* * *
The media people came through the hatch onto the main deck, and Defloria went over to help them around the maze of piping, cabling, and pumps to the reception area out of the wind. At first some of them looked and acted like tourists in white hard hats, rubbernecking the seemingly haphazard superstructures, spindly cranes, and the remnants of the drilling tower. Gail had moved to one side, well away from the podium, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, just another deckhand or roustabout, and Eve had to smile, because the woman wasn’t so bright after all. She stuck out like a sore thumb. Kirk’s picking her as his partner was a mystery, and oddly it made her relax a little.
She went to the podium as the television people took light readings, while a couple of the reporters looked at her as if they were examining a bug under a microscope, the same sort of reaction she’d gotten for the past year and a half, maybe more intense now because of the Nobel Prize and because of where they were and why they’d come. The Fox cameraman was panning from left to right across the main deck and then out at Schlagel’s flotilla, before turning back in a complete three-sixty until he focused on Eve.
“Anytime you’re ready,” she said as the reporters settled down.
Lloyd Adams, from ABC, glanced over his shoulder at his cameraman who nodded, and he in turn inclined his head for Eve to begin.
“Thank you for coming out here today for what I think is the first step toward America’s energy independence,” she began. “An important step. A necessary step.”
She and Don had worked on her presentation last night in his cabin, and she felt as if she’d begun on the right note, and she paused for effect — important, he’d assured her — and a deep basso boat horn close by to the west suddenly cut the silence.
Everyone looked up, and other boat horns joined in, a few at first, but then tens and dozens of them, surrounding the platform, the volume rising and falling like a chorus on the wind.
Don had told her to expect this. “Don’t let it fluster you,” he’d told her. “You’re the Nobel doc in charge. You’re trying to do something positive. The freaks don’t stand for anything, they’ll be here only to destroy what they can’t understand.”
“Shall we continue this inside, where it’s a little less noisy?” she shouted.
“No,” one of the newspaper reporters shouted, getting to his feet. “We understand what you’re trying to do and why. And we understand what’s at stake — not just the money, but the climate control issue you’ve talked about for the last year or two.” He swept his hand toward the edge of the platform over his shoulder. “Were you expecting this demonstration, and what do you say to the Reverend Schlagel’s charges that you’re playing God?”
“If the reverend is right, maybe I should just wave my hand and make them all miraculously disappear,” she said, and she regretted the remark the instant it popped out of her mouth.
“Is that what you want?” the Fox reporter asked.
It was exactly what she wanted, but she shook her head. “Of course not, as long as they don’t try to interfere with my work.”
“Like now?” the network reporter relentlessly followed up, and the other media people were curious enough to let him continue.
“A little humility every now and then wouldn’t hurt,” Don had warned her.
Gail had moved to the rear, behind the cameramen, and she shrugged, only this time the gesture wasn’t indifferent, it was sympathetic. Eve nodded.
“I have a big mouth that tends to get me in trouble,” she said. “What I mean to say is that I welcome scientific criticism, not attacks based purely on emotion or popular opinion that has been manipulated.”
“Is that why you were given the Nobel Peace Prize and not physics?” the Time magazine reporter asked.
The cacophony of boat horns seemed to be closing in on the rig, making it nearly impossible to hear or be heard on deck, and Eve wanted to shout back at the smug bastard. At the top of her lungs. This was the twenty-first century, goddamnit, not the Dark Ages. Yet a paleobiologist friend of hers told her recently that more than half of all Americans did not believe in evolution — they thought Darwin was a crock. Talk about Dark Ages. Sometimes it seemed to her as if the country was slipping backwards, the lights were really starting to go out. The age of exploration and discovery had given way to the new age of religious intolerance and war. Worldwide jihad.
She couldn’t help herself. “Why are you here?” she shouted.
“You’re front-page news, Doc,” one of the reporters said. “You and your God Project.”
* * *
The news conference, more like a circus with her as the chief clown, ended shortly after that remark. Most of the reporters were only mildly curious about the equipment in the control room, and the work that would be done as soon as the GE-built impellers were barged down to Hutchinson Island and attached to the platform. The depths and exact positions of the generator augers in relationship to the continuous micro-changes in the speed and angle of axis of the Gulf Stream at each particular location, which could affect the electrical output and any given moment, would be monitored. It was unknown at this point if a mechanism to change the depth and angle of incidence for each impeller would have to be designed and installed. Also unknown were the effects of salinity and temperature, or especially the opacity of the water, which might change the parts per million of biological organisms present at any given depth. With an intake diameter of twenty-five feet, a density differential could exist between the tops and bottoms of the impellers, which could affect efficiency.
Hundreds of other measurements would be taken from more than one thousand sensors, in the impeller blades themselves, on the internal bearings and gears inside the generators, on the electrical output — not only the amperage developed, but the consistency. How steady an output could be expected on a 24/7 basis for an entire year? Would this project act like solar cells, which produced energy that was subject to extreme fluctuations depending on how much dust landed on the solar panels, how many clouds were in the sky and how fast they moved, and at what latitudes the panels were located?
“There are a lot of variables,” Eve told them. “It’s what this stage of my experiment is all about.”
“What precautions have you taken to avoid another accident like the one last year in which a man was killed?” the French newspaper reporter asked.
“Better seals and redesigned fail-safes,” Eve answered matter-of-factly, though she was bitter. It was no accident, and everyone in her lab knew it, but there was no proof. No way ever of discovering the proof unless they could find the impeller that had fried its cable and now lay somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. But no one was looking, nor were there plans or money for such a search. So it was an accident.
“What comes next?” Tomi Nelson, who wrote for Scientific American, asked. She and the reporter from the Smithsonian had been the only two really more interested in the science and technology than the men in Schlagel’s opposition. But then they weren’t as interested in spot news as the others.
Don, who’d been missing for the briefing, had come in just as the question was asked. “If all goes well, and nothing bites us in the butt, we’ll hook up to the grid ashore and start giving Sunshine State Power and Light free electricity,” he said, coming around to where Eve stood facing the media people. “Sorry I’m late, Dr. Larsen.”
Press kits, including the bios of Eve and Don and everyone on the team, along with the science including diagrams, a little bit of math, some economic projections, and the long-range weather effects they were aiming for, had been sent ahead of time, so introductions weren’t necessary.
“I meant beyond that, Dr. Price,” Nelson asked. “What’s the next stage, or are you planning on going directly into production?”
“How many oil platforms do you expect it will take?” the Japanese reporter interrupted impolitely. “Excuse me, but do you think your environmentalists will object?”
“Let me answer both questions,” Eve said. “No more oil platforms, this one is just a tool for us to generate needed data. After we’re finished here, we’ll anchor the four impellers and their gen sets fifty feet beneath the surface and continue sending electrical power ashore. There will be no rig, and therefore no environmental issues.”
“And before anyone asks, because of the design of the impellers we will not be making sushi in the Gulf Stream,” Don said, and he got a few chuckles.
The boat horns had been blaring nonstop for about a half an hour, so that it had become mostly just background noise. But the Washington Post reporter nodded toward the windows. “Thad Schlagel promises to follow you all the away to Florida. What effect will that have on your work?”
“We brought earplugs,” Don said. “Anyway the extra publicity when we start giving away free electrical power won’t hurt.”
“If it works,” the Post reporter said.
Defloria and Gail came to the door. Eve introduced them as the tour guides, and although the reporters from Scientific American and Smithsonian wanted to stay and ask more questions, they also wanted to see the rest of the rig, and Eve promised to do follow-ups with them afterwards.
When they had cleared out, Eve took Don aside. “Where were you?” she demanded. She didn’t like being deserted.
“I’m sorry but I had to get the hell out of the way, I didn’t know what I’d say if I got started.”
And Eve came down a little. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “But it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Except for the noisemakers.”
“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 brough
t 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.
* * *
Biloxi’s weather had thickened by the time the InterOil helicopter touched down, and the journalists dispersed, most of them aboard the courtesy VIP shuttle over to the airport’s terminal for their flights out. A couple of them cabbed it to the Grand Biloxi Casino and Hotel, making DeCamp the last to leave, taking a cab rather than the shuttle over to the terminal because, he told the driver, he didn’t like mobs.
He had a beer in the lounge, and lost a roll of quarters to a slot machine over a half-hour’s period, then walked across to the baggage pickup area, and outside to get a cab to the Beau Rivage Casino and Hotel on the beach, where he’d stayed in a suite for the past three days.
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