“Well, hell, then, why don’t you guys just pop her?”
“Would if I could, asshole, but someone wants to see her. But here’s for the pleasure of knowing you.”
With that he slapped my face through the hood hard enough to make stars dance behind my eyes.
“Don’t move for ten minutes,” he said. “During that time, you think about who and what you’re messing with. Next time you come up on our screens, we’ll put a horse syringe through your eye and suck out your brain, assuming there’s one in here. Didn’t much feel like it, just now.”
I heard the back door to the lounge click shut a few seconds later, but that was the only thing I heard over the ringing in my left ear. I sat back, still trying to get my mental arms around the situation. When they’d come through the back door, I’d just assumed that Creeps had sent a team over to pick us up while we slept the sleep of the innocent, trusting that we were somehow going to be able to talk our way out of this mess. Now, I didn’t think those guys were part of my Bureau or anyone else’s Bureau.
What. The. Fuck. Over? And who wanted to see her?
I started working on getting that hood off my head. It took several minutes of grunting and thrashing, but I finally managed. Then I looked at the cuffs. A Mickey Mouse icon was looking back at me. They were toy cuffs. I pulled my wrists apart, hard, and the cuffs popped across the room. One final note of deep and abiding respect from my good buddy, the major. I got up and went aft to the porch deck to see about the dogs.
They were still wrapped tight and unconscious. I went to the galley, got a knife, and cut them out of that webbing. Then I carried each one into the warmth of the lounge and laid them out on the carpet. Frick’s hind legs began to quiver, but it was another fifteen minutes before they woke up. I found one tiny plastic dart entangled in the web on Frack, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. I wondered where Trask kept his Scotch. Coffee no longer seemed sufficient. I sat back down, called the guys at the beach house, and filled them in on what had happened.
“Who we messin’ with here, boss?” Tony said.
“Bad motherfuckers,” I replied. “And I still have Creeps to deal with.”
“Sounds like we country boys are way out of our league,” Pardee said. He left the obvious corollary to that observation unspoken.
I was getting just a little bit tired of that line. If I was going to stay with this hairball, though, I’d need their help. I still wanted to know why Allie had died. Pardee, attentive to the sudden silence on the line, solved it for me.
“Okay, okay, what do you need us to do?”
“Come over here around 10:00 A.M.,” I said. “Come by car. I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
That evening, Tony nosed our boat alongside the cargo wharf at Helios, where Ari Quartermain was waiting with two security officers and a Helios security office SUV. Tony and Pardee, along with Ari’s officers, stayed behind at the wharf while Ari and I got into the SUV and went for a drive onto one of the marsh roads.
The lights of the power plant formed a blazing sodium vapor barrier behind us, while across the river we could see the tops of container ships and the towering gantry cranes that serviced them. Ari pulled up on one of the cattail points that formed a bend in the cooling water canal and shut it down.
“We going all the way tonight, or is this just gonna be more foreplay?” I asked.
He chuckled and shook his head. “Scotch in the glove box,” he said. “Sorry for the paper cups. Why’d you come by boat?”
“I wanted to come in the back door,” I said. “You never know what the Bureau’s been telling the front gate security people.”
We got settled, and then he told me all about his wonderful day at work, which had gone pretty much as I had imagined it would.
“My moonpool is acting up.”
“Acting up? Do I want to hear this?”
“Some of the water from this canal goes into the cooling system for the moonpool,” he said. “Heat exchangers, to be precise. Not to be confused with makeup water, which is purified and comes from the county water system. This is a circulation system: moonpool water on one side, canal water on the other.”
“I believe.”
“Right. Only my heat exchangers are now clogged with something nasty, courtesy of this latest incident.” He looked over at me with weary eyes. “The spent fuel stack wants its cooling water, and wants it now. Left to its own devices, it tries to become a reactor again.”
“And that’s not good.”
“Not good at all. Plus, I’ve got this bureaucratic war going on between something like ten different agencies and a circling swarm of PrimEnergy lawyers. I’m tempted to gather them all into that building and drain the pool. Let them see what an atomic steam explosion looks like.”
I grinned in the darkness, despite the seriousness of the problem and the dizzying array of federal alphabets. “Make sure you get all the lawyers in there,” I said. “Where’s the body?”
“In a double body bag, inside a dry-storage cask parked in the moonpool building. That’s become an issue, too.”
“How so?”
“At least two federal entities are demanding an autopsy. I’ve told them the keys to the cask are available to anyone who’s brave enough to open it and who’s had all the children he wants to have. No takers so far.”
“Still think it’s Trask?”
He shrugged. “If we could figure out a way to clean the heat exchangers, we might recover some skin, but that’s going to be an enormously complex operation, by which time I wouldn’t think anything would be left. It’s a technically unprecedented situation, so NRC-approved safety procedures would have to be drawn up, staffed in Washington, approved, blah, blah, blah.”
“And in the meantime, the fuel stack is getting indigestion?”
“The worst thing that can happen in a moonpool is for all the cooling water to leak out and expose the fuel stack to the atmosphere. You get hydrogen and then a fire, which is not a comforting combination. So we have this system to reflood the pool if for some reason the basic containment fails. We can use that if we have to as a backup cooling system until we get the heat exchangers sorted out.”
I told him about our run for the roses last night, that Moira had been picked up again, and that I thought Trask might have been behind all the problems at the plant.
“Carl Trask a terrorist?”
“Colonel Carl Trask creating an ‘incident’ in order to reawaken America to the clear and present danger,” I said. “From this ex-cop’s point of view, he had motive, means, and opportunities galore.”
Ari let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “I guess it’s possible. But then what happened? How’d he end up in the moonpool?”
“Apparently, we might never find that out,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to focus on Allie Gardner. She was either a random victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or somehow she’s part of the mystery here. That’s why I wanted to meet tonight. I’m going to need your help with this, while at the same time, I don’t think I can help you anymore.”
“Because you promised the Bureau guys?”
“They’re right, you know. They need to run their investigation without outside interference, especially if they’re squabbling with other government agencies.”
He nodded. “Okay. That reads. What do you need from me?”
“I need to inspect your visitor logs—in detail—and it might be better for me to do that now, at night, with fewer people around in the admin offices.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Not what—who: I’m looking for Allie Gardner. We all assumed she’d never been here, at Helios. I’d like to confirm that, before yet another assumption bites me in the ass.”
An hour and a half later, we were closing in on the south end of the Wilmington container port. Tony had the boat’s red and green side navigation lights on but had turned off the white lights. There were four eno
rmous ships being worked farther up that long bulkhead pier under the glare of a forest of gantry cranes, but the downstream end was empty of activity and all the crane lights were dark. There was little moonlight, and while the container stack area was brightly lighted, the surface of the river a hundred yards out remained in darkness. Tony said we were going in on slack high water in the estuary, so the current was minimal. It would turn to ebb and increase significantly in about an hour.
Our search through the visitor records hadn’t turned up anything useful. Pardee and I had slipped into coat-and-tie outfits before going with Ari to the physical security admin office. I was hoping that anyone seeing us there would assume we were just some more federal people. We’d examined the time frame when Allie had been in Wilmington and found no record of her ever visiting Helios. Then we’d done it again to see if any other names jumped out at us, but none did. There were a lot of contractors and suppliers, making it clear that Helios was heavy into outsourcing. There was one entry indicating a Thomason had visited a Thomason, but that didn’t have anything to do with anything as best I could tell. I’d asked Ari if we could have a copy of those days’ log pages, and he’d promised to get us one when the admin offices reopened tomorrow.
The second reason we’d come by boat was to see if it was possible to approach the container port from the river without being discovered, and, if we were discovered, what would happen next. Tony held the boat in position at idle while we waited to see if a passing security truck would notice us. Ten minutes later, one came by up on the unloading area of the pier, but passed by with no reaction to us. My guess was that either the driver’s night vision was nonexistent against all those gantry crane lights farther up or he’d seen the boat and thought nothing of it.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.
Tony pointed the bow toward the end of the bulkhead pier. We crept in at idle, rounded the end of the pier about fifty feet out, and nosed up into the creek that formed the downstream boundary of the port. To our right were darkened warehouses and other semi-industrial buildings, which looked like they’d been abandoned for years along the riverbank. Stumps of long-gone pier pilings littered the bank, along with a backwater collection of listing barges, piles of rusty barrels, and dangling outflow pipes. To our left was the southern end of the container stack area, with lanes and rows of shipping containers stacked four to ten high.
“I’ve got five feet under the keel,” Tony announced as we pushed farther up the narrowing creek.
The water stank of oil, sewage, and other things, none of them good. The bulkhead pier on our left ended in a dirt bank and some long-dead trees. Farther up the creek was that jumbled pile of damaged and discarded containers I’d seen on our first visit. The security lighting ended at the edge of the stack laydown area. The container graveyard was not lighted at all, and it was also outside the chain-link fence that defined the port perimeter. The creek ran between the fence and a small mountain of discarded containers.
“Four feet,” Tony said, putting the engine in neutral and coasting forward now. He’d pointed out earlier that if we ran aground now, at high slack water, we’d be there until the next high tide came along to float us off.
“Can you put us on the bank with that container pile?” I asked.
He turned the boat toward the ribbon of oily trash bobbing along the dirt bank. Pardee went forward with a boathook to see what he could grab, while I stayed in the cockpit with Tony and the shepherds. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a body or two floating in all the mess, and, in fact, I saw at least one furry soccer ball with the head of a cat.
The boat stopped with a small bump, and Pardee hooked something on the bank to hold us there. I turned back toward the container port to see if we’d attracted any attention. The silent stacks looked back at me. The fence at the top of the opposite bank looked to be about ten feet high, but I could clearly see where the bottom of the chain-link had billowed out or been compromised by gullies washed out at low points. If we’d gone to that side of the creek, it would have been easy to climb the bank, watch for security trucks, and then slide under the chain-link. I wondered if they had a problem with pilferage in the stacks at night.
“Boss?” Pardee said.
I turned back around. He was pointing into the container junkyard, where I could see the flickering reflection of a small fire. Then I saw a human shadow on a nearby container, and then another. Frick growled quietly.
“Hobo jungle up there?” I said.
Pardee nodded. “Looks like it,” he said. “I guess you could live in an empty container.”
“I want to go up there, see if we can talk to somebody. Find out how hard it is to get into the container stack yard at night.”
“You taking the dogs?” Pardee asked.
“Hell, yes,” I said. “Why?”
He repositioned the boathook to steady the boat, which was trying to swing around in the creek. “Because those folks up there see those dogs, ain’t nobody gonna stick around to have a nice chat.”
“You think they’ll run?”
“I believe they will,” he said. He stuck his tongue out at Frick. She lifted a lip. “I would.”
I patted Frick’s head. “Then they better be really good runners,” I said.
In the event, they didn’t run. They didn’t even see us coming until Pardee surprised the shit out of a noisome collection of derelicts, drunks, and aging homeless types surrounding a small fire that was burning in a sawed-off steel drum. We’d separated in making our approach. Pardee had come in from the landward side, stepping into the firelight from between two mangled containers that had obviously been in a trucking accident several years ago. I remained in the shadows between the edge of the pile and the river, with the shepherds sitting by my side. The dozen or so denizens of the junkyard studiously ignored the large black man who was stepping carefully over two sleeping forms and into the middle of the group.
“Evening,” he said.
“We ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” one man said, still not looking directly at Pardee. “Just stayin’ warm, is all.”
“No problem,” Pardee said. “This isn’t a roust. I’m looking for someone.”
“You a cop?” another man asked. He appeared to be younger than most of the group, with shaved hair and some piercing jewelry on his face. The vivid red splotches on his face and neck indicated active disease of some kind.
“Skip tracer,” Pardee said. “I want someone who knows his way around the stacks over there, someone who can take us in through the fence and back out again without getting caught.”
“Who’s us?” the younger one said with a sneer. “Got a mouse in your pocket?”
“Us is me and my partner over there.”
That was my cue to step out into the firelight with the dogs, the sight of which provoked some uneasy repositioning among the assembled multitude.
“Them’re po-lice dogs,” a third man said, looking around nervously to see who or what else might be lurking in the shadows. “You guys is cops.”
“Nope,” Pardee said. “And cops are definitely what we want to avoid tonight. You boys hang out here. One of you must know how to get into that stack yard over there. There’s money in it for the right guy.”
“If you guys are bounty hunters, who you chasin’?” sneer-face asked. I already wanted to smack him. I think Frick wanted to eat him. Pardee passed the ball to me with a quick glance.
“We’re looking for a guy, late fifties, maybe even sixty,” I said. “Good shape, real short haircut. Likes to give orders.”
“How much money?” an older man asked. I hadn’t noticed him before, but he looked like he might have been somebody once, despite the rags and the filthy beard. He was sitting in the prime spot at the fire, in the warmth but out of the smoke.
“A C-note to take us in, show us the layout, and get us out again. Twenty minutes, tops, start to finish. Then we’re gone.”
“You fixin’ to steal som
e shit?” a man asked. “ ’Cause them cans over there? They’s all locked up. They even got alarms and shit.”
“I popped one, once,” a seriously grubby geezer announced. He was sitting all by himself, and the crusty stains that painted the front of his clothes from chops to crotch may have accounted for his isolation. “All’s was in there was a hundred-lebbenty milyun boxes of goddamn shit-paper.”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with shit-paper,” another observed. “Better’n usin’ yer shirt, like you do.”
This provoked general amusement, but I could see that the older man was interested. Pardee saw it, too, and produced the hundred-dollar bill, which got everyone’s attention.
“Shee-it,” the young one said. “I’ll do it.”
“No, I’ll do it,” the bearded man said, getting to his feet. Surprisingly, the young kid didn’t argue. The rest of them subsided into their boozy meditations.
The bearded man was nearly my size. He was wearing jeans, boondockers, two sweatshirts, and a black knit hat. His hands were tattooed with the smudgy ink of what looked like prison art. The way he was built and the animal grace with which he moved alerted me to watch him carefully. Pardee caught it, too. The rest of the junkyard crowd were bona-fide derelicts; this one was a hard guy, probably on the run and hiding out among the human debris that seemed to be accumulating on the edges of every American city these days.
“Lead on, then,” I said. Pardee stepped aside and the man went past him, giving Pardee the once-over. “You guys strapped?” he asked as we moved away from the campfire.
“What do you think?” Pardee replied, not actually answering the man’s question.
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 20
