Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  Pardee, on the other hand, was in trouble. Center stage, ICU trouble. Whatever Trask had gassed him with was still in control. The docs said that he smelled like ether, and that in the hands of a non-anesthesiologist, ether could be highly toxic and there was a chance of brain damage, or worse, if he didn’t come out of it in the next few days.

  I’d put a call in to Bernie Price and asked him if he could bird-dog Pardee’s police report for us. I preferred to have someone who knew both of us working with the admissions staff, who had all sorts of interesting questions about how Pardee came to inhale ether.

  “You’re sure this was Trask’s doing?” Ari asked.

  “Once again, I never saw him, but it sure sounded like him, and we had prior indication that he was doing stuff over there in the container port.”

  “Stuff.”

  “You don’t actually want to know,” I told him, “but he was allegedly working with the government, so it’s not a criminal enterprise. How’s Helios?”

  “You don’t actually want to know,” he parroted back to me with a wry grin. “The DNA comparison didn’t work, probably because of all the radiation exposure. The coroner’s office is freaking out because the body is not decomposing. Remember all that news about irradiating meat to prevent spoilage? Apparently it works.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “Look: Whatever Trask is planning, he has inside help, and it may be as soon as tonight.”

  He looked at his watch. “Tonight is over,” he said wearily. “It’s tomorrow already. Who’s the inside help, and what is the it?”

  “I like the Russian’s deputy, that Dr. Thomason, but I don’t have any firm evidence. Is he competent to create some kind of incident?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Ari said, “but it would have to be the moonpool. He doesn’t usually work the reactor side, although technically he’s licensed to do so. If he showed up over there in the middle of the night, everyone in the control center would wonder why.”

  “What’s the worst thing that could happen to the moonpool?”

  “Empty the pool,” he said promptly. “Remember, it’s mostly aboveground. Empty the pool, and the spent fuel stack could catch fire from the heat of decay.”

  “Would that be contained?”

  “To start with,” he said, “but if we got significant hydrogen generation and no remedial action was taken, you could get a gas explosion. Blow the containment building apart, and the Three Mile Island incident would look like an amusing Halloween prank.”

  “But there would be remedial action, right? You have automatic systems to deal with loss of the water?”

  “Certainly, but you said you thought Trask had inside help. If it’s Thomason, or someone with Thomason’s qualifications, he could disable all of those systems, and he could probably do so in a way that would keep the control room from knowing it until it was too late. Hell, I could do that.”

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “What’s your opinion of Thomason?”

  “He’s a good engineer. Ex-Navy nuke, like a lot of them are. Personality-free zone. Gets along with Petrowska, which takes some doing. Doesn’t socialize much within the plant. Don’t know his politics.”

  “Could he have some hidden agenda?”

  Ari rubbed his cheeks with both hands while he considered that question. “I suppose he could,” he said, “but I’ve never heard him ranting and raving, not, for instance, like Carl Trask.”

  “I still think you should alert your security people,” I said.

  He sighed and nodded. “And what, specifically, do I tell them?”

  I had a momentary vision of Trask turning a couple of cobras loose in the control room. My arm twinged. “You have stages of threat alert over there, don’t you? Like the airports? Raise the alert level immediately. You don’t have to explain why. Lock the fucking place down for a few days until we can pull the string on Thomason and actually apprehend Trask.”

  “We’ve already got the FBI and the NRC crawling up our asses,” he said. “I guess we could throw some more shit in the game.”

  “Ari, look: Your plant may be under attack. Two unexplained radiological releases. A dead body in the moonpool. Your physical security director is missing and presumed whacko. I get ambushed in the container port by a guy who has pre-staged facilities—in the junkyard. My partner is a gorp upstairs, courtesy of the same guy who turned a python loose on me. Pretend you’re sitting in front of a congressional committee afterward while a senator recites all that and then asks why nothing was done.”

  He put his shiny bald head in his hands and thought about it. “Coming offline unscheduled is a really big deal,” he said between his fingers. “I can lock the place down, as you put it, but if they’re after the moonpool, that wouldn’t affect the reactor side.”

  “Suppose the moonpool is a diversion?” I said. “Is the NRC looking at the reactor side? The Bureau? Anybody? Or is everybody focused on the moonpool?”

  He looked at me from between splayed fingers. “Fu-u-u-u-ck,” he said.

  Then he got out his cell phone. Ignoring all the signs about using cell phones in the hospital, he placed a call. He identified himself, but didn’t give his phone number, and then made them call him back. Then he asked for the supervisory engineer in the primary control room.

  “Hal, this is Ari Quartermain. This is an emergency communication. I have made an official determination that the reactor system is temporarily unsafe. I direct that you inform the grid operator that Helios is going offline. Once the generator hall comes off the grid, then I direct that you execute a deliberate reactor scram. I am ready to give you the authentication code word.”

  He listened for a moment, looking over at me with a grave expression.

  “That’s right. Make the appropriate log entries.” A pause. “Yes, of course I will take full responsibility, but do it now. There is an inside security threat to the RCS.”

  He listened some more. “No, do not wait. Tell the grid operations center they have five minutes to adjust the load. If they protest, tell them you’re going to scram in six minutes. They can handle it. They won’t want to, but they can. Let me know when you’re ready for the code word.”

  He listened, then put his hand over the phone. “He has to get a safe open,” he told me. “Two-man rule and all that.”

  “Can he object, or go over your head?” I asked.

  Ari shook his head. “He’s a nuke. This is a certified emergency procedure. My phone has a unique caller ID symbol that confirms it’s me. There are two code words, actually, one for duress, and one which means he has to do what I say.” He turned back to the phone.

  “I am ready to proceed,” he said. He waited, and then said, “No,” and then spoke a single word. He waited. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll inform the director.”

  He hung up and looked over at me. “Now the real fun begins,” he said. “And this time, Mr. Private Investigator, you’re going to get to play.”

  A weary-looking nurse in blue scrubs came into the waiting area, frowned at Ari’s cell phone, and then called my name. Her name tag had an ICU logo.

  “Your friend, Mr. Bell, is semiconscious,” she said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no one home.”

  I digested that announcement for a moment. “Will he recover?” I asked.

  “We don’t know, Mr. Richter. When I say he’s semiconscious, I mean he’s responsive to stimuli. His hand flinches if we probe a finger with a needle. We hope that Mr. Bell is still down there somewhere. For now, I’d suggest you go home until we contact you. Make sure Admitting has your contact numbers. Is Mr. Bell married?”

  “Yes, to a trial attorney, up in Triboro.”

  “Terrific,” she said. “Give that information to Admitting as well, please. She should come down here.”

  I did as she had asked, and called Alicia, Pardee’s wife, myself, to tell her what had happened. She said she’d be down first thing in the morning after she’d set up care
for the kids.

  I stopped by the pharmacy to fill some scrips of my own. “I need a shower and some sleep,” I told Ari. “People in there were keeping their distance.”

  “Yeah, you’re a bit funky this evening.”

  “You should smell the snake,” I said.

  “I believe I do.”

  “But we’re not done yet, are we.”

  “Nope. We have to go see the Man.”

  “We.”

  “Don’t make me say it.”

  We drove in separate vehicles directly to the admin building. I left the mutts in the Suburban and followed Ari into the building. The plant director and two other worried-looking managers were waiting for Ari. Behind the admin building, the huge green buildings of Helios looked just the same. The only thing missing was the subdued roar of the condenser cooling-water tailrace. Since the generators weren’t running, they weren’t pulling lebenty thousand gallons of cooling water a minute in from the river anymore. Otherwise you couldn’t tell.

  I’d been doing a slow burn ever since leaving the hospital. I made a mental note to stop worrying about gathering evidence of whatever outrages Trask and his henchman were contemplating. If I found him before the Bureau did, there wasn’t going to be any need for evidence. I’d rousted Tony to tell him what had happened, and he’d immediately said he’d be back in the morning. Mindful of the oblique hint Trask had given me, I asked him to stay in Triboro and to pull the string hard on Allie Gardner’s family background. I wanted him to get to her personnel file from the sheriff’s office. He thought he could con someone into helping him out.

  Then I asked him to contact Pardee’s wife and offer whatever help she needed, including a charter plane ticket if she wanted to fly down. If mystery-man Trask, with all his security toys, exotic pets, and fanatical ideas, had turned Pardee Bell into a vegetable with a handkerchief of diesel starter fluid, I intended to return the favor. Alicia was the kind of woman who would want to help with that.

  The plant director was a tall, spare man in his early forties who looked to be of Scandinavian descent. Ari introduced him as Dr. Johannsen, and his demeanor was all business. He was obviously unaware of who I was or what I’d been doing down there, so Ari filled him in. Then I told an abbreviated story of the night’s events and why I’d recommended they shut down the plant.

  “You did not actually see Colonel Trask during all this?” Johannsen asked.

  “I did not,” I said. “Nor did I see him the night we got run over out in the Cape Fear River.”

  He raised his hands, palms up, as if asking the obvious question.

  “It’s what you don’t know, Dr. Johannsen,” I said. It had been a really long night. “Consider everything that’s happened in the past week or so. The death by radiation poisoning of one of my associates, an unidentified body in your spent fuel storage pool, your physical security director’s gone missing, oh, and did I forget to mention the radiation incident over in the container port?”

  “Only one of those incidents connects directly to Helios,” he said. “Admittedly, Colonel Trask’s whereabouts are something of a mystery, but he’s done unusual things like this before. I could make the reverse argument: Most of this has happened since you showed up.”

  The look on my face must have concerned him, because he immediately tried to make amends. “Look, Mr. Richter, I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just that shutting down the plant the way it was done tonight is going to cause industry and public comment. The nuclear industry lives under a magnifying glass. Everyone will assume we had a reactor problem. What do we tell them?”

  “The truth?” I said. “That way it at least looks like you care as much about the security of your operation here as you do about your image.”

  I saw Ari look away. The director stared at me for a moment and then settled his face into a polite mask. “All right, Mr. Richter. I think you’re really tired after your, um, experiences tonight. We’ll excuse you now. Dr. Quartermain and I need to talk privately. Thank you for your services.”

  That sounded like a great idea to me, so I left. Once in the Suburban, I put my head back on the headrest and told the shepherds that I needed them to eat someone. They seemed amenable. All I had to do was come up with the name.

  I had to assume the plant’s technical people were on high alert by now, which should make it a whole lot harder for anyone inside or out to pull some shit. On the walk out to the hospital parking lot, I’d asked Ari what “scram” meant. He said it was slang for shutting a reactor down quickly by inserting all the control rods, thereby killing off the chain reaction. A scram was something the reactor usually did to itself if it detected a safety problem. Of course, even if the reactors were no longer critical, there was still plenty of heat and radiation present for duty, so it wasn’t as if they were cold and dark, and therefore not dangerous. And there’d be intense NRC interest in why it had happened. I told him it was a good thing they were already here, then. He had not been amused. It was obviously time for me to get some sleep and then to regroup.

  Tony called at about 10:00 A.M. from Triboro. He reported that Pardee’s wife was in touch with the hospital and en route by car, and that he’d have his hands on Allie’s archived personnel file sometime today. He wanted to know if he should still come down to the Wilmington area. I told him to get the file and then come down; I also asked him to bring some tactical equipment from our collection.

  “We going colonel-hunting?” he asked.

  “Something like that.”

  He said he’d be down by late afternoon.

  The next phone call was from Ari Quartermain. His voice was strained and he sounded as if he hadn’t slept all night.

  “We’ve finally heard from Trask,” he announced.

  “Good deal,” I said. “Now we know it wasn’t him in the moonpool. The question is: Where is he?”

  “On his boat, or so he says,” Ari replied. “Says he’s uncovered a security problem that turned out to be much bigger than he thought it was originally. Says he’ll come in tonight after getting some sleep. I told him we were shut down, and why.”

  “The ‘why’ being my suggestion?”

  “Yep. He said as long as we kept you and your people away from the plant, there was no need to be shut down. He said you are part of the problem.”

  “I’ll bet he did—I tumbled to him and whatever shit he’s got planned.”

  Ari sighed. “Well, I briefed the director. He knows Trask, and he doesn’t know you. He said we’d stay offline until Trask shows up and explains all this shit. In the meantime . . .”

  “In the meantime, you want me to stay the hell away from Helios, right?”

  “Pretty please?” he said.

  “I can do that,” I said. “But I’m going to file a police report charging Trask with the assault on Pardee Bell. When he’s done with whatever fanciful tale he’s going to spin for you guys, the Wilmington cops are going to want a word with him. And the Coast Guard wants to examine that boat.”

  “Funny you should use those words,” Ari said. “Fanciful tale. That’s how the director characterized your story from last night. Who else should I be watching?”

  “Watch the moonpool engineering crew,” I said. “My measure of Trask is that he won’t give up. Your shutting the plant down may have complicated that, but at least everyone’s alerted, right?”

  “They certainly are,” Ari said. “Anna Petrowska is somewhat skeptical, as you might imagine. She told the director that she thought you were delusional.”

  “She would, if she’s part of Trask’s plan.”

  “Cam, what’s her motive? What’s anyone’s motive to fuck around with the moonpool, for that matter?”

  “I don’t know, Ari, and I can’t help you anymore. But here’s a suggestion: Fill in Petrowska’s timeline for the past three or four days. Account for her every waking moment, because the tie-in might be between her and the guy in the moonpool, not Trask. Especially now that y
ou are pretty sure it’s not Trask in your lead-lined cask.”

  Ari didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he told me to keep in touch, and that he’d let me know when they actually sat down with Trask. I was being dismissed, and possibly so was the threat to Helios.

  “Ari?” I said.

  “Yes, Cam?”

  “Remember what happened the third time the kid cried wolf.”

  I hung up. I recalled what Sergeant McMichaels had said about Ari. If the technical security officer at a nuclear plant had a loan shark on his tail, would he take money to let a terrorist cell in the back door? I didn’t want to think about that. I made one more call.

  “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Wilmington resident agent’s office,” the voice recited.

  I identified myself and told the robot I needed to speak to Special Agent Caswell. As usual, he was not available, and could they take a message. Standard routine. I was tempted to tell them there was a bomb in the office, but I didn’t. Tony would have.

  “Tell him I called, and that I have information on the upcoming meltdown at the Helios power plant.”

  “Say again?”

  “You heard me,” I said, “and you’re taping, I presume.” I gave him my number and hung up.

  Creeps called back in five minutes. “You unsettled our desk operator,” he said.

  “Did you know Carl Trask contacted Helios this morning?”

  A moment of silence. “No,” he said finally. “I was not informed of that. Who told you?”

  I thought I heard a change in the background noise of the phone, although on a cell phone it was difficult to tell. Other people picking up muted extensions? “I need ten minutes of your time, especially if the upper management at Helios is no longer keeping my Bureau in the loop.”

  “Clock is running, Lieutenant.”

  Along with the tape, I thought. Fair enough. And he’d called me lieutenant, not mister. That meant he thought I might be useful, at least for a few minutes or so. I took them from the initial call from Trask all the way through my dismissal from the director’s office last night. Ironically, Creeps asked the same question the director had.