“I know,” he said, “but I’m talking about helping me with a different problem.”
“Somebody who is technically qualified, and who might be screwing around?” I said.
“Exactly.” He sipped some coffee and made a face. “Like what happened to Ms. Gardner.”
“So you do think that came from your plant?”
“Officially? That would be an unequivocal no. And I’ll defend that position for as long as I want to keep my job.”
“But.”
“Yeah. But. Fortunately for PrimEnergy and Helios, the feds are focusing elsewhere. There’s apparently been intel that the Islamists have given up the idea of smuggling in a nuclear bomb in favor of trying something with nuclear waste.”
“A dirty bomb instead of a Hiroshima bomb.”
“Yeah. A plutonium or a highly enriched uranium bomb has a very distinctive signature, and the ports-airports, seaports-are pretty much wired for that. Nuclear waste products, by definition, come in radiation-tight containers. No signature.”
“And Wilmington has a big container port,” Pardee said.
“Big enough. Not as big as Long Beach or L.A., but big enough, and about to double in size. A radioactive DOA in Wilmington set off all sorts of alarms. They’re going through the motions at Helios, but officially no one really believes that’s where this stuff came from. It would, simply stated, be much too hard.”
“But not impossible?” I asked.
He stood with his back to the sink and shrugged. “Actually, as an engineer, I’d think it would be very difficult, but, no, not impossible. And as the security officer it’s my job to exercise a little paranoia here.”
“You have somebody in mind?” I asked.
“It’s not so much one individual,” he said. “Look-technical security depends on three things in our industry: rigid adherence to approved engineering practices, a personnel reliability program, and the power industry’s version of what the military calls the two-man rule.”
“I believe,” I said, and he smiled.
“Okay. Briefly, here’s the idea. The two-man rule means no one individual is ever left in a situation where he could put the atomic reaction process at risk. Personnel reliability, or what we call fitness to serve, means that a guy who gets a DUI or gropes an undercover cop in a public men’s room gets looked at to see if he should keep his ticket as a plant or reactor operator. And procedure means just that: line-by-line read-back procedures for everything that happens in the control room or in the plant itself. One guy reads the operating procedure, say, for lining up the steam system, and a second guy reads it back to him before actually doing it.”
“That must be really slow.”
“It’s tedious, but reliable. It also requires a certain degree of technical openness. Nothing happens behind closed doors.”
“So?”
“So, if somebody tapped a source of radioactive water in the Helios plant, he would have to have violated all three wedges of technical security.”
I thought about the appearance of a tail on Quartermain’s visit out here today. “Would he need some help from the physical security department?”
He nodded. “Yes, I’d think so, and that’s the one division at Helios which is comparatively opaque. There’s a cast of dozens involved in bringing a reactor online and feeding the grid. But most of the time, nobody knows what the hell Trask’s people are doing.”
“Except following you around and breaking into my hotel room, presumably just because you and I met.”
“Well, there is that.”
“But I thought Trask worked for you-why not just fire his ass?”
“Truth?”
“Please.”
“My theory is that he’s got something on the director, because every time I’ve voiced my ‘concerns’ up the line, I get shut down. Can’t prove that, of course, but that’s what I’m beginning to think.”
“So you want us to take a look at them? Trask, his people, and any possible ties to the director?”
“Yeah.”
Before Quartermain could elaborate, Tony Martinelli came back into the kitchen from outside. He looked pleased with himself, which worried me a little bit. He saw the expression on my face and waved me off.
“It’s cool,” he said. “But not what I expected.”
“Ree-port.”
He looked at Quartermain and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Okay for him to hear this? I motioned for him to continue.
“Okay, so I go around the block, walk towards downtown for five minutes, turn around, and come back towards the house on the beachfront street. Just another tourist, out for some fresh salt air and a cigarette. And one block away, parked on the beach side of the street, I come upon a Bureau ride, complete with two specials sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous.”
“In their suits and ties. At the beach.”
“But they were such inconspicuous suits.”
“Can you describe the agents-a man and a woman, perhaps?”
“Negative. Just the usual Buroids with the usual sunglasses and happy faces. They looked bored.”
“So lemme guess: You stopped, stared, waved, said hi-there, peed on their tires, and then took their pictures?”
Tony feigned profound disappointment. “Absolutely not, boss,” he said. “I never said hi-there. However, I did notice their parking meter was expired, so I sicced a meter maid on them.”
I had to grin. “And then watched them flash some creds.”
“Aren’t you proud of me?” As in, lots of other options had come to mind.
“I am, Tony, I am,” I said, counting myself lucky that he hadn’t crawled under some cars and attached a towing chain from their rear axle to a tree. He’d seen that in a movie and often said he’d like to try it.
“So, the question is: Who’re they watching?” Pardee asked, sticking as always to business.
“Great question,” I said, turning to Ari. “You, us, Trask’s snoops, or all of the above?”
“I have no idea,” he said.
“Well, let’s find out,” I said. “Why don’t you leave, and we’ll see if they follow you out of here. If they stay put, we’re the target. If not… But before you go, Pardee here is going to help us create a way we can communicate securely. In the meantime, Tony and I will step out for some more of that salt air.”
I left Pardee and Ari in the kitchen to sort out secure comms. I asked Tony to get us into a position from which we could watch both the house and the watchers when Ari drove off. Tony had parked his car behind the house, so we used that to get set up behind the Bureau vehicle in one of the metered spots on the beach.
After about five minutes, we watched Ari come down the front steps of our rental unit and go to his car. Don’t turn around and wave, Ari , I thought. Just get in and drive away. The mental telepathy must have worked because that’s what he did. We waited. The two agents were just silhouettes in the car parked ahead of us, but we could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Then they cranked up their Bucar and surprised us by executing a U-turn.
“Down ’scope,” I said, and we both slid down in the front seat of Tony’s car. When they had passed us, we drove back to the house.
Pardee had brought some electronics gear, including two laptops, which were running in parallel in his version of a baby supercomputer. Using these, he had created a Web site on which Ari and I could post and retrieve messages using a secure password system. He hosted the site on our office server back in Triboro, so there’d be a cutout.
He also reported that our office manager had closed out Allie’s affairs by notifying her ex-husbands of her demise and sending her personal office effects to the sister in Turkey, no matter what she’d said. Fortunately, there were no remains to deal with, as the federal government still had that problem bagged up in a lead-lined vault somewhere. It was personally disturbing to think about Allie being stored in a locker like a side of meat, but, as Pardee gently reminded me, that wasn’t Allie. I knew he was right, but still.
It was noon, so we went out to find a place for lunch. Southport had a decent selection of lunch places, and we found something suitable on the main drag. The beauty of a small tourist town was that no one paid the three of us the slightest bit of attention. You were either born there or you were “from away,” like the Yankees say.