P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“You were seen conducting surveillance of the power plant,” he said, coming closer to get right in my face. “We have you on camera. Turn around.”

“No,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. I was about an inch taller than he was and a whole lot bigger. “I’m authorized to be here and, for that matter, inside the protected area if I want, by the director of technical security. Your boss’s boss, as I understand it. He told me you had no authority over me unless I showed up in an unauthorized place, such as within the vital area.”

Billy was visibly angry now, so I slowly positioned myself to deflect any sudden moves. I could see that his forearms were trembling, meaning that he wanted to club me with that weapon. The other two remained in position, but they didn’t seem to be getting excited just because Billy was.

“I said turn around; do it!” he yelled.

“Make me, Billy,” I replied, and then I whistled. The shepherds came out of their hides in the underbrush from behind the other two guards. Each one grabbed a mouthful of a guard’s wrist before the men were even aware the dogs were there. They both yelled in surprise, but they also both had the sense to make no sudden moves. Billy reacted by taking one step backward and swinging his weapon around, but then he, too, froze when he saw that he couldn’t shoot the dogs without hitting his two buddies. I itched to just clock him right there and then, but there really wasn’t any need.

“This is a great time to be very still,” I announced to the other two guys. “You twitch, those two will each amputate a hand. You guys understand me?”

Both of them nodded quickly, trying not to look down into those intent canine eyes. Their faces were red in the Bronco’s taillights. Even with semi-SWAT gear on, they had to be feeling close to fifty pounds per square inch of jaw pressure, and that was just the I-got-you squeeze.

At that moment, the fourth door on the Bronco opened. Colonel Trask stepped out into the headlights and walked over to where Billy and I were standing.

“Billy?” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

“You are so fucking fired,” Trask said. “Gimme that.”

Before Billy could respond, Trask took his weapon away from him, retrieved my IDs, and told him to get into the backseat of the Bronco. Then he looked at me and bobbed his head in the direction of the shepherds. I called them off and they trotted over to me, taking up positions on either side of me and locking on to Trask. He looked down, flashed an admiring grin, and then told the other guards to take the Bronco back to the plant and wait there for him. He handed over Billy’s weapon to one of them as they left.

Once the Bronco had driven away, Trask and I strolled over to the bank of the inlet canal and stared out over the swamps at the cluster of lights around the plant. The inlet canal was a good hundred yards across, and the water was deceptively still. On the other side of the plant, where the hot water came out of the main condensers, two huge nozzles from the plant blew steaming water five hundred feet down a concrete exit channel. There had to be a big current under the surface on the inlet side.

“It’s pretty out here,” he said, handing me back my IDs. “But don’t try this in the summertime.”

“Mosquitoes?”

He fished out some cigarettes, offered me one, which I declined, and lit up. “Yeah, buddy,” he said. “They arrive in formation, take your vehicle first, eat that, and then they come back for you.”

“This a truce?” I asked.

He gave me a sideways look that was half glare, half frustration. “I’ve got the NRC, the FBI, PrimEnergy’s head of security, federal, state, and county environmental engineers, local law, and now you wandering around in my perimeter. How would you feel?”

“I guess I’d have issues with all that,” I said.

He made a disgusted noise. “Issues? Issues? I hate that fucking word. You sound like some goddamned liberal. Issues, my ass. There is no way somebody took a cesium cocktail out of this plant, I don’t care what anybody says. We would have had any number of gamma detectors screaming bloody murder before they ever got to the first fence. Not to mention the fact that the guy’s hand bones would be glowing through his skin by now. They’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Maybe it wasn’t cesium,” I said.

“Whatever-same rules apply. They’re searching the wrong place.”

“What’s the right place, then?” I asked.

He pointed across the mile or so of swamps and inlets to the cluster of lights flooding the container port upriver. “Right over there,” he said. “That’s where it came from, and there’s probably more of it there right now. That place is a fucking turnstile for terrorists. Ten zillion pounds of stuff comes through there every day from all over the world, and they physically inspect-are you ready for this?- none of it.”

“From what little I know about it, I’d tend to agree with you,” I said, thinking back to my last conversation with Creeps. “I think the federal crowd here has to rule Helios out before the main focus returns across the river.”

He took a deep breath and then let it out. “Maybe,” he said. “But then I can’t figure out why Quartermain has brought someone like you into it.”

“Someone like me?”

“Oh, c’mon, you have zero expertise in the field of nuclear energy or industrial security.”

“Let me ask you something-do you get advance warning when there’s going to be one of those force-on-force intrusion drills?”

He looked sideways at me again. “Yeah, we do. Otherwise, someone might get shot.”

“What’s your record, then?” I asked. “The bad guys ever get through?”

“That’s nobody’s business but ours.”

I smiled. “Let me put it another way,” I said. “Your force-on-force drills ever assume the other side has inside help?”

He thought about that before answering me. “Possibly.”

“So how do you do that-someone role-plays, right? Someone’s designated to unlock a door or look the other way, and then you guys have to run that scenario to ground.”

“What’s your point?”

“Hypothetically, you use one of the Helios nukes to do that, or does one of your own security force people act the part of a bad nuke?”

“One of ours,” he said. “Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically, right. But suppose there’s a real one in there somewhere, some engineer who might actually let a bad guy in if the bribe money was good enough, or the blackmail dangerous enough-you drill for that, do you?”

“That’s Quartermain’s-” he began, then stopped.

“Unh-hunh,” I said. “That’s Quartermain’s bailiwick. Look, my people and I are not going to fuck around, cutting fences or trying to plant a fake bomb in the reactor building. What we work on out there in the world is mainly people-hunting. I’ve brought a surveillance expert and a computer hacker with me. We’re going to look hard at Quartermain’s program, not yours. And for the record, I’d just as soon do that without having to deal with guys in SWAT gear jumping out of the bushes all the time. That shit irritates my dogs.”

He stared out over the canal for a half minute. “Maybe we can work something out,” he said finally.

“Were those your people we ran off in Southport? The two guys pretending to be PrimEnergy utility workers while they pointed an acoustic cone at our windows?”

He frowned and shook his head. “Negative,” he said. “We don’t work off-site.”

I gave him a spare-me look.

“The Hilton?” he said. “That was unofficial. How’d you run ’em off?”

I told him, and he grinned.

“How’d you get your nickname?” I asked.