“Yeah, you’re a bit funky this evening.”
“You should smell the snake,” I said.
“I believe I do.”
“But we’re not done yet, are we.”
“Nope. We have to go see the Man.”
“We.”
“Don’t make me say it.”
We drove in separate vehicles directly to the admin building. I left the mutts in the Suburban and followed Ari into the building. The plant director and two other worried-looking managers were waiting for Ari. Behind the admin building, the huge green buildings of Helios looked just the same. The only thing missing was the subdued roar of the condenser cooling-water tailrace. Since the generators weren’t running, they weren’t pulling lebenty thousand gallons of cooling water a minute in from the river anymore. Otherwise you couldn’t tell.
I’d been doing a slow burn ever since leaving the hospital. I made a mental note to stop worrying about gathering evidence of whatever outrages Trask and his henchman were contemplating. If I found him before the Bureau did, there wasn’t going to be any need for evidence. I’d rousted Tony to tell him what had happened, and he’d immediately said he’d be back in the morning. Mindful of the oblique hint Trask had given me, I asked him to stay in Triboro and to pull the string hard on Allie Gardner’s family background. I wanted him to get to her personnel file from the sheriff’s office. He thought he could con someone into helping him out.
Then I asked him to contact Pardee’s wife and offer whatever help she needed, including a charter plane ticket if she wanted to fly down. If mystery-man Trask, with all his security toys, exotic pets, and fanatical ideas, had turned Pardee Bell into a vegetable with a handkerchief of diesel starter fluid, I intended to return the favor. Alicia was the kind of woman who would want to help with that.
The plant director was a tall, spare man in his early forties who looked to be of Scandinavian descent. Ari introduced him as Dr. Johannsen, and his demeanor was all business. He was obviously unaware of who I was or what I’d been doing down there, so Ari filled him in. Then I told an abbreviated story of the night’s events and why I’d recommended they shut down the plant.
“You did not actually see Colonel Trask during all this?” Johannsen asked.
“I did not,” I said. “Nor did I see him the night we got run over out in the Cape Fear River.”
He raised his hands, palms up, as if asking the obvious question.
“It’s what you don’t know, Dr. Johannsen,” I said. It had been a really long night. “Consider everything that’s happened in the past week or so. The death by radiation poisoning of one of my associates, an unidentified body in your spent fuel storage pool, your physical security director’s gone missing, oh, and did I forget to mention the radiation incident over in the container port?”
“Only one of those incidents connects directly to Helios,” he said. “Admittedly, Colonel Trask’s whereabouts are something of a mystery, but he’s done unusual things like this before. I could make the reverse argument: Most of this has happened since you showed up.”
The look on my face must have concerned him, because he immediately tried to make amends. “Look, Mr. Richter, I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just that shutting down the plant the way it was done tonight is going to cause industry and public comment. The nuclear industry lives under a magnifying glass. Everyone will assume we had a reactor problem. What do we tell them?”
“The truth?” I said. “That way it at least looks like you care as much about the security of your operation here as you do about your image.”
I saw Ari look away. The director stared at me for a moment and then settled his face into a polite mask. “All right, Mr. Richter. I think you’re really tired after your, um, experiences tonight. We’ll excuse you now. Dr. Quartermain and I need to talk privately. Thank you for your services.”
That sounded like a great idea to me, so I left. Once in the Suburban, I put my head back on the headrest and told the shepherds that I needed them to eat someone. They seemed amenable. All I had to do was come up with the name.
I had to assume the plant’s technical people were on high alert by now, which should make it a whole lot harder for anyone inside or out to pull some shit. On the walk out to the hospital parking lot, I’d asked Ari what “scram” meant. He said it was slang for shutting a reactor down quickly by inserting all the control rods, thereby killing off the chain reaction. A scram was something the reactor usually did to itself if it detected a safety problem. Of course, even if the reactors were no longer critical, there was still plenty of heat and radiation present for duty, so it wasn’t as if they were cold and dark, and therefore not dangerous. And there’d be intense NRC interest in why it had happened. I told him it was a good thing they were already here, then. He had not been amused. It was obviously time for me to get some sleep and then to regroup.
Tony called at about 10:00 A.M. from Triboro. He reported that Pardee’s wife was in touch with the hospital and en route by car, and that he’d have his hands on Allie’s archived personnel file sometime today. He wanted to know if he should still come down to the Wilmington area. I told him to get the file and then come down; I also asked him to bring some tactical equipment from our collection.
“We going colonel-hunting?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
He said he’d be down by late afternoon.
The next phone call was from Ari Quartermain. His voice was strained and he sounded as if he hadn’t slept all night.
“We’ve finally heard from Trask,” he announced.
“Good deal,” I said. “Now we know it wasn’t him in the moonpool. The question is: Where is he?”
“On his boat, or so he says,” Ari replied. “Says he’s uncovered a security problem that turned out to be much bigger than he thought it was originally. Says he’ll come in tonight after getting some sleep. I told him we were shut down, and why.”
“The ‘why’ being my suggestion?”
“Yep. He said as long as we kept you and your people away from the plant, there was no need to be shut down. He said you are part of the problem.”
“I’ll bet he did-I tumbled to him and whatever shit he’s got planned.”
Ari sighed. “Well, I briefed the director. He knows Trask, and he doesn’t know you. He said we’d stay offline until Trask shows up and explains all this shit. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime, you want me to stay the hell away from Helios, right?”
“Pretty please?” he said.
“I can do that,” I said. “But I’m going to file a police report charging Trask with the assault on Pardee Bell. When he’s done with whatever fanciful tale he’s going to spin for you guys, the Wilmington cops are going to want a word with him. And the Coast Guard wants to examine that boat.”
“Funny you should use those words,” Ari said. “Fanciful tale. That’s how the director characterized your story from last night. Who else should I be watching?”
“Watch the moonpool engineering crew,” I said. “My measure of Trask is that he won’t give up. Your shutting the plant down may have complicated that, but at least everyone’s alerted, right?”
“They certainly are,” Ari said. “Anna Petrowska is somewhat skeptical, as you might imagine. She told the director that she thought you were delusional.”
“She would, if she’s part of Trask’s plan.”
“Cam, what’s her motive? What’s anyone’s motive to fuck around with the moonpool, for that matter?”
“I don’t know, Ari, and I can’t help you anymore. But here’s a suggestion: Fill in Petrowska’s timeline for the past three or four days. Account for her every waking moment, because the tie-in might be between her and the guy in the moonpool, not Trask. Especially now that you are pretty sure it’s not Trask in your lead-lined cask.”
Ari didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he told me to keep in touch, and that he’d let me know when
they actually sat down with Trask. I was being dismissed, and possibly so was the threat to Helios.
“Ari?” I said.
“Yes, Cam?”
“Remember what happened the third time the kid cried wolf.”
I hung up. I recalled what Sergeant McMichaels had said about Ari. If the technical security officer at a nuclear plant had a loan shark on his tail, would he take money to let a terrorist cell in the back door? I didn’t want to think about that. I made one more call.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wilmington resident agent’s office,” the voice recited.
I identified myself and told the robot I needed to speak to Special Agent Caswell. As usual, he was not available, and could they take a message. Standard routine. I was tempted to tell them there was a bomb in the office, but I didn’t. Tony would have.
“Tell him I called, and that I have information on the upcoming meltdown at the Helios power plant.”
“Say again?”
“You heard me,” I said, “and you’re taping, I presume.” I gave him my number and hung up.
Creeps called back in five minutes. “You unsettled our desk operator,” he said.
“Did you know Carl Trask contacted Helios this morning?”
A moment of silence. “No,” he said finally. “I was not informed of that. Who told you?”
I thought I heard a change in the background noise of the phone, although on a cell phone it was difficult to tell. Other people picking up muted extensions? “I need ten minutes of your time, especially if the upper management at Helios is no longer keeping my Bureau in the loop.”
“Clock is running, Lieutenant.”
Along with the tape, I thought. Fair enough. And he’d called me lieutenant, not mister. That meant he thought I might be useful, at least for a few minutes or so. I took them from the initial call from Trask all the way through my dismissal from the director’s office last night. Ironically, Creeps asked the same question the director had.
“No,” I said. “I never actually saw him. But I’m pretty damned sure it’s Trask, and the people he called this morning think it’s him, too.”
“Very well,” Creeps said. “Then this should be fairly straightforward. I will inform my counterpart at the NRC that we will be present at Helios for this meeting.”
“You might want to watch for that boat, too,” I said. “Whatever he’s got in mind, it involves the boat.”
“This is something you know?”
“It’s how he gets around,” I said. “You see that boat parked at the power plant this evening, I’d recommend staying upwind.”
“You seriously think he’s going to create some kind of nuclear incident at Helios, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, I do,” I said, “and since all the attention has been focused on the moonpool, I’d say watch the reactors. They’re shut down right now, and that might have changed the security equation.”
“The body in the moonpool was a diversion?”
“Have you or any of your people ever been over to the reactor side of the plant?” I asked. They had not. Neither had I. Nobody was looking in that direction. If Trask had orchestrated all these previous incidents, he was certainly capable of an even bigger diversion. Creeps said he’d think about it, and then asked the one question for which I had no answer: What if nothing happens?
“Then I’m going after him for the boat collision and for what he’s done to Pardee Bell,” I said.
“Evidence, Lieutenant,” he prompted. “You have no evidence.”
“I will once I can get my hands on that boat,” I said. “There’s also his little fun parlor over in the container junkyard.”
“I assume you haven’t turned the television on, then,” he said. “The container junkyard went up in flames last night. Major fire, attributed to homeless vagrants who were known to nest there on cold nights.”
Shit, I thought. I should have expected that. “So what’s that tell you, Special Agent?”
“In an evidentiary sense? Nothing. But we’ll see what develops when Mr. Trask makes his appearance.”
“Hopefully not a mushroom cloud,” I said. “You’ve got my number.”
“Indeed we do, Lieutenant,” he said. “Have a nice day.”
I said something impolite, but they’d already hung up. The shepherds were sitting in the kitchen, looking at me expectantly. Important business needed immediate attention: They hadn’t been fed yet.
At four thirty that afternoon I pulled the Suburban into an overgrown driveway some fifteen miles upriver from the Helios power plant. According to my map, the Jellico River, a tributary of the larger Cape Fear River, was a quarter mile beyond the dense stand of white pines I was facing. The sun was slanting westward on a cool, clear day. There was a breeze whispering through the tops of the pine trees, and I could smell the earthy scents of river bottomland. The forecast had predicted high forties for this night, and the temps were on their way down.
It had eventually occurred to me that an eighteen-foot-long Burmese python probably did not live on Trask’s boat, which meant that he had to have a base of operations on land somewhere. I’d run into Sergeant McMichaels at the deli at noon, and we’d had a sandwich together. I told him enough about what had happened to my arm to inspire some assistance at the county seat. I needed to know if Trask owned property somewhere nearby. He thought Trask lived exclusively on that boat he kept over at Carolina Beach. I pushed a little, wondering if there were any county records that could tell me more. I said I needed to get up with Trask, to find out once and for all if it had been him piloting the boat that ran over ours out in the river.
Apparently, McMichaels had gone back to the office and done some checking, because he called me back a few hours later with an address of some riverfront property that could belong to Carl Trask. He dutifully lectured me about not seeking revenge or otherwise indulging in illegal acts, and I’d solemnly sworn never to do such a thing. With that necessary formality out of the way, he’d said the property was recorded as an abandoned nursery and landscaping complex on the Jellico River, which had been bought for investment purposes by a privately owned company called CCT Enterprises. The attorney of record, when queried about a fictional tax matter, had come up with Trask’s name and cell phone number as the principal point of contact for CCT. And was any of that information helpful at all?
I told him it was very helpful indeed and that I owed him one, if not more than one. He told me to save it for any occasion wherein the Helios power plant might pose a threat to humanity in the Southport community. I had to hand it to him: McMichaels kept himself very much in the loop when it came to matters involving Helios. His interest might have had something to do with all those concentric circles drawn on all the maps I’d seen of Hanover County, centered on the nuclear power plant. I asked him if there were known loan sharks in Brunswick County. None that he knew of, he said.
I pulled off the two-lane and drove down a narrow, weedy driveway through a stand of spindly pines until I came to a chain-link fence. It was nearly ten feet high, which was surprising for private property, and it stretched back into the trees. It wasn’t a new fence, but it did look intact. There was a single slide-back gate, which was securely padlocked, and signs warning people to stay out. The signs were badly rusted, as was a larger sign indicating that this was, or had been, the location of the Ashlands Nursery, wholesale only. There were power poles leading into the property, and the overhead wiring appeared to be functional. The entrance drive bent around to the left inside the gate, and I couldn’t see anything beyond that bend because of the pines. My cell phone stirred in my pocket. It was Tony, who wanted to know my twenty. I told him.
“I’m just crossing the Cape Fear River Bridge now,” he said. “Gimme a data point for my GPS and I’ll join up with you.”
I gave him the address McMichaels had given me, and Tony said he’d be here in about twenty minutes, if Igor wasn’t lying. Igor was the name Tony gave every electroni
c device he owned. I told him I was facing a seriously padlocked gate. He said he had a cure for that in his trunk.
I got the shepherds out, and we went for a little recon walkabout. I was looking for video cameras or other signs of electronic Igors that Trask might have put out there, if this was, in fact, his place. I checked the fabric of the chain-link fence for tiny sensor wires and scanned all the logical places for cameras in high places trained on the gate area. I examined the nearest outside telephone poles for taps, but there was nothing coming down the sides of the poles except spike holes and some tendrils of dead poison ivy. The sand around the gate did not look like it had been disturbed for years, and the dogs weren’t especially interested in any aspect of the gate area.
Tony showed up right on his timeline, for which he gave his GPS unit an affectionate little pat as he got out of his SUV. He greeted the shepherds and then went to the back of his vehicle and produced what we cops used to call a master key, which was a large bolt cutter with three-foot-long insulated handles. The business end resembled that of a snapping turtle. Ignoring the kryptonite padlock, he quickly cut through the chain. I waited for alarms to sound or Dobermans to appear, but nothing happened. I then got Tony to hand-overhand the gate and fence to see if he could see any signs of alarms. He went over everything I had inspected, but then got down on his hands and knees and fished in the sand for magnetic plates under the gate. To my chagrin, he found two, one under the locking end of the sliding gate, the other under the stationary part. There were wire conduits leading from the gate in the direction of that curving drive.
“Knew you were useful,” I said, examining the shiny little boxes. They were the size of a packet of cancer sticks, and much newer looking than the rest of the gate apparatus.
“The good news is that they use the gate steel as the test probe,” he said. “As long as there’s ferrous metal above the plates, we can go ahead and open the gate.”
He put the bolt cutters down on top of the detector nearest the locking point, and slid the gate open wide enough for all of us to go through. We started down the road. I kept the shepherds in front of us but not free-ranging. The light was beginning to fade here among all the trees, but the smell of the river was growing stronger. The driveway, which bore no sign of tire tracks, turned to the left and then back to the right in a wide S-turn, and then the band of pine trees ended. Ahead was a large, U-shaped greenhouse, with the two arms of the U pointing in our direction. We stopped at the edge of the trees, stepped back into them to maintain a little cover, and studied the layout.
The Moonpool cr-3 Page 27
