Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “About damn time,” I said.

  They both grinned back. “We watched you out there in that yard for two days before you bothered to look up,” Pardee said. He frowned when he heard the vehicles out in the fog. “We got hostiles inbound?”

  “We do,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “This is Mad Moira. She helped me escape. Tell me we have a boat.”

  I had many questions on the ride down the river toward Wilmington, with the biggest one being how they had known where to find me. It seems that I had none other than Colonel Trask to thank for that. Pardee told me they got a call back at the Triboro office from Quartermain’s slinky-toy assistant one day after I’d gone off the grid, with a request to come retrieve the shepherds.

  “That seemed a little strange,” Pardee said. “But then, we knew there were places in that plant you might not want to take the dogs.”

  “How’d Trask get into it?”

  “We came down and made sure the shepherds were okay. Then we waited at the beach house a couple more days, but we still couldn’t raise you. So I called Samantha. She told me you and Mr. Q. had gone to an ‘unspecified location’ as part of your investigation. She said you’d left instructions that you’d be in touch when circumstances permitted.”

  I watched Tony driving the boat with his face stuck into the radar display cone. We were definitely IFR tonight; the fog out on the river was, if anything, thicker than on shore. We could hear some buoy bells ringing as our wake set them to rocking, but I never did actually see one. Moira sat in one of the two padded chairs in front of the pilothouse, trying not to look afraid.

  Pardee went on to explain that, after all the radio silence on my part, he’d called Trask to see what he knew about my sudden disappearance and this so-called unspecified location.

  “Trask said it was news to him, and that he’d seen Quartermain at a meeting that morning.”

  “Did he tell you that the lovely Samantha is an undercover FBI agent?”

  Pardee looked at me in total surprise. “No-o-o, he did not. What the hell, over?”

  I told him what had happened, and all about the delightful federal spa and rest camp that I hoped was going up in flames as we spoke. I also speculated about the possible reaction from the Bureau when they found out we had escaped, and how.

  “Damn,” Pardee said. “They’re holding U.S. citizens? Right there in plain sight?”

  “Not so plain sight, when you think about it,” I said. “You drive by that place, it looks like a state penitentiary for the criminally insane. Not the kind of place where you’d want to go in and take a tour. It’s not run by the FBI, either. Those guards were all military types.”

  “That would make for an interesting story in the New York Times,” Pardee said.

  “Yes, it would. But I’ll bet that all the remaining detainees and their Marines will be out of there in DHS vans before dawn. They’ll probably let that building burn right to the ground. How’d you actually find me?”

  “Trask again. He gives us a call. Says a guy at the bar had seen someone who looked like you having a friendly discussion in the parking lot with what looked like a bunch of feds. Then everybody drove off together. Trask asked him what kind of vehicles, and figures the guy’s right.”

  “Okay, and the asylum?”

  “Trask has connections with local law, so he checks the jails and the hospitals, just to make sure. Then a guy in the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office tells him the feds have a ‘research center’ up on the Charing River—that’s the river we’re on now. It feeds into the Cape Fear. Supposedly this place had to do with AIDS research. Some big NIH grant. Old state facility for the insane; low security, really sick people, rumors of biohazards, et cetera, et cetera. Local no-go area.”

  “And Trask, being ex-military, would figure out that that could be a cover?”

  “He got a little coy about that, but I’m guessing from what he said that he went up there, cased the place, and recognized jungle bunnies. You don’t use Marines to guard AIDS victims. He calls, says he thinks he knows where you might be.”

  Trask the helpful herpetologist, I thought. He’d never wanted us in his plant. I should think he’d have been delighted at the possibility that I’d been swept up in some kind of Homeland Security net. “I wonder what prompted all his sudden concern?”

  “Good question, boss,” Pardee said, staring out into the fog. “And did Quartermain know? I mean, who told Samantha to make that call, her boss or her bosses?”

  “Creeps, I suspect,” I said. But, of course, Quartermain might have been in on it.

  The shepherds were sleeping in the front of the boat, curled around Mad Moira’s legs. She was dozing, too. Pardee went into the bow locker and got a blanket, which he wrapped around Moira’s shoulders. She gave him a smile, which made him sigh as he came back to where I was perched against the steering console. Tony still hadn’t taken his face out of the radarscope cone.

  “I’m also wondering why Quartermain didn’t come looking, too,” I said.

  “Well, I’d guess he was embarrassed to ask Colonel Trask where his ace investigator had wandered off to. And Special Agent Samantha was probably telling him all sorts of lies.”

  That made some sense, but the whole episode was still pretty bizarre. Except for the fact that Moira was sitting in the front of the boat, it wouldn’t be that hard to doubt that I’d seen what I’d seen.

  Half an hour later Tony executed a slow, sweeping turn to the left, and then the curtain of fog began to lift. His face finally emerged from the cone. We had joined the Cape Fear River, and the lights of Wilmington were visible in the distance on the port side.

  “I guess I better get up with Quartermain first,” I said, grateful to be able to see again. “Where are we going, by the way?”

  Pardee grinned in the darkness. “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said.

  An hour later, Tony maneuvered the boat carefully alongside a floating pontoon dock that was made up alongside a boathouse. Ari Quartermain stood on the bobbing platform to take our boat’s mooring lines. He was unshaven and dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a bulky sweatshirt. Behind him was a large brick house that overlooked the Cape Fear River and the distant lights of Fort Fisher Park across the water. The first faint indications of dawn were thinning out the darkness over the far Atlantic.

  Tony shut it down, and I went to wake Moira and her two sleeping foot-warmers. I introduced her to Ari, leaving out the other half of her first name, for the moment, anyway, and then we all walked up to the house and went into the kitchen, my mutts included. Ari pushed the button on an ancient-looking coffee percolator.

  It was a relief to sit down and stretch in a warm room. Helios must pay very well, I thought, when I saw the inside of the house. Ari plopped a box of doughnuts on the table and joined the rest of us. Frick, who loves doughnuts, sat pointedly at the edge of the table, begging hard. Moira asked if she could please spoil the doggie, and I reluctantly agreed. I made her cut it in half and share with Frack. Shepherds on a sugar high are not a pretty sight, and Moira being all cute with the dogs was scaring me a little.

  “Mr. Investigator,” Ari said, raising his coffee cup in a mock salute, “your guys do really good work. Where in the world have you been?”

  “The latest incarnation of Club Fed, I think,” I said. I told him the whole story, including Moira’s role in our escape, and revealed his admin assistant’s federal sideline. He nodded at that, as if the news solved a minor mystery for him.

  “I’ve always wondered why Judy—she was Samantha’s predecessor—up and quit like that,” he said. “I guess now I know.”

  “Our Bureau works in mysterious ways,” I said. “The larger question is why. Why do they think it operationally necessary to have someone undercover at that plant, and specifically in your office?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” he said, glancing a bit nervously at Moira. “Ain’t like there’s a booming market for highly toxic fission by-pr
oducts.” Even as he said that, I think he realized that there might, in fact, be just such a market. “Oh, shit,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, shit, squared,” I replied. “The whole world of Homeland Security is on watch for terrorists trying to smuggle a dirty bomb of some kind into the U.S. But what if the bad guys have figured out that there’s no need to smuggle it in, if what they need is already here?”

  “Then what the hell was that over at the container port a week ago?”

  “A diversion?” Tony said. “Something to keep all the watchdogs focused on the port, where they actually expect to find something?”

  “I’ve got another question,” I said. “Trask. My guys would not have gotten anywhere in finding me without his intervention. Why’d he do that?”

  “Why’d he meet with you at that bar?” Ari countered. “After which you got boxed and wrapped?”

  “You guys are starting to frighten me,” Moira piped up. “I was locked up in that place for a year plus because I poked my computers’ noses into one government program. You people playing with nuclear weapons?”

  I shook my head, and explained who Quartermain was and a little bit about how we’d become involved at the power plant. As Ari got up to check on the coffee, the phone rang. He glanced at his watch and picked up.

  “Hey, there, Sam,” he said. “You’re up early.” Then he listened for a minute or so. Then he looked over at me. “Uh, Sam? I’m just getting out of bed, okay? What’s going on?”

  He listened some more, then nodded to himself. He fished out a pen, wrote something down, and hung up.

  “It seems that one Special Agent Myers called the duty officer at the plant asking for my home number. Our policy is that all such calls go to Samantha—one of the perks of her job—and then she gets in touch with me if she thinks it’s a no-shitter.”

  “Lemme guess,” I said. “Missed-it Mary is looking for one Cam Richter?”

  Ari sat back down. “The Bureau wanted to know if you’d checked in with us,” he said. “You heard me—I didn’t exactly answer her question.”

  “Where was it I was supposed to be checking in from?”

  The percolator behind him began making worrisome noises. “Sam had told me you’d gone exploring at the container port. That your guys had taken the shepherds and gone back to Triboro, and that you and Trask were working together on something, or so Colonel Trask had told her.”

  “You didn’t bother to verify that with Trask?” I asked.

  “Trask doesn’t respond well to beepers,” Ari said. “He appears when he’s needed. Likes to say he’ll find you, not the other way around.”

  “And, of course, you had no reason to doubt what Samantha was telling you.”

  “Exactly. I was actually encouraged that you and Trask were working together. When I finally did run into him, he told me it was all news to him. Then your guys arrived, and here we are.”

  I exhaled a long breath. The whole thing just sounded so damned pat. Trask supposedly tells Samantha. Samantha tells Ari. Trask reappears as Helpful Harry, then steers my guys in just the right direction. If it looks too good to be true . . .

  Moira asked to use a bathroom, and were there any women’s clothes in the house? Ari said she could probably wear some of his wife’s stuff; she was on a business trip to New York for the week. He took her upstairs.

  I looked at Tony and could see that he, too, was perplexed. Pardee had his poker face on, which meant the same thing. I hadn’t been able to tell what was going through Ari’s mind, but there seemed to be an awful lot of irons in this fire just now. It wasn’t exactly a finger-pointing drill, but it was close. Ari came back downstairs, and then the damned phone rang again.

  “Seems everybody’s up early this morning,” Ari said with a sigh. He looked at the caller ID, frowned, picked up, and then frowned harder. “Special Agent Caswell. How can I help you at this hour of the morning?”

  He listened for a few seconds this time, pointed a finger gun at me, and then started writing something urgently on the yellow pad next to the phone. Tony got up to see what it said.

  “That’s very interesting. Look, that remote gate control system isn’t working right now. Let me get some clothes on, and I’ll be right down. Just a few minutes, okay? Thank you.” He hung up before letting Creeps reply and raised his eyebrows at our merry little band.

  Pardee was already gathering up the unused cups and the doughnut box from the table. I yelled to Moira that we had to run, gathered the shepherds, and headed for the back door. Tony was ahead of me, but he stopped suddenly. Through the back-door window we could see a large, official-looking patrol boat of some kind nosing in to the pier where our boat was tied up.

  We backed away from the window and returned to the kitchen. I told Ari that there was probably no point in any more running.

  “Why don’t you go down there to that gate,” I said. “See what they have to say. But look: Don’t lie, and don’t be confrontational. If they ask you directly, yes, we are here.”

  Moira came back into the room, looking surprisingly good in her borrowed clothes. I had an idea.

  “Ari—you have a computer she can use?” I asked as he put a jacket on.

  Ari said yes and took her to his study. I went with them and told Moira what I wanted her to do. Bright girl that she was, she sat right down, brought up a Word screen, and began typing.

  Ari dutifully trudged down the front drive, which curved out of sight behind some tall evergreens. Tony kept a watch on the patrol boat down by the dock, but it had backed away from the pier and was now just sitting there, bristling with whip antennas, its running lights unusually bright in the morning twilight. I’d known they’d figure out the boat angle, but I’d been hoping the fog on the river would delay pursuit until we could land somewhere safe. I’d forgotten the old cop adage: You can outrun the cop’s car, but you can’t outrun his radio.

  “What now, boss-man?” Pardee asked quietly, using Tony’s standard line.

  I explained what Moira was doing in Ari’s study, and what I hoped that would accomplish if Ari came back with Creeps and some of his helpers.

  “You think you guys really burned that place down?” Tony asked. Tony was thinking like an accessory to arson, among other things.

  “It sounded like they were evacuating the building, not fighting the fire,” I said. “On the other hand, I won’t admit to starting said fire. It just sort of happened, you know, coincidentally with our efforts to get out of the basement.”

  “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Which story won’t stand up for one minute once a competent forensics tech gets into it,” announced Special Agent Creeps Caswell, materializing in the kitchen doorway along with two large and extremely fit-looking special agents. They were all decked out in their spiffy blue FBI windbreakers, although I thought I spotted some black smudges on Creeps’s hands. We hadn’t heard them come in, and nor, apparently, had either of my two wonderful watchdogs, who had instead set the watch on the box of doughnuts. Ari Quartermain, looking somewhat sheepish, brought up the rear.

  “Mr. Richter,” Creeps intoned formally.

  “Special Agent,” I replied. No one was brandishing firearms yet, so I had high hopes for a civilized conversation around the kitchen table. We might even get some more coffee.

  “Where is Ms. Maxwell?” Creeps asked.

  “Otherwise engaged,” I said. “Here in the house, however, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  One of the helpers took a quick walkabout, came back, and nodded to Creeps.

  “Oh, good,” he said. “Your Bureau was getting tired of driving around in all that fog.”

  “So what happens now, Special Agent?” I asked. Tony and Pardee looked on with definite interest. Creeps’s helpers looked back at them with equal interest. Ari was trying to make himself look inconspicuous. The shepherds, sensing tension, walked over and sat down next to me.<
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  “What happens next is that your Bureau will restore the status quo ante, as that term applies to you and Ms. Maxwell,” he said. He glanced at my two accomplices. “And these two gentlemen may have to join your ranks, as it were.”

  “On what charge, Special Agent?”

  “You? Or them?”

  “Me, for starters. As I recall, I never did hear a charge the first time around.”

  “You must have more faith in your Bureau, Mr. Richter. I’m just so sure there was a charge, perhaps many, and even some evidence. It may be a little hard to find in the ashes of your erstwhile detention facility, but you know us—we’ll think of something. And then, of course, there’s the little matter of your escape and all the excitement leading up to it. There are some Marines who would like to have a word with you.”

  “It’s ready,” called Moira from the study.

  “What’s ready, Mr. Richter?” Creeps asked, frowning.

  “Why don’t we all just go see,” I said.

  We trooped into Ari’s study, and I invited Creeps to read what she’d written in her letter to the editor of the New York Times. She’d purposefully done it in a large font, and she’d done a really good job describing her imprisonment and the facility.

  Creeps read the letter carefully. I could almost see his lips moving. I watched his breathing change, and then he cleared his throat.

  “You understand, Ms. Maxwell,” he said, “that we have the resources to rebut everything you’ve said there. Furthermore, even if you transmit that, you will not be available for further comment or elaboration, which tends to diminish its chances for publication. So why don’t you just move that cursor to the delete button and stop all this foolishness.”

  Moira looked up at him. The Mad Moira light was clearly visible in those green eyes. Red hair and green eyes—Creeps should have known better.

  “So you guys don’t give a shit if I send this, then?” she asked. “Is that what I’m hearing?”

  “As I explained—” Creeps began.