Going Dark (Thorn Mysteries) (8 page)

Frank was silent, eyes on the road ahead.

“I know what you’re thinking, Frank. No one advised you of this either. But how it happened, Nuclear Regulatory bounced it to me because they knew I was running an operation on ELF. I passed it up my chain. After that, like I said, it was their call who to alert.”

“Your agency is under our jurisdiction, the Bureau’s. I should’ve heard about this every step along the way.”

“I’m just telling you what happened.”

He considered it a moment. “Well, shit. I’m halfway out the door. I shouldn’t be pissed nobody copies me on these things.”

“But you’re pissed anyway.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Relatively pissed, yes. Six on the ten-point scale.”

Frank knew all about ELF. An arm of Earth First! ELF activists were arsonists mainly. They favored primitive explosive devices to burn down ritzy housing developments built on sensitive lands, and SUV dealerships that specialized in gas hogs. They staged attacks on animal-testing labs, spiking ancient redwoods to shut down logging operations.

All loose-knit, no central command. A mishmash of beliefs. Animal liberators, anticapitalists, green anarchists, deep ecologists, ecofeminists. The entire array of next-generation revolutionaries. Everyone doing his or her thing. Save the earth, fuck the exploiters, punish the land developers, stop urban sprawl.

Business leaders upset over their economic losses had pressured the Bureau for years and finally bullied it into lumping together ELF and Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front and a few others like them and promoting them to the top of the list, ranking their kind as the number one domestic terrorist threat.

Not the Aryan Nations or the Islamic Brothers, not the twenty-odd militias in Idaho and Michigan and Colorado, wingnuts armed to the earlobes with rocket launchers and assault weapons, targeting cops and judges and abortion doctors, just waiting their chance to bring the federal government crashing down.

No, ecowarriors were number one.

Pure silliness, as far as Sheffield was concerned. Sure, their dollar totals were up in the 40 million range, mostly from burning down those posh resorts in Aspen and trashing cosmetics-testing plants, but they’d never killed anyone and seemed to be trying their best to keep it that way. They were a bunch of idealistic merry pranksters. A ragtag assortment of dope smokers with a badass green streak. Most of the few hundred criminal acts attributed to them were so minor league, it was a stretch to call them
criminal
at all. He kept it to himself, but Frank could even work up a mild sympathy for their cause. He wasn’t a big fan of urban sprawl.

“Apparently,” McIvey said, “whoever hacked the plant’s system wasn’t trying to crash the reactors or cause a meltdown or anything catastrophic. Besides leaving this screen saver behind, looks like their mission was exploratory, testing the plant’s cyber defenses. A probe of some kind, digital snooping. Possibly to identify vulnerabilities, what they call ‘susceptible nodes.’ Like this might be stage one, a warm-up for the main event. Or it could be just a one-shot deal. Thumbing their nose. A head fake. Pretending interest in Turkey Point, but planning to strike somewhere else.”

She blew through the tollbooth’s SunPass lane.

“You’re running a covert operation in my backyard. Withholding information about a security breach at the largest nuclear facility in Florida. In case you didn’t know, our South Florida Field Office has a cybersecurity task force, a WMD task force, we cover all those bases. Our guys are the best.”

“You want the truth, my opinion, it’s politics. People above me kept everyone in the dark so NIPC can score a takedown. Justify our existence.”

National Infrastructure Protection Center, that was her agency. Frank had watched it all mushroom since the Twin Towers were hit, an explosion of federal programs under the aegis of Homeland Security. NIPC identified and analyzed threats and vulnerabilities in the infrastructure. Electrical grids, bridges, roads, water systems, highways, railways, navigable waterways, airports, the Internet and phone systems. Anything that moved people or power or goods and services or information. The grid police.

Huge mandate that overlapped with about five other existing agencies, including work the FBI had been doing for most of Frank’s career. All that growth was supposed to improve interagency communication, but what it did was make the turf wars even more bitter than pre-9/11. Another reason he’d decided to pull the rip cord, float back to a life of full-time Hawaiian shirts.

“So here’s the deal, Frank. The computer network at Turkey Point is a closed loop. Critical areas are wired internally, but not exposed to the Internet. So a cyber attack has to be launched inside the plant using one of the on-site computers. Insert a flash drive or download malicious code. It has to come from inside the loop. But then you probably know all this.”

“Refresher course is fine. I like listening to you talk.”

She gave him a quick
don’t go there
look and got back to driving.

Sheffield debated it. Confess now, lay his cards faceup, or keep holding out. For her part, Nicole had been concealing several major investigations, which gave Sheffield the moral high ground. If he was going to drop his own bomb, this was the moment.

But McIvey floored the Taurus and blasted by another slow mover, rocking Sheffield back in his seat, and the moment passed.

NINE

“SO, AFTER THE BREACH,” MCIVEY
said, “Homeland was all over it. Their techies traced the entry to a workstation in the biology lab where the croc research is based. Appears somebody spent a few hours on that computer, planting the ELF logo, poking around. This desk sits idle most of the day while the biologists are out on airboats checking on the nests or whatever the hell they do. Only two people had access to that computer. One of those was killed in a recent crocodile attack. And the other is Cameron Prince.”

“I read the papers,” Frank said. “Prince took over for Leslie Levine.”

“The croc program, it’s public relations window dressing, the power company trying to spruce up its image, look like a good environmental citizen.

“They provide the biologists an airboat and a free pass to cruise the hundred and sixty miles of cooling canals on the edge of Biscayne Bay. The berms bordering the canals, that’s where the crocs nest. So Levine dies, Prince inherits the gig. In his airboat, coming and going as he pleases. Convenient access to the plant.”

“And that made you suspicious of Levine’s death.”

“It did.”

“Be awful hard to stage a croc attack.”

“Well, I raised concerns with the Metro homicide detective handling the case. Marcy Killibrew. You know her?”

“Met her. Can’t say I know her.”

“She showed me a video of the incident. It’s chaotic, hard to watch, but it seems to confirm Prince’s story.”

“I’m still stuck on the cyber attack.”

“
Attack
isn’t the right word.
Probe, snoop
.”

“Okay,
probe
. From inside the plant.”

“Well, after Homeland identified the entry point, the plant’s security team took over the on-site investigation with assistance from NIPC. We interviewed everyone with access to the biology lab. Did background searches, checking for any associations with ELF or other radical groups. Nothing popped.”

“You polygraphed them?”

“Yeah, Prince passed. He looks legit. Has a master’s in biology, virtually the same credentials as Levine. He’s from old Miami money, fallen on hard times. Not overtly political, no agitator. Gives educational speeches about his croc work to schoolkids and Rotary Clubs. But he didn’t feel right, so I devoted time to this guy, and one day last month, I got a hit.”

Sheffield tensed as Nicole blasted by a heavyset couple astraddle a Harley.

“Turns out Prince has people in and out of his house in the Grove. He’s a bodybuilder, got a home gym, charges a fee, supplementing his income. People work out, leave a few hours later, muscles all pumped. Nice glow in their cheeks. Cheaper than a gym membership and they get to rub shoulders with a second runner-up for Mr. Florida.

“So a month ago, two gentlemen turn up at his place. These guys definitely weren’t weight lifters. Their photos wind up on my desk, and I recognize them immediately, the Chee brothers, Pauly and Wally. A couple of Navajos from New Mexico. Pauly was in the navy, based in California.

“These days he’s a full-time ELF. His younger brother, Wally, is a high school dropout, computer programmer also with hard-core green credentials. From what we can tell, he’s become a highly proficient SCADA hacker. You familiar with SCADA?”

“Something about railroads?”

“That’s one thing, yeah. Stands for ‘supervisory control and data acquisition.’ The industrial-control computer network, adjusts railway tracks, manages oil pipelines, steers sewage into the water-treatment plants. You name it, if it has to do with infrastructure, SCADA systems run their computers.”

Sheffield was silent, staring at her profile.

“Okay, so Wally and Pauly walk into Prince’s Grove house and stay overnight. Next morning all three slip out, drive down to a public boat ramp in South Dade, a boat picks them up, takes them out to an island in Biscayne Bay. They’ve been playing patty-cake out there ever since. Prince Key, it’s five miles east of the plant. Pry the branches apart, you’ve got a nice view of the cooling towers.”

“So you were surveilling Prince. Doing all this under my nose.”

“I told you it wasn’t my call. Don’t get huffy.”

“‘Huffy’ isn’t on my playlist. ‘Ticked off,’ yeah, that’s a tune I know.”

“We’re watching Prince. We’re doing it by the book. Point is, Prince is in the thick of this. Talking up the marvels of nuclear power by night, hanging with antinuke warriors the next. The guy’s a full-fledged eco-wacko.”

“Wacko?”

“Absolutely.”

“Tell me something, McIvey. You a climate-change denier?”

She drew a breath and slowed for an exit off the turnpike. “What is it, Frank? Living at the beach surrounded by the great outdoors, you’ve turned into a tree hugger?”

“I do like trees. I admit it. Always have.”

“I’m not a denier. The science is there. It’s solid.”

“Next question. Since it’s true, polar ice melting, ocean turning acid, bigger, badder storms, you think there’s anything more important on the horizon for planet Earth than total obliteration?”

“Okay, okay, we’re all doomed, the end is near.”

“You sit in the same meetings I do, McIvey, read the NASA updates, Department of Energy, Weather Service. The goddamn US army has contingencies for climate-change scenarios. Those guys don’t waste time on fantasies. This shit is happening. The tsunami’s out there, rolling our way.”

“Let it out, Frank. Ventilate.” Smiling at him.

“I get worked up, yeah, but this is real and we go on our merry way. SUVs getting bigger, drilling a little deeper for the same old oil.”

“So you’re saying what exactly? The bad guys are right, so let them do what they want. Including blow up a power plant?”

Sheffield absorbed that for a few seconds, then said quietly, “Is that what we’re talking about, that’s the intel your snitch gave you?”

“Bendell didn’t know the endgame. But, yeah, an attack on the reactor, that’s an option. Worst case, of course. But a possibility.”

Sheffield was still looking at her profile. Nice, clean Midwestern lines, sharp angles, but not brittle. Maybe a double shot of Norwegian blood. Reminding him of somebody, a Hollywood actress from way back. Big star.

“You can quit staring at me, Frank.”

“It’s hard.”

“With you it’s probably always that way.” She looked over with that teasing smile.

“You got older brothers, don’t you?”

“Three. How’d you know?”

“They cops?”

“One is. Indiana state trooper. The other two are lawyers. Why?”

“Growing up with all those macho men around there was a lot of roughhousing. You being the only girl, that had to be a challenge.”

“I held my own.”

“They didn’t coddle you, protect little sis?”

“What’re you trying to say, Frank?”

“Just getting to know you. See how your mind works.”

“It works just fine,” she said.

“Like the rest of you.”

“You going to make me regret calling you?”

“Okay, okay. Sorry. That was out of line.”

A car passed on the right. Some kamikaze going faster than she was.

“Okay, so you lost Bendell, your eyes and ears inside the ELF cell. What exactly do you expect the Bureau to do?”

“Raid the island, bring them all in?”

“Get serious. You got a cartoon image on the power plant computers, and there’s some eco-freaks with no outstanding warrants, they’re hanging out on an island grilling veggie burgers and howling at the moon. Which is one step short of having absolutely nothing.”

Nicole gave him a stony look and pushed the car a little faster. “You’re right. That’s not much.”

“Tell me this,” Frank said, moving on. “Your hacker, this Wally Chee, he’s smart enough to put up the ELF image and keep it up there for a few days, but he’s too dumb to cover his tracks back to that biology workstation?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time a smart guy does something dumb.”

“Announcing themselves like that in the first place, putting that cartoon up on the plant’s computers, that’s just one more dumb thing? Warning everybody you’re about to do something?”

“Fits their pattern. In-your-face arrogance, stop me if you can.”

“Or a head fake. It’s all so obvious, none of it is true.”

Nicole looked over, smiled at him again. Slowing for a red light. “You’re a hard-ass, Frank, but I’m glad to be working with you. I am. I’m glad we’re able to do this without a lot of tension.” She turned his way, smiled.

Greta Garbo. He almost said it out loud but caught himself. She’d probably heard it a few times before. That same mysterious face, vulnerable and unapproachable at once, the pale coloring. Soft eyes that in a split second could harden and go cold.