The Moonpool

WILMINGTON

I met with Sergeant Price the next day right at lunchtime. We went down the street to get a sandwich, and then Price drove us east to New Hanover Regional Hospital, where the Wilmington city morgue was collocated. We checked in at the security desk and then began the inevitable wait.

“Face up or TV?” Price asked.

“Has there been an autopsy?”

“No. If there’s gonna be an autopsy they go to Jacksonville or Chapel Hill. This here is just stage one. Our ME takes a look and signs a toe tag. If cause of death is obvious, say, an MVA injury, or a gunshot to the head, then that’s usually it. Otherwise, off they go to the state pathology guys.”

“Okay, face-to-face, then.” I’ve seen a cop’s share of dead people, but since it was Allie, I felt obligated to do this in person, so to speak. Price seemed to understand. He went back to the desk and asked for the viewing room, and then we waited some more until the morgue attendant came to get us.

I made the identification, trying to ignore the stark fact that one of my colleagues was gone. Allie Gardner had never been a beautiful woman, but hers was a familiar and trusted face, and I was grateful not to have to look at the butchery of a pathology examination. She had died with a surprised look on her face, which wasn’t that unusual in my experience, although her mouth looked redder than it should have. I verbalized the ID, and Price nodded to the stone-faced attendant, who rolled the gurney back to the cold storage area.

We went back out to the administrative offices to meet with one of the hospital’s pathologists, who had performed a brief preliminary exam. He was a large black man, late fifties, wearing spotted scrubs and drying his hands on a huge wad of paper towels. His scrubs smelled of preservative fluids and other things best left unmentioned. He introduced himself to Bernie and acknowledged me with a brief nod.

“Based on what I saw of her throat, I think she was poisoned,” he announced. “We’re definitely going to want an autopsy on this one.”

I stared at him in disbelief, and even Price seemed to be surprised. Poison?

The doctor pitched the sodden wad of paper towels into a biohazard trash can. “Only thing I’ve seen like it was a case where a really angry woman poured a can of drain cleaner down her boyfriend’s throat while he was sleeping. Sodium hydroxide. I didn’t scope her, but they won’t have to. I’m guessing there’s severe esophageal burning as well as damage to the stomach lining. I’m talking chemical burns here, not fire.”

“You mean, like acid?” Price asked.

“I don’t have a clue right now as to what it was. I didn’t smell what I smelled with the Drano case, for what that’s worth.”

“Any signs that she was forced to drink poison?” I asked.

“And you are, again?” the doctor said, looking for some kind of ID badge on my shirt besides the visitor’s tag.

“He’s with me,” Price said, leaving it at that.

“O-o-kay,” the pathologist said with a shrug. “No, there was no bruising of the face or lips, and no evident indication of restraint. But an autopsy may contradict that. My job is to see if I can determine an obvious cause of death. If not, she goes upstate. We’ll transport tonight, get results back in a couple of days if they’re not overloaded up there.”

Price took me back downtown, where I retrieved my Suburban and went to check in at the riverside Hilton. Allie’s car had been towed away from the gas station, and I didn’t think it would be worth my while to go see a convenience store bathroom. I decided to call an old friend who had moved to Wilmington, former park ranger and current college professor Mary Ellen Goode. First I had to find her number, so I called the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, known locally as the U, and tried to get her office number. I’d forgotten how much academics, for all their fervently professed individualism, love their bureaucracy. I think I could have driven out there and asked any passing student quicker than it took for a succession of politically correct office persons to finally, grudgingly, part with a phone number and an extension. Which got me voice mail, naturally, but it was Mary Ellen’s lovely voice and it was good to hear. She called back a half hour later.

“Cam,” she said. “What a nice surprise. Are we in danger?”

I chuckled at that. We had met in the Great Smokies National Park during the cat dancers case, and again when I’d helped her sort out an especially nasty assault on one of the park’s ranger probationers. We’d clicked, and pretty hard, but my penchant for attracting violent encounters with violent people had finally overwhelmed her natural sensitivity. Her question was not entirely frivolous.

“Not this time,” I said. “I’m in town on business, but there shouldn’t be any major explosions, leaping panthers, or gunfire for at least, oh, hell, a couple hours or so. How about a drink?”

“I’d love to,” she said. “I’ve got one more seminar. Where are you staying?”

I told her the Hilton, and she said she’d meet me at seven in the riverfront lounge.

Even closing in on the big four-oh, Mary Ellen Goode could still light up a room when she arrived. That’s how I’d remembered her-the lady who lit up the room. Big bright smile, softly pretty face, and an aura of vulnerable femininity that made every male in range want to protect her, or at least lay on hands. But then I took a second look as she crossed to my table. Maybe it was the tight white skirt enclosing shimmering legs good enough to dent the low buzz of conversation in the lounge. Or that direct, lips-parted smile as she arrived at my table and gave me a second to take in the glorious package before I got a big hug. I tried hard not to grin like a schoolboy who’s just scored the head cheerleader’s prom ticket. I think I failed. I assumed she’d gone home to attend to powder and paintwork, because if this was how she looked in the classroom, none of the boys there were going to remember anything at all about environmental science.

Drinks ordered and appreciated, my biggest apprehension was that, once I told her what I was really doing in Wilmington, her enthusiasm at seeing me again would drain right out of those bright blue eyes and the evening would be a bust.

So I lied.

I told her I was in town meeting with the local authorities to make sure our company had all the proper licenses to work in this part of the state should we ever have to. Then I quickly asked her how she liked academia in comparison to being the chief environmental scientist up in the Great Smoky Mountains. She got a wistful look in her eye.

“I can’t deny that I miss it-the mountains, the park, I mean. And most of the rangers.”

“Most of the rangers. Ever hear from Ranger Bob?”

It was an inside joke, and she smiled shyly. “I do believe Ranger Bob got in over his head,” she said, and I laughed out loud. “But at least he made a run,” she continued. “Most of the men I’ve met in academia are-different.”

“Those who can, do…” I began-and then realized I was slinging that nasty little adage at her, too, now that she had gone back to the ivory tower. Except she’d already proved herself more than once on the “doing” side of that equation, and she knew that I knew that. Had she said “most” of the men?

“Well, sort of, at least for the men who went off to college and basically never left. One encounters the occasional ego who equates a big intellect with genuine manliness. You can tell because they talk too much.”

That’s my girl, I thought. Of course, I had the advantage of never having been encumbered with an oversized intellect, myself.

“No hits at all?”

She smiled again. “There’s one guy I’ve been seeing. He’s an oceanic engineer.” She saw my confusion. “That’s a mix of environmental science and undersea engineering,” she said. “He keeps construction companies from running afoul of the various EPAs. How about you-anyone?”

I shook my head. My last really enjoyable time with a woman had been with a seriously go-ahead lady SBI agent whom I’d hoped to entice out of the state womb and into our investigative crew. We’d ended up working the Spider Mountain case, in which Mary Ellen had also been involved. “You remember Carrie, of the SBI?”

She gave me an impudent grin. “Unh-hunh,” she said. She was leaning back in her chair now, squaring her shoulders, sipping some wine, and doing something with her legs that made a guy at the next table slop beer down his front.

“Stop that,” I said.

“You were telling me about Carrie of the SBI?” she said, ignoring me but allowing that sexy smile to stay on her face.

“Well,” I said, clearing my throat, “I offered her a job with H amp;S, but she got a better offer from the SBI. I think they were afraid that she’d sue them or something after that mess on Spider Mountain.”

“So she did the smart thing.”

“She did. And now I’m all alone, sad, depressed, picked on, and I don’t know what-all I’m ever gonna do.”

“And Frick and Frack?” she asked, still looking right at me. I began to feel a little bit like that proverbial deer in the headlights. They were lovely headlights, but she appeared to be a woman with some loving in mind. I was hugely flattered, while having a tiny little problem concentrating on the conversation.

“Fuzzy, smelly, barking too much, shedding, lazy. The usual. Frack’s getting older, slowing down a bit. Frick is Frick.”

“They’re not with you this trip?”

She knew I normally never went anywhere without my two shepherds. Keeping up the legend, I told her this wasn’t an operational outing, so I’d left them home this time.

“Now I feel much safer,” she said. “No shepherds, no bad guys.” More body language, with lots of independent movement. I realized I’d finished my wine. I don’t even much like wine.

“You need to refresh that?” She indicated my empty wineglass. Then she cocked her head. “Or is there somewhere more private? Where we could… talk?”

I caught my breath. She was doing what nice girls are never supposed to do: looking straight into my eyes and communicating on the limbic channel. I couldn’t really find my voice, so I just nodded, slowly, and pushed back my chair. She drained her glass, stood up, and smoothed out her skirt, looking away at nothing while she did it but once again creating a cone of bumbled male conversations in the immediate vicinity. The girl was on fire, and every hetero man within range was hoping I’d just fall over and die so he might come to her rescue. What little female talent there was in the lounge was shooting daggers.

I was so entranced I forgot to pay my tab, but, hell, they knew where I was staying.

I’d come down to Wilmington on short notice, so the only thing available had been one of the expensive top-floor suites. We sat out on the river balcony and enjoyed some more wine. It was actually a bit cold to be sitting out there, but neither of us had seemed to notice. What I had noticed was that Mary Ellen Goode was a genuine damsel in distress. Physical distress. Horns so long she was having to go through doors sideways. I was in pretty good shape for a man of my advancing years, with daily workouts at the Triboro police gym, ten-mile runs every other evening with the shepherds, and a diet that emphasized red meat for protein and Scotch for carbs.

She, on the other hand, led a semi-sedentary life as an assistant professor of environmental science, whose only concession to physical exercise was a three-mile walk down city sidewalks to and from her apartment. And still she wore my delighted ass right out, coming at our lovemaking with an urgency and desperate need that damned near flattened me in the worst possible context of that expression. We’d approached intimacy in our previous connections, but we’d never actually gone to bed. I should have tried a whole lot harder and a whole lot sooner. I did have the sense not to talk.

Afterward I ordered up a room service dinner for two and we went back out onto the balcony. We were wearing those terrycloth bathrobes the Hilton puts in their suites, but she had neglected to close things up. I’d been relieved when our room service waiter turned out to be a sweet young thing who was either oblivious to the layer of lust-scented ozone in the suite or else a really good actor. He hadn’t even looked twice at Mary Ellen in that loose robe. Maybe it was because he was concerned about my respiration rate.

I’d switched to Scotch and was trying not to think about anything while Mary Ellen excused herself and went into the bathroom. Then she was back.

“Ready?” she asked brightly, interrupting my mental drift.

I cowered behind my napkin and tried not to squeak. “Ready?”

“I am so glad you called,” she said, that bright stare back in play. “But it’s been a long dry spell, and, well, you know. Night’s young, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. Not exactly a squeak, but not entirely authoritative, either. Bad guys would not have been impressed.

She gave me a mock look of impatience. “This is a Hilton-the bathtub in there is a hot tub.”

I hadn’t noticed. I’d been distracted. Now she was slipping out of that useless robe, and I was even more distracted. The cold air did amazing things to her superstructure. I waited for sounds of ships colliding out there on the Cape Fear River.

“Tub will take five more minutes,” she announced. “Why don’t you get us some champagne.”

With that she pranced across the balcony and into the living room, heading in the direction of the bathroom. I sat back in my chair and wondered if I could get oxygen with that.

The new and much improved Mary Ellen decamped the next morning at eight, still smiling. I thought about getting up and going for a walk around the tourist district. Getting up I could manage. Walking was out of the question. I went back to sleep instead. A phone call from Bernie Price woke me up around ten.

“We have developments,” he said.

“Developments are good,” I said, wiggling my toes to make sure they’d still work.

“Not always,” he said mysteriously. “I’ll be down to get you in twenty minutes.”

“Make it thirty,” I said.

“What-you hungover?”

“No, just a long night.”

“Lucky you.” He laughed.

“You have no idea,” I said.

This time he drove us to the New Hanover County medical examiner’s offices. The ME himself was not available, and since he hadn’t been willing to tell Price what the developments were over the telephone, we remained in the mushroom mode while they rustled up a substitute.

Price had given me a long once-over when I got into his unmarked Crown Vic. “Mmm-hnnh” was all he said.

“Jealousy doesn’t become you,” I replied.

“Good thing we’re not walking to the lab,” he said.

“I can walk just fine,” I said.

“You squeak pretty good, too.”

We finally met with one of the assistant medical examiners, a visibly agitated, middle-aged black woman wearing a doctor’s white coat and radiating a disapproving attitude. She swept us into a tiny conference room and asked Price to close the door.

“Who’s this?” she asked him, pointing at me with her chin.

“Closest thing to next of kin and also the DOA’s employer,” Price said. “He’s a retired police lieutenant. What’s the big deal here?”

The doctor thought about it for a moment, looked me over belligerently, but then apparently consented to my remaining in the room.

“The big deal,” she said, “is that your College Road DOA turned out to be highly radioactive.”

I saw Price frown, as if he were confused. “Radioactive” is a term cops sometimes use to describe another cop who has sufficiently pissed off the brass that all the other cops begin keeping their distance. Then I realized she meant literally radioactive.

It turned out that they’d sent Allie’s remains to the state autopsy facilities in Jacksonville, where the requisite cutting and gutting had been duly conducted. When the remains were rolled by the nuclear medicine office on their way to cold storage, three separate radiation monitors had gone off simultaneously. The people in the nuclear meds office had started tearing the place up looking for the problem when the monitors suddenly went silent again-which implied that the highly radioactive something had gone by and was no longer in range.

They caught up with the morgue attendant in the hallway and had him roll his draped gurney back down the corridor. All the alarms went off again. When they explained what that meant to the attendant, the attendant went off. He’d abandoned said gurney and beat feet down the hall, at which point the entire facility had gone to general quarters. The feds had been summoned, and there were lots of questions flying around and apparently lots more inbound.

“You said they did the autopsy,” Price said calmly. Being the good bureaucrat that he was, Jacksonville being in a state of pandemonium wasn’t necessarily his problem. “Do they have an opinion?”

“An opinion?” she repeated, almost shouting. “Yeah, they have an opinion, Detective. Severe radiation poisoning. She apparently drank something that was highly radioactive.”

“Literally radioactive?” I asked.

“There’s a damn echo in here,” she snorted. “Whatever it was, it was hot enough to burn the bejesus out of her innards. Mouth, esophagus, trachea, heart, lungs, stomach-the works. First-class case of radiation poisoning. The lab people up there are beside themselves, and, of course, the whole damn world wants to know where it came from.”

“Beats me,” Price said equably. “But I guess we do have ourselves a homicide.”

I thought she was going to brain him, so I intervened. I explained what Allie had been doing in Wilmington, and that there was no plausible link between a pending divorce case and radiation poisoning.

“That all makes sense to me,” she said, “but inquiring federal minds are going to explore that notion in some detail. So I’d recommend you stick around here in Wilmington, Mr. Ex-police-lieutenant. And now I need to speak to the detective sergeant here in private, if you please.”

Price came out a few minutes later and shook his head. He put his finger to his lips until we were in the elevator. “Full-scale Lebanese goat-grab spooling up in the ME circles,” he said as we rode down. “Jacksonville is yelling at New Hanover for sending up a radioactive DOA, and New Hanover is yelling back that they had no way of knowing, et cetera, et cetera. You sure you’ve told me everything you know about this?”

“All I know is that Allie is dead. How she came in contact with radiation is beyond me. So now what?”

“The state chief medical examiner’s called in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC has called the Bureau. The federal host is inbound, as we speak.”

We went out to his car and climbed in. He sighed and looked around the peaceful parking lot, which we both knew wasn’t going to stay that way much longer.

“She give you any details?” I asked. “Like radioactive what?”

Price said no. She had told him they wouldn’t know the “what” until a lab very different from the state facility reviewed the case and the corpse. “She mostly wanted to vent, and I was the nearest cop. We’re the ones who sent the body to New Hanover, so somehow, this is all our fault.”

“That sounds familiar,” I said. What the fuck, Allie, I thought again. I’d felt like washing my own hands on the way out.

“So where do they sell radioactive fluids in beautiful downtown Wilmington, North Carolina?” I asked as we drove out of the lot and headed back to the city police building.

“We’ve got the Helios nuclear power plant over next door in Brunswick County,” Price said. “Did your legal lovebirds have any connection to the nuke industry?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “All lawyers look alike to me, and, besides, Allie wasn’t taking pictures of them at work.”

Price’s cell phone rang as we stopped for a red light. He picked up, listened for a minute, grunted an okay, and hung up. “They’re he-e-e-re,” he chanted. “Boss wants me back downtown ASAP. You really want to dance in this cow pie?”

“No way,” I said. “Gave that shit up when I retired.”

“Retirement’s starting to look real good.” Price sighed longingly.

Ten minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot. “I’ll let you out here, if that’s okay. You stayin’ overnight?”

I grinned at him. “As in, don’t leave town, there, stranger?”

Price shrugged. “Naw, not really. The federal suits will want to talk to you at some point, but otherwise…”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, immediately thinking of Mary Ellen Goode. “I’ll stay over another night. Anything I can do to help, you holler. They going to be able to keep this out of the media?”

Price shook his head. “Probably not,” he predicted. “Specially if somebody ties that radiation shit to the power plant over in Brunswick County. Which would be a real surprise-those folks have damned good security, and the guy who runs it is downright scary. What’s your cell number?”

I gave it to him, and he promised to stay in touch.

Two hours later, the phone at my bedside rang. I picked up. It was Bernie Price again.

“Lieutenant Richter?” Price said, speaking formally, which told me immediately he was probably calling from a room full of feds and other undesirables.

“Having fun yet, Bernie?” I asked.

“Not at all, sir,” Price said, without an audible hint of humor. “Would you be available to meet with two special agents from the FBI this afternoon?”

I looked at my watch. There wasn’t all that much left of the afternoon. “I’ll be in the hotel lounge in an hour,” I said. “Got names?”

“Special Agents Caswell and Myers,” Bernie said.

I smiled. Creeps Caswell and Missed-it Mary Myers. This could be interesting.

“I can’t wait,” I said. “I’ll fill you in after I see them.”

“Probably not, sir,” Bernie said, and then paused. I got the message.

“You’ve been told to sever all connections with itinerant ex-cops meddling in city business, have you?”

“That’s absolutely correct, sir,” he said.

“Gosh, Bernie, this really hurts my feelings. But maybe when all the dust settles, I can buy you a beer, hunh?”

“Count on it, sir,” he said. He sounded relieved that he hadn’t had to spell it out for me.

I thanked him, hung up, and went out onto the balcony to do some stretch exercises and try to wake up. For some reason I suddenly missed my shepherds. Then, looking at the other chair, I realized I also missed Allie. Had she been the victim of some random act of God, or had someone done this to her? The angry pathologist had used the word “ingested.” So she drank radioactive… what?

The Hilton’s lounge was spacious, modernistic, and relatively empty. There was a nice view of the Cape Fear River as the sun started down. The dark gray bulk of the battleship USS North Carolina, parked now as a World War II museum across the river, filled up the downstream windows. I got myself a beer and took a corner booth away from the main bar. The two FBI agents showed up fifteen minutes later, and I smiled when I caught the bartender staring at them.

I had encountered Special Agent Caswell and his partner only once during my active-duty career, and he had provoked the same reaction from me. He was a supervisory special agent, now in his late forties, with a spare, six-foot-six, permanently stooped frame. He had long, intensely black hair plastered straight back from his forehead, hooded eyes, an elongated, bony nose, large teeth, the original lantern jaw, and undertaker’s white hands and fingers, which seemed to protrude unnaturally from his suit jacket. He was a man who moved silently, and he tended to rub those porcelain hands together a lot. He had a soft, whispery, almost unctuous voice, reinforcing the funeral director impression. I didn’t know who’d given him his unofficial nickname, but I suspect it was one of the female agents over in the Bureau’s Raleigh field office. He was reputed to be a challenging interrogator, who, as I recalled, specialized in science and technology crimes.

Special Agent Mary Myers had apparently come to the Bureau with a high creep threshold if she was still partnered up with Brother Caswell. She was a well-fed, late-thirty-something blonde, five-seven or -eight, with watery blue eyes, a bunny rabbit nose, and round, horned-rim Wall Street eyeglasses, which framed a permanently puzzled and near-sighted expression on her otherwise unremarkable face. I figured she probably had an accounting degree and was one of those tenacious detail miners the Bureau used in complex white-collar financial crimes. Her Missed-it Mary nickname had arisen in the course of a stakeout incident during her first and only assignment as a street agent. Mary thought she’d been fired upon from a parked car and had emptied her service weapon in return, hitting three other parked cars and managing to set two of them on fire, while leaving the suspect vehicle untouched and her fellow agents watching in awe from beneath their own vehicle.

“Special Agents,” I said as they approached my corner table. I had not actually worked with either of them before, so they introduced themselves, flashed the appropriate picture-plastic, and sat down.

“So, how can I help you?” I asked, addressing myself to Caswell. Even sitting, he seemed to tower over me and the table, and I’m six-foot-plus. He began rubbing those undertaker hands together.

“We understand,” he began, “that Ms. Gardner was an employee of your company and that she was pursuing evidence of marital infidelity, involving one or more officers of the court?”

“I think just two philandering lawyers, actually,” I said. I saw Special Agent Myers discreetly opening her notebook. “I’ve gathered up the details of Allie’s investigation for you right here,” I continued, and handed a written summary to Myers so she wouldn’t have to take so many notes. She looked at it warily and then handed it to Caswell, who fished out some Silas Marner glasses and scanned it for a moment.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Richter,” he said, folding the two fax pages lengthwise and sliding them into his suit jacket pocket. “It is ‘mister’ these days, am I correct?”

“Absolutely,” I said, knowing full well that Caswell was telling me I’d been vetted before they came to see me. I had some history with the Raleigh Field Office, not all of it pleasant. “I haven’t been in law enforcement since I declined to testify in the cat dancers case.”

“Yes-s-s.” Caswell nodded, a bit startled that I would bring that up. “I do remember that case, but not why, exactly, you declined to testify.”

“Because I couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore,” I said. “And I had a civilian to protect as well. So: Where’d the hot stuff come from?”

Myers rolled superior eyes and looked away. Caswell gave me a patient if somewhat disappointed smile. “You know how this works, Mr. Richter. We ask the questions. You do your civic duty and help your Bureau. Or perhaps not, I suppose, in your case.”

It was my turn to smile. “It’s not my Bureau, Special Agent,” I said. “But nothing’s ever forgotten, is it.”

“Almost never, Mr. Richter. You’re quite right there. Quite right. Now, back to Ms. Gardner: Did she report anything at all which might have a bearing on how she died?”

I decided to quit sparring. “Nothing at all. As I told Detective Price, the case was entirely routine, to the point where Allie said she was coming back early. She had the goods, and that was it.”

“May we have access to ‘the goods,’ as you put it?”

“If our client is willing, we certainly won’t get in your way. But I should warn you, the client’s a Georgia redhead, and she’s really pissed off. In Georgia, that’s usually a legitimate pretext for gunfire.”

“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Richter,” Creeps said, peering at me over those antique specs. “As you may remember, we’re always extremely grateful for advice. And even if the client is not willing, may we please have her name and address?”

“Sure,” I said. I knew perfectly well that they could get that information, one way or another.

Caswell turned formally to his partner. “Special Agent Myers?”

“Do you have any idea why Ms. Gardner was at that particular gas station?” Mary asked.

“Getting gas?” I said. Her eyes narrowed. “Or do you mean her being over in the university district?”

“The latter, Mr. Richter,” she said patiently, pen and notebook poised.

I’d wondered about that, too. “Two possibilities, I think. She was just out for a drive, saw that she’d need to get gas before coming back the next morning, and hit the first station she came to. Or.”

“Or?”

“Or, all of the above and then whatever she drank got to her before she could get back to the hotel. She felt ill and found the nearest bathroom. I never did hear a time of death.”

“Where would you have heard a time of death?” Myers asked.

“At the county morgue?” I said.

“You were at the morgue?”

“I was. I was asked to make the ID for Detective Price. Talked to an assistant ME. Or rather, listened to one.”

Myers looked at Caswell. It was obvious she thought my talking to the assistant ME represented a grave breach of some federal procedure or another. Caswell nodded, rubbed his hands, and changed the subject.

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm Ms. Gardner?” he asked. Myers, back in her box, subsided and resumed taking notes.

“Her ex would be a long shot,” I said. “He left her for another woman, but that was eight, maybe nine years ago. She divorced him and then whacked him financially, at least as she tells it. Told it. But Allie was a pretty tough lady, so that’s not really likely after all this time.”

“And at work? At your, um, company? Everything okay there?”

I grinned at him. “It’s a real company, Special Agent. Licensed, bonded, the whole nine yards. We can even carry guns if we want to. And, yes, indeed, Allie was fine at work. Lots of boys and girls having trouble keeping their pants on, apparently.”

Myers sniffed, as if the notion of people without their pants on disagreed with her. I got the impression that lots of things probably disagreed with Special Agent Mary Myers, and that she always kept her pants on. I wondered if she even knew what her unofficial handle was.

“Was she personally involved with anyone that you know of?” Caswell asked.

I shook my head and had a sip of beer. I hadn’t bothered to offer the agents a drink. Bureau people are always on duty. Always. It’s one of the things that makes them formidable. “I think the both of them-Allie and Mel Lindsay, her partner in the firm-were tired of men and their bullshit.”

Myers blinked. Actually, she almost smiled at that. The lounge was starting to fill up.

“A relationship there?” Caswell asked.

“No, just work. They often traveled together. They were lethally thorough and enjoyed their specialty. Mel was seeing some guy for a while, but then discovered that he was married, so that ended abruptly. But, no, they were not a pair in that sense.”

Caswell almost looked disappointed. Creeps indeed, I thought. He looked at Myers and raised his eyebrows. She closed her notebook. We were done. I exchanged cards with Caswell. He asked me to call or e-mail him if I thought of anything else, and reminded me he needed Allie’s client’s name and address. He started to push back his chair and then stopped.

“You’re an investigator by trade, Mr. Richter,” he said. “Please tell me you are going to stay out of this one, correct?”

I looked at him. That was a question and a warning. “Sure, Special Agent,” I said, perhaps sounding more casual than I felt. “With you guys on the case, who needs me, right?”

“Precisely the right answer, Mr. Richter,” he said with a charming if patronizing smile. “Don’t disappoint your Bureau. We’ll be in touch.”

I signaled the college-student waiter for another beer. He brought it and asked me who the weird-looking dude was. I told him that the weird-looking dude was from the Darkside, and he nodded knowingly. Awesome, he said. Totally, I replied. We had communicated, and life was, like, good. So was the beer.

I put Allie’s death out of my mind for a few minutes and just enjoyed my drink and the sight of the sun going down on the battleship’s dimpled gray hull. The setting sun turned the river into a sheet of bronze, which made everything out there pretty much invisible. My inner self was still somewhat aglow from the previous evening with Mary Ellen. We had come so close to physical intimacy in our previous acquaintance that I’d half-expected to be disappointed. Instead, she had been almost intimidating in her need. Naturally, I felt used. Used, abused, and hoping like hell she’d want to do it all again.

Then I remembered something. Allie had said she’d be back the next day after taking care of some personal business. What might that have been? I should have said something to the special agents, but then again, maybe I could tease out a few more facts before I closed that loop.

“Mr. Cameron Richter?” a deep baritone voice inquired over my left shoulder. I looked up. A stocky black man stood next to my table. He was immaculately dressed in a stylish suit, and he was holding a leather-covered notebook across his middle.

“Yes?” I said. I would have stood, but I couldn’t get up without running into him, and he didn’t look like he’d move a whole lot.

“Forgive the intrusion,” he said. “I’m Aristotle Quartermain. May I have a word, please? This concerns the recent misfortune of Ms. Allison Gardner.”

He proffered his hand, and I automatically shook it. He was in his late fifties, and his skin was not just black but blue -black. He had a glistening, oversized bald head and intense owl-like eyes. He was built like a fire hydrant under that six-hundred-dollar suit, not tall as much as broad, and his hand felt like a silk-covered vise. He sat down carefully opposite me and put his notebook on the table.

“You have the advantage of me, Mr. Quartermain,” I said. “A drink?”

“That would be very nice, Mr. Richter. I believe I have one coming.”

“That sure of yourself?”

“It’s a fault, Mr. Richter. I’m the chief of technical security at the Helios nuclear power station. I’m afraid it’s gone to my head.”

The same waiter brought Quartermain his drink and gave me a conspiratorial look over my guest’s shoulder. The Darkside was everywhere tonight. Then I realized what Quartermain had just announced.

“Ah,” I said.

“Yes,” Quartermain replied, sampling his Scotch. He unzipped the fine-grained leather binder, extracted a neck chain containing his credentials, and slid it across the table. I examined the three plastic badges, each with his picture and the logo of the power company, PrimEnergy, which apparently owned and operated the Helios atomic power station.

“I’m technical security. Another gentleman is physical security. I’m in charge of keeping the nuclear process safe. The other guy is watching for bad guys coming over the moat. Technically, he works for me.”

“Why?”

“Because if our side of the security equation goes south, physical security becomes moot. Nobody will be trying to get in to the power plant under those circumstances, if you get my drift.”

“Got it,” I said. I studied the badges and handed them back. “Those look good, for the moment, anyway.”

“I’ve been at the bar,” he said, retrieving the badges. His fingers were large and impeccably manicured. “I did not want to intrude until the FBI people left. Special Agent Caswell is a sight to behold, is he not.”

“True enough,” I said. I’d decided to let him lead. He knew who I was and why I was in Wilmington, and he knew the Bureau people by name. The pleasant, isn’t-this-a-nice-evening expression melted off his face, and suddenly I was looking at a no-shit security officer. The transformation was dramatic.

“Your associate,” he said, lowering his voice, “was killed by ingesting about a pint of highly radioactive water.”

“How high is high?” I asked.

“High enough to permanently expose twenty-seven plates of X-ray film.” He paused, looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “Twenty-seven plates that were stored fifty feet away from the main analysis room in that lab. She might as well have crawled into an industrial-sized microwave oven, set it on high, and spent the night in there.”

“All this from one bottle of water?”

He leaned back in his chair and it creaked. “We don’t know that, of course. What the container was, I mean. We’re assuming that she drank it thinking it was just water, since there were no indications of coercion. Right now the situation up at the state forensic lab is somewhat-chaotic.”

“I can just imagine,” I said. “And they know this stuff came from the power plant?”

“No, no, they don’t know that. The NRC-that’s the Nuclear Regulatory Commission-is involved, as is, of course, the Bureau. Needless to say, they’re both looking hard at Helios as a possible source.”

“And let me guess, the plant and the company are circling the wagons at warp speed just now.”

He smiled and shook his head. “The company understands their concerns, of course, but the NRC technical people, at least, know that there’s no way radioactive water can come out of that plant and into the community absent a major, and I mean major, accident. Even then, it would appear in the form of water vapor. Not something you could drink. No. Technically, this isn’t possible.”

“And yet…”

“Yes. And yet. The isotopic fingerprints would normally tell the tale, except for the fact that any credible analysis of residual isotopes is going to be obscured by their having gone through human tissue.”

I just looked at him. Isotopic fingerprints? He saw my confusion. “When I was in nuke school,” he said, “the professor would sometimes say something in Greek and we’d all get blank expressions on our faces. Every classroom had a whiteboard or six. In the corner of one of the whiteboards there was always a rectangle with a circle drawn inside it. Inside the circle were the words ‘I believe.’ That was the I-believe button. If the instructor realized that he’d just baffled the entire class, he’d invite us to press the I-believe button and then he’d proceed with the rest of the lecture. Sometimes the problem cleared up, sometimes it didn’t. So: Say, ‘I believe.’ ”

I did. He grinned.

“What’s funny?”

“I was thinking about Special Agent Caswell’s reaction to isotopic fingerprinting. He tried to pretend he knew what it was. So I asked if the Bureau’s laboratory could do some for us. Special Agent Myers made a note to call them. That will be an amusing, if short, discussion.”

“Back to the problem at hand, Mr. Quartermain,” I said. “My associate, as you called her, is in an autopsy drawer. The technical impossibilities aside, I want to know how this happened and why.”

“I apologize,” he said at once. “I didn’t mean to trivialize what’s happened. In fact, that’s why I’ve come to see you. I’m here to offer you a job of work.”

“Me?”

“You and your company. That’s what you people do, correct? Investigations?”

I shifted in my chair. This was going just a bit too fast. “Mr. Quartermain,” I began.

“Please, call me Ari,” he said. His voice was genial enough, but those zero-parallax eyes never left mine.

“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.

I was on the diagonal corner from them when I got to Water Street. I thought about going over to them and commenting on the weather, but then decided to go on back to the hotel, which was only three blocks away. I’d have to cross one relatively dark parking lot and then walk up the flood ramp in front of the lobby, but there were people up there, and it didn’t look like a promising place for a mugging. When I went through the hotel doors and glanced back, I didn’t see anyone following me. Okay, too many late-night TV movies. I stopped at the lobby PC to check my e-mail, then went upstairs.

The corridor on my floor was empty and quiet. There was a room service tray with dirty dishes in front of the suite diagonally across from mine, but no other signs that there were humans about. I keyed open my door, flipped on the light.

And there they were.

One was standing by the window with his back to me, looking out at the river. A second was sitting at the desk chair, facing me, and holding a large black semiautomatic out at arm’s length, pointed at my stomach. The third, older than the other two, was sitting in the other chair, hands behind his head, and grinning at the expression on my face. I stopped short, keeping the door open, mentally kicking myself for not having the shepherds with me.

“Oh, shut the damn door, Lieutenant,” the older one said. “This is just a social call.”

I thought about shutting it and running, but had not yet looked at the fire escape card to see where the stairs were. There was also the wee matter of that. 45 looking right at me.

Some social call. The young guy with the big black gun was not smiling. Plus, the older one had called me lieutenant.

“C’mon,” he insisted. “We’ve all had dinner, and none of us wants to chase your ass around the hotel. Come in and close the door. Please?”

“Well, since you said please,” I said, putting on the best front I could muster. The guy looking out the window hadn’t turned around, but I knew he was watching me in the reflection of the room lights.

“Thank you very much,” the older guy said. “You’re wondering how we got in here.”

“Question crossed my mind,” I said.

I felt increasingly stupid standing in the little entrance alcove next to the bathroom door. I wondered if there was anyone in the bathroom, or if they’d found my own weapon in the hidden compartment of my toiletries bag. The rest of my stuff didn’t look as if anyone had been through it. “So what’re we here to talk about?”

“Actually, I’m here to talk, and you’re here to listen, if you don’t mind,” the man said. He was about fifty-five, with a hard face, a hatchet nose, and reddish gray hair planed into a flattop haircut. Like the others, he was wearing a windbreaker, khaki trousers, and military boots. There was a small black knife in a pouch on his right boot.

The other guy whose face I could see looked Italian. He was much younger, maybe in his late twenties. He was obviously trying to look like some kind of unblinking, lizard-eyed, hard-boiled young soldato in a crime family. He was succeeding. All three of them were in shape, with flat bellies, big chests, and heavy shoulders under those oversized windbreakers. I wondered how long the young guy could hold that heavy. 45 out at arm’s length like that. My arm was getting tired just watching him do it.

“A lot of that going around tonight,” I said, trying to look more relaxed than I felt. I could not possibly get to my gun before the guy in the chair could do some damage. “First the FBI, then-”

“We know,” the man said, waving his hand dismissively. He had a large gold university ring on his left hand. “Especially, we know Dr. Quartermain. That’s kinda why we’re here, Lieutenant. Dr. Quartermain’s operating way off his patch, talking to a civilian like you.”

“So, what, he’s operating on your patch, perhaps? And who is ‘we’-you got a mouse in your pocket?”

The man gave me a patient, mildly annoyed look that said, I’m not done talking and you’re not done listening. The hoodlum wannabe shifted in his chair, as if waiting for the command to jump up and bite me or something, but that. 45 never wavered. The third man continued to take in the sights out on the river, but he had one hand hanging casually in the folds of his jacket.

“We are the other half of security at the Helios power plant,” he said. “The so-called physical security half. We’re the guys who deal with the Navy SEALs when they run federally sponsored intrusion drills on the plant.”

I guess I was supposed to be impressed, but I was getting tired of standing at the door. I waved my right hand to include everyone in the room. “This is a little extreme for a bunch of rent-a-cops, isn’t it?”

“Ow,” Hatchet-Nose said. “Now you’ve hurt my feelings. But let me make sure the message gets through. You need to do two things: go away, and stop talking to your new best friend, Dr. Aristotle Quartermain.”

“According to Dr. Quartermain, you work for him.”

“Yes, he would probably say that. But security in an atomic power plant is a complex business. Multi-layered, if it’s done right. Lots of need-to-know barriers. The administrative wiring diagram doesn’t always tell the whole tale.”

“Let me get this straight-you’re security contractors at a commercial power plant who’ve followed me, broken into my room, with at least one gun visible, and the reason I shouldn’t break out my cell phone and dial 911 is…?”

“First of all, your cell phone is over there on the desk, and we have the battery. And young Billy here isn’t going to let you go over there and get it or anything else.”

I looked at young Billy, whose arm remained straight out with nary a tremor. That really was impressive.

“Secondly, your ‘going away’ is the operative part. It’s really good advice. We’re sorry for your loss and all that. We don’t know what happened, either, but what we do know is that the bad shit, whatever it was, didn’t come through my perimeter.”

My Bureau, and now my perimeter. “It came through somebody’s perimeter,” I said. “You got a name? Cops’ll want to know.”

He laughed softly. “You’re not going to call the cops, Mr. Richter. Unless you startle young Billy here, nothing’s going to happen. We’re going to leave, and you’re going to pack. Feel free to spend the night, but tomorrow, you’re going back to your fascinating private-eye work in beautiful downtown Triboro, North Carolina.”

“And if I don’t?” I said.

“There will be unpleasant consequences. The array of federal agencies involved in keeping nuclear power plants safe is, let’s see, how shall I put this-legion?”

“Oh,” I said. “Legion. Dozens of inept bureaucracies, tripping over each other while fucking up by the numbers? That legion? When you said unpleasant, I thought you meant Billy the Kid here.”

His semijocular, we’re-all-buddies-in-this-together expression slipped a little. “That can be arranged, too,” he said. “He’s young, but he’s impressive.”

“Holding that. 45 straight out like that for all this time-that’s impressive,” I said. “But I’d guess he needs two other guys for anything personal.”

Billy’s eyes narrowed. I’d hurt some more feelings.

The third man turned around at last. He, too, was lean from top to bottom, in his early forties, with close-cropped blond hair and the face of a Nazi death camp commandant, complete with disturbing pale blue eyes. “You can try me if you’d like,” he said.

“Actually, I prefer girls,” I said. I stepped to one side and held open the door. I saw Billy’s trigger finger, which had been resting alongside the trigger guard, slip into firing position. For some reason, though, I didn’t think he’d shoot. They hadn’t come here to shoot people. This time, anyway.

“Why don’t you clowns just leave?” I said. “And now’d be nice. You’re rent-a-cops, and you have zero authority outside of your contract area. The fact that you’re even here means you probably do have a hole in your so-called perimeter, so why don’t you go work on that instead of bothering Mr. Hilton’s paying guests?”

The older guy sniffed and then got up, zipping up his windbreaker. “Okay, Mr. Richter. We’ll leave. But trust me, you will, too. C’mon, people.”

He walked past me without a second glance, as did the SS officer look-alike. Billy sat in his chair for one second longer than necessary, and then pocketed the. 45 as he got up.

“That must be a relief,” I said. “My arm was getting tired just watching you.”

Billy sauntered by, never taking his eyes off my face. “Later,” he muttered.

“Earlier is better than later,” I said to his back. “That is, if you’re man enough without your ace buddies there. Nighty-night. Kid.”

I closed the door and slid the bolt and chain. I went into the bathroom and checked for my weapon. It was there, but the magazine was gone. So they had found it. I picked up my cell phone, and yes, it felt lighter than before. I picked up each of the two house phones, but neither of them worked, either. Thorough contractors, I’d give them that. If I wanted to squawk, I’d have to leave the room, and I really didn’t want to venture too far from my room just now. The best I could hope for was that Billy would come back to prove he was a man. I decided to prepare for that possibility.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a quiet knock on the door. I knew better than to peek through the little plastic optic. Our homicide crew had once found a drug dealer pinned to his hotel door by an ice pick that had been hammered into his eye through that little piece of plastic.

“Who is it?” I said in a singsong voice.

“It’s later,” a voice replied, and I recognized young Billy. Oh, good.

“Well, Billy,” I said, “you surprise me again. Why don’t you come on in and get your ass kicked.”

I stepped across the alcove, staying underneath the eyehole, removing the chain as I went. Then I crouched in the closet on the other side of the room door and wedged my shoulder against the wall. I unsnapped the dead bolt, and then, putting one foot about in the middle of the door, I reached over and pushed the door handle down.

He did exactly what I expected him to do, which was to kick the door as hard as he could the moment he heard that handle unlatch. If I’d been standing where someone normally stands when he opens a hotel room door, I’d have been hit in the face with the edge of said door and probably knocked unconscious. As it was, I was able to let the door swing halfway in against my cocked leg, and then I sent it back in his direction with the full force of my right leg. The edge caught him in the forehead and knocked him all the way across the hall, blood spurting from his nose and forehead as he slumped, cross-eyed and barely conscious, into a sitting position against the opposite wall, his scrawny ass on the room service tray. I reached up to the closet shelf, picked up the hallway fire extinguisher I’d lifted ten minutes earlier, and flooded his face with dry powder. He hadn’t let go of his . 45, but dropped it now to protect his eyes.

It was a peppy little fire extinguisher. He was still sufficiently stunned that he failed to tuck and roll, and I flat covered his eyes, nose, mouth, and chest with that noxious powder until the spray petered out. Then I threw the empty extinguisher as hard as I could at his right knee, achieving an entirely satisfactory crack and a loud grunt from young Billy. A small cloud of white powder puffed out from his lips when he cried out.

I stepped out into the hallway and retrieved his. 45. It looked a lot like mine, a SIG-Sauer model 220. Better than mine, it had a full magazine. I stepped back into my open doorway and then checked the hall. At the far end, to my left, near the elevator bank, stood the older man, leaning against the wall with his hands in his jacket pockets. He was looking at Billy and shaking his head. If ghosts could get nosebleeds, that’s what Billy looked like.

“Good help is hard to find,” I called down to him.

“Ain’t that the truth,” he said. I closed the door so he could retrieve his semi-wrecked, extremely white bad boy. I kept Billy’s gun.

I sighed as I washed some white powder off my own hands. I was pretty sure I’d get to see Billy again one day, and next time he probably would bring his friends. Then again, so would I.

Right now, however, I thought it best to leave town. Billy had been all noise and testosterone, but those other two guys looked like the real deal. Until I knew more about what the hell was really going on here in Wilmington, I’d probably be safer back home. I decided to take a shower, hit the sack, and go back to Triboro in the morning. Or I could call Mary Ellen Goode. I did that and got an answering machine. I told the machine I’d be back in a week and hoped to get together again.

A week later I surveyed my new digs in the village of Southport, a small but pleasant tourist town situated southeast of Wilmington on the estuary where the Cape Fear River pushes a gazillion gallons of fresh water a day into the Atlantic Ocean. The house itself was a two-story, multi-bedroom affair that rented for obscene sums of money for the five months or so of the summer tourist season and then usually sat empty for the rest of the year. It had spacious wraparound screened porches on both levels and overlooked the river beach and the barrier islands across the Cape Fear estuary. I could see the ferryboat that went over to Fort Fisher ploughing dutifully through a light chop as it approached the landing north of the town. The air smelled of seashore and there was a fine layer of white sand on everything.

I was no longer flying solo, having brought two of my original MCAT team members, Tony Martinelli and Pardee Bell, down from Triboro. Pardee had been one of two black detectives in the MCAT. He was a big guy, two inches taller than I was, who had really enjoyed getting in criminals’ faces, especially black criminals, so he could punk ’em out, as he was fond of saying. Everyone thought Pardee had been brought onto the team to provide some in-house muscle, but he happened to have a degree in computer science from NC State and could do some real damage with a desktop. He was married to a whip-smart trial attorney in Triboro, and he’d lasted for about one week in “retirement” from the sheriff’s office before said lady lawyer told him to go find something useful to do besides cleaning the house twice a day and generally driving her nuts. He’d been a level-headed, highly focused, and very professional deputy sheriff, and we were delighted when he’d called in to join the old crew at H amp;S.

Tony Martinelli, on the other hand, was half-crazy, in the southern sense of that term, which connotes wary respect for the truly eccentric. He was a little guy, maybe five-seven or -eight with the right boots on, but an effective cop because no one, bad guys or good guys, knew quite what he would do next. His specialty on the MCAT had been finding and then following persons of interest. We’d learned early on to intervene if Tony had been on someone’s tail for more than, say, a day or so, because he would get bored with it and then things were likely to go sideways. With jet-black hair, emotive brown eyes, and a puckish grin on his face, he looked like an altar boy who’d been caught trying out the sacramental wine. Women usually fell all over themselves to take him under their wings when he went out to party.

And, of course, now that I was in a house instead of a hotel, my trusty German shepherds were along for the ride. Frick was an American-bred sable bitch who would happily amputate the extremities of any intruder. I was her human, and she declined to share. Frack, the larger and older of the two, was an all-black East German border-guard model. He had a disconcerting habit of sitting down and staring at strangers instead of running around and barking like too many shepherds did. He had amber, lupine eyes, and lots of people were more than willing to believe me when I told them that Frack was really a wolf. As any dog owner knows, deterrence is ninety percent of the battle.

I watched Aristotle Quartermain coming down the ocean-front street in an elderly but shiny black Mercedes, holding a piece of paper on the steering wheel and counting house numbers. He finally looked up and saw me waving. The beachfront road was guarded by parking meters on the beach side of the street, and he found one with some time left on it. We gathered in the kitchen, where the coffeepot was happily making a fresh batch of Tony tar.

I’d briefed the whole H amp;S crew back in Triboro about my visit to Wilmington, cautioning them that the information about radiation poisoning was close-hold, at least for the moment. After a collective expression of shock, none of them knew what to make of it, or what to do with Ari Quartermain’s offer of employment. There was general agreement that I should go back, with help, and see what we could find out about what had really happened to Allie independent of whatever the feds were up to. I had asked Mel Lindsay to see if she could figure out what Allie’s personal business might have been about.

Mel and the office manager had finally managed to unearth a phone number for Allie’s sister, who was indeed a Department of Defense schoolteacher at a joint Turkish-American air base. Mel knew from conversations that Allie’s sister’s first name was Meredith, but she didn’t know her last name. They tried Meredith Gardner, but the DOD school system drew a blank on that. They did have a Meredith Thomason at the base in Turkey, so we gave that a try. I’d made the actual call and got a surprise.

The phone connection wasn’t great, but it quickly became clear that Ms. Thomason wanted nothing to do with the aftermath of Allie’s death. Allie’s decision to become a cop in the first place had never met with the family’s approval, and the fact that she’d come to a bad end came as no surprise. She’d said this with more than a hint of comeuppance in her voice. She was neither interested in nor capable of making final arrangements. Basically, Allie was estranged from her family. She was as on her own in death as apparently she’d been in life.

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, and I surely didn’t understand this woman’s total lack of sympathy. I hadn’t told her precisely what had happened, and was tempted to when she gave me the brush-off. Then she asked me, as Allie’s employers, could we please just “take care of it”? Somewhat appalled, I’d said I would do that and simply hung up on her.

I brought Ari back to the kitchen and introduced him to my crew, both two- and four-legged. There was a big table in the kitchen, so Pardee, Ari, and I plopped there. Tony went upstairs to get something. I offered coffee, but Ari declined when he saw Pardee’s spoon freestanding in his cup.

“So,” he asked, “what changed your mind?”

I told him about the visit from the Helios physical security posse. He frowned when I told him about Billy the Kid.

“Those guys are mostly ex-military,” he said. “Their boss is a retired Army colonel, name of Carl Trask. Nicknamed Snake. He was one of those beret guys-Ranger or Delta Force, something of that ilk. Has been hiring only former military men, and takes himself and his job very seriously.”

“As well he should,” I said. “Talk about a good terrorist target.”

“Not as good as the movies make out, Mr. Richter,” he said. “Still, yes, there is a threat, and when we hear submachine-gun fire in the swamps, Colonel Trask provides a measure of comfort.”

“Say what?” Pardee asked.

“The government runs intrusion drills on the protected area of the station. They’re called force-on-force exercises. The director’s office knows when one’s coming, but, supposedly, they don’t tell Trask. The NRC uses Navy SEALs, or people from the FBI’s hostage rescue team. The rule is, once physical security detects a possible intrusion, Trask alerts the station director, who gives him a code word that tells Trask it’s a drill. Then they hand out the blank ammo and go play cowboys and Indians with their buddies in the tall weeds.”

“What if real bad guys ever penetrated this intrusion exercise schedule?” Tony asked, coming into the kitchen. “Or had some help from the inside?”

I hadn’t realized he’d come back downstairs. Being quiet was one of Tony’s useful skills. He displayed other traits that were not useful but were always exciting.

“That could be very interesting, I suppose,” Ari said.

Tony put a finger to his lips and then spoke very softly. “As interesting as the fact that you were followed here? And that two guys in a PrimEnergy van are pretending to work on a telephone pole while they listen to what’s going on in here?”

There was a moment of silence around the table, and then we all got up to take a peek through the front window curtains. A white utility van was parked half a block away, with the PrimEnergy logo conspicuous on its side. The rear doors were open, and two men in coveralls were busy doing something at the base of a telephone pole. Their equipment and uniforms looked convincing, except for the cone of a distant sound concentrator propped inside the van and aimed at our front windows.

Tony stood next to one window, turned his back on the outside world, and pulled out a Glock. He nodded to Pardee and me, and we produced our own weapons. Then he racked his weapon right next to the glass and announced in a loud voice that none of us should shoot until he started it. We each racked our weapons and then watched the “utility” men scamper for cover behind their van. The concentrator seemed to be working very well.

“Okay, I’ll take care of this bullshit,” Ari said and went out the front door. We all followed him out onto the porch and stood there in plain view of the van, guns in hand just in case this wasn’t what it looked like. Ari went to his car, got something out of the glove compartment, and then hustled over to the van, where the two men were starting to stand up now that they realized they’d been had. I wondered if Ari had stopped off to get a weapon, but instead he walked up to them and began firing one of those disposable flash cameras in their faces. They tried to block their faces with their hands, then slammed the van’s back doors shut, hopped in, and drove off at a respectable clip.

“Goddamn Trask,” he muttered as he came back up the front steps, pocketing the camera.

“You sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, I think I recognized the one guy. We have a recording scanner at the Pass and ID Office that’ll confirm it.”

“Well, you’re obviously consorting with suspicious characters,” I said as we put away our weapons and went back into the kitchen. I was relieved that none of the neighbors, if indeed there were any, had been out on their porches.

“Did you tell this young man to check for someone following me?” he asked.

“Nope. He’s suspicious by nature and just chock-full of initiative.”

Ari grinned at Tony and thanked him for catching the tail. Tony said you’re welcome and then excused himself to go check for “smooth,” now that we had just chased “rough” away.

Ari blinked at that and then grinned again. “You guys are good,” he said.

Tony slipped out the back door while we resumed our conversation at the kitchen table. Quartermain explained what he wanted from us.

“Just as the federal government runs what we call force-on-force drills on the fences,” he began, “I have some budget money to run technical intrusion drills on my side of the perimeter.”

“Define your side of the perimeter,” I said.

“There are three security circles around a nuclear plant: the so-called corporate area, the protected area, and the vital area. Corporate means the public can be there-hunting, fishing, et cetera-if they abide by the company’s rules for the use of the land.”

“No fences?”

“Nope-the first fence defines the protected area. That takes pass and ID access to get in. That’s the area around the industrial plant and its buildings.”

“And the vital area?”

“That’s where the dragon lives-defined as the area where access makes the release of radiological materials possible.”

“That’s a little fuzzy, isn’t it?”

“By design-the vital area is what we nukes say it is. Think layers. Snake Trask and his people patrol the corporate area. They’ll protect the fenced perimeter; they’ll defend the vital area, with deadly force if necessary. The system works in reverse, too.”

“You mean protecting the rest of us from the reactor?”

“Exactly. The nuclear reaction happens inside a stainless steel reactor vessel. That vessel lives in a concrete, lead, and steel containment dome. The dome lives in a steel building. Trask keeps bad guys out; my people and I keep the dragon in.”

“Which puts you in charge.”

Ari smiled. “Like I said before, if my dragon gets loose, the security of the physical perimeter is no longer the issue.”

“Can it get loose?” Pardee asked.

“Yes, most likely through human error, compounded by an instrumentation failure,” Ari said. “The Russians hold the world records, plural. The Chernobyl melt was a classic example of unsafe design compounded by human error. The low-order detonation in the Chelyabinsk district back in 1957 was simple Communist stupidity.”

He went on to describe how the Russians had kept filling a radioactive waste tank until it overpressurized, started a partial reaction, and then literally exploded, contaminating a six-hundred-square-mile area. They then took to dumping their waste into a nearby lake. When the lake dried up in a drought and the radioactive sediments blew away in the wind, it created a no-man’s land the size of Maryland, which exists to this day.

“How about our own Three Mile Island?” I asked.

“The RCS, that’s the reactor control system, detected a problem and shut itself down. Should have been end of story. But then a valve opened and stayed open, while reporting to the control room that it was closed. That drained out all the cooling water.”

“If the reactor was shut down, why was that a problem?”

“Because even after the fission reaction shuts down, the residual heat of decay is still very high. Without cooling water, it can melt the core assembly. That’s what happened at TMI before they realized the instruments were lying. What’s forgotten is that it all stayed inside the containment structure, that movie not withstanding.”

“We’re not exactly qualified in nuclear engineering,” I pointed out.

“I know,” he said, “but I’m talking about helping me with a different problem.”

“Somebody who is technically qualified, and who might be screwing around?” I said.

“Exactly.” He sipped some coffee and made a face. “Like what happened to Ms. Gardner.”

“So you do think that came from your plant?”

“Officially? That would be an unequivocal no. And I’ll defend that position for as long as I want to keep my job.”

“But.”

“Yeah. But. Fortunately for PrimEnergy and Helios, the feds are focusing elsewhere. There’s apparently been intel that the Islamists have given up the idea of smuggling in a nuclear bomb in favor of trying something with nuclear waste.”

“A dirty bomb instead of a Hiroshima bomb.”

“Yeah. A plutonium or a highly enriched uranium bomb has a very distinctive signature, and the ports-airports, seaports-are pretty much wired for that. Nuclear waste products, by definition, come in radiation-tight containers. No signature.”

“And Wilmington has a big container port,” Pardee said.

“Big enough. Not as big as Long Beach or L.A., but big enough, and about to double in size. A radioactive DOA in Wilmington set off all sorts of alarms. They’re going through the motions at Helios, but officially no one really believes that’s where this stuff came from. It would, simply stated, be much too hard.”

“But not impossible?” I asked.

He stood with his back to the sink and shrugged. “Actually, as an engineer, I’d think it would be very difficult, but, no, not impossible. And as the security officer it’s my job to exercise a little paranoia here.”

“You have somebody in mind?” I asked.

“It’s not so much one individual,” he said. “Look-technical security depends on three things in our industry: rigid adherence to approved engineering practices, a personnel reliability program, and the power industry’s version of what the military calls the two-man rule.”

“I believe,” I said, and he smiled.

“Okay. Briefly, here’s the idea. The two-man rule means no one individual is ever left in a situation where he could put the atomic reaction process at risk. Personnel reliability, or what we call fitness to serve, means that a guy who gets a DUI or gropes an undercover cop in a public men’s room gets looked at to see if he should keep his ticket as a plant or reactor operator. And procedure means just that: line-by-line read-back procedures for everything that happens in the control room or in the plant itself. One guy reads the operating procedure, say, for lining up the steam system, and a second guy reads it back to him before actually doing it.”

“That must be really slow.”

“It’s tedious, but reliable. It also requires a certain degree of technical openness. Nothing happens behind closed doors.”

“So?”

“So, if somebody tapped a source of radioactive water in the Helios plant, he would have to have violated all three wedges of technical security.”

I thought about the appearance of a tail on Quartermain’s visit out here today. “Would he need some help from the physical security department?”

He nodded. “Yes, I’d think so, and that’s the one division at Helios which is comparatively opaque. There’s a cast of dozens involved in bringing a reactor online and feeding the grid. But most of the time, nobody knows what the hell Trask’s people are doing.”

“Except following you around and breaking into my hotel room, presumably just because you and I met.”

“Well, there is that.”

“But I thought Trask worked for you-why not just fire his ass?”

“Truth?”

“Please.”

“My theory is that he’s got something on the director, because every time I’ve voiced my ‘concerns’ up the line, I get shut down. Can’t prove that, of course, but that’s what I’m beginning to think.”

“So you want us to take a look at them? Trask, his people, and any possible ties to the director?”

“Yeah.”

Before Quartermain could elaborate, Tony Martinelli came back into the kitchen from outside. He looked pleased with himself, which worried me a little bit. He saw the expression on my face and waved me off.

“It’s cool,” he said. “But not what I expected.”

“Ree-port.”

He looked at Quartermain and raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, Okay for him to hear this? I motioned for him to continue.

“Okay, so I go around the block, walk towards downtown for five minutes, turn around, and come back towards the house on the beachfront street. Just another tourist, out for some fresh salt air and a cigarette. And one block away, parked on the beach side of the street, I come upon a Bureau ride, complete with two specials sitting in the front seat trying to look inconspicuous.”

“In their suits and ties. At the beach.”

“But they were such inconspicuous suits.”

“Can you describe the agents-a man and a woman, perhaps?”

“Negative. Just the usual Buroids with the usual sunglasses and happy faces. They looked bored.”

“So lemme guess: You stopped, stared, waved, said hi-there, peed on their tires, and then took their pictures?”

Tony feigned profound disappointment. “Absolutely not, boss,” he said. “I never said hi-there. However, I did notice their parking meter was expired, so I sicced a meter maid on them.”

I had to grin. “And then watched them flash some creds.”

“Aren’t you proud of me?” As in, lots of other options had come to mind.

“I am, Tony, I am,” I said, counting myself lucky that he hadn’t crawled under some cars and attached a towing chain from their rear axle to a tree. He’d seen that in a movie and often said he’d like to try it.

“So, the question is: Who’re they watching?” Pardee asked, sticking as always to business.

“Great question,” I said, turning to Ari. “You, us, Trask’s snoops, or all of the above?”

“I have no idea,” he said.

“Well, let’s find out,” I said. “Why don’t you leave, and we’ll see if they follow you out of here. If they stay put, we’re the target. If not… But before you go, Pardee here is going to help us create a way we can communicate securely. In the meantime, Tony and I will step out for some more of that salt air.”

I left Pardee and Ari in the kitchen to sort out secure comms. I asked Tony to get us into a position from which we could watch both the house and the watchers when Ari drove off. Tony had parked his car behind the house, so we used that to get set up behind the Bureau vehicle in one of the metered spots on the beach.

After about five minutes, we watched Ari come down the front steps of our rental unit and go to his car. Don’t turn around and wave, Ari , I thought. Just get in and drive away. The mental telepathy must have worked because that’s what he did. We waited. The two agents were just silhouettes in the car parked ahead of us, but we could see one of them talking on a cell phone. Then they cranked up their Bucar and surprised us by executing a U-turn.

“Down ’scope,” I said, and we both slid down in the front seat of Tony’s car. When they had passed us, we drove back to the house.

Pardee had brought some electronics gear, including two laptops, which were running in parallel in his version of a baby supercomputer. Using these, he had created a Web site on which Ari and I could post and retrieve messages using a secure password system. He hosted the site on our office server back in Triboro, so there’d be a cutout.

He also reported that our office manager had closed out Allie’s affairs by notifying her ex-husbands of her demise and sending her personal office effects to the sister in Turkey, no matter what she’d said. Fortunately, there were no remains to deal with, as the federal government still had that problem bagged up in a lead-lined vault somewhere. It was personally disturbing to think about Allie being stored in a locker like a side of meat, but, as Pardee gently reminded me, that wasn’t Allie. I knew he was right, but still.

It was noon, so we went out to find a place for lunch. Southport had a decent selection of lunch places, and we found something suitable on the main drag. The beauty of a small tourist town was that no one paid the three of us the slightest bit of attention. You were either born there or you were “from away,” like the Yankees say.

After a quick bite, we left the cafe and walked back to the car. I heard Tony swear and saw the parking ticket under the wiper blade. Then I saw that the meter was green. He lifted a folded piece of paper, read it, and handed it to me. There was a single line that read: ET come home. Now would be nice. It was signed with a large letter C.

“Sneaky futher-muckers,” I said, looking around. Tony grunted and pointed, and there, across the street, was the Bureau car we’d watched drive away. Apparently, not very far away. The agents waggled fingers at us. Tony rubbed his nose with his middle finger in response. The agent driving the car put his hands up to his face in mock horror.

“Okay, let’s go back and face the music,” I said.

“Who’s C.?” Tony asked.

C., as I’d suspected, turned out to be Creeps himself, minus his ditzy assistant this time. The other agents had followed us back to the house and were now waiting outside, reading magazines. Creeps was standing on the front porch when we got there, so I was pretty sure he hadn’t been inside. The shepherds were in there, staring out the front windows and definitely not looking like Welcome Wagon material.

I introduced my two helper-bees, and then we all went in. Since Pardee had set up his computers in the kitchen, I invited Creeps to sit in the living room, which meant that he had to fit that gangly, Lincolnesque frame of his into one of the sandy wicker rocking chairs. Wicker apparently is the furniture of choice for a beach house; everything in the living room was made of it.

“Welcome to our humble rental unit,” I said. Pardee and Tony leaned on opposite sides of the living room entryway. “Have we been bad?”

Creeps rubbed his hands together while he thought about what he was going to say. “I certainly hope not, Mr. Richter,” he said, “but, given the nature of our last conversation in Wilmington, your Bureau just wanted to make sure you hadn’t returned to investigate Ms. Gardner’s, um, unfortunate demise.”

“You were quite clear, I thought,” I said. “Back out, stay out, and assist my Bureau in any way I can and should as a good citizen. Right?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said warmly, smiling his best undertaker smile. Given that he’d signed his little love note “C.,” he had to be putting at least some of that bullshit on. “So: What, may I ask, are you doing down here with or for the technical security director of the Helios power station?”

“A job of work,” I replied, recalling Ari’s quaint phrase.

Creeps raised his eyebrows in a go-on expression.

“The details of which have not yet been made entirely clear,” I continued, fudging just a little. “Something to do with overlapping jurisdiction within the plant’s security apparatus. He’s the technical guy, and there’s a separate department that handles physical security. We’ll probably know more tomorrow.”

Creeps frowned. It took the frown a couple of seconds to spread across that huge, lachrymose face. “How does this bear on the Gardner case?”

Clever Creeps. You never knew where he was going with his questions, but he probably did, and all the time. “It doesn’t,” I said. “At least as far as we know. Besides, we’re not supposed to get involved in the Gardner case, remember? I guess you could talk to Mr. Quartermain.”

The frown vanished. “Oh, yes, indeed,” he said. “We’ll be talking to Mr. Quartermain, at some length, I suspect.”

“Well, while we’re on the subject of Allie Gardner, do you guys think that evil shit came from the plant or some other source?” I saw Tony and Pardee, who were standing out of Creeps’s line of sight, trying to suppress grins.

Creeps did a tsk-tsk number. “Mr. Richter, really,” he said disapprovingly. “I do hope you’re not intending to mess around with your Bureau. You know how we hate that. Although I can tell you this much: Right now, the NRC people don’t think the radioactive substance did come from Helios. There’s simply no way to do that without exposing the taker to the same radiation that would ultimately kill the takee, if you follow me.”

“Yeah, that occurred to me, too,” I lied. “But, honestly, I think Quartermain wants us for something totally unrelated. As I understand the politics of the situation, PrimEnergy wants to put some distance between what happened to Allie and the Helios station.”

Creeps nodded, but then changed the subject. “Under what modalities is Mr. Quartermain engaging H amp;S Investigations?” he asked.

I explained the contract money Ari said he had for security intrusion exercises. Creeps nodded again, as if he knew all about that program.

“You understand, Mr. Richter,” he said, “that those are federal dollars? And that any such intrusion exercises, whether force-on-force, tabletop war games, or otherwise, are supervised by the NRC? Which is itself a federal organization?”

“Makes sense,” I said. “But for us contractor weenies, a dollar is a dollar. We agree on a statement of work, a price, and the client’s boundary conditions. Then we do our thing, write a report, and send in the bill. As long as he can write the check, we don’t much care which budget line item governs the money.”

“Perhaps you should,” he said. “Because federal money brings federal oversight, and your Bureau is reasonably competent in the oversight department.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said, tiring of the games. “We know the rules, Special Agent. I told Quartermain that if we stumble onto anything that faintly resembles evidence of a real security problem, we’re obligated to take it to you guys. Why don’t you ask him?”

“We certainly shall do just that,” he declared. “Allow me to be frank: What happened to Ms. Gardner might be a one-off, or it might be the first indication of a much more serious problem, one we’ve actually been anticipating, and with no little trepidation, I might add.”

I recalled what Ari had said. “You think someone’s finally managed to get something nasty through that big-ass container port upriver?”

That surprised him, and people didn’t surprise Brother Creeps that often. He wagged a long, bony finger at me. “You be very careful talking about that little theory,” he said. “You people intrude into anything along those lines, and you might find yourself languishing on a certain Caribbean island.”

I put up my hands in mock surrender. “Got it, okay? As I’ve said, we’re not quite sure what Mr. Quartermain has in mind for us.”

“For what it’s worth, Mr. Richter, we think he wants to use you, as a genuine outsider, to demonstrate that his technical security system is intact, and that, ipso facto, no radiological release ever occurred at Helios.”

“I thought the NRC was going to do some kind of isotope analysis. What happened to that?”

He thought about that for a moment, obviously trying to decide if it was prudent to tell us anything at all. Then he nodded. “Yes. Well. The initial analysis was inconclusive. The residual radiation in Ms. Gardner’s tissue has decayed along with the tissue.”

“Was that the only way they could prove the stuff came out of Helios?”

“The only technically conclusive proof, yes.”

It was my turn to think. It seemed to me that Quartermain was basically going on the offensive by bringing us in; the NRC wouldn’t be able to tag Helios with a radiological release. If we couldn’t find a hole in their security, then he’d done what the company wanted him to do-cover their corporate asses.

“What would be the consequences if someone were to discover, inadvertently, of course, that it did come out of there?” I asked.

“The NRC would shut them down, and then the real fun would begin, Mr. Richter. So take some care, and remember whose side you’re on when it comes to national security versus corporate liability. If there’s a dangerous hole in the plant’s security, and you spot it, I’d better know about it before Mr. Quartermain does, understood?”

I told him it was, and he levered himself out of the creaking wicker chair. He stared down at the floor for a moment, as if making sure it was going to hold him. Then he looked back at me. “We’re operating under different rules these days, Mr. Richter. The war against terror has seen federal law enforcement crossing some lines which we used to hold fairly sacred.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, these days, if you interfere, you can disappear.”

Then he left us.

I breathed a sigh of relief after letting him out the front door.

“Now that’s a weird m-f,” Tony said. “Does he always speak in code like that?”

I went back into the kitchen and sat down. “That wasn’t code, guys. There’s something seriously amiss down here, and this time, I think we’re going to have to play by their rules. If it weren’t for Allie’s involvement, I’d back us out of this right now.”

“Allie’s beyond caring, boss,” Pardee pointed out, “and we don’t know squat about a nuclear power plant. What exactly is it this guy wants us to do?”

I still wasn’t quite sure myself, so I went sideways. “Why don’t you bring up the site and see if we’ve got mail?”

He did and we did. One message from Ari. He told us to report to the Helios administration building to begin processing for vehicle passes and ID cards.

We took two vehicles. The shepherds and I went in my Suburban; Tony and Pardee went in Pardee’s black Crown Vic. My Suburban was a plain vanilla 2500 series with the rear seats flattened to accommodate the mutts. Pardee’s ride was every inch the cop car-tinted windows, souped-up mill, several antennas, and those all-rubber semi-slick tires engineered for extreme road-handling. I think he missed being in Major Crimes. Also he liked to speed, and that getup plus a few other secret signs and totems pretty much guaranteed a pass from the state police.

We took Highway 133 up to the plant’s main entrance and turned in. It was a beautifully landscaped entrance that gave onto a four-lane, undivided parkway. As we turned in we heard a low siren wail in the distance. It sounded like the shift-change whistle at a manufacturing plant. The road made a broad S-turn once we got past the main entrance, and then a second one lined us up with the main gates. Somewhat to our surprise, we found a squad of armed and flak-jacketed men arrayed across the gate area as we approached. I slowed the Suburban and lowered my driver’s side window. Tony pulled in right behind me. One of the guards stepped forward, while the others spread out their line, keeping what looked like Colt M4s at a loose port arms.

“Yes, sir, can we help you?” the guard asked, eyeing the two big dogs behind me. He was courteous, but warily so. I realized then that the siren had gone off when some invisible sensor detected unauthorized vehicles approaching the main gates. I explained that we were guests of Dr. Quartermain and that we were supposed to meet him at the pass office. The guard nodded and told us that this was the plant entrance and that the admin office was another half mile down the road. We’d apparently driven right by it. He showed us where we could U-turn and wished us a nice day. The line of armed guards had relaxed fractionally, but they were still in position to shoot the two vehicles to pieces if that need were to arise.

The admin building looked like every other admin building I’d been in. I told the guys to leave their weapons in their vehicle. I unstrapped my own. 45 and jammed it down between the seat and the center console. I set Frick up in a harness and leash rig and took her into the building with me. I lowered the windows and instructed Frack to guard the Suburban with his life. He promptly lay down for a nap.

Once inside, we were taken to Quartermain’s office, where we were met by a thirty-something brunette hottie who’d obviously been told to expect us. If she was impressed by the sight of two large and one medium-sized, very fit men, one of them being attached to an equally fit German shepherd, she gave no sign of it. She eyed Frick and said that the dog might present a problem. I told her that the dog was a service dog and that federal law required admission of such dogs if they were harnessed, leashed, and suitably trained.

She bent forward to address Frick. “Are you suitably trained?” she asked. Tony made a small noise in his throat when she bent forward, but Frick merely looked at her for a second and then just barely wrinkled her lip.

“Why yes you are,” the young woman said, straightening up. “We won’t mess with your dog.”

I had to admit that it had been fun watching her straighten up, and she also was no dummy. “The dog is just part of the act,” I said. “But: There is another one out front.”

“Then we’ll need two dog passes, won’t we,” she said and went to get the paperwork. Watching her walk away continued to be fun. I asked her where Mr. Quartermain was. “In a meeting,” she called over her shoulder. I asked if Mr. Trask was in the building.

“You mean Colonel Trask?” she asked, just to make sure we knew how to address His Lordship.

“Older guy, reddish gray hair, face like a hatchet? Really pleased with himself?”

She turned her face away for a moment, trying to control a smile. The nameplate on her desk read SAMANTHA YOUNG, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT. Tony was still standing in the doorway, the veritable picture of a man fallen deeply in lust. Tony did that often.

“Did you really want to see the colonel?” she asked.

“Actually? No. You see one colonel, you’ve kind of seen them all.”

She nodded. “I asked,” she said, “because he’s supposed to sign your security passes. Is that possibly going to be a problem?”

“Why don’t you get Dr. Quartermain to handle that,” I suggested. “Probably save everybody a lot of time.”

At that moment, Aristotle Quartermain came into the office through a second door. “Handle what, Sam?” he asked. She explained the problem, and he waved it off. “I’ll sign these passes,” he said. “Give all your info to Sam here, and then let’s talk. I need them to have vehicle passes and smart-tags, too, Sam, okay?”

We did the paper drill, took mug shots and thumbprints, and then sat down with Quartermain in his inner office while young Samantha went down the hall to emboss and laminate our ID cards. I parked Frick over in one corner, where she decided to stare at our host. He thought that was pretty cool. Pardee had to snatch Tony by the collar to keep him from following Samantha. Quartermain had noticed.

“Ain’t she something?” he said admiringly. “Hired her about a year ago when my original assistant up and moved to Florida for some strange reason. She goes for her noonday run in this little gold spandex outfit? Now half the guys at the station are out exercising. And she can shoot, too. That’s a great dog you got there. He’ll need a pass, too, though.”

“It’s a she, and Samantha is getting the passes.”

Tony had closed his eyes, probably trying to visualize the spandex outfit. Tony’s idea of exercise was to stow two cases of beer in his fridge, not just one, but that might change. Pardee helpfully told him to stop drooling.

I told Quartermain about Special Agent Caswell’s visit, noting that that was the second time we’d had an “exchange of views,” and that between Trask and the FBI, the hospitality angle for H amp;S Investigations was disappointing.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not too surprised. Let me bring you up to speed.”

He told us that the first attempt to retrieve radioactive particles from Allie’s body had been a bust, which corroborated what Creeps had told us. The docs were pretty sure that whatever it was, water had been the medium and alpha particles the radiation vector. Then he took us all over to the visitors’ center, which had been closed to the public in the wake of the 9/11 disaster. There he showed us a diorama of the power station, a mockup of the control room, and some animated flowcharts that showed how the reactor system worked.

“As you can see, the nuclear reaction provides the heat. Some of the water that cools that reaction boils into steam and goes over here to the power plant, where the steam spins a turbine, which spins a generator, which makes big-time juice. The spent steam goes down here to a condenser, where cooling water from the river turns it from vapor to liquid water, and then it’s pumped back into the reactor vessel, where the whole cycle is repeated.”

“And that water is radioactive?” Pardee asked.

“The whole reactor vessel and everything in it is highly radioactive, but only because it’s an integral part of an ongoing nuclear fission reaction. It’s also pressurized-it’s a boiler, after all. So between the heat, the radiation, and the steam, it’s not something you can just reach into and get yourself a container of water. You’d be dead in about an hour if you tried.”

“So where’s this moonpool you talked about?” I asked.

He took us to another wall chart diagram, which was titled THE REFUELING SYSTEM. “The technical name is the spent fuel storage pool. As fuel elements outlive their usefulness, they’re taken down from the reactor core and transferred underneath the reactor building to an adjacent building, which contains the storage pool. There they stay until the government gets a permanent storage site up and running.”

“And that area’s radioactive?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s a lot like the reactor vessel itself, except the fuel elements aren’t bundled close together because we no longer want them to create a fission reaction. But the more recently they’ve been put into the moonpool, the hotter they are.”

“So what killed Allie could have come from there, as opposed to the main reactor itself?”

He paused for a moment. “ If the stuff came from a power plant, it is much more likely to have come out of a moonpool than the reactor vessel, for the basic reason that the moonpool is not pressurized. As I said, the reactor vessel is a closed, very hot, radioactive, and pressurized system. The pool’s a pool-atmospheric pressure, forty-five, fifty feet deep, a little scary-looking, but it’s just a pool.”

“Can we see it?” I asked.

“Gonna show you the whole shebang, Mr. Investigator, soon as those ID cards are ready.”

Three hours later, we returned to the admin building, following an extensive tour of the power plant. Quartermain himself conducted the tour, and it was obvious he knew his stuff as a nuclear engineer. We’d hit that I-believe button several times in the course of the tour. The shepherd attracted lots of stares, but most people in the plant seemed to be paying close attention to business, which was comforting.

We hadn’t actually seen either reactor-there were two at Helios, Unit One and Unit Two-and, as Ari pointed out, one never did want to actually see the reactor, because that would mean that its containment had been breached. The last persons to have seen an operating reactor had been at Chernobyl, and they were all very dead.

“You see one when it’s being built and installed, and you see it again when the plant gets decommissioned. Otherwise, you don’t want to see it.”

“Why do power plants get decommissioned?” I’d asked.

“Metallurgy,” he’d responded. “After twenty, twenty-five years of living in the energy flux of a uranium fission reaction, metal alloys can change state. The piping, the valves, the pumps, the fuel control mechanisms, even the instrumentation sensors become embrittled or otherwise metallurgically altered, sometimes to the point where the materials they were made out of no longer have the strength characteristics they had when they were brand-new.”

“So they shut ’em down, permanently? As opposed to replacing all that stuff?”

“Cheapest option,” he said. “The military does the same thing-they refuel their ship plants once, maybe twice, but when a warship’s reactor systems wear out, they scrap the whole boat. I’ve seen satellite shots of the Soviet naval bases with entire submarines rusting in the mudflats because the reactors gave out. Two, three billion dollars a copy. Talk about nuclear waste. Incredible.”

The moonpool had looked just the way Ari had described it: a large, deep concrete structure filled with ethereal blue-green water. There were detachable glass partition walls along the sides, and steel railings at the base of those walls. The dim shapes glimmering down at the bottom were the spent fuel, encased in gleaming metal tubes and arranged in a geometric shape that prevented fission from restarting in the pool.

“This is the area that worries Snake Trask,” Ari had told us. “In the other type of power plant, the pools are below-ground. As you can see, this one is mostly aboveground. A commercial airplane crash here could theoretically split the walls and dump the water.”

“And that would be bad?”

“Yes, because we’d probably get a fire or a hydrogen explosion and a big radiation release. There are systems in place to refill the pool; that’s one of the reasons these BWR plants are positioned near big bodies of water. But still, the moonpool is probably the most fragile part of a boiling water reactor plant.”

It was Colonel Trask himself who was waiting for us, or rather Ari, when we got back to Ari’s office following our atomic walkabout. He did not appear to be a happy camper. He demanded to speak to Dr. Quartermain in private, but the closed door didn’t afford them much privacy. As we stood around in the reception area trying not to stare at the lovely Samantha, we could hear Trask detonating on the subject of issuing clearance and physical access to people like us. I couldn’t hear what Ari was saying in reply, but, whatever it was, it wasn’t mollifying Trask very much. It was also clear from all the racket that the security chief and his people intended to make our stay on the plant grounds difficult.

I quietly told Pardee and Tony to go on back to the beach house and wait for me there, and meanwhile to see what they could do about getting us a boat.

“What kind of boat?” Tony asked.

“Twenty-footer or thereabouts, shallow draft, inboard engine, with a radar set if possible. Not for the open ocean. Strictly for river work. Try the marinas around Southport, or maybe Oak Island.”

“We drive, or they drive?” Pardee asked.

“We drive,” I said.

It sounded like the choleric colonel was winding down in there, so I asked Samantha if she could escort my people to the egress. I sat down in one corner of the reception area with Frick parked next to me on her leash. Trask glared at the two of us as he stalked out of Quartermain’s office. He was wearing green Army utilities this time and a large sidearm. A moment later, Ari appeared in his doorway and motioned for me to come in.

“Was that fun?” I asked, shutting his door behind me. If he was perturbed, he didn’t show it. He waved me to a chair.

“It’s all he knows how to do,” he said. “Shout and bluster. You know, asses will be kicked, hides flayed, things will be turned every which way but loose-all the standard Army bullshit.”

“He works for you-why don’t you indulge in some of the standard bullshit right back at him?”

“Because he’s useful,” he said. “He’s got a perpetual red-ass, and he is completely unpredictable. Since nobody knows where he’s going to turn up next, he tends to keep his and my people on their toes.”

“I can’t imagine nuclear engineers putting up with verbal abuse like that,” I said.

“Yeah, the hoo-ah stuff doesn’t play in technical security, because the assumption there is that we’re all focused on the same thing: keeping the dragon in its cave. Physical security assumes the good guys are in here, while everyone out there is a bad guy until proven otherwise.”

“Why the perpetual red-ass?”

Ari ran a hand over his gleaming scalp. “He’s convinced the country’s gone soft, especially on this war on terrorism. America has lost its manhood, is embracing appeasement, throwing away good soldiers’ lives in shitholes like Iraq and Afghanistan, paying court to billionaire Hollywood marshmallows, stuff like that.”

“He may have a point there,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it’s a democracy, isn’t it. Personally, I think it’s more of a classic case of a man confusing the deterioration of his own aging faculties with the rest of the nation. You know, grumpy old men. Old guys are always saying everything’s going to hell. Not like it used to be in my day, by God, when I had to walk three miles to school through ten feet of snow, et cetera.”

“How old is Trask?”

“Mid-sixties, actually.” He saw my surprise. “I know-he doesn’t look it.”

“Where’d he get the nickname?”

“He apparently likes snakes. You know, some kind of offbeat hobby.”

We talked contract and agreed on the broad provisions of a statement of work. “I have a request,” I said when we were done with that.

“Shoot.”

“I’ve sent my people home, but right now I’d like to take a little outside tour with my vehicle. Drive around the plant perimeter. Outside the protected area, but inside the corporate zone. Get the lay of the public land.”

“A lot of it’s swamp,” he said. “About twelve hundred acres in all, including farmland and designated wetlands. Stay on the roads, and don’t mess with any protected area fences-they’re wired six ways from Sunday. If you do run into the security people, show those badges. The worst they can do is escort you back to the main gate. You work for me, not them.”

“Gosh, you think I’ll run into Trask?”

“Isn’t that why you want to go out there?” he asked with a grin.

By sundown I was parked along the banks of the inlet canal, a man-made baby river that branched off the much larger Cape Fear River. It had been built to provide cooling water for the turbine steam condensers in the generator hall. I’d driven around the fields and ponds and swamps for about forty minutes before finding the spot I wanted. It was getting dark when Trask’s people finally showed themselves. I picked up a distant tail about halfway through my excursion. It looked like a Bronco or similarly boxy SUV, but they kept far enough back that I couldn’t tell how many people were in the vehicle. Ari had given me a road map of the so-called corporate area, and I’d meandered over most of it.

I was out of my vehicle, taking pictures of the power plant in the distance, when they finally made their move. The complex was now blurring into a twinkling cluster of sodium vapor lights silhouetting the big buildings in the center when the Bronco came in, skidding to a stop from an unnecessarily high-speed approach. Three doors popped open, and three security guys piled out, all decked out in partial SWAT costumes and brandishing stubby assault rifles of some kind. I waited for the Freeze, motherfucker! but instead two of them spread out into covering positions behind the headlights while the third approached me. His clear plastic faceplate revealed white bandages on his nose and forehead, and I recognized Billy the Kid. I didn’t see Trask, and I didn’t recognize the other two guys.

“Let’s see some identification,” he said, keeping his rifle at port arms and pretending we’d never met.

I wanted to point out that I was in the public domain area of the complex, but instead I just lifted the chain with my plant ID cards over my head and handed them over. He pocketed them with one hand while keeping his weapon ready.

“Those are not valid,” he announced. He hadn’t even so much as glanced at them.

“How would you know?” I asked. “Or can’t you read?”

“Because our office didn’t issue them,” he said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “You’ll have to come with us.”

“Where we going, Billy?” I asked, just so the other two guys would know I’d recognized him. “And by the way, isn’t this the public area?”

“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.

“My degree was in biology,” he said. “Herpetology, to be exact. I find snakes to be more predictable animals than most humans.”

Then his phone began to chirp. He stepped away from me, listened, swore, and snapped it shut.

“What now?” I asked.

“There’s been another one,” he said. “They got a radiation hit on a container.” He pointed with his chin at the forest of lighted gantry cranes upriver. “Over there, in the port.” He gave me a triumphant look. “See?” he said. “Told you that shit didn’t come from here.”

Then my phone rang.

“That’ll be Quartermain,” Trask said.

It was.

Tony, Pardee, and I met him at the Hilton, since none of us really knew our way around Wilmington yet. He was in the lounge having some coffee. He signaled the waitress to bring us some when he saw us.

“So,” I said, sitting down. “You and Helios off the hook?”

“Temporarily,” he said. “They got a radiation hit down in the container port. They have monitors all over the place, and each truck leaving the docks goes through two radiation scanners, one they know about, one they don’t.”

“What constitutes a hit?”

“They’re looking for gamma, primarily,” he said. “Gamma radiation indicates enriched uranium or plutonium, the bomb stuff. But any radionuclide will do it, and if a detector goes off, they lock down the entire port.”

“Bet that’s popular.”

“Oh, yeah. A colossal backup of cargo, containers hanging in midair. Ships that were supposed to sail at midnight missing their departure windows. Instant financial impact. Big deal.”

“Tough shit,” I said. “There is a war on, or so I hear.”

“Yeah, but that’s why they called us, among others. They wanted an instrument decon team from the Helios nuclear safety office. They’ve got radiation on or in a container but can’t find a source object.”

“How do we fit in?”

“I want you to see how an actual radiation incident is handled.”

He reached down and brought up a briefcase, opened it, and gave each of us a radiation dose monitor called a thermo-luminescent dosimeter, or TLD. It looked like a Dick Tracy wrist radio. I’d seen everyone in the plant wearing one, or more, and we’d been given temporary TLDs for our tour.

“These are your permanent TLDs,” he said. “They’ve been logged out to you by name and badge number, and you’ll turn them in weekly for readings. It’s your responsibility to look at them daily to make sure you have not received a dose you didn’t know about.”

“Good deal,” Tony muttered, examining the TLD suspiciously. It was bigger than the ones we’d worn for the tour. “I can remember when ‘receiving a dose’ meant something altogether different.”

“Same basic equipment tends to fall off your body,” Quartermain said without even a hint of a smile. “My team is already down there. Let’s boogie.”

We followed him in his official PrimEnergy car up to Third Street and then east through Wilmington to the container port. We went through some surprisingly elaborate security at the main gate, where we were given yet more, if temporary, ID badges, vehicle passes, and plastic hard hats. All this happened after they’d searched both vehicles, inside, out, and under. None of the people doing the searching seemed to care about the shepherds. There was already a double line of semis, each with a seagoing container strapped to its back, parked along both sides of the exit lanes. Some of the drivers were out along the road, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the flap to subside.

A container port requires vast amounts of horizontal space; Ari told us that the one in Wilmington consists of four hundred acres, most of it paved. There were none of the conventional warehouses one would associate with a seaport. The beauty of containers is that they’re weatherproof, so they just stack the outgoing containers ten high all over the place until it’s time to go to sea. Most of the incoming containers get dropped directly onto flat-frame trailers and go down the highway within minutes, literally, of being offloaded.

Unless there’s a problem. A twinkling cluster of red and blue lights down on the pier indicated that there was indeed a problem.

The gate people had told us not to drive onto the handling piers near the gantry cranes, so we parked next to a ten-pack stack and walked in. As we approached on foot, we could see several emergency vehicles parked at odd angles out on the pier but not too many people; apparently the nature of the problem was no longer a secret, and savvy humans were keeping their distance. I could see two guys in white spacesuits working around a single truck-and-trailer rig in the glare of both portable floods and the overhanging spotlights of an enormous gantry crane overhead. There was a cluster of mostly Asian faces peering curiously down from the high bows of a sixty-thousand-ton container ship.

I left the dogs in the vehicle. Quartermain took us over to a command center van bearing the markings of the Customs and Border Protection Agency, where a small crowd of Border Patrol cops, Coast Guard officers, and port authority officials stood around watching the moonwalkers inside the perimeter do their thing with instruments and sample kits. I noticed that the van was positioned upwind and that the bystanders were keeping a respectful distance. I half-expected to see the gangly figure of Creeps in the crowd, but none of these people looked like Bureau types. Tony popped a cigarette out of a pack, but one of the port authority guys immediately shook his head at him. Quartermain explained that some radiation came in the form of tiny airborne particles, so a spill scene was no place to be taking deep drags of air.

“Spill scene?”

“Procedurally, we’re treating this as a radiation spill, even though we know that’s not what it is,” he explained. “That’s a spill team, and they’re trained to find and decontaminate radioactive materials that shouldn’t be there.”

The back doors of the container had been opened, and we could see a stack of cardboard boxes filling the opening, packed right up to the container’s ceiling. One spacesuit man was incongruously on his back on a mechanic’s creeper, taking readings underneath the rig, while the other was on his knees holding a floodlight for him. A worried-looking middle-aged man in a suit and white hard hat came over when he spotted Quartermain, who introduced him to us as Hank Carter, security director for the Wilmington Port Authority.

“This isn’t making any sense, Dr. Quartermain,” he said. “We’ve got alarms, your guys are getting a lot of noise on the detectors, but we can’t find a single frigging point source on that can.”

“You got gamma?” Quartermain asked.

“No, alpha. It’s not high intensity-the levels are too low. It’s also spread out, like somebody painted the container with something radioactive.”

“Like water, maybe?” I said in a quiet aside to Ari.

He nodded. “Tell them to look for any accumulations of water, and test those,” he said.

“Water?” Carter said. “This is a container port; there’s water everywhere.”

“Tell them to look along the edges of that container or on the bottom of the trailer itself, in the cracks. All the places where water might linger after coming down off a ship. And check the truck.”

Carter gave Ari a sharp look, as if wondering whether the Helios security director knew something he didn’t and, if so, how. Then he went over to the command van and climbed in. Moments later we saw one of the spacesuited guys stop, listen to his radio, and give a thumbs-up sign that he understood. There was a rough-looking white man dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt sitting inside the van looking very uncomfortable, and I guessed that he must be the truck driver. I sent Tony and Pardee to go for an inconspicuous stroll around the temporary perimeter, just looking. I told them to fan out and see who or what might be watching the circus with more than casual interest.

A few minutes later, there was a commotion in the command van, and Carter beckoned Ari over. I went with him.

“You were right,” Carter said. “It’s water. Or some kind of radioactive fluids pooled on the trailer frame, underneath. Not the container. Which brings up my next question.”

“Just an educated guess,” Ari said. “Based on the recent incident downtown. We’re assuming that was water, too, because the victim drank it.”

“Damn. Can your people help us decontaminate?”

“Yep. I’ll send for a foam generator. They’ll spray the entire underside of the trailer and then wait for the foam to harden. Then it can be broken off as a solid, bagged, and taken back to our low-level waste holding area.”

Carter looked vastly relieved. “Should we sweep the entire pier?” he asked.

“Have you searched inside the container itself?”

Carter shook his head. “That was next,” he said.

“Okay, do that and let my guys sweep whatever comes out,” Ari said. “Then I’d sweep the ship that container came off of, and I’d suggest you talk to and sweep all those guys watching us right now up there, if that’s the ship.” He pointed at the row of oriental faces sixty feet above us. To a man, they all vanished.

“No problem,” Carter said, opening his flip-radio and barking out some orders. Moments later, the huge gantry crane rumbled into life and rolled down the pier to where the ship’s gangway was positioned. A crew of hard hats emerged out of the darkness and attached cables to the gangway, and then the crane just lifted it off the ship. Whoever was onboard was going to stay there or go for a night swim in the Cape Fear River.

One of the customs agents in the van stuck his head out and told Carter that the FBI was at the main gate and inbound.

I looked sideways at Ari, and he understood. He said that he would stay there to coordinate the decontamination team’s efforts, and that we outlanders should make our creep. I saw Tony and Pardee standing under a light tower a hundred yards or so down the pier. I went back to the car and let the shepherds out, and then we walked down to join them, giving the spill scene a wide berth.

“What’d they find?” Tony asked.

“It sounds like it’s the truck and trailer, not the container, but of course it could have dripped down from the container. It’s a mystery right now. You guys see anything of interest?”

“Lots of ladders,” Pardee said. He pointed to the edge of the concrete handling pier, which itself was a hundred yards wide and constructed as a bulkhead pier along the riverbank. I could just see the round tops of ladder railings leading down over the edge of the pier.

“They’re every hundred feet or so,” Tony said.

“Meaning, if this hot stuff didn’t come from overseas, it could have come by boat? From the river?”

“Isn’t that what you wanted a boat for?” Pardee asked.

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” I said. Up near all the strobe lights, we could see a trio of Bureau cars pulling in to join the evolving radiation incident. “Let’s move right along, shall we?”

We strolled casually down the entire length of the container pier, which was easily a mile long. I let the shepherds range out to the edges of the lighted area. The dark river and the even darker wetlands stretched off to our right. I thought I could make out the lights of Helios downriver. To our left were the container stacks, whose rows seemed to go on forever into the terminal yards. There was one other ship tied up alongside the pier, and two gantries were busy snatching containers from the pier and lifting them up into the massive ship, which had developed a slight starboard list as the cans, as they were called, came aboard. The gantries with their projecting booms reminded me of medieval siege towers, only with lights.

We walked down to the very end of the pier area, checking for security cameras and fences where the industrial area ended. There appeared to be a railroad switchyard inboard of the container work and storage area. Large forklifts were hoisting containers onto flatbed railcars in the glare of sodium vapor lights. On the far, landward side of the yard we could see what looked like a container junkyard outside the security fence, filled with damaged or badly rusted steel boxes dropped haphazardly on a low hillside.

A white pickup truck with a police light bar mounted over the cab drove by, stopped, and backed up. We walked over. The security guard inside, who had to be at least sixty years old, wanted to know who we were and what were we doing down there. I told him we were with Dr. Quartermain, and we all flashed our temporary gate IDs. He gave the shepherds a wary look, rolled the window up, and then made a call on his radio. We couldn’t hear the response, but apparently it satisfied him that we were not saboteurs. He nodded and drove off.

“That’s not much of a deterrent,” Tony observed.

“The bad guys wouldn’t know that until they got close to the truck, and I’d guess he has a panic button in there. This place is huge.”

We’d come to the very end of the container pier. The Cape Fear River was nearly a half mile wide at this point, and looked wider because of the total darkness on the other side. Channel buoys winked at us all the way down the river. We could hear that muscular current swirling through the dolphin pilings at the end of the pier. The water smelled of salt marsh and diesel oil; some seagulls overhead on night patrol screamed at us. The visible debris in the water was streaming by at a good five knots.

“Something’s not computing here,” I said. “I mean, look: If some bad guys are trying to smuggle in radioactive material, why in the hell would they, first, plant some in town, and then, second, splash it on the outside of a container here in the port?”

“How do we know it got downtown?” Pardee asked.

“We don’t,” I admitted. Pardee had a point. If Allie ingested the hot stuff, she could have done that anywhere. The fact that she was downtown when it got to her didn’t mean anything.

Pardee nodded.

Tony finally lit up his cigarette. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling a cloud. “You’d think, if the jihadis were trying to get a dirty bomb or something in, they sure as hell wouldn’t want to alert that crew back there.”

“And not once, but twice? Radiation getting loose in the Wilmington area? Maybe from the Helios plant, maybe not. Now this. Maybe it’s some whack-job stealing shit from a hospital radiology lab, spreading it around town just for grins.”

“The fact that it was outside may be important,” Pardee said. A seagull appeared out of the darkness and landed boldly twenty feet away. Frick went for it, resulting in a lot of squawking and feathers. Frack, showing his age, just watched.

“Yeah, I agree. I wonder if it’s maybe a-”

At that moment, we saw a commotion up at the tractor-trailer. They had unloaded about half the boxes from inside the container. From our vantage point, it looked like they’d gone all the way to the front wall of the container, but then I realized there weren’t enough boxes out on the pier. They’d hit a fake wall.

The Helios team was backed out, and a bunch of border cops jumped into the container and went to work on the wall. We started walking back to get a closer look, but stayed close to the first row of stacked containers as we went up the pier. The cops appeared to be getting nowhere fast, so they filed out and let a couple of longshoremen climb into the container with axes in hand. I saw Ari walk over to the edge of the pier, obviously searching for a cell phone signal.

Then there was a shout from inside the container as the fake wall burst open and a dozen or so men bolted out, piled right over the startled longshoremen, and ran flat-out into the container stacking area, fanning out in all directions, before the cops could comprehend what was going on. Everyone at the scene was caught completely flat-footed. A couple of cops pulled their weapons, but then realized they couldn’t shoot the stowaways just for running. One security truck peeled out in pursuit and instantly collided with the corner of a container in a true Keystone Kops moment. Tony started laughing.

Then we heard a shout from our left. It sounded like it had come from down below the edge of the pier. We ran to the edge in time to see Ari Quartermain floating past in the current about twenty feet off the pier, waving frantically. The lights from one of the gantry cranes shone down into the water, or we would never have been able to see him.

“Get it,” I yelled at Frack, who went over the side in one big jump and splashed down into the water. He surfaced a moment later and began paddling in the direction of the struggling Quartermain. Tony found a life ring with a rope attached, and we started walking to keep up with the current as Frack dragged the man closer to one of those ladders we’d spotted. The dog had Ari by his jacket collar, and, fortunately, Quartermain wasn’t fighting the dog, but swimming with him instead. When they got close enough, Tony made sure Ari could see the life ring and then tossed it to him. Once he had it, Tony belayed the rope on the pier and let the current bring both man and dog alongside, close enough for Quartermain to grab one rung on the next ladder. Up the pier I could hear sirens approaching.

Frack still had a mouthful of Quartermain’s jacket, but Ari, thinking faster than I might have managed under the same circumstances, held on to the ladder with one hand while he poked the life ring over the dog’s front end. I called Frack off, and the three of us hoisted him back up to the pier while Quartermain clung to the bottom of the ladder. I’d swear Frack was grinning as we hauled his fuzzy wet butt over the edge of the pier. That mutt loves an adventure.

Tony went down the ladder and helped Quartermain climb up. Once they were topside, Ari flopped down on the concrete, gasping from his exertions in the icy water.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“One of those runners knocked me into the river,” he said, still puffing. “I think he went in, too, but I didn’t see him again.”

Frack stuck his nose into Ari’s face and gave him a big lick. Ari patted the dog’s head and thanked him formally for saving his ass. Up the pier there were more cops arriving, and several vehicles were starting to prowl the virtual canyons between all the stacked containers. We flagged down a passing security truck and asked the rent-a-cop to take a badly shivering Ari up to the scene to see if they could get a blanket for him.

Tony and Pardee automatically had started to walk up the pier, but I called them back.

“Bad idea,” I said. “Bunch of embarrassed cops and feds up there. Time for us interested parties to dee-part.”

As we drove back into Southport, I asked Tony if he’d found any decent gin mills in town. Tony, being Tony, knew of four; he was nothing if not attentive to important logistical details. We stopped at one a block in from the municipal beachfront. I left the shepherds in the vehicle. The place was about as dead as an off-season beer joint could be, which suited us just fine. The bartender was down at one end of the bar, eyes glued to the evolving story of a mass escape of stowaways down at the container port.

“Well,” Tony said, “Quartermain wanted the attention off Helios; that mess should do it.”

The television was now showing aerial views of the container pier.

“Anybody ever say if the radiation they got over there was similar to what they found inside Allie?” Pardee asked.

“They think they had alpha at the truck scene,” I said, “and that’s the best candidate for what got Allie.”

“Yeah, that’s kinda my point,” Pardee said.

“As in, these could be two related incidents?”

“Three incidents-Allie, the hot trailer, and now a bunch of illegals in a container.”

Tony finished his drink and put the glass down with an audible clink. “I don’t know, boss,” he said. “Maybe we should just do what Creeps suggests. Radiation poisoning? Gamma fucking rays? Human smuggling? That’s all federal shit. This is no place for us local gumshoes.”

“Granted, but I still want to know what happened to Allie.”

“We know what happened to Allie,” he replied. “We just don’t know why.” He paused to deliver a mild burp. “Although I have a theory.”

“Which is?”

“She ran into a ‘thing’ in the night,” he said. “A national security ‘thing.’ It went bump and then ate her up from the inside out. I’m sorry for her, don’t get me wrong. But shit happens, you know? As in, wrong time, wrong place?”

This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Pardee?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’ll stay if you want,” he said. “But whatever the hell’s going on here is gonna go major league after tonight, and I, for one, don’t want to disappear into one of those overseas rendition centers.”

I sighed and studied my glass for a moment. I could understand where they were coming from. When we set up H amp;S Investigations, we agreed that it would be mostly part-time work-basically, guys would put in as much time as any of them wanted or needed to make some money. None of us had to take on a case if we didn’t want to, and, after a life of chasing vicious street criminals, additional excitement was typically not the objective.

“All right,” I said. “I copy all that. Lemme talk to Quartermain tomorrow, see if we’re still in the picture. Although…”

“Although what?” Tony asked.

“You guys are probably right-we should back out of this hairball. On the other hand, working some bullshit for Quartermain likely gives us our best chance to find out what happened to Allie-and why.”

“Isn’t that what the Bureau’s gonna do?”

“They might, but if this is part of a larger national security picture, they just might bury the part that involved Allie.”

I looked over at the television, where the bartender was switching through the local Wilmington channels with the mute button on now. The same picture kept coming up-an overhead of the container port from a helicopter and the world’s supply of flashing blue and red lights dispersed along the pier, trying to surround the gazillion containers stacked out there. The runners were definitely not in evidence. I suggested it was time to call it a day.

The next morning, I left a message for Quartermain with the delectable Ms. Samantha Young. Then the three of us went down to the marina below Southport and picked out a boat. We settled on an Everglades 290, which was twenty-nine feet long, with a supposedly unsinkable fiberglass hull and twin 225-horsepower Honda engines. It was designed primarily for daytime sport fishing and was rated to carry up to fourteen people. It had an enclosed cockpit structure amidships, a GPS navigation system, two radios, a fathometer, and a Decca short-range radar set. I booked it for two weeks, with the understanding that it would be berthed each night back at the marina. I paid in advance for the first week’s rent, full-replacement insurance, and a damage deposit. Tony was a boat enthusiast; I had owned a lake boat at one time, but he would be the designated driver.

Quartermain called my cell as we were finishing up at the marina. He wanted me to come to the plant. I told the guys to find some charts of the area and to lay out a track to get up to the plant from Southport. Then I drove over to the power plant. I left Frack in the Suburban and took Frick in with me. I didn’t really need a dog with me, but I wanted everyone I encountered to know that when they saw me, they’d better look out for at least one German shepherd.

Samantha escorted us over to the main reactor complex this time, and then into the spent fuel storage building security office. There I was surprised to run into Colonel Trask, who said he’d take me to the upper-level control room himself. One of the security people checked me into the building, duly noting the presence of the dog in the facility log. A plant technician took me into an adjoining room, where I dressed out in a lightweight spacesuit and registered my current TLD reading. Then Trask and I proceeded into the moonpool access area.

The building was constructed of heavy, steel-reinforced concrete and presented three layers of security checks before we could access the moonpool itself. Because the spent fuel pool was mostly aboveground, we stepped out of an airlock chamber through a heavy steel door and faced a solid wall of heavily studded concrete. I noted surveillance cameras trained on us through each step of the security points. We had to climb eight sets of steel ladder-stairs to get to the top, passing a mezzanine level on the way. Trask didn’t say much beyond directions on when to step through doors. Interestingly, it took swiping both his badge and mine to get through the doors. Trask explained that this had to do with the two-man rule: No one was allowed to go anywhere in the vital area by himself. Just before going inside the main pool enclosure, he positioned both of us in front of a wall-mounted video camera and verbally identified us to the camera lens. After a moment, the door in front of us was remotely unlocked, and Trask pointed me through it.

Quartermain was waiting for me in what looked like a monitoring anteroom along with some technicians. His eyes looked a bit puffy, and he was moving awkwardly, although that may just have been because he, too, was already suited up in a white whole-body coverall. There were no windows in the building, and the air was humid and surprisingly warm.

The moonpool itself was still spooky-looking. The water was incredibly clear and suffused with that ethereal blue-green light down toward the bottom, caused apparently by the residual radiation. And whereas the reactors were caged in huge hemispherical reinforced concrete domes, the spent fuel storage pool was open to view from catwalks on all four sides. It looked like the water was actually moving a little bit. Quartermain said it was and again explained the mechanics of the pool, the water cooling and the emergency backup refill system.

“So why’d they build them aboveground?”

“Pre-9/11 reactor design considerations,” he answered. “Robotic machines defuel and refuel the reactors, since humans can’t go anywhere near that stuff. There’s a whole tunnel complex underneath this building. The robots pull the fuel elements down out of the core, turn them sideways, cart them through a tunnel to the moonpool, stand them back up again, and then set them up for long-term storage. Takes months to do it, and after a while the pools get full. Then any other elements have to go into cask storage. Basically, it’s easier to transfer the stuff from an aboveground pool to the dry casks.”

“Casks, as in big lead-lined tanks?”

“Yup. Exactly. Steel and lead. We have some here, but they’re empty. So far, anyway. But if they don’t open Yucca Mountain pretty soon, we’ll be using them.”

“Is spent fuel a valid terrorist target?” I asked.

“Yes, there’s some bad shit down there at the bottom. That’s one of the main reasons we have people like Trask and his ex-Rangers here. Now: about last night.”

“Other than your unplanned swim, you got what you wanted, right?”

“I think we did. My spill team still has to write up their report, and we’ll be doing some more analysis on the foam once we get it back here.”

“Anyone tying the material to the stowaways?”

“Internally, Homeland Security and the Bureau are treating it as an attempted RDD attack, although the official cover story is only talking about the runners.”

“RDD?” All the acronyms were beginning to overwhelm me.

“Radiological dispersion device-dirty bomb, in English.”

“Except there was no bomb, right?”

“We had hot stuff and illegal males hidden in the same box. All sorts of conjecture about that. For all we know, there’s a bomb still over there, in another container.”

“They catch any of the runners?”

“Two,” he said. “South American, not Middle East. The ICE guys are baffled.”

More acronyms. “ICE?”

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement. More feds. You need to brush up on your alphabets.”

“I’m trying not to. So now what?”

“They’ll determine the destination for that container, and then screen the entire system for any other containers going to the same destination. If they find one, that’s where they’d expect bomb components to be.”

I thought his reasoning was a little tenuous. “You didn’t exactly find a thermos of bad stuff in that container, Ari,” I said.

“Yet,” he shot back.

“Okay, so let the big dogs run with it. You no longer need me or my people, right?”

He didn’t answer right away. He glanced sideways at three fully masked technicians who were taking readings from some instruments suspended in the pool. We turned our backs to them and the glowing pool before he replied. Frick, who seemed nervous, stayed close by my side. I wondered if the dog could sense the presence of something dangerous down there in that shimmering water.

“Actually,” Ari said, “I’d like you to stay. Remember my telling you that we might be able to trace marker isotopes when Ms. Gardner was killed?”

I nodded, although that hadn’t worked out with Allie’s postmortem.

“We have been able to recover the isotopic markers from our spill team’s monitors.”

“And?”

“The markers aren’t unequivocal,” he said grimly, indicating the moonpool with a sideways nod of his head, “but one could make the case that they point right here.”

“Who knows that?” I asked, wanting suddenly to get out of this foreboding building.

“At this moment, nobody but me and my lab people. They’d just brought me the report when I called you. But I will have to notify the company and, more importantly, the NRC. And then we’re probably going to experience some more interesting times, in the Chinese sense.”

I remembered Creeps saying they’d shut the plant down if they could prove the water came from the moonpool. “You’re saying you now think somebody did take radioactive water or materials, or both, out of this facility?”

“Seems impossible, doesn’t it,” he said. “You’ve seen the security. And, of course, it could have come from another BWR plant. But we’re the closest. Plus, you can’t and you wouldn’t get near an operating power reactor, so…”

I looked around as I digested this bit of news. The pool was contained in a sealed concrete building, swarming with radiation-monitoring instruments, accessible only through three layers of security checks, one manned, two electronic, and under constant television surveillance from a control room. So it wasn’t likely that someone just wandered up here with a rope and a bucket.

“Who’s the guy in charge of this area?” I asked.

“Not a guy,” he said. “Her name is Anna P. Martin. Doctor Anna Petrowska Martin, to be specific.”

“Judas Priest!” I said. “You’ve got a damned Russian on your management team?”

“Now, now, don’t rush to judgment. We also have Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and, yes, one Russian, and even some native-born Americans.”

“You do?”

“Consider the state of public education in this country these days, Mr. Richter. You think America’s producing bumper crops of nuclear engineers? If it weren’t for technically educated foreigners, there’d be no nuclear power or any other high-tech industry in this country. What we can’t rape and pillage from the Navy’s nuclear power program, we make up with foreigners. All of whom are fully vetted American citizens, by the way, as is Dr. Martin.”

I shook my head. I had strong views on Russians even being in this country, having dealt with my share of them in the Manceford County major crimes office. The Russian gangs made the Mafia look like pasta-bellied pussies. They were vicious beyond belief, and I firmly believed we should deport every damned one of them back to their beloved rodina tomorrow.

I was about to expand on these sentiments when I realized that one of the white-suited techs was standing behind me. He took off his headgear. Her headgear. I’d formed a mental image of a fullback-shouldered Madame Khrushchev when Ari had told me about Comrade Dr. Martin, but this was most definitely not the case.

“Did I hear my homeland being mentioned?” she said, shaking out a wave of platinum-blond hair. She was one of those chiseled Slavic beauties, with pronounced cheekbones, bright ice-blue eyes, and a challenging mouth. I could hear the Eastern European accent, but she’d obviously been in the States for some time. I’d paid no attention to the “guys” in the baggy white suits, or I would have noticed that one suit wouldn’t necessarily be called baggy.

Ari introduced us, explaining that I was a professional investigator, and that I’d been contracted to help him with an internal problem. She gave him a quizzical look, and me a condescending smile. Then recognition dawned in those polar eyes.

“Ah, yes, the policeman with the Alsatian dogs,” she said, extending a gloved hand.

We shook hands clumsily through all the protective gear. Her grip was firm, and, based on the mildly amused look on her face, she’d overheard my sentiments regarding the presence of a Russian on the staff in the vital area of the plant. I mumbled something polite, which she ignored. She turned back to Ari to ask what more he had heard about the incident last night. He demurred and said he hadn’t any further data at the moment. She smoothed her hair one more time and then looked back at me.

“Are you a technical person, Mr. Richter?” she asked. “An engineer, perhaps?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Just run-of-the-mill police.”

“Oh,” she said with a distinctly dismissive smile. “And you don’t care much for Russians, do you?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I think they belong in Russia.”

“But America is the land of opportunity, yes?”

“As a policeman, all the Russians I’ve ever met were savages, whose idea of opportunity in America was to rape, maim, steal, and kill. Seeing as you’re a Ph. D. and working here, I guess I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

“Well, my goodness,” she exclaimed, stepping back away from me. “You are beginning to remind me of the police back in my birth country. I thought your job as a policeman was to protect and defend.”

“To protect and defend Americans,” I said.

“I’m an American citizen, you ignorant oaf!”

“Anna,” Ari said.

She glared at me again, relayed some technical information in nuke-speak to Ari, and then stomped off to rejoin her team. Or tried to-it’s hard to stomp in paper boots.

Ari was grinning at me. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “She has a temper, and you did step on her toes just a wee bit.”

“Do I look sad?” I asked.

“You look like every other normal male who meets her for the first time,” he said, still smiling. “She’s hardcore about her job and her science, though. She just fired one of her senior techs for breaking protocol on an emergency procedure exercise. When it comes to the moonpool, she’s serious as a heart attack.”

“Then how did some of this evil shit get loose?” I asked, pointing with my chin at the glowing pool.

“Good question, Mr. Investigator,” he replied evenly.

In other words, There’s your mission impossible, Mr. Phelps, should you choose to accept it. I told him about my guys’ reservations after last night’s circus on the pier, and that I’d told them they could back out if they wanted to. He actually thought that might simplify things. One stranger wandering around the complex ought to attract less attention than three.

“I’ll need their badges back,” he reminded me.

“Does Comrade Martin know that the stuff on the truck might have come from here?” I asked.

“She will as soon as I file the NRC report,” he said. “She will feature prominently in the resulting internal investigation.”

“Is that control room over there manned 24/7?”

“No,” he said. “Just when they’re running tests or some other evolution. Otherwise, there’s no one up here.”

I hesitated before asking the next question, but there was no way around it. “If the NRC is going to investigate this from the outside, and the company’s going to be turning over rocks from the inside, and the Bureau is going to be watching both, tell me again what you want me to do?”

He glanced around the steel deck once more. Dr. Martin and her techs had disappeared, and we were alone with the moonpool and its unearthly glow. It looked like some Northern Lights had drowned down there.

“Do you know what a Red Team is?” he asked.

I did not.

“It’s a government expression, normally used in war gaming. When the government conducts a war game, it postulates a hypothetical crisis scenario, and then pits a group of actual government officials against the crisis. These are real officials, but they’re role-playing. Someone from the White House staff will play the president. Another person, say from the Defense Department, will play the role of secretary of defense.”

“Yeah, I’ve read about those.”

“Right. The game directors gather them into a room and throw a tabletop crisis situation at them. They work the problem until they either solve it or it beats them. The good guys are called the Blue Team.”

“I believe.”

“Good. The Red Team sits in another room and reacts to what the Blue Team does, typically by throwing complications into the game. The idea is to make the war game truly dynamic, and to test how well the Blue Team can handle an evolving crisis situation when all their nicely preplanned contingency plans go off the tracks. Plus, the Red Team is privy to the Blue Team’s assumptions and contingency plans before the game starts. They hit those assumptions, and the Blue Team now has to deal with a changing crisis situation.”

“So the Red Team people are the bad guys.”

“Exactly. The Blue Team assumes their simulated Katrina relief convoys can get to New Orleans on the interstates. The Red Team knocks out all the bridges.”

“So you want me to act like a bad guy? See if I can get through the perimeter, break in here and swipe some radioactive water or some spent fuel rods, then go package it and, what? Sell it?”

“Not exactly,” he said patiently. “Unless you have a death wish. But here’s the problem: The NRC’s going to come in here this time and try to prove that radioactive water got loose from Helios, either from the moonpool or somewhere else in the reactor system.”

“Reasonable reaction,” I said.

“PrimEnergy has to defend itself, and the company is going to take the position that it not only didn’t happen but couldn’t happen. Now: Unless some unhappy camper stands up and confesses to a crime that would jail him for about ten successive life sentences, it’s going to end in a Mexican standoff.”

“Which would suit the company, right?”

“Frankly, I think that would suit the government, as well. They don’t even want to hear that there’s been a clandestine radiological release from an operating plant, because that would probably lead to an industry-wide shutdown of this type of nuclear power plant.”

“Why all of them?”

“Because the security system here is common to all of them. It would be a very big deal. Nobody at the NRC or in the industry wants to do that.”

“You’re telling me the NRC would cover it up?”

“No, no, not if they find something concrete, some glowing gun, so to speak. But if it turns into a stone-cold mystery, they’ll ‘study’ it. They might keep probing, but, basically, they’ll keep all the BWR plants turning and burning.”

“And you want me to do what, specifically?”

“I want you to Red-Team it. Not actually do it, mind you, but see if you can figure out a way to get radioactive water out of this plant and into Wilmington. I want you to do this independently, without the official, approved assistance of anybody at this plant, including me.”

“But if the experts can’t prove it, how can I?”

“You weren’t listening-the experts on both sides of this equation don’t want to prove it. So, absent some glaring, oh-shit technical hole in the system, the books are probably going to close on the demise of Ms. Gardner and the hot truck chassis across the river.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you,” I said.

“It’s got to be a people problem, not a technical problem. The NRC’s going to send in nukes. PrimEnergy is going to defend with the likes of Anna P. They’re literally going to be looking at piping systems for leaks. There aren’t any. I need someone to probe the people side. Again, without inside help.”

“Ah.”

He smiled grimly. “Yeah. Operative words: inside help. Everybody else has a stake in this. You wouldn’t. If I’ve got a sleeper, I think it’ll take an outsider to find him.”

This could be a very dangerous game, I thought, given those stakes he was talking about. “What about Trask and his people-you going to cut them in?”

“No, but I’ll let you develop a working relationship with them as you want to. Your current access extends only to the protected area, not the vital area. You’re in this building only because Trask let you in and I’m escorting you.”

“I wouldn’t have access here?”

“Would you know what do to in here? How it even works? I don’t need a technical investigator-I need someone who can uncover a human weakness here, not an engineering defect. I believe that’s what you guys do.”

His argument made sense. Unless, of course, he was the bad guy. “How would we communicate?”

“Can we keep that computer link we have now?” he asked.

“Yes, until the feds tumble to it. I mean, they’ll look at everyone’s computer once your investigation starts, especially the Bureau people. Yours included.”

“The NRC won’t bring the Bureau in immediately, not until they find that smoking gun or a suspect.”

“The Bureau may have its own thoughts about that,” I said. “Listening to Special Agent Caswell, they’re already in.”

“The NRC will be in charge of this investigation,” he said impatiently. “They find a person of interest, they’ll turn the Bureau on. Look: You said you wanted to find out how and why Ms. Gardner got killed. I need a neutral outsider to test my system. And, what the hell, this beats watching lawyers fornicate, doesn’t it? You said you were bored.”

“It was Allie Gardner who was bored,” I said. I felt like I’d been talking to a car salesman. But Ari was walking over to the control room to talk to Dr. Anna Petrowska Martin, Ph. D. Frick was sitting against the main steel wall of the moonpool room, giving me one of those shepherd looks that says, Don’t do it, dummy.

“What are you looking at, dog?” I said. “Aren’t you up for a little adventure? I mean, what could possibly go wrong, hunh?”

That afternoon, I carefully nosed my new water toy into the entrance of the plant’s inlet canal. I’d owned my lake boat for about four years, and, while this one was longer and heavier, driving a boat is like riding a bicycle-once you learn, you’ve pretty much got it. River navigation was quite different from lake driving, but Tony had laid out a perfectly clear track, and if the sixty-thousand-tonners could manage it, so could I. The 290 handled nicely and had plenty of power, and the raised cockpit provided excellent visibility. The shepherds seemed comfortable enough, especially since we were driving around in perfectly still waters. I’d stayed out in the ship channel coming up the Cape Fear River, which was serious overkill in terms of water depth for my little craft-the Corps of Engineers kept the channel dredged to forty-two feet to accommodate the huge container ships, and the 290 drew twenty inches. Between the GPS and the river buoys, even I could find my way to the inlet canal.

There were a couple of fishermen in smaller boats hanging around at the entrance to the inlet canal, and they waved as I turned in. I cut the big Hondas down to idle so as not to throw up too big a wake. As I approached the power plant, I saw a small tug and cargo barge parked at a bulkhead pier. There didn’t seem to be anyone working or guarding the barge, so I had to assume it was carrying routine, non-nuclear supplies for the plant. From a security standpoint, a barge probably presented less of a threat than a truck, but it, too, was nowhere near close to the main buildings.

I’d reluctantly sent Pardee and Tony back to Triboro, after they confirmed that they’d just as soon not get involved in this one. Pardee reiterated his willingness to stay and help, but I’d finally decided I’d work this one myself. I asked him to continue to manage the comms support for our supposedly secure channel to Quartermain’s computer. Tony wanted to make sure I didn’t think he was leaving me in the lurch, and I reassured him that was not the case since what I needed down here was competent help. That got the usual snort out of him. I received one e-mail message from Ari just after noon, which said simply that the fun and games had begun. I decided that it would be a great afternoon for a boat ride.

The marina people had briefed me on the rules concerning both the container port and the power plant canals. While the access to both was nominally public, Notices to Mariners had been published that security considerations could and would take immediate precedence if circumstances so dictated, meaning they could run your ass out of those so-called public access areas whenever they chose to do so. If you argued, they could confiscate your boat. If you really argued, they could sink your boat. They also explained that most of the real fishermen liked to go into the discharge canal over on the other side, because the heated water attracted more fish.

The container port was approachable, but there, too, the Coast Guard had some hard-and-fast rules. You had to stay at least a hundred yards away from any ships at the pier, and that no-go line expanded to two hundred yards at night. Any boat operating in the main channel or the approaches to the pier had to give way to any ship maneuvering in that area. That was kind of a no-brainer, with the informal but implacable law of gross tonnage being the enforcement mechanism. Sixty thousand tons versus four thousand pounds was how boats, even unsinkable boats, became debris. The bottom line was clear: The port authorities were nervous, and this was probably a good time to avoid the container port and all its works.

My objective in making this trip was to do it once in daylight before I tried it again at night. The inlet canal provided river water for the steam turbines’ condensers. It ended at a huge grated concrete blockhouse assembly where the cold water was drawn into the maws of the big steam condensers under the power house, some four hundred yards distant. A line of buoys prevented boats from getting close to the actual inlet, more for their own safety than the plant’s. There was visible turbulence around the inlet grates and a baby logjam of river debris plastered against the screens. I saw tinted hemispherical television camera pods on telephone poles around the inlet.

I was wearing jeans, sneakers, a baggy sweatshirt under a light windbreaker, a floppy hat, and oversized sunglasses. The shepherds should have been out of sight of the cameras unless there were some I hadn’t seen yet, and there probably were. But as I made a slow turn at the business end of the canal and headed back toward the river, there didn’t seem to be any reaction from plant security. Nighttime might be a different story. I was careful not to spend too much time staring at the two big green buildings of Helios, where the atomic dragons soaked in their elemental fires. And then my cell phone chirped.

“Richter,” I answered.

“Yes, we know,” a voice replied. It was my new best friend, Colonel Trask.

“So where are you, Colonel?” I asked, as I nudged the boat’s throttle up one notch, heading for the egress.

“I’m in central control,” he said. “My eyes are in that little green fishing boat on your starboard bow.”

I looked, and there was the “fisherman” who’d waved. He was holding binoculars on me, and behind him I saw the TV camera, mounted backward on his windscreen, pointed in my direction as I approached the river.

“I feel safer already,” I said.

“There you go, making assumptions again, Mr. Richter,” he said. “What were you doing at the moonpool this morning?”

“Dr. Quartermain wanted to show me something,” I said, “and I got to meet one of your Russians. Gotta admit, that was a surprise.”

“I’m with you on that one,” he said. “Omnia Russians de-lenda sunt.”

“How’s the visitation going with the NRC?”

“The way it always goes when they get their black hats on, Mr. Richter. Lots of noise and motion, but not much movement. Everyone’s really serious, of course, and very important. I understand you got to watch the wetback marathon last night over across the way.”

“Sure did,” I said. “Lots of noise and all kinds of movement. Including Dr. Quartermain. In fact, one of my mutts helped fish him out of the river.”

“So we heard,” he said. “A good German shepherd is hard to beat. Look-you take a drink of whiskey from time to time?”

“No more than once a day,” I said. I was abeam of the “fisherman,” who was no longer covering me with his binocs. His TV camera, on the other hand, was swiveling just fine, probably under the control of whatever room Trask was in. Only then did I notice that the boat was anchored at both ends.

“There’s a pleasant little watering hole down in Southport, called Harry’s,” he said.

“How original,” I said. I felt the main river current grab the boat’s bow and begin to slide us toward the south bank of the canal. I kicked up the power and veered out toward the main channel.

“Yeah, well, it’s kind of a hangout for various stripes of Helios people. How’s about I buy you a drink, say, around eight thirty or so?”

“I never say no to a free drink,” I said. “Do I have to be on the lookout for Billy the Kid anymore?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Richter,” he said. “But bring your shepherds.”

“Count on it, Colonel.”

I put a call in to Mary Ellen Goode when I got back to the beach house. This time she answered. She sounded as warm and friendly as ever, but at the same time, a bit reserved.

“Cam,” she said. “I got your message. You’re back?”

“I am indeed,” I said. “Can we get together?”

“Um,” she began. Surprised, I let a small band of silence build.

“The thing is,” she said, “I don’t think that’d be, what’s the word I’m looking for-appropriate?”

“Seemed pretty appropriate the other night at the Hilton,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed about that, are you?”

“A little,” she said. “I have to confess to using you, in a manner of speaking.”

“Well, damn, woman,” I said, trying to keep it light while hiding my confusion. “If that was using me, you can use me and even abuse me any time you want. C’mon, Mary Ellen, what’s going on?”

“The thing is, I’m getting married in a month.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And, lemme see: You were getting married in a month and a week when you came out to see your old buddy from upstate.”

A slight hesitation. “Yes.”

“So what was all that-your bachelorette party?”

“In a way. Well, no, that’s not fair. I just, well, I just wanted to know what it would be like. Edward is a nice guy, but he’s nothing like you. I had to know.”

I couldn’t decide if I should be mad or disappointed. “Know exactly what, Mary Ellen?”

“Cam, that night was incredibly exciting and eminently satisfying. What I had to know was whether or not I was in love with you, and you with me, or just turned on by the fact that you are so very different from all the men I work with and see every day.”

That sounded a bit lame to me. “As in, get it on with the pool boy one last time?”

“No, no, no. Please, don’t be angry, even though you have every right to be. But let me ask you something: Are you in love with me?”

“I hold you in great affection, Mary Ellen,” I said, suddenly the weasel. “You know that.”

“Yes, I do, but do you want to marry me? You want a family? A house in the academic suburbs and some kind of normal, nine-to-five life, one that doesn’t involve gunfights in the dark?”

I sighed. We both knew the answer to that question.

“Right,” she said, and I felt my heart sink, even though I knew she was absolutely right. I’d been married, and I was way past my sell-by date to go there again, even with this lovely woman.

“We smoked some mirrors that night, Mary Ellen,” I said. “You gotta admit, when we were good, we were very good.”

“Stop reminding me, Cam. But the truth is, I want all of those things, and it’s kind of now or never as I see it.”

“I guess I wasn’t really calling about having a drink, was I,” I admitted.

She giggled. “And I appreciate the sentiment,” she said. “Shit. This is hard. I thought all I’d have to do is send you a Dear John and go on with my life. Tell me one more thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked. I thought I knew what she’d want to know, and she did not disappoint.

“Are the shepherds with you?”

Bingo, I thought. “They are. And, yes, I am. You didn’t buy the admin story, did you?”

“Wanted to,” she said. “ Really wanted to. But…”

“This mean I can’t call from time to time? Just to see how you’re doing?”

“You might get Edward.”

“Aaarrgh,” I said.

“Cam: It’s been more than great. But now…”

“Got it, babe. All the very best in the next chapter, and I mean that most sincerely. I do have to say, just for the record, mind you, that I’m sorely disappointed in missing out on some more use and abuse.”

I could almost see the smile I could hear in her voice. “Good-bye, Cam.”

Okay, I thought. A clean shoot-down if there ever was one. Let’s go see what kind of a date Carl Trask is.

Harry’s Bar was located in the second-to-last block before the Southport municipal beach and fishing pier. It was a traditional layout-a long, dimly lit, and smoky rectangular room, mirrored bar and stools on one side, a single row of tables on the other. At the back was a jukebox, a worn-looking dance floor, and a stairway with a sign that said POOL, with an arrow pointing up the stairs. I didn’t think they meant swimming. There was a neon Budweiser sign in the window, along with a dusty and somewhat tattered liquor license taped to the glass near the door. A dozen-plus metal stools decorated the bar, all occupied by what looked like workers from the plant, based on all the badges and TLDs. Not a particularly rough-looking crowd, but it was definitely hard hat country. Some of the tables near the dance floor were occupied by small groups of women who were making a giggling reconnaissance of the bar until I showed up with a large German shepherd in tow.

The tables up front were empty, so I chose one in the front corner near the door and sat down with my back to the wall. I had Frick on a harness with me, and I put her under the table with her back to the wall. Some of the guys at the bar noted the shepherd, but most were busy drinking and talking, in that order, and paid us no mind. The women started giggling again. The bartender tried to protest about the dog, but Frick showed her teeth and he elected to retire with his dignity and his ankles intact.

I ordered Scotch and was enjoying my drink as much as I could having just been dumped by the prettiest woman I knew. A polite, even complimentary dumping, but still. Then Ari’s assistant, the lovely Samantha Young, came through the door. This time the giggling really stopped, and was replaced by some frustrated stares from the Southport debutante conga line huddled over their exotic drinks along the back wall. Samantha was wearing what I think are called designer jeans, a light jacket over a heartbreaker sweater, and slightly more war paint than I’d noticed at the office. She carried a small, businesslike leather purse under her left arm.

She closed the door, shucked the jacket, and inhaled. I think most of the guys at the bar inhaled, too. Some of them even whimpered. She gave them a casual once-over, ignored all the daggers coming down the line from the back tables, and then chose the table next to mine. I tipped my glass at her when she sat down, and she gave me a friendly nod, scoring many points for me at the bar. The tables were close enough that we could talk without moving into each other’s space. I asked her how things were going in the head shed at Helios.

“Lots of new faces and interesting questions,” she said. “Which one is that under your table?”

I told her, and then had to explain the genesis of their names. A couple of the more lubricated members of the stool staff were starting to cast lustful if bleary eyes at Samantha while making the usual delicate anatomical observations. She ignored the boozy chatter and accepted a glass of white wine from the bartender. He raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

“Ari said one of your shepherds pulled him out of the river?”

“Yeah, that was Frack-he’s out in the Suburban. Frick here doesn’t much like water. They get everything cleaned up over there in the port?”

She shrugged, indicating she didn’t know. Then she looked over my shoulder at the front door. “ Achtung,” she said quietly.

Colonel Trask stood in the doorway, examining the crowd at the bar like a cop about to make a general roust. There was a tightening of shoulders and turning of faces among the regulars. Then he saw me sitting next to Samantha and walked over. He, too, had changed out of work clothes and was wearing khakis, running shoes, a red and black lumberjack shirt, and an ancient Marine utility cap, complete with a faded eagle embossed above the brim. I was a bit surprised to see what looked like a holstered. 357 Mag strapped onto his right hip. He saw me looking.

“Never leave home without it,” he said, ignoring Samantha. Then he noticed Frick. “May I sit down?” he asked the dog politely.

Frick looked at him as if he were crazy, and I said it was okay, that she’d been fed. He grinned and sat down, but he kept his feet well under his chair. Frick, too, had noticed the hand cannon, and the sight of guns in the open made her alert.

“You’re ahead of me,” he observed and motioned for the bartender to bring him a Bud by pointing at the neon sign. The bartender nodded.

“You’re a single-malt man?” Trask asked. He sat with his back to Samantha, and was probably the only man in the bar who hadn’t looked at her twice.

“It’s Scotch weather,” I said. “The NRC found any smoking neutrons yet?’

“Early days, Lieutenant,” he said. “Most of them are scientists, and they take a while to organize a proper cluster-fuck.”

So now I was a lieutenant again. Coming up in the world? But then I realized he was calling me lieutenant because he expected me to call him colonel. Well, hell, I could do that.

“They’ll be looking at your operation, too?” I asked.

“Oh, shit, yes. But I have a standard answer for that line of questioning-I offer to give any or all of them a can of chicken soup, and then challenge them to get it through my perimeter.”

“Chicken soup.”

“Yup.”

“Radioactive chicken soup?”

“Nope. But it does come in a metal can, as would any radionuclides that decided to go walkabout with human assistance.”

“Are there other ways for radionuclides to get loose?”

“Surely you jest,” he replied.

“Actually, I don’t.”

“Then go online sometime and Google for a site called RADNET plus the word ‘an-thro-po-genic.’ Familiarize yourself with the term Accident in Progress. See what our government’s been co-facilitating in the field of nuclear safety. Have your lunch first, though.”

“You biting the hand that feeds you?”

“You bet. But back to the chicken soup: I’m talking about someone trying to smuggle radioactive water out of Helios. They wouldn’t put it in a Ziploc bag, no matter what the TV ads say.”

“Unless, of course, you’re dealing with a prospective Muslim martyr,” I said. I thought Samantha might be listening to everything we were saying, but the jukebox started up, and then she had to fend off some prospective dance partners. She looked a tad annoyed; maybe she was put off by all the drooling.

Trask nodded. “But then we should have had a second incandescent DOA,” he said, “and that didn’t happen.”

“Or they haven’t found him in the Dumpster behind the mosque,” I said. “Those guys are fucking serious.”

“You’re right as rain about that,” he said. “Problem is, we Americans aren’t. Islam has declared a religious war and we’ve declared democracy back at them. Imagine, democracy in the twelfth century!”

“Probably seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. I sensed a rant coming, and sat back to let him vent.

“I don’t know why I give a shit anymore,” he said. “This country is finished. Washed up. Weak in the knees and damp in the panties. Genetically diluted by millions of illegal aliens, all squalling for their ‘rights,’ for God’s sake. Distracted by video games, talk shows, and prancing heiresses’ crotch shots. Half of the population looks like it just graduated from a Chicago feedlot. America deserves what’s coming.”

“There are men and women fighting overseas right now who’d argue with you,” I said.

“Those are the legions on the frontiers of the empire,” he said, warming to what had to be his favorite subject. “Most of them choose to stay out there among the barbarians because they’re disgusted by what’s going on back at the ripening core. A do-nothing, tax-and-spend government, sweaty, sticky-fingered politicians, usurping judges, thoroughly corrupt political parties, elected pedophiles prowling the United States Capitol-shee-it! The new pope got it right: Islam is a religion of blood and iron, but most Americans are happily focused on money, food, sex, and the latest Xbox video game.”

Yee-haw, I thought. Ari had warned me, too. I wanted to argue with him, but I recognized a zealot when I saw one. Besides, I thought he had a point: For a country at war, life in America sure looked like business as usual. I let him babble on, nodding and going along, because I still didn’t know why we were meeting. Finally he began to run down.

“You really a herpetologist?” I asked, trying to steer us out of all the political foaming at the mouth.

“Not in the practicing sense,” he replied. “I studied snakes because I admire them. Elemental creatures with an unusually perfect predation design.”

“Keep them as pets?”

He laughed. “No. Snakes can’t really be pets. They’re reptiles. Primitive animals. A pet implies an emotional quotient, like your shepherd there. Snakes hunt, eat, digest, doze off, sometimes for weeks, and then they hunt again. Kind of like the falcons in days of yore-they were never hunting for their so-called falconer. They were hunting because they were starving. That’s how you train a falcon to hunt, by the way. You capture it, and then you starve it. When it’s just about ready to fall off its perch, you take it hunting.”

“I’ve been reading about people turning pythons loose in the Everglades,” I said. “That’s kind of a scary thought.”

“That will be interesting, over time,” he said. “Depending on the species, they never stop growing.”

“A threat to a human?”

“Not in the sense that a python can eat a fully grown human. But a big one can surely kill you if you happen to encounter him in or near the water. They prey on monkeys a lot. Catch one drinking from a pond or a stream, grab its face and pull its nose underwater. Then they wait.”

“How big is big?”

“A Burmese can be six to seven meters,” he said. “A hundred fifty kilos, maybe more. They have prehensile tails-always attached to something. Their teeth are an inch long and they slant backwards, so if they achieve a solid bite, you’re not going anywhere. With both ends secured, they throw coils around you. That much weight, you can’t stand up. Once down, they just lie there. When you inhale, they do nothing. Every time you exhale, though, they squeeze. Pretty soon you can’t inhale. Like one of those goddamned seat belts in the backseat-the ones made for baby seats? Every time you lean back, it tightens and locks? Just like that.”

“Lovely thought.”

“Yeah, well, a primitive being can be scary. You know, it’s an artifact from the Pleistocene. And then it moves. You’re wondering why I called you.”

“Yup,” I said, glad to get off the subject of snakes. I don’t much care for snakes.

“Ms. Luscious behind me turned in the badges and TLDs for your two sidekicks, which tells me two things: They’re smarter than you are, and they’ve probably gone back to West Bumfuck, North Carolina.”

“That’s Triboro to the inhabitants,” I said.

“But you’re still here.”

“So I am.”

“Which means Quartermain’s got you doing some shit.”

I didn’t respond. He seemed to have all the answers so far. He leaned back in his chair. Samantha was looking bored, but I noticed she’d changed chairs, which put her one foot closer to us, either for some protection against all the barroom cowboys or to hear better over the jukebox. Trask was obviously waiting for me to say something.

“He does,” I said. “But I have to do it solo, without any help from anyone at Helios. If it’s any comfort, I do not intend to come creeping around the perimeter at night with fence cutters and a bag of grenades.”

“So you said,” he replied. “Too bad-we do grenades.” Then he was serious again. “Okay, here it is,” he said. “You’re on my radar. I’m pretty sure you’re not a bad guy, so I’m not here to tell you how bad things could go for you or any of my usual horseshit. But know this: There may be other players in whatever game Quartermain has going. I’m guessing he wants to use you as a Red Team. Private PI as agent provocateur. If that’s the case, you would do well to have me as an ally.”

“Unless you’re the subject,” I replied, just to throw some shit of my own into the discussion.

He was startled. “The subject?” he asked.

“As in, subject of interest. The target of an investigation. The objective of some kind of play. The individual under surveillance. It’s a law enforcement term.”

He blinked at that. He’d supposedly done tours with the military police. He had to know the usage of that word, so his question had been a stall for time. I decided to press him a little.

“As to other players in the game,” I continued, “I have to assume the feds have at least one agent under, if only because Quartermain would want to cover all his bets and his ass. You know, the Roman emperor’s wistful question: Who guards the guards?”

I waited, but he just sat there, staring at me.

“Actually, though,” I continued, “that’s not my real problem.”

“What is your real problem, then?”

“I think some evil fuck killed one of my people,” I said.

“That was probably a coincidence.”

“There are no coincidences,” I said. “First rule of homicide.”

He looked away, ostensibly taking in the dance floor scene, but thinking now. He still hadn’t even so much as said hello to Samantha, a woman he knew and probably the most attractive female in the town that night. Suddenly I thought I understood-Samantha’s being there was no coincidence, either. I heard noises out there in the woods.

“There’s one more thing,” he said finally. “Billy.”

“Oh, dear. Billy.”

“Yeah, well, he was a holdover from the previous security director. Cousin of somebody’s mama, I think. Local Southport boy. Once I started bringing my people in, he sort of stood out, and not in a good way. I told you he wouldn’t be a problem, but I may have been wrong about that.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

He smiled. “I guess I expected you to say, Bring it on. I can handle that young punk, et cetera, et cetera.”

“I can handle Billy if I see him coming,” I said. “I can’t handle Billy if he’s a long-gun kinda guy.”

He nodded. “That is very good thinking,” he said. “The good news is that he’s not a shoot-from-the-weeds kinda guy, in my opinion. The bad news is that he’s been running his mouth, and he said if he couldn’t get to you, he’d get to your furry friends. So be careful out there, okay?”

My new best friend, I thought. “Thanks again for the warning.”

“Warnings,” he said. “As in plural.”

“I’ll give you this much, Colonel. If I detect a clear and present danger to your vital area, I will most definitely let you know.”

He nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “Back at you.”

He finished his drink, dropped some cash on the table, gathered his jacket, and got up. This time he did acknowledge Samantha, and she waved back at him over the shoulder of a large man who was sporting a half-dozen dangling Helios badges and trying to score a dance. I decided this was a great time to make my creep before one of the hefties at the back of the bar asked me to dance. I rehooked Frick, went over to the bar, and settled up. Then we left.

I let Frick run around for a minute in the parking lot and then jumped her into the back of the Suburban, fired it up, and drove out of the lot. I went slowly around the block, drove back into the lot, and parked in a dark corner where I could watch Harry’s front door. I dropped the windows and settled in to wait. Sure enough, about two minutes later, out came Samantha. She was still clutching that purse in her left hand like a football and talking on a cell phone. She looked around the parking lot, as if checking for lurking muggers or rapists.

I didn’t move, and I didn’t think she’d seen me. She then walked over to a plain vanilla Ford and got in. The phone conversation went on for a few minutes, and then she signed off. She pulled the rearview mirror over, checked her makeup, then lit the car off, backed out of her parking space, and drove directly over to where I was parked and pulled in, nose to tail. She smiled at me as she rolled down her window.

“It was the purse, wasn’t it,” she said.

I nodded. I’d seen too many just like it under the arm of just about every female FBI agent I’d ever met. Compact, hard leather, big, easily accessible snap, and perfect for a concealed weapon. Some of them even had springloaded pouches, so all she had to do was unsnap the purse, hit the butt of the weapon with her open hand, and go to town.

“You think Trask knows?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s too busy trying to pretend he doesn’t notice that glorious bod of yours. It’s a military thing, I think-if the troops are all salivating and acting like teenagers, the colonel should remain aloof.”

She rolled her eyes, but at least had the grace not to protest about sexist comments and such. She was a genuine beauty, and it was tough not to just look at her. Which is why, when Frick suddenly barked, I realized I’d been well and truly had. Three large men in dark clothes and sporting what looked like H amp;K MP5s were standing on the other side of my Suburban. One of them presented his FBI credentials through the passenger side window. As I took the situation onboard, a black Suburban rolled up behind us and stopped. I looked back over at Samantha.

She gave me a wistful smile. “Sorry about this,” she said. “Nothing personal.” Then she rolled up her window, backed out, and drove away.

They were actually polite. No cuffs, no perp walk, no reading of rights in the headlights or anything like that. They let me take the dogs back to the house and put them inside. They told me to leave my cell phone and any weapons I might be carrying, which I did. Then I was escorted to the black Suburban and settled into the backseat with one of the agents. Two more got in the front seat, and a fourth took my car keys and followed us in my Suburban. We were a regular parade.

They were acting like this was just a normal office call among professionals, but still, I didn’t even think about resisting or giving them any lip. I sat there in the backseat with my seat belt fastened and both hands clearly visible in my lap as we drove north toward the lights of Wilmington, up over the Cape Fear Memorial Bridge, down into town, and then east toward the container port, which is where I thought we were going.

Wrong. We turned north onto Shipyard Drive, away from the port, and went several blocks north before turning right into a cluster of two-story brick buildings. We drove around to the back of one of them, which was right next to a fitness center, and parked. They took me through a cipher-locked back door and into what I assumed was the FBI’s resident agent’s office in Wilmington. I was escorted down a hallway to a conference room. There was a cardboard box on the conference table. The agent who seemed to be in charge told me that it would be just a few minutes.

“What will be just a few minutes?” I asked.

“Your ride.”

An hour later my “ride” drove through the gates of what looked like a state hospital for the mentally challenged. There were grim, twenty-foot-high brick walls along the front, an ornate if presently unguarded wrought-iron gateway, and a central paved road pointing toward a large, five-story brick building in the distance. Alongside the road were low, boarded-up white structures that looked like vintage World War II Tempo buildings.

I was now wearing a set of bright orange nylon overalls, courtesy of the cardboard box in the conference room. My ankles were connected by eighteen inches of thin stainless steel wire, and my wrists were similarly constrained. When we pulled up in front of the Victorian-looking main building, one of my escorts in the front seat asked me to lean forward so he could drop the hood over my head. Throughout the entire process, I hadn’t said a word, and I didn’t say anything when the cotton hood was draped over my head and neck. There were no eyeholes, so I was now totally dependent on the two escorts to shuffle me out of the car and into the building, with quiet instructions about steps, the door, turn right, turn left, turn around, okay, sit down. I was physically larger than either of them, but the restraints and now the hood reduced me to something very small indeed. I could see light and blurred shapes through the hood, but nothing else. Every time I inhaled, the hood flattened against my face. It smelled of industrial-strength laundry soap.

I sat on what felt like a park bench in what I assumed was a hallway. I could hear voices coming from another room nearby, but there was no alarm or excitement, just the casual conversation I remembered when doing a routine booking. Some low laughter, a phone ringing and being answered, someone stirring a coffee mug, football talk, and the shuffle of papers. The hallway smelled of institutional disinfectant and stale coffee in equal proportions.

There’d been no drama at the RA’s office, either. A walk down the hall to the bathroom, where I was asked to strip down to my underwear, given a cursory examination for weapons, and then handed my new costume. Then back to the conference room to wait. Being an ex-cop, I knew that my best move at this point was to keep my mouth shut, which I did. I didn’t know what charges, if any, were being filed, or if I was really even under formal arrest, although the orange jumpsuit had not been an encouraging development. No one came in to ask questions, and the people who were handling me had obviously not been interested in idle chitchat.

Hands appeared at my elbows, and I stood up. Turn left, the sounds of an electronically controlled door, walk straight ahead, turn right, stop. Elevator sounds. Step in, turn around, stop. Doors closing. Elevator movement, with four dings indicating that we were going to the fifth floor. Doors opening. Step out, turn right, walk straight ahead. A firm hand on each elbow, but no antagonistic pressure holds. I’d seen pictures of the Al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo, and wondered why their heads always hung down. Now I knew: The only things I could see were the tops of my feet.

Finally, stop here. The sounds of another electronic door. Turn right, step through the door, that’s good, now three more steps, turn around, sit down. Elbows free. Good. The hood came off. And there was Creeps, stretching out his long, awkward frame in a too-small metal chair across the room. My two hallway helpers stood by the door, within reach. They were dressed in Marine combat fatigues and had distinctive military haircuts. One of them crumpled up my hood in his large hands.

The room was about twelve by fifteen feet square. I’d been expecting a cell, but it wasn’t like that. There were two windows, dark now, of course, a normal single bed with a night table and a reading lamp, a small desk and chair, and two other armchairs. There was a door that I hoped led to a bathroom. The walls were painted a muted green, and the floors were polished linoleum. The only thing that indicated I was in a cell was the fact that there was no doorknob on the inside, just a card reader.

Creeps watched me take it all in before speaking. “Mr. Richter,” he said.

“Special Agent,” I replied. If they’d expected me to protest or otherwise spout off, I meant to disappoint them. For the moment.

“I apologize for the hood,” he said, “but it’s become standard procedure for military detention facilities these days. Tends to take the piss and vinegar out of prospective rebels, you understand. That said, there is a plus side: Nobody sees who’s being admitted to the facility, either.”

He waited for a response; I remained silent. I knew full well that every interaction between a prisoner and his guards of whatever stripe was part and parcel of an interrogation record. I hadn’t been Mirandized, but then again, he had just mentioned the term “ military detention facility.” When he realized there wasn’t going to be a reaction, he leaned forward.

“Right,” he said. “Let me explain why you’re here. Were you and your associates present at the scene of a radioactive material spill at the container port yesterday?”

I nodded. I’d looked for a video camera, but hadn’t seen one.

“Were you present when the trailer in question disgorged several illegal aliens into the container stack area?”

I said yes.

“Were you warned by me, personally, not to get involved in the matter of a previous radioactive material incident involving one of your associates?”

“Sort of,” I said.

He looked down that long bony nose. “Sort of?”

“I’m an investigator for hire, Special Agent. Until I spoke in detail with Dr. Quartermain, I could not know that what he wanted me to do involved either incident.”

“Do you remember what I said as I was leaving your rented house?”

“Interfere and disappear.”

“Yes, indeed. Guess what?”

“I give up.”

“You will be detained at this facility until further notice. You will be allowed no contact with the outside world until further notice. If you cooperate with the established regimen of detention, you will be given certain privileges, such as an operating television, this room instead of a rubber room in the psychotic isolation cells down in the basement, access to library materials, unfettered exercise outdoors within the confines of the grounds and the rules, and even some choices of meals. The converse to all that is also true.”

“What about my dogs?”

“Your shepherds. Right. We have contacted your associates and asked them to come retrieve your dogs. One-” He fished out a notebook and read his notes. “One Anthony Martinelli is coming down tonight to retrieve them and return them to your home in Triboro.”

All of that left the obvious question unspoken.

“We told him that we had received a call from you asking for one of them to come retrieve the dogs. That you did not sound as if you were under duress but that you would be out of pocket for some time on your new assignment and, for reasons known only to you, could not take the dogs.”

I wanted to ask him if he thought Tony really believed that bullshit, but thought better of it. The two guys in military fatigues were standing at parade rest, looking bored. The one guy had reduced the hood to a compact orange wad.

“Do you understand what I was telling you about privileges, Mr. Richter?”

“What I don’t understand is how you think you can abduct me, transport me to some American version of the Lubyanka, and hold me incommunicado ‘until further notice,’ without a hint of a criminal charge or even a Miranda. Since when has the Bureau been doing this kind of shit to American citizens?”

“Since the passage of the Patriot Act, Mr. Richter.”

“That’s for baby-burning Islamic terrorists.”

He stood up. “I’ll get you a copy of the act, Mr. Richter. You might be surprised when you read the whole thing, and even more surprised if you read some of the action memoranda flowing from said act. Few people have actually read it, I’m told, including an embarrassing number of congresspersons.” He looked around my new home. “In the meantime, please behave. This is as good as it gets. The alternative accommodations are reportedly unpleasant.”

“Reportedly? This isn’t your fun house?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Richter. You’re now in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. Your Bureau does not indulge in detention facilities. Gentlemen, would one of you please swipe your magic card?”

There was a pamphlet on the bed, along with a green mag-stripe card. The pamphlet spelled out the rules in straightforward, military language. The bathroom was shared with the room next door. Swipe the card-if the bathroom was available, the door would unlock. Take the card with you, because if you didn’t, you’d be in there until the cleaning crews showed up. Detainees would be served three meals a day. Breakfast would be at 0730. Lunch would be brought in at 1130. Dinner at 1730. Exercise periods would be scheduled by the guard force.

The second page had more rules. My official status was detainee. In case I was wondering. Each detainee was restricted to his or her room for twenty-two hours a day. There would be a two-hour exercise period within the grounds. There were rules for the time one spent outdoors: Detainees had to stay thirty feet away from any perimeter fence. There was a white chalk line on the grass indicating the thirty feet. Detainees could not speak to any other detainees while out on the grounds. Detainees would wear a hood the entire time they were outside of their rooms, including during exercise periods. The fence around the grounds was under continuous surveillance. There were guard dogs involved in that surveillance. Detainees would obey the instructions of any and all guards, but would not speak to guards unless the guard spoke first. Deadly force was authorized throughout the facility. Enjoy your stay with us.

I tried the card on the bathroom door and got lucky. Then I came back to my new room and tried the bed. It was a bed. There were no clocks on the wall, and the television, mounted high on one wall, was silent. I got up and turned out the overhead lights. The windows revealed that the building was near a river, but I didn’t know which river. The trip from downtown Wilmington had taken at least an hour. There were lights on the building shining down onto the grounds. I could actually make out those chalk lines against the perimeter fence, but there was a jumper barrier ledge under my window, so I couldn’t see directly down into the exercise yard.

Terrific, I thought. Then I was startled by two loud raps on the door. I waited to see what would happen. Two more raps.

“Well, come right in,” I called, turning on the bedside lamp.

“There’s a hood in the closet,” a voice said. “Put it on.”

I looked and found it. Same haute couture orange, much lighter, and this one had eyeholes. I put it on, turned on a reading lamp, and told my caller to come in again, wondering how much I looked like a Klansman.

The card lock beeped and a major of Marines stepped through the door, along with two new escorts. The major turned on the overhead lights. He was an extremely fit white male, dressed in pressed and stiffly creased cammies, highly polished boots, and a Marine-green utility cap. He had either gone completely bald or had shaved his head. He wore a large gold ring on his left hand, which I presumed was the source of the raps. His two escorts looked just like him, only much younger. They wore black leather gloves, which made them more menacing than the previous two escorts. I wondered if things were finally going to get physical.

The major looked at me and then consulted a clipboard. “Mr. Doe,” he said. “I’m Major Carter. I’m the OIC of this facility.”

“My name isn’t Doe,” I said. “It’s-”

“It’s Doe. Actually, J. Doe Five-Seven. That’s what it says here on your entry paperwork, and that’s all we need to know. I’m here to explain a few things to you.”

I perched on the edge of the bed, feeling more than a little ridiculous in my orange jumpsuit and KKK headgear. “Go right ahead, Major.”

“Thank you, Mr. Doe. As you can see, we are United States Marines. Temporarily, this facility is a military reservation, so military law applies.”

“I thought this place was a state loony bin.”

“And you would be correct about that, Mr. Doe. It has been used for that purpose, but it was decommissioned sometime after 9/11. Now it is a federal loony bin. My federal loony bin, to be specific.”

“I guess I’m a little surprised to see Marines.”

“Marines go where they’re told to go and do what they’re told to do, Mr. Doe. Now, speaking for myself, and probably for my two escorts here, we’d all rather be back in the Happy Valley participating in Uncle George’s Assholes for Allah program. That’s like our Toys for Tots only lots more fun. But, sadly, we’re here instead. And so are you.”

“Who put me here? Can you tell me that?”

He sniffed and glanced at his clipboard. “The Octopus put you here, Mr. Doe. That’s what we call the Department of Homeland Security. Tentacles every fucking where. Black ink billowing out in noxious clouds if anyone gets too close or pokes sticks at it. Big, round, intelligent eyes. And an even bigger beak in the middle.” He looked back up at me. “This would be the beak, Mr. Doe.”

I shook my head in wonder. This couldn’t be happening. He’d apparently seen that look before.

“The good news, Mr. Doe: there’s neither a C nor a T after your number five-seven. That means you are neither a criminal nor a terrorist detainee. That would require different accommodations.”

“Oh, like the basement?”

He seemed surprised. “The basement? There’s nothing in the basement but rats, wires, boxes of records, and rusty pipes. My Marines use the basement to hone their hunting skills against the day they go back to real Marine work. No, sir, any C -code detainees at this facility are held on another floor, and the T -codes go see a little bit of Fidel’s Communist paradise. Let me get through my brief, please. It’s late and I need my beauty sleep.”

One of the escorts twitched with what may have been a smile. I sat back on the bed and let Herr Kommandant read me some more rules. The basic premise was as Creeps had described it: Be good, don’t give the guard force any shit, and this would be like any other motel, only with one-way doorknobs and perpetual room service.

“Isolation is the rule here, Mr. Doe. Hood’s on when outside the rooms. You don’t talk to guards, other detainees, the housekeeping people, and especially anyone outside the fence. When you use that card to access the bathroom, the other person’s card won’t work until you’ve used yours to exit. If you tarry overlong in the bathroom, your card will stop working. You want to live in there instead of in here, be our guest.”

“Do I get my one phone call?”

He shook his head. “Isolation means just that, within and without. Octopus rules.”

“And for how long does this go on?” I asked.

He shrugged. “That’s up to the Octopus, Mr. Doe. Did you perchance ignore a warning from someone in authority to stay away from something or someone?”

I nodded. “It’s possible.”

“Well, that’s it, then. Whoever that authority is, they’ll make the decision, and then the Octopus will wave one of its many arms and you’ll return to main pop out there in civvie-land. Or not.”

I stood up, and the escorts made subtle adjustments in their stance. They weren’t armed, but they both looked like men who didn’t need a gun to get things done.

“The government can’t hold me forever, Major,” I said. “Even military prisoners have rights.”

“The housekeeping people will deliver a menu each morning through this slot in the door, Mr. Doe,” he said, ignoring my declaration of human rights. “You can indicate the items you don’t want each day. Your tray will be delivered through that drawer. When you’re finished, put the tray and all utensils back in the drawer.”

“Okay.”

“Your mommy doesn’t work here, Mr. Doe. You will be responsible for keeping your room clean. Housekeeping will clean the bathroom daily, and sanitize the room once a week while you’re out in the exercise yard. Lights go out at 2200, and the door card readers lock down at the same time. See that red button?”

He pointed at a red button next to the hallway door. I nodded.

“That’s the panic button. If you have a genuine emergency, you push that button. If we feel it’s not a genuine emergency after we’ve responded, you’ll get yelled at. If you get yelled at twice, the panic button is disabled, and then when you do have a genuine emergency, you’ll just have to die. Clear?”

“Crystal,” I said. “Don’t fuck with the panic button. How about television? Books?”

“Let’s see how the first few days go, Mr. Doe,” the major said. He looked me up and down. “You look like a guy who works out. Maybe even a tough guy? There’s a weight set in the yard; not many of our detainees use it. Feel free. If you get the urge to rumble, we can set up a smoker with some of my Marines. Do a little boxing instruction, maybe some hand to gland. Fun stuff like that.”

His Marines looked mildly interested. There’s a brand of soap products called Arm and Hammer. Their logo is a muscular arm raising a small maul. These guys looked like the maul. “What time is it now?” I asked.

He almost looked at his watch, but checked himself. “It’s late, and it’s dark, Mr. John Doe Fifty-Seven. From now on, please just play by my rules, and pray that the Octopus doesn’t forget you’re here. They do that, you know.”

I lay back on the bed when they were gone, wondering what the fuck I’d gotten myself into this time. I heard the card reader on my side of the bathroom door click and saw the little light go red. A noisy bathroom fan went on. Someone, my neighbor, I supposed, had come into the bathroom. Thirty minutes or so later, the fan went off and my bathroom door LED went green. I fell asleep, wondering how long before Tony and the guys came looking. Soon, I fervently hoped.

Two days later, I was moved to another room on the same floor. No change in amenities, and I figured it was a housekeeping issue. Life in the detention center went pretty much as briefed. The food was mess-hall chow. Mass-produced, acceptable, if not exactly cholesterol conscious. I began drawing lines through some menu items on the second day, concerned about my girlish figure and the fact that I had nothing to do but sit or sleep. The two-hour exercise window was precisely measured, with one surprise: There were fenced lanes in the grounds, running from the building to the perimeter fence, beyond which I assumed was the river. The lanes were fifty feet wide and nearly five hundred feet long. I know. I paced mine.

Other detainees were out in their own lanes, and no one seemed interested in making eye contact, which, admittedly, would have been difficult as we were all wearing hoods. With eyeholes, we could see straight ahead. If anyone was curious about his lane neighbor, he would have to turn his head, and my guess was that this movement would be visible to the guards or on whatever surveillance system was covering the grounds.

If there was a weight set out there, I didn’t find it. I concentrated on doing stretching exercises, a brisk walk, a jog, and then a real run, up and back, for about forty minutes. It got hot under the damned hood. After that, I reversed the order to cool off. I saw only one other detainee doing something similar; the rest just walked, back and forth, inside their fences. It was surreal, this procession of baggy orange jumpsuits, humping dutifully back and forth between the perimeter and the hulking, concrete building. I’d expected guard towers and spotlights, but there was just a fence, and not a new one at that. Beyond the fence was a field of dormant grass, and then some dense woods. I’d caught a glimpse of the river from my fifth-floor window, but it wasn’t visible from the yard.

At the end of two hours, a police whistle would sound, and the Orangemen all trudged back to the steel double doors. We were required to sound off and identify our numbers, and then we were admitted to the interior and walked in groups of five detainees with a Marine at each end of the line to the freight elevators. The elevator was as close as we got to another human being, but there was no contact. We were marched to our respective rooms and told to stand in front of our doors. The doors all clicked at once, up and down the hallway, and we went through. My neighbor apparently was let out for a different exercise period, and the yard was busy all day with orange jumpsuits walking the line.

On the fifth day it rained, and a voice came by my closed door and asked if I wanted to stay inside or go out. I chose to go out; many others did not. The Marines issued me a full-length plastic slicker that had a rain hood. I spent the whole two hours outside, getting damp in the process but determined not to miss a chance for fresh air and exercise. During the time I was out there, a group of Marines humping full battle packs came jogging around the perimeter fence on the outside, soaking wet but keeping perfect time to the subdued chanting of their sergeant, who ran, similarly encumbered, right alongside. I noticed the major was also running, with two packs on, one rank in front of the rest of the group. Gotta hand it to Marine officers-they know how to lead from the front.

When I got back to my room, I found a stack of books and my watch on the desk. It was all nonfiction and not very recent, but I was delighted to have books at last. The television remained dark, but I didn’t care very much. I’m not much of a vidiot under the best of circumstances. I worried about my mutts, and wondered for the umpteenth time if my guys were looking for me. I couldn’t see Tony believing anything the G-men told him, but, on the other hand, he’d had doubts from the git-go about what I was doing down there at Helios. If Quartermain happened to back up what the agents told him, he’d probably go into the watch-and-wait mode.

My secret surprise came late that night, when I was awakened by a sound I couldn’t place. The rain was still coming down outside, so the room was dark except for the light coming in under the door from the hallway. Instinctively I reached for my trusty. 45 and then remembered I was fresh out of heat.

I heard it again: The hinges on the bathroom door made a faint squeaking noise. I tensed in the bed, not knowing what to expect, and then a human figure loomed out of the darkness and sat down on my bed.

“Hi, there,” a female voice said. “I’m Mad Moira Maxwell, and I’m your neighbor. What’s your name?”

Coming from a relatively sound sleep, it took me a few seconds to gather my wits, sparse as they were.

“Cam Richter,” I said. I could just make out her face, but the rest of her was wrapped up in a lumpy bathrobe. Her eyes were wide and, I realized, just a little crazy-looking. Had she said Mad Moira?

“So what’d you do?” she asked, making herself more comfortable on the edge of my bed. She didn’t weigh much, and her hair was disheveled. Red hair, I realized. There might be something to that Mad business after all.

“Failed to heed a nose-out warning from appropriate authority. Twice, I think. And you?”

“Sedition with a computer or three,” she said brightly.

“I haven’t heard that word since high school civics. Sedition?”

“It’s come back into vogue these days,” she said. “The government is taking itself a lot more seriously than it used to, and here we are.”

“How’d you fiddle the bathroom door locks?” I asked, mindful of the major’s warnings about being good and not talking to other detainees. I sat up in the bed to give her more room. That didn’t work. She slid closer. She smelled of soap and healthy young female.

“When you can do sedition with a massively parallel computer system, door locks are a piece of cake,” she said. “I am-I was, I suppose-a professor of computer science at the U in Wilmington. How about you?”

“I was a lieutenant in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, back in Triboro, for far too long. Now I’m a freelance investigator. Or maybe just lance, now that I think about it. Free I am not.”

“Know that feeling,” she said.

“How long have you been in here?” I asked.

“One year, one month, ten days, and a wake-up, as the Marines like to say.”

She laughed when she saw the surprise registering on my face. “Oh, yes, lieutenant, this can go on for a long, long time. Especially for sedition in time of war, even if it is an undeclared war.”

“Fuck me,” I said, without thinking.

“Right now?” she asked, and then she laughed again. It was an appealing laugh, but those eyes still had that penumbra of lunacy around the edges. I figured her for about thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight or so. It was hard to tell in the gloom, and I wasn’t about to turn on a light.

“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “I mean-aw, shit…”

She waved a hand. “No offense taken. In fact, I kind of like the direct approach. Especially after being locked up in here. The last guy in this room was a Muslim of some stripe, and he was scared to death of women. He threatened to report me when I visited. I told him I’d throw menstrual fluids on him in his sleep if he opened his yap. That seemed to do it.”

“Ri-i-ght,” I said. Mad Moira indeed.

“Yeah, well, I tend toward direct action. They don’t call me Mad Moira for nothing. You have anyone on the outside who’s going to be wondering where you went?”

“Actually, I think so. Or maybe it’s more like hope so. And you?”

“The Arts and Sciences faculty was probably relieved all to hell when I went ‘on sabbatical,’ as I suspect they’ve been told. If anyone has inquired, they’ve probably been damned tentative about it.”

A legend in her own mind, I thought. “You one of those feminazis I keep reading about?” I asked.

“You bet,” she said proudly. “Although I’m not anti-male. I am definitely anti-government, especially this government, which I believe to be illegal, unconstitutionally elected, and guilty of all sorts of perversions of the Bill of Rights. You going to escape?”

Oh, great, I thought. Another fanatic. She ought to meet Carl Trask. They could rant together. As to escape, the thought had occurred to me, but so had the nature of the guard force. These guys weren’t your typical paunchy, chain-smoking, union-card-carrying, fifty-year-old penitentiary screws. That little group jogging around the perimeter fence in eighty pounds of full battle regalia hadn’t been out there for a picnic, and none of them, not one, had been even breathing hard. If I did try to escape, I’d better succeed on the first try. Plus, I didn’t exactly know my newest best friend all that well.

“Thought about it,” I said finally. “But it looks really hard. Besides, I don’t fancy living in a real cell. I’m hoping my friends get some really nasty lawyers to start looking.” Even as I said that, I wondered if it was likely, at least in the near term, especially if Quartermain was part of the cover. I realized that he was increasingly the unknown element here.

“I’ve thought about nothing else,” she said, shifting on the bed. In profile her face was quite pretty, and, yes, that was red hair. “If I could get my hands on the computers that run this place, we could walk out of here in five minutes.”

“Then what?” I asked. The same government agency that rounded her up in the first place would more than likely round her up again, and this time she might have to learn Spanish or some other foreign tongue. “Are you familiar with the term ‘rendition’?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, that’s what attracted their attention. I was getting a pretty good handle on the size and scope of that program. Of course, I had to break through some federal firewalls to do it.”

“Yeah, they hate that,” I said. “Frankly, I used to hate it when hackers went after our sheriff’s office computers. If they were local assholes, we’d drop by and do something physical about it.”

“Oh, so I’m an asshole now?”

“Look, Moira, I don’t know you. I do know that I have not been fucking around with the federal government’s war on terrorism. I ignored a warning from an FBI agent to stay out of a case that got one of my people killed, so here I am. If you went hacking into the feds’ computer networks, they have to assume you’re part of the problem, just like the president said.”

“So it’s okay for the government to kidnap citizens in the night and lock them up for the duration?”

I shrugged. “Personally, I favor prosecution in open court. I’d certainly be willing to take my chances in that venue. But: Did you do the crime?”

She didn’t answer.

“You know the saying. And I have to tell you, as an ex-cop, this is pretty cushy time.”

“Yet here you are,” she said. “You don’t think what you did was a crime, but you’re doing the time, just like me.”

She had me there. “I guess I think someone’s eventually gonna try to get me out,” I said. “Maybe not right away, but soon enough. My people are going to see through the smoke screen and, being all ex-cops themselves, they’ll push it. Someone ‘in authority’ will come in here one day and ask me if I’ve gotten the message, I’ll play nice, and then I’ll be out.”

“I used to think that, too,” she said. “See how you feel a year from now. Or two.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re not thinking it through,” she said. “Why would they let you out? To have you on the outside, running your mouth about what happened to you just because you pissed off the FBI? They’ve done the hard part-they’ve swept you off the streets and covered their tracks. Your people can push as hard as they want, but the United States Government, and that’s spelled with a capital G these days, doesn’t have to say one fucking word. They have zero motivation to let you out. And you know what else?”

“I give up.”

“I’ve talked to six other people in this place. And given the rules, that’s been harder than you might think. No one knows of anyone who’s ever been let go. Moved, yes, but not just let go. I’m not saying it hasn’t ever happened, what with the lovely headgear and all, but, best I can tell, we’re all in here for life.”

“Don’t you have family? A husband? Or at least one good friend?”

“Nope,” she said. I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. When I thought about it, though, neither did I. If the guys at H amp;S bounced off the Octopus shield and then gave up, I had nobody who would keep trying, except maybe my shepherds. She was watching my face.

“That’s why I asked if you’ll try to escape, because if you do, I want to go with you. And I can help.”

It was my turn to study her. “How do I know you’re not from the Octopus, as the major calls it. That you’re not in my room because they’re letting you into my room, to find out if I’m going to be a good boy or if I’ve been sitting up here, lo, these few nights, plotting and scheming.”

“You don’t,” she said immediately. “I’m able to fiddle these doors because one of the nice senoras dropped her hall pass card. It only works on the bathroom doors, not the room doors. But I can get us out into that hallway, and there are fire stairs at each end of that hallway. The elevators are computer controlled. The fire stairs are not.”

“How do you know this?”

She stood up and shucked her jumpsuit. Underneath she was wearing a long white football shirt that reached down to just below her knees. She put her hands behind her head, stretched, and turned around slowly to show off. Even in the dim light, I could see her body. She was lovely in all respects. “This is what I work out in when it’s warm outside,” she said. “The Marines are all horny young American males. The major does not go down into the basement, ever, no matter what he says.”

She picked up the jumpsuit and wiggled back into it, all the time watching me watching her doing it. “Girls and boys have their needs, and Marines are nothing if not direct. I’m telling you, I can get us out of this building. What I can’t do is get over that final fence.”

“Or what’s probably on the other side of it,” I said. “And there’s still the problem of afterward.”

“I’ll take my chances. And if I can get to my computers, they’ll wish they’d never ever tangled with likes of me.”

Her computers had probably been reduced to burned blobs of plastic in a landfill, but I didn’t tell her that. I was busy rearranging my covers to hide my reaction to her little tease. “Where does the ‘Mad Moira’ business come from?” I asked.

“Because I’ll do absolutely anything once,” she said with that sly, half-crazy look. “Even you, big guy.”

Then she was gone, and the light on my bathroom door was green again. I got up to look out the window, just to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming. On my way back to the bed my bare feet discovered a filmy little unmentionable.

Okay, I thought. I hadn’t been dreaming.

Time to think. A redhead with a radical left political agenda who admitted to being part crazy wanted to light off an escape attempt from a prison run by Marines. What could possibly be wrong with that proposition?

The next morning, I heard the familiar sounds of guards in the hallway escorting prisoners, excuse me, detainees, to exercise. My turn came two hours later, and I shuffled down to the elevator with six other people, all indistinguishable in their jumpsuits and hoods. If my newfound ally was among the group, I had no way of telling, but it seemed as if they didn’t let adjacent rooms out together.

Once outside, I went through my regular routine. There were guards here and there, but they seemed almost uninterested in what the detainees were doing, or not doing-some just sat on the benches against the side fence and smoked. There was no smoking permitted in the building, but cigarettes were provided to the real addicts when they came out for their fresh air.

I covertly watched the other people, trying to see if I could make out Mad Moira in the group, but it was impossible. The jumpsuits were identically baggy, and the hoods revealed nothing that would indicate the gender of any detainee. I did glance up at the top floor to see if I could see a face at her window, but the glass appeared reflective. No luck there, either.

Then a detainee tried to escape.

It was almost ordinary. I was doing some stretching to relieve incipient cramps in my legs from the sprints when I saw a detainee who was three lanes away walk calmly over the end chalk line to the final fence and begin to climb. He didn’t bolt or yell or do anything dramatic. He simply crossed the line, grabbed a handful of chain-link, and began to clamber up the wire. I looked around to see what the guards would do, and was surprised to see them do absolutely nothing. One guard who had stopped to watch when the man started up the fence lit a cigarette and then sat back down on a bench. That gave me a bad feeling: If the guards weren’t concerned, the escapee had better be. They were expecting a show.

The orange figure climbed steadily until he reached the top. He looked back as if expecting machine-gun fire from within the exercise yard, but the guards were all just watching and still acting unconcerned. There were no guard towers or other weapons stations around the building-just that fence. There were three strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence, tilted inward, but the detainee pulled a couple of bath towels out of his jumpsuit, doubled them over the barbed wire, wobbled for a moment at the top of the fence, and then tumbled over.

The other detainees had all stopped doing whatever they’d been doing and stood there, watching, just like I was. I expected sirens, a prison escape alarm-some kind of institutional reaction to the escape attempt, but there was only silence and the watching guards. Who had to know what was about to happen.

As the orange-clad figure began climbing down the other side of the fence, I heard a bang from over my left shoulder. I first thought it was a gunshot, but then realized it was a large wooden trapdoor opening and closing in the building’s wall. I saw something come through that door, something black and moving fast. It was a large rottweiler. Full grown, ugly as a stump, and rounding the far corner of the fence at the speed of heat in that bearlike gait they have. It made not a sound, but ran as hard as it could to the point just below the detainee, who’d by now seen the dog coming. He stopped his descent about halfway down the fence and stared. I could see the dog’s spittle flying as he came, head down, ugly pig eyes locked on to his prey, and those massive black haunches driving him forward. The escapee was still a good eight feet in the air, and he’d frozen in midclimb, his arms stretched one over the other, and his feet in a similar disposition, one up, one down.

He started back up as the thick black dog arrived, but he might as well not have bothered. The rottie screeched to a stop, took one measuring look, barked once, a nasty, wet sound, and then jumped up onto the fence, all four legs driving. To my amazement, the damned dog began scrambling up the fence, using his enormous teeth to help him climb. He overtook the man’s lower leg at probably ten feet off the ground and clamped down on his ankle. Then he let go of the fence. The man screamed in pain as the dog’s clamped-on, dead weight took effect. I almost thought I could hear the bones crunching, and I could absolutely see bright red blood spurting out of those clenched jaws. The man screamed again, and clung to the chain-link with white knuckles, his free leg swinging in the air now while the dog just hung from the other leg, growling and biting down harder, the froth in his mouth running red from the terrible damage he was doing to the man’s lower leg and ankle.

It was no contest. The dog must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and between the dead weight, the horrible slaughterhouse noises, and the dog’s own squirming, the man simply could not hold on. They both fell to the ground, and I held my breath. I thought surely the rottie would let go and then go for the man’s throat, but he didn’t let go. He began pulling the screaming man along the fence, back toward the corner from which he had appeared, matching each scream with a growl of his own and a sharklike shake of his massive head, as if determined to drown out the human’s piteous cries and simultaneously rip off his prize. He dragged that poor bastard all the way down the fence line, jerking backward around the corner, and then backed into the trapdoor, where they both disappeared into sudden silence.

I remembered to breathe. I looked over at the guards, who had gone back to their routine of walking back and forth along the interior walkway, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The rest of the detainees in the exercise area were still frozen in their tracks, as was I. I’m sure we were all wondering what would happen next, inside that door, but the show was definitely over and that was that. It had taken all of maybe ninety seconds. I glanced back up at the top floor, and this time I thought I saw a blurred white face in Moira’s window.

Okay, neighbor, I thought. Still want to make a run for it? I looked back out at the fields and woods beyond the perimeter fence. The trees were perhaps two hundred yards across the open field from the fence. I assumed the river was just beyond that tangle of willows, scrub oaks, and haphazardly piled flood debris.

But then I saw a welcome sight.

Frick and Frack were looking back at me. They were sitting just inside the tree line, clear as day, if you were looking.

When I recovered from my surprise, I began walking casually toward the perimeter fence, conscious of the fact that absolutely no one else was getting anywhere near it. I was sure the guards were watching and wondering if the madness was contagious, but then I turned around at the chalk line and did a light jog back to the other end of my pen. I did this twice more, and each time confirmed that I could see my shepherds’ heads sticking up through the weeds just inside the tree line, watching me.

Okay, I thought, if they’re watching me, then there’s a human out there, too, hopefully with binocs. On the third trip back to the perimeter, the whistle blew. I scoped the guards out of the corner of my eye. They were gathering to assemble the detainees to go back into the building. I got to the white line, stopped, stretched, got down on one knee with my hands on the ground, and pushed the other leg out behind me. Then, keeping my body between the guards and my hands, I made an imaginary pair of scissors out of my two hands and mimed cutting through the fence. I got back up and walked casually to the other end, where a guard was waiting for me. I heard another Marine bark out a command, reminding the small line of prisoners that there was no talking allowed.

“Nice pet you-all got there, Marine,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Kibble and Bits,” he said. “Step out. Fall in. No talking. Clear?”

Clear as a bell, I thought. I stepped out, fell into line on the sidewalk, and shut my yap. If the dog hadn’t already done it, they were going to have to amputate that poor bastard’s foot.

That evening after supper I went in to use the bathroom. There was a message soaped on the mirror: Well? It was signed MM and followed by the words erase this. I erased the message with a wet cloth, picked up my soap bar to reply, but then put it back down and went about my business. On balance, I still didn’t know if I could trust Moira to be who and what she said she was. First of all, what were the chances they’d put a man and an attractive woman in conjoined rooms? Even with all the elaborate key card security, she’d still managed to get into my room. And how had she done that? With a conveniently dropped key card, which was never reported missing? Third, she was a wild-eyed redheaded female. I’d tangled with one of those in my younger days, and tangled was the operative word. In my view, red in the head meant Celt in the blood, and that tribe had always and only been about mortal combat.

I wedged my door open with a towel, retrieved her skivvies, and put them on the edge of the sink. Then I retreated to the relative safety of my room. Whatever I was going to do about escaping, I wasn’t going to complicate it with Mad Moira.

Unless, of course, I wanted use of that magic key card.

I sat down at the little desk and thought about it some more. Obviously, there was no going over the fence in broad daylight with that thing on ready-alert. So: first things first. See if my guys out there got the message about cutting the fence. I got up and looked out the window. It was raining again, and now there were tendrils of fog creeping up from the river through that band of trees where I’d seen Frick and Frack. Maybe tonight, they’d make their move.

The next day was gray and overcast, but without the rain. I took my usual exercise period, this time around midafter-noon. Which exercise pen you got depended on the whim of the guard, but I’d noticed that the first guy in the lineup after coming out of the building went to the first pen to our left, and so on. I set myself up so that I was shut into the same pen as yesterday.

I did my standard exercise package, but ended up near the perimeter fence instead of the base of the pen, where I faked a leg cramp. I sat down on the grass and did a little kabuki, pretending to suffer through the act of straightening out my “cramped” thigh muscles. In between grunts and twitches, I examined the fence. I was looking for signs that it had been cut, but it hadn’t.

Well, shit. So much for that.

Then I scanned the grass and weeds outside of the pen. Immediately beyond the fence was the perimeter running track the Marines used. Beyond that, it was just wet weeds and foot-high grass all the way to the edge of the woods. And, yes, there were signs something had come across that field to the fence. Subtle signs, but to anyone who’d done any tracking, they were there.

I examined the fence again. I had to be very careful here. I had to assume there was a video camera focused right on me because I was lingering near the forbidden fence and the white line of death-by-rottweiler inside the pen.

I stood up, and then sat right back down again with a grunt of simulated pain. Two feet closer to the fence. I stared hard, but the fence was intact. What wasn’t intact was all the clips along the bottom of the panel of chain-link wire in this pen. They were all there, but they had all been severed. Assuming there was enough slack in this fence, I should be able to push my way out under the bottom of the chain-link.

Okay. The guys had been watching.

I got back up again and hopped around on my good leg while trying to make the other one work properly. In the process I turned out toward the woods, pointed at my watch, and then stretched three fingers against my stomach. Then I began limping back toward the other end of the exercise pen. I saw one guard watching me, but he looked more sympathetic than alarmed. I hobbled back to the end of the pen and sat down on the ground again, continuing to massage my thigh muscle.

“You okay?” the Marine asked quietly through the fence.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Fucking cramp.”

“Heard that,” he said, one workout guy to another.

I kept up the gimp act all the way back to my room. I heard the last cohort of exercise-bound people being mustered out in the hallway, and it sounded as if my next-door neighbor’s door had opened and closed. I waited fifteen minutes, and then went into the bathroom, where I took a long, hot shower to soothe my “cramped” limbs. When I was finished in the bathroom, I soaped a single word onto the mirror: talk.

The lights went out throughout the facility at ten o’clock. Mad Moira was in my room ten minutes later. This time she was wearing her jumpsuit, and I could confirm what I needed to know-she was slim. I was the one who was going to have a problem getting under that fence, assuming we could even get out to it. I told her I was going out tonight.

“Wow,” she said. “That was quick. You have someone waiting?”

I ducked her question. “Can you get us to the exercise pen that’s the third from the left?” I asked.

She thought about that for a moment.

“I can get us to a door that goes outside; after that, it’ll depend.”

“On?”

“On the alarm system-the hallway room door card readers are locked down after ten o’clock. I don’t think the bathroom doors are. I think it’s a fire safety thing-they want one door that can be operated by a housekeeping card in case the main system goes down.”

“You think?”

She shrugged. “Well, I can hear the room card readers click off at 10:00 P.M.; I’ve listened to the bathroom hallway door reader, and it doesn’t.”

“So it’s still possible there’ll be an alert the moment you key that door?”

“Sure.”

She must have seen the look on my face.

“Look: The difference is, that door will open. These room doors won’t. There aren’t any readers on the stairwell doors-again, think fire safety. My plan was to key the door, open it, and run like hell for the fire stairway. After that…”

“Yeah,” I said. “After that, it could get really interesting.”

She shrugged again. “I’m ready to give it a shot. I’ve seen loading dock ramps that go down to the basement on the back of the building. The first floor is where the security station probably lives. I’d say try for the basement, then out.”

“That’s where that damned rottweiler came from,” I said. “If he’s loose in the basement, we’re hosed.”

“The dogs aren’t loose down there,” she said.

“And you know this how?”

“The Marines hang out down there at night. They use pistols,. 22s, to hunt rats. They do it with rat-shot, so’s to avoid ricochets. They drop garbage in the basement corridors, turn off all the lights, wait for a while, and then go out with night vision goggles. They wouldn’t do that if there were dogs loose.”

“And if they’re down there tonight? Maybe the basement is the wrong objective.”

“If they are, they’ll be drinking beer right now. They like to get a buzz on before they go killing things in the dark. But they’re usually done by midnight-the major gets them all up at five thirty for