“She’s got an audience,” said Burt.
Suddenly a small black object dropped into view. It was hard to pick up with the binoculars, but when I locked onto it I saw the tucked falcon bulleting down from the heights. She looked half under control and half out of control, her midair adjustments sudden and tense, like an airplane in a dive too fast to withstand and too steep to pull out of. I thought she might start smoking. The gulls cried and scattered and the falcon angled sharply and a moment later a gull burst into feathers and dropped, pinwheeling through the sky, wings and feet akimbo, the falcon following in relaxed switchbacks, minding her investment on its way to the sand. The three pigeons I’d seen loitering amid the spikes sped over the rooftops like fugitives.
The guards and employees clapped and hooted, some heading back to their tasks, others enjoying a moment in the warm midday sun.
“The seabirds in Finland would stay away for two weeks after a peregrine patrol,” said Burt. “I don’t know about these Californians. You know how optimistic we can be. But a falcon is cheap security against birds. You get a seagull loose in the electrical or pigeons sneaking inside to nest over the cooling pools, you’ve got a problem.”
I watched RaptorLand Man work his way between the buildings and come to a stop at the security fence. His falcon squatted a few yards away, tearing at the gull.
34
Just after three o’clock, a well-worn panel truck pulled up to the deliveries gate. It was white, with a large cooling unit on top and a faded Paradise Date Farm graphic on its broadside panel. I noted the license plate number. An SNR guard with a clipboard stepped to the driver’s side as the window went down. The driver was a young blond man in a black golf shirt and Ray-Bans who said something to the guard and smiled. The guard laughed, tapped his sidearm, and went back into his booth. A moment later the gate rolled open and the produce truck went in.
“I don’t think they’re delivering fresh Medjools,” said Burt.
“I doubt they’re delivering anything,” I said.
The produce truck trundled past the security building and down the road toward the cooling pools, then went out of sight between the steam-containment domes. Came out farther south and stopped in front of a small windowless building.
The driver parked, the tall door at the back of the truck rolled open, and he hopped out. Three SNR guards barged from the squat building, all wearing heavy gloves with high safety cuffs, bearing a small but apparently very heavy wooden box.
“Look familiar?” I asked.
“The heaviest thing on earth is the nucleus of a uranium atom,” said Burt.
“There are eighteen hundred tons of enriched uranium now in storage right here,” I said. “In the form of spent fuel rods. Guarded by SNR.”
“Think portability,” said Burt. “The rods are titanium and they encase the fuel pellets. Small pellets. Like dog kibble. Break open a titanium rod and you’ve got death pellets, ready for deployment.”
“Think concealability,” I said.
“And don’t forget pure power,” said Burt. “Close exposure to one pellet is enough to kill a man within minutes. I’ve seen acute radiation syndrome in rats. Brutally thorough and surprisingly fast. Nausea, convulsions, diarrhea, seizures. Hemorrhage of eyes, nose, and ears. Sudden organ shutdown. Like in old science-fiction movies. Over in minutes.”
They hefted the box into the truck, leaning hard to get it in far enough for the door to close. The four men talked for a while, one of the guards gesturing at the sky, one gloved hand the gull and his other hand the falcon, knocking her meal from the sky.
“You think they’re selling this stuff?” I asked.
“It’s the opposite of valuable,” said Burt.
“Except to well-financed players smart enough to work with it.”
“SNR wouldn’t sell to jihadists,” said Burt. “But they might act themselves. So how about a dirty bomb targeting blacks and Muslims, in keeping with Alfred Battle’s sociopolitical beliefs? Manufactured in their little lab way out in the desert? Led by SNR’s physicists and mechanical engineers.”
“For use where?” I asked.
“Again, who do they hate?”
“Blacks. Muslims. Nosey PIs.”
“A mosque,” said Burt. “A black church. A Black Lives Matter rally. A feast at the end of Ramadan. A nightclub popular with young blacks. A black celebrity. The home of a Muslim family. No end to the possibilities.”
The guards and driver touched fists and the driver boarded his truck. The backup warning sounded as he made a three-point turn and headed out the same way he had gone in.
We gave the lumbering produce truck a comfortable head start down Basilone Road toward the freeway. Stayed far back as it joined the tractor-trailers and the extra-slow drivers all the way down to San Diego and onto Interstate 8 East, bound for the Imperial Valley. Near Buena Vista the truck took the Rattlesnake Road exit, made a left at the stop, then slowly accelerated toward the town and Paradise Date Farm beyond.
I went right on Rattlesnake, swung a bat turn across the median when it looked safe. The Taurus fishtailed severely in the fine white desert sand, and for a moment I thought we’d go under. But the road shoulder rose up to meet us, then asphalt, and I punched the car up Rattlesnake, back to the freeway onramp, and onto the interstate.
“You’d have felt like a real idiot getting stuck back there,” said Burt.
“PIs don’t get stuck.”
I was about to call Mike Lark when Mike Lark called me.
“Ford, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children just got a tip. A girl matching Daley Rideout’s picture and description was seen in the company of three or perhaps four men on the beach in front of Cotton Point Estates in San Clemente five minutes ago. She’s even wearing the Beethoven top you said she took with her. San Clemente sheriffs are rolling.”
“Here’s one for you, Mike.”
I told him that the Paradise Date Farm produce truck about to trigger one of the wasp-cams might have just picked up one very heavy wooden crate from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.
“Like the ones in the freezers?” he asked.
“Fresh from the nuclear energy plant.”
“Do you know this for a fact?”
“I watched them load it.”
“This changes everything,” he said. “This is now federal. This is us.”
“You’re welcome.”
“The truck just came on-screen. Tell me what you find at Cotton Point.”
Lark rang off and Burt held his phone up for me to see.
I held the Taurus to eighty most of the way to San Clemente, radar detector plugged in and Burt’s keen eyes on the lookout.
It’s a long haul from deep in the Imperial Valley to south Orange County. Had to gas up in Alpine, wade around a wreck in Del Mar and construction traffic in Oceanside.
I badly needed a posse of deputies in fast radio cars, an aggressive watch captain, and three units on their way, dispatched well ahead of me. And how about a helicopter? All the useful tools I used to have and now do not.
But I did count my blessings. I had me. I had Burt. A six-cylinder Taurus with a radar detector on the dash and a Colt .45 1911 in the console. A concealed-carry permit to make it legal.
I called Lark again, but he hadn’t heard anything from the San Clemente sheriffs. Because they’d gotten there too late to intercept Daley, I thought. Or it was a false tip to begin with. Happens all the time. Sometimes on purpose.