P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“Can do,” I said, “but first I need to check on Tony Martinelli and Pardee Bell. Can you guys spare me a couple of hours, and then I’ll come over?”

That seemed to work for them, and they left. Missed-it had her notebook out as she went through the door, writing furiously as Creeps dictated something to her.

“That was you, called in the warning last night?” an older man sitting nearby asked. The pair of pagers on his belt and a small radio on the table suggested he was an EMT. He had the look of a man who needed more sleep.

“Yep, that was me,” I said. “I’m sorry for all the uproar that must have caused, but I figured better safe than sorry. Did that big siren mean what I thought it did?”

Several heads were nodding. “Everybody goes inside and stays inside,” another man recited. “Close all the windows. Bring in the pets. Turn on the weather radios and wait for instructions. Don’t go outside until that siren stops.”

“Don’t forget the last part,” someone said.

“Oh, yeah,” the older guy said. “If the siren goes steady, then go into an interior room, sit down on the floor, put your head between your knees, and-”

“Kiss your ass good-bye!” the rest of the crowd shouted in unison.

“Well, y’all dodged a bullet last night,” I said. “The first thing that happened was a diversion. The real attack was on the reactor control systems. But they got some warning, too.”

It was clear I could have told my tale several times over, but I decided it was time to go. When I tried to pay my bill, however, the pastry guy said it was on the house. I thanked him and went outside. Out of habit, I was still looking around for the mutts, but now there was just some local traffic out on Main pushing along under another clear, cool November day on the Carolina coast. I looked for my Suburban and then realized it was still parked over in the woods next to the outlet canal. I guess I knew that; I was more worn out than I’d known. I started walking.

When I got back to the house, I found Sergeant McMichaels sitting on the front porch, watching a dozen seagulls harass some beachcombers across the street. His police cruiser was parked out front. He might have been asleep when I started up the walkway; he looked like he could use it, too. There was a plastic bottle of drinking water sitting on the porch table next to him, and my Suburban was parked in front of his cruiser.

I thanked him for retrieving my ride, and then got to tell my story again, this time answering some of the questions I’d ducked out on in the deli. Then he told me his side of it, of receiving my warning and trying to verify it through the Helios control center, only to be told by some very unhappy woman that their instrumentation showed no problems at the moonpool.

“Then it was that I had to make something of a judgment call,” he said. “You’ve seen those concentric rings on all the maps? There is a city- and county-wide alert system and also preplanned evacuation routes in place, all because of Helios. One call can put both systems in motion.”

“You made that call?”

“I did,” he said. “It’s the one time you don’t have to say anything twice. The threat of radiation concentrates the mind wonderfully, you know. Of course, the county managers all wanted to know my source, and my source’s credibility.”

“That must have been the hard part,” I said.

He smiled. “Not that hard,” he said. “Everyone admired those German shepherds of yours. It’s a small enough town, when it comes right down to it. We may love our power plant, but many of us work there, too, and it frightens us sometimes.”

“Hostages to the dragon.”

He nodded at the bottle of water. “That’s hot,” he said. “We had no real sampling equipment, so I dumped out the good water, took a sample off the water tower manifold nearest the plant. The EMTs brought a dosimeter around. Pegged right off the scale, it did.”

“Then you shouldn’t be driving around with that,” I said.

“It was a lab meter,” he replied. “You’d have to drink it to hurt yourself. Or so the Helios people told us.”

“But they wouldn’t take it with them, would they,” I said.

He frowned. “No, they would not, actually.”

“Just like Allie Gardner,” I said. “You were closer to real catastrophe than you knew, I think. I don’t believe Trask ever intended to do widespread harm. His ally, that left-wing nutcase, was way ahead of him.”

“And this is the same left-wing nutcase whom you helped to escape from the alleged DHS detention center?” he asked slyly.

“Other way around, Sergeant,” I said. “She made it possible for me to get out of there. She had the magic card that got us out of our rooms and into the basement.”

“And what is her problem with this great country?”

I told him what Mary Ellen had told me. “To hear her side of it, we’re becoming Nazi Germany. She, of course, is nothing more than a civic activist exercising her First Amendment rights. Mainly with a computer. Think Freedom of Information Act on digital steroids. But when they came to the boat for her, I wondered if there wasn’t more to it.”

“And, of course, it was Trask and his some of his service buddies who took her, not DHS.”

I nodded. “Had to be, although one of them was the Marine major who ran the ‘alleged’ detention center. He did warn me, actually, about Mad Moira. I’d assumed she was working for Trask. It appears I had that backwards. That’s what I get for making assumptions.”

“Surely you know the old saying.”

“By heart. Look: I need to find out where Tony Martinelli is and how my other investigator, Pardee Bell, is doing over at County.”

“I can help with part of that,” he said. “Mr. Martinelli, I’ve been told, ended up at New Hanover County Hospital for twenty-four hours of observation, ostensibly for radiation exposure. Apparently, he didn’t care for it very much and checked himself out. My spies tell me he’s at the Hilton in Wilmington. Your Mr. Bell I don’t know about.”

“Ari Quartermain?”

“Ah,” he said. “Not so good, there. He suffered a heart attack as a result of his exertions. He’s been transported to Duke, upstate. Touch and go there, I’m told.”

“I’m not too surprised; he was under serious stress even before Trask grabbed him. How about that Dr. Thomason?”

McMichaels shook his head. “In the woods. Deep in the woods. Not glowing, but close.”

“There’s a loose end there,” I said. “Dr. Thomason was connected to the case that brought me down here in the first place. My associate, Allie Gardner? Trask told me that Thomason killed her with a bottle of radioactive water. Trask found out somehow and blackmailed Thomason into helping him.”

“Did he now,” McMichaels said, taking out a notebook.

I told him about my strange conversation with Allie’s sister, and the fact that the Helios logs had revealed a Thomason visiting a Thomason. He said he’d inform the Wilmington police. I told him to talk to Detective Bernie Price in homicide.

“And the plant?” I asked. “How far did she get?”

“My niece’s husband, Bobby, works on the reactor side,” he said. “The hacker didn’t have a clue as to how the RCS worked, but was able to enter commands. They were in the process of shutting both reactors down when your warning came in. Once they understood the problem, they used a manual system and scrammed them both, and that was that.”

“But if it had been a knowledgeable hacker…”

“Oh, yes. Bobby said that a knowledgeable intruder with that kind of access would have crept into the system instead of barging in. They could have made it very much worse, and left the control people with dangerously limited options.”