Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “When you have your facts come back and talk to me,” he’d told her.

  He was tall, dark, and slender, handsome, almost beautiful, but she’d always thought he looked and acted like a toad.

  “And since there’s nothing for you to do at Hutchinson Island — leastways until it’s back up and running — finding the facts is your new assignment. Your only assignment.”

  And now she was downstairs in the data center adjacent to operations with Eric Yablonski, a man who, if complete opposites actually existed, was Curtley’s counterpoint. Short, dumpy, homely, only a whisper of fine gray hair on his pink head, he was the kindest, nicest, and brightest man she’d ever met, with an open, generous heart, an easy laugh, and a sarcasm that had never fooled anyone — not her, not his staff, and especially not his wife and eight doting children.

  “Curtley didn’t want to hear what you had to say so he kicked you out and sent you down here,” he said. “What makes you think that I’m any different?”

  His office was separated from the main floor of the data center by a plate-glass window to the right, which in turn was separated from operations, which was called the Watch — the same as at the CIA — to the left by another large window. Four computer experts in the data center compiled and analyzed the real-time information gathered by five specialists in the Watch 24/7. It was all about threat assessments, what was coming at the U.S. right now, or what was developing somewhere — perhaps an intercepted telephone call or calls shunted over from the National Security Agency, or satellite images from the National Reconnaissance Office showing increased activity at some camp on the Syrian desert, or perhaps a field report from a CIA agent somewhere in the Middle East, Russia, or just lately South America.

  “ Veni, vidi, vici, ” Yablonski had once said, gazing out the windows at what he considered was his private domain, because everything flowing from the Watch to the data center was his to ponder, to rearrange, to fit into patterns that no one else was seeing, and translate the patterns into real-world events. His job was to penetrate the haze to find what was happening and why.

  Only he and everyone else had missed Hutchinson Island, and he’d been beating himself up about it all night, so that now he looked like a train wreck in progress, his tie askew, his dress shirt rumpled, and his jacket dropped in a heap on top of one of the lockboxes.

  “I never saw it coming, but I should have,” Gail said, sitting down across from his desk that was dominated by a pair of wide-screen monitors.

  “If it’s any consolation, neither did I, sweetheart,” Yablonski said, and his face fell a little. “I’m sorry as hell about Larry. I didn’t know him, personally, but if he was a good enough man to work with you down there then he must have been first class.”

  “Thanks, but the entire control room crew was killed and one of Gruen’s people was taken out too, along with Kirk McGarvey’s partner. It was a screwup from the moment it started, and I was the administration’s hotshot who was supposed to make sure shit like that never went down.”

  Yablonski gave her a hard, critical stare then nodded. “Yup, you did screw up, but that particular scenario wasn’t in your playbook.”

  “It should have been.”

  “So you’re taking all the blame, is that it? Instead of analyzing what you let happen, how to guard against it ever happening again, and finding out who did this to us and why, so I can chase down some leads and find out how I screwed up, you’re going to wallow in self-pity?”

  She looked away. “Shit,” she said. Mac had said almost the same thing to her, and just as bluntly. And he had handed her a lifeline, which she had temporarily blocked out of her head. She turned back and actually managed a slight smile. “But that was a nice speech.”

  “I worked on it all morning, soon as I found out you guys were on the way up.”

  Gail took the disk out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him. “This is what we recorded from one of our video cams at the visitors center’s parking lot.” She came around behind his desk so she could watch the video.

  “Do we maybe have a suspect?” Yablonski asked, bringing the disk up on one of his monitors. It was nighttime and the parking lot was empty.

  She explained about the man on the tour she’d seen at the control-room observation window. “A few minutes later one of my security people called and said a man showed up back at the visitors center, claimed he was sick and drove off. A little bit after twelve.”

  “Same guy who caught your attention?” Yablonski asked, fast-forwarding the video.

  “I didn’t know it at the time, but I had my suspicions, so I talked to the people at the visitors center who checked him in under the name Robert Benson, a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Same description. He’d told them earlier that after the tour he had an appointment up in Jacksonville. But when he left, he headed south. The wrong way.”

  Yablonski had gotten to the section of the recording that showed a man walking across the parking lot to a blue Ford Taurus. “That him?”

  “Yes. Can you get the tag number?”

  Yablonski paused the disk and magnified the image, centering on the license plate. “Florida, Dade County, Z12 5LS.” They watched as the man got into the car, pulled out of the parking lot, and turned to the south on A1A.

  “Didn’t look sick to me,” Gail said.

  “Or guilty,” Yablonski said. He pulled up a search program, got into Florida’s Division of Motor Vehicles for Dade County and brought up the tag number. “Hertz, Miami International,” he said. Next, he hacked into the Hertz computer system. “Okay, rented yesterday morning to Robert Benson, San Francisco. Your guy.”

  “Has the car been turned in yet?”

  “Two thirty yesterday afternoon.”

  “Shit,” Gail said. “It’s not likely he left any forensic evidence for us.”

  “Probably not. Anyway the car went out this morning on a one-week rental,” Yablonski said. “But we’re not done yet.” He pulled up San Francisco’s Motor Vehicle Department, and brought up Robert Benson’s driver’s license, which included an address, a thumbprint, height, weight, and a photograph.

  “That’s not him,” Gail said. “So what the hell happened to the real Benson?” But she knew damn well what had happened to the man, who in all likelihood was lying dead in a field somewhere, or maybe at the bottom of the bay. “Check the city police files.”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job, dear girl,” Yablonski said, already headed in that direction. But they came up blank. Next he hacked into the school district’s mainframe, bringing up Benson’s file. “He’s on vacation, not due back until the fifth.”

  “He’s never coming back,” Gail said. “The son of a bitch killed him.”

  Yablonski looked up at her. “I’ll go along with that assumption for the moment. But why him, why that particular man?”

  “He had a timetable, so he went looking for someone about the same height and weight, and killed him for his identity.”

  “That’s a stretch even for a cop. I mean how the hell does he pick out the one poor sap in the entire country who he’s going to pose as?” Yablonski shook his head. “Either your guy is brilliant or he knows something we don’t. And by now he’s long gone, certainly not back to California.”

  “Australia or maybe South Africa,” Gail said. “The clerk at the visitors center said he spoke with an English accent — but she didn’t think it sounded like he was a Brit.”

  Yablonski glanced toward the plate-glass window, and picked up his phone. “It’s okay, let him in.”

  Gail turned as McGarvey said something to one of the clerks, then came across the data center, and walked in. He nodded to Gail.

  “Mr. McGarvey, I presume,” Yablonski said. “Good job at Hutchinson Island.”

  “Not good enough,” McGarvey said. “My friends call me Mac.”

  “Mine call me Eric,” Yablonski said and he rose to shake McGarvey’s hand. “Let me guess, French assigned you to fi
nd the terrorists, you asked to have Gail help, and he tossed me in to the bargain.”

  “Do you know Otto Rencke?”

  Yablonski grinned. “Never met the man, but everybody in my business knows him or knows of him, and we’re all in a bit of awe.”

  McGarvey nodded. “He can be a little scary sometimes. I’m going to ask him to give us a hand, and if you’ll agree, I’d like you to work with him.”

  “Absolutely,” Yablonski said without hesitation.

  Gail explained what they had come up with so far, tracing the man on the video as far as San Francisco, where they’d run into a dead end.

  “Not quite,” McGarvey said. “At least you’ve established that he had taken someone else’s identity. Makes him our prime suspect, along with Forcier.”

  “But why San Francisco?” Yablonski asked. “Why not Denver, or Chicago, or Indianapolis. According to Gail the people who talked to him said he had an English accent, maybe Australian. So why not Sydney or Melbourne?”

  “When we find him, I’ll ask. Do we have any images of his face?”

  “Not on this disk,” Yablonski said. “But he took a tour inside the plant, at least as far as the control room observation corridor. He’ll be on some of those disks.”

  “If the radiation hasn’t fried them and if we can get in to retrieve them,” Gail said. “But I got a pretty good look at his face so I can give a description to a police artist. Maybe we’ll get lucky.

  “What about Forcier? Was he scheduled to be on duty?”

  “No, but he had the proper ID card to get inside. It’s likely he met our Aussie and let him in.”

  “Could this guy have gotten a weapon or the Semtex past security in the visitors center?” McGarvey asked.

  “Not a chance,” Gail said. “But Forcier could have brought the stuff in. Nobody checks the employees. We run a pretty vigorous background check on our people before we offer them a job. I don’t remember Forcier specifically, but he was fully vetted for work in the control room, which meant his background investigation had to have been rock solid.”

  “Obviously somebody missed something, so keep trying with the Australian and Forcier. In the meantime I’ll get Otto started, and then take a run out to San Francisco, see what I can dig up.”

  “Do you want me to tag along?” Gail asked.

  “No. For now just stick it out here,” he told her. “I’ll have Otto call you and you can pool resources. But my guess is that this guy isn’t Australian; you might try South African ex-special forces or the SASS, their secret service.”

  Yablonski’s phone rang and he picked it up, but the call was for McGarvey. “Dr. Larsen.”

  “You’re a hard man to track down,” Eve said when McGarvey got on.

  “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” McGarvey said. “You took a tumble yesterday, are you okay?”

  “Just fine,” she said dismissively. “I’m here in Washington, and I’d like to buy you lunch if you’re free.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “This is important, at least to me it is. The Watergate at noon? Then I won’t bother you again.”

  McGarvey glanced at his watch. It was just past 11:30 A.M. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”

  “Good.”

  “NOAA’s Doctor Larsen from Hutchinson Island?” Gail asked when McGarvey hung up.

  “Yes. She wants to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” McGarvey said, and he missed the quick expression of anger on Gail’s face.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  McGarvey had no real idea why he had agreed to meet Eve Larsen for lunch except for the fact she’d been at Hutchinson Island yesterday, right in the middle of the attack, and he’d never trusted coincidences.

  Last year she’d been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Physics, her picture on the cover of Time : RADICAL DOC TOO RADICAL FOR STOCKHOLM? She hadn’t gotten the prize, which was probably a good thing. People who blew up nuclear energy plants might not hesitate to kill the high priestess of alternative energy.

  Dressed in a charcoal gray pantsuit with flaring legs, and a plain white blouse that practically fluoresced against her deep tan, she was seated at the half-filled bar in the Watergate Hotel, sipping a martini.

  She was absorbed with something on the television screen behind the bar and didn’t notice McGarvey until he sat down next to her, and when she looked at him she smiled warmly, though he could see that she was worried, or at the very least had something she considered to be very important on her mind.

  “Hi,” McGarvey said.

  “Have you seen that?” she motioned toward the television that was tuned to CSPN, a stern-faced woman announcer reporting on something apparently grave. The sound was off, but her words appeared as a crawl at the bottom of the screen. A high-ranking U.S. embassy employee and her driver and bodyguard had been assassinated on the airport highway in Caracas, Venezuela.

  An incident like that was bound to happen down there sooner or later, but something about the photograph of the woman, which flashed on the screen, was familiar to McGarvey and when her name came up on the crawl he realized that he knew her.

  Eve was looking at him. “Did you know her?”

  “I’m not sure. It was several years ago.”

  “You were with the CIA?” Eve asked. She glanced up at the television, but the announcer was back to reporting on the Hutchinson Island meltdown, which had dominated every newscast since yesterday.

  “Yes, but you called me. What can I do for you?”

  “Did she work for the CIA?”

  McGarvey had to remind himself that he was dealing with a woman a lot smarter than the average scientist, and by her attitude now and her questions, a lot more aware of her surroundings outside the lab. “Even if I knew that, which I don’t, I couldn’t tell you. But if she was working for the Company the media will out her sooner or later.”

  “Because if she was a CIA officer, don’t you see a coincidence with what happened at Hutchinson Island?”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  Eve shrugged, and glanced up at the aerial view of the power plant on the screen. “Anything else going on in the world? You were the director of the Agency, if anyone would know something like that it would be you, right?”

  “Not much just now.”

  “Well, nothing’s been on CNN in the past twenty-four hours except for the attack on Hutchinson Island, and now this assassination, which was supposedly carried out by something called the Earth Liberation Front. They want to topple the Chávez government so that they can use the oil revenues to fight for a clean environment. They want to put themselves out of business by squeezing the price of oil so sharply they’ll make it impossible to keep using it for gasoline.”

  “Where’s the connection?”

  “I know about these people, and a thousand other groups like theirs. They’re the ones who want people like me to succeed. They not only want to shut down our consumption of oil, for any purpose, they want to stop the use of coal, reduce our carbon emissions all the way back to preindustrial days.”

  “Hutchinson Island isn’t clean enough for them?

  “A nuclear plant emits more heat into the atmosphere than just about any other type of power plant. They might consider that just as big a threat to the environment as carbon dioxide.”

  “That’s a stretch, isn’t it?” McGarvey asked, though he wasn’t so sure. And it depended on what Lorraine Fritch was doing in Caracas.

  Eve was thoughtful. “Maybe,” she said. “But I don’t like coincidences and I’m especially suspicious of hidden connections. Hidden motives.”

  McGarvey smiled. “You’d make a good detective.”

  She returned his smile. “I’ll take that as a compliment, but being a scientist is just about the same thing.”

  “I’ll look into it,” he promised her. “But you said you wanted to talk about something that was important to you. Was that it?”<
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  “Related,” she said, even more thoughtful than a moment ago. Worried? McGarvey wondered. “What usually happens when someone or some group goes on the attack?”

  “Someone fights back.”

  “Right,” Eve said. “And who would have the most to lose by closing down, or at least restricting, Venezuelan oil production?”

  She was leading him, but McGarvey didn’t care because he knew where she was going, and why she might be at least concerned for her own safety. “The other oil producers.”

  “And who would have the most to gain by making the public believe nuclear energy was so unsafe we might as well shut them down.”

  “Big oil.”

  “And then there’s my little project. Tapping the sea for energy, so we can get rid of nukes, as well as coal, oil, and gas-fired plants.”

  “Something every energy producer would want to fight,” McGarvey said. “They’re all against you.”

  “Now that the evil genie is out of the bottle — now that they’ve struck in Venezuela and Florida — maybe the war has begun in earnest, and I might be next.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “You must still have connections over at the CIA. Maybe you can find out if something is coming my way.”

  “I’m working the Hutchinson Island attack, but I’ll see what I can find,” McGarvey said. “No promises.”

  “None expected,” Eve told him. “But I have a hunch something’s just around the corner. And I always like to follow up on my hunches.”