man to have around in a pinch. This is the second time you were there when I needed you.”
They used the restaurant’s valet service, and when they were seated Eve ordered a martini straight up with a twist and McGarvey a cognac. And now that she was calming down, he told her the rest of it. “The Norwegian authorities think that you may be in some danger during the Nobel ceremonies, and they asked for our help with security. I’m coming to Oslo with you.”
Her eyes were large. “My God, he’d actually try to get to me over there? That’s more than crazy.”
“Not him specifically, but one or more of his followers.”
She thought about that for a long moment. “To do what?”
“Kill you,” McGarvey told her. He didn’t think there was any use sugarcoating the possibility that someone might want to more than just hurt her because of her project. And if she knew what could be coming at her, she would take her personal safety a little more seriously, at the very least until Schlagel was neutralized, if ever.
“Are you telling me that I need to hire bodyguards for the rest of my life?” she demanded. She was even more shook up than she had been leaving the television studio and encountering the mob and the man who’d tried to reach her. “Goddamnit, that’s not the way science works. You pose questions and then search for answers that make sense. Free and open exchanges. Not billy clubs and knives and guns and bombs.”
“You need to think about it, at least until your project is in place and you can prove that it works.”
She looked away. “Galileo and Giordano Bruno should have had bodyguards to save them from the church. I thought we were past that.”
“It’s not just religion, like the antiabortion activists claim it is, or the Islamic fundamentalists who’re waging war against the rest of us, or even Schlagel. It’s about power. And for the moment you’re a means to Schalgel’s end.”
Eve shook her head. “It’s so unfair.”
McGarvey felt sorry for her. Living in an ivory tower had apparently blinded her to the realities of the present-day world, just as Bruno had been blinded into believing that teaching the truth about astronomy as it was known in the sixteenth century would protect him from the Inquisition. But it hadn’t and he’d been burned at the stake in Rome. “Yes, it is,” he told her.
“Do you want the job?” Eve asked.
McGarvey nodded. “At least as far as Oslo, and we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, try to keep a low profile.”
“Winning a Nobel Prize tends to make that difficult,” she said pensively.
It was ten when McGarvey finally made it back to his apartment after dropping Eve off at the Watergate. She’d asked him to come up and have a drink, but he’d declined, telling her that he had a full day tomorrow. She’d handed him a copy of the disk. “This will explain what I’m trying to do,” she’d said. And before she’d walked away she’d given him an odd, thoughtful look, as if she knew something and wanted to say it but then decided against it.
Gail was in bed reading. “I caught your lady scientist’s special on Fox. She’s an impressive woman.”
“She’s in trouble and she didn’t see it coming,” McGarvey said, hanging up his jacket and removing his holster and pistol.
“All the networks covered Schlagel’s little circus word-for-word, move-for-move. The guy is good.”
“Was my name mentioned?”
“Front and center. Former director of the CIA squiring the lady scientist, protecting her from the zealots who the reverend blasted for trying to take the situation too far. It’ll make the front pages by morning.”
“Exactly what he wanted,” McGarvey said.
“And it puts you in the crosshairs, exactly what you wanted,” Gail said, and she smiled wistfully. “I suppose it would be dumb of me to tell you to take care.”
McGarvey stopped and looked at her, really looked at her. She was an attractive woman, always had been in his estimation, though with her dark eyes and hair she was almost the complete opposite of his wife Kathleen. And she was young, fourteen years younger than he was, and he felt a little guilty about feeling something for her.
“What?” she asked after a moment.
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s just been a long day and I’m tired.”
“Are you still planning on going to Oslo?” Gail asked.
“I’m pretty sure that they’re going to come after her.”
“From what I saw on Fox there’s no doubt about it. And I can even see a little of why Schlagel might be genuinely frightened. If her project develops on the scale she’s talking about there just might be some unintended consequences. Something that even she can’t see. Consequences that might affect us all.”
“It’s the oil people who want to stop her,” McGarvey said.
“InterOil gave her a seagoing oil platform for the next step of her experiment, along with the money to fix it up and tow it to Florida’s east coast.”
“Good PR,” McGarvey said. “Even if the rig doesn’t get that far. But I think the same people who did Hutchinson Island will come after her for the same reasons. It’s oil, but it has more to do with propping up the oil derivatives and hedge funds. From what I’m told if you added up all the oil derivatives you’d come up with a number that is seven — maybe even ten — times larger than all the actual oil in the ground. They’re all betting on the same horse. The system is like a house of cards, one misstep and everything comes crashing down around us. And those consequences would be even worse than our mortgage meltdown or the Great Depression. Countries have gone to war for a lot less.”
“Oil,” Gail said. “In the end the hedge funds don’t really matter as much as what’s in the barrel and where it’s shipped to.”
“That’s right,” McGarvey said.
“And that kind of thinking puts your lady scientist right in the middle, and the rest of us could be just as well damned whatever happens; if her project is stopped we’ll be at the mercy of OPEC, and if she succeeds we could be facing another depression and maybe a war for oil. With China?”
“We’re not there yet,” McGarvey said, and he went into the bathroom to take a shower, his thoughts alternating from Eve Larsen falling into the center of a growing storm, to Gail Newby and his relationship or lack thereof with her. And he couldn’t sort out his feelings, which he decided was stupid. He was a decisive man, always had been. When Katy had given him the ultimatum early in their marriage, it had taken him less than a split second to turn around and run to Switzerland. But now he felt like an emotional cripple.
When he was done, he pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went back into the bedroom.
Gail had put her book aside, and had turned off the bedside lamp. “It’s been two years since your wife was killed,” she said. “It’s time for you to rejoin the world, don’t you think?”
And he thought about Katy and their life together. A photograph of the two of them standing on the Eiffel Tower was on the nightstand. Lately he’d been having a little trouble seeing her face and every night that he was in the apartment he would stare at her picture, study it, remembering how the corners of her eyes would wrinkle when she was really happy and smiling or laughing. But when he was away on assignment those details were still in his memory, but not in his mind’s eye. And even at this minute he couldn’t remember her laugh, not exactly; he couldn’t hear it in his ears, but he knew intellectually that she would chuckle at the back of her throat when all was right in her world.
“It’s all right, Kirk,” Gail said, her voice soothing, gentling, sensing something of what was going through his mind. “No commitments, not ever unless it’s something you want. Just two people comforting each other. We need it. I need it.”
McGarvey was about to say no, but the word died on his lips.
Gail tossed the covers aside. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, one leg bent at the knee. And she smiled shyly
He went to her finally, and for a long time they just held each other until in the end they made slow, gentle love. He didn’t feel guilty because there was no reason for it, and he knew that Katy would approve.
Assassinating someone, even in the light of day when the subject is surrounded by a mob, guarded by security types, including the local and federal police, and whose every move is documented in real time by television cameras and for posterity by press photographers, is relatively simple. Get into the correct position with the correct
