Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  Then I finally made the connection. Allie’s unmarried sister’s name was Thomason. If she had never been married, then that was Allie’s maiden name. I remembered that visitor log entry: Thomason visiting Thomason.

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “It involves family money, Lieutenant. That’s all he’d tell me. I got the impression he took her share. I didn’t push any further, because I needed him, not his back story. How ’bout it: You ready to rumble?”

  “What, you coming down to join me?” I asked, tightening my grip on the Colt and anchoring the butt. God, I wished the shepherds were here. Even now, a piece of my brain heard them coming through the woods at high speed to rescue my ass one more time. But they weren’t.

  Then Trask made his move, and it was impressive. Turned out, he was in my tree. Our tree, I guess. He was all the way at the top, and he did what you can only do in a big pine tree: He jumped away from the trunk, arms and legs out like a spider, fell through the first tier of branches, and grabbed one. As it bent under his weight, it slowed him down just a little, and then he let go and dropped through the next tier, and so on, each time braking his descent just enough to be able to drop damn near right on top of me in a hail of needles and broken branches. I heard him coming all the way down, and it didn’t do me one bit of good. I didn’t even have time to fire the Colt, because my weary brain just wasn’t working fast enough to understand what he was doing before there he was in a whoosh of air, pine needles, and a black mass of shadow, his angry face twisted into a murderous rictus and his hands reaching for my throat.

  The Colt saved me, after all.

  I’d had it pointed straight up the whole time, the stock wedged on the ground, my finger near, but not on, the trigger. Trask landed right on it and drove the barrel and even some of the action through his solar plexus and right out his back. My left hand, trapped under his body, felt a sudden warm flood. Trask screamed.

  There we lay for a moment, in a truly grotesque embrace. Trask didn’t make a sound except for one ghastly inhale, and then he sagged against me, insane eyes wide open, the fingers of both of his hands curling and uncurling, as if he still wanted to choke the life out of me. My sight line was directly over his shoulder, and I could see the muzzle of the Colt tenting the back of his shirt, even as a really big blood vessel emptied itself all over my left side.

  I wanted to roll out from under him, but I was suddenly exhausted, so I just lay there and let him bleed. He was still breathing, sort of, and then I realized he was actually looking at me. His eyes were a hundred years old.

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” I said. “With all of this?”

  “Duty,” he gasped. “Duty to warn.”

  “I’m sorry, man, but all they’re gonna think is that you were just nuts.”

  “No,” he wheezed. “You don’t understand.” He was going fast, but determined to tell me something. “Moira came to me.”

  My brain, even befuddled as it was, did a double take. “This wasn’t your idea?”

  “No,” he said, whispering now as his life drained out of him. “Listen. Important. Moonpool. Diversion.”

  He coughed some blood, which must have hurt like hell. I saw the muzzle of the Colt throbbing under the shirt with what was left of his heartbeat. One of his hands suddenly tightened on my neck, but he was trying to get my attention, not hurt me. “The reactors,” he said. “She wants the reactors.”

  His eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.

  I rolled free with a shudder and wiped off my hands in the pine needles.

  The moonpool was a diversion after all? Obviously Trask had given Moira access to the plant’s security computers. Was he telling me she might have access to the main reactor control system as well?

  I tried to remember what Ari had said about that—same system, or were they split? Now that the moonpool was stabilized, they’d stand down from the emergency—and then she’d strike.

  I looked over at that canal; the current was still running, and I thought I could smell diesel fuel now. Would the Helios people be expecting a second attack? I remembered the utter confusion at that university in Virginia, when they thought the shooting in the dorm was the main event and stopped looking.

  I saw something moving through the upper branches of the trees. It looked like a blue ghost. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked again. Then it penetrated: blue strobe lights from a police car, reflecting off the tree trunks. Then there were headlights pointing down the towpath. I waited until the lights were shining right over my head and raised one bloody arm. The cop car dipped to a stop and two sets of doors clunked open. I kept the arm in the air until I knew they could see me, or rather us. I heard one of them say, “Holy shit,” and then there was lots of excited radio conversation.

  “Goddamn, bud—what the hell happened here?” one of them asked, approaching warily with his weapon in hand but held down by his leg. Trask lay facedown on the ground, the barrel of the M4 still pinning him.

  I didn’t know if they were county or Southport, but I told him to contact Sergeant McMichaels at Southport and tell him they’d found Trask and Richter. Then I lay back in the needles to rest as they played flashlights around the scene. They obviously thought I was wounded, based on the fact that my entire left side was glistening with all that blood, and I wasn’t going to clarify that right now because they’d put their weapons away. Then I remembered Billy.

  “There’s another one out there,” I said. “Back along the towpath, not too far from the perimeter fence at Helios. He’ll need a meat wagon.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He shot my shepherds.”

  “He hurt bad?” the cop asked, radio microphone in hand.

  “Not bad enough,” I said.

  Once the reports went in to their dispatcher, I asked them to get a message to the FBI in Wilmington.

  “Report the same names,” I said. “Trask and Richter. Then tell them there may be a second attack, on the reactors this time.”

  The cop’s eyes went wide. “Second attack?” he said. “Whole county’s going apeshit right now. Some shit about radiation in the water supply—you saying this was deliberate?”

  I nodded and told him to ask for Special Agent Caswell at the Wilmington RA, and to make sure they knew this was a no-shitter.

  “How do you know all this, mister?”

  I pointed at the corpse of Carl Trask lying next to me. “This is the guy who did it,” I said. “But it’s not over. They must shut that plant down.”

  I could see he was hesitating.

  “Okay, look,” I said. “You got a cell phone I can use?”

  He looked at his partner, who nodded. Then he passed me his cell. He was a county deputy, as revealed by his shoulder patch. I used my right hand so as not to get blood on it.

  I called 911. The operator came on, but instead of the standard what-is-your-emergency, she simply stated that the system was in overload and that they could not take any reports right now. I asked her to patch me through to the central control room at the Helios power plant and said that this was a radiation emergency. She said they already had one of those. She sounded pretty frazzled, and I could just imagine what the 911 center looked like tonight.

  “Listen, operator,” I said, “right now you’ve got a possible radiation problem in the water system. Unless you want to see the sun rise in the west tonight, patch me through, please.”

  She had to think about that for a second or two, but then my meaning penetrated. “Right,” she said. “Patching.”

  While I waited, I tried to think of what to say that would get their undivided attention. A man finally answered the call, identified himself as the Helios control center duty engineer, and asked if I could please hold.

  “No!” I shouted, startling the two deputies. “This is Lieutenant Richter. One of the people who attacked the moonpool tonight has hacked into your reactor control system.”

  “Wha
t?” he said. “Hold on.” He sounded tired and harassed, but then he put his hand over the mouthpiece and called out to someone. Then I heard a woman’s voice say, “Give me that.” I thought I recognized that voice. Sure enough, my favorite Russian came on the line.

  “Who is this, please?”

  I told her. She started yelling at me about making infantile crank calls when responsible engineers were dealing with a genuine emergency. I knew she was going to hang up in a second, so I broke into her tirade.

  “Shut your mouth, you stupid, arrogant bitch,” I yelled. “She’s got your whole system—your reactor controls and probably all your safeguard systems.”

  “What? What?! What are you saying to me?”

  I was having trouble concentrating. “Is your RCS responding to you?” I asked.

  A split-second hesitation. “I am not permitted—”

  “Trask gave her the codes. You have an expert hacker riding your system. If you have a manual mode, now’s the time, comrade. Remember Chernobyl.” I was trying desperately to remember the word Ari had used. Run. Fall.

  No, scram.

  “Scram those reactors, before she shuts down your control room.”

  In the background I heard someone yell that Unit One was ramping to full power, uncommanded. She hung up on me. I lay back in the pine needles, suddenly conscious of the two deputies gaping at me.

  “Which way is the wind coming from right now?” I asked one of them. It took him a few seconds to realize I’d just asked him a question.

  “Uh, why?” he said.

  “Guess,” I said, as a second set of blue lights began to show through the trees, followed by the wail of an approaching ambulance.

  I let them transport me to the ER along with what was left of Carl Trask. I figured that federal agents of some variety would be along soon enough. Once the ER people cleaned me up and realized I wasn’t really injured, I was sent back out to the waiting room while they dealt with the loaded and chambered assault rifle sticking out of Trask’s back.

  It was zero dark thirty, and I was done. I didn’t want to play twenty questions with anyone, so I asked the front desk to call me a taxi, let myself out the front door, and had the guy take me to the beach house in Southport. I wanted to take a long, hot shower, but, of course, there was no water pressure. I knew that, I told myself. I had a Scotch instead, and then had an idea. This was a beach house.

  I went outside and walked across the street, onto the beach, and right into the water. What was I thinking: That water was cold as ice, but it did the job. I stood out there up to my neck, occasionally dousing my face, and grateful for the lack of any real surf. When some submerged thing bumped my right leg, I decided enough was enough. I went back inside the house, stripped down in the kitchen, had another Scotch, and fell into the bed. My hands and face still smelled of pine pitch. It was better than snake.

  Buroids were on deck bright and early the next morning. There was some heavy-duty cop-knocking on the front door, and then they waltzed right in. When they got upstairs and found me sitting up in bed, one agent told me to get up and get dressed while the other notified someone via radio that the subject had been apprehended.

  Not having had any coffee, the subject was still trying to restore color vision and coherent thought. I asked them if they had a warrant for my arrest. This produced some awkward hemming and hawing, and then verbal foot-shuffling. I told them to leave my ass alone or I’d smear them with pine pitch and get ticks in their Bucar. I also mentioned that I was probably still somewhat radioactive. That made them both back up a few steps.

  “Tell Creeps I’ll meet with him down at the deli on Main Street,” I said.

  “Why not right here?” one of them asked, not bothering to pretend not to know who Creeps was.

  “Because there’s no coffee and there’s no food. I’ll be there in an hour.”

  “Sir, we’ve been ordered to bring you in to the RA’s office.”

  I started to make inhalation noises. I held my nose, took a deep breath through my mouth, and let it out slowly. “I inhaled twenty million curies of moonpool radiation last night,” I said, still holding my nose. “I’m going to sneeze. Then I’m probably going to die, and so are you.”

  They vanished.

  Once they left, I prayed that the water was back on. It was, and I finally was able to delouse in style. If the water was still radioactive, it might actually get the pine pitch off, but I kept my mouth shut just in case. Once out of the shower I had a thought and called Mary Ellen again, this time at her office phone number.

  “I miss you,” I said. “Even if you are getting married.”

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “Are you up to your mendacious ass in deep camel dung? Are there bad guys looking for you? Are there good guys mad at you? Have you killed anyone in the past twenty-four hours?”

  “Um.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  “And that’s why I’m calling. I need a spot of information. You ever heard of a woman named Moira Maxwell? She’s an—”

  “Mad Moira? Of course I’ve heard of her. Everyone here has.”

  “What’s she famous for?”

  She told me to hang on a second. I heard her dismissing a student. Then she was back.

  “Moira Maxwell is the resident campus Bolshevik,” she said. “The UNC system is a liberal, left-leaning establishment, to say the least, but Moira Maxwell is a one-off. She makes even the professional liberals squirm. Wa-ay out there.”

  “All talk, or is she capable of being a doer?”

  Mary Ellen had to think about that. “She’s a modern revolutionary, which means she lurks on the Web instead of in dingy Parisian garrets.”

  “A virtual Bolshie.”

  “Well, by that I mean she doesn’t burn underwear down in the campus Union, or picket the dean’s office and chant the “Internationale.” Please God you’re not mixed up with that nutcase?”

  “Better that you don’t know,” I said. “Not romantic, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  She laughed. “Got that right, Mr. Investigator. Reportedly, Mad Moira doesn’t keep boyfriends.”

  She did in that detention center, I wanted to say, but held my peace. “It’s possible she’s involved in the same matter I’m looking into,” I said. “I guess what I really wanted to know is whether she has the courage of her convictions, or if the Red Square stuff is all about getting attention.”

  “She’s called Mad Moira by the faculty people who know her,” Mary Ellen said.

  “Mad as in nuts, or mad as in angry?”

  “Both,” she said. She hesitated. “These are the calls that scare me, Cam.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Stick with your plan, lovely lady. I’m probably not going to change.”

  “Nor should you,” she said. “Doing this stuff, well, that’s just you.”

  But not you, I thought sadly. “I’m still going to miss you, even when you’re Mrs. Professor.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Me, too. Good-bye, Cam. Please, keep safe.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”

  I thought I heard a small laugh, but then she was gone.

  Creeps and Missed-it Mary came through the deli’s doors like Batman and Robin, stopping most of the subdued conversations among the locals, who had been discussing last night’s atomic panic. They were both dressed up in metallic-looking Bureau suits, and they appeared very official indeed. They saw me and walked over to my table, while the locals adjusted their places as if they anticipated gunplay or some other drama. I’d stuffed two, count ’em, two apricot Danish down my gullet, along with enough coffee to restore both stereo vision and sequential sentences. I told them the Danish were terrific, and suggested they get themselves some coffee and then we could talk.

  “Your Bureau is incredibly busy this morning, Mr. Richter,” Creeps said, slipping off his sunglasses. He looked a little ragged around the edges. Missed-it nodded emp
hatically. Very busy, yes, sir, you’re certainly right about that.

  “You have breakfast yet, Special Agents?”

  Mary looked over at Creeps. He said no, and then Mary said no.

  “The earth will no doubt continue to rotate if you do, so: I say again—why don’t you guys go get some coffee and Danish, come back to the table, and we’ll talk like civilized people often do.”

  They stared at me for a moment and then, amazingly, did what I suggested.

  Once they were seated, I asked them if everything was reasonably secure out at Helios. Creeps said yes; they’d isolated the moonpool, and the engineers had taken the reactors into local control and shut them both down before there were any further excursions.

  “Excursions?” I asked.

  “Nuke-speak,” Creeps said. “When the power levels in the reactor rise or fall out of ordered limits.”

  “Or, in other words, when the engineers no longer have control of the reactors.”

  “Just so.” He looked around nervously to see if the civilians were listening. They were, raptly.

  “And that actually happened?”

  “I believe so, yes. Fortunately, the, um, individual who penetrated the control network did not know what she was doing. The danger was that she had the network, and the engineers in the control room did not.”

  “Did radioactive water get into the county water system?”

  Creeps was lifting his coffee cup to his mouth when I asked that question. He stopped. I admired his self-control in not looking down into the cup. Then he went ahead and took a sip. Missed-it was looking at her cup as if she had seen a roach operating at periscope depth, but when Creeps took a sip, she dutifully did, too. They’re big on loyalty in our Bureau.

  “It got out of the plant and all the way to the first water tower, about two miles away. The system is engineered to recognize back-pressure in the lines, and the primary supply valves shut themselves. When the back-pressure continued to build up, relief valves lifted and the water was diverted out onto the grounds of the water tower.”