Quartermain was waiting for me in what looked like a monitoring anteroom along with some technicians. His eyes looked a bit puffy, and he was moving awkwardly, although that may just have been because he, too, was already suited up in a white whole-body coverall. There were no windows in the building, and the air was humid and surprisingly warm.
The moonpool itself was still spooky-looking. The water was incredibly clear and suffused with that ethereal blue-green light down toward the bottom, caused apparently by the residual radiation. And whereas the reactors were caged in huge hemispherical reinforced concrete domes, the spent fuel storage pool was open to view from catwalks on all four sides. It looked like the water was actually moving a little bit. Quartermain said it was and again explained the mechanics of the pool, the water cooling and the emergency backup refill system.
“So why’d they build them aboveground?”
“Pre-9/11 reactor design considerations,” he answered. “Robotic machines defuel and refuel the reactors, since humans can’t go anywhere near that stuff. There’s a whole tunnel complex underneath this building. The robots pull the fuel elements down out of the core, turn them sideways, cart them through a tunnel to the moonpool, stand them back up again, and then set them up for long-term storage. Takes months to do it, and after a while the pools get full. Then any other elements have to go into cask storage. Basically, it’s easier to transfer the stuff from an aboveground pool to the dry casks.”
“Casks, as in big lead-lined tanks?”
“Yup. Exactly. Steel and lead. We have some here, but they’re empty. So far, anyway. But if they don’t open Yucca Mountain pretty soon, we’ll be using them.”
“Is spent fuel a valid terrorist target?” I asked.
“Yes, there’s some bad shit down there at the bottom. That’s one of the main reasons we have people like Trask and his ex-Rangers here. Now: about last night.”
“Other than your unplanned swim, you got what you wanted, right?”
“I think we did. My spill team still has to write up their report, and we’ll be doing some more analysis on the foam once we get it back here.”
“Anyone tying the material to the stowaways?”
“Internally, Homeland Security and the Bureau are treating it as an attempted RDD attack, although the official cover story is only talking about the runners.”
“RDD?” All the acronyms were beginning to overwhelm me.
“Radiological dispersion device—dirty bomb, in English.”
“Except there was no bomb, right?”
“We had hot stuff and illegal males hidden in the same box. All sorts of conjecture about that. For all we know, there’s a bomb still over there, in another container.”
“They catch any of the runners?”
“Two,” he said. “South American, not Middle East. The ICE guys are baffled.”
More acronyms. “ICE?”
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More feds. You need to brush up on your alphabets.”
“I’m trying not to. So now what?”
“They’ll determine the destination for that container, and then screen the entire system for any other containers going to the same destination. If they find one, that’s where they’d expect bomb components to be.”
I thought his reasoning was a little tenuous. “You didn’t exactly find a thermos of bad stuff in that container, Ari,” I said.
“Yet,” he shot back.
“Okay, so let the big dogs run with it. You no longer need me or my people, right?”
He didn’t answer right away. He glanced sideways at three fully masked technicians who were taking readings from some instruments suspended in the pool. We turned our backs to them and the glowing pool before he replied. Frick, who seemed nervous, stayed close by my side. I wondered if the dog could sense the presence of something dangerous down there in that shimmering water.
“Actually,” Ari said, “I’d like you to stay. Remember my telling you that we might be able to trace marker isotopes when Ms. Gardner was killed?”
I nodded, although that hadn’t worked out with Allie’s postmortem.
“We have been able to recover the isotopic markers from our spill team’s monitors.”
“And?”
“The markers aren’t unequivocal,” he said grimly, indicating the moonpool with a sideways nod of his head, “but one could make the case that they point right here.”
“Who knows that?” I asked, wanting suddenly to get out of this foreboding building.
“At this moment, nobody but me and my lab people. They’d just brought me the report when I called you. But I will have to notify the company and, more importantly, the NRC. And then we’re probably going to experience some more interesting times, in the Chinese sense.”
I remembered Creeps saying they’d shut the plant down if they could prove the water came from the moonpool. “You’re saying you now think somebody did take radioactive water or materials, or both, out of this facility?”
“Seems impossible, doesn’t it,” he said. “You’ve seen the security. And, of course, it could have come from another BWR plant. But we’re the closest. Plus, you can’t and you wouldn’t get near an operating power reactor, so . . .”
I looked around as I digested this bit of news. The pool was contained in a sealed concrete building, swarming with radiation-monitoring instruments, accessible only through three layers of security checks, one manned, two electronic, and under constant television surveillance from a control room. So it wasn’t likely that someone just wandered up here with a rope and a bucket.
“Who’s the guy in charge of this area?” I asked.
“Not a guy,” he said. “Her name is Anna P. Martin. Doctor Anna Petrowska Martin, to be specific.”
“Judas Priest!” I said. “You’ve got a damned Russian on your management team?”
“Now, now, don’t rush to judgment. We also have Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and, yes, one Russian, and even some native-born Americans.”
“You do?”
“Consider the state of public education in this country these days, Mr. Richter. You think America’s producing bumper crops of nuclear engineers? If it weren’t for technically educated foreigners, there’d be no nuclear power or any other high-tech industry in this country. What we can’t rape and pillage from the Navy’s nuclear power program, we make up with foreigners. All of whom are fully vetted American citizens, by the way, as is Dr. Martin.”
I shook my head. I had strong views on Russians even being in this country, having dealt with my share of them in the Manceford County major crimes office. The Russian gangs made the Mafia look like pasta-bellied pussies. They were vicious beyond belief, and I firmly believed we should deport every damned one of them back to their beloved rodina tomorrow.
I was about to expand on these sentiments when I realized that one of the white-suited techs was standing behind me. He took off his headgear. Her headgear. I’d formed a mental image of a fullback-shouldered Madame Khrushchev when Ari had told me about Comrade Dr. Martin, but this was most definitely not the case.
“Did I hear my homeland being mentioned?” she said, shaking out a wave of platinum-blond hair. She was one of those chiseled Slavic beauties, with pronounced cheekbones, bright ice-blue eyes, and a challenging mouth. I could hear the Eastern European accent, but she’d obviously been in the States for some time. I’d paid no attention to the “guys” in the baggy white suits, or I would have noticed that one suit wouldn’t necessarily be called baggy.
Ari introduced us, explaining that I was a professional investigator, and that I’d been contracted to help him with an internal problem. She gave him a quizzical look, and me a condescending smile. Then recognition dawned in those polar eyes.
“Ah, yes, the policeman with the Alsatian dogs,” she said, extending a gloved hand.
We shook hands clumsily through all the protective gear. Her grip was firm, and, based on the mildly
amused look on her face, she’d overheard my sentiments regarding the presence of a Russian on the staff in the vital area of the plant. I mumbled something polite, which she ignored. She turned back to Ari to ask what more he had heard about the incident last night. He demurred and said he hadn’t any further data at the moment. She smoothed her hair one more time and then looked back at me.
“Are you a technical person, Mr. Richter?” she asked. “An engineer, perhaps?”
“Afraid not,” I said. “Just run-of-the-mill police.”
“Oh,” she said with a distinctly dismissive smile. “And you don’t care much for Russians, do you?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I think they belong in Russia.”
“But America is the land of opportunity, yes?”
“As a policeman, all the Russians I’ve ever met were savages, whose idea of opportunity in America was to rape, maim, steal, and kill. Seeing as you’re a Ph.D. and working here, I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
“Well, my goodness,” she exclaimed, stepping back away from me. “You are beginning to remind me of the police back in my birth country. I thought your job as a policeman was to protect and defend.”
“To protect and defend Americans,” I said.
“I’m an American citizen, you ignorant oaf!”
“Anna,” Ari said.
She glared at me again, relayed some technical information in nuke-speak to Ari, and then stomped off to rejoin her team. Or tried to—it’s hard to stomp in paper boots.
Ari was grinning at me. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “She has a temper, and you did step on her toes just a wee bit.”
“Do I look sad?” I asked.
“You look like every other normal male who meets her for the first time,” he said, still smiling. “She’s hardcore about her job and her science, though. She just fired one of her senior techs for breaking protocol on an emergency procedure exercise. When it comes to the moonpool, she’s serious as a heart attack.”
“Then how did some of this evil shit get loose?” I asked, pointing with my chin at the glowing pool.
“Good question, Mr. Investigator,” he replied evenly.
In other words, There’s your mission impossible, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it. I told him about my guys’ reservations after last night’s circus on the pier, and that I’d told them they could back out if they wanted to. He actually thought that might simplify things. One stranger wandering around the complex ought to attract less attention than three.
“I’ll need their badges back,” he reminded me.
“Does Comrade Martin know that the stuff on the truck might have come from here?” I asked.
“She will as soon as I file the NRC report,” he said. “She will feature prominently in the resulting internal investigation.”
“Is that control room over there manned 24/7?”
“No,” he said. “Just when they’re running tests or some other evolution. Otherwise, there’s no one up here.”
I hesitated before asking the next question, but there was no way around it. “If the NRC is going to investigate this from the outside, and the company’s going to be turning over rocks from the inside, and the Bureau is going to be watching both, tell me again what you want me to do?”
He glanced around the steel deck once more. Dr. Martin and her techs had disappeared, and we were alone with the moonpool and its unearthly glow. It looked like some Northern Lights had drowned down there.
“Do you know what a Red Team is?” he asked.
I did not.
“It’s a government expression, normally used in war gaming. When the government conducts a war game, it postulates a hypothetical crisis scenario, and then pits a group of actual government officials against the crisis. These are real officials, but they’re role-playing. Someone from the White House staff will play the president. Another person, say from the Defense Department, will play the role of secretary of defense.”
“Yeah, I’ve read about those.”
“Right. The game directors gather them into a room and throw a tabletop crisis situation at them. They work the problem until they either solve it or it beats them. The good guys are called the Blue Team.”
“I believe.”
“Good. The Red Team sits in another room and reacts to what the Blue Team does, typically by throwing complications into the game. The idea is to make the war game truly dynamic, and to test how well the Blue Team can handle an evolving crisis situation when all their nicely preplanned contingency plans go off the tracks. Plus, the Red Team is privy to the Blue Team’s assumptions and contingency plans before the game starts. They hit those assumptions, and the Blue Team now has to deal with a changing crisis situation.”
“So the Red Team people are the bad guys.”
“Exactly. The Blue Team assumes their simulated Katrina relief convoys can get to New Orleans on the interstates. The Red Team knocks out all the bridges.”
“So you want me to act like a bad guy? See if I can get through the perimeter, break in here and swipe some radioactive water or some spent fuel rods, then go package it and, what? Sell it?”
“Not exactly,” he said patiently. “Unless you have a death wish. But here’s the problem: The NRC’s going to come in here this time and try to prove that radioactive water got loose from Helios, either from the moonpool or somewhere else in the reactor system.”
“Reasonable reaction,” I said.
“PrimEnergy has to defend itself, and the company is going to take the position that it not only didn’t happen but couldn’t happen. Now: Unless some unhappy camper stands up and confesses to a crime that would jail him for about ten successive life sentences, it’s going to end in a Mexican standoff.”
“Which would suit the company, right?”
“Frankly, I think that would suit the government, as well. They don’t even want to hear that there’s been a clandestine radiological release from an operating plant, because that would probably lead to an industry-wide shutdown of this type of nuclear power plant.”
“Why all of them?”
“Because the security system here is common to all of them. It would be a very big deal. Nobody at the NRC or in the industry wants to do that.”
“You’re telling me the NRC would cover it up?”
“No, no, not if they find something concrete, some glowing gun, so to speak. But if it turns into a stone-cold mystery, they’ll ‘study’ it. They might keep probing, but, basically, they’ll keep all the BWR plants turning and burning.”
“And you want me to do what, specifically?”
“I want you to Red-Team it. Not actually do it, mind you, but see if you can figure out a way to get radioactive water out of this plant and into Wilmington. I want you to do this independently, without the official, approved assistance of anybody at this plant, including me.”
“But if the experts can’t prove it, how can I?”
“You weren’t listening—the experts on both sides of this equation don’t want to prove it. So, absent some glaring, oh-shit technical hole in the system, the books are probably going to close on the demise of Ms. Gardner and the hot truck chassis across the river.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you,” I said.
“It’s got to be a people problem, not a technical problem. The NRC’s going to send in nukes. PrimEnergy is going to defend with the likes of Anna P. They’re literally going to be looking at piping systems for leaks. There aren’t any. I need someone to probe the people side. Again, without inside help.”
“Ah.”
He smiled grimly. “Yeah. Operative words: inside help. Everybody else has a stake in this. You wouldn’t. If I’ve got a sleeper, I think it’ll take an outsider to find him.”
This could be a very dangerous game, I thought, given those stakes he was talking about. “What about Trask and his people—you going to cut them in?”
“No, but I’ll let you develop a
working relationship with them as you want to. Your current access extends only to the protected area, not the vital area. You’re in this building only because Trask let you in and I’m escorting you.”
“I wouldn’t have access here?”
“Would you know what do to in here? How it even works? I don’t need a technical investigator—I need someone who can uncover a human weakness here, not an engineering defect. I believe that’s what you guys do.”
His argument made sense. Unless, of course, he was the bad guy. “How would we communicate?”
“Can we keep that computer link we have now?” he asked.
“Yes, until the feds tumble to it. I mean, they’ll look at everyone’s computer once your investigation starts, especially the Bureau people. Yours included.”
“The NRC won’t bring the Bureau in immediately, not until they find that smoking gun or a suspect.”
“The Bureau may have its own thoughts about that,” I said. “Listening to Special Agent Caswell, they’re already in.”
“The NRC will be in charge of this investigation,” he said impatiently. “They find a person of interest, they’ll turn the Bureau on. Look: You said you wanted to find out how and why Ms. Gardner got killed. I need a neutral outsider to test my system. And, what the hell, this beats watching lawyers fornicate, doesn’t it? You said you were bored.”
“It was Allie Gardner who was bored,” I said. I felt like I’d been talking to a car salesman. But Ari was walking over to the control room to talk to Dr. Anna Petrowska Martin, Ph.D. Frick was sitting against the main steel wall of the moonpool room, giving me one of those shepherd looks that says, Don’t do it, dummy.
“What are you looking at, dog?” I said. “Aren’t you up for a little adventure? I mean, what could possibly go wrong, hunh?”
Cam - 03 - The Moonpool Page 10