I rolled my eyes, and then we all trooped out to the impound yard. Allie’s car was parked by itself alongside the chain-link fence.
“What specifically are we looking for?” Samantha asked.
“We don’t know,” I replied. “Anything that might tell us where she went while she was down here in Wilmington. Receipts, fast-food wrappers, her briefcase, a prescription for radioactive pills. Like that.”
In the event, we found most of the above, including the videocassette onto which she’d downloaded her camcorder tape. Allie had kept a plastic grocery bag slung between the two front seats for trash, and we pulled out the usual collection of fast-food debris and two gas receipts. We copied down the dates, times, and addresses from those and the one Wendy’s receipt I’d found glued to the floor carpet by a sticky French fry. Her purse, which had been jammed under the front seat, had the usual female stuff. Samantha held on to the videocassette while we poked around under the seats, in the trunk, and in the glove box. Pardee went through her luggage, which consisted of a backpack and a briefcase, and which he said contained nothing of direct interest.
We went back into the CBP offices, and someone rustled up a cassette player. Allie had done the tape professionally, with voiceovers on time, place, and the names of the subjects involved. There wasn’t that much actual run-time video, but it was clear what the two lovebirds were there for, or at least clear enough for any suspicious wife and her lawyer. Pardee had taken one thing from Allie’s briefcase: her hotel receipt from the Hilton. Nothing on the bill except room, meal charges, and lots of taxes. No phone charges. More blank walls.
We left everything with Samantha and went back out to my Suburban. As we drove away I speculated on the lack of any phone calls on her hotel bill.
“Nobody uses hotel phones anymore,” Pardee said. “Especially when you have one of these.” He produced what I assumed was Allie’s cell phone, which he’d apparently palmed from the briefcase when Samantha wasn’t looking.
“Hoo-aah,” I said. “They’ll git you for that.”
“They have access to the central office records; we don’t, not without some help. But this thing ought to have a call log, don’t you think?”
He switched the phone on while I drove and accessed the call log. “Aha,” he said.
“Aha, what?”
“I think I recognize a number, or at least an exchange. Hang on a minute.”
He told the phone to recall the number and then waited. Then he said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and switched off.
“That was the Helios general information number,” he announced. “For some unknown reason, Allie called the power plant.”
Aha, indeed, I thought. Now we had a tie, however indirect, between Helios and one of the unexplained radiation incidents. I maneuvered the Suburban through a very complicated cloverleaf to get up onto the Cape Fear River Memorial Bridge.
“Does it show the duration of the call?” I asked, in case Allie had simply dialed a wrong number as Pardee had pretended to do.
“Nope,” he replied. “Just the call and the date, which was, lemme see, the day before she died.”
“Call ’em back and ask for Quartermain.”
A moment later, he was speaking to Quartermain’s secretary. Pardee raised his eyebrows at me, and I told him to see if Ari could meet us in a half hour for a quick private conversation. She put him on hold, and then came back on to tell him that Dr. Quartermain could meet us in an hour and named a restaurant in Southport. I nodded, and Pardee told her we’d be there.
The restaurant turned out to be a New York-style deli, which opened for breakfast and lunch only, down on the main drag leading to the municipal beach. It was noisy and surprisingly full of people when Ari came in, saw us at a corner table, and excused his way through the counter line to join us. I’d decided to go ahead and tell him what we’d found out about Carl Trask.
“Can’t stay,” he announced, checking his watch.
“That good a day, is it?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes. “We are infested with agencies whose names are all abbreviated,” he said. “A million questions, no answers. What you got?”
“A live Carl Trask?” I said.
He leaned back in his chair, visibly surprised. “Really,” he said. “Maybe I’d better get a sandwich after all.”
Pardee volunteered to stand in line and order for all three of us while I debriefed my visit from the local constabulary and the news that Allie had made a call to the power plant the day before she died.
That really threw him. “She did? Do you know who she called?”
I shook my head. “All we know is that her cell phone called your central number at Helios. Does your switchboard record calls coming in?”
“No,” he said. “Unless it’s a threat or a crank call; then the operator can hit a capture-record button, but otherwise, no, calls are just calls. And if that’s not Carl Trask in the cask, who the fuck is it?”
“Slow down, Ari,” I said. “We have one guy, admittedly a senior cop, telling us he’s pretty sure he saw Trask at the Southport marina. Pretty sure doesn’t hack it. Until one of us sees him, we don’t actually know anything.” Then I told him about the note and our plan to rendezvous with Trask to find out what the hell he was doing.
“Besides being AWOL from Helios?” Ari said. “We’ve temporarily suspended his access and clearances. If he’s running some kind of security test, the only place he can get into right now is the public admin building, where his current security clearance level is zero.”
“We have indications that Trask is part of a Homeland Security undercover operation at the container port,” I said. “I don’t want to go into detail about that just now, but it might explain some of his strange comings and goings. So: We’ll meet, we’ll talk, and then maybe we’ll know more.”
“That may well be,” Ari said, “but as far as I’m concerned, he’s got a job to do at Helios, and we have a major physical security breach investigation going on right now. That’s where he’s supposed to be, not out there playing cowboys and Indians with his black-ops pals. You want a new job?”
“Been there, done that. Look, until we actually confirm all this, I’d like you to not share this news with the Bureau.”
He nodded. “Okay; we’re not exactly best friends right now, anyway. Those guys are probing everything that’s not nailed down, even stuff that has no bearing on the floater in the moonpool.”
“That’s what they do,” I said. “Especially when it’s new ground for them. They learn, then they dig, and learn some more. It’s their strength.”
“Well, right now, all their digging is upsetting my engineers. If this shit keeps up, our chief engineer is going to recommend a safety shutdown, and the NRC does not want that to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’d have to explain why to the secretary of energy and the rest of the power industry.”
“So?”
He laughed. “ So? If someone asks the right questions, that could lead to a system-wide shutdown. Think nationwide rolling blackouts.”
“But you said the plant, the power-generation side, anyway, wasn’t affected by the moonpool. So why a system-wide shutdown?”
“Because the technical and physical security systems are totally integrated; they’re the same system for the whole plant. If it failed at Helios, it could fail at any of the BWR plants. That would technically make all the plants, by definition, no longer safe to operate. Those are NRC rules, so they’d be squatting on their own petard, to mangle the metaphor. I need Trask back, and yesterday would be nice.”
“You’re thinking the same thing that I am, then?” I said. “Trask had to be a part of getting that guy in, whoever he is?”
He ran his fingers over his shining bald head. “There are no indications that the security system failed in the physical or electronic sense. Ergo, yes, someone with access and clearance had to be involved.”
“Trask, or a helper?”