She got up to leave, and managed a slight smile. “No pressure, Kirk.”
“None felt,” McGarvey said, and they knew that both of them were lying.
Later that afternoon, even more frustrated with their continued lack of progress, McGarvey cabbed it back to Georgetown and on the way his cell phone chimed. It was Eve, and she sounded out of breath. She was in Washington up to her eyeballs with last-minute work before heading down to the rig the day after tomorrow, and she wanted to have dinner with him tonight. Five thirty at the restaurant in the Watergate. Her apartment was just across the parking lot, and she needed to make an early night of it because she still had a ton of work to do.
McGarvey found that he was glad to hear from her, in part because he finally had a timetable. And she was waiting for him in a booth at 600 at the Watergate, a reasonably priced restaurant, she said, with a reasonable menu and reasonably decent food. They had a view of the Potomac, and the place was less than half full because of the early hour.
When their drinks came, and they had both ordered filets, Eve came straight to the point, and McGarvey thought that she seemed a little more intimidated than she had been outside the Fox studio after her interview and again when they’d first arrived in Oslo.
“Up in Princeton in my lab, I pretty well run the show. I’m my own boss, but down here in Washington it’s a different story, because technically my project comes under NOAA’s umbrella, and sometimes they can get pretty heavy-handed.”
McGarvey shrugged. “I’ve worked with and for the government for most of my adult life, so I know what you mean. But they’re the ones with the big bucks.”
Eve brightened a little. “You haven’t heard about my good news.”
“No.”
“If we get the rig to Hutchinson Island, and set up the impellers so that we’re delivering electricity to the grid, I’ll be given a nonconditional grant for one billion dollars.”
Alarm bells immediately began to ring, but McGarvey just smiled at her. “NOAA?”
She laughed. “Not a chance. This comes from Dubai, from the International Bank of Commerce. The fax came to my office two days ago, but we’ve decided to keep it quiet until Florida.”
But it was an empty gesture meant to lull her into a sense of complacency, make her believe that with that kind of money no one would try to stop her. But that’s exactly what the offer meant. No money would ever be paid to her, because the rig would never reach the Gulf Stream and the UAEIBC would make sure of it.
“That’s a bank funded primarily with oil and oil derivatives money,” he said.
She was taken by surprise, and she shook her head. “That’s what Bob Krantz told me yesterday. Almost word for word. He’s head of special projects for NOAA, which makes him my boss. He suggested I turn it down.”
“Wouldn’t matter,” McGarvey said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you realize what that kind of money will do for my project? How many impeller-generators we can anchor out in the Gulf Stream? It’ll give me a five year head start.”
“If you get to Hutchinson Island.”
Suddenly Eve was alarmed. “Bob tried to get a Coast Guard escort for us, but they turned him down flat. No evidence that we would come under attack, especially now that the guys who tried to kill me in Oslo are no longer a threat.”
That wasn’t surprising to McGarvey, considering the tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and just about every OPEC country. The U.S. government had made enough mistakes in Iraq, and combined with its unwavering support of Israel against the Palestinians, U.S. popularity in the region was nil. The administration had to be walking a fine line, because it needed OPEC more than they needed the U.S. Any oil not sold to the U.S. would be snapped up by the Chinese; it was becoming a worldwide sellers’ market.
“I’m coming with you,” MacGarvey said.
She laughed nervously. “Do you actually think someone will try to stop me?” she asked. “Try to sabotage the rig? The same people who hit Hutchinson Island?”
“I thought it was a possibility. Now I’m sure of it.”
“Because of the grant offer?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Her eyes were round. She looked a little overwhelmed, as if she’d been given a problem that had no solution or set of solutions that made any sense. “I can’t accept it.”
“We’ve already gone over their reasons, and nothing has changed. You represent a serious threat to a lot of people.”
“Explain this to the Coast Guard, or the CIA, you have the connections.”
“Won’t help. The government will not get involved, unless an actual attack takes place.”
“By then it would be too late.”
“It’s why I’ll be aboard the platform, and I don’t want you telling anybody who I am. As far as your people are concerned, I’ll just be a part of the delivery crew.”
“Don will know.”
“Ask him to keep it quiet, your lives might depend on it,” McGarvey said.
She wanted to argue, he could see it in the set of her jaw, in her eyes. “One man against however many they — whoever the hell
“I’ll bring one other person with me.”
“And you’ll be armed. You’ll have weapons.”
“Yes.”
Again she was nearly overwhelmed by what he was telling her. “What if they just drop a bomb on the rig, or fire a missile at us?”
“I think it’d take more than that to destroy something that large,” McGarvey said.
“Okay, so they plant bombs,” Eve argued, her voice rising.
“I’m going to fly down to the rig and take a look, see how I would do it if I wanted to stop you.”
“All right, what about a suicide bomber?”
“They’ll be professionals, which means they’ll want to get away. It’s their one weakness.”
She laughed humorlessly. “Some weakness. And I suppose I can’t refuse your help. I don’t want to put my people in harm’s way, most of them are just kids. But, goddamnit I’m not going to let the bastards beat me. This experiment is too important.”
“I agree.”
“But what about afterwards? I mean if my experiment is a success, and we begin delivering power to the SSP and L connection with the grid, what then? Armed guards forever?”
“Maybe, at first,” McGarvey said. “Until you go to the next phase and anchor your impellers to the ocean floor. And sooner or later, if I understand what you’re trying to do, there’ll be hundreds of them.”
“Tens of thousands,” Eve said absently.
“By then the project will be far too large to sabotage.”
She focused on him. “I just have to survive long enough for that to happen,” she said, and smiled wanly. “Welcome to the team.”
FORTY-FIVE
Brian DeCamp, dressed in desert camos, lay in a hollow, studying the fantastic-looking structure nearly the size of a soccer field that a squad of Libyan Army engineers had knocked together over the past thirty days. It was the middle of the night in the deep desert more than six hundred kilometers southeast of Tripoli, the only time the construction crews worked, and the only time DeCamp and his three operators came out of their tents, or moved from under the camouflage netting that covered just about everything.
One of the engineers came to the rail of the partial mock-up of Vanessa Explorer, and pissed over the side. It was an insult to the four nonbelievers he knew were preparing for another assault exercise. But an insult that
