I was too surprised to offer any opposition, and my brain was telling me to sit very still. The major laughed.
“Surprised?” he said.
“You came for her?”
“You bet your interfering ass,” he said. “You have no idea who you’ve been consorting with, Lieutenant Richter, but suffice it to say, she is most definitely part of the problem and not the solution.”
This time he knew my name, and my surprise must have shown. He pulled his face mask to his mouth and said something. The room began to clear itself of black-clad soldiers. The last one to leave leaned over and slapped a black hood over my head and cinched it down around my neck with a cord.
“You gen-pop civilians don’t have a clue,” the major said. “You think that woman’s some sort of civil libertarian, fucking around out there on the Web, making some kind of statement.” I could feel him leaning closer, smell the chemical scent coming off the body armor.
“There’s a war on, asshole,” he snarled. “Right now it’s being fought over there. People like her want to bring it over here. They want to see school buses blown over by IEDs. They want to see the jihadis get a nuke into Washington, or take down the national electric grid and put us all back to the eighteen-hundreds. Moira Maxwell is all too typical of the new and improved, college-overeducated, peace-now, antiwar, anti-male, anti-authority Movement, and that’s Movement with a capital M. They spell America with a k, and for reasons nobody can fathom, they hate this country and all it stands for.”
“Well, hell, then, why don’t you guys just pop her?”
“Would if I could, asshole, but someone wants to see her. But here’s for the pleasure of knowing you.”
With that he slapped my face through the hood hard enough to make stars dance behind my eyes.
“Don’t move for ten minutes,” he said. “During that time, you think about who and what you’re messing with. Next time you come up on our screens, we’ll put a horse syringe through your eye and suck out your brain, assuming there’s one in here. Didn’t much feel like it, just now.”
I heard the back door to the lounge click shut a few seconds later, but that was the only thing I heard over the ringing in my left ear. I sat back, still trying to get my mental arms around the situation. When they’d come through the back door, I’d just assumed that Creeps had sent a team over to pick us up while we slept the sleep of the innocent, trusting that we were somehow going to be able to talk our way out of this mess. Now, I didn’t think those guys were part of my Bureau or anyone else’s Bureau.
What. The. Fuck. Over? And who wanted to see her?
I started working on getting that hood off my head. It took several minutes of grunting and thrashing, but I finally managed. Then I looked at the cuffs. A Mickey Mouse icon was looking back at me. They were toy cuffs. I pulled my wrists apart, hard, and the cuffs popped across the room. One final note of deep and abiding respect from my good buddy, the major. I got up and went aft to the porch deck to see about the dogs.
They were still wrapped tight and unconscious. I went to the galley, got a knife, and cut them out of that webbing. Then I carried each one into the warmth of the lounge and laid them out on the carpet. Frick’s hind legs began to quiver, but it was another fifteen minutes before they woke up. I found one tiny plastic dart entangled in the web on Frack, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. I wondered where Trask kept his Scotch. Coffee no longer seemed sufficient. I sat back down, called the guys at the beach house, and filled them in on what had happened.
“Who we messin’ with here, boss?” Tony said.
“Bad motherfuckers,” I replied. “And I still have Creeps to deal with.”
“Sounds like we country boys are way out of our league,” Pardee said. He left the obvious corollary to that observation unspoken.
I was getting just a little bit tired of that line. If I was going to stay with this hairball, though, I’d need their help. I still wanted to know why Allie had died. Pardee, attentive to the sudden silence on the line, solved it for me.
“Okay, okay, what do you need us to do?”
“Come over here around 10:00 A.M.,” I said. “Come by car. I think we’ve been going about this all wrong.”
That evening, Tony nosed our boat alongside the cargo wharf at Helios, where Ari Quartermain was waiting with two security officers and a Helios security office SUV. Tony and Pardee, along with Ari’s officers, stayed behind at the wharf while Ari and I got into the SUV and went for a drive onto one of the marsh roads.
The lights of the power plant formed a blazing sodium vapor barrier behind us, while across the river we could see the tops of container ships and the towering gantry cranes that serviced them. Ari pulled up on one of the cattail points that formed a bend in the cooling water canal and shut it down.
“We going all the way tonight, or is this just gonna be more foreplay?” I asked.
He chuckled and shook his head. “Scotch in the glove box,” he said. “Sorry for the paper cups. Why’d you come by boat?”
“I wanted to come in the back door,” I said. “You never know what the Bureau’s been telling the front gate security people.”
We got settled, and then he told me all about his wonderful day at work, which had gone pretty much as I had imagined it would.
“My moonpool is acting up.”
“Acting up? Do I want to hear this?”
“Some of the water from this canal goes into the cooling system for the moonpool,” he said. “Heat exchangers, to be precise. Not to be confused with makeup water, which is purified and comes from the county water system. This is a circulation system: moonpool water on one side, canal water on the other.”
“I believe.”
“Right. Only my heat exchangers are now clogged with something nasty, courtesy of this latest incident.” He looked over at me with weary eyes. “The spent fuel stack wants its cooling water, and wants it now. Left to its own devices, it tries to become a reactor again.”
“And that’s not good.”
“Not good at all. Plus, I’ve got this bureaucratic war going on between something like ten different agencies and a circling swarm of PrimEnergy lawyers. I’m tempted to gather them all into that building and drain the pool. Let them see what an atomic steam explosion looks like.”
I grinned in the darkness, despite the seriousness of the problem and the dizzying array of federal alphabets. “Make sure you get all the lawyers in there,” I said. “Where’s the body?”
“In a double body bag, inside a dry-storage cask parked in the moonpool building. That’s become an issue, too.”
“How so?”
“At least two federal entities are demanding an autopsy. I’ve told them the keys to the cask are available to anyone who’s brave enough to open it and who’s had all the children he wants to have. No takers so far.”
“Still think it’s Trask?”
He shrugged. “If we could figure out a way to clean the heat exchangers, we might recover some skin, but that’s going to be an enormously complex operation, by which time I wouldn’t think anything would be left. It’s a technically unprecedented situation, so NRC-approved safety procedures would have to be drawn up, staffed in Washington, approved, blah, blah, blah.”
“And in the meantime, the fuel stack is getting indigestion?”
“The worst thing that can happen in a moonpool is for all the cooling water to leak out and expose the fuel stack to the atmosphere. You get hydrogen and then a fire, which is not a comforting combination. So we have this system to reflood the pool if for some reason the basic containment fails. We can use that if we have to as a backup cooling system until we get the heat exchangers sorted out.”