Cold War - Jerome Preisler [61]
He shifted his thickset frame in his chair. On his immediate right, Olav Langkafel, a quiet but integral cog in Norway’s Energy and Petroleum Ministry, was voicing an anxious hypothetical about the close reconnaissance capabilities UpLink might have out there on the ice. Morgan decided to address it with an example that would also hopefully resolve some of the issues raised by his six other guests. Give them the overview they seemed to be missing.
“Before you go on with that last what-if, let me ask you a question,” he said, raising a finger in the air. “Are you by any chance acquainted with the term ‘zoo event’?”
Langkafel was momentarily nonplussed. Morgan supposed it wasn’t too often that he got interrupted.
“No,” he replied. “I am not.”
Morgan slid his glasses down the bridge of his nose, regarding the Norwegian over their solid-gold rims. A man of few words, Langkafel. Blond hair and mustache, fair complexion, stern features. In his navy-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, he gave off an almost regimental air.
Morgan added a dimension of wise understanding to his self-assured smile . . . with just the merest hint of condescension thrown in to keep Langkafel in line. It was a delicate balance. His goal was to communicate that he was far enough ahead of the game to have expected Langkafel’s response, but that the expectation signified neither dismissiveness nor a lack of respect.
“The phrase is pretty obscure,” he said. “Caught my ear a while back, though, and stuck with me. I like how it’s sort of mysterious, but not so dramatic you’d think a Hollywood screenwriter dreamed it up. It refers to something that happened near Bouvetoya Island, right at the edge of the Antarctic Circle, a frigid hunk of rock I’m betting you have heard about. Your country’s held a territorial claim on it for a while, correct?”
Langkafel nodded rigidly. “Bouvetoya is a designated nature preserve with few natural resources worth mentioning. Its chief value is as a site for satellite weather stations.”
Morgan knew that, of course. And he had known Langkafel would know. But he wanted to spread around the verbiage, engage the group, get his points across without appearing to lecture. It was an approach he’d borrowed from trial lawyers: When the goal was to deliver information through someone else’s his lips, you never asked a question whose answer wasn’t entirely predictable. Whether you were in the courtroom or boardroom, the essential tactic was the same.
Mindful of his digestive problems, Morgan resisted the tray of biscotti in front of him, and instead raised a glass of carbonated mineral water to his lips. He drank slowly, watching buds of filtered sunlight shrivel on the burgundy curtains over the room’s terrace doors. Two floors below, in the main hall of the restored medieval guild house he had occupied since his lamented flight from the States, the art gallery his family had run for nearly a hundred years was silent, its staff having canceled the day’s appointments at his instruction. With dusk, the specialty shops and fashion houses along the right bank of the Limma would be closing as well. Morgan imagined their owners offering courtly good-nights to prosperous clients, the musical tinkle of chimes above their shutting entries, and then their lights blinking out one by one. That was Zurich for him. A city of ritualized decorum and sterile elegance. Of priggish, elitist bankers and financiers.
And, Morgan thought, of ultimately civilized exiles.
He put down his glass, scanning the group around the table, his eyes gliding from person to person. Stored in his mind were two curricula vitae for each of them—the public and private, sanctioned and unsanctioned, licit and illicit details of their personal lives and careers. All were tangled up in invisible strings, pulling some while they themselves got pulled by others.
Take Feodor Nikolin down at the opposite end of the table. On the front of the sheet, Nikolin was an advisor to the elected governor of Russia’s Baltic oil and gas pipeline region. Back