Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Sergeant Lloyd J. McMichaels, at your service, sir,” he said pleasantly. “And aren’t those lovely shepherds.”

  “They are indeed, Sergeant,” I said. “Can I offer you a coffee or something?”

  He eyed the Scotch briefly, smiled, and said thank you, no, on duty and all that. I then asked how I could help him.

  “You would be the retired Lieutenant of Police Cameron Richter, would you not, sir?”

  I nodded.

  “And your two associates, also retired police officers, from up in the Triad of North Carolina?”

  “Correct again, Sergeant. We’re actually all retired from the sheriff’s office in Manceford County. I formed a private investigations company when I got out, and several of my cohorts joined me when their time was up.”

  “Lovely, lovely,” he said, nodding. “Sounds like an ideal setup, it does—cops working with other cops. It must save a lot of bother, not having to work for or with civilians.”

  “That was the point,” I said. “We wanted to be around people who knew how to act, as it were.” The shepherds were back to lying down again, obviously comfortable with a uniformed policeman on the front porch. They always reacted well to confident people.

  “Would you be so kind as to share with me your reasons for being here in our little village?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And I apologize for not stopping by the House and making my manners. I actually didn’t think you’d care.”

  He gave me a droll look over the bridge of his spectacles.

  I explained who we were working for and a little bit about the case, focusing mostly on Allie’s death by radiation poisoning. He nodded when I was done.

  “It was the presence of all those fierce-looking G-men in town which provoked my interest,” he said. “Southport is a touristy place, of course, although at this time of year, not many of them, to be sure. So seeing federal officers lurking about our streets, without so much as a squeak from the Wilmington office, by the by, piqued our attention.”

  “I guess we all forgot our manners,” I said. “But this doesn’t involve Southport, as best I can tell. Helios is where the action is.”

  “Ah, Helios,” he said. “The land of the captive suns. Does this action perhaps include a homicide, as I’m being told?”

  “Are you being told?”

  “Actually, no, not officially. But you know how locals are, Lieutenant. People do like to gossip.”

  The EMS guys, for instance, I thought. I told him what had happened at the moonpool, and that the current thinking was that it might be Carl Trask who had drowned in the moonpool. Surprisingly, that produced another skeptical look.

  I told him the Bureau special agent in charge was named Caswell, and then asked McMichaels if he knew Colonel Trask personally. He did. The colonel had made his manners some time ago when he took the physical security job at Helios. He’d called on all the local police departments and sheriff’s offices within twenty miles of Helios, and he was a prominent member of the multi-county nuclear accident response organization, as was Dr. Quartermain. Then the sergeant asked why we thought the body in the moonpool might be the good colonel. I told him, explaining the problem of making the physical identification. He grimaced, thought about that for a moment, and then asked when, exactly, all this had happened. I told him.

  “That’s very odd, then,” he said. “Because I think you may be mistaken. In fact, I’m sure you’re mistaken. I saw Colonel Trask down at the Southport marina earlier this evening—he was refueling a rather large cabin cruiser, on which I believe he lives. Named the Keeper, is it?”

  He was smiling now at my obvious surprise, and then he reached into his trousers pocket and produced a small envelope. “He even asked me to deliver this little love note to you; that’s how very sure I am that the good colonel is alive and well. Drop by the House sometime; we always have a pot of coffee going.”

  He heaved himself out of the rocker and then paused at the top of the steps. “Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “An odd choice for the job he holds over there.”

  “Because . . . what?” I was hoping McMichaels wasn’t some kind of closet racist.

  “The word around town is that the good doctor has a bit of a gambling problem,” he said. “Of the compulsive persuasion, or so I’m told.”

  “This something you know?”

  “Indeed not. Just what I’ve been told by people who fancy the occasional game of cards.”

  “Does the company know?”

  He eyed me over those antique-looking spectacles. “Probably not,” he said. “Good night to you, sir.”

  I opened the envelope after he left. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a series of numbers handwritten across the top. If Trask was trying for a secret code, he’d succeeded—I couldn’t make any sense of the numbers. The bigger news, of course, was that Trask was not the corpus delicti in dry layup at the plant. I looked at my watch—almost one o’clock. I decided to let my news wait until morning. There was no grieving widow, and, as best I knew, no clear and present danger to the plant.

  The gossip about Ari Quartermain was interesting, if true, but I couldn’t see any connection between that and Allie Gardner. My brain swirled with all sorts of possibilities and mysteries, but I elected to shut down and get some much-needed sleep.

  In the morning I briefed Pardee and Tony on our late-night visitor. Tony examined the note, then passed it to Pardee.

  “Why would he send you a note?” Pardee asked.

  “I don’t know—to let me know he’s alive? Maybe he’s heard all the rumors.”

  “Or to set up a meet?” Pardee said. Tony asked for the note back and took a pencil to the numbers.

  “Right,” he said. “The first set of numbers is very likely a latitude and longitude position; the second one is a date-time group, probably in Greenwich time—there’s a Z at the end of it. So: place and time.” He looked at his watch, which was festooned with time-zone dials. “Tonight, in fact, at 11:00 P.M.”

  “Good headwork,” I said. “Can you tell where?”

  “I’ll need the GPS set on the boat, or at least a chart of the area. But these numbers look local—maybe in the Cape Fear estuary, or just off Carolina Beach, in the Atlantic. Did you tell him we have a boat?”

  “He knows, and this makes sense, of sorts—a rendezvous at sea ought to be fairly private.”

  “Unless one of the alphabets planted some devices,” Pardee said.

  “Would they work out at sea?”

  “They could record, but probably not transmit. But they could have placed a satellite tag, and if they did, they’ll know someone’s moving that boat around.”

  “Shouldn’t we tell Dr. Quartermain?” Tony asked.

  I hesitated. I felt ninety-percent sure that Ari Quartermain was not a bad guy, but the local police sergeant had sowed a seed or two of doubt. “Let’s lay eyes on Trask; that way our information will be firsthand,” I said. “Then we can tell Ari. In the meantime, let’s confirm the rendezvous point, and then we’ll start working backwards on Allie’s timeline.”

  Tony went down to the marina to pull a chart so he could verify that the numbers did translate into a rendezvous position. Pardee and I called Ari’s office and asked his new secretary to see if those visitor log copies were available for us to pick up. My plan was to get those and then go into Wilmington and talk to Bernie about getting a look at her vehicle, or the report of their search, assuming they’d done one. I called our H&S offices back in Triboro to get the videotape Allie had taken of the legal lovebirds.

  “What videotape?” Horace asked. “She never returned, remember?”

  I knew that, I thought. Back to Bernie Price. I was more tired than I realized.

  As it turned out, Bernie couldn’t help us, either. The feds had taken everything—the car, the contents, Allie’s backpack and briefcase, everything—and since the front seat of her car had registered on a Geiger counter, the Wilmington police impound w
as just as happy to see Allie’s radioactive ride go away.

  Reluctantly, I called Creeps and explained what I needed. I harped on the fact that we were honoring our agreement: This was about Allie Gardner and not events at Helios. He told me he’d see what our Bureau could do.

  For the moment, we were stymied. I called the marina over in Carolina Beach to see if the Keeper was present for duty. It was not, and Cap’n Pete had no information as to where the colonel had gone off to this time, as usual. He wouldn’t have told me if he knew, I suspected.

  Another blank wall. We were batting a thousand this morning.

  I decided to go for a run. When I got back, Pardee had news. Creeps had arranged access to Allie’s car, which was being held at the Customs and Border Protection office in Wilmington. They had, surprisingly, not yet put a forensics team on the car, so if we wanted to do so, the Wilmington resident agent would send an agent to be present. Any physical evidence would, of course, have to remain in federal control.

  We stopped by the Helios admin center to pick up the visitor log copies and then went on to Wilmington. The Customs and Border Protection office was located on Medical Center Drive in a low, brick building that looked a lot like the local FBI resident agent’s office. There was a fenced parking compound behind the building containing some boats and various vehicles with the CBP logo on the doors. We went up to the front doors and confronted a video camera. There were no actual signs on the building indicating it was a government building, but the roof was littered with radio antennas, and the flags of both the United States and the Coast Guard fluttered out front. The doors clicked, and we began processing through security.

  The agent sent over to assist us in our enquiries was none other than the lovely Samantha Young, ex-administrative-assistant at Quartermain’s office. She was dressed in a neatly tailored pantsuit, which did nothing to disguise her splendid physical assets. Even the CBP guys were impressed, which probably explained why we had four male agents helping us sign in.

  “Hi, there, Ms. Judas,” I said.

  “Ouch,” she said with a smile. “Nothing personal, you understand.”

  “Just business, I know,” I said. “But it got personal once I went inside that Marine Corps rest home.”

  “Whatever that is,” she said with a face chock-full of feigned innocence.

  I rolled my eyes, and then we all trooped out to the impound yard. Allie’s car was parked by itself alongside the chain-link fence.

  “What specifically are we looking for?” Samantha asked.

  “We don’t know,” I replied. “Anything that might tell us where she went while she was down here in Wilmington. Receipts, fast-food wrappers, her briefcase, a prescription for radioactive pills. Like that.”

  In the event, we found most of the above, including the videocassette onto which she’d downloaded her camcorder tape. Allie had kept a plastic grocery bag slung between the two front seats for trash, and we pulled out the usual collection of fast-food debris and two gas receipts. We copied down the dates, times, and addresses from those and the one Wendy’s receipt I’d found glued to the floor carpet by a sticky French fry. Her purse, which had been jammed under the front seat, had the usual female stuff. Samantha held on to the videocassette while we poked around under the seats, in the trunk, and in the glove box. Pardee went through her luggage, which consisted of a backpack and a briefcase, and which he said contained nothing of direct interest.

  We went back into the CBP offices, and someone rustled up a cassette player. Allie had done the tape professionally, with voiceovers on time, place, and the names of the subjects involved. There wasn’t that much actual run-time video, but it was clear what the two lovebirds were there for, or at least clear enough for any suspicious wife and her lawyer. Pardee had taken one thing from Allie’s briefcase: her hotel receipt from the Hilton. Nothing on the bill except room, meal charges, and lots of taxes. No phone charges. More blank walls.

  We left everything with Samantha and went back out to my Suburban. As we drove away I speculated on the lack of any phone calls on her hotel bill.

  “Nobody uses hotel phones anymore,” Pardee said. “Especially when you have one of these.” He produced what I assumed was Allie’s cell phone, which he’d apparently palmed from the briefcase when Samantha wasn’t looking.

  “Hoo-aah,” I said. “They’ll git you for that.”

  “They have access to the central office records; we don’t, not without some help. But this thing ought to have a call log, don’t you think?”

  He switched the phone on while I drove and accessed the call log. “Aha,” he said.

  “Aha, what?”

  “I think I recognize a number, or at least an exchange. Hang on a minute.”

  He told the phone to recall the number and then waited. Then he said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and switched off.

  “That was the Helios general information number,” he announced. “For some unknown reason, Allie called the power plant.”

  Aha, indeed, I thought. Now we had a tie, however indirect, between Helios and one of the unexplained radiation incidents. I maneuvered the Suburban through a very complicated cloverleaf to get up onto the Cape Fear River Memorial Bridge.

  “Does it show the duration of the call?” I asked, in case Allie had simply dialed a wrong number as Pardee had pretended to do.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Just the call and the date, which was, lemme see, the day before she died.”

  “Call ’em back and ask for Quartermain.”

  A moment later, he was speaking to Quartermain’s secretary. Pardee raised his eyebrows at me, and I told him to see if Ari could meet us in a half hour for a quick private conversation. She put him on hold, and then came back on to tell him that Dr. Quartermain could meet us in an hour and named a restaurant in Southport. I nodded, and Pardee told her we’d be there.

  The restaurant turned out to be a New York–style deli, which opened for breakfast and lunch only, down on the main drag leading to the municipal beach. It was noisy and surprisingly full of people when Ari came in, saw us at a corner table, and excused his way through the counter line to join us. I’d decided to go ahead and tell him what we’d found out about Carl Trask.

  “Can’t stay,” he announced, checking his watch.

  “That good a day, is it?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “We are infested with agencies whose names are all abbreviated,” he said. “A million questions, no answers. What you got?”

  “A live Carl Trask?” I said.

  He leaned back in his chair, visibly surprised. “Really,” he said. “Maybe I’d better get a sandwich after all.”

  Pardee volunteered to stand in line and order for all three of us while I debriefed my visit from the local constabulary and the news that Allie had made a call to the power plant the day before she died.

  That really threw him. “She did? Do you know who she called?”

  I shook my head. “All we know is that her cell phone called your central number at Helios. Does your switchboard record calls coming in?”

  “No,” he said. “Unless it’s a threat or a crank call; then the operator can hit a capture-record button, but otherwise, no, calls are just calls. And if that’s not Carl Trask in the cask, who the fuck is it?”

  “Slow down, Ari,” I said. “We have one guy, admittedly a senior cop, telling us he’s pretty sure he saw Trask at the Southport marina. Pretty sure doesn’t hack it. Until one of us sees him, we don’t actually know anything.” Then I told him about the note and our plan to rendezvous with Trask to find out what the hell he was doing.

  “Besides being AWOL from Helios?” Ari said. “We’ve temporarily suspended his access and clearances. If he’s running some kind of security test, the only place he can get into right now is the public admin building, where his current security clearance level is zero.”

  “We have indications that Trask is part of a Homeland Security undercover operation at the c
ontainer port,” I said. “I don’t want to go into detail about that just now, but it might explain some of his strange comings and goings. So: We’ll meet, we’ll talk, and then maybe we’ll know more.”

  “That may well be,” Ari said, “but as far as I’m concerned, he’s got a job to do at Helios, and we have a major physical security breach investigation going on right now. That’s where he’s supposed to be, not out there playing cowboys and Indians with his black-ops pals. You want a new job?”

  “Been there, done that. Look, until we actually confirm all this, I’d like you to not share this news with the Bureau.”

  He nodded. “Okay; we’re not exactly best friends right now, anyway. Those guys are probing everything that’s not nailed down, even stuff that has no bearing on the floater in the moonpool.”

  “That’s what they do,” I said. “Especially when it’s new ground for them. They learn, then they dig, and learn some more. It’s their strength.”

  “Well, right now, all their digging is upsetting my engineers. If this shit keeps up, our chief engineer is going to recommend a safety shutdown, and the NRC does not want that to happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’d have to explain why to the secretary of energy and the rest of the power industry.”

  “So?”

  He laughed. “So? If someone asks the right questions, that could lead to a system-wide shutdown. Think nationwide rolling blackouts.”

  “But you said the plant, the power-generation side, anyway, wasn’t affected by the moonpool. So why a system-wide shutdown?”

  “Because the technical and physical security systems are totally integrated; they’re the same system for the whole plant. If it failed at Helios, it could fail at any of the BWR plants. That would technically make all the plants, by definition, no longer safe to operate. Those are NRC rules, so they’d be squatting on their own petard, to mangle the metaphor. I need Trask back, and yesterday would be nice.”