“I meant to ask Ari this: Why in the world is there even a way in for a hacker? Why would the reactor control system ever be exposed to the Web?”
“Ah, that. Yes. I asked the same question. Bobby told me that PrimEnergy decided about two years ago to network their plants here in North Carolina. They maintain a sort of super control room at their headquarters. They want to be able to see a problem developing in case the local control room misses it.”
“And they used the Web?”
“No, no, they have an encrypted network. That’s what Trask gave the hacker.”
“They catch up with her?”
“Not yet, but there are lots of agencies looking. Listen, I have to ask: What happened to Billy Summers?”
“He shot my dogs.”
McMichaels paged backward through his notebook for a second. “They had to do some very unpleasant surgery on young Billy,” he said. “A double amputation, I’m told. Something to do with orchids. And he is temporarily unable to move his arms or legs.”
“He shot my dogs,” I said again.
“Right,” McMichaels said, closing the notebook. “I’m very sorry about that. The whole town will be sorry to hear it.” He paused. “Do you know that he did that? That they’re dead? Should people be on the lookout, perhaps?”
“I never found them,” I said, “and they failed to find me. They may still be trapped in that tailrace from the condenser jets. But, yes, I’d appreciate people being on the lookout.”
“The tailrace,” he said. “We took a teenager out of that rotor once; he’d been missing a year. An unlovely memory. I am very sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Now I have to go see Creeps Caswell and do this all formally. Will you let me know what you find out on the Thomason matter? That was why I came down here in the first place.”
“You might ask your friends at the RA; they supposedly interviewed Thomason before he went into isolation.”
I thanked him for all his help, and he left. As I went back into the house, I noticed he’d left behind his bottle of glowworm juice. I made a note to remind him to come back and get it later. I’d had well enough of radioactive water. Then I decided to bring it into the kitchen-no point in someone snitching it and then getting the ultimate bellyache from hell.
Since Billy had destroyed our cells, I used the house phone to call the Hilton and leave a message for Tony. He met me an hour later at County, where we found Alicia in much better spirits. Pardee was significantly improved, and they were planning to surface him tomorrow morning. We made some casual inquiries at the desk about Dr. Thomason, but nobody seemed to know his status, or else they just wouldn’t talk to us. Tony reluctantly agreed to accompany me for my debrief at the resident agency building.
On the way over, he told me about the exciting finish to the moonpool flap, and how Ari had saved his ass by telling the irate technicians that he, Tony, was one of the good guys. After that, he said, they went to work getting their dragon-shit covered back up with lots and lots of water. That had even helped the county water problem, because they sucked a lot of the contaminated stuff back into the moonpool when they restarted the pumps.
The rest of my day was spent talking to the FBI. Sometimes they really like to talk. I was more than ready to get out of there that evening and get back to Southport and my dwindling supply of Scotch. Tony said he’d met someone interesting at the Hilton and asked if I’d mind if he stayed in town. Fine by me. I thought I might just go “home” and sulk, maybe even get wasted, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I also thought briefly about going over to County on the way back to visit young Billy Summers. Maybe squeeze an IV tube or three. But if McMichaels was right, and they’d amputated what I thought they’d amputated, that was good enough. For the moment, anyway. I could probably find him again if I wanted to.
I grabbed a greaseburger on the way into Southport and then went to the beach house. I was disappointed to find Buroids waiting. They warned me that subject Moira Maxwell was thought to be still in the Wilmington area, and said they would like to stake out my pad on the possibility that she might try to contact me.
“Why on earth would she do that?” I asked.
The young agent looked at me patiently. Then I understood. “My Bureau didn’t tell you why to stake out my house,” I said. “Just to effing do it, right?”
They both nodded, happy to not have to explain something they probably didn’t understand anyway. I asked them if they wanted to come in the house or just hang around within visual range. They chose the latter, and one of them gave me his pager in case something happened.
I went back inside, and they disappeared up the street. I wasn’t too worried about Mad Moira. I might have foiled her big show, but she had plenty of spleen left for her native land, and I assumed she’d know not to get within a mile of me or my people.
Another assumption shot to hell. When I turned on the lights in the kitchen, there she was, my favorite redheaded harpy complete with a nasty-looking, nickel-plated handgun and her computer bags. She’d cut her lovely red hair down to a skullcap that only a lesbian could love, and she appeared to be dressed for travel. Through the back window I could see Tony’s vehicle.
“Hey, cellmate,” she said. “Why don’t you just relax and sit down for a minute.”
“You know there’s Bureau in the neighborhood, don’t you?” I said, sitting down, and regretting that the kitchen could not be seen from the street. How in the hell did she get Tony’s car?
“Oh, them,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “I have some friends taking care of that problem.”
“You have friends?” I asked.
She slid into a chair opposite me and gave me that fire-eyed grin. “Believe it or not, Lieutenant. Not only friends but like-minded citizens who are more than willing to help me on my little crusade. We’re not done, not by a long shot.”
“What are you doing here, Moira? You’re not mad at me, are you?”
She barked a laugh. “Do you think?” she said. “But actually, this”-she waved the purse gun-“this is for my protection. I just wanted to tell you face-to-face that we’ll never stop until America regains its freedom and the rest of the world is safe from our grievously aggressive government and our runaway military-industrial complex. We intend to show them that the people are the real weapons of mass destruction when it comes to tyranny.”
I almost said blah-blah-blah. I hadn’t heard this bullshit since watching some of those sixties movies, but it was coming from the same quarter it usually did: arrogantly overeducated people who’d never been out there on life’s front lines. I said nothing, and just waited. I wondered if there was any way I could activate that pager in my pocket without her noticing.
“You don’t believe me?” she asked, frustrated at my silence.
“Don’t you think, Moira,” I said, “that creating incidents of terror will only strengthen the government’s resolve? Make it grab even more authority? If Trask was right, and the country’s become dangerously complacent, what you guys tried was exactly the wrong thing to do, wasn’t it?”
She shook her head. “What we’ll create is doubt-doubt about the government’s ability to protect the masses of citizens in this country who already feel powerless. Doubt about the moral underpinning of this so-called war on terror. Doubt about who the bad guys really are: them or maybe us. And from doubt springs true revolution.”
I’d finally had it, even if she did have a gun. “Oh, c’mon, Moira,” I said. “Masses and classes? That bullshit went out with Karl Marx caps and granny glasses. Communism is dead, or hadn’t you heard?”
“Don’t tell Comrade Putin that,” she replied. “Or better, visit Russia and see for yourself. I have.”
“The Russians can’t help themselves,” I said. “They like their tyrants. You, on the other hand, sound like a one-woman propaganda machine. What other Americans are going for revolution? None.”
“You th
ink?” she said. “Have you asked yourself why Carl Trask told your boys where you were? It wasn’t to get you out, big guy-it was to get me out. That’s why you changed rooms. Our thing is a lot bigger than you know.”
“You’re telling me the major was part of this?”
“No, but he’s devoted to Carl Trask and his ideas about the decay in this country.”
“You and the military guys are on different sides, Moira.”
“They think so, and you think so. The difference is that my side is using them.” She glanced at her watch and got up. “I’ve got a plane to catch.” She pointed at our portable computer on the kitchen table. “You might want to get rid of that. That’s the computer that actually hacked into Helios. It’s a slave to the ones I have in here.”
I blinked. I was impressed and said so. Then I asked her where she was going.
She laughed. “As if I would tell you?” she said. “Oh, let’s see, then-how about, I don’t know, Mexico?”
“Mexico.”
“It doesn’t matter where I go,” she said, pointing at her computer bags. “As long as there’s one or two of these around.” She zipped up her jacket and headed for the back door. She saw the water bottle. “May I?” she said.
“Be my guest,” I said, keeping my voice absolutely neutral. She grabbed the bottle, stuck it in her jacket pocket, and pushed open the back screen door.
“Moira?” I called. “If you actually do go down to Margaritaville?”
“Yes, dear?”
“Don’t drink the water.”
The next morning, Tony and I went back to the hospital to be there when Pardee surfaced. We were too late. Alicia was beaming at his bedside. Pardee had come out of it on his own and announced he was hungry, damned hungry. The doctors were very pleased and yet equally adamant that there would not be a party just yet. They asked us if we would mind very much just going away and coming back later. We slunk away to find some coffee in the hospital cafeteria. I told Tony about what had happened last night, and he looked at me with new respect. I told him that he’d eventually get his vehicle back if he’d just be patient, and that, no, I didn’t intend to share the news of Moira’s departure call with Creeps and company.
We had our coffee and then went down to see Bernie Price to close the loop on the Thomason case. He had been in touch with the reluctant sister, who was now on her way home to the U.S. to see about her brother, and possibly even her sister, Allie. She had told Bernie that there had been an inheritance from their parents, but Allie’s revolt and subsequent enlistment with the sheriff’s office had provoked their father to verbally disown her. When the second parent died several years later, the money had been much larger than they’d known, and the older brother, acting as executor, had divided it between himself and Allie’s sister, even though the trust had specified a three-way split. Allie had apparently just found out, and had gone to Helios to confront Dr. Thomason. Whether she threatened to expose him wasn’t known, but when I had made that call to the sister in Turkey, she had known that the chickens might be coming home to roost. I suspected Thomason had admitted to Allie what he’d done, and when she threatened to expose him, he poisoned her with moonpool water. The loving sister would probably never admit that, but Bernie said she was in for some pointed questioning.
Alicia took Tony back to Triboro when she went back for a day with the kids. The docs would not let Pardee go until he’d been observed operating normally for forty-eight hours. I drove back over to Southport. I decided to stay at the beach house as long as Pardee was still stuck in the hospital, even though Alicia said she’d be back down in a day or so. That evening, Sergeant McMichaels stopped by the house again. He had a rustic-looking individual with him. I thought he’d come for his bottle of radioactive water, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. He introduced the other man as a local fisherman, who had some news for me.
“Think mebbe I got your dogs,” the man said. “One German shepherd, one black wolf-lookin’ one?”
My heart jumped. “Where?”
“My place,” he said. “On the river. They wandered in yesterday mornin’, I called the sergeant here. He’d had word out, you was lookin’.”
“Are they hurt?”
The man shuffled his feet and looked warily at McMichaels. “You can tell him,” the sergeant said.
“The black one? He’s done lost him a back leg. Looks like somebody shot it off. Got him a hurt eye, too. Bad hurt, I reckon. The other one’s okay, but she won’t eat nothin’ and she keeps makin’ teeth at me.”
That would be Frick, I thought. “Let’s go,” I said. Frack’s lost a leg? The thought of that almost made me wish it wasn’t them. Almost.
The man turned out to be an inshore fisherman. He ran a one-man-band operation and plied his trade in the Cape Fear estuary for the Wilmington restaurant markets. His riverside place was in a small community of riverbank places whose yards were cluttered with boat gear, junked cars, wobbly-looking piers and boats, and weathered mobile homes. He took us out back to a makeshift dog kennel, where I heard a familiar bark.
Hallelujah. It was them. Frick was thin and a bit tattered, but she perked right up the moment she saw me coming across the backyard. I heard a couple of other cars pulling up out front but concentrated on greeting Frick and then examining Frack. I could tell immediately that his right eye was a total loss. His left rear leg was gone from the elbow down. The fisherman had put some kind of horrible goo on it that stank of fish, but I didn’t see any swelling or other signs of infection. He couldn’t stand up, but he was very glad to see me, and his tail worked just fine. I sat down in the pen between them and just talked to them, trying to keep a dry eye and not really succeeding as I watched Frack try to get closer to me. It was such a relief to see them alive, battered as they were.
“Y’all gonna put that one down?” the fisherman asked. McMichaels studied his shoes, as if already knowing the answer to that one.
“Hell, no,” I said. “He’s going to be like me-retired.”
“Well,” Sergeant McMichaels said, “there’s one more thing. Lots of folks in town appreciated what you did. We talked about what happened to the shepherds. So, well, over there.”
I looked through the pen wire to see a dozen or so locals standing by the corner of the fisherman’s trailer. I recognized some faces from the Southport diner.
“Seems that some of the folks in town wanted to do something, pay you back,” McMichaels said, pointing to my dogs with his chin. “Your partners here getting hurt and all. We got together. We have something for you. Some one, actually.”
He signaled to the small crowd by the trailer, and a man came around the corner with a very large sable shepherd on a leash. No one spoke as he walked over to where I was sitting in the pen. Frick got up and stared, but the big dog ignored her and simply sat down and looked at me through the wire. I don’t think I’d ever seen a shepherd with as much gravitas as this one. She turned out to be a female. Calm, amber eyes, erect ears, broad chest, and an aura of complete superiority.
“This here,” the man said, “is Kitty. She’s yours, you want her. Folks here were trying to think of some way of repaying you. I bred her, but she’s yours, if you can use her.”
“Kitty.”
The man smiled. “My wife’s idea of a joke, before we knew how big she was gonna get. Should Carol ever get herself into trouble, she wanted to be able to say, ‘Here, Kitty, Kitty,’ and have a big-ass ol’ German shepherd come around the corner. The bigger she got, the funnier that got. What do you think?”
I got up, patted my two pals on the head, and went out to meet Kitty. I sat down on the ground in front of her, and she examined me gravely. I let her smell my hands and the big bandage on my right forearm. Frick gave a jealous woof. Frack, on the other hand, put his head down between his paws. I think he knew that his replacement was on deck. I realized I’d have to work on that.
Kitty stood up, walked around me once, and went to the pen to
touch noses with Frick, who wagged her tail, before coming back to me. She sat down again.
“Shake on it, Kitty,” the man said.
Damned if she didn’t put out a big old paw. The people over by the trailer started to applaud.
And me?
Well.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-a39020-9431-d343-78b3-86c0-957a-9adb3f
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 11.12.2011
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
The Moonpool cr-3 Page 36
