I told him about our run for the roses last night, that Moira had been picked up again, and that I thought Trask might have been behind all the problems at the plant.
“Carl Trask a terrorist?”
“ Colonel Carl Trask creating an ‘incident’ in order to reawaken America to the clear and present danger,” I said. “From this ex-cop’s point of view, he had motive, means, and opportunities galore.”
Ari let out a long sigh. “Damn,” he said. “I guess it’s possible. But then what happened? How’d he end up in the moonpool?”
“Apparently, we might never find that out,” I said. “In the meantime, I’m going to focus on Allie Gardner. She was either a random victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or somehow she’s part of the mystery here. That’s why I wanted to meet tonight. I’m going to need your help with this, while at the same time, I don’t think I can help you anymore.”
“Because you promised the Bureau guys?”
“They’re right, you know. They need to run their investigation without outside interference, especially if they’re squabbling with other government agencies.”
He nodded. “Okay. That reads. What do you need from me?”
“I need to inspect your visitor logs-in detail-and it might be better for me to do that now, at night, with fewer people around in the admin offices.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Not what-who: I’m looking for Allie Gardner. We all assumed she’d never been here, at Helios. I’d like to confirm that, before yet another assumption bites me in the ass.”
An hour and a half later, we were closing in on the south end of the Wilmington container port. Tony had the boat’s red and green side navigation lights on but had turned off the white lights. There were four enormous ships being worked farther up that long bulkhead pier under the glare of a forest of gantry cranes, but the downstream end was empty of activity and all the crane lights were dark. There was little moonlight, and while the container stack area was brightly lighted, the surface of the river a hundred yards out remained in darkness. Tony said we were going in on slack high water in the estuary, so the current was minimal. It would turn to ebb and increase significantly in about an hour.
Our search through the visitor records hadn’t turned up anything useful. Pardee and I had slipped into coat-and-tie outfits before going with Ari to the physical security admin office. I was hoping that anyone seeing us there would assume we were just some more federal people. We’d examined the time frame when Allie had been in Wilmington and found no record of her ever visiting Helios. Then we’d done it again to see if any other names jumped out at us, but none did. There were a lot of contractors and suppliers, making it clear that Helios was heavy into outsourcing. There was one entry indicating a Thomason had visited a Thomason, but that didn’t have anything to do with anything as best I could tell. I’d asked Ari if we could have a copy of those days’ log pages, and he’d promised to get us one when the admin offices reopened tomorrow.
The second reason we’d come by boat was to see if it was possible to approach the container port from the river without being discovered, and, if we were discovered, what would happen next. Tony held the boat in position at idle while we waited to see if a passing security truck would notice us. Ten minutes later, one came by up on the unloading area of the pier, but passed by with no reaction to us. My guess was that either the driver’s night vision was nonexistent against all those gantry crane lights farther up or he’d seen the boat and thought nothing of it.
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.
Tony pointed the bow toward the end of the bulkhead pier. We crept in at idle, rounded the end of the pier about fifty feet out, and nosed up into the creek that formed the downstream boundary of the port. To our right were darkened warehouses and other semi-industrial buildings, which looked like they’d been abandoned for years along the riverbank. Stumps of long-gone pier pilings littered the bank, along with a backwater collection of listing barges, piles of rusty barrels, and dangling outflow pipes. To our left was the southern end of the container stack area, with lanes and rows of shipping containers stacked four to ten high.
“I’ve got five feet under the keel,” Tony announced as we pushed farther up the narrowing creek.
The water stank of oil, sewage, and other things, none of them good. The bulkhead pier on our left ended in a dirt bank and some long-dead trees. Farther up the creek was that jumbled pile of damaged and discarded containers I’d seen on our first visit. The security lighting ended at the edge of the stack laydown area. The container graveyard was not lighted at all, and it was also outside the chain-link fence that defined the port perimeter. The creek ran between the fence and a small mountain of discarded containers.
“Four feet,” Tony said, putting the engine in neutral and coasting forward now. He’d pointed out earlier that if we ran aground now, at high slack water, we’d be there until the next high tide came along to float us off.
“Can you put us on the bank with that container pile?” I asked.
He turned the boat toward the ribbon of oily trash bobbing along the dirt bank. Pardee went forward with a boathook to see what he could grab, while I stayed in the cockpit with Tony and the shepherds. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see a body or two floating in all the mess, and, in fact, I saw at least one furry soccer ball with the head of a cat.
The boat stopped with a small bump, and Pardee hooked something on the bank to hold us there. I turned back toward the container port to see if we’d attracted any attention. The silent stacks looked back at me. The fence at the top of the opposite bank looked to be about ten feet high, but I could clearly see where the bottom of the chain-link had billowed out or been compromised by gullies washed out at low points. If we’d gone to that side of the creek, it would have been easy to climb the bank, watch for security trucks, and then slide under the chain-link. I wondered if they had a problem with pilferage in the stacks at night.
“Boss?” Pardee said.
I turned back around. He was pointing into the container junkyard, where I could see the flickering reflection of a small fire. Then I saw a human shadow on a nearby container, and then another. Frick growled quietly.
“Hobo jungle up there?” I said.
Pardee nodded. “Looks like it,” he said. “I guess you could live in an empty container.”
“I want to go up there, see if we can talk to somebody. Find out how hard it is to get into the container stack yard at night.”
“You taking the dogs?” Pardee asked.
“Hell, yes,” I said. “Why?”
He repositioned the boathook to steady the boat, which was trying to swing around in the creek. “Because those folks up there see those dogs, ain’t nobody gonna stick around to have a nice chat.”
“You think they’ll run?”
“I believe they will,” he said. He stuck his tongue out at Frick. She lifted a lip. “I would.”
I patted Frick’s head. “Then they better be really good runners,” I said.
In the event, they didn’t run. They didn’t even see us coming until Pardee surprised the shit out of a noisome collection of derelicts, drunks, and aging homeless types surrounding a small fire that was burning in a sawed-off steel drum. We’d separated in making our approach. Pardee had come in from the landward side, stepping into the firelight from between two mangled containers that had obviously been in a trucking accident several years ago. I remained in the shadows between the edge of the pile and the river, with the shepherds sitting by my side. The dozen or so denizens of the junkyard studiously ignored the large black man who was stepping carefully over two sleeping forms and into the middle of the group.
“Evening,” he said.
“We ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong,” one man said, still not looking directly at Pardee. “Just stayin’ warm, is all.”