McGarvey drove slowly through the barrier. “They’re probably blaming us for all this.”
“Haven’t you seen Schlagel on TV?” Gail asked. “He’s telling his flock that nuclear power plants are like having atomic bombs in your backyards. According to him it’s just a matter of time before something will happen at every nuclear facility. We’re playing with something that belongs only to God.”
“Looks like they’re buying the message.”
“Not only his congregation is buying it, lots of other people are coming around to his message, pointing at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. No one wants something like that in their backyard, and there’s a hundred-plus nuclear plants in the U.S. with plans for maybe three dozen more.”
McGarvey had a sudden, vicious thought. “Does Schlagel have any money? Serious money?”
Gail gave him an odd look. “He’s raking in plenty from his ministry and television and radio stations. He’s at least a multimillionaire. Why?”
“He wants to run for president.”
“Yes, so?”
“He needs a cause, and what better than playing into the people’s fear of nukes?”
“Are you serious?”
“I think it’s worth looking into,” McGarvey said.
THIRTY-TWO
The assignments had finally begun to lose their luster for Brian DeCamp. Wolfhardt showing up in Nice had been a stark reminder of how fragile his life was — had always been. In general, assassins did not live to retirement age, a fact that loomed large in his mind as he sat sipping an aquavit with a very good espresso at the sidewalk cafe in front of the Grand Hotel.
Oslo’s fall weather was mild, though on the cool side compared to southern France, and the long-range forecast for the December Nobel Prize week was for continued moderate temperatures. It would make for an easier hit, though a heavy snowstorm, just like an overcast night or a fogbound morning, would help mask an escape.
But this was the situation he would have to deal with, and on reflection he remembered worse conditions from which he’d walked away, and coming here to spend a couple of days in Oslo as an ordinary tourist under false papers was the first step of four: the plan, the equipment, the hit, and the following ninety minutes, which always were the most crucial. If you weren’t out of the immediate detection and arrest zone by then, it meant that the authorities probably had the upper hand and the odds against escape began to rise exponentially.
As he saw it now after touring the downtown area, there were three possibilities. The first was here at the Grand Hotel where he had booked a standard room. The Nobel Prize recipients and their guests and most of the attending dignitaries always stayed here, which opened a host of possibilities, all of them involving either the import of a silenced weapon to Norway, or a purchase here. The former, he’d concluded from the start, would present the smallest risk of detection. Unlike the U.S. and most of Europe, especially Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries had reacted the least to the attacks of 9/11, so getting a disassembled pistol, suppressor, and ammunition disguised in some way in his checked on luggage would be fairly straightforward. It was obvious that he wasn’t a Muslim, and beyond that consideration the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians had little interest.
So finding what suite she was staying in, arranging for a room key, slipping inside in the middle of the night and killing her, was the first and simplest plan, especially if any of Schlagel’s people were staying at the Grand.
The second would be a long-range shot either just before or immediately following the ceremony at the Radhuset, city hall, a few blocks from the harbor. The crowds would be large, though not very noisy according to what he’d read and learned from talking to people yesterday and today. But again Schlagel’s people would be on site, making their noises. Walking through the hall and across the broad boulevard to the harbor, he’d found no suitable shooting position from which blame could be directed toward the reverend’s crazies. So again he considered the possibilities of loading only two rounds into an untraceable silenced pistol, taking his shots from inside the crowd, immediately dropping the weapon in the middle of Schlagel’s group, and then melting away as the crowd began to react.
And the third, and in many respects the least problematic, would be making the hit while she took a horse- driven carriage tour of Oslo’s old town. It would take the importation of a silenced long gun, something only slightly more difficult than a pistol, and finding the right spot from a rooftop, hotel room, or apartment somewhere along the route of her tour.
The next consideration was his appearance. His disguise at Hutchinson Island had been slight, consisting mostly of a change in hairstyle and color, tinted contact lenses, lifts in his shoes, and a studied shift in his demeanor — a different walk, a different tilt of his head, downcast eyes, compressed lips. But on the off chance that photographs had been taken from the power plant’s security cameras, or a computer-assisted likeness of his face had been distributed to bodyguards assigned to Dr. Larsen, or to the Norwegian federal security police, he would need to do more this time. A wig, different clothing, a different eye color, different complexion, possibly even some minor plastic surgery, though he wasn’t sure that would be necessary because when he came back here he certainly wouldn’t be announcing his presence. He would remain in the background, anonymous in the polite Norwegian crowds.
And for some reason just now he thought about Martine’s flat bottom and knobby knees, and he looked away momentarily to watch the orderly traffic moving along the broad, cobblestoned Karl Johansgate, and the people on foot. The Norwegians were an orderly people. But hardy for all of that because of the northern climate, and a very long history of war, mostly with Sweden against the Russians. And he was inestimably sad for just that moment, thinking that he might never see her again, because of Gunther Wolfhardt and the German’s principal. And that led to an instant of intense hate, so that when the waiter came to ask if he would like another espresso or aquavit, DeCamp had to make a conscious effort of will to force a pleasant smile and look up.
“No, thank you. Just the check, please.”
The waiter handed him the bill, and DeCamp laid an American twenty dollar bill on the table, and got up, and headed the few blocks past the parliament building and city park back to the Radhuset for a final look before he returned to his pied-a-terre in Paris to make his final preparations and wait until it was time to strike.
That early evening, his work done, DeCamp was sitting at the bar drinking a dark Martini & Rossi with an orange peel when he happened to glance up at the television tuned to CNN, in Norwegian but with an English crawl at the bottom of the screen. The Princeton laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Evelyn Larsen had been vandalized in the early morning hours. There were no injuries, though one of the laboratory assistants had witnessed the attack by two men armed with metal bars and sledgehammers.
And he came to the same conclusion that the news reader suggested: The attack must have been inspired by the Reverend Jerimiah Schlagel’s recent sermons against what he called, “Dr. Larsen’s God Project — an abomination against the Almighty’s plan for us all.”
Schlagel’s denial came from his pulpit in McPherson, but DeCamp had to smile inwardly. Gunther Wolfhardt knew what he was doing.
THIRTY-THREE
Everything was the same and yet eerily different as McGarvey parked at the end of a row of military and civilian vehicles, and as he and Gail got out of the rental car she said so. They had driven into a war zone, and across the street and through the main gates the damaged containment dome loomed up like a mushroom cloud after an atomic explosion. The operators in the cabs of the three giant cranes lifting concrete slabs in place wore hazmat suits, as did the workmen on the scaffolding, who were careful to keep the rising concrete wall between them and the dome as they troweled mortar into the joints.
Other people dressed in hazmat suits came and went from the South Service Building, which just now seemed to be a beehive of activity. The thickness of the building’s north wall had apparently taken the brunt of the
