by Wes Lowe
“It gets better,” said Davy. “Thinking she had a job for life, she took the plunge and bought herself a little fixer-upper ten minutes away from the plant last weekend. It was more than what she could afford, but she figured that with projected raises, she’d only have to bite the bullet for three years before she could cover the mortgage without needing to scrimp.”
“Surprise, surprise,” said Carter with ironic optimism.
“No shit. When she got her layoff notice, she went into panic mode. Spending for the down payment, furniture, and materials for the renovation not only depleted her bank account but maxed out her credit cards. Her parents and friends can’t help and it’s pointless to expect the credit union to bail out a jobless person. She’s a perfect candidate as our insider into CNP. I would start with her.”
Carter grinned. “The ball’s rolling. Get me her number and I’ll call her.”
“Coming at you.”
Becky sat at her kitchen table staring blankly at nothing but the empty air. She had been abandoned again. As a newborn, the birth mother she never knew had left her in the women’s washroom of the welfare office. Three years ago, she was blindsided when her husband of a dozen years moved out of their apartment, the jerk leaving her for his male lover.
And now CNP was screwing her over. She had tried to hide her fear of rejection all her life, but the lies from a company that she truly believed that she would devote her life to were pushing her to a psychological breaking point.
She wasn’t wallowing in self-pity, but just accepting that no one cared for her. She was another part of the invisible minority.
Becky’s cell phone rang. It was someone with a 323 area code. She knew it was probably a telemarketer, but the distraught divorcee would speak to anyone right now that could take her mind off the quagmire she was in.
“Hello, who’s this?” Becky snapped.
“Are you Becky Stewart?” answered a friendly male voice.
“Depends on who’s asking.”
“I got it. Becky, you don’t know me from Adam and I gotta keep this conversation secret…”
Becky interrupted, “I’m not buying anything.”
“Wait. Wait. I don’t want to sell you anything. I want to hire you as a consultant.”
“Oh, brother. That’s a load of crap.”
“Do this for me. Take a look at your email. You’re gonna see that someone has just given you a two-hundred-and-fifty dollar Amazon gift certificate. That someone was me.”
“Give me a sec.” Becky quickly changed windows on her smart phone to her emails and yes, there was an Amazon gift certificate for two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.
“Got it. So what’s the catch and why me?” asked Becky, still skeptical about this anonymous caller. But hey, she had used up all her savings and taken out a loan for her home’s down payment. Totally cash poor, every cent would help.
“You’ve been blowing up social media. It wasn’t a stretch from there. I want a consultant on a film I’m going to make.”
“So what exactly do you want me to ‘consult’ about?”
“I’m planning to re-make a film; ‘The China Syndrome.’ I want to know more about nuclear power plants but I don’t want the PR bullshit that the company would lay out. They’ll just lie through their teeth and say how wonderful everything is. That’s BS. I want someone from the inside who knows not only how everything works and is laid out, but about the dirt that those assholes are always covering up.”
Becky didn’t want to admit that she had never heard of The China Syndrome, but she definitely needed the gig. “What’s it pay?”
“A thousand bucks if you can take me on a tour of the plant. But this has gotta be top secret. I don’t want anybody knowing what I’m doing or they might steal the idea.”
“I need fifteen hundred. Deal?”
There was a pause. Feeling her goldmine slipping away, Becky raised her hands and conceded defeat. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it for a thousand. When can you come? The later the better. That way, there won’t be too many people. I got keys that’ll take us everywhere.”
“Midnight tomorrow?”
“Sure. Come to my house. The address is…”
“I know where you live.”
As the phone disconnected, Becky thought, “There must be a God.”
16
Clandestine Tour
A Chevrolet Cruze pulled up in front of Becky’s bungalow at 11:52 pm. She knew the time because she had been checking her watch constantly as she stared out the window, her fingers twitching with anxious anticipation.
She saw a tall man wearing a hoody, sunglasses, and a mask over his face step out of the car and swallowed. Why the hell does he need to disguise himself?
As the stranger walked toward her home, she debated about whether to let him in or not, but practicality overruled personal safety; she needed the dough. Becky opened the front door before he had a chance to knock. “Hi. You ready?” she offered, her friendly smile masking her inner turmoil.
The stranger’s voice was shockingly friendly. He was just as pleasant in person as he was on the phone. “Just about. I gotta make sure you’re the person I want.”
Her worries about being mugged or raped vanished. All she could think about was how badly she needed this cash. Was he going to back out? She couldn’t let that happen and words tumbled from her mouth. “I’ve been at CNP for three months and worked all over the damn plant in maintenance. They only paid me like a janitor but they had me shlepping garbage, sorting out junk, and I worked a ton of overtime. There ain’t nothing about the place that I don’t know about. I know the complete layout, all the secrets, where all the spare keys are kept… I even know where the execs bang the secretaries… I’ll even throw that in if you want.” She raised her eyebrows up and down, then tossed her head in the direction of the bedroom.
The hooded man shook his head at the dumpy, lumpy broad. “Maybe later; I’m here mainly for business. But I need to know you can keep a secret.”
Becky looked offended at the insult. She gave a tight-lipped smile before grimacing. “Of course I can.”
Carter could see her shoulders slumping and knew that she would agree to anything to get the money. He was glad he had had the foresight to prepare for this possibility.
He reached into his pocket. There were two envelopes inside, one thicker than the other. He pulled out the thicker one and handed it to her. “Count it and then we can go.”
Becky pulled the bills out, licked her index finger and thumb, and began counting. Her eyes grew big when she discovered there was fifteen hundred bucks, not the agreed upon thousand.
“You asked for fifteen so I thought about it and decided to give it to you,” answered Carter before Becky asked the question. “Call it a ‘pre-bonus.’”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” This was a mountain of cash. It would cover next month’s mortgage, car payment, and groceries if she remained frugal.
The man took the hoody and mask off his face. Becky swallowed. This was the most perfect man she had ever been this close to in her life; smooth skin, flashing eyes, strong jaw. “Boy am I glad to get out of that. So damn uncomfortable.”
Becky asked timidly, “What’s your name?”
“Just call me Angelo,” said Carter.
“Okay. Shall we go?” Becky didn’t think he looked Italian but she didn’t care. He’d already shelled out the dough.
“That’s why I’m here.” Carter paused for a moment before adding, “Is there a way to do this on the down low. I don’t want anyone to know that I’ve been there.”
Becky grinned. “Angelo, your wish is my command. My lips are sealed.”
“Turn in there,” said Becky pointing to a little turnoff that was almost impossible to see in the poor light.
Carter winced as he guided the car in the direction that Becky’s finger aimed at. “Why here?”
“You said you don’t want nobody to know you’re here. CNP is abo
ut a mile away, and here there’s nothing but ferns and bugs and trees.”
They drove into a small clearing. “Park here. We’re safe. Some of the guys have been growing weed here for years and years. Nobody’s ever been caught and I don’t think we’ll be the first.”
They exited the car and Becky wagged a finger toward a small entrance further into the woods. She pulled a small flashlight from her pocket and turned it on.
From Becky’s familiarity with getting to CNP despite the darkness, it was clear to Carter that this wasn’t the first time she had been along the path. When they got to the wire mesh fence surrounding the nuclear reactor plant, she knew exactly where the wire had been cut that would allow them to sneak through.
“Now, let’s go sightseeing,” grinned Becky as she and Carter stooped down and squat-walked through the hole at the base of the fence.
Reaching the other side, Carter asked, “Great. So what are we going to see first?”
Becky extended a pointed index finger to identify the three hyperbolic-shaped structures and the buildings surrounding them. “Those things are the cooling towers. Beside them, that building with a dome on top is the containment building where the reactor is stored. That other big building is where the spent fuel rod pool is.” Her voice turned angry as she pointed to a two-story office building. “And that’s the administration building where the liars, cheats, and mucky muck nincompoops work.”
She lowered her arm and stuffed her hand into her vest pocket. “Anything in particular you want to see?”
“An office is an office is an office. We can skip that but I would like to take a better look at the cooling tower, where the spent fuel rods are, and the containment building.”
“You got it, Angelo,” said Becky cheerfully. “Everything. We can start with the exteriors and then work our way inside.”
As Carter snapped pictures of the three-hundred-foot tall concrete chimney-shaped cooling tower, he asked, “That’s a real weird shape. Why’s that?”
Becky shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? Not me.”
“Right,” replied Carter. He did in fact know the answer before he asked; he just didn’t want to raise suspicions by appearing too knowledgeable. The tower was a hyperboloid of revolution, a surface generated by rotating a hyperbola around one of its principal axes. They were that shape as the towers needed to be as wide as possible to increase the surface area. If they were too narrow, a powerful jet of steam could race through the constriction, putting unnecessary and dangerous pressure on the tower.
If Becky had given a more substantive answer, that would demonstrate a knowledge level that would make her even more useful, but her response demonstrated that she was likely just to be an expendable front-liner.
Inwardly, Carter smiled as he took pictures of the exteriors with his cell phone. A smaller nuclear power plant, it had two tall cooling towers standing beside the two concrete containment buildings which housed the nuclear reactors.
“The cooling tower kind of looks like a giant deformed golf tee to me,” said Carter.
“I wouldn’t know. Golf is outside of my budget. Ready to look inside?”
“For sure.
Before Carter joined Sommers Dawson Archer, he was totally ignorant about nuclear power plants. After all, he was going to become a Hollywood mogul. But when his father derailed that aspiration, he had to learn more about atoms, uranium, and nuclear energy from step one. Despite its iconic inward curved shape as the symbol for a nuclear power plant, Carter didn’t know that a cooling tower had nothing to do with creating nuclear energy but was really as simple as what its name suggested. A cooling tower was only a building where water created from the reactor cooled down.
And for all the years that he had been at SDA, he had never been inside a non-functioning cooling tower before. He was used to visiting gigantic structures with weird geometric shapes spouting steam into the air and not being able to step inside because it was full of water. That’s why he was surprised by the simplicity of CNP’s cooling tower. On top of stilt-like supports at the base, it was essentially a hollow concrete shell with floors covered with long distribution pipes, and several rows of metal walkways that staff used for maintenance purposes. Its main purpose was to have the hot water generated by the reactor cool down for re-use. As the hot water cooled, it released thermal energy into the environment.
Carter dismissed this as a potential site to plant one of the dirty bombs and said to Becky, “This is boring. Let’s see the good stuff.”
“It’s your nickel. We’ll see whatever you want to see,” replied Becky.
The two exited the cooling tower and walked over to the nearby domed containment building.
“This thing is built like a brick shithouse. Reinforced steel and concrete. Five feet thick walls. That’s more than Fort Knox. Airtight. Over a hundred feet tall,” elaborated Becky as she used her key to enter the imposing building.
Carter paid close attention as Becky gave him a running detailed commentary while they walked through the plant, describing what she knew about the nuclear reactor, its pressurizer, reactor coolant pumps, steam generator, and other equipment.
Even a poorly built or maintained containment building was still a solid fortified structure. After all, this is where the nuclear reactor was stored. Becky pointed out the piping that might release fission products to the atmosphere in the event of an accident. It was designed, in any emergency, to contain the escape of radioactive steam or gas.
Throughout Becky’s exhaustive three-hour tour, Carter was constantly making videos or snapping pictures, including many that Becky thought were superfluous.
“Boy, you sure take a lot of pictures. Hundreds more than the average person coming through here,” remarked Becky.
“Gotta be thorough. Want to make sure that the movie will be authentic. The better prepared we are, the less it will cost in production,” answered the fake movie mogul. “I didn’t really see a lot of radiation detection devices. I would have thought there would have been a lot more.”
“They’re all over the place. At the guardhouse by the entrance, in the reactor room, in the offices… they’re everywhere. But CNP are cheap bastards. A lot of them don’t work or are in the shop. Geiger counters, radiation portal monitors, even those little pager-sized detectors. I think it’s because nothing has ever gone wrong so management uses that as another place to pinch pennies. We could get fried to a crisp and no one would ever know,” snorted Becky sarcastically. Reverting to a conciliatory tone, she asked, “Ready to see the fuel rods pool?”
Carter nodded “You betcha.”
Carter and Becky walked to a large building fifty yards away. After entering, they continued down a long hall whose walls were made of solid metal.
She stopped in front of a door with a circular hand wheel instead of a doorknob, similar to a door that one might find on a submarine.
Becky began turning the hand wheel. Carter gaped when the door opened to reveal the huge pool standing less than thirty feet away from him.
“Very cool. What can you tell me about them?”
“Not a whole lot. The water is almost the temperature of a hot tub but not quite. I heard that there are used fuel rods in casks, but not even the old-timers around here know when the last time was that anybody put anything in. Not that I ever tried swimming in it, but I know the water’s over twenty feet deep, maybe even thirty.”
Becky was obviously not technically minded but that didn’t matter to Carter. The pictures and videos were what he needed. “I’m good for here but you can draw me a rough layout?”
“Sure. Let’s head back to my place.”
Sunrise was about ready to break when Carter and Becky arrived back at Becky’s home. Sitting at her kitchen table, Carter watched as Becky crudely drew out the layout of CNP, giving the approximate location and functions of each room, stairwells, the employees’ entrances, the guard room, and any other details she could think of.
Afte
r two grueling hours diagramming the map of CNP, Becky looked up asked, “Anything else?”
Carter shook his head. “You’ve done great. I’ll get going then.”
“Not quite, Mr. Angelo. We got some unfinished business,” said Becky.
There was an ominous tone in her voice that made Carter wince. Oh brother. Man up Carter. Last thing he wanted was to spend a minute in bed with the homely, smelly pig, but he needed to keep her quiet. “Well, let’s finish it then,” said Carter as he moved to unbuckle his belt.
“Not that, numbnuts,” snarled Becky.
She walked to an old beat-up desk and reached into the middle drawer. Becky whipped out a gun and pointed it at Carter. “Now talk and don’t give me no bullshit about being a Hollywood producer, and you ain’t no pussy faggot ‘Angelo’ either.”
Carter made an instant decision. Becky would be a formidable ally. Hired guns were never as motivated as someone with a cause, and Becky most definitely had a cause.
Unfazed with the weapon aimed at his head, Carter spoke gently. “Put that thing down. If you kill me, someone’s gonna find out sooner or later, and you don’t have the knowledge or cash to permanently go underground. Worse yet, that does nothing to damage CNP.”
Becky snarled as she waved her weapon, “What you talking about?”
Carter’s voice was calm but deadly serious. “I saw all your posts. I heard you whine and complain for the last five hours. I know how damn mad you are and I totally get it. You want to get back at those two-faced jerks at CNP. And you’re right. And you’re smart. I have no interest in making a movie.”
“Figured so. No one else could give a damn about the radiation detectors. What’s your real plan?”
Carter’s gaze locked with Becky’s. “You’re not the only one in the world that’s pissed at CNP. I’m giving you a choice. You can either blow my brains out now and accomplish nothing, or you can join me and we will make the bastards pay.”