The diver came up a lot faster than the body, which was understandable. He had something to lose; the corpse no longer did. But when the body broke the surface, my heart sank. The grapple had hooked the man’s belt at the back, so the body was bent in half at the waist.
That wasn’t the bad part, though.
From about the collarbones up, there was nothing but gleaming white bone. No skin. Just a blue-white, shining skull with no face.
And certainly no ID.
Until I saw the small, black knife pouch on the man’s right boot as he dangled, dripping, on the chain. I’d seen that knife before.
“I think that’s Carl Trask,” I said, pointing to that boot knife.
“Oh, shit,” Ari muttered. He stared at the faceless figure. The height, weight, general build made it possible. “I think it is.”
One of the techs, looking a bit unwell, pointed a distant-reading radiation monitor at the sodden figure and shook his head. He signaled the bridge people, and the body was lowered back into the moonpool to a depth of about ten feet.
Anna Petrowska was staring at Ari over the upper rim of her eyeglasses from inside the control room, as if asking Tony’s favorite question: Now what?
Great question, I thought. Ari Quartermain’s face was a study in anxiety.
“We need the second diver to go down,” he said. “That’s not a body anymore. That’s highly radioactive nuclear waste. We’re definitely going to have to entomb that.”
A few hours later, Ari and I were sitting in the front seat of my Suburban sipping some Scotch from my emergency flask. To say that things had become complicated would be the understatement of the year.
First, they’d had to get the second, unexposed diver suited up and into the water to bag the body, which was now suspended on a chain in the moonpool, because the first diver down had come dangerously close to going over his annual TLD limits. Then they’d brought the bag up and called in the foam team, who’d proceeded to do the same routine on the bag that they’d done on the truck. This produced a white, oblong semisolid object some eight feet in length that was still capable of setting off radiation alarms.
The Bureau had told Ari to call them when he had a body on deck. He duly made the call, but then had to explain that there was probably not going to be a proper identification, much less an autopsy. This news did not sit well with our Bureau. They’d told him to freeze the scene and await the imminent arrival of adult supervision. I took that as a clear signal to fold my tents and steal away into the desert night.
I told Ari that I’d wait outside in my vehicle and got one of the vital area techs to escort me back out of the building. I called my guys at the beach house and brought them up to date and, once again, instructed them to be vigilant. Tony said he had one shepherd on the front porch and the other lurking in the back garage with the door open. Moira had gone to bed, but he and Pardee were planning to keep watch for a while. I reminded them that, if the G did show up in the night, they’d be after Moira and me, not them. Tony gently reminded me about the role of co-conspirators in the double-oh-jay statutes.
“Our threat to go public with their detention operation was a holding action, at best,” I said. “You guys don’t have to babysit her or me. You want to bail, you probably should.”
“You just want to be alone with the wild woman,” Tony said.
“She’s as scary as the Bureau right now,” I said.
“She’s got some interesting shit pre-positioned on her computer, and she backed it all up on Pardee’s. That girl’s a hot sketch, you know that?”
“Remember her nickname, paisan,” I said. “Chances are, she earned it.”
“What-me worry? Nice redheaded Catholic girl like that?”
Now Ari was looking longingly at the flask, but then decided against it.
“So,” I said. “Who or what put Carl Trask in the moonpool?”
He shook his head slowly, as if he still didn’t believe it. “He pissed people off all the time, but everybody knew he was just doing his job-as he saw it. I can’t finger a single soul who’d want to kill the man.”
I thought briefly about Billy the Kid, but then saw the improbability. “Well, we should be able to narrow down the suspect list pretty quick,” I said. “It has to be someone with access to that building and all three levels of security.”
He looked over at me in the gloom of the parking lot. “Not if it was Trask who took his killer in there,” he said. “Then it could be anybody.”
“But the cameras, the card readers-won’t they show who went in, and when?”
“The FBI’s all over that as we speak,” he said. “And the short answer is-yes.”
“Short answer?”
“Well, you know what can be done with video-camera data, if someone knows how.”
“C’mon, Ari-you’ve been watching too many movies. That’s harder than it looks, and it implies some detailed planning and premeditation. And I’ll warn you right now: The Bureau is going to want a sit-down with you, and it won’t be a casual conversation.”
“Well, I am the head of technical security.”
“And because this just about has to be an inside job. C’mon: You must have a theory about what the hell’s going on here.”
He stared out the window for a long moment. He opened his mouth to say something, but then his cell phone chirped. He sighed and looked at the data window. Then he answered it.
In response to a question, he said he was outside, getting some fresh air. Then he looked over at me, his eyes widening. “No way,” he said. “Where’d they get that?”
He listened some more, then said he had no idea but that he’d be back inside in five minutes. He snapped his phone shut.
“That was your favorite Russian,” he said. “The Bureau’s apparently turned up a tape showing you and Trask going through the moonpool security tiers. She confirmed to them that you had been up there tonight. She said they wanted to know if I knew where you were.”
“Yes, you do,” I replied. “I’m gone.”
Two hours later, Tony nosed our boat alongside Carl Trask’s Keeper over in the Carolina Beach marina. We’d come through the narrow defile of Snow’s Cut and down the city dock channel to the marina at idle and with our running lights off. The Keeper was tied up on one of the outboard finger piers because of her deeper draft, which kept her two piers away from most of the other live-on boats. Tony brought our boat alongside, squished some fenders, and then held her steady. I passed the shepherds up onto the Keeper ’s deck, and then Moira and I followed. The marina office was dark, as were all the boats that we could see, and nobody seemed to be out and about on the nearby downtown streets. I was glad it was the off-season.
Tony passed up our gear and then, as agreed, backed away quietly and headed back out to the Cape Fear River. I led Moira up the slanting ladder to the bridge area, and we went through the same interior door Cap’n Pete had used to see if Trask was on board. A centerline companionway led down into the main lounge. I assumed there were cabins forward and the usual amenities aft of the lounge. Moira stretched out on a deep sofa and ran her fingers through her hair. We’d left the interior lights off, but I checked our surroundings through the portholes anyway. The shepherds went around checking out the scents and then plopped themselves down in front of the couch.
I really hadn’t wanted to bring Moira along, but even she recognized that if the Bureau was going to pick me up again, they’d sure as hell pick her up as well. I’d driven to Southport as fast as I could without sucking up a speeding ticket and explained what was going on to my two guys. It was Tony who’d suggested Trask’s boat as a hiding place, at least initially. Pardee had taken my Suburban over to the local Wal-Mart parking lot, parked it, and walked back to the beach house. If the FBI showed up, their story would be that Moira and I went out somewhere and they hadn’t a clue as to where we’d gone after that. That would hold up for a day, at most, but by then we’d be across the river with at least some freedom of movement. Tony and I had traded cell phones just to confuse any existing eavesdropping triangulation systems.