P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“Okay, Ari. You saw me talking to the FBI people. If you know anything about the Bureau, you’ll know that the last thing they will either want or permit is my involvement in this mess. Double-oh-jay is the term of art they prefer when civilians get in their way.”

It was his turn to blink. “Double-oh-jay,” I repeated. “Obstruction of Justice, with a capital J in their case. Say: ‘I believe.’ ”

He laughed then, a great big gut-trouncing bellow of a laugh that had people in the lounge looking over at us.

“I believe,” he said, still chuckling. Then his face sobered up again. “Look,” he continued. “The feds are cranking up a circus and a half over this incident. A joint NRC-FBI team is going to be arriving at the plant first thing tomorrow morning. We, and by ‘we’ I mean reps from the company, the plant operators, various contractors, and nuclear safety engineers, are going to demonstrate that there’s no way hot water got out of that plant in a form that could be consumed. It’ll take a day or so, maybe longer, but then they’re going to go away and look for some other explanation.”

“So what is it you would want me and my people to do?”

“You want to find out what happened to Ms. Gardner?” he asked. “As opposed to, say, finding grounds for some kind of lawsuit?”

That pissed me off. It must have shown in my face because he sat back in his chair and raised his hand defensively.

“Okay,” he said. “That was out of line.” He hesitated. “Look, I came to you because of some things the FBI people said about you. That you were known to them and that you played by your own rules. That you were an outsider, and the fact that Allison Gardner was from your organization was ringing bells for them.” Another pause. “I think I need someone like you, but not until the feds back out.”

“Because there is a way that hot water could escape from your plant? Is that it?”

He took a deep breath. He looked like a man who was about to take a significant risk. “Possibly,” he said, “but not from the reactors, per se. The energy side, I mean. And it would require some inside help.”

“Okay, then where?”

“From the moonpool,” he said.

I leaned back in my chair, looked around for the waiter, and signaled for another round and a switch to Scotch for me. I had no idea what a moonpool was, but his other implication was clear. He was wondering if he might not have himself a bad guy in his favorite nuclear power station. I knew nothing about the technical side of a nuclear power plant, but I was aware that the entire industry lived life on a political and environmental knife-edge, where the least mistake could cost a power company tens of millions. Which is probably why he was talking to me: He wanted to scope out any such problem before the feds came to the same conclusion and swarmed back to shut the place down.

“Let’s get two things straight right away,” I said. “ If I agree to help you, and I haven’t decided that yet, and we uncover some felonious shit, said shit gets handed over to the appropriate federal authorities at once.”

“Of course,” he said. “Especially if there’s a terrorist angle to this.”

That hadn’t occurred to me, although now that I thought of it, it should have.

“And second?” he asked.

“And second, my concern is not for your power station. Allie Gardner was a close friend and associate. She was good troops and a stand-up cop in her day. She got a raw deal from two serial-asshole husbands, and this was not what should have happened to her. Okay?”

“Got it,” he said.

I theorized that since Allie hadn’t been doing anything remotely related to the Helios power station, what had happened to her had probably been a random event. He nodded, but didn’t actually say anything.

“So: What’s a moonpool?”

“It’s an old engineer’s slang term for the spent fuel storage pool in a nuclear power plant. A power reactor doesn’t consume all of its fuel before the uranium bundles become inefficient, so we regularly remove spent fuel elements and transfer them to a deep pool within a containment structure for storage. Right after a refueling event, the rods are really hot, physically and radiation-wise, and they make the water glow this incredible, otherworldly blue color. Moonpool.”

“And this water is radioactive?”

“You wouldn’t want to swim in it,” he said. “It’s not so much that the water is radioactive as that the spent fuel assemblies are. Now, if one or more of those assemblies is a leaker, and particles of radioactive material get loose in the water, then the water is, for all practical purposes, radioactive.”

“But they’re not supposed to be leaking, right?”

He shrugged. “Metallurgy mutates in the presence of an ongoing, long-term fission reaction. The actual uranium fuel is cladded, but the fission reaction can sometimes burn holes or weak spots in the cladding. That’s why the moonpool is forty-five feet deep.”

“And if they do leak, the water could be hot enough to do the kind of damage the ME was talking about?”

“Not if you’re just standing next to the moonpool. But if you ingested it? Oh, yes, easily.”

“Look, Ari,” I said. “You don’t know me or my people. None of us is qualified to snoop around a nuclear power plant, and with the feds in it, we’d inevitably bump up against each other. In my experience, they don’t play well with others. I think we’re gonna pass.”

He nodded. He was visibly disappointed, but perhaps not surprised. “Okay,” he said. “It was worth a shot. I can tell you that you may never find out what happened to your associate, though.”

“Meaning the feds’ll clamp a lid on this and weld it shut?”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ll know that’s what’s happening when a special agent brings you some security forms to sign, where you promise not to divulge any piece of this in the interests of national security, homeland defense, and apple pie.”

“What if I decide to just decline to sign?”

He smiled at me. “You’re licensed by the state government, right?” he said. “Who do you think they check with before issuing those kinds of licenses?”

Point taken, I thought. “What exactly would you want us to do?”

“Let’s wait for the current shitstorm to settle down,” he said. “Then let’s talk again.”

I walked Ari out to his car, said good night, had dinner, and then went for a stroll down the riverwalk toward the center of town. The evening was cool and clear, and the boardwalk was empty. The Cape Fear River was running strong as the tide went out, tugging audibly at pilings and coiling up clumps of trash in small whirlpools along the banks. The buoys out in the channel leaned toward the Atlantic Ocean as if they wanted to escape. The few tourist joints down at the base of Market Street still operating during the off-season were doing a desultory business, with overdressed seating hostesses standing by their patio rostrums, smiling longingly at me as I ambled past all those empty al fresco tables.

I became aware of the three guys who had started following me. They’d appeared in my wake about the time I passed the Cape Fear Serpentarium. Since I couldn’t be sure they were following me and not just out for an after-dinner walk of their own, I turned left into the next street and walked uphill, away from the river. At the next corner I turned left again onto Front Street and headed back toward the center of the tourist district. They kept going along the riverwalk and went out of sight when I made that left on Front. I went four or five blocks, made one more left, and walked back down toward the river, where, lo and behold, there they were again, this time standing on the boardwalk, patently admiring the battleship across the river. They were fit men, dressed in khaki trousers, ball caps, sneakers, and dark windbreakers. They looked like a security detail whose protectee had dismissed them for the night. Or maybe not.