“And watching Bob Daley’s brains explode didn’t arouse you?” Apollo scoffed.
To his delight, Althea sounded shaken when she answered. “Of course not. Bob Daley was different. You know why he had to die.”
“Do I?” Apollo teased, like a cat toying with a mouse.
“There were never meant to be others!”
“Oh, but there will be others, my dear. Many, many others. One percent of the world’s population is a big number, you know. The righteous oppressed have tasted vengeance at last. And they want more!” His voice quivered with excitement. “Greedy, grasping, earth-raping bastards like Cranston deserve to die.”
Earth-raping. It was an expression that Group 99’s eco-warriors had long used to describe fracking. Althea had always found it laughable in the past, immature and melodramatic, something only a self-righteous student could have coined. There were sides to Group 99 that had always bothered her, but she’d stuck with them, for Daniel’s sake. But hearing the term from Apollo’s lips now, hijacked as a cause in which he could wrap his sadism and blood lust, chilled her to the bone.
Apollo started to laugh. “Just remember, Althea,” he sneered. “You opened the gates of hell. Not me.”
Is that what I did? she thought, once the phone went dead, gazing out across the lake to the mighty Alps in the distance. Did I open the gates of hell?
She pulled out her suitcase and hurriedly started to pack.
“SOMETHING TO DRINK, MA’AM?”
The flight attendant’s voice jolted Tracy back to the present.
“Coffee, please. Black.”
She was going to need it. The file Greg Walton had given her—his idea of “light reading”—had turned out to be a practically impenetrable analysis, not only of Henry Cranston’s bu
siness, but of the fracking industry in general. Group 99 had long been opposed to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, believing the new techniques for extracting shale gas by pumping vast amounts of pressurized water deep underground to be deeply harmful to the environment. Was this why Cranston had been murdered?
If so, it marked a departure from Group 99’s prior MO. Prior attacks aimed at the fracking industry had all been both cyber and financial in nature. And indeed, only hours before Cranston’s death, four million dollars were mysteriously siphoned out of two of his corporate accounts; accounts held at the same private bank in Zurich where Althea was believed to have had meetings. It was all suspiciously incestuous, especially as Tracy now knew that Hunter Drexel had been working on a story about the fracking business at the time of his kidnap. Drexel’s past stories had all been very much of the exposé variety, as explosively controversial as they were riveting. In his checkered journalistic career, he’d tackled such taboo topics as child abuse in the Catholic Church, police brutality and rampant corruption in the world of international humanitarian aid.
So why would Group 99 kidnap a man who was about to write the equivalent of an op-ed piece on their behalf, taking down the fracking industry?
And why would they murder Henry Cranston when they’d already gone to the trouble of carrying out a brilliant and successful economic attack?
Captain Daley’s brutal execution certainly seemed to have been a watershed moment in terms of Group 99’s willingness to embrace violence. Overnight, it seemed, they’d made the leap from activists to terrorists.
Why? Tracy wondered, as she worked her way through the material. How does killing people advance their cause?
The last third of Greg Walton’s file was devoted to a man he wanted her to meet on her return from Switzerland, an American billionaire oil and gas magnate by the name of Cameron Crewe.
Tracy had seen profiles of Crewe from time to time. There’d been something in the New York Times a few years back, and a piece in Newsweek more recently, about his extensive charity work. If fracking had an “acceptable face,” Cameron Crewe was it. Crewe Oil was well known for its ecologically sensitive drilling practices, at least versus others in the industry, and for plowing back millions of dollars in aid and grants to the communities in which they worked. Crewe Oil had built schools in China, medical centers in Africa, and affordable housing projects in Greece, Poland and a number of impoverished former soviet republics, including Bratislava. They had created jobs, planted trees and endowed hospitals around the globe. Perhaps for this reason, uniquely among the big five fracking companies, they had never been targeted by Group 99.
Cameron Crewe himself had been touched by tragedy. His only son, Marcus, had died from leukemia at fourteen—the same age as Nicholas. Crewe’s marriage had collapsed soon afterwards. Somehow these bald, sad facts served to humanize the billionaire in the public consciousness. People liked Cameron Crewe.
Ironically, Hunter Drexel had been en route to an interview with Crewe in Moscow when he was snatched off the streets by Group 99 heavies. And the links didn’t end there. Henry Cranston was also a direct competitor of Cameron Crewe’s. In fact, Tracy read now, Crewe Oil had been the under bidder on Cranston Eneregy Inc.’s latest landmark deal to begin fracking for shale gas in Poland. In the wake of Henry Cranston’s death, they now looked likely to take over that contract. There were rumors that they’d already moved in behind the scenes on the original Greek deal that Henry had been working on, before Prince Achileas’s unfortunate suicide at Sandhurst.
The lights in the cabin dimmed. Tracy’s fellow passengers began to settle down to sleep. Switching on her reading light, Tracy sipped her coffee instead. Pressing her face against the window for a moment, she looked out into the blackness.
Thoughts of Nicholas came to her then. She could only ever hold them off for so long. Sleep was the worst. As soon as she let herself slip under, the dreams would begin. Strangely, they were never nightmares about the accident. They were always beautiful dreams, snapshots from the past. Blake was in some of them. Jeff was in others. But always there was Nicholas, smiling, laughing, his hand holding Tracy’s, their fingers entwined in love. In Tracy’s dreams she could hear her son, feel him, smell him. He was so real. So alive.
And then she would wake up and the loss would crush her again afresh, like an anvil being dropped onto her heart. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken without screaming, or crying out, her hands grasping at the air in front of her as if she could somehow hold on to Nick, reach into her beautiful dreams and pull him back to her . . .
She thought about Jeff.
Did Jeff have dreams like that too?
Was he out there tonight somewhere, soul-dead and hopeless like she was, clawing at the void that Nicholas’s death had left?
Tracy had felt guilty, running out on Jeff. She knew he must be hurting too, desperately. But the truth was she simply didn’t have the strength to see him. Nick had looked so like him, had been so like him. It would be too hard. Besides, in Tracy’s experience, a grief shared was never a grief halved. Human loss was not a team game. Each person dealt with tragedy differently.