“Shut your mouth, you stupid, arrogant bitch,” I yelled. “She’s got your whole system-your reactor controls and probably all your safeguard systems.”
“What? What?! What are you saying to me?”
I was having trouble concentrating. “Is your RCS responding to you?” I asked.
A split-second hesitation. “I am not permitted-”
“Trask gave her the codes. You have an expert hacker riding your system. If you have a manual mode, now’s the time, comrade. Remember Chernobyl.” I was trying desperately to remember the word Ari had used. Run. Fall.
No, scram.
“Scram those reactors, before she shuts down your control room.”
In the background I heard someone yell that Unit One was ramping to full power, uncommanded. She hung up on me. I lay back in the pine needles, suddenly conscious of the two deputies gaping at me.
“Which way is the wind coming from right now?” I asked one of them. It took him a few seconds to realize I’d just asked him a question.
“Uh, why?” he said.
“Guess,” I said, as a second set of blue lights began to show through the trees, followed by the wail of an approaching ambulance.
I let them transport me to the ER along with what was left of Carl Trask. I figured that federal agents of some variety would be along soon enough. Once the ER people cleaned me up and realized I wasn’t really injured, I was sent back out to the waiting room while they dealt with the loaded and chambered assault rifle sticking out of Trask’s back.
It was zero dark thirty, and I was done. I didn’t want to play twenty questions with anyone, so I asked the front desk to call me a taxi, let myself out the front door, and had the guy take me to the beach house in Southport. I wanted to take a long, hot shower, but, of course, there was no water pressure. I knew that, I told myself. I had a Scotch instead, and then had an idea. This was a beach house.
I went outside and walked across the street, onto the beach, and right into the water. What was I thinking: That water was cold as ice, but it did the job. I stood out there up to my neck, occasionally dousing my face, and grateful for the lack of any real surf. When some submerged thing bumped my right leg, I decided enough was enough. I went back inside the house, stripped down in the kitchen, had another Scotch, and fell into the bed. My hands and face still smelled of pine pitch. It was better than snake.
Buroids were on deck bright and early the next morning. There was some heavy-duty cop-knocking on the front door, and then they waltzed right in. When they got upstairs and found me sitting up in bed, one agent told me to get up and get dressed while the other notified someone via radio that the subject had been apprehended.
Not having had any coffee, the subject was still trying to restore color vision and coherent thought. I asked them if they had a warrant for my arrest. This produced some awkward hemming and hawing, and then verbal foot-shuffling. I told them to leave my ass alone or I’d smear them with pine pitch and get ticks in their Bucar. I also mentioned that I was probably still somewhat radioactive. That made them both back up a few steps.
“Tell Creeps I’ll meet with him down at the deli on Main Street,” I said.
“Why not right here?” one of them asked, not bothering to pretend not to know who Creeps was.
“Because there’s no coffee and there’s no food. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Sir, we’ve been ordered to bring you in to the RA’s office.”
I started to make inhalation noises. I held my nose, took a deep breath through my mouth, and let it out slowly. “I inhaled twenty million curies of moonpool radiation last night,” I said, still holding my nose. “I’m going to sneeze. Then I’m probably going to die, and so are you.”
They vanished.
Once they left, I prayed that the water was back on. It was, and I finally was able to delouse in style. If the water was still radioactive, it might actually get the pine pitch off, but I kept my mouth shut just in case. Once out of the shower I had a thought and called Mary Ellen again, this time at her office phone number.
“I miss you,” I said. “Even if you are getting married.”
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Are you up to your mendacious ass in deep camel dung? Are there bad guys looking for you? Are there good guys mad at you? Have you killed anyone in the past twenty-four hours?”
“Um.”
“Unh-hunh.”
“And that’s why I’m calling. I need a spot of information. You ever heard of a woman named Moira Maxwell? She’s an-”
“Mad Moira? Of course I’ve heard of her. Everyone here has.”
“What’s she famous for?”
She told me to hang on a second. I heard her dismissing a student. Then she was back.
“Moira Maxwell is the resident campus Bolshevik,” she said. “The UNC system is a liberal, left-leaning establishment, to say the least, but Moira Maxwell is a one-off. She makes even the professional liberals squirm. Wa-ay out there.”
“All talk, or is she capable of being a doer?”
Mary Ellen had to think about that. “She’s a modern revolutionary, which means she lurks on the Web instead of in dingy Parisian garrets.”
“A virtual Bolshie.”
“Well, by that I mean she doesn’t burn underwear down in the campus Union, or picket the dean’s office and chant the “Internationale.” Please God you’re not mixed up with that nutcase?”
“Better that you don’t know,” I said. “Not romantic, if that’s what you’re asking.”
She laughed. “Got that right, Mr. Investigator. Reportedly, Mad Moira doesn’t keep boy friends.”
She did in that detention center, I wanted to say, but held my peace. “It’s possible she’s involved in the same matter I’m looking into,” I said. “I guess what I really wanted to know is whether she has the courage of her convictions, or if the Red Square stuff is all about getting attention.”
“She’s called Mad Moira by the faculty people who know her,” Mary Ellen said.
“Mad as in nuts, or mad as in angry?”
“Both,” she said. She hesitated. “These are the calls that scare me, Cam.”
“I understand,” I said. “Stick with your plan, lovely lady. I’m probably not going to change.”
“Nor should you,” she said. “Doing this stuff, well, that’s just you.”
But not you, I thought sadly. “I’m still going to miss you, even when you’re Mrs. Professor.”
“Yes,” she said. “Me, too. Good-bye, Cam. Please, keep safe.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
I thought I heard a small laugh, but then she was gone.
Creeps and Missed-it Mary came through the deli’s doors like Batman and Robin, stopping most of the subdued conversations among the locals, who had been discussing last night’s atomic panic. They were both dressed up in metallic-looking Bureau suits, and they appeared very official indeed. They saw me and walked over to my table, while the locals adjusted their places as if they anticipated gunplay or some other drama. I’d stuffed two, count ’em, two apricot Danish down my gullet, along with enough coffee to restore both stereo vision and sequential sentences. I told them the Danish were terrific, and suggested they get themselves some coffee and then we could talk.
“Your Bureau is incredibly busy this morning, Mr. Richter,” Creeps said, slipping off his sunglasses. He looked a little ragged around the edges. Missed-it nodded emphatically. Very busy, yes, sir, you’re certainly right about that.
“You have breakfast yet, Special Agents?”
Mary looked over at Creeps. He said no, and then Mary said no.
“The earth will no doubt continue to rotate if you do, so: I say again-why don’t you guys go get some coffee and Danish, come back to the table, and we’ll talk like civilized people often do.”
They stared at me for a moment and then, amazingly, did what I suggested.
Once the
y were seated, I asked them if everything was reasonably secure out at Helios. Creeps said yes; they’d isolated the moonpool, and the engineers had taken the reactors into local control and shut them both down before there were any further excursions.
“Excursions?” I asked.
“Nuke-speak,” Creeps said. “When the power levels in the reactor rise or fall out of ordered limits.”
“Or, in other words, when the engineers no longer have control of the reactors.”
“Just so.” He looked around nervously to see if the civilians were listening. They were, raptly.
“And that actually happened?”
“I believe so, yes. Fortunately, the, um, individual who penetrated the control network did not know what she was doing. The danger was that she had the network, and the engineers in the control room did not.”
“Did radioactive water get into the county water system?”
Creeps was lifting his coffee cup to his mouth when I asked that question. He stopped. I admired his self-control in not looking down into the cup. Then he went ahead and took a sip. Missed-it was looking at her cup as if she had seen a roach operating at periscope depth, but when Creeps took a sip, she dutifully did, too. They’re big on loyalty in our Bureau.
“It got out of the plant and all the way to the first water tower, about two miles away. The system is engineered to recognize back-pressure in the lines, and the primary supply valves shut themselves. When the back-pressure continued to build up, relief valves lifted and the water was diverted out onto the grounds of the water tower.”
“Lovely,” I said. “They’ll never have to cut that grass again.”
“Well, that’s preferable to decontaminating the entire county and possibly the municipal water system,” he said. “Dr. Quartermain was able to tell the response team how to shut down the moonpool’s internal pumps. Now then: Would you care to recite your evening’s activities?”
I did. They just listened, not taking notes, which told me I’d be asked to go through this all again downtown with some office scribes. When I was finished, I became suddenly aware that the entire cafe had gone silent. Apparently, everyone, including the cooks and the waitstaff, had been listening to my tale of horrors from the night before. Creeps looked around the room as if realizing for the first time that the great unwashed public was now privy to Bureau secrets. He cleared his throat and suggested that we reconvene in the Wilmington office.
“Can do,” I said, “but first I need to check on Tony Martinelli and Pardee Bell. Can you guys spare me a couple of hours, and then I’ll come over?”
That seemed to work for them, and they left. Missed-it had her notebook out as she went through the door, writing furiously as Creeps dictated something to her.
“That was you, called in the warning last night?” an older man sitting nearby asked. The pair of pagers on his belt and a small radio on the table suggested he was an EMT. He had the look of a man who needed more sleep.
“Yep, that was me,” I said. “I’m sorry for all the uproar that must have caused, but I figured better safe than sorry. Did that big siren mean what I thought it did?”
Several heads were nodding. “Everybody goes inside and stays inside,” another man recited. “Close all the windows. Bring in the pets. Turn on the weather radios and wait for instructions. Don’t go outside until that siren stops.”
“Don’t forget the last part,” someone said.
“Oh, yeah,” the older guy said. “If the siren goes steady, then go into an interior room, sit down on the floor, put your head between your knees, and-”
“Kiss your ass good-bye!” the rest of the crowd shouted in unison.
“Well, y’all dodged a bullet last night,” I said. “The first thing that happened was a diversion. The real attack was on the reactor control systems. But they got some warning, too.”
It was clear I could have told my tale several times over, but I decided it was time to go. When I tried to pay my bill, however, the pastry guy said it was on the house. I thanked him and went outside. Out of habit, I was still looking around for the mutts, but now there was just some local traffic out on Main pushing along under another clear, cool November day on the Carolina coast. I looked for my Suburban and then realized it was still parked over in the woods next to the outlet canal. I guess I knew that; I was more worn out than I’d known. I started walking.
When I got back to the house, I found Sergeant McMichaels sitting on the front porch, watching a dozen seagulls harass some beachcombers across the street. His police cruiser was parked out front. He might have been asleep when I started up the walkway; he looked like he could use it, too. There was a plastic bottle of drinking water sitting on the porch table next to him, and my Suburban was parked in front of his cruiser.
I thanked him for retrieving my ride, and then got to tell my story again, this time answering some of the questions I’d ducked out on in the deli. Then he told me his side of it, of receiving my warning and trying to verify it through the Helios control center, only to be told by some very unhappy woman that their instrumentation showed no problems at the moonpool.
“Then it was that I had to make something of a judgment call,” he said. “You’ve seen those concentric rings on all the maps? There is a city- and county-wide alert system and also preplanned evacuation routes in place, all because of Helios. One call can put both systems in motion.”
“You made that call?”
“I did,” he said. “It’s the one time you don’t have to say anything twice. The threat of radiation concentrates the mind wonderfully, you know. Of course, the county managers all wanted to know my source, and my source’s credibility.”
“That must have been the hard part,” I said.
He smiled. “Not that hard,” he said. “Everyone admired those German shepherds of yours. It’s a small enough town, when it comes right down to it. We may love our power plant, but many of us work there, too, and it frightens us sometimes.”
“Hostages to the dragon.”
He nodded at the bottle of water. “That’s hot,” he said. “We had no real sampling equipment, so I dumped out the good water, took a sample off the water tower manifold nearest the plant. The EMTs brought a dosimeter around. Pegged right off the scale, it did.”
“Then you shouldn’t be driving around with that,” I said.
“It was a lab meter,” he replied. “You’d have to drink it to hurt yourself. Or so the Helios people told us.”
“But they wouldn’t take it with them, would they,” I said.
He frowned. “No, they would not, actually.”
“Just like Allie Gardner,” I said. “You were closer to real catastrophe than you knew, I think. I don’t believe Trask ever intended to do widespread harm. His ally, that left-wing nutcase, was way ahead of him.”
“And this is the same left-wing nutcase whom you helped to escape from the alleged DHS detention center?” he asked slyly.
“Other way around, Sergeant,” I said. “She made it possible for me to get out of there. She had the magic card that got us out of our rooms and into the basement.”
“And what is her problem with this great country?”
I told him what Mary Ellen had told me. “To hear her side of it, we’re becoming Nazi Germany. She, of course, is nothing more than a civic activist exercising her First Amendment rights. Mainly with a computer. Think Freedom of Information Act on digital steroids. But when they came to the boat for her, I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.”
“And, of course, it was Trask and his some of his service buddies who took her, not DHS.”
I nodded. “Had to be, although one of them was the Marine major who ran the ‘alleged’ detention center. He did warn me, actually, about Mad Moira. I’d assumed she was working for Trask. It appears I had that backwards. That’s what I get for making assumptions.”
“Surely you know the old saying.”
“By heart. Look: I need to find out where
Tony Martinelli is and how my other investigator, Pardee Bell, is doing over at County.”
“I can help with part of that,” he said. “Mr. Martinelli, I’ve been told, ended up at New Hanover County Hospital for twenty-four hours of observation, ostensibly for radiation exposure. Apparently, he didn’t care for it very much and checked himself out. My spies tell me he’s at the Hilton in Wilmington. Your Mr. Bell I don’t know about.”
“Ari Quartermain?”
“Ah,” he said. “Not so good, there. He suffered a heart attack as a result of his exertions. He’s been transported to Duke, upstate. Touch and go there, I’m told.”
“I’m not too surprised; he was under serious stress even before Trask grabbed him. How about that Dr. Thomason?”
McMichaels shook his head. “In the woods. Deep in the woods. Not glowing, but close.”
“There’s a loose end there,” I said. “Dr. Thomason was connected to the case that brought me down here in the first place. My associate, Allie Gardner? Trask told me that Thomason killed her with a bottle of radioactive water. Trask found out somehow and blackmailed Thomason into helping him.”
“Did he now,” McMichaels said, taking out a notebook.
I told him about my strange conversation with Allie’s sister, and the fact that the Helios logs had revealed a Thomason visiting a Thomason. He said he’d inform the Wilmington police. I told him to talk to Detective Bernie Price in homicide.
“And the plant?” I asked. “How far did she get?”
“My niece’s husband, Bobby, works on the reactor side,” he said. “The hacker didn’t have a clue as to how the RCS worked, but was able to enter commands. They were in the process of shutting both reactors down when your warning came in. Once they understood the problem, they used a manual system and scrammed them both, and that was that.”
“But if it had been a knowledgeable hacker…”
“Oh, yes. Bobby said that a knowledgeable intruder with that kind of access would have crept into the system instead of barging in. They could have made it very much worse, and left the control people with dangerously limited options.”
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