“I can shoot a gun and mold plastic explosive,” bin Helbawi had argued stubbornly.
“By the time this happens some of those people may be your friends.”
“Never,” bin Helbawi had replied angrily. He had gotten himself worked up, and DeCamp had reached across the table and laid his right hand over the boy’s.
“No one doubts your dedication, Achmed, least of all me. I know what you’re capable of doing. It’s why you were sent to me. But you’ll need patience, too. And trust. We’ll work as a team. You’ll see.”
Bin Helbawi had looked away and remained staring at the passersby for a long time, as if he were trying to memorize the scene, knowing that he would probably never see it again, and DeCamp had allowed him his peace for the moment.
When he’d turned back, he nodded. “I was told that you were an expert, and that I should listen to you and obey your orders.”
“Instructions,” DeCamp had corrected. “You taught me about nuclear power stations and I taught you about weapons and explosives. We will do this together.”
Careful not to step in any of the blood, DeCamp stuck his pistol in his belt and went around the computer desks to the panels and consoles on the back wall that controlled reactor one. He set his satchel on the floor, took out one of the Semtex bricks, removed the olive drab plastic wrap, and plastered it against the reactor coolant panel, his movements precise.
Bin Helbawi remained standing in front of the supervisor’s desk, looking down at the dead man. He glanced over at DeCamp. “Stan interviewed me for this job,” he said, his voice strained.
“Forget him, you have work to do. Get on with it.”
“Bastard,” bin Helbawi said, and DeCamp thought the remark was meant for him and he reached for his pistol, but bin Helbawi fired one round into Kubansky’s body. “
“Enough,” DeCamp said.
Still bin Helbawi hesitated for a few seconds, until finally he came out of his angry trance, laid his pistol on one of the computer desks, and came around to the panels and consoles for reactor two, and began setting the Semtex bricks on the controls for the reactor coolant pumps and the scram unit, finishing just behind DeCamp.
“How long would it take to rewire just the two scram panels to bypass what we’ve done here?” DeCamp asked.
“At least an hour, maybe a little longer,” bin Helbawi said. He seemed to have steadied down. “They’d have to be careful not to disturb the plastique.”
“The detonators are set for two hours, so once they’re cracked you’ll have to hold out here for seventy-five minutes. Can you do that?”
“Of course.
It took less than two minutes to place the detonators and activate them.
“Seventy-five minutes,” DeCamp said. He took off his coveralls and employee badge, and tossed them aside, then laid his pistol and spare magazine on one of the consoles.
“I know.”
“Jam the door lock after I leave.”
Bin Helbawi was staring at Kubansky’s body, and he nodded but didn’t turn around as DeCamp went to the door and opened it a crack to make sure no one was in the corridor. He keyed his cell phone, shutting down the camera, and without looking back stepped out of the control room, went down the hall, and out the back door where he headed over to the visitor’s center, a bland expression on his face. The reactors would melt down in two hours and no one would be able to do a thing about it.
SIX
Gail was in the driveway between condenser building two and its turbine building when Karl Reider, one of the Barker security people at the visitors center, called her FM radio.
“One of the people on the noon tour just showed up here. He’s leaving. Says he’s sick.”
“Are you holding him?” Gail asked, worried for reasons she couldn’t define at that moment. But then Wager maintained that worried was her normal state of mind, while she thought it was nothing more than a matter of being a stickler for detail. A precision freak.
Reider hesitated for a moment. “There was no reason for it,” he said. “He just walked out the door so he’s probably still in the parking lot, do you want me to bring him back?”
Ever since she’d come aboard, discipline at the plant had definitely tightened up. She’d fired a couple of security people in her first ninety days, which had sent a definite message to everyone else: Don’t cross the bitch. They were on their toes, no one wanted to get on her bad side.
Just now no one was around, and except for the heavy industrial whine of the turbines and generators, the day was bright, warm, and at peace, yet she had to force herself to keep on track, because she’d never believed in intuition — feminine or not. “No reason for it,” she radioed. “What’d you say his name was?”
“Robert Benson,” Reider said. “I pulled up his tour app, he’s a schoolteacher from San Francisco. Short guy, slight build, light hair.”
The security team had definitely sharpened up in Gail’s estimation, and she remembered the man in the second-floor corridor as the tour group had passed. He’d been at the rear and had glanced at her briefly before looking away. Guilty secrets? Or just so nervous at being so close to a pair of live nuclear reactors that he had already been getting sick?
“Good job, Karl,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Yes, ma’am. EE out.”
She switched channels and pulled up a page showing the closed-circuit cameras around the plant, scrolled down to the single camera under the eaves of the visitor’s center that was pointed at the parking lot and hit Enter. A black-and-white image of the half-filled lot came up on her FM radio’s small screen. One car was just turning into the driveway from the beach road, A1A, and as it went left she spotted a lone figure just getting into a dark blue Ford Taurus parked next to the Orlando tour bus, his back to the camera. Moments later the car backed out of its spot, turned and went out to the highway and headed south.
He hadn’t been in a hurry, and he definitely hadn’t acted like a man who was nervous either because of his surroundings or because he had done something wrong and was making a getaway, and yet something about him bothered Gail. She couldn’t put her finger on it, except that he had seemed almost too self-assured for a man who’d gotten sick and had to cut the tour short. On the way to his car he hadn’t looked around nervously or over his shoulder to see if anything was happening behind him.
The screen on her FM radio was too small for her to make out the license number, but that would show up on the recordings in security, and there’d been something about the incident that made her want to follow up.
She switched back to the main calling channel as she turned and headed around the corner to where she had left her golf cart. “Post one, this is Newby,” she radioed.
“Post one, Reider.”
“Did you talk to this guy?” Gail asked.
“No, that would have been Deb Winger, the tour guide.”
“I meant there at the center. Who checked him in and out? Who talked to him?”
“Monica checked his ID and gave him his package, but no one checked him out. He just came in, laid his badge and hard hat on the counter, said he was sorry, but he had to leave, he was sick, and he walked out the door.”
Gail got in the golf cart, made a sharp U-turn, and headed over to the visitor’s center. Something wasn’t right, damn it, she could practically taste it, smell it in the air. She really didn’t believe in intuition, but sometimes she had hunches. “Is she still there?”
“She’s on her lunch break.”
“I’m on my way over, I want to talk to her,” Gail said. “Newby out.”
Some schoolkids and their teachers from Vero Beach were still in the visitors center, working with the
