Abyss

“Did you really pack earplugs?”

“I don’t think we’ll need them,” Don said. “Those people will get tired and go home as soon as the media bails.”

* * *

Vanessa’s private catering service rose nicely to the occasion, providing a pleasant champagne brunch that afternoon for the media and for the scientific staff, and Eve spent most of the hour and a half answering questions about her project and whether some of Schlagel’s objections might be valid.

“The creationists are still down on Darwin,” she told Enrique Obar, a L.A. Times reporter. “The Flat Earth Society believes Magellan was a liar. There’s proof that we never walked on the moon. Earth is only six thousand years old — and change. Airplanes can’t really fly. Baseballs don’t curve. An arrow can never reach its target. And four thousand seven hundred and fifty-eight angels, or some number like that, can dance on the head of a pin. Makes me one of the crazies.”

“All that sounds good, Dr. Larsen,” Obar said, smiling. “But in fact he’s gained quite a following. What are you going to do about him?”

Gail had changed into jeans and a light pullover and she was standing nearby, drinking a glass of champagne and obviously eavesdropping.

“About the only thing I can do, I suppose,” Eve said.

“What’s that?”

“Prove that the world is round.”

FIFTY-TWO

The flight back to InterOil’s Gulfport-Biloxi VIP terminal went without incident, the weather calmer inshore than it had been out on Vanessa Explorer. A number of the reporters made calls on their cell phones as soon as they came within range of a tower, while a couple of them tilted their heads back and fell asleep, and others were making notes on their laptops or BlackBerries.

Twenty minutes out the Japanese journalist Kobo Itasaka turned to Brian DeCamp. “Tell me what you think.”

DeCamp, who’d traveled as Joseph Bindle, special correspondent to the Manchester, England Guardian, had been busy working out the next steps based on what he had learned this afternoon. The rig was even more vulnerable than he’d first thought, but getting aboard without raising too much of an alarm — enough of an alarm that someone would call for help — remained a problem he’d yet to solve. He wasn’t overly concerned, it would be seven days before it reached the 1,800 fathom mark about two hundred miles southwest of Tampa, but it was the one detail left. He glanced at the Japanese sitting next to him. “Think about what?”

“The chances the woman’s experiment will succeed.”

DeCamp shrugged. “Oh, I shouldn’t think it will,” he said, flattening his rounded vowels so that he sounded more like a Midland’s Plains Brit than a South African. “The science isn’t very sound, is it?”

“Then you agree with the religious right here?”

This or any other discussion that might draw attention to him wasn’t what he’d wanted. But a couple of the other reporters had looked interested and he couldn’t back away. “Heavens no. It’s just that meddling with the weather could very likely have some unintended consequences, I suppose. She means to diminish anticyclones in the Atlantic, but mightn’t that increase the intensity of storms sweeping west across North America?”

“Interesting possibility, something I’ll look into,” Itasaka said, and turned away.

But one of the other reporters was curious. “Who did you say you wrote for?” he asked.

“The Guardian, ” DeCamp said, and all of a sudden he realized his mistake, and he grinned. “I suppose I should have said hurricanes. It’s the three years I did at our Canberra bureau. New habits die hardest.”

“Have you been to Iraq yet?” the reporter asked. Something wasn’t adding up for him, and it was plain by his questions.

“No, and I bloody well have no desire to witness the slaughter of a lot of fools, some of them my own countrymen, for an American ambition. Or for that matter put my arse on the line for the next IED to pop off while I’m on the way to the loo.”

The reporter started to say something else, but DeCamp turned away and looked out the window, dozens of oil rigs in every direction, clouds sweeping in for what looked like a rainy evening to come, which suited his suddenly dark mood.

Using the Bindle identity to get out to the oil rig had carried a set of risks — one of which was running into someone who knew the real correspondent — and another of which was being drawn into a discussion about some subject only an actual journalist would know something about. And Iraq was one of them. He’d been to Baghdad on a number of occasions, once before the second Gulf War had begun, but as an assassin, not a newspaper reporter. He didn’t know the language, or the places where the international press usually hung out, or the little problems and everyday irritations that came with being a newsman embedded with a military unit. He couldn’t talk the talk that would convince a veteran reporter that he was an actual correspondent.

But it had been worth the gamble to inspect the oil platform firsthand. Now he had a much clearer picture of what problems his team would be faced with and the solutions to all but two — how to get aboard and how to deal with the tug’s crew and communications equipment.

And it had been worth the price of fifty thousand euros to the real Bindle, living and working as a freelancer in Paris, to take a vacation in Rome and let DeCamp take his place on the tour. An assignment two years ago required that he be allowed access to the German Parliment building, the refurbished Reichstag in Berlin, but not as a tourist, as a member of the press, which would give him nearly unlimited access to the offices of a deputy on a hit list.

DeCamp had reasoned that an accredited journalist would have just the sort of access that he needed, so he went looking for the right man, who had his similar build and height, who was a freelancer, lived in Europe, and was down on his luck. And Bindle had been fairly easy to find. An afternoon spent on the Internet researching British freelance journalists came up with a list of a dozen men of approximately the right age, five of whom had published a decreasing number of stories over the past five years. Bios on each of them, though scant, led him to two men, one a former Australian yellow journalist who’d come to London nine years ago and had never really made his mark.

And Bindle, who had been a success until four years ago when his output dropped dramatically from twenty or more big freelance pieces per year to just a handful, had brought him to the top of the list. A little digging brought up a London newspaper article about the deaths of Bindle’s wife and teenaged daughter in a car crash. Though Bindle had not tested positive for alcohol or drugs, he’d been driving, and had failed to yield the right of way. The accident had been his fault; he’d killed his wife and daughter.

DeCamp, in disguise, had found him drunk in a Paris bar, followed him home, sobered him up, and offered him the proposition.

“No real way out for me is there,” Bindle had agreed. “Just let me write the actual pieces, and never tell me what you’re really up to, you bugger. I don’t want to know. I don’t care even if you’re a spy for the goddamned Chinese or somebody.”

Which had led to Germany, and the deputy.

DeCamp had followed him into a bathroom on the third floor, killed him with a stiletto thrust to the heart, and placed the body in one of the stalls. He was long gone from the building before the man’s body was discovered and the alarm was sounded.

DeCamp sent his notes and photos for the story to Bindle, via a blind IP address, the reporter obligingly wrote the piece, submitted it to the Guardian , and went back to his drinking.

No one connected Bindle’s visit with the murder, because the next day the reporter’s human-interest story on the differences in governing styles between Berlin and the old post — World War II capital in Bonn appeared in the newspaper. He was a reporter, not an assassin.

* * *