“Goddamn Trask,” he muttered as he came back up the front steps, pocketing the camera.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, I think I recognized the one guy. We have a recording scanner at the Pass and ID Office that’ll confirm it.”
“Well, you’re obviously consorting with suspicious characters,” I said as we put away our weapons and went back into the kitchen. I was relieved that none of the neighbors, if indeed there were any, had been out on their porches.
“Did you tell this young man to check for someone following me?” he asked.
“Nope. He’s suspicious by nature and just chock-full of initiative.”
Ari grinned at Tony and thanked him for catching the tail. Tony said you’re welcome and then excused himself to go check for “smooth,” now that we had just chased “rough” away.
Ari blinked at that and then grinned again. “You guys are good,” he said.
Tony slipped out the back door while we resumed our conversation at the kitchen table. Quartermain explained what he wanted from us.
“Just as the federal government runs what we call force-on-force drills on the fences,” he began, “I have some budget money to run technical intrusion drills on my side of the perimeter.”
“Define your side of the perimeter,” I said.
“There are three security circles around a nuclear plant: the so-called corporate area, the protected area, and the vital area. Corporate means the public can be there—hunting, fishing, et cetera—if they abide by the company’s rules for the use of the land.”
“No fences?”
“Nope—the first fence defines the protected area. That takes pass and ID access to get in. That’s the area around the industrial plant and its buildings.”
“And the vital area?”
“That’s where the dragon lives—defined as the area where access makes the release of radiological materials possible.”
“That’s a little fuzzy, isn’t it?”
“By design—the vital area is what we nukes say it is. Think layers. Snake Trask and his people patrol the corporate area. They’ll protect the fenced perimeter; they’ll defend the vital area, with deadly force if necessary. The system works in reverse, too.”
“You mean protecting the rest of us from the reactor?”
“Exactly. The nuclear reaction happens inside a stainless steel reactor vessel. That vessel lives in a concrete, lead, and steel containment dome. The dome lives in a steel building. Trask keeps bad guys out; my people and I keep the dragon in.”
“Which puts you in charge.”
Ari smiled. “Like I said before, if my dragon gets loose, the security of the physical perimeter is no longer the issue.”
“Can it get loose?” Pardee asked.
“Yes, most likely through human error, compounded by an instrumentation failure,” Ari said. “The Russians hold the world records, plural. The Chernobyl melt was a classic example of unsafe design compounded by human error. The low-order detonation in the Chelyabinsk district back in 1957 was simple Communist stupidity.”
He went on to describe how the Russians had kept filling a radioactive waste tank until it overpressurized, started a partial reaction, and then literally exploded, contaminating a six-hundred-square-mile area. They then took to dumping their waste into a nearby lake. When the lake dried up in a drought and the radioactive sediments blew away in the wind, it created a no-man’s land the size of Maryland, which exists to this day.
“How about our own Three Mile Island?” I asked.
“The RCS, that’s the reactor control system, detected a problem and shut itself down. Should have been end of story. But then a valve opened and stayed open, while reporting to the control room that it was closed. That drained out all the cooling water.”
“If the reactor was shut down, why was that a problem?”
“Because even after the fission reaction shuts down, the residual heat of decay is still very high. Without cooling water, it can melt the core assembly. That’s what happened at TMI before they realized the instruments were lying. What’s forgotten is that it all stayed inside the containment structure, that movie not withstanding.”
“We’re not exactly qualified in nuclear engineering,” I pointed out.
“I know,” he said, “but I’m talking about helping me with a different problem.”
“Somebody who is technically qualified, and who might be screwing around?” I said.
“Exactly.” He sipped some coffee and made a face. “Like what happened to Ms. Gardner.”
“So you do think that came from your plant?”
“Officially? That would be an unequivocal no. And I’ll defend that position for as long as I want to keep my job.”
“But.”
“Yeah. But. Fortunately for PrimEnergy and Helios, the feds are focusing elsewhere. There’s apparently been intel that the Islamists have given up the idea of smuggling in a nuclear bomb in favor of trying something with nuclear waste.”
“A dirty bomb instead of a Hiroshima bomb.”
“Yeah. A plutonium or a highly enriched uranium bomb has a very distinctive signature, and the ports—airports, seaports—are pretty much wired for that. Nuclear waste products, by definition, come in radiation-tight containers. No signature.”
“And Wilmington has a big container port,” Pardee said.
“Big enough. Not as big as Long Beach or L.A., but big enough, and about to double in size. A radioactive DOA in Wilmington set off all sorts of alarms. They’re going through the motions at Helios, but officially no one really believes that’s where this stuff came from. It would, simply stated, be much too hard.”
“But not impossible?” I asked.
He stood with his back to the sink and shrugged. “Actually, as an engineer, I’d think it would be very difficult, but, no, not impossible. And as the security officer it’s my job to exercise a little paranoia here.”
“You have somebody in mind?” I asked.
“It’s not so much one individual,” he said. “Look—technical security depends on three things in our industry: rigid adherence to approved engineering practices, a personnel reliability program, and the power industry’s version of what the military calls the two-man rule.”
“I believe,” I said, and he smiled.
“Okay. Briefly, here’s the idea. The two-man rule means no one individual is ever left in a situation where he could put the atomic reaction process at risk. Personnel reliability, or what we call fitness to serve, means that a guy who gets a DUI or gropes an undercover cop in a public men’s room gets looked at to see if he should keep his ticket as a plant or reactor operator. And procedure means just that: line-by-line read-back procedures for everything that happens in the control room or in the plant itself. One guy reads the operating procedure, say, for lining up the steam system, and a second guy reads it back to him before actually doing it.”
“That must be really slow.”
“It’s tedious, but reliable. It also requires a certain degree of technical openness. Nothing happens behind closed doors.”
“So?”
“So, if somebody tapped a source of radioactive water in the Helios plant, he would have to have violated all three wedges of technical security.”
I thought about the appearance of a tail on Quartermain’s visit out here today. “Would he need some help from the physical security department?”
He nodded. “Yes, I’d think so, and that’s the one division at Helios which is comparatively opaque. There’s a cast of dozens involved in bringing a reactor online and feeding the grid. But most of the time, nobody knows what the hell Trask’s people are doing.”
“Except following you around and breaking into my hotel room, presumably just because you and I met.”
“Well, there is that.”
“But I thought Trask worked for you—why not just fire his ass?”
“Truth?”
“Please.”
>
“My theory is that he’s got something on the director, because every time I’ve voiced my ‘concerns’ up the line, I get shut down. Can’t prove that, of course, but that’s what I’m beginning to think.”
“So you want us to take a look at them? Trask, his people, and any possible ties to the director?”
“Yeah.”
Before Quartermain could elaborate, Tony Martinelli came back into the kitchen from outside. He looked pleased with himself, which worried me a little bit. He saw the expression on my face and waved me off.
“It’s cool,” he said. “But not what I expected.”
“Ree-port.”
He looked at Quartermain and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Okay for him to hear this? I motioned for him to continue.
“Okay, so I go around the block, walk towards downtown for five minutes, turn around, and come back towards the house on the beachfront street. Just another tourist, out for some fresh salt air and a cigarette. And one block away, parked on the beach side of the street, I come upon a Bureau ride, complete with two specials sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous.”
“In their suits and ties. At the beach.”
“But they were such inconspicuous suits.”
“Can you describe the agents—a man and a woman, perhaps?”
“Negative. Just the usual Buroids with the usual sunglasses and happy faces. They looked bored.”
“So lemme guess: You stopped, stared, waved, said hi-there, peed on their tires, and then took their pictures?”
Tony feigned profound disappointment. “Absolutely not, boss,” he said. “I never said hi-there. However, I did notice their parking meter was expired, so I sicced a meter maid on them.”
I had to grin. “And then watched them flash some creds.”
“Aren’t you proud of me?” As in, lots of other options had come to mind.
“I am, Tony, I am,” I said, counting myself lucky that he hadn’t crawled under some cars and attached a towing chain from their rear axle to a tree. He’d seen that in a movie and often said he’d like to try it.
“So, the question is: Who’re they watching?” Pardee asked, sticking as always to business.
“Great question,” I said, turning to Ari. “You, us, Trask’s snoops, or all of the above?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Well, let’s find out,” I said. “Why don’t you leave, and we’ll see if they follow you out of here. If they stay put, we’re the target. If not . . . But before you go, Pardee here is going to help us create a way we can communicate securely. In the meantime, Tony and I will step out for some more of that salt air.”
I left Pardee and Ari in the kitchen to sort out secure comms. I asked Tony to get us into a position from which we could watch both the house and the watchers when Ari drove off. Tony had parked his car behind the house, so we used that to get set up behind the Bureau vehicle in one of the metered spots on the beach.
After about five minutes, we watched Ari come down the front steps of our rental unit and go to his car. Don’t turn around and wave, Ari, I thought. Just get in and drive away. The mental telepathy must have worked because that’s what he did. We waited. The two agents were just silhouettes in the car parked ahead of us, but we could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Then they cranked up their Bucar and surprised us by executing a U-turn.
“Down ’scope,” I said, and we both slid down in the front seat of Tony’s car. When they had passed us, we drove back to the house.
Pardee had brought some electronics gear, including two laptops, which were running in parallel in his version of a baby supercomputer. Using these, he had created a Web site on which Ari and I could post and retrieve messages using a secure password system. He hosted the site on our office server back in Triboro, so there’d be a cutout.
He also reported that our office manager had closed out Allie’s affairs by notifying her ex-husbands of her demise and sending her personal office effects to the sister in Turkey, no matter what she’d said. Fortunately, there were no remains to deal with, as the federal government still had that problem bagged up in a lead-lined vault somewhere. It was personally disturbing to think about Allie being stored in a locker like a side of meat, but, as Pardee gently reminded me, that wasn’t Allie. I knew he was right, but still.
It was noon, so we went out to find a place for lunch. Southport had a decent selection of lunch places, and we found something suitable on the main drag. The beauty of a small tourist town was that no one paid the three of us the slightest bit of attention. You were either born there or you were “from away,” like the Yankees say.
After a quick bite, we left the café and walked back to the car. I heard Tony swear and saw the parking ticket under the wiper blade. Then I saw that the meter was green. He lifted a folded piece of paper, read it, and handed it to me. There was a single line that read: ET come home. Now would be nice. It was signed with a large letter C.
“Sneaky futher-muckers,” I said, looking around. Tony grunted and pointed, and there, across the street, was the Bureau car we’d watched drive away. Apparently, not very far away. The agents waggled fingers at us. Tony rubbed his nose with his middle finger in response. The agent driving the car put his hands up to his face in mock horror.
“Okay, let’s go back and face the music,” I said.
“Who’s C.?” Tony asked.
C., as I’d suspected, turned out to be Creeps himself, minus his ditzy assistant this time. The other agents had followed us back to the house and were now waiting outside, reading magazines. Creeps was standing on the front porch when we got there, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t been inside. The shepherds were in there, staring out the front windows and definitely not looking like Welcome Wagon material.
I introduced my two helper-bees, and then we all went in. Since Pardee had set up his computers in the kitchen, I invited Creeps to sit in the living room, which meant that he had to fit that gangly, Lincolnesque frame of his into one of the sandy wicker rocking chairs. Wicker apparently is the furniture of choice for a beach house; everything in the living room was made of it.
“Welcome to our humble rental unit,” I said. Pardee and Tony leaned on opposite sides of the living room entryway. “Have we been bad?”
Creeps rubbed his hands together while he thought about what he was going to say. “I certainly hope not, Mr. Richter,” he said, “but, given the nature of our last conversation in Wilmington, your Bureau just wanted to make sure you hadn’t returned to investigate Ms. Gardner’s, um, unfortunate demise.”
“You were quite clear, I thought,” I said. “Back out, stay out, and assist my Bureau in any way I can and should as a good citizen. Right?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said warmly, smiling his best undertaker smile. Given that he’d signed his little love note “C.,” he had to be putting at least some of that bullshit on. “So: What, may I ask, are you doing down here with or for the technical security director of the Helios power station?”
“A job of work,” I replied, recalling Ari’s quaint phrase.
Creeps raised his eyebrows in a go-on expression.
“The details of which have not yet been made entirely clear,” I continued, fudging just a little. “Something to do with overlapping jurisdiction within the plant’s security apparatus. He’s the technical guy, and there’s a separate department that handles physical security. We’ll probably know more tomorrow.”
Creeps frowned. It took the frown a couple of seconds to spread across that huge, lachrymose face. “How does this bear on the Gardner case?”
Clever Creeps. You never knew where he was going with his questions, but he probably did, and all the time. “It doesn’t,” I said. “At least as far as we know. Besides, we’re not supposed to get involved in the Gardner case, remember? I guess you could talk to Mr. Quartermain.”
The frown vanished. “Oh, yes, indeed,” he said. “We’ll be talking to Mr. Quartermai
n, at some length, I suspect.”
“Well, while we’re on the subject of Allie Gardner, do you guys think that evil shit came from the plant or some other source?” I saw Tony and Pardee, who were standing out of Creeps’s line of sight, trying to suppress grins.
Creeps did a tsk-tsk number. “Mr. Richter, really,” he said disapprovingly. “I do hope you’re not intending to mess around with your Bureau. You know how we hate that. Although I can tell you this much: Right now, the NRC people don’t think the radioactive substance did come from Helios. There’s simply no way to do that without exposing the taker to the same radiation that would ultimately kill the takee, if you follow me.”
“Yeah, that occurred to me, too,” I lied. “But, honestly, I think Quartermain wants us for something totally unrelated. As I understand the politics of the situation, PrimEnergy wants to put some distance between what happened to Allie and the Helios station.”
Creeps nodded, but then changed the subject. “Under what modalities is Mr. Quartermain engaging H&S Investigations?” he asked.
I explained the contract money Ari said he had for security intrusion exercises. Creeps nodded again, as if he knew all about that program.
“You understand, Mr. Richter,” he said, “that those are federal dollars? And that any such intrusion exercises, whether force-on-force, tabletop war games, or otherwise, are supervised by the NRC? Which is itself a federal organization?”
“Makes sense,” I said. “But for us contractor weenies, a dollar is a dollar. We agree on a statement of work, a price, and the client’s boundary conditions. Then we do our thing, write a report, and send in the bill. As long as he can write the check, we don’t much care which budget line item governs the money.”
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 6