“It’s true, Frank. I could use your help.” She cut right, swerved past the plumbing truck.
“Hey, are we in some kind of hurry? ’Cause if we are, maybe you should turn on your blue light.”
“Don’t have one. Why? Do women drivers scare you?”
“Nothing so global as that.” Frank tugged his shoulder harness tighter.
She glanced over at him, at his shirt, and gave him that half smile. As if she was embarrassed for him and wanted to say something, but was holding fire. Fifth or sixth time she’d shown that smile, starting when she’d shown up at the Silver Sands Motel, where he lived on Key Biscayne.
Nine thirty that morning, he was waiting for her at the concrete picnic table, dressed in his best Hawaiian shirt, the yellow one with blue hula girls, and faded jeans and loafers. Showered, hair combed, ready. His brown hair going sandy and thinning in back, but his body holding up, still trim. His face showed he was nearing sixty, weathered from years in the South Florida sun, with blue, honest eyes, an easy smile, a single shiny scar on the bridge of his nose from a sucker punch thrown by a meth freak, but otherwise relatively unbattered, considering his profession.
When she’d arrived, she’d given him that teaser smile and asked if it was his day off, and Frank said, yeah, as a matter of fact. Well, she wanted him to meet someone and she was in a hurry, so there wasn’t time for him to change, and he’d said fine, he hadn’t been planning to.
Nicole McIvey stood there in her crisp gray slacks and silky purple top, not formfitting, but tight enough to give away her figure. Not a flashy lady, but in nearly every way he could think of, Nicole was dead center in Sheffield’s hormonal sweet spot. Trim body with a hardy edge. Pale blond hair that she wore loose to her shoulders, clear blue eyes with a sharpshooter’s glint. Eyebrows so light they were barely there.
She carried herself smoothly, as airy on her feet as a yoga guru. She had a take-no-prisoners sense of humor, like a woman who’d learned her first life lessons horsing around with older brothers.
First time he saw her at a Homeland Security briefing up in Lauderdale, he’d felt a twinge. She picked up on it, glancing his way more than necessary, a couple of subtle smiles. Flirting, but discreet. Second occasion, a Christmas party for some top-tier feds in South Florida, at a mansion out on the beach along the Intracoastal with a view of the Miami downtown skyline lit up in reds and greens, Biscayne Bay gleaming, soft winter breeze. Open bar. McIvey was drinking mango champagne cocktails. Sheffield was on his third Bud when she came over, started talking. Asked him if he was staring at her. He apologized, said she reminded him of somebody.
Dare I ask?
First wife, he said, but she’s long gone.
An amicable divorce, I hope?
What’s the opposite of amicable? he said.
She looked back at the party as if considering rejoining the crowd. Took a minute, but finally turned back to him. Never married again?
Not even close.
She hurt you that much, Frank? You’ll never love again?
You’re mighty quick on the draw.
You like going slow, Frank? You’d be the first man I met.
I used to think I’d never get over her. But not anymore. Twenty years, I believe I’m all healed up.
They wound up leaning against the boathouse, chatting, getting around to the weather, the cool tropical winter night, the scattering of stars, Nicole saying it looked like silver mistletoe twinkling up there, a bit of come-on poetry.
They discussed work, people they knew, the music filtering down from the big house, people laughing quietly on the other side of the lawn, then they both went silent, looking at each other, and with a tilt of her head, she offered him a kiss and he took it. He wasn’t sure how drunk she was, or how drunk he was. But that kiss lasted about as long as any Frank could remember, and then came her hands, not hurried or rough, but sure, aware, the slow sensuous sound of his own zipper, her long fingers unbuckling him, you’re sure about this, he managed to whisper, oh, yes, she said, then her skirt going up, panties tugged down, her sleek inner thighs, the athletic maneuvers she managed while they consummated it in the shadows of the boathouse.
After they were done, she split for the bathroom and didn’t return.
Next day he tracked down her number and called her.
She didn’t let him get past hello before saying it was a mistake. She never did stuff like that. What? You’re a nun, a virgin? I mean the zipless thing, she said. Never? Never, she said. And it’s not a good idea for either of them. Her so junior, him so senior.
Sheffield did his best to minimize all that, joking around, trying to get his silver tongue going. But when he ran out of words, she was quiet and stayed that way until he gave up and that was that, no further contact all winter, spring, and summer until this morning when she’d rung his room at the Silver Sands.
For his entire career with the Bureau, Sheffield had never once hit on a coworker, even one a step removed from the FBI. It was one of Sheffield’s unbendable rules. Never dally with cops, ’cause if it came back to bite you in the ass, it would clamp hard. But as Nicole had said, Sheffield had a foot in retirement. And he could still hear that silky zipper. Still feel her sure-handed way with his belt.
On the phone at 8:00 a.m. today, Frank asked her what this was all about.
She said this had to be face-to-face. She’d fill him in on the way down to the power plant. Which power plant? You mean Turkey Point? I’ll fill you in, she repeated.
“I’ve seen electrocutions before. Nothing like this.”
“He caught fire. From the inside out, his major organs, that’s what the ME told me. It’s rare, but it happens.”
“Jesus.”
“There was a half-assed attempt to make it look accidental. But it was clear what went down. They hooked Marcus up to the electrical grid. Like a message. Power to the people. Something cute like that. That’s how they think. They found out he was spying on them, they fried him.”
“That’s a message?”
“They’re big into messaging,” she said.
“Who we talking about?”
She plucked her phone from the cup holder, fiddled with it one-handed, cutting her eyes back and forth from the phone to the insane traffic heading south, everybody in a hurry to get to the Keys and relax.
She held out the phone again.
It was an image of a cartoon elf, chubby and stern-faced and wearing a green frock and a beret. His leggings were also olive drab and the toes of his boots curled up like those of the fairy-tale elves from Grimm. He was holding an oversize flintlock rifle at port arms and an ammo belt was slung over one shoulder. He was winking, but it wasn’t merry. More warlock than pixie.
“Earth Liberation Front,” Frank said. “Your guy infiltrated an ELF cell?”
“A month ago, there was a cyber incursion at Turkey Point. They left this image behind on all the computer screens in the power plant, and it stayed there for a couple of days until Homeland’s tech guys managed to remove it.”
Frank was silent, eyes on the road ahead.
“I know what you’re thinking, Frank. No one advised you of this either. But how it happened, Nuclear Regulatory bounced it to me because they knew I was running an operation on ELF. I passed it up my chain. After that, like I said, it was their call who to alert.”
“Your agency is under our jurisdiction, the Bureau’s. I should’ve heard about this every step along the way.”
“I’m just telling you what happened.”
He considered it a moment. “Well, shit. I’m halfway out the door. I shouldn’t be pissed nobody copies me on these things.”
“But you’re pissed anyway.”
He looked at her and smiled. “Relatively pissed, yes. Six on the ten-point scale.”
Frank knew all about ELF. An arm of Earth First! ELF activists were arsonists mainly. They favored primitive explosive devices to burn down ritzy housing developments built on sensit
ive lands, and SUV dealerships that specialized in gas hogs. They staged attacks on animal-testing labs, spiking ancient redwoods to shut down logging operations.
All loose-knit, no central command. A mishmash of beliefs. Animal liberators, anticapitalists, green anarchists, deep ecologists, ecofeminists. The entire array of next-generation revolutionaries. Everyone doing his or her thing. Save the earth, fuck the exploiters, punish the land developers, stop urban sprawl.
Business leaders upset over their economic losses had pressured the Bureau for years and finally bullied it into lumping together ELF and Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front and a few others like them and promoting them to the top of the list, ranking their kind as the number one domestic terrorist threat.
Not the Aryan Nations or the Islamic Brothers, not the twenty-odd militias in Idaho and Michigan and Colorado, wingnuts armed to the earlobes with rocket launchers and assault weapons, targeting cops and judges and abortion doctors, just waiting their chance to bring the federal government crashing down.
No, ecowarriors were number one.
Pure silliness, as far as Sheffield was concerned. Sure, their dollar totals were up in the 40 million range, mostly from burning down those posh resorts in Aspen and trashing cosmetics-testing plants, but they’d never killed anyone and seemed to be trying their best to keep it that way. They were a bunch of idealistic merry pranksters. A ragtag assortment of dope smokers with a badass green streak. Most of the few hundred criminal acts attributed to them were so minor league, it was a stretch to call them criminal at all. He kept it to himself, but Frank could even work up a mild sympathy for their cause. He wasn’t a big fan of urban sprawl.
“Apparently,” McIvey said, “whoever hacked the plant’s system wasn’t trying to crash the reactors or cause a meltdown or anything catastrophic. Besides leaving this screen saver behind, looks like their mission was exploratory, testing the plant’s cyber defenses. A probe of some kind, digital snooping. Possibly to identify vulnerabilities, what they call ‘susceptible nodes.’ Like this might be stage one, a warm-up for the main event. Or it could be just a one-shot deal. Thumbing their nose. A head fake. Pretending interest in Turkey Point, but planning to strike somewhere else.”
She blew through the tollbooth’s SunPass lane.
“You’re running a covert operation in my backyard. Withholding information about a security breach at the largest nuclear facility in Florida. In case you didn’t know, our South Florida Field Office has a cybersecurity task force, a WMD task force, we cover all those bases. Our guys are the best.”
“You want the truth, my opinion, it’s politics. People above me kept everyone in the dark so NIPC can score a takedown. Justify our existence.”
National Infrastructure Protection Center, that was her agency. Frank had watched it all mushroom since the Twin Towers were hit, an explosion of federal programs under the aegis of Homeland Security. NIPC identified and analyzed threats and vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Electrical grids, bridges, roads, water systems, highways, railways, navigable waterways, airports, the Internet and phone systems. Anything that moved people or power or goods and services or information. The grid police.
Huge mandate that overlapped with about five other existing agencies, including work the FBI had been doing for most of Frank’s career. All that growth was supposed to improve interagency communication, but what it did was make the turf wars even more bitter than pre-9/11. Another reason he’d decided to pull the rip cord, float back to a life of full-time Hawaiian shirts.
“So here’s the deal, Frank. The computer network at Turkey Point is a closed loop. Critical areas are wired internally, but not exposed to the Internet. So a cyber attack has to be launched inside the plant using one of the on-site computers. Insert a flash drive or download malicious code. It has to come from inside the loop. But then you probably know all this.”
“Refresher course is fine. I like listening to you talk.”
She gave him a quick don’t go there look and got back to driving.
Sheffield debated it. Confess now, lay his cards faceup, or keep holding out. For her part, Nicole had been concealing several major investigations, which gave Sheffield the moral high ground. If he was going to drop his own bomb, this was the moment.
But McIvey floored the Taurus and blasted by another slow mover, rocking Sheffield back in his seat, and the moment passed.
NINE
“SO, AFTER THE BREACH,” MCIVEY said, “Homeland was all over it. Their techies traced the entry to a workstation in the biology lab where the croc research is based. Appears somebody spent a few hours on that computer, planting the ELF logo, poking around. This desk sits idle most of the day while the biologists are out on airboats checking on the nests or whatever the hell they do. Only two people had access to that computer. One of those was killed in a recent crocodile attack. And the other is Cameron Prince.”
“I read the papers,” Frank said. “Prince took over for Leslie Levine.”
“The croc program, it’s public relations window dressing, the power company trying to spruce up its image, look like a good environmental citizen.
“They provide the biologists an airboat and a free pass to cruise the hundred and sixty miles of cooling canals on the edge of Biscayne Bay. The berms bordering the canals, that’s where the crocs nest. So Levine dies, Prince inherits the gig. In his airboat, coming and going as he pleases. Convenient access to the plant.”
“And that made you suspicious of Levine’s death.”
“It did.”
“Be awful hard to stage a croc attack.”
“Well, I raised concerns with the Metro homicide detective handling the case. Marcy Killibrew. You know her?”
“Met her. Can’t say I know her.”
“She showed me a video of the incident. It’s chaotic, hard to watch, but it seems to confirm Prince’s story.”
“I’m still stuck on the cyber attack.”
“Attack isn’t the right word. Probe, snoop.”
“Okay, probe. From inside the plant.”
“Well, after Homeland identified the entry point, the plant’s security team took over the on-site investigation with assistance from NIPC. We interviewed everyone with access to the biology lab. Did background searches, checking for any associations with ELF or other radical groups. Nothing popped.”
“You polygraphed them?”
“Yeah, Prince passed. He looks legit. Has a master’s in biology, virtually the same credentials as Levine. He’s from old Miami money, fallen on hard times. Not overtly political, no agitator. Gives educational speeches about his croc work to schoolkids and Rotary Clubs. But he didn’t feel right, so I devoted time to this guy, and one day last month, I got a hit.”
Sheffield tensed as Nicole blasted by a heavyset couple astraddle a Harley.
“Turns out Prince has people in and out of his house in the Grove. He’s a bodybuilder, got a home gym, charges a fee, supplementing his income. People work out, leave a few hours later, muscles all pumped. Nice glow in their cheeks. Cheaper than a gym membership and they get to rub shoulders with a second runner-up for Mr. Florida.
“So a month ago, two gentlemen turn up at his place. These guys definitely weren’t weight lifters. Their photos wind up on my desk, and I recognize them immediately, the Chee brothers, Pauly and Wally. A couple of Navajos from New Mexico. Pauly was in the navy, based in California.
“These days he’s a full-time ELF. His younger brother, Wally, is a high school dropout, computer programmer also with hard-core green credentials. From what we can tell, he’s become a highly proficient SCADA hacker. You familiar with SCADA?”
“Something about railroads?”
“That’s one thing, yeah. Stands for ‘supervisory control and data acquisition.’ The industrial-control computer network, adjusts railway tracks, manages oil pipelines, steers sewage into the water-treatment plants. You name it, if it has to do with infrastructure, SCADA systems run
their computers.”
Sheffield was silent, staring at her profile.
“Okay, so Wally and Pauly walk into Prince’s Grove house and stay overnight. Next morning all three slip out, drive down to a public boat ramp in South Dade, a boat picks them up, takes them out to an island in Biscayne Bay. They’ve been playing patty-cake out there ever since. Prince Key, it’s five miles east of the plant. Pry the branches apart, you’ve got a nice view of the cooling towers.”
“So you were surveilling Prince. Doing all this under my nose.”
“I told you it wasn’t my call. Don’t get huffy.”
“‘Huffy’ isn’t on my playlist. ‘Ticked off,’ yeah, that’s a tune I know.”
“We’re watching Prince. We’re doing it by the book. Point is, Prince is in the thick of this. Talking up the marvels of nuclear power by night, hanging with antinuke warriors the next. The guy’s a full-fledged eco-wacko.”
“Wacko?”
“Absolutely.”
“Tell me something, McIvey. You a climate-change denier?”
She drew a breath and slowed for an exit off the turnpike. “What is it, Frank? Living at the beach surrounded by the great outdoors, you’ve turned into a tree hugger?”
“I do like trees. I admit it. Always have.”
“I’m not a denier. The science is there. It’s solid.”
“Next question. Since it’s true, polar ice melting, ocean turning acid, bigger, badder storms, you think there’s anything more important on the horizon for planet Earth than total obliteration?”
“Okay, okay, we’re all doomed, the end is near.”
“You sit in the same meetings I do, McIvey, read the NASA updates, Department of Energy, Weather Service. The goddamn US army has contingencies for climate-change scenarios. Those guys don’t waste time on fantasies. This shit is happening. The tsunami’s out there, rolling our way.”
“Let it out, Frank. Ventilate.” Smiling at him.
“I get worked up, yeah, but this is real and we go on our merry way. SUVs getting bigger, drilling a little deeper for the same old oil.”
Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) Page 6