One of the cops shouted something, and Jenkins tried to answer back, raising the pistol over his head.
DeCamp turned and watched from the fringes of the still-moving crowd as the police opened fire, Jenkins and Langsdorf falling back to the pavement, each hit more than a half-dozen times.
Back in Paris, DeCamp waited at noon for the first two days since Oslo just within the entrance to the Saint-Germain-de-Pres church where he had a straight line view of the Deux Maggots cafe across the boulevard. He was armed. Although he was certain that Wolfhardt would come to him, he wasn’t sure of the reception because the second half of his payment for assassinating Eve Larsen had been deposited into his account.
It was a mixed message the German and his employer had sent him; the woman had not been hurt and the assignment had been a failure except that the blame had gone to the two men shot to death by the Oslo police. They were wanted by the FBI for questioning about a series of abortion clinic bombings a few years ago, and their names were being linked to the Reverend Schlagel’s ministry.
Schlagel had gone on his SOS television network the morning of the very next day and on Fox News that evening, saying in effect that although he vehemently disagreed with what Dr. Larsen had set out to do, he would defend to his death her right to practice science as she saw it. He would fight her godless research with everything in his body and mind, including his hourly prayers to Jesus Christ his Savior, but he would also thank God for her miraculous escape, and for the souls of his poor lost sheep, shot to death in Oslo.
A priest in a cassock and wide-brimmed hat, head lowered so that his eyes were not visible, came out of the nave. “You failed,” he said. “Again.”
DeCamp turned suddenly, reaching for his pistol, but then stayed his hand. “The vagaries of these sorts of assignments,” he said. He willed himself to remain calm. This meeting was expected. “Yet you paid my fee. Why? Do you want me to try again?”
“Yes, but in a different fashion. This time the assignment will be much larger, more complex, and it will require additional personnel.”
“I work alone.”
“Not this time.”
“If I refuse?” DeCamp asked.
“That’s not an option, something you know, otherwise you would not have waited for me to show up here.”
“I will need additional funds.”
“Under ordinary circumstances I would have told you to pay for this one out of the profits you’ve earned from the monies you have already received for two failed assignments. But my employer is generous. An additional two million euros will be deposited to your Prague account within twenty-four hours.”
On the surface of it the offer was more than fair, it was generous. Afterwards, no matter the outcome, DeCamp would fetch Martine and they would disappear. Perhaps to Australia. An outback sheep station. Anonymous, safe, where a man could see for miles if an enemy were to approach.
“Am I to be told the details?” he asked.
Wolfhardt reached beneath his cassock for something, and DeCamp almost pulled out his pistol, but it was a thick manila envelope.
“Here are the details. And I sincerely wish you luck, for all of our sakes, including yours, of course.”
“Of course,” DeCamp said, and he turned and walked away.
Wolfhardt had come back from France with assurances that DeCamp would accept the new assignment, and Anne Marie busied herself talking to investors, reassuring them actually, telling them that their hundreds of millions were safe in the dozen MG funds. “We make money on the way down as well as on the way up,” she explained. Though no one asked how, because they all knew that making profits from a declining market meant only that the MG was essentially stealing money from investors in other funds. And she’d always made sure, in those cases, that she never raided any fund in which some of her investors held positions.
The American Securities and Exchange Commission, which in Anne Marie’s estimation had always been run by idiots who had risen to their levels of incompetence, were working to put a stop to what was called high- frequency trading, which amounted to nothing more than letting computers buy stocks and a millisecond later, before the results showed up on the big board, and before mere humans on the floor could make their orders, the machines would automatically make a sale. In those brief millisecond bursts, profits that totaled in the billions each year were made. Of course the SEC thought it gave the high-frequency traders an unfair advantage, which was why the practice was under fire. Supposedly. But she had her own cadre of highly paid computer friends working out of Amsterdam who’d managed over the past several months to do some trading on the side, so far without detection.
Making money was so easy this way that sometimes Anne Marie felt a stab of guilt, or even boredom, because she agreed with her father’s original philosophy that systematic macro trading, which was what this amounted to, was only for idiots and cowards. But then no profit held any shame. Nor could it ever, by definition.
Even though it was winter and a series of cold fronts had marched across the Mediterranean since November, Anne Marie had gone back to her yacht to get away for a few days or weeks, however long it took to refresh her batteries. And everything seemed to be on track. Her investors were content, al-Naimi was off her back for the moment, DeCamp was presumably in the process of bringing the next operation together, and Schlagel’s God Project campaign was in full swing, especially now that Eve Larsen had been presented with the Nobel Prize and had survived an assassination attempt. The woman was blessed, and she was in the clear for the moment.
And it was more grist for Schlagel’s well-oiled mill. People in the U.S. were already putting a lot of pressure on Congress to rethink the permitting process for new nuclear power stations, along with a growing call for immediate inspections of every nuclear plant. The inspections would probably result in closures, or in repair orders that would be so expensive to complete that the utility companies would be forced to take the matter to their boards. The conservative ones, faced with gigantic repair bills and the growing tide of fear and distrust among the general public, would likely decide on even further shutdowns.
People in the southeast, especially in places like rural Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama were actually knocking down power lines by shooting out the insulators because they were convinced the electricity coming from nuclear power plants was itself radioactive and using electrical appliances inside their homes would give them radiation poisoning. It was Schlagel’s doing, of course, and in Anne Marie’s estimation the man was nothing short of brilliant, and in a Machiavellian sort of way he might make an interesting president after all.
Her thoughts had been flitting around like that ever since Hutchinson Island, and even out here in the Med she hadn’t been able to settle down. Her mood, like the weather, had varied from cold and damp, during which she was too depressed to work or even think, or to cold and blustery, during which she had sudden bursts of energy even though she felt somehow scattered, not together. And all of it was disconcerting.
Yesterday they’d been slowly cruising east to Athens to pick up a few people she’d considered inviting aboard because she’d started out with just her crew and two bodyguards and she’d thought that some of her depression might be plain loneliness, but she’d been spooked for no good reason she could think of, and she’d ordered the captain to turn south toward the African coast where the weather might be a little warmer. She was more tired of the cold than of her loneliness.
She sat at the bar in the main saloon drinking a glass of champagne. Dinner had been tasteless, and now that it was fully dark outside, no lights on any horizon, not even those of a passing ship, no moon, no stars under an overcast sky, the thought of going to bed alone was so dreary at this moment, she was almost frightened. So frightened that when her encrypted sat phone buzzed, the caller ID showing al-Naimi’s number, she was almost relieved, even though his call probably meant trouble of some kind.
“Mr. al-Naimi, good evening,” she said.
“Are you alone at this moment?” the Saudi intelligence officer asked.
Anne Marie felt a slight tingle of fear. “Yes.”
“You are doing a good job with the antinuclear power movement in the United States. We’re pleased — the royal family, unofficially, of course — but if the next phase of your operation goes as well as the first we will allow even more money to be placed in your fund.”
