That had puzzled McGarvey as well, and it was one of the reasons he’d taken the time to go out to California to see if he could find any answers. And he had. “Benson was a homosexual, and he lived alone.”
Rencke got it immediately. “Lots of gay men in San Francisco, lots of gay bars, meat factories. He might have started with any database, but he ended up with single males working for the school system who had the same general build. Sooner or later he was bound to get lucky, and he did with Benson, and picked up the poor bastard at a bar and went home with him.”
“It gives up a couple of facts,” McGarvey said. “Our man’s smart, and we have a fair idea that he’s slightly built, which matches what the parking lot camera picked up.”
They got off the elevator on the third floor, and went down the hall to Rencke’s suite of offices, which was a cluttered mess: maps, books, atlases, magazines, and newspapers in a half-dozen languages, scattered on tables, on the floor, on chairs. Most of the world’s knowledge still wasn’t digitized, and sometimes information had to be found the old-fashioned way. A long table in the shape of a big letter C was filled with computer monitors, all of them large, some of them touch screens. Images showed on all of the screens, a couple of them with lavender backgrounds, which was one of Rencke’s coded systems that warned of some sort of trouble possibly heading our way.
There was room for a secretary and a couple of assistants, but he’d never felt the need to have someone work with him. “We all have our little secrets, ya know,” he’d once confided to McGarvey. “And I don’t want anyone prying into mine.”
“What’s coming up lavender, Hutchinson Island?” McGarvey asked.
“Nothing important yet, but I expect the threat level to rise, especially once we find out who the contractor was, because it looks like he was working for al-Quaeda. These are chewing on the Lorraine Fritch situation.”
“She was one of ours.”
“Yeah, COS Caracas. She and her number two were putting something together on Miguel Octavio and his connection with the UAE International Bank of Commerce, and she must have come up with something important. She called Marty Bambridge and said she was coming here with something too big to trust to the Internet or even encrypted phones. Had to be done in person. Anyway a couple of guys dressed as cops took her out along with her driver and bodyguard within sight of the airport.”
“No briefcase or computer disk?”
“Nada. Whoever made the hit took whatever she was carrying with her.”
“What about her number two?”
“Don Morton. One of the good ones, sharp as they come. But he didn’t have a clue what she’d found. He didn’t even know she was heading out of the country. The only one she told besides Marty was the ambassador.”
“Do you know Eve Larsen?”
Rencke grinned. “Everybody does. She’s a bright lady. Just won the Nobel Peace Prize, though I figured her for physics in ten or twenty years.”
“She was at Hutchinson Island talking to some SSP and L bigwigs when the attack occurred. And she thinks that Lorraine’s assassination and Hutchinson Island are related.”
Rencke was intrigued; it showed on his face. “That’s a stretch.”
“That’s what I told her. But she had a pretty convincing argument that Lorraine was taken down by people who want to topple the Chavez government and take over oil production, so that they could eventually shut it down.”
“Never happen,” Rencke said.
“No. And I don’t think this anti-oil group killed her. It was probably Octavio because of something Lorraine dug up. And the timing is the thing that Dr. Larsen picked up on, the assassination coming on the heels of the Hutchinson Island attack.”
“None of the oil companies would be crazy enough to pull off stunts like those,” Rencke said. “That just won’t wash, Mac. You might argue that most of them didn’t give a damn about anything except profits and the hell with the environment. But the same can be said of a lot of countries — China among them. Us. We’re building coal- fired plants that pollute a hell of a lot more than nukes or natural gas, or even cars on the road.”
“I’m just fishing here. But you just said that Don Morton and Lorraine had come up with a connection that linked Octavio to the UAE bank. Those people are probably just as dirty as the guys who ran the BCCI were.”
“Whoa, wait a minute, kemo sabe,” Rencke said, suddenly very excited. “Shit, it’s al-Quaeda, supported by the UAE IBC.” He dropped into a chair in front of one of the touch screen monitors and brought up Forcier’s image data to the right. “This is your suicide bomber. Real name Achmed bin Helbawi, from Sadda, a little town on the Afghan border south of Peshawar. Al-Quaeda recruited him when he was just a kid, and sent him to Saudi Arabia to study nuclear engineering. We found out that he was a standout at King Abdul Aziz University, and then he suddenly disappeared for about a year, until he turned up at a couple of French nuclear power training facilities in Saclay and Montigny under a Saudi passport. Then last year sometime he shows up on the doorstep of a headhunter in New York who got him the Hutchinson Island job under the name Thomas Forcier with a legitimate French passport.”
“Did the same bank that Octavio is connected with fund Helbawi’s education?”
“I don’t know that yet,” Rencke admitted. “But it’s an interesting thought. Maybe Dr. Larsen wasn’t making much of a stretch after all.”
“If we can make that connection it would be a common point between Lorraine and Hutchinson Island.”
“And your pro,” Rencke said. “An operation like that had to have a tight plan. Helbawi on the inside pumping info back out. I assume the Bureau has tossed his apartment. Have you been told anything?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll put it on my shopping list,” Rencke said. “But for now, job one is finding out who the contractor is.”
“And where he’s gone to ground. I’d like to have a chat with him.”
Rencke laughed. “I bet you would.”
And McGarvey was brought back to his conversation with Eve at the Watergate, and her speculations and fear that someone might be coming after her next. “The IBC has to be getting some of its money from the Saudis and some other oil interests,” he said. “Octavio, for one. Who’d have the most to lose if Venezuela’s oil production were to be interrupted?”
“Well, not Exxon, or BP or any of the others. But it might play havoc with some of the hedge fund guys and derivatives people.”
“And who would have the most to gain, if the American public began to believe that nuclear energy was too risky, maybe deny any new permits or licenses?”
“The same people,” Rencke said. And he’d gotten McGarvey’s point. “Eve Larsen and her project could be on the firing line, especially now that she’s won the Nobel Prize, because it’s a safe bet she’ll get the funding, and probably from some company like BP. Would be great publicity for them. Investing in alternative energy.”
“Have you heard anything?”
Rencke started to shake his head, but then turned to one of his computer monitors connected to a keyboard and pulled up a media search engine. “I remember something on Fox News maybe a year or two ago. An accident.”
A minute later he found the program with George Szucs and Eve Larsen aboard the
“If it was sabotage, someone was after her more than a year ago,” Rencke said.
Left unsaid, because it wasn’t necessary, was that the Nobel Prize had just made Eve Larsen the biggest target on the block. Coal, gas, nukes, oil, and everyone connected with the big four would be gunning for her.
“See what you can dredge up,” McGarvey said. “But the contractor’s identity is still primary.”
“I’m on it,” Rencke said.
TWENTY-SIX
