Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “No,” I said. “I never actually saw him. But I’m pretty damned sure it’s Trask, and the people he called this morning think it’s him, too.”

  “Very well,” Creeps said. “Then this should be fairly straightforward. I will inform my counterpart at the NRC that we will be present at Helios for this meeting.”

  “You might want to watch for that boat, too,” I said. “Whatever he’s got in mind, it involves the boat.”

  “This is something you know?”

  “It’s how he gets around,” I said. “You see that boat parked at the power plant this evening, I’d recommend staying upwind.”

  “You seriously think he’s going to create some kind of nuclear incident at Helios, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, “and since all the attention has been focused on the moonpool, I’d say watch the reactors. They’re shut down right now, and that might have changed the security equation.”

  “The body in the moonpool was a diversion?”

  “Have you or any of your people ever been over to the reactor side of the plant?” I asked. They had not. Neither had I. Nobody was looking in that direction. If Trask had orchestrated all these previous incidents, he was certainly capable of an even bigger diversion. Creeps said he’d think about it, and then asked the one question for which I had no answer: What if nothing happens?

  “Then I’m going after him for the boat collision and for what he’s done to Pardee Bell,” I said.

  “Evidence, Lieutenant,” he prompted. “You have no evidence.”

  “I will once I can get my hands on that boat,” I said. “There’s also his little fun parlor over in the container junkyard.”

  “I assume you haven’t turned the television on, then,” he said. “The container junkyard went up in flames last night. Major fire, attributed to homeless vagrants who were known to nest there on cold nights.”

  Shit, I thought. I should have expected that. “So what’s that tell you, Special Agent?”

  “In an evidentiary sense? Nothing. But we’ll see what develops when Mr. Trask makes his appearance.”

  “Hopefully not a mushroom cloud,” I said. “You’ve got my number.”

  “Indeed we do, Lieutenant,” he said. “Have a nice day.”

  I said something impolite, but they’d already hung up. The shepherds were sitting in the kitchen, looking at me expectantly. Important business needed immediate attention: They hadn’t been fed yet.

  At four thirty that afternoon I pulled the Suburban into an overgrown driveway some fifteen miles upriver from the Helios power plant. According to my map, the Jellico River, a tributary of the larger Cape Fear River, was a quarter mile beyond the dense stand of white pines I was facing. The sun was slanting westward on a cool, clear day. There was a breeze whispering through the tops of the pine trees, and I could smell the earthy scents of river bottomland. The forecast had predicted high forties for this night, and the temps were on their way down.

  It had eventually occurred to me that an eighteen-foot-long Burmese python probably did not live on Trask’s boat, which meant that he had to have a base of operations on land somewhere. I’d run into Sergeant McMichaels at the deli at noon, and we’d had a sandwich together. I told him enough about what had happened to my arm to inspire some assistance at the county seat. I needed to know if Trask owned property somewhere nearby. He thought Trask lived exclusively on that boat he kept over at Carolina Beach. I pushed a little, wondering if there were any county records that could tell me more. I said I needed to get up with Trask, to find out once and for all if it had been him piloting the boat that ran over ours out in the river.

  Apparently, McMichaels had gone back to the office and done some checking, because he called me back a few hours later with an address of some riverfront property that could belong to Carl Trask. He dutifully lectured me about not seeking revenge or otherwise indulging in illegal acts, and I’d solemnly sworn never to do such a thing. With that necessary formality out of the way, he’d said the property was recorded as an abandoned nursery and landscaping complex on the Jellico River, which had been bought for investment purposes by a privately owned company called CCT Enterprises. The attorney of record, when queried about a fictional tax matter, had come up with Trask’s name and cell phone number as the principal point of contact for CCT. And was any of that information helpful at all?

  I told him it was very helpful indeed and that I owed him one, if not more than one. He told me to save it for any occasion wherein the Helios power plant might pose a threat to humanity in the Southport community. I had to hand it to him: McMichaels kept himself very much in the loop when it came to matters involving Helios. His interest might have had something to do with all those concentric circles drawn on all the maps I’d seen of Hanover County, centered on the nuclear power plant. I asked him if there were known loan sharks in Brunswick County. None that he knew of, he said.

  I pulled off the two-lane and drove down a narrow, weedy driveway through a stand of spindly pines until I came to a chain-link fence. It was nearly ten feet high, which was surprising for private property, and it stretched back into the trees. It wasn’t a new fence, but it did look intact. There was a single slide-back gate, which was securely padlocked, and signs warning people to stay out. The signs were badly rusted, as was a larger sign indicating that this was, or had been, the location of the Ashlands Nursery, wholesale only. There were power poles leading into the property, and the overhead wiring appeared to be functional. The entrance drive bent around to the left inside the gate, and I couldn’t see anything beyond that bend because of the pines. My cell phone stirred in my pocket. It was Tony, who wanted to know my twenty. I told him.

  “I’m just crossing the Cape Fear River Bridge now,” he said. “Gimme a data point for my GPS and I’ll join up with you.”

  I gave him the address McMichaels had given me, and Tony said he’d be here in about twenty minutes, if Igor wasn’t lying. Igor was the name Tony gave every electronic device he owned. I told him I was facing a seriously padlocked gate. He said he had a cure for that in his trunk.

  I got the shepherds out, and we went for a little recon walkabout. I was looking for video cameras or other signs of electronic Igors that Trask might have put out there, if this was, in fact, his place. I checked the fabric of the chain-link fence for tiny sensor wires and scanned all the logical places for cameras in high places trained on the gate area. I examined the nearest outside telephone poles for taps, but there was nothing coming down the sides of the poles except spike holes and some tendrils of dead poison ivy. The sand around the gate did not look like it had been disturbed for years, and the dogs weren’t especially interested in any aspect of the gate area.

  Tony showed up right on his timeline, for which he gave his GPS unit an affectionate little pat as he got out of his SUV. He greeted the shepherds and then went to the back of his vehicle and produced what we cops used to call a master key, which was a large bolt cutter with three-foot-long insulated handles. The business end resembled that of a snapping turtle. Ignoring the kryptonite padlock, he quickly cut through the chain. I waited for alarms to sound or Dobermans to appear, but nothing happened. I then got Tony to hand-overhand the gate and fence to see if he could see any signs of alarms. He went over everything I had inspected, but then got down on his hands and knees and fished in the sand for magnetic plates under the gate. To my chagrin, he found two, one under the locking end of the sliding gate, the other under the stationary part. There were wire conduits leading from the gate in the direction of that curving drive.

  “Knew you were useful,” I said, examining the shiny little boxes. They were the size of a packet of cancer sticks, and much newer looking than the rest of the gate apparatus.

  “The good news is that they use the gate steel as the test probe,” he said. “As long as there’s ferrous metal above the plates, we can go ahead and open the gate.”

  He put the bolt cutters down on top of the de
tector nearest the locking point, and slid the gate open wide enough for all of us to go through. We started down the road. I kept the shepherds in front of us but not free-ranging. The light was beginning to fade here among all the trees, but the smell of the river was growing stronger. The driveway, which bore no sign of tire tracks, turned to the left and then back to the right in a wide S-turn, and then the band of pine trees ended. Ahead was a large, U-shaped greenhouse, with the two arms of the U pointing in our direction. We stopped at the edge of the trees, stepped back into them to maintain a little cover, and studied the layout.

  There were three World War II–vintage Quonset huts on one side of the greenhouse, but they had obviously been derelict for many years. On the other side was a perfectly flat but weed-infested area where potted plants had probably been stored under plastic. The pipe frames for the plastic were broken down and rusting away. Beyond the greenhouse there was a battered-looking single-wide trailer home, and beyond that, a coil of the Jellico River was visible through some swamp grass. The nose of the single-wide had fallen off its blocks, which meant that it was unlikely that it was habitable.

  “Everything’s a wreck except the greenhouse,” Tony said quietly.

  I’d noticed that, too. No broken panes of glass or vines climbing the structure, and there was a battery of what looked like solar panels erected along the south side, all tilted to maximize insolation. The pipes serving the panels were insulated in heavy black foam rubber, and that was also intact.

  “Nice, isolated place to grow a cash crop of weed,” I said. “The nearest farmhouse has to be a mile or so from here.”

  “A little obvious to the DEA air patrols,” he said. “My guess is orchids or something along those lines. The power lines terminate there, not at the trailer.”

  I’d missed that fact, a reminder of why it was always better to have a partner along. “What news on Pardee?” I asked, as we continued to scan our surroundings.

  “Alicia made it down there about one,” he said. “No change, either way, better or worse, which they say is good news. They’re telling her it could be a few more days before he surfaces.”

  “Where is she staying?”

  “Hilton.”

  A gaggle of ducks blasted off from somewhere to our right and bulleted across the greenhouse area. The breeze coming off the river was turning colder. The glass panels of the center section of the greenhouse appeared to be opaque, either from some paint or possibly condensation on the glass. I wondered if the whole thing was heated, or just that long center section. We were running out of daylight.

  “I think we need to get around this and check the riverbank for a pier.”

  “And a boat, maybe?”

  “Hopefully,” I said. “And if it’s there, we’ll need some long guns.”

  “No problem,” he said, and we began to move sideways, staying inside the tree line so as not to be perfectly obvious. The shepherds patrolled ahead of us, noses down, but not alarming at anything. We walked silently across a thick bed of pine needles. Once we got around the nursery area, we could see larger, hardwood trees draped along the riverbank. The mobile home looked even more forlorn from this angle, but there was a path leading down from the trailer to the bank. The remains of a rotting pier, its decking planks twisted sideways, stuck out into the river.

  No boat. Plus, the water under the pier didn’t even look deep enough to accommodate the Keeper.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now we have to check out that greenhouse.”

  “Let’s not and say we did,” Tony said. “I’ve just figured out what’s in there.”

  I told him we needed to make sure. As we started back, I noticed a five-hundred-gallon propane tank on the back side of the greenhouse. That side faced west, and the windows were even more opaque.

  To our surprise we found the back door, near the fuel tank, unlocked. Surprised until we read the little sign on the door’s window: THERE IS NO POINT TO LOCKING THE DOORS IN A GLASS BUILDING, it read. BUT IF YOU COME IN HERE, THE CHANCES ARE VERY GOOD THAT YOU’LL NEVER COME OUT ALIVE. It was signed THE KEEPER.

  That’s all it said. No threats about trespassers being prosecuted or anything else. Seemed clear to me, and more than clear to Tony, who once again suggested we just spot this little expedition and get the flock out of there. I was tempted, but if this was Trask’s snake house, I had plans for it.

  I put the shepherds on a long down not far from the door. I opened the door and we stepped through, guns in hand, to face a wave of warm, humid air. I found a small power panel just inside the door and threw the breakers that were not on; the third and fourth ones turned on lights throughout the greenhouse, although they were very low-wattage lights. There was a round knob on one side of the power panel box, which began to make a noise when I turned the lights on.

  The space right inside the door resembled an interior screen porch, with a very fine metal mesh. There was a large water heater with three pumps clustered at its feet, from which ran insulated water manifolds that spread out through the building, or at least into the right wing where we’d come in. There were stainless steel tables and painted metal cabinets along one wall, three refrigerators or freezers, and a glass-fronted cabinet with vials of different things inside, probably antivenin compounds.

  “Fuck me,” Tony said, pointing behind the heater. There we could see a separately screened annex, where there were five cages full of rats, and not the pretty white lab rats I was used to seeing in captivity. These were gray and brown Norway rats, some of them big enough to be worrisome and not at all afraid of us. They squirmed and squeaked when the lights came on, as if they knew what the presence of humans meant. There were wooden handles with metal snare loops hanging on each cage, and hand access plates on each door.

  Outside the screened-in area, which was perhaps twenty feet square, there was a jungle. Literally a jungle, with huge green plants, vines, some flowers, tropical bushes, low-growing trees, and even thick, wet-looking grass. Then we realized that it wasn’t an open jungle, but rather a series of screened-in cages, some small, some big enough for a horse. We could see the heating pipes running through the grass areas. Both of us stared pretty hard at those pipes to see if any of them were moving. There was one long black plastic pipe, perhaps ten inches in diameter, which ran the entire length of the screened area on one side and protruded into the jungle part.

  There was a three-foot-wide gravel path bordered by four-by-six posts lying horizontally, to which the cages’ front screens attached. Three stainless steel kitchen tables on wheels were parked along the pathway. Some of the riotous vegetation had poked through the screens and overhung the path. The large black pipe ended three feet into the jungle in a blank cap. Some kind of heat exchanger? The whole place smelled like greenhouses always do, moist, composted earth, wet vegetation, and high humidity, but with another smell overlaying it all. I recognized that smell.

  “Now what?” Tony said, clearly implying that we’d seen all we had to.

  “I’m going to check this place out,” I said. “You can wait here, stand guard if you’d rather.”

  “No fucking way, boss,” Tony said.

  “You want to go first?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Because usually, with snakes, it’s the first guy pisses ’em off, and the second guy who gets bit.”

  “I’ll go first.”

  We went in single file, stepping carefully, although logic said that the handler, or was it the keeper, had to have one totally safe route through his reptilian kingdom. I’d seen some snake-handling sticks hung on the wall back by the utility room, but didn’t want my hands encumbered by anything but my trusty SIG. I told Tony to fish out his flashlight in case the lights went out.

  “Why would the lights go out?” he asked.

  “Because the alarm we didn’t see summons the owner?”

  “Another good reason to get the fuck out of here,” he pointed out.

  The cages were on either side, fill
ed with greenery that I didn’t recognize. There were water feeders like the one I’d seen on the boat in all the cages, and sometimes rock piles or artificial burrows. Each cage had two stainless steel padlocks on its door. And, yes, there were snakes.

  Most of them were smallish, compared to the Burmese monster. Some looked plain enough; others were dramatically patterned, with pronounced, flattened triangular heads sporting muscular, protruding venom glands on either side. All of them that we could see were tracking us with flickering tongues and glittering eyes, and I realized that the lights coming on probably meant feeding time to this crew. One thick bastard, which I recognized as a Gabon viper, coiled aggressively as we walked by. I saw Tony’s finger slip down onto the trigger of his Glock, and then realized I’d done the same thing.

  About half the cages were empty, or else the inhabitants were enjoying a postprandial coma in one of those artificial burrows. I wasn’t about to open any doors to find out, nor did we have keys. We turned the corner into the base of the U-shaped complex, and came upon some really large cages and some equally large snakes: pythons, anacondas, and some other constrictors I didn’t recognize from my days as a National Geographic subscriber. Some ignored us, some watched. I wondered if Trask threw the rats in dead or alive. I’d read somewhere that snakes could live for months after ingesting one good meal.

  The final wing had a set of double doors made of clear Plexiglas, which created an airlock. When we stepped through the second door, we encountered a much drier heat. Gone was the jungle. This wing was more like a desert, and the cages were filled with sand, rocks, the ubiquitous water feeders, some deadwood from the beach, and not much else. The temperature gauges read eighty degrees, but it seemed hotter. Even the lights were different, although still not very strong. They’d been greenish in the other section; in here they were more like orange. Strangely, all these cages appeared to be empty, unless the whole crowd was down in their holes.