“Yes, to a trial attorney, up in Triboro.”
“Terrific,” she said. “Give that information to Admitting as well, please. She should come down here.”
I did as she had asked, and called Alicia, Pardee’s wife, myself, to tell her what had happened. She said she’d be down first thing in the morning after she’d set up care for the kids.
I stopped by the pharmacy to fill some scrips of my own. “I need a shower and some sleep,” I told Ari. “People in there were keeping their distance.”
“Yeah, you’re a bit funky this evening.”
“You should smell the snake,” I said.
“I believe I do.”
“But we’re not done yet, are we.”
“Nope. We have to go see the Man.”
“We.”
“Don’t make me say it.”
We drove in separate vehicles directly to the admin building. I left the mutts in the Suburban and followed Ari into the building. The plant director and two other worried-looking managers were waiting for Ari. Behind the admin building, the huge green buildings of Helios looked just the same. The only thing missing was the subdued roar of the condenser cooling-water tailrace. Since the generators weren’t running, they weren’t pulling lebenty thousand gallons of cooling water a minute in from the river anymore. Otherwise you couldn’t tell.
I’d been doing a slow burn ever since leaving the hospital. I made a mental note to stop worrying about gathering evidence of whatever outrages Trask and his henchman were contemplating. If I found him before the Bureau did, there wasn’t going to be any need for evidence. I’d rousted Tony to tell him what had happened, and he’d immediately said he’d be back in the morning. Mindful of the oblique hint Trask had given me, I asked him to stay in Triboro and to pull the string hard on Allie Gardner’s family background. I wanted him to get to her personnel file from the sheriff’s office. He thought he could con someone into helping him out.
Then I asked him to contact Pardee’s wife and offer whatever help she needed, including a charter plane ticket if she wanted to fly down. If mystery-man Trask, with all his security toys, exotic pets, and fanatical ideas, had turned Pardee Bell into a vegetable with a handkerchief of diesel starter fluid, I intended to return the favor. Alicia was the kind of woman who would want to help with that.
The plant director was a tall, spare man in his early forties who looked to be of Scandinavian descent. Ari introduced him as Dr. Johannsen, and his demeanor was all business. He was obviously unaware of who I was or what I’d been doing down there, so Ari filled him in. Then I told an abbreviated story of the night’s events and why I’d recommended they shut down the plant.
“You did not actually see Colonel Trask during all this?” Johannsen asked.
“I did not,” I said. “Nor did I see him the night we got run over out in the Cape Fear River.”
He raised his hands, palms up, as if asking the obvious question.
“It’s what you don’t know, Dr. Johannsen,” I said. It had been a really long night. “Consider everything that’s happened in the past week or so. The death by radiation poisoning of one of my associates, an unidentified body in your spent fuel storage pool, your physical security director’s gone missing, oh, and did I forget to mention the radiation incident over in the container port?”
“Only one of those incidents connects directly to Helios,” he said. “Admittedly, Colonel Trask’s whereabouts are something of a mystery, but he’s done unusual things like this before. I could make the reverse argument: Most of this has happened since you showed up.”
The look on my face must have concerned him, because he immediately tried to make amends. “Look, Mr. Richter, I’m not accusing you of anything. It’s just that shutting down the plant the way it was done tonight is going to cause industry and public comment. The nuclear industry lives under a magnifying glass. Everyone will assume we had a reactor problem. What do we tell them?”
“The truth?” I said. “That way it at least looks like you care as much about the security of your operation here as you do about your image.”
I saw Ari look away. The director stared at me for a moment and then settled his face into a polite mask. “All right, Mr. Richter. I think you’re really tired after your, um, experiences tonight. We’ll excuse you now. Dr. Quartermain and I need to talk privately. Thank you for your services.”
That sounded like a great idea to me, so I left. Once in the Suburban, I put my head back on the headrest and told the shepherds that I needed them to eat someone. They seemed amenable. All I had to do was come up with the name.
I had to assume the plant’s technical people were on high alert by now, which should make it a whole lot harder for anyone inside or out to pull some shit. On the walk out to the hospital parking lot, I’d asked Ari what “scram” meant. He said it was slang for shutting a reactor down quickly by inserting all the control rods, thereby killing off the chain reaction. A scram was something the reactor usually did to itself if it detected a safety problem. Of course, even if the reactors were no longer critical, there was still plenty of heat and radiation present for duty, so it wasn’t as if they were cold and dark, and therefore not dangerous. And there’d be intense NRC interest in why it had happened. I told him it was a good thing they were already here, then. He had not been amused. It was obviously time for me to get some sleep and then to regroup.
Tony called at about 10:00 A.M. from Triboro. He reported that Pardee’s wife was in touch with the hospital and en route by car, and that he’d have his hands on Allie’s archived personnel file sometime today. He wanted to know if he should still come down to the Wilmington area. I told him to get the file and then come down; I also asked him to bring some tactical equipment from our collection.
“We going colonel-hunting?” he asked.
“Something like that.”
He said he’d be down by late afternoon.
The next phone call was from Ari Quartermain. His voice was strained and he sounded as if he hadn’t slept all night.
“We’ve finally heard from Trask,” he announced.
“Good deal,” I said. “Now we know it wasn’t him in the moonpool. The question is: Where is he?”
“On his boat, or so he says,” Ari replied. “Says he’s uncovered a security problem that turned out to be much bigger than he thought it was originally. Says he’ll come in tonight after getting some sleep. I told him we were shut down, and why.”
“The ‘why’ being my suggestion?”
“Yep. He said as long as we kept you and your people away from the plant, there was no need to be shut down. He said you are part of the problem.”
“I’ll bet he did-I tumbled to him and whatever shit he’s got planned.”
Ari sighed. “Well, I briefed the director. He knows Trask, and he doesn’t know you. He said we’d stay offline until Trask shows up and explains all this shit. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime, you want me to stay the hell away from Helios, right?”
“Pretty please?” he said.
“I can do that,” I said. “But I’m going to file a police report charging Trask with the assault on Pardee Bell. When he’s done with whatever fanciful tale he’s going to spin for you guys, the Wilmington cops are going to want a word with him. And the Coast Guard wants to examine that boat.”
“Funny you should use those words,” Ari said. “Fanciful tale. That’s how the director characterized your story from last night. Who else should I be watching?”
“Watch the moonpool engineering crew,” I said. “My measure of Trask is that he won’t give up. Your shutting the plant down may have complicated that, but at least everyone’s alerted, right?”
“They certainly are,” Ari said. “Anna Petrowska is somewhat skeptical, as you might imagine. She told the director that she thought you were delusional.”