I really hadn’t wanted to bring Moira along, but even she recognized that if the Bureau was going to pick me up again, they’d sure as hell pick her up as well. I’d driven to Southport as fast as I could without sucking up a speeding ticket and explained what was going on to my two guys. It was Tony who’d suggested Trask’s boat as a hiding place, at least initially. Pardee had taken my Suburban over to the local Wal-Mart parking lot, parked it, and walked back to the beach house. If the FBI showed up, their story would be that Moira and I went out somewhere and they hadn’t a clue as to where we’d gone after that. That would hold up for a day, at most, but by then we’d be across the river with at least some freedom of movement. Tony and I had traded cell phones just to confuse any existing eavesdropping triangulation systems.
I sat down in a recliner next to the couch and started to explain to Moira why I’d decided to run, at least until Ari Quartermain got to the bottom of this mysterious videotape.
“You don’t have to convince me,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Somebody parked at least one dot-exe file on my Web computer that refuses to scrub, so I figured your Gestapo still loves me.”
“You’ve seen that before?”
She nodded. “Just before they came the last time,” she said. “I had all the resources of the U’s computer lab, and, short of putting the computer in a swimming pool, I still couldn’t make it go away. That’s a federal intrusion, and probably from a National Security Agency super.”
“Can they track you physically if you go online, say, from here?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “If it’s wireless, say, a coffee shop or bookstore, the wi-fi network is registered to a physical place or place of business. If it’s via a cell phone, they can triangulate the towers. If it’s a dial-up, it’s moving over a domestic or business telephone number, all of which have a physical address.”
“Shit, when did all this happen?”
She smiled. “Despite Mr. Gore’s claims, the Internet was created by the Defense Department. They never create anything to which they don’t have supervisory access. That’s not to say it can’t be spoofed, and I can make it really hard. But we’re talking about putting a laptop up against a Cray supercomputer or ten. Bad odds, over time.”
I got up and went around to the portholes again, checking to see if anyone was coming toward or down our pier. But the marina remained asleep, so I dropped back down into the waiting arms of the recliner. Suddenly I was pretty tired and found myself trying to stifle a big yawn. That set Moira off, and then she sat up and patted the corner of the couch. I moved over as she made a pillow out of a car blanket draped across the back of the couch, lay down, and put her head in my lap.
“I just have one question, Mr. Ex-policeman.”
“Shoot.”
“If everybody thinks this Trask guy was murdered, won’t they come here? To where he lived? Won’t they want to search this boat, see if anything points to a motive or something?”
I stared down at her for a second. Of course they would. They’d rustle up a search warrant first thing in the morning and be here in force by nine or so. Shit.
“All of you ex-cops, and you didn’t think of that?” she asked in mock disbelief.
“Some of us ex-cops have had a long effing day,” I said grouchily, mostly because she was absolutely right. None of us had thought it through, and unless we were willing to steal this boat, we’d be seeing a herd of Buroids on deck with the morning sun. At this stage of the game, I was almost willing to just wait for them to show up. Almost.
The cell phone in my jacket pocket vibrated. It was Pardee. Tony hadn’t returned yet, but the beach house had had night visitors. He’d changed the story: Tony was out on the town with Moira, and I was, to the best of his knowledge, still at the power plant. They’d asked to look around, and he’d told them to come back with a warrant, which they promised they would, and when they did, et cetera, et cetera.
“But here’s the thing,” he began.
“I know-we’ve already figured that out.”
“Yeah-okay. Which is why I’ve turned Tony around.”
Then I heard the tramp of footsteps out on the main pier. It sounded like they were coming our way.
“Turn him around again, Pardee,” I said wearily. “I think we’re busted.”
Actually, we weren’t. The footsteps turned out to be two severely inebriated yachtsmen who were trying to goose-step down the pier to their boat. I watched the two clowns make it to their gangway, where they sat down and promptly had another nip.
Too early the next morning I took the mutts down the pier to a grassy area in front of the marina office to let them make their morning insults. I left them out on deck when I got back. Thirty minutes later, I thought I heard them walking around aft as if they were interested in something back there. I went to the portholes, but it was still misty dark outside except for the lights coming from the marina parking lot. None of the nearby boats was showing any lights, and the marina office was still dark. One of the dogs scratched pitifully on the back door, so I relented and went back to bring them in from the cold.
When I opened the door, I discovered both shepherds totally immobilized in what looked like black nylon fishnets, and two space aliens dressed all in black pointing stubby assault rifles at my face. There seemed to be six more climbing over the boat’s transom as I stood there like a complete idiot.
I had to admit: They were good. Really good. They’d managed to get alongside the boat without alerting the shepherds, immobilize them without a sound, and board the Keeper without either of us feeling or hearing anything. The leader of the squad motioned for me to back up into the narrow companionway between the galley and the vestibule leading down into the engine compartment. His face was entirely concealed by a tactical SWAT mask, but the muzzle of his weapon was in plain view and unwavering. Three of them squeezed by the leader with the muffled sounds of body armor, and then I heard a little squeak from Moira in the main lounge. A minute later, Moira and I were sitting on the couch, our hands in our laps bound by plastic handcuffs looped through our belts, and the room was filling up with men in black.
They spread out, quietly but efficiently, throughout the boat, making sure there wasn’t anyone else on board. Within about a minute, the entire crew was back in the main lounge. There were none of the usual “Clear!” reports being shouted from room to room. Instead I heard a muttering sound among the group, which was when I realized they were networked on a tactical headset radio circuit. This was not your garden-variety SWAT team. They were big, and their body armor made them look huge. One of them found Moira’s cell phone. He picked it up, scanned the screen, and then extracted the battery and the SIM card. Then he crunched the plastic carcass in his gloved hand and dropped the plastic bits into a trashcan by the desk.
One of the group handed his weapon to another man and stepped forward. He took his face mask off with a faint hiss of air. It was the Marine major from our erstwhile federal day-care center, and he did not look happy.
“What did you do to my dogs?” I asked.
“They’re safer in the nets than running around,” he said. “This way we don’t have to kill them. Like they killed one of my dogs.”
“I apologize for that,” I said. “He was doing his job, but so were mine.”
“Your ‘job’ was to sit tight. I want to know how you got loose in the first place.”
I wasn’t going to tell him anything, but then Moira spoke up. “ I got us loose, Major Fuckface,” she spat. “Your so-called electronic security was a joke.”
“And I suppose you started that fire?”
“Damned straight,” she said before I could deny everything. “I hope the whole goddamned place burned down.”
“Got your wish, sweetheart,” he said. “Now we’re going to get mine. Someone wants to see you.”
He snapped his fingers, and two of his masked brutes came forward. One hauled Moira to her feet by her cuffed wrists w
hile the other pulled a black mesh body stocking over her head from the back in one smooth motion. He stretched it down to her waist, where the first man let go of her cuffs long enough for his buddy to pull the stocking all the way down to her ankles. The fabric completely encased her body. She tried to struggle, but the first guy was holding what looked like a compact hair dryer, which was already plugged into a wall receptacle. He turned it on and blew hot air all over Moira, and, to my amazement, the loose folds of fabric shrank her into a tight black nylon mummy with only her terrified eyes and nose showing. Two more men stepped forward and picked her up by her armpits and ankles and carried her toward the back of the boat and out the back door. Another one had her computers under his arms. I caught one last glimpse of her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was scared or really angry.
I was too surprised to offer any opposition, and my brain was telling me to sit very still. The major laughed.
“Surprised?” he said.
“You came for her?”
“You bet your interfering ass,” he said. “You have no idea who you’ve been consorting with, Lieutenant Richter, but suffice it to say, she is most definitely part of the problem and not the solution.”
This time he knew my name, and my surprise must have shown. He pulled his face mask to his mouth and said something. The room began to clear itself of black-clad soldiers. The last one to leave leaned over and slapped a black hood over my head and cinched it down around my neck with a cord.
“You gen-pop civilians don’t have a clue,” the major said. “You think that woman’s some sort of civil libertarian, fucking around out there on the Web, making some kind of statement.” I could feel him leaning closer, smell the chemical scent coming off the body armor.
“There’s a war on, asshole,” he snarled. “Right now it’s being fought over there. People like her want to bring it over here. They want to see school buses blown over by IEDs. They want to see the jihadis get a nuke into Washington, or take down the national electric grid and put us all back to the eighteen-hundreds. Moira Maxwell is all too typical of the new and improved, college-overeducated, peace-now, antiwar, anti-male, anti-authority Movement, and that’s Movement with a capital M. They spell America with a k, and for reasons nobody can fathom, they hate this country and all it stands for.”
“Well, hell, then, why don’t you guys just pop her?”
“Would if I could, asshole, but someone wants to see her. But here’s for the pleasure of knowing you.”
With that he slapped my face through the hood hard enough to make stars dance behind my eyes.
“Don’t move for ten minutes,” he said. “During that time, you think about who and what you’re messing with. Next time you come up on our screens, we’ll put a horse syringe through your eye and suck out your brain, assuming there’s one in here. Didn’t much feel like it, just now.”
I heard the back door to the lounge click shut a few seconds later, but that was the only thing I heard over the ringing in my left ear. I sat back, still trying to get my mental arms around the situation. When they’d come through the back door, I’d just assumed that Creeps had sent a team over to pick us up while we slept the sleep of the innocent, trusting that we were somehow going to be able to talk our way out of this mess. Now, I didn’t think those guys were part of my Bureau or anyone else’s Bureau.
What. The. Fuck. Over? And who wanted to see her?
I started working on getting that hood off my head. It took several minutes of grunting and thrashing, but I finally managed. Then I looked at the cuffs. A Mickey Mouse icon was looking back at me. They were toy cuffs. I pulled my wrists apart, hard, and the cuffs popped across the room. One final note of deep and abiding respect from my good buddy, the major. I got up and went aft to the porch deck to see about the dogs.
They were still wrapped tight and unconscious. I went to the galley, got a knife, and cut them out of that webbing. Then I carried each one into the warmth of the lounge and laid them out on the carpet. Frick’s hind legs began to quiver, but it was another fifteen minutes before they woke up. I found one tiny plastic dart entangled in the web on Frack, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. I wondered where Trask kept his Scotch. Coffee no longer seemed sufficient. I sat back down, called the guys at the beach house, and filled them in on what had happened.
“Who we messin’ with here, boss?” Tony said.
“Bad motherfuckers,” I replied. “And I still have Creeps to deal with.”
“Sounds like we country boys are way out of our league,” Pardee said. He left the obvious corollary to that observation unspoken.
I was getting just a little bit tired of that line. If I was going to stay with this hairball, though, I’d need their help. I still wanted to know why Allie had died. Pardee, attentive to the sudden silence on the line, solved it for me.
“Okay, okay, what do you need us to do?”
“Come over here around 10:00 A.M.,” I said. “Come by car. I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
That evening, Tony nosed our boat alongside the cargo wharf at Helios, where Ari Quartermain was waiting with two security officers and a Helios security office SUV. Tony and Pardee, along with Ari’s officers, stayed behind at the wharf while Ari and I got into the SUV and went for a drive onto one of the marsh roads.
The lights of the power plant formed a blazing sodium vapor barrier behind us, while across the river we could see the tops of container ships and the towering gantry cranes that serviced them. Ari pulled up on one of the cattail points that formed a bend in the cooling water canal and shut it down.
“We going all the way tonight, or is this just gonna be more foreplay?” I asked.
He chuckled and shook his head. “Scotch in the glove box,” he said. “Sorry for the paper cups. Why’d you come by boat?”
“I wanted to come in the back door,” I said. “You never know what the Bureau’s been telling the front gate security people.”
We got settled, and then he told me all about his wonderful day at work, which had gone pretty much as I had imagined it would.
“My moonpool is acting up.”
“Acting up? Do I want to hear this?”
“Some of the water from this canal goes into the cooling system for the moonpool,” he said. “Heat exchangers, to be precise. Not to be confused with makeup water, which is purified and comes from the county water system. This is a circulation system: moonpool water on one side, canal water on the other.”
“I believe.”
“Right. Only my heat exchangers are now clogged with something nasty, courtesy of this latest incident.” He looked over at me with weary eyes. “The spent fuel stack wants its cooling water, and wants it now. Left to its own devices, it tries to become a reactor again.”
“And that’s not good.”
“Not good at all. Plus, I’ve got this bureaucratic war going on between something like ten different agencies and a circling swarm of PrimEnergy lawyers. I’m tempted to gather them all into that building and drain the pool. Let them see what an atomic steam explosion looks like.”
I grinned in the darkness, despite the seriousness of the problem and the dizzying array of federal alphabets. “Make sure you get all the lawyers in there,” I said. “Where’s the body?”
“In a double body bag, inside a dry-storage cask parked in the moonpool building. That’s become an issue, too.”
“How so?”
“At least two federal entities are demanding an autopsy. I’ve told them the keys to the cask are available to anyone who’s brave enough to open it and who’s had all the children he wants to have. No takers so far.”
“Still think it’s Trask?”
He shrugged. “If we could figure out a way to clean the heat exchangers, we might recover some skin, but that’s going to be an enormously complex operation, by which time I wouldn’t think anything would be left. It’s a technically unprecedented situation, so NRC-approved safety procedures would h
ave to be drawn up, staffed in Washington, approved, blah, blah, blah.”
“And in the meantime, the fuel stack is getting indigestion?”
“The worst thing that can happen in a moonpool is for all the cooling water to leak out and expose the fuel stack to the atmosphere. You get hydrogen and then a fire, which is not a comforting combination. So we have this system to reflood the pool if for some reason the basic containment fails. We can use that if we have to as a backup cooling system until we get the heat exchangers sorted out.”
I told him about our run for the roses last night, that Moira had been picked up again, and that I thought Trask might have been behind all the problems at the plant.
“Carl Trask a terrorist?”
“ Colonel Carl Trask creating an ‘incident’ in order to reawaken America to the clear and present danger,” I said. “From this ex-cop’s point of view, he had motive, means, and opportunities galore.”
Ari let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “I guess it’s possible. But then what happened? How’d he end up in the moonpool?”
“Apparently, we might never find that out,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to focus on Allie Gardner. She was either a random victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or somehow she’s part of the mystery here. That’s why I wanted to meet tonight. I’m going to need your help with this, while at the same time, I don’t think I can help you anymore.”
“Because you promised the Bureau guys?”
“They’re right, you know. They need to run their investigation without outside interference, especially if they’re squabbling with other government agencies.”
He nodded. “Okay. That reads. What do you need from me?”
“I need to inspect your visitor logs-in detail-and it might be better for me to do that now, at night, with fewer people around in the admin offices.”
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