P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“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.

After a quick bite, we left the cafe and walked back to the car. I heard Tony swear and saw the parking ticket under the wiper blade. Then I saw that the meter was green. He lifted a folded piece of paper, read it, and handed it to me. There was a single line that read: ET come home. Now would be nice. It was signed with a large letter C.

“Sneaky futher-muckers,” I said, looking around. Tony grunted and pointed, and there, across the street, was the Bureau car we’d watched drive away. Apparently, not very far away. The agents waggled fingers at us. Tony rubbed his nose with his middle finger in response. The agent driving the car put his hands up to his face in mock horror.

“Okay, let’s go back and face the music,” I said.

“Who’s C.?” Tony asked.

C., as I’d suspected, turned out to be Creeps himself, minus his ditzy assistant this time. The other agents had followed us back to the house and were now waiting outside, reading magazines. Creeps was standing on the front porch when we got there, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t been inside. The shepherds were in there, staring out the front windows and definitely not looking like Welcome Wagon material.

I introduced my two helper-bees, and then we all went in. Since Pardee had set up his computers in the kitchen, I invited Creeps to sit in the living room, which meant that he had to fit that gangly, Lincolnesque frame of his into one of the sandy wicker rocking chairs. Wicker apparently is the furniture of choice for a beach house; everything in the living room was made of it.

“Welcome to our humble rental unit,” I said. Pardee and Tony leaned on opposite sides of the living room entryway. “Have we been bad?”

Creeps rubbed his hands together while he thought about what he was going to say. “I certainly hope not, Mr. Richter,” he said, “but, given the nature of our last conversation in Wilmington, your Bureau just wanted to make sure you hadn’t returned to investigate Ms. Gardner’s, um, unfortunate demise.”

“You were quite clear, I thought,” I said. “Back out, stay out, and assist my Bureau in any way I can and should as a good citizen. Right?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said warmly, smiling his best undertaker smile. Given that he’d signed his little love note “C.,” he had to be putting at least some of that bullshit on. “So: What, may I ask, are you doing down here with or for the technical security director of the Helios power station?”

“A job of work,” I replied, recalling Ari’s quaint phrase.

Creeps raised his eyebrows in a go-on expression.

“The details of which have not yet been made entirely clear,” I continued, fudging just a little. “Something to do with overlapping jurisdiction within the plant’s security apparatus. He’s the technical guy, and there’s a separate department that handles physical security. We’ll probably know more tomorrow.”

Creeps frowned. It took the frown a couple of seconds to spread across that huge, lachrymose face. “How does this bear on the Gardner case?”

Clever Creeps. You never knew where he was going with his questions, but he probably did, and all the time. “It doesn’t,” I said. “At least as far as we know. Besides, we’re not supposed to get involved in the Gardner case, remember? I guess you could talk to Mr. Quartermain.”

The frown vanished. “Oh, yes, indeed,” he said. “We’ll be talking to Mr. Quartermain, at some length, I suspect.”

“Well, while we’re on the subject of Allie Gardner, do you guys think that evil shit came from the plant or some other source?” I saw Tony and Pardee, who were standing out of Creeps’s line of sight, trying to suppress grins.

Creeps did a tsk-tsk number. “Mr. Richter, really,” he said disapprovingly. “I do hope you’re not intending to mess around with your Bureau. You know how we hate that. Although I can tell you this much: Right now, the NRC people don’t think the radioactive substance did come from Helios. There’s simply no way to do that without exposing the taker to the same radiation that would ultimately kill the takee, if you follow me.”

“Yeah, that occurred to me, too,” I lied. “But, honestly, I think Quartermain wants us for something totally unrelated. As I understand the politics of the situation, PrimEnergy wants to put some distance between what happened to Allie and the Helios station.”

Creeps nodded, but then changed the subject. “Under what modalities is Mr. Quartermain engaging H amp;S Investigations?” he asked.