”
His smile was neutral. “The department cannot fund you, but I certainly can direct you to some folks who might be able to help. Perhaps Exxon or BP would be willing to give you one of their retired or soon-to-be retired oil platforms I know people over at Interior.”
“I don’t believe I have many friends in the oil industry,” Eve had said.
“You don’t understand how things work in the business world; this has nothing whatsoever to do with friendship. It has to do about appearances. Most of the oil producers are backing away from alternative energy research.”
“Just what I mean.”
“But they’re taking heat in the media because of it, and because of the BP Gulf spill. Giving you a piece of hardware that they’re no longer using would cost them nothing — hell, it would even save them the money they’d have to spend at a breaker yard. And this way they’d get the benefits of some good PR for a change.” He shook her hand again. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Eve and Don followed Krantz up to his office in Silver Spring and for the first ten minutes neither of them said a word, especially not Eve who was so caught up with the Nobel Prize thing that she could not think of anything else. She realized at one point that what she was feeling was a legitimate sense of wonderment or rapture, perhaps even the Rapture, but instead of meeting Christ at the midway point down from heaven, she was seeing her project actually happening. As Krantz had told her before they left the DOE auditorium: “It’ll be hard to say no to a Nobel laureate.”
Don finally looked over at her. “You’ll have a lot of crap facing you in the next few days. I didn’t say anything back there, but the FBI wants to interview you about what you were doing at Hutchinson Island.”
“Begging for them not to laugh me out of there,” she said.
“Debbie said this guy sounded serious.”
Debbie Milner was the general office manager at NOAA, and it was she who’d also taken the e-mail from Oslo through Eve’s lab at Princeton. Nothing got by her.
“I’ll talk to them,” Eve said. “But we have a lot of work to do, and probably less than a year to get it done, because I want to be ready to plug into Hutchinson Island’s power connection once it’s up and running.”
Don laughed. “You’re not thinking straight, Eve.”
She looked at him, really looked at him this time. He was an arrogant, conceited, irritating man, a prick at times, but at thirty-one he was one of the most intelligent men, other than her ex, she’d ever known, and she’d known a lot of bright guys. His Ph.D. thesis at Princeton three years ago was on possible methods of controlling the planet’s climate, and its sheer brilliance and clarity were among the main reasons she had considered him for postdoc work, even though she hadn’t been his thesis adviser. The fact she’d found him attractive had almost, but not quite, made her drop him from consideration, but in the end she’d hired him, and was still very glad she had done so.
“The Nobel Prize thing?” she asked.
“Right from the get-go; they’re setting up a party for you in the boardroom, but that’s just the start. Debbie says the phones have been ringing off the hook, and our Web site is damn near in gridlock with people wanting to talk to you. Mostly the press, but M.I.T., Cal Tech, Harvard, and a bunch of other department heads, plus the environmental geeks want a piece of you, too. She didn’t have time to tell me everything, but on top of all that you’re going to have to come up with a statement for the media — a sound bite that won’t put everyone to sleep — and beyond that you’ll need to start work on your acceptance speech.”
She had to laugh with him, because of course he was right. And she’d never understood until just this moment why just about every writer or scientist complained that getting the Nobel Prize had kept them from their work. But Krantz was right too, when he assured her that it would be tough to say no to a Nobel laureate. Look what it had done for Al Gore; taken him from a failed presidential candidate to a respected, even renowned world figure who’d spoken at the U.N. And she relaxed a little, knowing that she would have to start learning how to go with the flow.
Sensing her new mood, Don reached over and patted her on the knee. “That’s better.”
“As long as they don’t try to put my face on Wheaties boxes,” she said.
Anne Marie Marinaccio had buried herself in her work over the past year plus, each month that passed with no news driving her ever deeper into a funk that seemed at times to be bottomless. Ominously she’d not been pressured by al-Naimi or anyone else from Riyadh or any of the royals who’d invested, and continued to invest with the MG. And in some ways their new investments, many of them quite heavy, in the range of several hundreds of millions U.S., were even more troublesome to her. It was as if they — collectively — knew something that she didn’t. And at times she’d been afraid that some sword of Damocles was about to drop down and chop her head off.
But except for the dismal state of the economy, worldwide, during which the MG had continued to invest not only on shorted oil issues, in secret as much as that was possible given the volume of money she was hedging, nothing seemed to be lurking around the corner. Al-Naimi had kept the wolves at bay as he had promised for fourteen long months.
And suddenly it was as if the dam had burst. Gunther had called her yesterday around ten in the evening. “It’s been done.”
And she remembered her feelings of relief mixed with a bit of awe at what she had set in motion, and the reasons for it as well as the consequences. Especially the unintended consequences, the even more important thought that came into her head as she watched the CNN news reports on the scene, and listened as the
