“See this?” he said, pointing to what looked like the top of a soup can buried in the concrete. “See how all these cans are stacked exactly the same way? This is a reader. Each can has a transmitter tag, which identifies the container by number, source, and destination. Every stack has a reader, and every reader is networked to a control room at the head of the yard.”
He stood up and pointed to the lowest container’s double doors, where there was a lead seal and what looked like a padlock on each of the three operating rods. Upon closer examination, I could see that the locks, too, were actually electronic devices of some kind.
“Break the seal and open any door out here, that smart-tag there tells on you and sets off a strobe light on the top of the nearest light pole. Unless of course, someone in the control room disables that reader at a specified time.”
“Can someone open the box from the inside?”
“Actually, yes. After they had a couple of incidents of illegals suffocating in containers, they modified all the cans so that if you get locked in, you can pull the latch plates off from the inside and bust the doors. Still be an alarm, though.”
“Seems pretty damned secure.”
“It is.”
“So all that stuff about you and Trask moving illegals out of here? That was all bullshit?”
“Nope,” he said. Then he waited for us to get the picture.
“You’re saying that’s all being done under government supervision?” Pardee asked.
“Yep,” Houston said.
“What the fuck?” I said.
“Well, here’s the theory, as it was explained to us snuffies who work the port: Homeland Security decided that it would be better to know who was moving through this port in the way of aliens, especially skilled people, than to play cops and robbers and never know what or who they might have missed.”
“That’s a lot like saying the government is selling cocaine so that they’ll have good statistics on the drug market.”
“Well,” Houston countered, “you seeing any big progress on the control of illegal immigration into this country? You seeing bills getting through Congress?”
We all knew the answer to that.
“You’re not seeing that,” he continued, “because the major corporations who own the politicians don’t want effective immigration control. Same deal for national ID cards. Why in the hell are we stuck with a Social Security card for identification that ties in with every aspect of our personal finances? Stupid-or intentional?”
“I hear you,” I said, not wanting to get into it with yet another politically frustrated citizen.
“I can’t prove all that, of course, but there would have to be some pretty high-priced top cover for this kind of program, don’t you think?”
I thought back to what Ari had said about foreigners at the power plant, and wondered if that was just another manifestation of what was going on there. This was the second eye-opener I’d collided with here in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. The first had been a military-operated civilian detention center. Houston must have read my mind.
“There’s a war on, Lieutenant,” he said. “J. Q. Public seems to forget that. And there are two fronts: one overseas, where regular soldiers are learning about street fighting from the jihadis. Then a second one here on our so-called borders, where the umpteenth guy in one of these shipments through here or any of the other ports might be a legitimate CAD-CAM wizard. Or he might be the final member of a cell that’s been building for five years, the one guy who can actually wire up the satchel nuke. By becoming part of the pipeline, we get a look.”
“And they only have to get lucky once,” I said. “We have to be lucky every damned time.”
He nodded.
“So what happened the other night, when that container erupted with stowaways?”
“Somebody fucked up,” he said promptly. “It’s a government program, remember?”
I smiled. “Why are you telling us this?” I asked.
“Two reasons,” he said, again looking around. “One, word’s out among the working cops here on the waterfront that you won’t take go-away for an answer. I figured you might as well know what you’re poking your nose into.”
“And two?”
“Two: I want something. What’s happened to Trask? Jungle drums are saying nobody can raise him.”
“Your boss checked with the Bureau?” Pardee asked, giving me a warning look over Houston’s head.
“Bureau doesn’t share for shit. They’re not part of Homeland Security, as I’m sure you guys remember.”
I thought about it for a moment. Why not tell him? Why wouldn’t the Bureau want that information to get loose? I told him what little we knew, or at least surmised, and he whistled in surprise.
“But there’s no positive ID?”
“Nope, and there may not ever be one. The fella who runs the marina where Trask keeps his boat told me he goes off into the night all the time, so maybe that’s what he’s done, and it’s somebody else who went dunking for neutrons.”
“But you don’t think so?”
I shook my head, remembering the shape of the body and that boot knife. “I think it’s Trask. His boss at Helios thinks it’s Trask.”
“He’s got a hidey-hole somewhere back in the jumble,” Houston said, “but he’s not there. I checked.”
A pair of headlights surprised us, coming around the adjacent stack. I hadn’t heard a vehicle, and neither had the dogs. Then I saw why: It was an electric golf cart that rolled up to where we were standing. The two men inside acknowledged Houston and then gave us a pointed once-over. The driver seemed to be especially interested in the dogs. They weren’t in uniform, per se, but they had the look of federal officers.
“They’re cool,” Houston told them. “Tell Hanson I’ve got word on the colonel. I’ll be on the air at the regular time.”
The driver nodded, and they went humming away into the night without having said a word. At least they had recognized Houston, scruffy clothes, long hair, and all. He looked at his watch. “We need to get back,” he said.
“You out there in that jungle all by yourself?”
“No, I’ve always got one backup. The kid with the face metal? They rotate people through the homeless network once a month or so. The real derelicts are clueless.”
We started back for the fence. “Any of those people ever cotton to who you really are?” Pardee asked.
“Occasionally,” Houston said, lifting the chain-link so we could get through. “But then I tell the colonel. He takes ’em somewhere in that steel jungle over there, and they don’t come back.”
“He’s killing people?”
“No, I don’t think so. There was one guy, a real whack-job, way off his meds, heard voices all the time. He started going on about spies, narcs, other wild shit, and aiming some of it at me because I kind of control the campfire. The colonel showed up one night, took him off for a little talk. We saw the guy again, maybe three days later, at the fire. Dude couldn’t speak a coherent word.”
“A suddenly mute schizophrenic-that would be a relief.”
“Scared-out-of-his-squirming-gourd mute,” Houston said. “Sat there, shaking like a leaf, and babbling about monsters and snakes out there in the container jungle. Freaked the rest of ’em out. Hell, it freaked me out. He wandered off after a coupl’a days, never saw his ass again. After that, somebody acts out, all I have to do is mention that I’m seeing the colonel that night, and all the regulars get big-eyed. Nobody fucks with me.”
“How long you been under?” I asked, as we re-entered the container tunnel.
“Going on two years,” he said.
“Damn! Hope you’re not married.”
“Not anymore,” he said. “But, looking on the bright side, there’s a ton of overtime.”
It was after midnight by the time we got back to the beach house. We sat out on the front porch having a beer and some leathery leftover pizza, kicking
around the next steps. I still wanted to focus on Allie: I needed to develop a detailed timeline of her visit to Wilmington. She’d made that single report back to the office the day after beginning her surveillance of the dallying lawyers. Got the goods, will be back tomorrow. But what was that personal business she’d gone to do? Who’d seen her? Who’d she talked to? How’d she end up at that convenience store? She hadn’t filed a report, and I actually hadn’t seen her videotape, which I now remembered I’d promised to share with the Bureau people. It might be in her car-maybe get ahold of that, see what it showed.
Tony amplified that idea. See how many miles she’d burned up on the trip. My people always set their odometers when they go out on assignment so they can log and then later write off the business mileage on their personal vehicles. See if there was any paperwork, bridge tolls, ferry tickets, hotel parking stubs, anything to indicate she’d left Wilmington. I said I’d call Bernie Price, find out what they’d done with her vehicle, which they’d supposedly recovered from the gas island at that convenience store.
“In other words, we need to do some scut work,” Tony observed.
“It’s what we do,” I said. “It’s usually what pays off, too. Any better ideas?”
No one had a better idea, so we went in. It was late, but I wasn’t ready for sleep yet. I got a jacket out of the closet, poured a glass of Scotch, and went back out to the front porch with the shepherds. It was cold and damp enough for fog, but there was just enough of a sea breeze coming in from the estuary to keep the fog at bay. All the neighboring houses were dark. Channel buoy lights blinked here and there out there in the light chop on the river, and a large container ship slid soundlessly across my view, bound for the Atlantic and away.
A Southport cop car came along on a slow roll through the neighborhood. It went past our rental, stopped, and then backed up. The shepherds got up to watch from the top of the steps. A fifty-something uniformed cop with an Irish face, a prominent belly, and sergeant’s stripes got out and put his cap on. He then walked casually up the front walk. He stepped up to the porch, patted each dog on the head, and asked if he could have a word. I pointed to one of the wicker rockers, and he sank into it with the sigh of a man who does not like to spend time on his feet.
“Sergeant Lloyd J. McMichaels, at your service, sir,” he said pleasantly. “And aren’t those lovely shepherds.”
“They are indeed, Sergeant,” I said. “Can I offer you a coffee or something?”
He eyed the Scotch briefly, smiled, and said thank you, no, on duty and all that. I then asked how I could help him.
“You would be the retired Lieutenant of Police Cameron Richter, would you not, sir?”
I nodded.
“And your two associates, also retired police officers, from up in the Triad of North Carolina?”
“Correct again, Sergeant. We’re actually all retired from the sheriff’s office in Manceford County. I formed a private investigations company when I got out, and several of my cohorts joined me when their time was up.”
“Lovely, lovely,” he said, nodding. “Sounds like an ideal setup, it does-cops working with other cops. It must save a lot of bother, not having to work for or with civilians.”
“That was the point,” I said. “We wanted to be around people who knew how to act, as it were.” The shepherds were back to lying down again, obviously comfortable with a uniformed policeman on the front porch. They always reacted well to confident people.
“Would you be so kind as to share with me your reasons for being here in our little village?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “And I apologize for not stopping by the House and making my manners. I actually didn’t think you’d care.”
He gave me a droll look over the bridge of his spectacles.
I explained who we were working for and a little bit about the case, focusing mostly on Allie’s death by radiation poisoning. He nodded when I was done.
“It was the presence of all those fierce-looking G-men in town which provoked my interest,” he said. “Southport is a touristy place, of course, although at this time of year, not many of them, to be sure. So seeing federal officers lurking about our streets, without so much as a squeak from the Wilmington office, by the by, piqued our attention.”
“I guess we all forgot our manners,” I said. “But this doesn’t involve Southport, as best I can tell. Helios is where the action is.”
“Ah, Helios,” he said. “The land of the captive suns. Does this action perhaps include a homicide, as I’m being told?”
“Are you being told?”
“Actually, no, not officially. But you know how locals are, Lieutenant. People do like to gossip.”
The EMS guys, for instance, I thought. I told him what had happened at the moonpool, and that the current thinking was that it might be Carl Trask who had drowned in the moonpool. Surprisingly, that produced another skeptical look.
I told him the Bureau special agent in charge was named Caswell, and then asked McMichaels if he knew Colonel Trask personally. He did. The colonel had made his manners some time ago when he took the physical security job at Helios. He’d called on all the local police departments and sheriff’s offices within twenty miles of Helios, and he was a prominent member of the multi-county nuclear accident response organization, as was Dr. Quartermain. Then the sergeant asked why we thought the body in the moonpool might be the good colonel. I told him, explaining the problem of making the physical identification. He grimaced, thought about that for a moment, and then asked when, exactly, all this had happened. I told him.
“That’s very odd, then,” he said. “Because I think you may be mistaken. In fact, I’m sure you’re mistaken. I saw Colonel Trask down at the Southport marina earlier this evening-he was refueling a rather large cabin cruiser, on which I believe he lives. Named the Keeper, is it?”
He was smiling now at my obvious surprise, and then he reached into his trousers pocket and produced a small envelope. “He even asked me to deliver this little love note to you; that’s how very sure I am that the good colonel is alive and well. Drop by the House sometime; we always have a pot of coffee going.”
He heaved himself out of the rocker and then paused at the top of the steps. “Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “An odd choice for the job he holds over there.”
“Because… what?” I was hoping McMichaels wasn’t some kind of closet racist.
“The word around town is that the good doctor has a bit of a gambling problem,” he said. “Of the compulsive persuasion, or so I’m told.”
“This something you know?”
“Indeed not. Just what I’ve been told by people who fancy the occasional game of cards.”
“Does the company know?”
He eyed me over those antique-looking spectacles. “Probably not,” he said. “Good night to you, sir.”
I opened the envelope after he left. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a series of numbers handwritten across the top. If Trask was trying for a secret code, he’d succeeded-I couldn’t make any sense of the numbers. The bigger news, of course, was that Trask was not the corpus delicti in dry layup at the plant. I looked at my watch-almost one o’clock. I decided to let my news wait until morning. There was no grieving widow, and, as best I knew, no clear and present danger to the plant.
The gossip about Ari Quartermain was interesting, if true, but I couldn’t see any connection between that and Allie Gardner. My brain swirled with all sorts of possibilities and mysteries, but I elected to shut down and get some much-needed sleep.
In the morning I briefed Pardee and Tony on our late-night visitor. Tony examined the note, then passed it to Pardee.
“Why would he send you a note?” Pardee asked.
“I don’t know-to let me know he’s alive? Maybe he’s heard all the rumors.”
“Or to set up a meet?” Pardee said. Tony asked for the note back and took a pencil to the numbers.
“Right,” he said. “The first
set of numbers is very likely a latitude and longitude position; the second one is a date-time group, probably in Greenwich time-there’s a Z at the end of it. So: place and time.” He looked at his watch, which was festooned with time-zone dials. “Tonight, in fact, at 11:00 P.M. ”
“Good headwork,” I said. “Can you tell where?”
“I’ll need the GPS set on the boat, or at least a chart of the area. But these numbers look local-maybe in the Cape Fear estuary, or just off Carolina Beach, in the Atlantic. Did you tell him we have a boat?”
“He knows, and this makes sense, of sorts-a rendezvous at sea ought to be fairly private.”
“Unless one of the alphabets planted some devices,” Pardee said.
“Would they work out at sea?”
“They could record, but probably not transmit. But they could have placed a satellite tag, and if they did, they’ll know someone’s moving that boat around.”
“Shouldn’t we tell Dr. Quartermain?” Tony asked.
I hesitated. I felt ninety-percent sure that Ari Quartermain was not a bad guy, but the local police sergeant had sowed a seed or two of doubt. “Let’s lay eyes on Trask; that way our information will be firsthand,” I said. “Then we can tell Ari. In the meantime, let’s confirm the rendezvous point, and then we’ll start working backwards on Allie’s timeline.”
Tony went down to the marina to pull a chart so he could verify that the numbers did translate into a rendezvous position. Pardee and I called Ari’s office and asked his new secretary to see if those visitor log copies were available for us to pick up. My plan was to get those and then go into Wilmington and talk to Bernie about getting a look at her vehicle, or the report of their search, assuming they’d done one. I called our H amp;S offices back in Triboro to get the videotape Allie had taken of the legal lovebirds.
“What videotape?” Horace asked. “She never returned, remember?”
I knew that, I thought. Back to Bernie Price. I was more tired than I realized.
As it turned out, Bernie couldn’t help us, either. The feds had taken everything-the car, the contents, Allie’s backpack and briefcase, everything-and since the front seat of her car had registered on a Geiger counter, the Wilmington police impound was just as happy to see Allie’s radioactive ride go away.
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