Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  And for some reason just now he thought about Martine’s flat bottom and knobby knees, and he looked away momentarily to watch the orderly traffic moving along the broad, cobblestoned Karl Johansgate, and the people on foot. The Norwegians were an orderly people. But hardy for all of that because of the northern climate, and a very long history of war, mostly with Sweden against the Russians. And he was inestimably sad for just that moment, thinking that he might never see her again, because of Gunther Wolfhardt and the German’s principal. And that led to an instant of intense hate, so that when the waiter came to ask if he would like another espresso or aquavit, DeCamp had to make a conscious effort of will to force a pleasant smile and look up.

  “No, thank you. Just the check, please.”

  The waiter handed him the bill, and DeCamp laid an American twenty dollar bill on the table, and got up, and headed the few blocks past the parliament building and city park back to the Radhuset for a final look before he returned to his pied-à-terre in Paris to make his final preparations and wait until it was time to strike.

  * * *

  That early evening, his work done, DeCamp was sitting at the bar drinking a dark Martini & Rossi with an orange peel when he happened to glance up at the television tuned to CNN, in Norwegian but with an English crawl at the bottom of the screen. The Princeton laboratory of Nobel Prize winner Dr. Evelyn Larsen had been vandalized in the early morning hours. There were no injuries, though one of the laboratory assistants had witnessed the attack by two men armed with metal bars and sledgehammers.

  And he came to the same conclusion that the news reader suggested: The attack must have been inspired by the Reverend Jerimiah Schlagel’s recent sermons against what he called, “Dr. Larsen’s God Project — an abomination against the Almighty’s plan for us all.”

  Schlagel’s denial came from his pulpit in McPherson, but DeCamp had to smile inwardly. Gunther Wolfhardt knew what he was doing.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Everything was the same and yet eerily different as McGarvey parked at the end of a row of military and civilian vehicles, and as he and Gail got out of the rental car she said so. They had driven into a war zone, and across the street and through the main gates the damaged containment dome loomed up like a mushroom cloud after an atomic explosion. The operators in the cabs of the three giant cranes lifting concrete slabs in place wore hazmat suits, as did the workmen on the scaffolding, who were careful to keep the rising concrete wall between them and the dome as they troweled mortar into the joints.

  Other people dressed in hazmat suits came and went from the South Service Building, which just now seemed to be a beehive of activity. The thickness of the building’s north wall had apparently taken the brunt of the radioactive steam, but most of the outflow had blown directly out to sea.

  Bob Townsend and Chris Strasser, dressed in spotless white coveralls, came out of the decontamination tent and walked over to the Command Post trailer, their hair wet and their faces red. Neither of them looked happy, but when they spotted McGarvey and Gail coming along the road they held up.

  “What are you two doing here?” the plant manager asked, his mood and manner brusque. He had a lot on his mind; it was his power station on his watch that had been damaged. And it was obvious that he was placing a lot of the blame on Gail’s shoulders.

  “We’d like to get up to security and pull out the digital records from the surveillance cameras,” she said.

  “You can look at them, but nothing’s coming out of there until we’ve finished the decontamination process,” Strasser said. “We’ll have to tear down every piece of equipment, strip the ceilings and walls and floors, everything, before we can start to put the place back together and get reactor one online.”

  “That’ll take at least a year,” Townsend said.

  “How about the damaged reactor?” McGarvey asked.

  “It’ll never come online,” Townsend said. “But it could have been a hell of a lot worse if you and your people hadn’t shown up. They were heroes. You were.”

  “We were doing our jobs,” McGarvey said, his gut tightening. “But this scenario wasn’t in the playbook, so instead of beating up on anybody, we’ll find out who did it and why, so just maybe we’ll have a shot at preventing a next time.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “A few.”

  “Is there electricity in the building?” Gail asked. “We’ll need it to power up one of the computers and send whatever images we come up with back to Washington.”

  “Portable generators,” Strasser said disgustedly. “But the hard disks may have been fried, and even if they weren’t it’s possible that the digital records were corrupted.”

  “How bad is it?”

  “Better than we expected, less than one hundredth of a sievert per hour,” Strasser said. “Less inside the suits, of course, but we’re limiting exposure to four hours per shift just to be on the safe side. There was a pretty strong electromagnetic pulse — that was the blue tinge we saw from the air — which may have caused some damage to the data circuits. We just don’t know yet. Right now our primary concern is to clean up so that we can put our crews in there to rebuild everything.”

  “Do we need to be briefed before we go inside?” McGarvey asked.

  “Essentially it’s don’t take your suit off for any reason, don’t eat or drink anything inside the building, no souvenirs, stay no more than four hours, and if you tear a hole in your suit, no matter how small, get the hell out of there on the double. There’s a pretty good team of National Guard people helping ours in the tent, so just do what they tell you. Suits are inside.”

  “What about the bodies?” Gail asked.

  “They’ve been buried,” Townsend said, his jaw tight.

  “Where?”

  “Nevada.”

  * * *

  The hazmat suits were bright reflective silver, large clear Lexan faceplates giving them nearly unrestricted vision straight forward and ninety degrees to either side, but they were hot and the bottled air was so dry it parched their mouths and throats after the first five minutes.

  They walked across the street through the main gate and into the parking lot. Several cars had been left behind, including, McGarvey presumed, the rental car Eve Larsen had used. He’d promised her that if it wasn’t glowing in the dark she could come back and get it, but all the cars here would be transported out and buried with the other nuclear waste.

  Gail pointed to a Volvo convertible. “If I stop payments do you suppose the repo man will take it?” she shouted.

  “Yours?”

  “Yeah, I bought it two months ago. Hell of a waste.”

  Two large semis were backed up to the front entrance, and workmen were trundling out irradiated material from inside the building: desks, chairs, lockers from the break area, coveralls and hardhats, doors, windows, light fixtures, and acoustical ceiling tiles, plus the monitors and panel electronics from the control room.

  The cleanup crews hadn’t started on the second floor yet, but when they did the entire place would be stripped bare so the reconstruction could begin if the basic structure was radiation free. Otherwise the entire building would have to be razed.

  Just inside the entry hall they stopped at the foot of the stairs, and Gail shook her head. “They’ll never put this place back together.”

  “They’re trying to save money,” McGarvey told her.

  “Shutting down has put a huge strain on the state’s energy needs.”

  “It could have been worse.”

  “You’ve already said so, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Gail said. “When they start to pass out the blame, a ton of it will come my way, which I don’t give a damn about. But what frosts me is that they’ll stay so shortsighted they won’t beef up security the way they know they should.”

  And she was right, of course, McGarvey thought. Nothing much had been done so far to harden security procedures at the other 103 nuclear plants, except to
temporarily cancel public tours. Homeland Security was still looking for attacks from the sky. Airliners were not allowed to fly through exclusion zones around any nuclear facility.

  But increased security measures were expensive. And in these troubled times money was tight.

  Upstairs they went down the corridor to the blasted-out observation window. The glass had been swept up and the blood cleaned from the floor and wall, nevertheless they walked with care lest they step on a stray shard and cut a hole in their booties.

  The bodies had been removed from the corridor as well as from the control room below where workers were busy disassembling the control panels for both reactors and carting them away. The supervisor’s desk and the two control consoles had already been removed and Gail shivered.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “It never does from the outside looking in,” McGarvey told her, and she turned to look at him.

  “It makes sense to someone?”

  McGarvey nodded, the gesture mostly lost inside the hood. “It’s up to us to find out who,” he shouted.

  “Does it always work that way for you?”

  McGarvey felt a short, sharp stab of pain for what he had lost and how he had lost it. But in the end he had found the who and the why. “Yes,” he told her.

  She read something of that from the expression on his face. “Let’s get on with it,” she said. She glanced down at the work being done in what was left of the control room and then headed back down the corridor to the security suite.

  * * *

  Nothing seemed to have been disturbed in Gail’s or Wager’s offices, her purse was where she had left it behind her desk and Wager’s jacket was still draped over his chair. Everything here would eventually wind up in a nuclear waste dump somewhere.

  The light switches worked, and she powered up the computer in the monitoring room, but it wouldn’t boot up, and neither would any of the monitors that had displayed the closed-circuit television images from around the power plant.

  “Your engineer was right, the computers are fried,” McGarvey said.

  “It means even if the DVDs stayed intact we have no way of accessing any of them, unless we come back with a laptop,” Gail said bitterly. “This was a wasted effort.”

  “It was worth the try,” McGarvey said, just as disappointed as she was.

  Gail walked back out to her office and took a photograph out of the wallet in her purse.

  “No souvenirs,” McGarvey warned her.

  “This is my favorite picture of my father,” Gail said. “I just wanted a last look.” She put the photo and wallet back in her purse and went back downstairs and outside with McGarvey.

  The noise of the angry crowd that was pressing its way past the barricades hit them at once. People were chanting, “God’s work is for God.”

  At least a dozen TV broadcast trucks had moved up as well, nearly to the command post trailer, and the cameras and microphones were trained on Reverend Schlagel, who stood in the bed of a pickup truck, preaching to the crowd with a bullhorn.

  “Nuclear energy is death!” he shouted. “God’s work. He created the sun and the stars — nuclear furnaces — and men whose only faith is technology have presumed to duplicate His work.”

  “No! No! No!” the crowd screamed.

  “What will happen at the one hundred and three remaining nuclear hellholes in operation in this country alone? More accidents? More disasters? More death and destruction? People displaced from their homes by rude beasts slinking out of Bethlehem?”

  In just a few minutes he had whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

  He pointed over his shoulder at the heavily damaged containment dome. “The devil’s handiwork. Is this what you want in your backyard? The sure and certain sign of the evil that walks the earth?”

  “No! No! No!”

  He gestured toward the National Guard troops standing by at the fringes of the crowd. “They couldn’t even protect this one hellish installation. Should the idolaters of technology, the shortsighted men and women in our nation’s capital, the fat cats at companies like Westinghouse and Mitsubishi whose only interest is that profits be allowed to build even more insults to God Almighty’s mysterious purpose for us? Construction of more than thirty of them will start this year unless we stop them. Will we allow this to happen?”

  “No! No! No!” The crowd chanted. “God’s work is for God!”

  “Do you think they’ll try to get inside the plant?” Gail asked. None of Schilling’s security people had come back to work yet, and even with the National Guard standing by she felt vulnerable.

  “Schlagel’s not that stupid,” McGarvey said, leaning closer so that she could hear him over the roar of the crowd. “He’s here to make his point.”

  “And he’s doing a fine job of it.”

  * * *

  Otto called McGarvey’s cell phone. “Oh, wow, Mac, they hit Dr. Larsen’s Princeton lab in the middle of the night. Trashed the place.”

  Listening to the crowd it came as no surprise. “Anyone hurt?”

  “No. Two guys, in and out in under ten minutes. Wiped out a bunch of computers and other equipment. One of the techies was there but she managed to stay out of their way.”

  “Descriptions?”

  “Nada.”

  “What about Eve?”

  “She and Dr. Price went out to take a look at their oil platform.”

  “Has she been informed?”

  “Presumably,” Otto said. “When are you coming back?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Talk to you in the morning.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Eve arrived with Don Price on campus that evening after missing their connection in Atlanta where they’d spent an anxious few hours in the terminal on the phone with Lisa and the rest of the team. The FBI had sent a couple of agents to the airport to ask a few questions, and provide a little security until she got on the plane, though no one was suggesting that Eve’s safety was in any doubt.

  They’d cabbed it in from the airport, and standing in the doorway to her laboratory, surrounded by campus security, Princeton cops and the FBI, and her techies, Lisa on one side and Don on the other, Eve was all but overwhelmed at first by the destruction. Someone had invaded her personal space with violence and she felt physically ill, almost the same as when one of her first papers for publication had failed a peer review — for being too fringe, in the words of one of the docs who thought she was a little nutso, in addition to being a female in a man’s profession.

  Lisa was physically okay, but she’d been traumatized witnessing the attack. “It made no sense,” she’d said first thing. “I mean why smash up some computers? We’ll pull the hard drives and retrieve the data. Maybe lose a half day, tops. Were they dumb, or what?”

  But she’d been shaking and Eve had held her for a long moment. “Dumb.”

  Aldo Bertonelli, the FBI special agent in charge from the Bureau’s Trenton office, was pleasant enough except he wanted only to ask questions but not give any answers. “I’d like you to take an inventory, if you would, Doctor.”

  Eve wasn’t sure that she understood him. “Nothing’s going to be missing,” she said. “They weren’t here to steal anything from us. Hell, they could have asked and we would have shared any of the data they wanted.” She looked at the mess. “They came here to send us — send me — a message.”

  “And what message would that be?”

  “They call this the God Project.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Schlagel,” Eve said.

  Bertonelli shrugged. “It’s a theory, but have you received any threatening phone calls, e-mails, or text messages that would lead you to believe such thing?”

  “Bloody hell,” Eve said half under her breath. “Do you watch television at all, Agent Bertonelli? The son of a bitch is gunning for me, and he’s all but ordered his crazies to pull the trigger.”

  “He’s denied any involvement, Do
ctor.”

  “Of course he has,” Eve said, disgusted, and she was finished with the authorities, who in her estimation spent more of their time covering their own asses than actually doing real investigative work when sensitive issues were involved.

  When Bertonelli and the others had gone, she shared her opinion with Don, who disagreed. “They’re doing their jobs, and you have to cut them some slack.”

  “Like you did with Defloria about Vanessa?” she shot back, knowing they were two different things, not related to each other, and she immediately apologized. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Now that the police had finished their investigation, taking photographs, presumably looking for fingerprints or DNA evidence, Lisa and the others had started the data retrieval and cleanup work, which would be finished by morning.

  “From their standpoint it might,” Don said, meaning, of course, Schlagel and his people.

  But Eve had been looking at her techies, especially Lisa, and she was startled, almost as if she’d seen a vision of all of them lying in bloody heaps, smashed like their equipment. Only humans had no hard drives to retrieve, and she was frightened.

  “I feel like we’re in the Dark Ages,” she said. “The Inquisition.”

  “It’ll pass,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  Don nodded and smiled. “You bet,” he said, and he hugged her.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It was late by the time they got back to Washington and cabbed it to McGarvey’s small third-floor apartment in Georgetown. The front bowed windows of the brownstone looked down on Rock Creek, and last fall the changing leaves had been restful for his nerves, which at that point had still been shattered.

  “Nice view,” Gail said putting down her bag.

  “When you have the time to look,” he said. “Take the bedroom, I’ll sleep out here.”