Then I remembered something. Allie had said she’d be back the next day after taking care of some personal business. What might that have been? I should have said something to the special agents, but then again, maybe I could tease out a few more facts before I closed that loop.
“Mr. Cameron Richter?” a deep baritone voice inquired over my left shoulder. I looked up. A stocky black man stood next to my table. He was immaculately dressed in a stylish suit, and he was holding a leather-covered notebook across his middle.
“Yes?” I said. I would have stood, but I couldn’t get up without running into him, and he didn’t look like he’d move a whole lot.
“Forgive the intrusion,” he said. “I’m Aristotle Quartermain. May I have a word, please? This concerns the recent misfortune of Ms. Allison Gardner.”
He proffered his hand, and I automatically shook it. He was in his late fifties, and his skin was not just black but blue-black. He had a glistening, oversized bald head and intense owl-like eyes. He was built like a fire hydrant under that six-hundred-dollar suit, not tall as much as broad, and his hand felt like a silk-covered vise. He sat down carefully opposite me and put his notebook on the table.
“You have the advantage of me, Mr. Quartermain,” I said. “A drink?”
“That would be very nice, Mr. Richter. I believe I have one coming.”
“That sure of yourself?”
“It’s a fault, Mr. Richter. I’m the chief of technical security at the Helios nuclear power station. I’m afraid it’s gone to my head.”
The same waiter brought Quartermain his drink and gave me a conspiratorial look over my guest’s shoulder. The Darkside was everywhere tonight. Then I realized what Quartermain had just announced.
“Ah,” I said.
“Yes,” Quartermain replied, sampling his Scotch. He unzipped the fine-grained leather binder, extracted a neck chain containing his credentials, and slid it across the table. I examined the three plastic badges, each with his picture and the logo of the power company, PrimEnergy, which apparently owned and operated the Helios atomic power station.
“I’m technical security. Another gentleman is physical security. I’m in charge of keeping the nuclear process safe. The other guy is watching for bad guys coming over the moat. Technically, he works for me.”
“Why?”
“Because if our side of the security equation goes south, physical security becomes moot. Nobody will be trying to get in to the power plant under those circumstances, if you get my drift.”
“Got it,” I said. I studied the badges and handed them back. “Those look good, for the moment, anyway.”
“I’ve been at the bar,” he said, retrieving the badges. His fingers were large and impeccably manicured. “I did not want to intrude until the FBI people left. Special Agent Caswell is a sight to behold, is he not.”
“True enough,” I said. I’d decided to let him lead. He knew who I was and why I was in Wilmington, and he knew the Bureau people by name. The pleasant, isn’t-this-a-nice-evening expression melted off his face, and suddenly I was looking at a no-shit security officer. The transformation was dramatic.
“Your associate,” he said, lowering his voice, “was killed by ingesting about a pint of highly radioactive water.”
“How high is high?” I asked.
“High enough to permanently expose twenty-seven plates of X-ray film.” He paused, looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Twenty-seven plates that were stored fifty feet away from the main analysis room in that lab. She might as well have crawled into an industrial-sized microwave oven, set it on high, and spent the night in there.”
“All this from one bottle of water?”
He leaned back in his chair and it creaked. “We don’t know that, of course. What the container was, I mean. We’re assuming that she drank it thinking it was just water, since there were no indications of coercion. Right now the situation up at the state forensic lab is somewhat—chaotic.”
“I can just imagine,” I said. “And they know this stuff came from the power plant?”
“No, no, they don’t know that. The NRC—that’s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—is involved, as is, of course, the Bureau. Needless to say, they’re both looking hard at Helios as a possible source.”
“And let me guess, the plant and the company are circling the wagons at warp speed just now.”
He smiled and shook his head. “The company understands their concerns, of course, but the NRC technical people, at least, know that there’s no way radioactive water can come out of that plant and into the community absent a major, and I mean major, accident. Even then, it would appear in the form of water vapor. Not something you could drink. No. Technically, this isn’t possible.”
“And yet . . .”
“Yes. And yet. The isotopic fingerprints would normally tell the tale, except for the fact that any credible analysis of residual isotopes is going to be obscured by their having gone through human tissue.”
I just looked at him. Isotopic fingerprints? He saw my confusion. “When I was in nuke school,” he said, “the professor would sometimes say something in Greek and we’d all get blank expressions on our faces. Every classroom had a whiteboard or six. In the corner of one of the whiteboards there was always a rectangle with a circle drawn inside it. Inside the circle were the words ‘I believe.’ That was the I-believe button. If the instructor realized that he’d just baffled the entire class, he’d invite us to press the I-believe button and then he’d proceed with the rest of the lecture. Sometimes the problem cleared up, sometimes it didn’t. So: Say, ‘I believe.’ ”
I did. He grinned.
“What’s funny?”
“I was thinking about Special Agent Caswell’s reaction to isotopic fingerprinting. He tried to pretend he knew what it was. So I asked if the Bureau’s laboratory could do some for us. Special Agent Myers made a note to call them. That will be an amusing, if short, discussion.”
“Back to the problem at hand, Mr. Quartermain,” I said. “My associate, as you called her, is in an autopsy drawer. The technical impossibilities aside, I want to know how this happened and why.”
“I apologize,” he said at once. “I didn’t mean to trivialize what’s happened. In fact, that’s why I’ve come to see you. I’m here to offer you a job of work.”
“Me?”
“You and your company. That’s what you people do, correct? Investigations?”
I shifted in my chair. This was going just a bit too fast. “Mr. Quartermain,” I began.
“Please, call me Ari,” he said. His voice was genial enough, but those zero-parallax eyes never left mine.
“Okay, Ari. You saw me talking to the FBI people. If you know anything about the Bureau, you’ll know that the last thing they will either want or permit is my involvement in this mess. Double-oh-jay is the term of art they prefer when civilians get in their way.”
It was his turn to blink. “Double-oh-jay,” I repeated. “Obstruction of Justice, with a capital J in their case. Say: ‘I believe.’ ”
He laughed then, a great big gut-trouncing bellow of a laugh that had people in the lounge looking over at us.
“I believe,” he said, still chuckling. Then his face sobered up again. “Look,” he continued. “The feds are cranking up a circus and a half over this incident. A joint NRC-FBI team is going to be arriving at the plant first thing tomorrow morning. We, and by ‘we’ I mean reps from the company, the plant operators, various contractors, and nuclear safety engineers, are going to demonstrate that there’s no way hot water got out of that plant in a form that could be consumed. It’ll take a day or so, maybe longer, but then they’re going to go away and look for some other explanation.”
“So what is it you would want me and my people to do?”
“You want to find out what happened to Ms. Gardner?” he asked. “As opposed to, say, finding grounds for some kind of lawsuit?”
That pissed me off. It mu
st have shown in my face because he sat back in his chair and raised his hand defensively.
“Okay,” he said. “That was out of line.” He hesitated. “Look, I came to you because of some things the FBI people said about you. That you were known to them and that you played by your own rules. That you were an outsider, and the fact that Allison Gardner was from your organization was ringing bells for them.” Another pause. “I think I need someone like you, but not until the feds back out.”
“Because there is a way that hot water could escape from your plant? Is that it?”
He took a deep breath. He looked like a man who was about to take a significant risk. “Possibly,” he said, “but not from the reactors, per se. The energy side, I mean. And it would require some inside help.”
“Okay, then where?”
“From the moonpool,” he said.
I leaned back in my chair, looked around for the waiter, and signaled for another round and a switch to Scotch for me. I had no idea what a moonpool was, but his other implication was clear. He was wondering if he might not have himself a bad guy in his favorite nuclear power station. I knew nothing about the technical side of a nuclear power plant, but I was aware that the entire industry lived life on a political and environmental knife-edge, where the least mistake could cost a power company tens of millions. Which is probably why he was talking to me: He wanted to scope out any such problem before the feds came to the same conclusion and swarmed back to shut the place down.
“Let’s get two things straight right away,” I said. “If I agree to help you, and I haven’t decided that yet, and we uncover some felonious shit, said shit gets handed over to the appropriate federal authorities at once.”
“Of course,” he said. “Especially if there’s a terrorist angle to this.”
That hadn’t occurred to me, although now that I thought of it, it should have.
“And second?” he asked.
“And second, my concern is not for your power station. Allie Gardner was a close friend and associate. She was good troops and a stand-up cop in her day. She got a raw deal from two serial-asshole husbands, and this was not what should have happened to her. Okay?”
“Got it,” he said.
I theorized that since Allie hadn’t been doing anything remotely related to the Helios power station, what had happened to her had probably been a random event. He nodded, but didn’t actually say anything.
“So: What’s a moonpool?”
“It’s an old engineer’s slang term for the spent fuel storage pool in a nuclear power plant. A power reactor doesn’t consume all of its fuel before the uranium bundles become inefficient, so we regularly remove spent fuel elements and transfer them to a deep pool within a containment structure for storage. Right after a refueling event, the rods are really hot, physically and radiation-wise, and they make the water glow this incredible, otherworldly blue color. Moonpool.”
“And this water is radioactive?”
“You wouldn’t want to swim in it,” he said. “It’s not so much that the water is radioactive as that the spent fuel assemblies are. Now, if one or more of those assemblies is a leaker, and particles of radioactive material get loose in the water, then the water is, for all practical purposes, radioactive.”
“But they’re not supposed to be leaking, right?”
He shrugged. “Metallurgy mutates in the presence of an ongoing, long-term fission reaction. The actual uranium fuel is cladded, but the fission reaction can sometimes burn holes or weak spots in the cladding. That’s why the moonpool is forty-five feet deep.”
“And if they do leak, the water could be hot enough to do the kind of damage the ME was talking about?”
“Not if you’re just standing next to the moonpool. But if you ingested it? Oh, yes, easily.”
“Look, Ari,” I said. “You don’t know me or my people. None of us is qualified to snoop around a nuclear power plant, and with the feds in it, we’d inevitably bump up against each other. In my experience, they don’t play well with others. I think we’re gonna pass.”
He nodded. He was visibly disappointed, but perhaps not surprised. “Okay,” he said. “It was worth a shot. I can tell you that you may never find out what happened to your associate, though.”
“Meaning the feds’ll clamp a lid on this and weld it shut?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’ll know that’s what’s happening when a special agent brings you some security forms to sign, where you promise not to divulge any piece of this in the interests of national security, homeland defense, and apple pie.”
“What if I decide to just decline to sign?”
He smiled at me. “You’re licensed by the state government, right?” he said. “Who do you think they check with before issuing those kinds of licenses?”
Point taken, I thought. “What exactly would you want us to do?”
“Let’s wait for the current shitstorm to settle down,” he said. “Then let’s talk again.”
I walked Ari out to his car, said good night, had dinner, and then went for a stroll down the riverwalk toward the center of town. The evening was cool and clear, and the boardwalk was empty. The Cape Fear River was running strong as the tide went out, tugging audibly at pilings and coiling up clumps of trash in small whirlpools along the banks. The buoys out in the channel leaned toward the Atlantic Ocean as if they wanted to escape. The few tourist joints down at the base of Market Street still operating during the off-season were doing a desultory business, with overdressed seating hostesses standing by their patio rostrums, smiling longingly at me as I ambled past all those empty al fresco tables.
I became aware of the three guys who had started following me. They’d appeared in my wake about the time I passed the Cape Fear Serpentarium. Since I couldn’t be sure they were following me and not just out for an after-dinner walk of their own, I turned left into the next street and walked uphill, away from the river. At the next corner I turned left again onto Front Street and headed back toward the center of the tourist district. They kept going along the riverwalk and went out of sight when I made that left on Front. I went four or five blocks, made one more left, and walked back down toward the river, where, lo and behold, there they were again, this time standing on the boardwalk, patently admiring the battleship across the river. They were fit men, dressed in khaki trousers, ball caps, sneakers, and dark windbreakers. They looked like a security detail whose protectee had dismissed them for the night. Or maybe not.
I was on the diagonal corner from them when I got to Water Street. I thought about going over to them and commenting on the weather, but then decided to go on back to the hotel, which was only three blocks away. I’d have to cross one relatively dark parking lot and then walk up the flood ramp in front of the lobby, but there were people up there, and it didn’t look like a promising place for a mugging. When I went through the hotel doors and glanced back, I didn’t see anyone following me. Okay, too many late-night TV movies. I stopped at the lobby PC to check my e-mail, then went upstairs.
The corridor on my floor was empty and quiet. There was a room service tray with dirty dishes in front of the suite diagonally across from mine, but no other signs that there were humans about. I keyed open my door, flipped on the light.
And there they were.
One was standing by the window with his back to me, looking out at the river. A second was sitting at the desk chair, facing me, and holding a large black semiautomatic out at arm’s length, pointed at my stomach. The third, older than the other two, was sitting in the other chair, hands behind his head, and grinning at the expression on my face. I stopped short, keeping the door open, mentally kicking myself for not having the shepherds with me.
“Oh, shut the damn door, Lieutenant,” the older one said. “This is just a social call.”
I thought about shutting it and running, but had not yet looked at the fire escape card to see where the stairs were. There was also the wee matter of that .45 looking right at me.<
br />
Some social call. The young guy with the big black gun was not smiling. Plus, the older one had called me lieutenant.
“C’mon,” he insisted. “We’ve all had dinner, and none of us wants to chase your ass around the hotel. Come in and close the door. Please?”
“Well, since you said please,” I said, putting on the best front I could muster. The guy looking out the window hadn’t turned around, but I knew he was watching me in the reflection of the room lights.
“Thank you very much,” the older guy said. “You’re wondering how we got in here.”
“Question crossed my mind,” I said.
I felt increasingly stupid standing in the little entrance alcove next to the bathroom door. I wondered if there was anyone in the bathroom, or if they’d found my own weapon in the hidden compartment of my toiletries bag. The rest of my stuff didn’t look as if anyone had been through it. “So what’re we here to talk about?”
“Actually, I’m here to talk, and you’re here to listen, if you don’t mind,” the man said. He was about fifty-five, with a hard face, a hatchet nose, and reddish gray hair planed into a flattop haircut. Like the others, he was wearing a windbreaker, khaki trousers, and military boots. There was a small black knife in a pouch on his right boot.
The other guy whose face I could see looked Italian. He was much younger, maybe in his late twenties. He was obviously trying to look like some kind of unblinking, lizard-eyed, hard-boiled young soldato in a crime family. He was succeeding. All three of them were in shape, with flat bellies, big chests, and heavy shoulders under those oversized windbreakers. I wondered how long the young guy could hold that heavy .45 out at arm’s length like that. My arm was getting tired just watching him do it.
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 4