I asked if they were treating her all right, although that bordered on being a frivolous question. Alicia Barter-Bell was a litigator who specialized in suing hospitals and doctors when they mistreated black people in Triboro. I’m no admirer of the tort bar, but after hearing some of her stories, I had to admit that the occasional shark attack was probably good for the hospitals’ QA program. Apparently, they were being treated very well indeed. She wanted to know if we’d caught up with Trask. I told her we were working on it, glad she couldn’t see the Scotch. She asked that, if we did catch him, we save a part of him for her. I was afraid to ask which part she wanted saved.
I rubbed my tired eyes, which made my arm hurt again. I probably should not have been mixing single malt with antibiotics and the residue of a really spiffy tetanus shot, but I didn’t care. Tony kept quiet, waiting for me to decide what we were going to do next, if anything. The bar wasn’t very full, and the few regulars present were all watching the TV along with the bartender.
My cell phone went off. It was Ari.
“Where are you?” he asked, almost too quickly. I told him.
“Aw, shit,” he said. “Someone’s here.”
“Where’s here?”
“I’m at home. The Bureau people are still at the plant. Everybody’s waiting for Trask. But I think someone’s-”
Sudden silence.
“Ari?”
Then the connection was broken. I hit the received call log, dialed back. Four rings, then voice mail.
Not good. I told Tony, who suggested we call Sergeant McMichaels, ask him to go see. Great idea.
McMichaels had gone home, but they promised to call him. He called me back three minutes later, and I told him what had happened. He said he’d send a car over there, but wanted to know what was going on. I suggested we meet face-to-face. He gave us directions to Ari’s house on the river. We threw money on the table and went over there in our two vehicles.
By the time we arrived, there were two cruisers there, both at the front gates, which they hadn’t managed to open. Sergeant McMichaels was standing outside one of them and came over when we showed up. It was cold enough that his breath was showing in the early night air. Snakes hopefully were expiring upriver by the dozens.
“I’ve got people inside,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to be asking me how.”
“And?”
“No one there,” he said. “One window broken in the back kitchen door, said door unlocked and ajar. Lights on, a TV dinner in the microwave, but no signs of violence. They found this cell phone, but nothing else indicating trouble.”
“Can I keep that?” I asked.
He looked at it for a second and then, obviously perplexed, handed it over.
“Anyone check the pier?” I asked before he could ask me any more questions.
“The pier?” he said. “Oh. You think this is the good colonel? Come by boat?”
“The not-so-good colonel, Sergeant,” I said. The three uniformed cops were listening, so I suggested he and I take a little walk. I filled him in.
“A greenhouse full of snakes?” he exclaimed. “I’d heard that was his nickname, but I had no idea. But why would he take Dr. Quartermain?”
“I think he’s going to the power plant. He needs Ari to penetrate the vital area security systems. It takes two people to get through the important doors, and his own cards have been disabled. He’s going to do something, but I don’t know what.”
McMichaels stared out into the dark river. “Do something at Helios,” he said quietly. “Do I need to trigger the area incident alert system?”
“I think we need to call the Bureau, tell them Quartermain’s missing.”
“Wonderful idea,” he said. “I’ll get someone to go have a look down at the boathouse.”
I had the RA’s office number on my cell phone, which I expected to get me a duty officer. Worse. It got me voice mail. I left a message that there were indications Dr. Quartermain had been kidnapped and that I urgently needed to speak with Special Agent Caswell.
We saw a cop climbing over the wall near the gate and went back to see what he had, which was not much. The landing float was wet, but there was a light chop out in the river, so waves could have done that. I wondered if Trask could have come alongside that float with a boat that big and still managed to tie it up by himself. It was possible, or maybe he had some help.
My cell went off. It was Creeps.
“Lieutenant,” he said amiably. “Quartermain kidnapped?”
I told him where I was and why.
“Oh, I think not, Lieutenant,” Creeps said. “I think we’re going to have to start calling you Lieutenant Bum-dope. I just got off the phone with Dr. Quartermain five minutes ago. He’s heard from Trask. We’re meeting at the container port in just under an hour.”
“The container port?”
“There’s an echo on this line,” he said. “Yes, the container port. Trask is arriving by boat, Dr. Quartermain by car, I presume. If he was under duress, he certainly didn’t sound like it. Homeland Security will be there, along with the usual federal suspects. Is there evidence of a struggle at Dr. Quartermain’s house?”
“Um, no, or not that the local police have found.”
“Oh, dear, you’ve gone and upset the local police? Is there a boss present?”
I said yes and gave the cell to McMichaels, who identified himself and then listened. I told Tony what Creeps had told me. Tony threw up his hands and shook his head. McMichaels thanked Creeps, closed the phone, and gave it back to me.
“Well,” he said, looking a bit embarrassed. “No harm, no foul, I suppose.”
I didn’t believe it. Not that Creeps was lying, but that Ari was on his way anywhere voluntarily. To prove that, though, I had to get to the plant, and there was no way the gate people were going to let us in. If I had a boat… but I didn’t have a boat, and it wasn’t likely the marina would rent me another one. McMichaels was rounding up his people.
“There’s no way Trask can just drive up into that canal,” I said to Tony. “We know they have that whole area under surveillance.”
“It’s his people who have it under surveillance,” Tony pointed out unhelpfully.
“How else could he get in there?”
“Get in where?” McMichaels said as he rejoined us..
I explained my problem. The sergeant gave me a patient look, as in, Why are we still talking about this – you heard the Bureau.
“People like to fish around power plants,” I said. “Something about the warm water. Is there another way to get close to the plant by boat, besides that intake canal from the Cape Fear River?”
“Certainly,” he said. “The tailrace canal. That’s where the warm water is, by the way. Not on the intake side.”
I wanted to execute a Polish salute. Of course that’s where the warm water was. That’s where those two enormous jets came out of the condensers below the generator hall.
“Can you lead us there?”
“I can, but of course I’d be wanting to know why.”
“Well, we’re not going to swim up the tailrace and break into the power plant, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, I know that, Lieutenant. You haven’t seen the tailrace when the plant is running.” He paused for a moment. “You get something into your head, you don’t let go, do you?”
“Not when I think I’m right, and especially when I hope I’m wrong.”
He thought about that. “If it were anything but Helios,” he said, “I’d be firmly requesting you to exit the jurisdiction. But.”
“But you know the government’s first instinct is to cover itself when they suspect someone’s made a big mistake.”
“Indeed I do,” he said. “Okay, I’ll take you. Let me get these boys on their way. Although getting in via the tailrace is just not possible.”
What I knew that the sergeant didn’t was that the plant wasn’t running. The tailrace would be quiet as a mill
pond.
McMichaels led us down a narrow dirt road that seemed to be going absolutely nowhere until we popped out on the banks of a broad creek. The perfectly straight banks indicated that it was man-made. No current was visible, just a strip of dark water perhaps eighty feet wide. We got out of our vehicles and walked to the bank. To our right, the only light was the occasional sweep of a lighthouse that had to be several miles away. To our left, above the trees, was the loom of the power plant’s lights, although the buildings themselves were not visible.
“I think I need to take these dogs for a walk, Sergeant,” I told McMichaels.
“I understand perfectly, Lieutenant,” he said with a grin. “By the by, I was just thinking that perhaps this would be a good juncture for me to resume my domestic duties back at home, from which I was so rudely summoned.”
“This would be a great time to be at home, Sergeant,” I said. “But may I please have your phone number?”
His grin vanished. “Look, boyo,” he said. “If you discover that some evil bastard has or is about to let the fire genie out of that handsome power plant over there, you call me at once. I kid thee not. We all love our power plant, but we have few illusions about what could happen should all those smart boys manage to muddle things up, eh?”
“I promise,” I said. “I think what Trask has in mind is a scare, not a disaster. He keeps talking about a wake-up call.”
“Nine-eleven was called a wake-up call, Lieutenant. If the scary colonel has truly gone mad, he may no longer be able to tell the difference.”
Tony and I got our gear, locked the cars, and set out with the dogs a few minutes later. We had entered McMichaels’s phone number into our respective cell phones. Tony’s battery was fresh; mine was showing faded green bars on the battery icon. We’d put on our tactical vests. Tony carried a shotgun in addition to his Glock. I stuck with my SIG and sent the shepherds out ahead. There was a cleared walkway along the tailrace canal, like a towpath. I had Tony stay about thirty yards behind me in case we walked into something unexpected. The sliver of moon did little to illuminate the woods, but as we got closer to the power plant, all those perimeter lights made the moon superfluous.
Then we got a surprise. We saw the Keeper, or a boat very similar to it, sitting out in the middle of the tailrace.
We simultaneously faded left into the woods, and I waited for Tony to catch up to me. The shepherds came hustling back when they realized I was no longer following them.
“That our boy?” he said.
“Looks like it, but I don’t see any lights or hear a generator.”
We watched the darkened boat for a few minutes. Trask could be hunkered down on board and sweeping the canal banks with a night vision scope for all we knew. Or he could have anchored the boat, turned everything off, and gone ashore in that rubber dinghy. In which case, we should be able to find the dinghy.
“Let’s assume,” I said.
“Oh, goody,” Tony said.
“Let’s assume he went ashore, took Ari with him to gain access to the vital area. There should be a rubber dinghy hidden somewhere along here.”
“Or,” Tony said, “he’s over there on that boat with a thirty-aught, waiting for assumers.”
“That thought crossed my mind,” I said. “Okay, look: I’ll go see if I can find the dinghy. You take a position in the woods here and cover the boat with the shotgun. If someone starts shooting, you keep their heads down while I…”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “While you go see the Baby Jesus.”
“He didn’t come here tonight to get me,” I said, perhaps with more conviction than I felt. “He’s suckered all the authorities over to the container port for a meeting that’s not going to happen, and by the time they tumble, something bad will go down in that plant. We need to move.”
“Roger that.” He then settled down behind a tree stump and unlimbered the shotgun. It was a long shot for a scattergun, but the noise might distract a shooter long enough for me to get to cover. Or at least fall down and die gracefully. I would have really preferred that Trask wait a night; my arm hurt, and I needed some downtime.
Frick found the dinghy. It wasn’t hidden along the riverbank. Instead, it was partially deflated and hanging in a tree just high enough that a passing human wouldn’t see it. Suspicions confirmed: Trask was ashore and ahead of us.
I signaled Tony, and we put on some speed going up the path. We were taking a chance that Trask was lying in wait ahead, but I didn’t think he was. The controlling factor for Trask was how long the alphabets would wait before they realized they’d been had and came hotfooting back to the plant.
Frack tripped the trigger wire. He’d gotten ahead of his partner and gave a little yipe when a hank of piano wire snapped back at his leg. As he bent to bite at it, a green tree branch festooned with barbed wire came whipping across the path like an angry cobra right about face level on a walking human. Fortunately for us, we were both twenty feet back when it let go, but even from that distance, we could hear the barbs whistling. We stopped short. Frack, blissfully unaware of his near-miss, had untangled the tripwire and continued on to catch up with Frick, who’d dutifully plunged on up the path. Trees moved all the time; this one hadn’t bothered her. It sure bothered me, and it reminded both of us that we were pursuing a guy onto his home turf. He probably hadn’t assembled that little nasty an hour ago.
“We need to get off this path,” Tony said, examining the still-quivering branch.
“That’ll slow us down,” I said, looking into the dark woods to our left.
“Not like a face full of barbed wire would,” he said.
“Point taken,” I said. We moved to our left and started pushing our way through the bushes. Fortunately, it was November, or we’d have gotten nowhere fast. I summoned the shepherds with a low whistle and then sent them ahead again, having been reminded once more of the value of four-legged scouts. Even in the woods, the lights of Helios were getting brighter.
After about twenty minutes, we ran up against the perimeter fence, which was a modern chain-link affair, twelve feet high at least, and topped with three strands of barbed wire slanting out toward anyone approaching. Red and white signs every fifty feet warned prospective intruders to go away or face large fines and many lawyers. On the other side was open ground, with the main generator hall almost a half mile inside the wire. To our right was the tailrace, which was also fenced across the water. A line of orange buoys stretched across the canal fifty feet downstream of the fence, and heavy-duty sodium vapor lights provided illumination of the water area for two tower-mounted TV cameras.
Just below the concrete generator hall, two enormous nozzles from the condenser outlets pointed in our direction. They looked like bus-sized caves, and the tailrace canal opened into a hundred-yard-wide, concrete-banked channel right below the nozzles. The silhouettes of the green buildings containing the reactors and the moonpool blocked out the night sky behind the generator hall.
The shepherds ran up to the fence and into the lighted area, so I called them back to where we stood in the relative shadow.
“Now what?” Tony asked, frowning at the fence line, the lights, and the cameras.
“Trask has had all the time in the world to make his plans,” I said. “He knows every foot of this perimeter, and he’d know how to put a hole in that fence without getting caught. We just have to find it.”
“Can the shepherds do that?” he asked.
“If we had a Trask scent article they could,” I said. Then I realized I had something just as good. Ari’s cell phone.
I gave the shepherds a good sniff of the cell phone in its leather case, told them to find it, and they began casting for scent. As always, it was fun to watch those exquisitely sensitive noses searching for mere molecules in the grass. Frick suddenly stopped at the side of the towpath, circled once, and then trotted toward the intersection of the concrete channel banks and the perimeter fence. The channel’s bank was a terrace
d structure, looking like a set of concrete bleachers parallel to the tailrace. The dogs were halfway down the bank between the top edge of the concrete and the placid canal water.
Frack caught the scent, and they both went slower, tails wagging, noses down, zigzagging across the ground, back and forth along the base of the fence. Just outside the cone of illumination from the left-hand light tower, they stopped and began worrying the bottom of the chain-link. As I was about to recall them, Frick went under, followed by Frack, and then they ran up into the plant area along the concrete rim of the bank.
“There’s our hole,” I said. We emerged from cover and trotted over to the end of the concrete bank. I was hoping like hell that the cameras weren’t being closely monitored now that the plant was shut down. If they were, we’d be met by a couple of Broncos loaded with SWAT types in about three minutes. As if confirming my fears, as we bent down to find the three-cornered tear in the fence, a noisy Klaxon horn sounded off on one of the light towers on the other side. It went on continuously, sounding like the dive alarm on a World War II submarine.
Tony looked at me, and I motioned for him to go ahead. We were this close, and I wasn’t going to stop now, even if the guard force had been alerted. There had to be places to hide in the industrial area. The shepherds were waiting about a hundred feet up the concrete ledge. The Klaxon was beginning to hurt my ears as we struggled with the stiff wire and some of the canal bottom debris tangled into the fence. Tony went first and got under with a lot of grunting and puffing. I could almost feel the light from those towers giving us a sunburn, and my ears were unconsciously listening for the sound of braking vehicles and slamming doors. As I started under the fence, what I heard instead was a low rumble, which got louder and louder as I pushed my legs and then my stomach under the wire. I heard Tony say “Holy shit,” which was when I realized what the rumbling noise was. Those two enormous jets were firing up.
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