The Last Good Guy

43

I picked up Daley in El Centro. Steered west through the black night, eyes fixed on the yellow dividing lines. We climbed the boulder-piled mountains, my thoughts crowded with death and destruction, my mood calm and bad. Burt behind us in the Eldo.

Daley dozed beside me after talking briefly but emotionally with Penelope. Burt scanned the road behind and ahead of us while trading messages with Penelope: Daley’s frame of mind and physical condition, our own conditions, our estimated time of arrival in Oceanside, would we have to stop for gas or food?

The road signs accelerated into my high beams. A small owl lifted off from the road shoulder.

Burt on the phone. “What was the body count back there, Roland?”

“At least six SNR guards, one FBI agent, and a sheriff’s deputy are dead. Battle rolled an ATV, but it looks like he’ll make it. Marie’s fine. Connor Donald is in the wind, waving a machine gun.”

I needed some hard intel. “Daley, did you leave Nick’s place with Connor and Eric willingly?”

“I knew them. I called them to come get me. I felt safe at first.”

“Did they force you to stay with them after that?”

“Yes.”

“Did Reggie Atlas sexually assault you?”

“He did not. He often looks at me very strangely.”

“Do you have any idea how much torment you’ve put your sister through?”

“She lives in fear,” said Daley. “Because of me. As she constantly reminds me.”

“She’ll be glad to have you back.”

Oceanside was misty and cool, a world away from Imperial Valley. I could see Daley registering the city, her neighborhood, her street. She looked exhausted and unhappy, and I had the thought that I didn’t want to be Penelope Rideout tonight. We passed the sprawling Oceanside Transit Center, lit but quiet at this late hour. “You turn at Myers,” said Daley. “I take it you’ve been here before.”

I nodded.

“Did you go in my room?”

I nodded again.

“How’s my Gibson?”

“Looking good,” I said. “Penelope has really missed you. I hope you can find some kind words for her.”

“I lost my Martin, half my clothes, and my backpack full of CDs,” she said dreamily. “Back in all that gunfire. That was really scary.”

“Did you hear me about the kind words?” I asked.

“I can find some good words,” said Daley. “Sisters always fight. I’m happy to be home again. I think, maybe, I’m about to be really happy.”

When we pulled into the little driveway, Penelope burst through the front door, charged across the porch and down the drive toward us.

Daley met her halfway and they collided in a hug that sent them spinning like dancers. Both of them yelping and crying at once, hands on each other’s faces, words rushing over words.

“No Toto,” said Burt at my window. “But you did well, Roland. You’ve earned some overtime pay and a good long vacation.”

For a moment I watched them through the windshield, then checked the rearview and stepped from the truck. Penelope came over and threw herself into my arms and locked on like a constrictor. Over her shoulder I saw Daley coming toward us with an amused smile.

Inside, I set the window blinds for a good view and the four of us crowded around the dinette. Burt and I sat facing the small living room and the front door. Penelope thanked God for the food and for Daley’s return. Then served hot rolls and butter and a stew she’d made.

Daley shoveled down her dinner, then brought her Gibson into the living room and started playing. She stopped and looked at us once, briefly, then dropped her attention to the guitar again, devoted to her instrument, as musicians always are.

“You shouldn’t be here tonight,” I told Penelope. “Too much mayhem in the air.”

She eyed me. “I feel it.”

“You two can come home with us. I’ve got a casita free. Or the Hyatt Grand downtown has good security. We can drive or follow you there. Talk to Daley if you’d like.”

“We’ll go with you,” Penelope said. “I want us all to be close.”

Burt smiled, staring through the living room window, then broke open another roll.

Early-morning darkness still over Rancho de los Robles, the stars fading, coyotes yipping not far away.

Francisco stood in the porchlight of his casita, strapping a cooler of food and water to his bike rack for the very long workday ahead. He had groomed and dressed as would any Central American beginning his workday in Fallbrook: showered and cleanly shaven, hair recently cut, long-sleeved shirt tucked in and buttoned up, long pants, wide belt, and boots. Triunfo watched us, tail wagging. They came down and Frank greeted Penelope with a charged smile. She introduced him to her sister.

“You are the girl is loved,” he said.

“Sounds like a song,” said Daley.

Penelope and Daley got casita three, two small bedrooms with a shared bath, a sufficient kitchen, and a cedar-walled living room with a fireplace and a view of the pond and the sunsets.

An hour later we were all sitting side by side along the western edge of the big patio, facing the pond and the rolling acres and the hills.

An odd eight-pack: Burt and me, Penelope and Daley, Dick and Liz, Frank and Melinda. Coffee and English muffins. Small talk with big pauses. A softly murmured account from Melinda, of a pleasant dream from which she’d just awakened, about riding a horse facing backward and guiding it by the tail. From behind us the rising sun touched its light to the hills, and the sky above them went from black to gray.

Francisco excused himself, got on his bike, and rode down the driveway toward the gate.

I got two hours of sleep, snores thundering from my bedroom, I am told.

I left Burt in charge, and three hours later met Mike Lark at the entrance of Paradise Date Farm.

I looked out at the legions of disgruntled reporters and their vehicles, all having baked in the sun for hours by then, with more hours to come if the reporters wanted the story. I saw Howard Wilkin, my friend at the San Diego Union-Tribune, and he saw me, not necessarily a good thing for a PI with privacy for himself and his clients in mind.

Lark picked me up in one of the armored Suburbans, the thick plexiglass windshield chipped and cloudy with dust, its flanks well dented by recent bullets.

“You wouldn’t believe what these people were going to do,” he said.

“I thought dirty bomb,” I said.

“Worse. How’s the girl?”

“I think everything’s all right. I think.”

He glanced at me, then gunned his shot-up Suburban toward the compound. Even from a distance I could see that the barnyard was crammed with vehicles that weren’t there just a few hours ago. I saw new people, too — futuristic clomping men and women in white hazmat suits, helmets, masks, and breathing gear. Geiger-Müller counters, dosimeters, particle detectors, radiation meters, from wands to wheeled. A team of two push-pulled an explosives containment vessel toward the wide-open metal hangar.

Lark reintroduced me to FBI’s Western Region director, Frank Salvano, whom I’d worked with under comparably violent circumstances less than a year ago. Older, gaunt, with short silver hair and round wire-rimmed glasses.

“Not you again,” he said, with a wrinkle of a smile.

“In fact.”

Followed by a moment of silence for the agents he had lost in those dark and terrifying days we had spent together. A shadow drifted across Lark’s good young face, Joan Taucher reaching out from whatever lockdown he’d assigned her to. I know the tricks that memory plays. How it can surprise you.

“Don’t touch anything,” said Salvano.

“I won’t even breathe.”

“We need to suit up,” Lark said. “We’re still not sure what we’re up against.”

After being scanned by an Agent Fromm — who noted our pre-exposure levels in her notebook — Lark and I encased ourselves in antiexplosion and antiradiation bulk, tightened the boots, pulled on heavy breathing helmets, and checked our oxygen flows and communications. Last up, gloves.

Lark led me into the hangar, past the clutter of ATVs and tool-strewn work benches I’d seen on the wasp-cam video, all the way to the back of the big building, where the security doors stood closed. An explosion-and-radiation-proofed agent let us in.

“This is the heart of it,” Lark said. His voice came through the tiny speaker in the helmet, clear and bright. “You remember the big glove box. We speculated that those coffin-shaped crates would fit perfectly into this baby. Look.”

Through the curved, clear window I could see one of the wooden crates from the San Onofre power plant lying open in the glove box. The wooden lid lay beside it, with loosened steel bands encircling it like ribs. In the middle of the glove box was a long, shiny steel tube with three black, metallic-looking pellets that had either spilled from the tube or been shaken loose from it. Fuel pellets, I was all but certain. Also, a battery-operated Sawzall with what looked like a diamond blade. Two locking wrenches.

“Here’s what Washington has kicked loose so far,” said Lark. “Seven years ago, Marie Knippermeir’s American Agriculture Enterprises bought Paradise Date Farm from Imperial Farm and Mine. Cheap — two million six, plus the debt. Paradise was still productive but running in the red. Poor management. Their main account was Eid-al-Mawlid Co., specializing in Muslim events and holidays — birthdays, weddings, the breaking of the fast of Ramadan. A thriving company. They need plenty of dates, a centuries-old Middle Eastern staple. Fresh, frozen, dried, preserved — packaged in mail-order gift baskets for Muslims all across the United States. Eid-al-Mawlid is kind of like Harry and David, but they specifically market to Muslims.”

In the dimmer caves of my imagination I saw the truth beginning to take on its terrible form. I studied the strange tableau inside the curving clear dome of the glove box: the clumsy hands suspended on their robotic sleeves, awaiting their next deployment, diamond-bladed saw, a small electric grinder like a jeweler might use, the wooden crate with its sprung lid, the shining zirconium tube, and the three black uranium pellets either spilled or shaken loose so they could be...

Behind his mask, Lark’s face was impossible to read; his voice was dry but urgent. “Fast-forward to 2016. SNR gets the San Onofre contract to guard the plant during the actual physical decommissioning. Decommissioning will take a decade. First, they have to cool the spent fuel rods in wet storage for five years before they can even weld them into steel-and-concrete casks. That’s how hot they are, both thermally and radioactively. Battle offered San Diego Gas and Electric a sweet deal for SNR. He had good men — most with military or law enforcement experience. At a good price, too, because Battle and SNR weren’t guarding the spent rods at San Onofre just to make money.”

“They wanted the pellets.”

“And they’ve got four freezers of them out there in that storage building. Each freezer holds one crate. The crates are fitted with concrete molds that surround one fuel rod, which contains fifty-six pellets. The concrete keeps the radiation shielded, and the freezers keep the pellets cool enough to be worked on in the glove box. Specifically, to be ground. Note the diamond saw for getting through the concrete and titanium, and the jewelers’ grinder, and the locking wrenches to hold the pellets to the wheel. The end product is ground fuel pellets the consistency of beach sand. They’ve got this whole process on video in the farmhouse library. And more. Adam Revell got talkative when I told him a conspiracy to kill people with radiation could get him a death penalty.”

“Radioactive dust,” I said. “To be sprinkled on the dates before they ship to Eid-al-Mawlid, which will wrap the fruit up real pretty and ship the baskets out to their Muslim customers.”

A moment of silence as I considered the consequences of such a thing. I could hear Lark’s breathing through my speaker.

“Thousands of innocent people,” said Lark. “Women and children. Anyone who ingests the smallest amount, touches it, breathes it. The Eid-al-Mawlid employees would be the first to report symptoms. A matter of days, depending on dose equivalent and Gray levels. Then, acute radiation syndrome — blistering skin, convulsions, vomiting, diarrhea, bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ears. Death within two days to two weeks. Agony itself. It would have taken days for us to even figure out what was happening. This is one of the most depraved and disgusting things I’ve ever seen attempted. The bosses are still arguing whether or not to even acknowledge it publicly.”

It took a long moment for that depravity and disgust to really settle in.

“In Arabic, the words Eid-al-Mawlid mean ‘birth of the prophet,’” said Lark. “It’s one of Islam’s holiest days and biggest celebrations. This year it’s November ninth. The big Paradise shipments were set to commence two weeks from now — in time to be made into gift baskets for the Sunni Mawlid on November ninth. We beat SNR to the punch, Roland. Barely. Thanks to you and Daley Rideout and those wasp-cams.”

My moment of glory came and went and I enjoyed it briefly, but all the way to my bones.