Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (38 page)

“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 electronic 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.

There were three World War II–vintage Quonset huts on one side of the greenhouse, but they had obviously been derelict for many years. On the other side was a perfectly flat but weed-infested area where potted plants had probably been stored under plastic. The pipe frames for the plastic were broken down and rusting away. Beyond the greenhouse there was a battered-looking single-wide trailer home, and beyond that, a coil of the Jellico River was visible through some swamp grass. The nose of the single-wide had fallen off its blocks, which meant that it was unlikely that it was habitable.

“Everything’s a wreck except the greenhouse,” Tony said quietly.

I’d noticed that, too. No broken panes of glass or vines climbing the structure, and there was a battery of what looked like solar panels erected along the south side, all tilted to maximize insolation. The pipes serving the panels were insulated in heavy black foam rubber, and that was also intact.

“Nice, isolated place to grow a cash crop of weed,” I said. “The nearest farmhouse has to be a mile or so from here.”

“A little obvious to the DEA air patrols,” he said. “My guess is orchids or something along those lines. The power lines terminate there, not at the trailer.”

I’d missed that fact, a reminder of why it was always better to have a partner along. “What news on Pardee?” I asked, as we continued to scan our surroundings.

“Alicia made it down there about one,” he said. “No change, either way, better or worse, which they say is good news. They’re telling her it could be a few more days before he surfaces.”

“Where is she staying?”

“Hilton.”

A gaggle of ducks blasted off from somewhere to our right and bulleted across the greenhouse area. The breeze
coming off the river was turning colder. The glass panels of the center section of the greenhouse appeared to be opaque, either from some paint or possibly condensation on the glass. I wondered if the whole thing was heated, or just that long center section. We were running out of daylight.

“I think we need to get around this and check the riverbank for a pier.”

“And a boat, maybe?”

“Hopefully,” I said. “And if it’s there, we’ll need some long guns.”

“No problem,” he said, and we began to move sideways, staying inside the tree line so as not to be perfectly obvious. The shepherds patrolled ahead of us, noses down, but not alarming at anything. We walked silently across a thick bed of pine needles. Once we got around the nursery area, we could see larger, hardwood trees draped along the riverbank. The mobile home looked even more forlorn from this angle, but there was a path leading down from the trailer to the bank. The remains of a rotting pier, its decking planks twisted sideways, stuck out into the river.