Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (49 page)

“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 café 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.”

“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.