Алистер Маклин - Goodbye California

For once, and rarely for him, he looked ill at ease. Ryder produced a crumpled packet of his favoured Gauloises, lit a forbidden cigarette – Mahler’s aversion to wine, women, song and tobacco was almost pathological – and helped him out.

‘Something wrong at San Ruffino, then?’

Mahler looked at him in sharp suspicion. ‘How do you know? Who told you?’

‘So it’s true. Nobody told me. We haven’t committed any violations of the law recently. At least, my son hasn’t. Me, I don’t remember.’

Mahler allowed acidity to overcome his unease. ‘You surprise me.’

‘First time the two of us have ever been called in here together. We have a couple of things in common. First, we’re father and son, which is no concern of the police department. Second, my wife – Jeff’s mother – is employed at the nuclear reactor plant in San Ruffino. There hasn’t been an accident there or the whole town would have known in minutes. An armed break-in, perhaps?’

‘Yes.’ Mahler’s tone was almost grudging. He hadn’t relished the role of being the bearer of bad news, but a man doesn’t like having his lines taken from him.

‘Who’s surprised?’ Ryder was very matter of fact. For any sign of reaction he showed Mahler could well have remarked that it looked as if it might rain soon. ‘Security up there is lousy. I filed a report on it. Remember?’

‘Which was duly turned over to the proper authorities. Power plant security is not police business. That’s IAEA’s responsibility.’ He was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, one of the responsibilities of which was to supervise the safeguard system for the protection of power plants, specifically against the theft of nuclear fuels.

‘God’s sake!’ Not only had Jeff failed to inherit his father’s physical characteristics, he was also noticeably lacking in his parent’s massive calm. ‘Let’s get our priorities right. Lieutenant Mahler. My mother. Is she all right?’

‘I think so. Let’s say I have no reason to think otherwise.’

‘What the hell is that meant to mean?’

Mahler’s features tightened into the preliminary for a reprimand but Sergeant Ryder got in first. ‘Abduction?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Kidnap?’ Jeff stared his disbelief. ‘Kidnap? Mother is the director’s secretary. She doesn’t know a damn thing about what goes on there. She’s not even security classified.’

‘True. But remember she was picked for the job; she didn’t apply. Cops’ wives are supposed to be like Caesar’s wife – beyond suspicion.’

‘But why pick on her?’

‘They didn’t just pick on her. They took about six others, or so I gather: the deputy director, deputy security chief, a secretary and a control room operator. More importantly – although not, of course, from your point of view – they took two visiting university professors. Both are highly qualified specialists in nuclear physics.’

Ryder said: ‘That makes five nuclear scientists to have disappeared in the past two months.’

‘Five it is.’ Mahler looked acutely unhappy.

Ryder said: ‘Where did those two scientists come from?’

‘San Diego and UCLA, I believe. Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know. It may be too late already.’

‘What’s that meant to mean, Sergeant?’

‘It means that if those two men have families they should be under immediate police guard.’ Mahler, Ryder could see, wasn’t quite with him so he went on: ‘If those two men have been kidnapped then it’s with a special purpose in mind. Their co-operation will be required. Wouldn’t you co-operate a damn sight faster if you saw someone with a pair of pliers removing your wife’s fingernails one by one?’

Possibly because he didn’t have a wife the thought had clearly not occurred to Lieutenant Mahler, but, then, thinking was not his forte. To his credit, once the thought had been implanted he wasted no time. He spent the next two minutes on the telephone.

Jeff was grim-faced, edgy, his voice soft but urgent. ‘Let’s get out there fast.’

‘Easy. Don’t go off half-cocked. The time for hurry is past. It may come again but right now it’s not going to help any.’

They waited in silence until Mahler replaced his phone. Ryder said: ‘Who reported the break-in?’

‘Ferguson. Security chief. Day off, but his house is wired into the San Ruffino alarm system. He came straight down.’

‘He did what? Ferguson lives thirty miles out in the hills in the back of nowhere. Why didn’t he use his phone?’

‘His phone had been cut, that’s why.’

‘But he has a police band car radio–’

‘That had been attended to also. So had the only three public phone boxes on the way in. One was at a garage – owner and his mechanic had been locked up.’

‘But there’s an alarm link to this office.’

‘There was.’

‘An inside job?’

‘Look, Ferguson called only two minutes after he had arrived there.’

‘Anybody hurt?’

‘No violence. All the staff locked up in the same room.’

‘The sixty-four-million-dollar question.’

‘Theft of nuclear fuel? That’ll take time to establish, according to Ferguson.’

‘You going out there?’

‘I’m expecting company.’ Mahler looked unhappy.

‘I’ll bet you are. Who’s out there now?’

‘Parker and Davidson.’

‘We’d like to go out and join them.’

Mahler hesitated, still unhappy. He said, defensively: ‘What do you expect to find that they won’t? They’re good detectives. You’ve said so yourself.’

‘Four pairs of eyes are better than two. And because she’s my wife and Jeff’s mother and we know how she might have behaved and reacted we might be able to pick up something that Parker and Davidson might miss.’

Mahler, his chin in the heels of his hands, gazed morosely at his desk. Whatever decision he took the chances were high that his superiors would say it was the wrong one. He compromised by saying nothing. At a nod from Ryder both men left the room.

The evening was fine and clear and windless, and a setting sun was laying a path of burnished gold across the Pacific as Ryder and his son drove through the main gates of San Ruffino. The nuclear station was built on the very edge of the San Ruffino cove – like all such stations it required an immense amount of water, some 1,800,000 gallons of sea-water a minute, to cool the reactor cores down to their optimum operating temperatures: no domestic utility supply could hope to cope with the tiniest fraction of this amount.

The two massive, gleamingly-white and domed containment structures that housed the reactor cores were at once beautiful – in the pure simplicity of their external design – but sinister and threatening; if one chose to view them that way: they were certainly awe-inspiring. Each was about the height of a twenty-five-storey building with a diameter of about 150 feet. The three-and-a-half-feet-thick concrete walls were hugely reinforced by the largest steel bars in the United States. Between those containment structures – which also held the four steam generators that produced the actual electricity – was a squat and undeniably ugly building of absolutely no architectural merit. This was the Turbine Generator Building, which, apart from its two turbo-generators, also housed two condensers and two sea-water evaporators.

On the seaward side of those buildings was the inaptly named ‘auxiliary building’, a six-storey structure, some 240 feet in length, which held the control centres for both reactor units, the monitoring and instrumentation centres and the vastly complicated control system which ensured the plant’s safe operation and public protection.