It was his turn to blink. “Double-oh-jay,” I repeated. “Obstruction of Justice, with a capital J in their case. Say: ‘I believe.’ ”
He laughed then, a great big gut-trouncing bellow of a laugh that had people in the lounge looking over at us.
“I believe,” he said, still chuckling. Then his face sobered up again. “Look,” he continued. “The feds are cranking up a circus and a half over this incident. A joint NRC-FBI team is going to be arriving at the plant first thing tomorrow morning. We, and by ‘we’ I mean reps from the company, the plant operators, various contractors, and nuclear safety engineers, are going to demonstrate that there’s no way hot water got out of that plant in a form that could be consumed. It’ll take a day or so, maybe longer, but then they’re going to go away and look for some other explanation.”
“So what is it you would want me and my people to do?”
“You want to find out what happened to Ms. Gardner?” he asked. “As opposed to, say, finding grounds for some kind of lawsuit?”
That pissed me off. It must have shown in my face because he sat back in his chair and raised his hand defensively.
“Okay,” he said. “That was out of line.” He hesitated. “Look, I came to you because of some things the FBI people said about you. That you were known to them and that you played by your own rules. That you were an outsider, and the fact that Allison Gardner was from your organization was ringing bells for them.” Another pause. “I think I need someone like you, but not until the feds back out.”
“Because there is a way that hot water could escape from your plant? Is that it?”
He took a deep breath. He looked like a man who was about to take a significant risk. “Possibly,” he said, “but not from the reactors, per se. The energy side, I mean. And it would require some inside help.”
“Okay, then where?”
“From the moonpool,” he said.
I leaned back in my chair, looked around for the waiter, and signaled for another round and a switch to Scotch for me. I had no idea what a moonpool was, but his other implication was clear. He was wondering if he might not have himself a bad guy in his favorite nuclear power station. I knew nothing about the technical side of a nuclear power plant, but I was aware that the entire industry lived life on a political and environmental knife-edge, where the least mistake could cost a power company tens of millions. Which is probably why he was talking to me: He wanted to scope out any such problem before the feds came to the same conclusion and swarmed back to shut the place down.
“Let’s get two things straight right away,” I said. “ If I agree to help you, and I haven’t decided that yet, and we uncover some felonious shit, said shit gets handed over to the appropriate federal authorities at once.”
“Of course,” he said. “Especially if there’s a terrorist angle to this.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, although now that I thought of it, it should have.
“And second?” he asked.
“And second, my concern is not for your power station. Allie Gardner was a close friend and associate. She was good troops and a stand-up cop in her day. She got a raw deal from two serial-asshole husbands, and this was not what should have happened to her. Okay?”
“Got it,” he said.
I theorized that since Allie hadn’t been doing anything remotely related to the Helios power station, what had happened to her had probably been a random event. He nodded, but didn’t actually say anything.
“So: What’s a moonpool?”
“It’s an old engineer’s slang term for the spent fuel storage pool in a nuclear power plant. A power reactor doesn’t consume all of its fuel before the uranium bundles become inefficient, so we regularly remove spent fuel elements and transfer them to a deep pool within a containment structure for storage. Right after a refueling event, the rods are really hot, physically and radiation-wise, and they make the water glow this incredible, otherworldly blue color. Moonpool.”
“And this water is radioactive?”
“You wouldn’t want to swim in it,” he said. “It’s not so much that the water is radioactive as that the spent fuel assemblies are. Now, if one or more of those assemblies is a leaker, and particles of radioactive material get loose in the water, then the water is, for all practical purposes, radioactive.”
“But they’re not supposed to be leaking, right?”
He shrugged. “Metallurgy mutates in the presence of an ongoing, long-term fission reaction. The actual uranium fuel is cladded, but the fission reaction can sometimes burn holes or weak spots in the cladding. That’s why the moonpool is forty-five feet deep.”
“And if they do leak, the water could be hot enough to do the kind of damage the ME was talking about?”
“Not if you’re just standing next to the moonpool. But if you ingested it? Oh, yes, easily.”
“Look, Ari,” I said. “You don’t know me or my people. None of us is qualified to snoop around a nuclear power plant, and with the feds in it, we’d inevitably bump up against each other. In my experience, they don’t play well with others. I think we’re gonna pass.”
He nodded. He was visibly disappointed, but perhaps not surprised. “Okay,” he said. “It was worth a shot. I can tell you that you may never find out what happened to your associate, though.”
“Meaning the feds’ll clamp a lid on this and weld it shut?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ll know that’s what’s happening when a special agent brings you some security forms to sign, where you promise not to divulge any piece of this in the interests of national security, homeland defense, and apple pie.”
“What if I decide to just decline to sign?”
He smiled at me. “You’re licensed by the state government, right?” he said. “Who do you think they check with before issuing those kinds of licenses?”
Point taken, I thought. “What exactly would you want us to do?”
“Let’s wait for the current shitstorm to settle down,” he said. “Then let’s talk again.”
I walked Ari out to his car, said good night, had dinner, and then went for a stroll down the riverwalk toward the center of town. The evening was cool and clear, and the boardwalk was empty. The Cape Fear River was running strong as the tide went out, tugging audibly at pilings and coiling up clumps of trash in small whirlpools along the banks. The buoys out in the channel leaned toward the Atlantic Ocean as if they wanted to escape. The few tourist joints down at the base of Market Street still operating during the off-season were doing a desultory business, with overdressed seating hostesses standing by their patio rostrums, smiling longingly at me as I ambled past all those empty al fresco tables.
I became aware of the three guys who had started following me. They’d appeared in my wake about the time I passed the Cape Fear Serpentarium. Since I couldn’t be sure they were following me and not just out for an after-dinner walk of their own, I turned left into the next street and walked uphill, away from the river. At the next corner I turned left again onto Front Street and headed back toward the center of the tourist district. They kept going along the riverwalk and went out of sight when I made that left on Front. I went four or five blocks, made one more left, and walked back down toward the river, where, lo and behold, there they were again, this time standing on the boardwalk, patently admiring the battleship across the river. They were fit men, dressed in khaki trousers, ball caps, sneakers, and dark windbreakers. They looked like a security detail whose protectee had dismissed them for the night. Or maybe not.
I was on the diagonal corner from them when I got to Water Street. I thought about going over to them and commenting on the weather, but then decided to go on back to the hotel, which was only three blocks away. I’d have to cross one relatively dark parking lot and then walk up the flood ramp in front of the lobby, but there were people up there, and it didn’t look like a promising place for a mugging. When I went through the hotel doors and glanced back, I didn’t see anyone fo
llowing me. Okay, too many late-night TV movies. I stopped at the lobby PC to check my e-mail, then went upstairs.
The corridor on my floor was empty and quiet. There was a room service tray with dirty dishes in front of the suite diagonally across from mine, but no other signs that there were humans about. I keyed open my door, flipped on the light.
And there they were.
One was standing by the window with his back to me, looking out at the river. A second was sitting at the desk chair, facing me, and holding a large black semiautomatic out at arm’s length, pointed at my stomach. The third, older than the other two, was sitting in the other chair, hands behind his head, and grinning at the expression on my face. I stopped short, keeping the door open, mentally kicking myself for not having the shepherds with me.
“Oh, shut the damn door, Lieutenant,” the older one said. “This is just a social call.”
I thought about shutting it and running, but had not yet looked at the fire escape card to see where the stairs were. There was also the wee matter of that. 45 looking right at me.
Some social call. The young guy with the big black gun was not smiling. Plus, the older one had called me lieutenant.
“C’mon,” he insisted. “We’ve all had dinner, and none of us wants to chase your ass around the hotel. Come in and close the door. Please?”
“Well, since you said please,” I said, putting on the best front I could muster. The guy looking out the window hadn’t turned around, but I knew he was watching me in the reflection of the room lights.
“Thank you very much,” the older guy said. “You’re wondering how we got in here.”
“Question crossed my mind,” I said.
I felt increasingly stupid standing in the little entrance alcove next to the bathroom door. I wondered if there was anyone in the bathroom, or if they’d found my own weapon in the hidden compartment of my toiletries bag. The rest of my stuff didn’t look as if anyone had been through it. “So what’re we here to talk about?”
“Actually, I’m here to talk, and you’re here to listen, if you don’t mind,” the man said. He was about fifty-five, with a hard face, a hatchet nose, and reddish gray hair planed into a flattop haircut. Like the others, he was wearing a windbreaker, khaki trousers, and military boots. There was a small black knife in a pouch on his right boot.
The other guy whose face I could see looked Italian. He was much younger, maybe in his late twenties. He was obviously trying to look like some kind of unblinking, lizard-eyed, hard-boiled young soldato in a crime family. He was succeeding. All three of them were in shape, with flat bellies, big chests, and heavy shoulders under those oversized windbreakers. I wondered how long the young guy could hold that heavy. 45 out at arm’s length like that. My arm was getting tired just watching him do it.
“A lot of that going around tonight,” I said, trying to look more relaxed than I felt. I could not possibly get to my gun before the guy in the chair could do some damage. “First the FBI, then-”
“We know,” the man said, waving his hand dismissively. He had a large gold university ring on his left hand. “Especially, we know Dr. Quartermain. That’s kinda why we’re here, Lieutenant. Dr. Quartermain’s operating way off his patch, talking to a civilian like you.”
“So, what, he’s operating on your patch, perhaps? And who is ‘we’-you got a mouse in your pocket?”
The man gave me a patient, mildly annoyed look that said, I’m not done talking and you’re not done listening. The hoodlum wannabe shifted in his chair, as if waiting for the command to jump up and bite me or something, but that. 45 never wavered. The third man continued to take in the sights out on the river, but he had one hand hanging casually in the folds of his jacket.
“We are the other half of security at the Helios power plant,” he said. “The so-called physical security half. We’re the guys who deal with the Navy SEALs when they run federally sponsored intrusion drills on the plant.”
I guess I was supposed to be impressed, but I was getting tired of standing at the door. I waved my right hand to include everyone in the room. “This is a little extreme for a bunch of rent-a-cops, isn’t it?”
“Ow,” Hatchet-Nose said. “Now you’ve hurt my feelings. But let me make sure the message gets through. You need to do two things: go away, and stop talking to your new best friend, Dr. Aristotle Quartermain.”
“According to Dr. Quartermain, you work for him.”
“Yes, he would probably say that. But security in an atomic power plant is a complex business. Multi-layered, if it’s done right. Lots of need-to-know barriers. The administrative wiring diagram doesn’t always tell the whole tale.”
“Let me get this straight-you’re security contractors at a commercial power plant who’ve followed me, broken into my room, with at least one gun visible, and the reason I shouldn’t break out my cell phone and dial 911 is…?”
“First of all, your cell phone is over there on the desk, and we have the battery. And young Billy here isn’t going to let you go over there and get it or anything else.”
I looked at young Billy, whose arm remained straight out with nary a tremor. That really was impressive.
“Secondly, your ‘going away’ is the operative part. It’s really good advice. We’re sorry for your loss and all that. We don’t know what happened, either, but what we do know is that the bad shit, whatever it was, didn’t come through my perimeter.”
My Bureau, and now my perimeter. “It came through somebody’s perimeter,” I said. “You got a name? Cops’ll want to know.”
He laughed softly. “You’re not going to call the cops, Mr. Richter. Unless you startle young Billy here, nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to leave, and you’re going to pack. Feel free to spend the night, but tomorrow, you’re going back to your fascinating private-eye work in beautiful downtown Triboro, North Carolina.”
“And if I don’t?” I said.
“There will be unpleasant consequences. The array of federal agencies involved in keeping nuclear power plants safe is, let’s see, how shall I put this-legion?”
“Oh,” I said. “Legion. Dozens of inept bureaucracies, tripping over each other while fucking up by the numbers? That legion? When you said unpleasant, I thought you meant Billy the Kid here.”
His semijocular, we’re-all-buddies-in-this-together expression slipped a little. “That can be arranged, too,” he said. “He’s young, but he’s impressive.”
“Holding that. 45 straight out like that for all this time-that’s impressive,” I said. “But I’d guess he needs two other guys for anything personal.”
Billy’s eyes narrowed. I’d hurt some more feelings.
The third man turned around at last. He, too, was lean from top to bottom, in his early forties, with close-cropped blond hair and the face of a Nazi death camp commandant, complete with disturbing pale blue eyes. “You can try me if you’d like,” he said.
“Actually, I prefer girls,” I said. I stepped to one side and held open the door. I saw Billy’s trigger finger, which had been resting alongside the trigger guard, slip into firing position. For some reason, though, I didn’t think he’d shoot. They hadn’t come here to shoot people. This time, anyway.
“Why don’t you clowns just leave?” I said. “And now’d be nice. You’re rent-a-cops, and you have zero authority outside of your contract area. The fact that you’re even here means you probably do have a hole in your so-called perimeter, so why don’t you go work on that instead of bothering Mr. Hilton’s paying guests?”
The older guy sniffed and then got up, zipping up his windbreaker. “Okay, Mr. Richter. We’ll leave. But trust me, you will, too. C’mon, people.”
He walked past me without a second glance, as did the SS officer look-alike. Billy sat in his chair for one second longer than necessary, and then pocketed the. 45 as he got up.
“That must be a relief,” I said. “My arm was getting tired just watching you.”
Billy saunt
ered by, never taking his eyes off my face. “Later,” he muttered.
“Earlier is better than later,” I said to his back. “That is, if you’re man enough without your ace buddies there. Nighty-night. Kid.”
I closed the door and slid the bolt and chain. I went into the bathroom and checked for my weapon. It was there, but the magazine was gone. So they had found it. I picked up my cell phone, and yes, it felt lighter than before. I picked up each of the two house phones, but neither of them worked, either. Thorough contractors, I’d give them that. If I wanted to squawk, I’d have to leave the room, and I really didn’t want to venture too far from my room just now. The best I could hope for was that Billy would come back to prove he was a man. I decided to prepare for that possibility.
Fifteen minutes later, there was a quiet knock on the door. I knew better than to peek through the little plastic optic. Our homicide crew had once found a drug dealer pinned to his hotel door by an ice pick that had been hammered into his eye through that little piece of plastic.
“Who is it?” I said in a singsong voice.
“It’s later,” a voice replied, and I recognized young Billy. Oh, good.
“Well, Billy,” I said, “you surprise me again. Why don’t you come on in and get your ass kicked.”
I stepped across the alcove, staying underneath the eyehole, removing the chain as I went. Then I crouched in the closet on the other side of the room door and wedged my shoulder against the wall. I unsnapped the dead bolt, and then, putting one foot about in the middle of the door, I reached over and pushed the door handle down.
He did exactly what I expected him to do, which was to kick the door as hard as he could the moment he heard that handle unlatch. If I’d been standing where someone normally stands when he opens a hotel room door, I’d have been hit in the face with the edge of said door and probably knocked unconscious. As it was, I was able to let the door swing halfway in against my cocked leg, and then I sent it back in his direction with the full force of my right leg. The edge caught him in the forehead and knocked him all the way across the hall, blood spurting from his nose and forehead as he slumped, cross-eyed and barely conscious, into a sitting position against the opposite wall, his scrawny ass on the room service tray. I reached up to the closet shelf, picked up the hallway fire extinguisher I’d lifted ten minutes earlier, and flooded his face with dry powder. He hadn’t let go of his . 45, but dropped it now to protect his eyes.
The Moonpool cr-3 Page 4
