weapon and pull the trigger.
Na’ef Radwan, a twenty-one-year-old kid from Lod, walked up behind Menachem Begin and put a bullet into the man’s head. Easy. But the kid had been arrested on the spot.
The tough part about an assassination is the escape in the confusion immediately following. That takes planning. And luck.
DeCamp arrived in Oslo four days before the Nobel ceremony, checking into a small suite at the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans Gate just across the street from the Parliament at four on a cool overcast afternoon. He’d booked the room within the hour after Wolfhardt had left him in Nice, and even that far in advance he’d been lucky.
The hotel was full because of the ceremony, the lobby bustling with former Nobel laureates and VIPs from around the world. In many circles this was the biggest game of the year, anywhere. The world’s best and brightest, honored and on display for their feats.
Dressed in faded jeans, a white shirt, and an expensive black blazer, DeCamp used the Canadian passport that identified him as Edward Grecinger, with an American Express card, which showed a billing address in Quebec. He’d changed his eye color to bright green with contact lenses, wore an expensive wig of salt-and-pepper hair, longish in the back, and with lifts in his shoes was nearly two inches taller than at Hutchinson Island.
His wallet open on the counter, the pretty young clerk glanced at the photo of his wife and two children and she smiled.
“You have a lovely family, sir,” she said.
“I miss them already.”
He signed the check-in card and upstairs declined the bellman’s offer to help unpack his single suitcase, but tipped well.
A half hour later, satisfied that there were no bugs in the suite. DeCamp, still wearing the jeans and blazer, added a sweater to the outfit and a soft gray scarf around his neck, and went outside for a walk down to the town hall where the ceremony would be held. He would be remembered as the quiet Canadian with a lovely family who tipped well.
Eve Larsen would forever remember the three days in Oslo mostly as a blur of images: press conferences in the morning of the ninth, followed by lunch with dignitaries, followed by dinner with more dignitaries including former vice president Al Gore, himself a Nobel laureate, and finally her two bedroom suite at the Grand Hotel, her chastely in one room and McGarvey in the other. And the ceremony, of course, and the attack on her life.
That first night she’d come out of her room shortly after midnight, too keyed up about the next day’s speech — lecture, as the Norwegians called it — to sleep and she found McGarvey staring out one of the balcony windows that looked down on Karl Johans Gate, Oslo’s main drag. His back was slightly hunched, his head down, and looking at him from behind Eve thought he was a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders, yet the only trouble they’d encountered to that point had come from her postdoc Don Price, who’d been genuinely put out that McGarvey had not only accompanied them, but that it was McGarvey who stayed in the suite with her, while he had to accept a room of his own, two floors down.
“A penny for your thoughts,” she said softly.
Startled, he turned around suddenly, and for just an instant his face was a mask of agony and maybe regret. But then the look was gone and he shrugged. “So far so good,” he said. “Worried about tomorrow?”
“I hate giving speeches, but Don’s read it and says it’s good.”
“He’s in love with you,” McGarvey said. “And a little jealous of me and of your work.”
She smiled. “All of the above. And sometimes I think there might be something between us, but beyond that he’s a damned good scientist, and I trust his judgment.”
“That’s a good thing.”
He was still dressed though he’d taken off his jacket and she’d seen the pistol in its holster at the small of his back, and she was just a little thrilled as well as frightened by the danger and immense power the man radiated. “Do you ever sleep?”
“Just change the batteries now and then.”
She’d wanted to ask him what he’d been thinking about, staring out the window, but she respected his space, as she wanted others to respect hers. Yet she was curious, in part because he’d rescued her twice, and because he’d come to Oslo with her, but mostly because he was a complicated man and she wanted to understand him, though she couldn’t say why. The silence between them suddenly became awkward.
“You should try to get some sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow will be even busier than today.”
“I’ve looked at the itinerary. By the time we actually get around to the ceremony in the evening, I don’t know if I’ll have to energy to make my lecture.”
“You’ll do just fine,” McGarvey said. “If you get some rest.”
She was practically dead on her feet, but she’d managed the day because she was pumped up and felt a little fear. She nodded, and started to return to her bedroom, but then turned back. “If there’s going to be trouble, when and where will it happen?”
“Maybe first thing in the morning in front of the hotel, or during one of your press conferences,” McGarvey said. “But your afternoon is free, so you’re going to stay put here.”
“Don wanted to do some sightseeing, just the two of us,” Eve said, but McGarvey shook his head.
“The cops here are good, but not that good.”
“What about outside town hall just before the ceremony?”
“The royal family will be there, and security will be tight,” McGarvey said. “So I’m guessing that if nothing has happened by then you’ll be in the clear.”
She had another thought, something she had pondered all afternoon and even during cocktails and dinner with Gore and a lot of the Nobel Prize committee members including its chairman Leif Jacobsen, a thoroughly enjoyable gentleman of the old school. And because she’d been so distracted she guessed that she must have seemed aloof to everyone at the table. “No one at the press conferences brought up Schlagel’s name. Didn’t you find that odd?”
“They were being polite,” McGarvey said. “You’ve won the Nobel, which is a very big deal, and you’ll get a lot of respect for it wherever you go, but no more so than here.”
“But you think that it’s going to happen,” she said, more as a question than a statement.
“That’s why I’m here,” McGarvey said.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Eve said and she went back to her bedroom. But still she couldn’t sleep, nor could she concentrate on her written speech, so just like McGarvey had done she went to the window and stared out at the city. It had begun to snow again lightly, lending an almost heavenly air to the scene, complete with ice crystal halos around the streetlights. For the first time in years she thought about Birmingham when she was a child, before she realized that she was different than everyone else. There’d been one Christmas in particular that stuck in her mind. She could see the snow-covered Midland Plains the morning she’d ridden out into the countryside with her father and her brothers to find a tree. The weather was cold, her coat threadbare, and she was a little hungry, but she remembered being excited and happy. Happier, she thought just now staring out at the streets of Oslo, than she’d ever been except for maybe at this moment.
“The damned thing works,” Don had told her, and she was here because of it.
When sleep finally came she dreamed about Schlagel racing after her in the middle of the night, a horrible grimace on his face, his mouth filled with fangs that dripped with blood. He meant to kill her and her happiness was gone, replaced by fear.
The package with DeCamp’s pistol, the ammunition, silencer, and cleaning kit arrived the day after he’d checked in to the hotel. None of his telltales had been tampered with; neither the customs authorities nor FedEx had bothered to look inside to make sure that the small international air box from Paris actually contained a notebook computer, battery charger, and external hard drive.
He’d signed for it at the desk and back in his suite had loaded the Steyr and put everything into the wall safe. No need to run the risk of carrying it around the city until he needed it.
That night, seated at the lobby bar, he’d spotted Eve Larsen dressed in evening wear emerging from the elevator with a man and crossing to the street door. He’d only got a fleeting glimpse but he was sure the man was Kirk McGarvey, the former director of the CIA. And he’d sat back in his bar stool to consider his options with this
