P Deutermann - The Moonpool

They slowly began lowering the grapple hooks down into the pool while the radio tech talked them through the positioning process. Petrowska signaled for Ari to join her in the control room. I went with him.

“The diver’s about three meters over the stack,” she said, pointing to a television display. I could see the shape of the diver shimmering on the screen. He was hard-hatted, and the top of his head was emitting a stream of truly beautiful bubbles. “I’ve shut off the circ pumps, so we have some hydrogen generation and rising temps. That will be as low as he can go. He’s got sixty more seconds to get that hook on, and then we’ll have to extract him.”

“How hot?”

“Rems,” she said. Initially, that didn’t mean anything to me, but it sure got Ari’s attention. Then I remembered that our personal dosimeters measured millirems. Milli, as in one thousandth of a rem.

I swallowed. There was a reason why that water was glowing down there. I wondered if the diver could see his TLDs.

The radio tech on the bridge suddenly signaled a thumbs-up. One of the others helped the cop pull on the grapple rope, while the others began to raise the suspended platform to get their buddy the hell out of his radiation bath.

The diver came up a lot faster than the body, which was understandable. He had something to lose; the corpse no longer did. But when the body broke the surface, my heart sank. The grapple had hooked the man’s belt at the back, so the body was bent in half at the waist.

That wasn’t the bad part, though.

From about the collarbones up, there was nothing but gleaming white bone. No skin. Just a blue-white, shining skull with no face.

And certainly no ID.

Until I saw the small, black knife pouch on the man’s right boot as he dangled, dripping, on the chain. I’d seen that knife before.

“I think that’s Carl Trask,” I said, pointing to that boot knife.

“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered. He stared at the faceless figure. The height, weight, general build made it possible. “I think it is.”

One of the techs, looking a bit unwell, pointed a distant-reading radiation monitor at the sodden figure and shook his head. He signaled the bridge people, and the body was lowered back into the moonpool to a depth of about ten feet.

Anna Petrowska was staring at Ari over the upper rim of her eyeglasses from inside the control room, as if asking Tony’s favorite question: Now what?

Great question, I thought. Ari Quartermain’s face was a study in anxiety.

“We need the second diver to go down,” he said. “That’s not a body anymore. That’s highly radioactive nuclear waste. We’re definitely going to have to entomb that.”

A few hours later, Ari and I were sitting in the front seat of my Suburban sipping some Scotch from my emergency flask. To say that things had become complicated would be the understatement of the year.

First, they’d had to get the second, unexposed diver suited up and into the water to bag the body, which was now suspended on a chain in the moonpool, because the first diver down had come dangerously close to going over his annual TLD limits. Then they’d brought the bag up and called in the foam team, who’d proceeded to do the same routine on the bag that they’d done on the truck. This produced a white, oblong semisolid object some eight feet in length that was still capable of setting off radiation alarms.

The Bureau had told Ari to call them when he had a body on deck. He duly made the call, but then had to explain that there was probably not going to be a proper identification, much less an autopsy. This news did not sit well with our Bureau. They’d told him to freeze the scene and await the imminent arrival of adult supervision. I took that as a clear signal to fold my tents and steal away into the desert night.

I told Ari that I’d wait outside in my vehicle and got one of the vital area techs to escort me back out of the building. I called my guys at the beach house and brought them up to date and, once again, instructed them to be vigilant. Tony said he had one shepherd on the front porch and the other lurking in the back garage with the door open. Moira had gone to bed, but he and Pardee were planning to keep watch for a while. I reminded them that, if the G did show up in the night, they’d be after Moira and me, not them. Tony gently reminded me about the role of co-conspirators in the double-oh-jay statutes.

“Our threat to go public with their detention operation was a holding action, at best,” I said. “You guys don’t have to babysit her or me. You want to bail, you probably should.”

“You just want to be alone with the wild woman,” Tony said.

“She’s as scary as the Bureau right now,” I said.

“She’s got some interesting shit pre-positioned on her computer, and she backed it all up on Pardee’s. That girl’s a hot sketch, you know that?”

“Remember her nickname, paisan,” I said. “Chances are, she earned it.”

“What-me worry? Nice redheaded Catholic girl like that?”

Now Ari was looking longingly at the flask, but then decided against it.

“So,” I said. “Who or what put Carl Trask in the moonpool?”

He shook his head slowly, as if he still didn’t believe it. “He pissed people off all the time, but everybody knew he was just doing his job-as he saw it. I can’t finger a single soul who’d want to kill the man.”

I thought briefly about Billy the Kid, but then saw the improbability. “Well, we should be able to narrow down the suspect list pretty quick,” I said. “It has to be someone with access to that building and all three levels of security.”

He looked over at me in the gloom of the parking lot. “Not if it was Trask who took his killer in there,” he said. “Then it could be anybody.”

“But the cameras, the card readers-won’t they show who went in, and when?”

“The FBI’s all over that as we speak,” he said. “And the short answer is-yes.”

“Short answer?”

“Well, you know what can be done with video-camera data, if someone knows how.”

“C’mon, Ari-you’ve been watching too many movies. That’s harder than it looks, and it implies some detailed planning and premeditation. And I’ll warn you right now: The Bureau is going to want a sit-down with you, and it won’t be a casual conversation.”

“Well, I am the head of technical security.”

“And because this just about has to be an inside job. C’mon: You must have a theory about what the hell’s going on here.”

He stared out the window for a long moment. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his cell phone chirped. He sighed and looked at the data window. Then he answered it.

In response to a question, he said he was outside, getting some fresh air. Then he looked over at me, his eyes widening. “No way,” he said. “Where’d they get that?”

He listened some more, then said he had no idea but that he’d be back inside in five minutes. He snapped his phone shut.

“That was your favorite Russian,” he said. “The Bureau’s apparently turned up a tape showing you and Trask going through the moonpool security tiers. She confirmed to them that you had been up there tonight. She said they wanted to know if I knew where you were.”

“Yes, you do,” I replied. “I’m gone.”

Two hours later, Tony nosed our boat alongside Carl Trask’s Keeper over in the Carolina Beach marina. We’d come through the narrow defile of Snow’s Cut and down the city dock channel to the marina at idle and with our running lights off. The Keeper was tied up on one of the outboard finger piers because of her deeper draft, which kept her two piers away from most of the other live-on boats. Tony brought our boat alongside, squished some fenders, and then held her steady. I passed the shepherds up onto the Keeper ’s deck, and then Moira and I followed. The marina office was dark, as were all the boats that we could see, and nobody seemed to be out and about on the nearby downtown streets. I was glad it was the off-season.