always expressive, French Algerian face faded. “What is it?”
“Someone is coming here, I think,” he told her.
They spoke in French, which he’d always thought was one of the greatest gifts Colonel Frazier had given him. “It’s a far more civil and civilized language than English,” the colonel had lectured. “The language of poetry, and of love.”
“For lunch?” Martine asked hopefully. She was in love with DeCamp as he was with her; her only two complaints ever were his absences from time to time, and their lack of friends.
“It’s possible,” he told her, and he went into the front vestibule where he got his front-of-the-house pistol, a 9 mm Steyr GB, and stuffed it in the waistband of his jeans, beneath his shirt. When he turned, Martine was there at the end of the hall at the kitchen door.
She was slender with small breasts, a boyish bottom, and straight legs with knobby knees that he’d always liked, and that sometimes he kidded her about. She in return would give him one of her large, goofy smiles and mention his thinning hair: “I live with a bald man.
Only now she was serious, and a little angry and perhaps frightened, too. “
“Go back into the kitchen, please.”
“Why have you armed yourself? I demand to know.”
“In case we are in trouble,” he told her. “Now, please, Martine, return to the kitchen and remain there until I call for you.”
She wanted to argue, he could see that from her expression, but it was the one part of their lives together that he’d made perfectly clear to her at the beginning. “There are certain aspects of my business that we will never discuss, that you will never ask me about, that you will never try to discover. It is just this one thing,
She hesitated, but then nodded with a sad, weary expression and went back into the kitchen.
DeCamp felt sorry for her, but right now he had something more important to deal with. No one in the business, none of his contacts, no one he’d ever worked with, spoken to, or dealt with knew this place. Whenever he returned from a contract, he took great care to make absolutely certain that he hadn’t been followed. Here he lived with Martine as Brian Palma, an ex-pat originally from Australia with the identification to prove it. Not even Martine knew or suspected anything different.
But now someone was on the way here, because no other houses existed on the Rue de Rivoli, a dirt track actually, this far up into the hills. And he didn’t think that someone showing up here was a coincidence so soon after Florida.
He went outside and positioned himself at the end of the long covered veranda, the roof supported by Romanesque columns that he’d added a few years ago. The shade was nice in the mornings and sometimes he and Martine had their coffee and croissants out here, and watched the birds play in the thermals above them along the hilltops and ridges. Pleasant, but when the Mercedes topped the last rise and came around the tight curve, his gut tightened a little and he could think only of what was about to happen, rather than what had happened.
The German car pulled up, and Gunther Wolfhardt got out, coatless, his long-sleeved white shirt tucked in the waistband of his dress slacks, the sleeves rolled up. He spotted DeCamp in the shade, and slowly turned completely around. Next he lifted both pant legs one at a time and let them drop. He’d come here unarmed, and he wanted that bit of business on the table from the beginning.
“You may have compromised me by coming here,” DeCamp said.
“You’ll have to trust my tradecraft.”
“Or kill you and dispose of your body,” DeCamp said. “Not so difficult.”
Wolfhardt shrugged indifferently. “I’ve come with another assignment,” he said. “And time is a critical factor, which is why I came here today instead of arranging our usual meeting in Paris. I brought everything for you to look at, including an advice of deposit for one million euros.”
DeCamp’s curiosity was piqued, he supposed because at some point he’d unconsciously made a sort of Faustian bargain, only instead of his soul for knowledge, he’d traded his future for money and for the almost sexual rush of battle that had been a part of him since he was a kid on the streets of Durban and then the glory days of the Buffalo Battalion. But now, no matter what happened, he had the melancholy feeling that he would have to give up this haven, give up Martine and their pastoral lives together.
And in the end, no matter what happened, he would kill Wolfhardt and then go to ground.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said, stepping down from the porch. “And you can tell me about this new assignment. I’m guessing it will somehow relate to Florida.”
“As a direct result, partly because you took so long with it.”
“Couldn’t be helped. It was the nature of the thing. Nothing more.”
The dirt road narrowed to what once might have been a goat path that wound its way farther up into the stony hills, and DeCamp and Wolfhardt headed up away from the house.
“Have you heard the name Eve Larsen?” Wolfhardt asked.
The name was familiar. “In what context?”
“She’s a scientist working on alternative means of producing electricity.”
DeCamp had seen something about her on CNN. “She’s just won the Nobel Peace Prize. Do you want me to assassinate her?”
“Yes,” Wolfhardt said. “She’s just been given an old oil-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere down around Mississippi. Are you familiar with the geography?”
“Not intimately, but I have a working knowledge.”
“Dr. Larsen’s plan is to refurbish the platform and have it towed to the Atlantic side of the Florida peninsula where it would be anchored in the Gulf Stream about forty kilometers directly opposite the Hutchinson Island nuclear station. She means to start generating electricity from the ocean currents and plug it into the U.S. grid, the Eastern Interconnect. And it looks as if she has more than a fair chance of doing just that.”
All of it suddenly came to DeCamp in one piece, and he suppressed a smile. “What happened to the facility is already beginning to attract a certain type of negative attention, which I think is exactly what your people wanted to happen. Sway public sentiment away from nuclear energy. And if, as you say you want to stop Dr. Larsen from achieving her goal, it must mean that you’re working for one of the major oil corporations, or perhaps OPEC, or even Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela whose interests would be most hurt by more nuclear plants and by Dr. Larsen’s project.”
Wolfhardt did not smile, nor did he rise to the bait.
“You, or whoever you work for, arranged to give Dr.Larsen the platform, and probably money for her experiment, which you’ve come to hire me to stop,” DeCamp said, nearly everything clear to him to that point. And suddenly he knew, or could guess the rest, and he thought it was ingenious, risky, and expensive.
“Go on,” Wolfhardt prompted, not at all pleased.
“You think that her science is sound, that she has a chance of succeeding, but the blame must never hit your oil interest principals.”
They walked a little farther up the hill in silence, until Wolfhardt stopped. “You’re a very capable man. Bright. Perhaps too bright. But what you have guessed is precisely why we’re commissioning you to kill her, the blame going to the Reverend Schlagel. Have you heard this name as well?”
DeCamp got no satisfaction from being right. But he took a few moments to work out at least some of the broad strokes of such an operation. He smiled. “I know the name. Question is do you have any direct influence over him? Enough, say, to get him involved in a public campaign against her?”
“It’s already begun, in part because of the incident at Hutchinson Island, but in part because he means to use Dr. Larsen’s project as his cause celebre. He means to run for president.”
DeCamp had deduced as much. “All eyes will be on both of them, which makes the hit all the more problematic.”
“There’s more. Schlagel’s followers will be in Oslo for the Nobel ceremony. Kill her there, the blame will be easy to assign to them.”
“It may ruin his chances.”
“No,” Wolfhardt said, but did not explain.
And DeCamp did not care, but with the world’s attention focused on Oslo, the assignment had less than a
