After she’d dismissed her bodyguards, she went out to the balcony where one of the house staff brought her a pot of Earl Grey with lemon, and she looked out over the waterfront, starting to get busy now. She’d gotten a few hours sleep on the airplane, but she was still dead tired, only she couldn’t shut down her mind. She was three thousand miles from the Med where al-Naimi had issued his warning, and it seemed like a lifetime.
Her decision would pit her either against the Saudi intelligence apparatus, in which case the MG would almost certainly go under and her life be put in jeopardy, or against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in which case she would need plausible deniability. Nothing could point in her direction. Though what the Saudis wanted would probably still be impossible — four hundred dollar oil for electrical generation would put an untenable burden on the American economy. It was something that al-Naimi and whoever was directing him did not understand. Of course China and a rapidly emerging India could soon take over from the Americans, but it was the transition period that bothered Anne Marie.
In the end, there was no decision. Not really. Once she’d started down this path there’d never been the possibility of getting out cleanly, no matter how much she’d talked herself into believing she could. It was oil, after all, which had its tendrils in just about every corner of the planet. Almost no place on earth was free of needing it.
At noon, she finally telephoned Wolfhardt. “I’m back.”
“I heard. Trouble?”
News traveled fast, and her chief of special projects had ears everywhere, including a satellite feed from the surveillance equipment on
“I have a job for you, this one could be the biggest yet,” Anne Marie said. “Get us a tee time.”
“Already have. Two o’clock.”
The Majlis eighteen at the Emirates Golf Club was the best in Dubai, green fairways snaking in and around the desert sand dunes, and it was the first grass course in the Middle East. Before then golfers played in what amounted to eighteen-hole sand traps.
Wolfhardt was waiting outside the pro shop with a cart on which he’d already loaded his own and Anne Marie’s clubs. He was a short, stocky man of fifty-six, with broad, powerful shoulders and a round, almost cherubic face that had fooled more than one person who wanted to believe a man’s smile was a mirror to his soul. In fact Wolfhardt was as ruthless as he was brilliant; driven, he’d once admitted, by some inner demon. He was a sociopath by birth, a killer who only valued money as a way of keeping score on his “jobs,” as he called his assignments.
Since joining the MG he’d seldom pulled the trigger himself. Instead he’d arranged the hits, and sabotage and suicide bombings, with an exquisite precision he’d learned from the Russians at the KGB’s School One outside of Moscow, from years of direct experience in the field, and from retraining at the Dzerzhinsky KGB Higher School and the Red Banner Yuri Andropov KGB Institute, both in Moscow.
He’d never been married, so far as Anne Marie knew, though from time to time he would disappear to somewhere in Europe, usually for no more than one week, and each time he came back it was clear he’d shed a little of his tension. But Anne Marie never asked about Wolfhardt’s personal life or where he went and why.
“Good afternoon, Gunther,” Anne Marie said, sitting down on the passenger side.
“Good afternoon,” Wolfhardt replied, very little German accent in his deep bass voice.
He drove down to the first tee where they had to wait five minutes before the foursome ahead of them chipped on to the green. Play today would be slow, but Anne Marie didn’t mind. Wolfhardt would either accept the assignment or he’d refuse. It wouldn’t be about money, it would be about personal consequences, and before he agreed he would first have to see the entire operation as well as its aftermath in one seamless piece, with nothing reaching back here. Not simply plausible deniability, but complete and total distance, not so much as the hint of any connection, and Anne Marie thought it might take some time to bring Wolfhardt to that point.
The afternoon was desert hot and airless, but the golf cart was air-conditioned, and the small cooler just behind the seats held an ice-cold bottle of Krug and one crystal glass for Anne Marie and a bottle of Evian for Wolfhardt.
Both of them were indifferent golfers, though no matter how poorly Anne Marie played, she always managed to beat Wolfhardt, though they never actually kept score.
And Wolfhardt always kept his silence at times like these when it was obvious Anne Marie had something important on her mind. Nor did Anne Marie ever speak until she had worked out her approach. No cocktail party small talk, no banter between friends. This was strictly business.
Until the difficult 434-yard par-4 eighth hole, which required a long but precise drive uphill if there was to be any chance of reaching the tiny, sharply sloped green in two. Most golfers were happy to walk away with a double bogey, because even in two strokes it often took four putts to put it in.
They had to wait again for the foursome ahead of them, and Anne Marie poured a glass of champagne. “The job I have for you will be difficult,” she began. “There will be consequences even more far-reaching than nine/eleven.”
“The Saudis?”
Anne Marie looked at him, and for the first time wondered if the East German had become too powerful, too all-knowing, maybe omnipotent. But there was no way out now.
“Al-Naimi came out to see me. They want four hundred dollars per barrel.”
“They’d lose the American market,” Wolfhardt said. “Anyway what do they think we could do about it? You said another nine/eleven.”
“The U.S. is switching to an electrical economy, or at least one that’s hybrid, and eventually it’ll catch on elsewhere. Europe first, eventually China and India.”
“Nukes are back in, and wind and solar power are getting the press. What do the Saudis have in mind, because crashing airplanes into places like the World Trade Center or the Pentagon wouldn’t help. Even if they destroyed the White House or—” Wolfhardt stopped in midsentence and an odd, calculating, even thoughtful look came into his round face. “Impossible to stop all that. There’s plenty of natural gas, especially in the U.S. for the interim until the new nuclear plants come online. That’ll be their main source.”
“They want oil-fired power plants.”
Wolfhardt smiled, obviously knowing what had been suggested to Anne Marie, and appreciating the grand sweep of the project. “Consequences indeed.”
“We’ll start with the nukes. Make them even more unpalatable then they were after Three Mile Island.”
“Or Chernobyl.”
“Can it be done on a large enough scale to make a difference?” Anne Marie asked, hopeful for the first time since she’d left
Wolfhardt shrugged, most of his attention elsewhere, planning, looking ahead, balancing odds, risk management. His concentration was one of the traits, besides his intelligence, experience, and ruthlessness, that had attracted Anne Marie.
“Nuclear power stations are vulnerable, especially in the States,” he said, almost dreamily. “A nuclear accident would be difficult but certainly not impossible. Their Homeland Security is a joke. Even though they have some good people working for them, no one takes anything seriously. Their eyes are in the sky, not on the front door.”
“Americans are leery of nuclear power. We need to make them frightened enough to be willing to shut them down, even when they know they need more electricity.”
Wolfhardt focused. “It’ll take more than an accident.”
“Two, or three.”
“Public sentiment. The public has to be swayed in a very large way by someone who is very good. Someone
