Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (13 page)

“Pauly? Shall we give him a chance?”

The man said something below his breath.

“What is it, Pauly?”

“Why’s he here?” His voice was low and thick as though it had been days since he’d last uttered a word.

“What do you mean?”

“Why’d he come?”

“He was worried about Flynn.”

“Why?”

“He thought Flynn was mixed up in something suspicious. Isn’t that right, Thorn?”

Thorn nodded.

Pauly peered hard at Thorn as if inspecting a slab of meat.

“Vote no, vote no, vote no,” Wally chanted.

Pauly said, “Abstain.”

“Abstain!” Wally threw up his hands. “You can’t fucking abstain. You got to vote no. The guy’s an asshole. Look at him, he’s dumber than a bag of used condoms. What’re you talking about, man? Don’t abstain. I’ll personally do the honors, cut his smart guy’s throat.”

“All right, that’s it,” Leslie said. “Thorn stays. But it’s probationary. We have a few days before we move. Time for Thorn to prove himself one way or the other.”

Thorn kept silent. Not the moment for an acceptance speech.

“I’m coming for you, douche bag,” Wally said, stabbing a finger at Thorn. “Head on a fucking swivel.”

Looking down at the ground, Leslie said, “Now I have some bad news.”

No one spoke. Wally waved a mosquito from his face.

“Marcus Bendell was killed this morning. Electrocuted.”

Flynn flinched but the others showed nothing.

Wally said, “No big loss. Bendell wasn’t playing a skill position.”

“Like you are?” Flynn said.

“Goddamn right.”

“A hacker? Ten-year-old kids can do what you do on their cell phone.”

“I’m a fucking SCADA programmer, asshole. I spent a year in a hacker dojo learning UNIX, mastering the code. I can make passenger jets crash. What the fuck do you bring to the table?”

Leslie stood silently, waiting for them to sort it out.

When Flynn didn’t reply, she said, “Answer him, Flynn. What do you bring to the table?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I have to contribute.”

“What’s your skill, Flynn?” She spoke softly and without judgment or pressure as if she’d spent considerable time mediating between hostile men in sweaty barracks tents.

“I don’t have any.”

“Second that motion,” Wally said.

“You’re an actor, aren’t you? An artist. A creative person.”

Flynn said, “Sometimes I wonder.”

“We all wonder,” she said. “Only those cursed by hubris don’t wonder about the roles they play.”

“Cursed by hubris?” Wally said. “What is this, vocabulary day? We’re back in tenth grade?”

“You never left, Wally,” said Flynn.

Leslie let the silence grow for several moments, then said, “Marcus was an informant for the feds.”

No one made a sound.

“Our contact inside Turkey Point learned that Marcus was passing information to a government agent, and our man took it upon himself to remove Marcus from the equation. He did this without consulting me or anyone else within ELF.”

Flynn was staring at the bare ground at his feet.

“So much for nonviolence,” Thorn said.

“This man was acting on his own. What he did was outrageous and wrong, and I’ve let him know we will not tolerate any more violent acts.”

“So our cover’s blown,” Prince said. “We have to shut down. Get the hell out of here.”

“No,” Leslie said. “I believe we’re okay.”

“But the feds know we’re out here, they know our goal.”

“The moment Wally put the ELF logo on their system, they knew we’d targeted the plant. They don’t know anything more specific than that.”

“But they could raid the island, bring us all in.” Prince looked at the others as if trying to marshal support, but no one responded.

“And what would they find? Kayaks, a solar panel, a laptop computer with a sterilized hard drive, and a group camping out in the wilderness. No, they won’t raid the island. We’ve done nothing wrong. They couldn’t know our attack plan because Marcus didn’t know it, and none of the rest of you do either. Even if they took us into custody, it would be useless. If one of you wanted to confess, you have nothing specific to reveal.”

“When do we hear it,” Pauly said, “the plan?”

Pauly’s voice was deep and velvety, enunciating each syllable with the care of a DJ on a late-night jazz station.

“I can tell you this much,” she said. “Wally’s computer incursion has produced the desired results. They’re worried about the plant’s security, and they’re reacting exactly as we expected.”

“And how is that?” Pauly said.

“Their security team is meeting now. We’ll hear the results this afternoon and we’ll respond accordingly.”

No one spoke. Wally shifted his weight from foot to foot as if he had to piss. Cameron stood straight, shoulders erect, hands gripped behind his back as if doing an isometric workout on the sly. They weren’t exactly spellbound by Leslie, but they were listening. Something about the quiet assurance in her voice seemed to soothe this rowdy group. Thorn had never seen or imagined this side of Leslie. To him she was still the damaged kid on his dock, insecure, defenseless. But the woman who stood before this group was smart and determined, had a steady command of the situation. Nothing fragile about her.

She explained that for the next few days no one would be leaving the island except Prince, who would come and go, continuing his work with the crocodiles, business as usual.

Finally, she informed them, there was to be a change in the routine. A simple but necessary form of security. The buddy system was now in force. For the next week, they would be paired up and would never be out of sight or proximity of their buddy even for a few seconds. The pairings were as follows: Leslie and Cameron. Flynn and Wally. And Thorn and Pauly Chee.

“No fucking way,” Wally said. “This peter puffer and me, you put us together, one of us will be dead by sundown, and his name won’t be Wally.”

“That’s my decision. From this moment on you’ll be in constant contact with your partner, day and night, until we’ve achieved our goal.”

Wally started to protest again, but his brother turned to him, brought his mouth close to Wally’s ear, and spoke in a harsh, guttural tongue Thorn didn’t recognize. Wally flinched and sealed his lips.

With that, the meeting was adjourned.

FIFTEEN

“SO WE’RE GOOD? YOU GET
a feel for the layout?” Assistant Director Emily Sheen greeted them at the door of the conference room and motioned them inside.

Nicole said yes, a good feel. Sheffield waffled his hand.

He and Nicole, guided by Claude Sellers, had completed an hour ride-around crammed in the front seat of a Ford pickup, no air-conditioning, Claude at the wheel, showing off the highlights of the three-thousand-acre complex. Afterward they’d spent another half hour covering nearly every square foot of the five-story containment building and the dual control rooms full of gleaming hardware, and, good God, ten minutes later Frank could still feel the rumble of the turbines in his sockets.

Claude had insisted on the tour. If they were going to work together, the FBI and NIPC and the plant’s security team, Sellers said they needed a hands-on feel for the outdoor layout, the scale and distances, before they sat down at the table and began in earnest to refine their threat assessments.

“I’ve been here before,” Frank said to Emily Sheen.

“Yeah, yeah,” Claude said. “That’s twice already you said that.”

They took seats on opposite sides of a long table in the third-floor meeting room. Across from Frank was a large window that looked down on the main floor of the control room from one story above.

Men and women in blue jumpsuits and hard hats were carrying equipment, while others in surgical smocks and paper hairnets checked gauges and consulted in small clusters near the elaborate panels and banks of computers. Dozens of joysticks rose from the command consoles flanked by banks of servers and display monitors with row after row of gauges and dials of every size and arrays of color-coded LED lights. A shift supervisor manned one vast desk, with two other equipment operators stationed at another wedge-shaped desk. The room seemed as vast and intricate as a Mars mission at NASA control.

On the walls of the conference room dozens of TV screens played black-and-white videos from all the security-cam placements around the facility. The front gate, the entry to the office building, and everything in between, including views from three cameras that were set up along the coastline monitoring the waters just offshore.

Claude took a seat alongside the woman from NRC, Emily Sheen, fiftyish, with a blocky face and blunt bangs, prematurely gray, and wearing a spongy, green suit that might’ve fit ten pounds ago.

“Actually I was here on multiple occasions,” Frank said. “First time, Freddy Manks was head of security. You were in diapers, Sellers. FBI handled the force-on-force drill, and in five minutes my team penetrated the perimeter and were having cocktails in the control room. You guys were pathetic.”

“Yeah, well, those times are long gone.”

Under the table Nicole nudged Frank’s ankle. A professional thump. Cool it. We’ve got to work with these people.

Frank believed he had a solid read on Claude. The guy was a brazen bully. The way he smiled, not quite a sneer, but a snide curl in the corner of his upper lip. As if he were tolerating humankind, but only barely. His halo of testosterone stinking up the place. And his grooming, Jesus. That Fu Manchu mustache, plucked and manicured, and the way his scalp gleamed as if he buffed it with a shoe rag.

Not to mention his outfit. A tight brown shirt with epaulets, green slacks, and a white-cord bolo tie, for christsakes, with a red stone at his throat. When Frank was ten years old and didn’t know better, he’d worn a tie like that once and got the snot knocked out of him after Sunday school. It was in-your-face dorky. Probably had a collection of string ties, his jerk-off trademark.

“All right, if everyone’s ready,” Sheen said, “let’s commence.”

If Frank could get a refund on the hours he’d spent sitting at conference tables like this one, listening to some federal hack hold forth on the trivia he or she was handsomely paid to spew, he’d be about twenty years younger. Maybe his back wouldn’t hurt so much. And maybe he’d have a kindlier view of the wonders of government service, too.

Or if he could have spent the rest of the afternoon staring across the mahogany expanse at Nicole McIvey, revisiting their evening behind the boathouse, the time would have been well spent.

But Nicole sat to his right, which allowed him only minimal glances at her profile and a few downwind whiffs of her natural odor. The woman had lathered up during their drive-around and was now giving off a sea-salty, wholesome scent that reminded Frank of sun-dried sheets.

“As you know,” Sheen said, “the NRC monitors the entire array of the nation’s nuclear materials, medical, industrial, as well as anyone using or producing nuclear fuel. We police waste disposal and decommissioning of nuke plants when they’re taken out of service. We supervise plant updating and reconstruction and watch over all private nuclear research and testing.

“But today’s topic is security. Agent Sheffield mentioned the force-on-force drills, which is, of course, our primary method of ensuring all power plants in the US are prepared to thwart attacks, and to be certain the private security forces the power companies employ are up to the task.

“The regularly scheduled drill wasn’t set to take place until eighteen months from now, but in light of the recent computer incursion, the NRC believes the timetable should be altered. We’ve decided the drill should take place in the upcoming week.”

“Your people could be ready that soon?” Frank asked.

“We’re ready now,” Claude said. “It’s you guys I’m worried about.”

“Let me get this straight,” Frank said. “You’re worried you’ve got a vulnerability and you think running a drill will find it?”

“In an abundance of caution—” Ms. Sheen began, but Frank raised his hand and cut her short.

“What you want is for the FBI to give you cover, then if something bad happens, we get the blame.”

“You’re misreading our intentions,” she said. “A drill is simply a motivational tool. We want everyone at Turkey Point working at their highest level of efficiency, and we believe this is one way to accomplish that goal.”

“Might take a little more than a drill,” Frank said.

“That’s a laugh,” Claude said. “The feds lecturing us about efficiency.”

Claude pushed his chair back, stood, and looked for a moment as if he were about to leap across the table and try to bite off some of Frank’s soft tissue. Then Claude produced that slimy smile and left the room.

“He’s getting the scale model,” Sheen explained with a vacant smile.

While they waited, Nicole small-talked with Sheen, playing the geography game: Where’ve you been based, where’d you grow up?

Frank looked out the window, watching the steam swirl from the cooling towers, disappearing into an achingly blue sky. Watching birds change course around the monster vent stacks, thinking about the plant, the three thousand acres, how hard it would be to defend this place against a determined enemy.

The way force-on-force worked, an attack team was chosen by the NRC to go up against the plant’s privately trained security force. Before the drill took place, both sides gathered around a tabletop mock-up of the plant or ran computer simulations. The feds proposed assault scenarios, the plant security team offered responses, the feds coming back with countermeasures to those responses, brainstorming back and forth for a day or two, war games meant to tighten security protocols.

Tabletop drills preceded the actual force-on-force exercise by a few weeks. Enough time for the plant security team to fix the flaws discovered in the mock-ups. And to tweak operational procedures, harden their perimeters, add personnel, repair any weak links in their communications network.

Thirty years back, Sheffield, a youngster, was assigned to his first force-on-force team. Gung ho going in. But by the end of the drill, he saw the whole deal was about as rigorous as a neighborhood game of capture the flag. Guys firing blanks at other guys firing blanks. Clunky, inefficient, and silly. Evaluators were posted throughout the area with binoculars and clipboards. Hard to score, hard to get a real feel for the vulnerability of the plant or the skill of the defense team.