be king. At least through my lifetime.”
“And afterwards?” Anne Marie asked, though for the life of her she had no idea why.
Schlagel laughed. “Haven’t you grown up enough, darlin’, to realize there ain’t no hereafter?” He leaned forward. “I want you to get one of your good old boys to give the little lady her platform, and maybe help with the money for her waterwheels. And you can leave the rest to me.”
It was never about anything else but timing, of course. In that Schlagel was right. Nuclear energy had to become unpalatable to the public, which he would help bring about, and Dr. Larsen had to fail, for which she would arrange for a little insurance just in case something happened to the good reverend.
She raised her glass of champagne. “The God Project,” she said.
“Leave it to me,” Schlagel said, clinking glasses.
That same evening back at her penthouse apartment, Anne Marie telephoned Wolfhardt, and explained everything to him.
“I’ll call on Mr. DeCamp, immediately,” he said.
“Yes, do that.”
“But I don’t think waiting for her to actually get her oil platform and perform her experiment is such a good idea. She needs to be assassinated.”
“It could come back to us,” Anne Marie said. She was thinking about al-Naimi, and she almost said the Saudis, but she held off.
“Nothing would reflect on your oil interests, I can practically guarantee as much.”
“Who then?” she asked, but she suddenly realized that Wolfhardt was only stating the obvious; when fingers were pointed they would be toward Schlagel and his people. She chuckled, the noise coming all the way from the back of her throat. The irony would be delicious, actually pitting her and the reverend — two allies — against each other. Actually in concert with each other. Asset multipliers, such operations were called.
“I think you know,” Wolfhardft said.
“Of course,” Anne Marie agreed. “And I trust you implicitly, but with care, Gunther, and with fail-safes and contingencies.”
It was two in the morning when she called Schlagel’s encrypted phone. He was still at the Raffles and after five rings when he finally answered she could hear at least two women giggling in the background. “This had best be very good, darlin’,” he said, and he sounded drunk.
“Can you talk?”
“I can always talk. What do you want?”
“I want you to start now.”
Suddenly Schlagel was sober, and he sounded guarded. “Something happen?”
“Let’s just say I had an epiphany,” Anne Marie told him.
“I’m all ears.”
“Go after Dr. Larsen right now, sharp and hard. Send a couple of your soldiers after her. Shoot up her car, burn down her apartment, attack one of her lab assistants, maybe smash some of her scientific equipment. I don’t care what.”
Schalgel was silent for several beats, and Anne Marie could almost see him figuring the angles, working out the percentages. “I want the bitch aboard the oil platform.”
“I agree. Don’t kill her, just shake her up.”
“Why?”
“I want to slow her down,” Anne Marie said. “She’ll get her platform, but I want your people to hound her all the way to Oslo. Make her know that she’s vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable people make mistakes.”
“And if she starts making mistakes — I don’t care what sort of mistakes — everything else that the woman says or does will become suspect.”
Again Schlagel was silent for a beat, but then he chuckled. “You are one gloriously devious woman, darlin’,” he said. “And I can’t tell you just how much I love you.”
“Because we’re cut of the same cloth,” she managed to tell him though her gorge was rising. “We’re winners.”
“Amen.”
PART TWO
Through December
TWENTY-FIVE
When McGarvey showed up at the CIA’s front gate, a pass was ready for him, and although normally visitors to the Agency had to be met here by someone authorized to act as an escort, he’d been the DCI. His was a special case.
“Welcome back, Mr. Director,” one of the security officers said pleasantly.
“Just here for a visit,” McGarvey said, and he drove up to the parking area in front of the Old Headquarters Building, the morning sunny and warm, nothing like his mood.
Rencke was waiting for him in the main lobby, and he was hopping from one foot to the other as he usually did when he was excited about something, or was in the middle of some important project. He was a man of medium height whose head seemed too large for his body; his red frizzy hair was always out of control, flowing out in every direction lending him the air of an Einstein, a genius, which in fact he was. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans, an old T-shirt with the logo of the KGB on the breast, and unlaced tennis shoes. Even a successful marriage hadn’t made him clean up his act, which every boss he’d ever work for thought was an act designed to irritate them, which it wasn’t. He was just Otto, and had been this way since McGarvey had first met him years ago.
“Oh, wow, that was something not in the playbook,” he said, giving McGarvey a massive hug. “Louise wants to know if you can you come over for dinner tonight. You haven’t seen Audie in a long time.”
“Not until this business is over,” McGarvey said.
Otto gave him a sharp look, but said nothing until they were passed through security and headed down the busy first-floor corridor filled with displays from the early days of American intelligence efforts beginning with the OSS during World War II. The entire corridor served as the CIA’s museum of its own artifacts.
“Eric Yablonski clued me in with what you guys are up to. We’ve been sharing files. He doesn’t think Hutchinson Island was an isolated incident.”
“Neither do I.”
“What’d you find out about the schoolteacher in San Francisco?”
“His neck was broken, and his body wrapped in a plastic sheet and stuffed in a closet. Means our guy was in the apartment.”
“Did you have someone dust the place?”
“The Bureau sent over a couple of people, but they came up with nothing, which is about what I expected,” McGarvey said. “Points to this guy being a pro, which means he got his training from somewhere, and for now I’m betting South African intelligence, or maybe a paramilitary unit. A SSP&L clerk who talked to him said he had some kind of a British accent.”
“Buffalo Battalion?” Rencke asked.
“It would fit. He lost his job and instead of letting all of his training go to waste he turned freelance.”
“But why San Francisco?” Rencke wanted to know. “And why that particular schoolteacher? I’m coming up blank and so is Eric.”
