Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “In and out in five,” Billy said. “Ten at the most. We’re just sending a message tonight.”

  “Yessir, just a righteous message,” Terry agreed.

  And sometimes Billy thought that his friend was just a few bricks short of a load. But he was loyal.

  They took a crowbar and a five-pound sledgehammer from the trunk, and moving silently went to the glass door which luck would have it was not locked, something that surprised them. But then scientists had the reputation of being absentminded.

  Dr. Larsen’s office was in the west corner of the ground floor, but her lab and wave tank, where they figured they could cause the most damage in the shortest amount of time, took up most of the basement. Places like this were always controlled by a computer or computers, easy targets.

  The main hall was deserted, all the office doors closed, only the corridor lights showing. They’d brought balaclavas just in case they ran into someone, and they pulled them on as they started down the stairs. Terry was a short, but stocky ordinary-looking guy, but Billy looked like a linebacker, with broad shoulders and a thick, beefy neck, and a full head of thick blond hair that since the service he’d kept long as a source of pride. But it was dead giveaway in operations like these, so whenever possible he went in with at least a lid.

  A long unadorned corridor, dimly lit, ran the length of the basement. Doors with frosted glass panels lined the hall, some marked only with numbers, but near the end, one was marked DR. EVELYN LARSEN, NOAA.

  They stopped and Billy put his ear to the door to listen. Some machinery was running inside, barely audible, but he couldn’t hear anyone talking or moving around and he looked over his shoulder and gave Terry a nod.

  “In and out in five.”

  “Righteous.”

  For just an instant Billy wanted to stop and ask his friend what he thought God was all about, at least in terms of what they’d been doing with the abortion clinics and now this. But he let it go and tried the door, which was unlocked. Stupid, the fleeting thought crossed his mind, but then he pushed the door open and went inside.

  The lab was large, at least big enough for a dozen or more people to work at what were computer stations each at the heads of or in the middle of benches on which sat a myriad of strange-looking equipment, some of it mechanical, but most of it electrical or electronic, or in three cases on small tables in the middle of the tiled floor in front of large pieces of complicated equipment that rose to the ceiling. At the far end of the room, which measured at least one hundred feet in length, a large plate-glass window looked out on the wave pool.

  “The computers first,” Billy said, and he started forward, when a young woman seated at one of the terminals halfway across the room suddenly jumped up. He’d completely missed her.

  “Who are you?” the woman said, a girl actually in Billy’s estimation. Early twenties at the most.

  “We’re here to set things right, in the Lord’s name, darlin’,” Billy said, striding directly toward her.

  But she stood there, rooted like a deer in the middle of a highway, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, until at the last moment she shrieked something, turned on her heel, and sprinted to the end of the room and out a door Billy hadn’t noticed into the wave pool room.

  His military career and later his abortion clinic operations had taught him to beware of loose ends that could unravel the most carefully laid plan. The young woman surely fit that bill, but she stopped at the edge of the wave pool and looked through the window at him. Stared at him, and he had to sort of admire her courage, stupid or not.

  He took a step forward, raising the sledgehammer, but she didn’t budge. It was as if she was taking pictures of him, and he was of a mind to say the hell with the lab and go after her. Girls like that needed lessons in humility; it’s what his dad had tried to teach his mother.

  But something crashed behind him, and he turned in time to see Terry swing his crowbar into a computer CPU sitting on the floor beneath its station, then giggle like a girl. When he turned back, the young woman at the side of the wave pool was gone.

  Terry smashed another computer, and Billy turned to his part of the work. “In and out in five,” he said.

  “Righteous,” Terry agreed.

  But in Billy’s mind it surely could have been more than righteous, it would have been fine to lay his hands on the young woman.

  THIRTY-ONE

  McGarvey accompanied Gail back down to Hutchinson Island for the simple fact that there was little else he could do in Washington until Otto and Yablonski came up with an ID on the contractor. But so far both men had drawn blanks.

  “If we can get back inside the South Service Building, I want to take a look at the rest of the recordings for that day,” she’d said. “Larry told me that the feeds from some of the cameras came up blank, on some sort of a loop that just showed the same frame over and over again.”

  “Maybe he missed one,” McGarvey suggested.

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  They rented a car at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and as they came to the south bridge over to Hutchinson Island, a few miles from the power plant, they encountered the first of the media trucks with satellite dishes on the roofs. “Like hyenas to a fresh kill,” Gail said.

  “They’re doing their jobs,” McGarvey said, though he’d never had any particular fondness for newspeople, especially not after he’d faced the Senate when he’d been nominated as director of the CIA.

  “They did a number on my father when he was killed,” Gail said bitterly. “Called him a misplaced cop with a hero complex and a pathological need for recognition that could have got some innocent people hurt.”

  “I know. I read the stories.”

  Gail glanced at him, a hurt look on her face. “They were damned unfair. And I’m next, only I don’t understand why.”

  “For the most part they’re just trying to figure out whatever it is they’re covering, so that they can explain it to their audience.”

  “In an ideal world I might believe you, Kirk. But a lot of these people are less interested in the truth than they are about increasing their fame, so they can demand bigger salaries.”

  But McGarvey had wanted to believe differently after the storm of media coverage when his wife and daughter had been slaughtered by an IED at Arlington Cemetery, because he didn’t want to vent his rage on the press. They had been insensitive, but they had not pulled the trigger. The deaths were not their fault. It was like apologizing for being Americans after 9/11. No, the cause had been radical terrorist hatreds under the guise of the Islamic jihad, which was supposed to spread the true faith. And in turn it was really about power; who had it and who wanted to take it from them.

  “Sensationalism,” McGarvey said, seeing her point.

  “Voyeurism,” she said. “People driving past a bad accident and slowing down so they can see the blood and gore. There but for the grace of God, go I.”

  “Worrying about it isn’t going to help our investigation,” McGarvey said, and he felt like a hypocrite, because that’s exactly how he had operated throughout his career. When he was in the field he worried about everything; in the end it was oftentimes the minor, overlooked detail that cost the agent his or her life.

  And across the bridge and onto the island when they were stopped by the first Army National Guard checkpoint, beyond which they could see the fringes of the crowd lining A1A the last five miles to the power plant, his gut reaction was that the media was being manipulated by the Reverend Jerry Schlagel. Many of the people streaming past the checkpoint carried signs with the theme: LEAVE GOD ’ S WORK TO GOD!

  McGarvey powered down the window and he and Gail held up their NNSA identity cards for the armed solider. “What’s that all about?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” the soldier said. “They started showing up around midnight, and we were ordered to let them through.”

  A National Guard lieutenant dressed in B
DUs came over and glanced at the ID cards. “Can you tell us what happened?” he asked. He looked a little green.

  “We’re working on it,” McGarvey said.

  “Any TV people up there?” Gail asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. From all over the place. England, Germany, even Japan. It’s like a rock concert.”

  There was no need in McGarvey’s mind to ask who the star would be. “How far out is the perimeter?”

  “Post One is five hundred meters, sir. But you’ll want to drive up to the staging area just outside the main gate. The on-site commander is up there along with a first aid station and decontamination tent.”

  “How about A1A north?”

  “It’s closed.”

  “Can we get inside the South Service Building?” McGarvey asked.

  “I don’t know, sir. But they’ve already started evaluation work, and some cleanup. We’ve been told that it’s nowhere near as bad as it could have been.”

  “Call ahead and let them know we’re on the way,” McGarvey said

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said and he waved them through.

  * * *

  Driving the five miles north they passed a nearly continuous mob heading toward the power plant. Most of the people were dressed plainly in jeans or shorts, some with baseball caps, others with straw hats; men and women of all ages, children, some in their mothers’ arms, some in strollers, even buggies, and tiny carriages that were towed by bicycles. None of them drove, except for the few bikes, all of them were on foot, and nearly everyone carried backpacks or big shoulder bags, as if they planned on staying at least overnight, and many of them carried the God signs.

  “There has to be twenty thousand people here,” McGarvey said.

  “Probably more,” Gail said. “But look at their faces. They’re happy.”

  “These have to be Schlagel’s people. Looks like they’re going to a tent revival meeting.”

  “Yeah, but why, Kirk?” Gail asked. “What’s the point of calling his flock to a sabotaged nuclear power plant?”

  A pair of National Guard Humvees came up the highway and McGarvey had to move over to let them pass. The crowds were spilling out on to the roadway and he had to be careful not to run over anyone, until finally the highway was completely blocked and he had to slow to a crawl, the mob parting in front and surging back behind. It was like being in the middle of a low fog, nothing visible except overhead, until in the distance, finally, the plant’s containment domes came into sight.

  Gail sat forward. “They’ve already started to cap the north dome,” she said.

  A wall of what at this distance looked like large concrete panels rose nearly halfway to the top of the damaged containment dome. At least three large cranes surrounded the perimeter and as they continued north one of the cranes slowly lowered another concrete slab in place. They could see scaffolding, but they were still too far to see the workmen.

  The outer perimeter of Post One was a hundred yards farther, and here the big crowd was spreading out on both sides of the road, some of the people all the way down on the beach, others on the fringes of a swampy area to the west. A pair of National Guard trucks was set up as a negotiable barrier, the first one parked halfway across the road from the right, and the other a few yards away parked halfway across the road from the left. In order to pass the barrier it was necessary to drive around the first truck, then make a sharp turn to the right to get past the second truck. None of the mob was being allowed beyond the barrier. National Guard troops formed a line from the water’s edge to the swamp. And for now, at least, it seemed as if the people were content to come this far and stop, as if they were waiting for something to happen.

  McGarvey pulled up at the barrier and he and Gail showed their IDs to a nervous first lieutenant.

  “Colonel Scofield is expecting you,” he said. “The CP is in the first trailer.”

  A lot of television vans had been allowed through and they were parked on either side of the road, nearly all the way up to the main gate area, where the command post trailer was parked. Several tents had been set up on either side of the highway, and just now there seemed to be a lot of activity inside the main gate. Even from here McGarvey could see that people coming out of the South Service Building were wearing bright silver hazmat suits, bulky hoods covering their heads. The building was evidently still hot.

  “Where do we park?” McGarvey asked.

  “This side of the CP,” the lieutenant said. “You’ll need to be briefed before you’ll be allowed to go any farther.” He stepped aside and waved McGarvey through.

  A number of people in the crowd were watching them. They were not smiling.

  McGarvey drove slowly through the barrier. “They’re probably blaming us for all this.”

  “Haven’t you seen Schlagel on TV?” Gail asked. “He’s telling his flock that nuclear power plants are like having atomic bombs in your backyards. According to him it’s just a matter of time before something will happen at every nuclear facility. We’re playing with something that belongs only to God.”

  “Looks like they’re buying the message.”

  “Not only his congregation is buying it, lots of other people are coming around to his message, pointing at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. No one wants something like that in their backyard, and there’s a hundred-plus nuclear plants in the U.S. with plans for maybe three dozen more.”

  McGarvey had a sudden, vicious thought. “Does Schlagel have any money? Serious money?”

  Gail gave him an odd look. “He’s raking in plenty from his ministry and television and radio stations. He’s at least a multimillionaire. Why?”

  “He wants to run for president.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “He needs a cause, and what better than playing into the people’s fear of nukes?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “I think it’s worth looking into,” McGarvey said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The assignments had finally begun to lose their luster for Brian DeCamp. Wolfhardt showing up in Nice had been a stark reminder of how fragile his life was — had always been. In general, assassins did not live to retirement age, a fact that loomed large in his mind as he sat sipping an aquavit with a very good espresso at the sidewalk café in front of the Grand Hotel.

  Oslo’s fall weather was mild, though on the cool side compared to southern France, and the long-range forecast for the December Nobel Prize week was for continued moderate temperatures. It would make for an easier hit, though a heavy snowstorm, just like an overcast night or a fogbound morning, would help mask an escape.

  But this was the situation he would have to deal with, and on reflection he remembered worse conditions from which he’d walked away, and coming here to spend a couple of days in Oslo as an ordinary tourist under false papers was the first step of four: the plan, the equipment, the hit, and the following ninety minutes, which always were the most crucial. If you weren’t out of the immediate detection and arrest zone by then, it meant that the authorities probably had the upper hand and the odds against escape began to rise exponentially.

  As he saw it now after touring the downtown area, there were three possibilities. The first was here at the Grand Hotel where he had booked a standard room. The Nobel Prize recipients and their guests and most of the attending dignitaries always stayed here, which opened a host of possibilities, all of them involving either the import of a silenced weapon to Norway, or a purchase here. The former, he’d concluded from the start, would present the smallest risk of detection. Unlike the U.S. and most of Europe, especially Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries had reacted the least to the attacks of 9/11, so getting a disassembled pistol, suppressor, and ammunition disguised in some way in his checked on luggage would be fairly straightforward. It was obvious that he wasn’t a Muslim, and beyond that consideration the Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians had little interest.

  So finding what suite she was staying in, arranging for a room
key, slipping inside in the middle of the night and killing her, was the first and simplest plan, especially if any of Schlagel’s people were staying at the Grand.

  The second would be a long-range shot either just before or immediately following the ceremony at the Radhuset, city hall, a few blocks from the harbor. The crowds would be large, though not very noisy according to what he’d read and learned from talking to people yesterday and today. But again Schlagel’s people would be on site, making their noises. Walking through the hall and across the broad boulevard to the harbor, he’d found no suitable shooting position from which blame could be directed toward the reverend’s crazies. So again he considered the possibilities of loading only two rounds into an untraceable silenced pistol, taking his shots from inside the crowd, immediately dropping the weapon in the middle of Schlagel’s group, and then melting away as the crowd began to react.

  And the third, and in many respects the least problematic, would be making the hit while she took a horse-driven carriage tour of Oslo’s old town. It would take the importation of a silenced long gun, something only slightly more difficult than a pistol, and finding the right spot from a rooftop, hotel room, or apartment somewhere along the route of her tour.

  The next consideration was his appearance. His disguise at Hutchinson Island had been slight, consisting mostly of a change in hairstyle and color, tinted contact lenses, lifts in his shoes, and a studied shift in his demeanor — a different walk, a different tilt of his head, downcast eyes, compressed lips. But on the off chance that photographs had been taken from the power plant’s security cameras, or a computer-assisted likeness of his face had been distributed to bodyguards assigned to Dr. Larsen, or to the Norwegian federal security police, he would need to do more this time. A wig, different clothing, a different eye color, different complexion, possibly even some minor plastic surgery, though he wasn’t sure that would be necessary because when he came back here he certainly wouldn’t be announcing his presence. He would remain in the background, anonymous in the polite Norwegian crowds.