The Moonpool cr-3

by P. T. Deutermann

  Reluctantly, I called Creeps and explained what I needed. I harped on the fact that we were honoring our agreement: This was about Allie Gardner and not events at Helios. He told me he’d see what our Bureau could do.

  For the moment, we were stymied. I called the marina over in Carolina Beach to see if the Keeper was present for duty. It was not, and Cap’n Pete had no information as to where the colonel had gone off to this time, as usual. He wouldn’t have told me if he knew, I suspected.

  Another blank wall. We were batting a thousand this morning.

  I decided to go for a run. When I got back, Pardee had news. Creeps had arranged access to Allie’s car, which was being held at the Customs and Border Protection office in Wilmington. They had, surprisingly, not yet put a forensics team on the car, so if we wanted to do so, the Wilmington resident agent would send an agent to be present. Any physical evidence would, of course, have to remain in federal control.

  We stopped by the Helios admin center to pick up the visitor log copies and then went on to Wilmington. The Customs and Border Protection office was located on Medical Center Drive in a low, brick building that looked a lot like the local FBI resident agent’s office. There was a fenced parking compound behind the building containing some boats and various vehicles with the CBP logo on the doors. We went up to the front doors and confronted a video camera. There were no actual signs on the building indicating it was a government building, but the roof was littered with radio antennas, and the flags of both the United States and the Coast Guard fluttered out front. The doors clicked, and we began processing through security.

  The agent sent over to assist us in our enquiries was none other than the lovely Samantha Young, ex-administrative-assistant at Quartermain’s office. She was dressed in a neatly tailored pantsuit, which did nothing to disguise her splendid physical assets. Even the CBP guys were impressed, which probably explained why we had four male agents helping us sign in.

  “Hi, there, Ms. Judas,” I said.

  “Ouch,” she said with a smile. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

  “Just business, I know,” I said. “But it got personal once I went inside that Marine Corps rest home.”

  “Whatever that is,” she said with a face chock-full of feigned innocence.

  I rolled my eyes, and then we all trooped out to the impound yard. Allie’s car was parked by itself alongside the chain-link fence.

  “What specifically are we looking for?” Samantha asked.

  “We don’t know,” I replied. “Anything that might tell us where she went while she was down here in Wilmington. Receipts, fast-food wrappers, her briefcase, a prescription for radioactive pills. Like that.”

  In the event, we found most of the above, including the videocassette onto which she’d downloaded her camcorder tape. Allie had kept a plastic grocery bag slung between the two front seats for trash, and we pulled out the usual collection of fast-food debris and two gas receipts. We copied down the dates, times, and addresses from those and the one Wendy’s receipt I’d found glued to the floor carpet by a sticky French fry. Her purse, which had been jammed under the front seat, had the usual female stuff. Samantha held on to the videocassette while we poked around under the seats, in the trunk, and in the glove box. Pardee went through her luggage, which consisted of a backpack and a briefcase, and which he said contained nothing of direct interest.

  We went back into the CBP offices, and someone rustled up a cassette player. Allie had done the tape professionally, with voiceovers on time, place, and the names of the subjects involved. There wasn’t that much actual run-time video, but it was clear what the two lovebirds were there for, or at least clear enough for any suspicious wife and her lawyer. Pardee had taken one thing from Allie’s briefcase: her hotel receipt from the Hilton. Nothing on the bill except room, meal charges, and lots of taxes. No phone charges. More blank walls.

  We left everything with Samantha and went back out to my Suburban. As we drove away I speculated on the lack of any phone calls on her hotel bill.

  “Nobody uses hotel phones anymore,” Pardee said. “Especially when you have one of these.” He produced what I assumed was Allie’s cell phone, which he’d apparently palmed from the briefcase when Samantha wasn’t looking.

  “Hoo-aah,” I said. “They’ll git you for that.”

  “They have access to the central office records; we don’t, not without some help. But this thing ought to have a call log, don’t you think?”

  He switched the phone on while I drove and accessed the call log. “Aha,” he said.

  “Aha, what?”

  “I think I recognize a number, or at least an exchange. Hang on a minute.”

  He told the phone to recall the number and then waited. Then he said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and switched off.

  “That was the Helios general information number,” he announced. “For some unknown reason, Allie called the power plant.”

  Aha, indeed, I thought. Now we had a tie, however indirect, between Helios and one of the unexplained radiation incidents. I maneuvered the Suburban through a very complicated cloverleaf to get up onto the Cape Fear River Memorial Bridge.

  “Does it show the duration of the call?” I asked, in case Allie had simply dialed a wrong number as Pardee had pretended to do.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Just the call and the date, which was, lemme see, the day before she died.”

  “Call ’em back and ask for Quartermain.”

  A moment later, he was speaking to Quartermain’s secretary. Pardee raised his eyebrows at me, and I told him to see if Ari could meet us in a half hour for a quick private conversation. She put him on hold, and then came back on to tell him that Dr. Quartermain could meet us in an hour and named a restaurant in Southport. I nodded, and Pardee told her we’d be there.

  The restaurant turned out to be a New York-style deli, which opened for breakfast and lunch only, down on the main drag leading to the municipal beach. It was noisy and surprisingly full of people when Ari came in, saw us at a corner table, and excused his way through the counter line to join us. I’d decided to go ahead and tell him what we’d found out about Carl Trask.

  “Can’t stay,” he announced, checking his watch.

  “That good a day, is it?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “We are infested with agencies whose names are all abbreviated,” he said. “A million questions, no answers. What you got?”

  “A live Carl Trask?” I said.

  He leaned back in his chair, visibly surprised. “Really,” he said. “Maybe I’d better get a sandwich after all.”

  Pardee volunteered to stand in line and order for all three of us while I debriefed my visit from the local constabulary and the news that Allie had made a call to the power plant the day before she died.

  That really threw him. “She did? Do you know who she called?”

  I shook my head. “All we know is that her cell phone called your central number at Helios. Does your switchboard record calls coming in?”

  “No,” he said. “Unless it’s a threat or a crank call; then the operator can hit a capture-record button, but otherwise, no, calls are just calls. And if that’s not Carl Trask in the cask, who the fuck is it?”

  “Slow down, Ari,” I said. “We have one guy, admittedly a senior cop, telling us he’s pretty sure he saw Trask at the Southport marina. Pretty sure doesn’t hack it. Until one of us sees him, we don’t actually know anything.” Then I told him about the note and our plan to rendezvous with Trask to find out what the hell he was doing.

  “Besides being AWOL from Helios?” Ari said. “We’ve temporarily suspended his access and clearances. If he’s running some kind of security test, the only place he can get into right now is the public admin building, where his current security clearance level is zero.”

  “We have indications that Trask is part of a Homeland Security undercover operation at the container port,” I said. “I don’t want to go into detail
about that just now, but it might explain some of his strange comings and goings. So: We’ll meet, we’ll talk, and then maybe we’ll know more.”

  “That may well be,” Ari said, “but as far as I’m concerned, he’s got a job to do at Helios, and we have a major physical security breach investigation going on right now. That’s where he’s supposed to be, not out there playing cowboys and Indians with his black-ops pals. You want a new job?”

  “Been there, done that. Look, until we actually confirm all this, I’d like you to not share this news with the Bureau.”

  He nodded. “Okay; we’re not exactly best friends right now, anyway. Those guys are probing everything that’s not nailed down, even stuff that has no bearing on the floater in the moonpool.”

  “That’s what they do,” I said. “Especially when it’s new ground for them. They learn, then they dig, and learn some more. It’s their strength.”

  “Well, right now, all their digging is upsetting my engineers. If this shit keeps up, our chief engineer is going to recommend a safety shutdown, and the NRC does not want that to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’d have to explain why to the secretary of energy and the rest of the power industry.”

  “So?”

  He laughed. “ So? If someone asks the right questions, that could lead to a system-wide shutdown. Think nationwide rolling blackouts.”

  “But you said the plant, the power-generation side, anyway, wasn’t affected by the moonpool. So why a system-wide shutdown?”

  “Because the technical and physical security systems are totally integrated; they’re the same system for the whole plant. If it failed at Helios, it could fail at any of the BWR plants. That would technically make all the plants, by definition, no longer safe to operate. Those are NRC rules, so they’d be squatting on their own petard, to mangle the metaphor. I need Trask back, and yesterday would be nice.”

  “You’re thinking the same thing that I am, then?” I said. “Trask had to be a part of getting that guy in, whoever he is?”

  He ran his fingers over his shining bald head. “There are no indications that the security system failed in the physical or electronic sense. Ergo, yes, someone with access and clearance had to be involved.”

  “Trask, or a helper?”

  “That’s my problem: If we can’t find out how the floater got in there, then the default assumption has to be that the system failed.”

  “And they’re interviewing everybody? That Russian, for instance, and her people, the operating engineers?”

  “Oh, hell, yes, three times a day. We’re going to be sitting down with lie detectors shortly. The company’s sending down a battalion of lawyers, which made the Bureau really happy.”

  Pardee showed up with sandwiches and iced tea. I could see that Ari wasn’t really hungry, but he ate anyway. We chewed through lunch in silence, and then he looked at his watch again. I told him we’d get back to him first thing, either late tonight or in the morning, when we had something. He thanked us for lunch and then pushed back his chair.

  “If it’s him, you tell that crazy bastard to get back in,” he said. “I don’t care what or who else he’s screwing around with-we need him back at Helios, now.”

  At eleven that night, Tony and I arrived at the designated rendezvous point, which was a point just to seaward of where the Cape Fear River poured out into the Atlantic. The night was dark and cold, with a steady fifteen-knot breeze kicking up some small whitecaps around us. Tony had noted that the rendezvous time would coincide with slack water following an ebb tide, which would minimize the current coming across the bar. Otherwise, we’d have had a tough time staying in the lat-long position designated in the note. To the north the lights of Kure Beach twinkled over the dunes; to our west were Southport and the Oak Island pilots’ station. The actual rendezvous position was nearly alongside the so-called sea buoy, the first buoy that a ship entering the Cape Fear estuary encountered. The buoys had all looked small from a distance, but this thing was big, some fifteen feet high. It was festooned with barnacles, radar reflectors, bird manure, the blinking light, and a crowd of sleeping pelicans.

  Tony kept checking the radar for any contacts, especially one of those huge container ships. There were some big blobs on the scope up near the container port, but they were most likely tied up to the pier. The layout of the river entrance and the shorelines of the estuary stood out in sharp green lines on the radarscope display. The boat had been bouncing around quite a bit when we stopped, so Tony put us on a two-mile racetrack pattern, which kept the motion to a minimum as we idled around, waiting for Trask. I’d left Pardee back at the house so we’d have a base of communications ashore, and I’d briefed Tony on the way out to the rendezvous. He’d had some questions.

  “If Trask is working undercover for Homeland Security, how come the Bureau doesn’t know that? I mean, aren’t they supposed to be talking to each other these days?”

  “That’s the theory,” I said, “but, remember, out of all those alphabets, the FBI is the one that is not inside the Homeland Security mantle. My guess is they both hold back from each other.”

  He turned the wheel to go back downwind and looked again into the radarscope cone. “But why would they do that? Wasn’t that the point of those so-called intel fusion centers? So everybody knew what everybody else was doing? So they could stop stepping on each other’s toes?”

  “It’s a Washington thing,” I said. “I think it’s about budget money. The agency with the biggest budget has the most power. You bare your bureaucratic soul to an outfit that competes for budget money with you, you make yourself vulnerable. We played those games back in the sheriff’s office, remember? Major Crimes versus Patrol, Patrol versus Community Relations? Same deal, bigger honeypot.”

  “We’ve got a contact,” he announced, pointing down into the radarscope cone. I looked. There was a tiny green blip down in the direction of Oak Island. Tony turned on the leaders function, which put a green line on the blip. The length of the line represented the contact’s speed, and the direction of the line indicated its course. This one was coming our way.

  “It could be a pilot boat,” I said.

  “Then we’d expect a contact to seaward-an inbound ship.” He flipped the range scale out to twenty-five miles, but there was nothing coming from seaward. He dropped the scale back down to ten miles, and the contact continued to close us. Whoever it was, he was coming out of the estuary.

  Tony made sure the VHF radio was tuned to channel 16, which was the standard channel for ship-to-ship comms in restricted waters. Trask probably wasn’t going to initiate voice communications, in case the Coast Guard had been alerted to watch for his boat. I still wondered if a Bureau team had put an RFID tracer on the boat. If they thought Trask was dead, though, why would they care about his boat? Even if they did know that Trask had been working undercover for the government, the boat’s whereabouts still shouldn’t matter.

  “He’s coming right for us,” Tony said. “Or at least for that buoy.”

  “Our nav lights are on, right?” I asked.

  He nodded and picked up binoculars to search the night ahead of us. The flashing light from the sea buoy wasn’t helping with our night vision. The seas were confused, and I guessed that the tide had turned. When the sea began to flow back into the estuary, it collided with the outbound river current, creating a crazy patchwork of waves and whorls in the water. Tony was having to work to keep the boat on course as the currents opposed each other over the bar.

  I checked my cell phone and found coverage. I called Pardee back at the house.

  “We’ve got a contact headed our way,” I said. “We’ll call again after we have our meeting, or in one hour, whichever is sooner.”

  “And if you don’t?” he asked. “Where are you?”

  “We’re loitering about something called the sea buoy,” I said. “Where the seaward end of the channel into the Cape Fear River begins.”


  “Roger that,” he said. “One hour, and then I call the Coast Guard.”

  I agreed and hung up.

  “Five miles and closing,” Tony said. “We’re right in the main shipping channel. Want to go meet him?”

  The water around the sea buoy was getting rougher and rougher. “Might be a little flatter inside,” I said. I wasn’t getting seasick so much as having trouble staying upright as our small boat bounced and pitched in the confused chop. I was glad I hadn’t brought the shepherds.

  Tony kicked it up a few knots, and we pointed into the estuary. When the sea buoy was a half mile or so behind us, channel 16 suddenly came to life.

  “Hold your position,” a voice said. No call signs, no identification numbers or names, just a voice. It sounded like Trask, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.

  “Roger,” Tony replied, also leaving out any identifying information. It was totally incorrect procedure, but it worked, and anyone listening would be clueless as to who was talking or why. Tony slowed and tried to find a stable course, but the water was still pretty rough. The current seemed to be pushing us into the estuary, although it was hard to tell in the dark.

  “Two miles,” Tony said, staring out into the night. He kept checking the radar to see where the other boat should be. I kept looking for lights but didn’t see any.

  “Shouldn’t we be able to see his running lights?” I asked. “That’s a big boat.”

  “You’d think so,” he said. “Unless he’s turned them off. That thing had radar, didn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Tony switched the range scale down to five miles, and the blip became larger, halfway in from the edge of the screen. The electronic leader pointed right at the center of our scope, where the rising chop had created a bloom of green sea return on the display.

  Tony kept looking out with the binoculars, while I switched the range scale down to two miles. The contact was still visible, but it was getting perilously close to the edge of the blob from the sea return, which now covered the inner one-third of the display. At some point, the radar would become useless. That point was just about now.