‘Richard Gere?’
‘Yes, exactly! Gere! He plays the grandfather of—’
‘Shh!’ Loreena silenced him with a hand motion. ‘Look.’
From the side exit of the central building, two athletic-looking men in casual clothes came out, strolled over to the patrolling policeman and started speaking to him. Both were wearing sunglasses.
‘They don’t look like oil workers.’
‘No.’ Loreena leaned forward, wondering why she had a feeling of déjà vu. She played the section back again and again, zooming in on their faces. A moment later, a slim woman dressed in a trouser suit walked out of the building and positioned herself next to the entrance. The policeman pointed to something, the men looked in the direction of his outstretched hand, one of them holding something under his nose, which might have been a map of the city, and the conversation continued. In the background, a pot-bellied man with long black hair approached, wound his way towards the unguarded side entrance and shuffled inside.
‘Look at that,’ whispered Loreena.
A few moments later, the athletic-looking men shook the policeman’s hand and headed off. The woman in the trouser suit leaned against a tree, her arms folded, and then Bruford’s recording jumped. Sequences followed in which the girls continued to get up to mischief, without anything happening in the immediate vicinity of the building, then the crowd of people and the podium came into view. Both uniformed officials and civilians were pushing their way forward, everything was hectic. Images that had clearly been filmed right after the assassination attempt.
‘The guy that disappeared into the house—’ said the intern.
‘Could be anyone. The janitor, the engineer, some tramp.’ Loreena paused for breath. ‘But if not—’
‘Then we just saw the killer.’
‘Yes, the man who shot Gerald Palstein.’
They exchanged glances like two scientists who had just discovered an unknown, probably fatal virus and could see a Nobel Prize glimmering against the abyss of horror. Loreena isolated a freeze-frame of the fat man, enlarged it, connected her computer with the base station in Juneau and loaded the Magnifier, a program that could do wonders with even the grainiest of material. Within seconds, the blurred features became more contoured, strands of greasy hair separated from white skin, a straggly moustache corresponded with sparse chin stubble.
‘He looks Asian,’ said the intern.
Chinese, Loreena thought suddenly. China was involved in the Canadian oil-sand trade. Hadn’t they even acquired licences? On the other hand, what would the death of an EMCO manager change about the fact that Alberta was lost? Or was Imperial Oil in Chinese hands? But then EMCO would have belonged to them too. No, it didn’t make sense. And killing Palstein certainly didn’t. As he himself had said: Every unpopular decision I make reduces my popularity, but I’m really only the strategic leader.
She stroked her chin.
The sequence with the fat man alone was enough to justify a report, even if the guy turned out to be harmless. Yet it would make the police look a laughing stock. Greenwatch would have used up all its ammunition at once. A brief triumph that would cost them their decisive head-start in the investigations. The chance of solving the case by themselves would be blown.
Perhaps, thought Loreena, you should be content with what you have.
Indecisive, she rewound the film to the moment when the men with the sunglasses engaged the policeman in conversation. She zoomed in on them and let the Magnifier do its work, extracting details from the blurred image which, with all likelihood, came very close to their actual appearance. But even after that the policeman still looked unidentifiable, just an average policeman. The taller of the two men, however, looked familiar to her. Very familiar, in fact.
The computer informed her that the editorial office in Vancouver wanted to speak to her. The face of Sina, editor for Society and Miscellaneous, appeared on the display. ‘You wanted to know whether any other managerial figures from the oil trade have been injured since the beginning of the year.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Bingo. Three, one of them being Umar a-Hamid.’
‘The OPEC Foreign Minister?’
‘Correct. He fell off his horse in January and broke his leg. He’s recovered now. The nag was suspected of having connections in the Islamist camp. No, I’m just kidding. The next, Prokofi Pavlovich Kiselyev—’
‘Who in God’s name is that?’
‘The former Project Manager of Gazprom in West Siberia. He died in March, a car accident, reported to be his own fault. The man was ninety-four years old and half blind. That’s it for this year.’
‘You said there were three.’
‘I took the liberty of going further back. Which brings it to three. There’s always someone of course, one gets sick, another dies, a suicide here and there, nothing unusual. Until you look at the case of Alejandro Ruiz, the strategic second in command of Repsol.’
‘Repsol? Weren’t they taken over by ENI in 2022?’
‘It was discussed, but it never actually happened. In any case, Ruiz was, or is, quite an important figure in strategic management.’
‘And now? Which is it: was or is?’
‘That’s the problem. We’re not sure if he can still be counted as being alive. He disappeared three years ago on an inspection trip to Peru.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Overnight. He vanished. Lost without a trace in Lima.’
‘What else do you know about him?’
‘Not much, but if you like I can change that.’
‘Please do. And thank you.’
Alejandro Ruiz—
Repsol was a Spanish–Argentine company, trailing at the bottom of the field’s top ten. There weren’t all that many points of contact between the Spanish and EMCO. Was she risking wasting her time? Did the disappearance of a Spanish oil strategist in Lima in 2022 have anything to do with this?
Palstein was a strategist too.
Her thoughts oscillated between this new information and Bruford’s film recordings, trying to make some kind of sense out of them, knotting the ropes of logic together.
And suddenly she knew who one of the men in the sunglasses was.
‘Really! I swear to you!’
They were sitting in a small café on the Fifth Avenue Southwest, just a few blocks away from the Imperial Oil Limited headquarters. Loreena was drinking her third cappuccino, and the intern was sucking at a Diet Coke and devouring an awe-inspiring breakfast, composed of porridge, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes and much, much more. Loreena’s analytical mind couldn’t help wondering why someone would drink Diet Coke in the face of neutron-star-like calorie compression. Fascinated, she watched as he led a spoon of warm gruel, saturated in maple syrup, towards his mouth for processing.
‘The Magnifier can’t perform miracles,’ said the intern. ‘The picture isn’t that sharp.’
‘But I saw the guy just two days ago, and he was this close to me.’ She held her hand in front of her face. Through the gaps between her fingers, she saw a sausage disappear. ‘This close!’
‘Which makes me a little concerned that you may have kissed him.’
‘Don’t be silly. He wanted to see my ID card. As if Palstein’s house were the Pentagon or something.’
The intern put his spoon down and wrinkled his forehead.
‘There’s nothing unusual about his security people keeping a check on things.’
‘And did they? Did they check up on things? What had they lost in the house anyway?’
‘As I said.’ He picked his spoon back up. ‘They were keeping a check that—’