“Ironic that an environmentalist is going to head one of the largest oil companies in the world, isn’t it?”
“I can’t think of anyone better suited. You’ll have an easier time working from within than fighting from the outside.”
Aggie smiled, the expression radiating from her mouth to encompass her eyes and her entire character. “That was my thinking as well.”
“But what I meant was, what happens between us now?”
She swayed toward him until her body was pressed against his, her small breasts flattened against his chest, one thigh snuggling between his legs. “You take me to bed and make love to me until neither of us can walk,” Aggie replied. “The lawyers will eventually track me here, so we’ve got only a couple of days. After that, Philip? I don’t know. You’ve got your world and I’ve got mine. Maybe they’re the same — only time will tell.”
Later that night, much later, in fact, Mercer and Aggie lay on top of the sheets of Mercer’s bed in a damp tangle of limbs, their breathing just now returning to a normal rhythm. Seeing the repair work around the skylight over the bed, Aggie asked him who had been responsible for the attack on his home.
“It wasn’t your father, if that was what you were thinking,” Mercer said. “The FBI found a bunch of receipts from a private investigator in your father’s home office. He’d had you followed for a couple of months. Since you moved back to Washington, actually. Henna believes it was nothing more than overzealous parental concern.”
“That’s how he knew what time I came here that night?”
“Right. And it was the private investigator I heard the night of your father’s party leaving the area after the first attempt on my life. He must have followed me home after I dropped you off at your condo in Georgetown.”
“He was a sick, greedy man,” Aggie said about her father and snuggled deeper into Mercer’s arms. “But it’s a relief to know he had nothing to do with that.”
He explained his theory about Max’s suicide, and that seemed to make Aggie feel a little better about her father. There was one detail he would not relate to her, something he didn’t even want to believe himself. It was something Dick Henna had told Mercer while he was recuperating in Abu Dhabi with Wayne Bigelow.
The detonating device used to release the liquid nitrogen on the Alaska Pipeline, the one that Jan Voerhoven had triggered, was not the same one used to activate the computer virus in Alyeska’s system. That trigger had been activated while Mercer and Aggie were in the Marine Terminal’s Op-center, fifteen minutes after the
Ivan Kerikov is still alive.
