interactive displays. They were scheduled for the one o’clock tour and had probably eaten their lunches on the bus on the way down. Reider came over when Gail walked in the back door. He was a big man, a high school football standout who’d never made it in college, so that now at thirty-one he could only hope for a supervisory position with the security company one day. But he’d sharpened up over the past year or so, and he never seemed to resent his job.
“Monica’s waiting in the break room for you. Is there something I should know about?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Gail told him. “But you did the right thing to call me. I don’t like anything unusual to happen around here, if you know what I mean.”
“I hear you.”
Gail nodded at the other security officer and woman standing behind the counter and went back to the break room where the greeter who’d checked Benson in was seated at one of the tables. She was a middle-aged woman, slightly round, with a pleasant face but frizzy hair, and just now she looked nervous, most likely because Reider had filled her in about the Ice Maiden who ran security. She started to rise, but Gail waved her back down.
“Monica?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gail shook her hand. “Look, this is probably nothing, but I just wanted to check out something with you, if that’s okay.”
The woman nodded and wet her lips. She looked as if she were about ready to jump up and run out the door.
“You’ve done nothing wrong, I just need to ask you about the guy you checked in. The one who came back a couple of minutes ago, said he was sick, and left.”
“Mr. Benson. He didn’t look sick when I processed him. He was sort of calm, and pleasant. Nice manners, soft-spoken.”
“Did he say why he was taking the tour? He was a schoolteacher, maybe he was doing this so that he could bring something back to his classroom. Did he mention anything?”
“No. He just told me that he had an appointment later this afternoon so he’d join the Orlando tour. I offered the two o’clock because it was a much smaller group, but he turned that down.”
Gail had another thought. “How often does something like this happen? Someone getting sick and leaving in mid-tour?”
“I’ve been here three years and it’s never happened while I was on front counter duty.”
“Has the tour guide been notified?” Gail asked.
“I don’t know.”
Gail went to the door and beckoned for Reider, who came over. “Has anyone told the tour guide that she’s missing one of her flock?”
Reider looked sheepish. “No, ma’am. You’re the only one I told.”
“You’d better let her know.”
“Shall I call her back in?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Gail said sternly. “But I want to see her in my office as soon as she’s done. Damn sloppy.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Gail turned back to the desk clerk in the break room. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Mr. Benson? Anything, any little detail that might have caught your attention? You said that he was soft-spoken, nice manners. Southern?”
“No, he was English, maybe Australian, or something like that. I don’t think I’ve heard the exact accent. But it was nice.”
“A foreigner?”
The woman shrugged. “He had a California driver’s license.”
Even easier to forge than a passport, Gail thought. “You said he told you something about needing to take the noon tour because he had an appointment? Did he mention where?”
Monica brightened. “As a matter of fact he did. He said he had to be in Jacksonville.”
For a split second it just didn’t sink in, but when it did Gail’s heart tightened. The car had turned to the
“Christ,” she muttered, and she went back through the visitors center in a rush, ignoring Reider who’d looked up in alarm, and out the back door to her golf cart and headed back to the South Service Building as fast as the cart would carry her.
Steering with one hand she keyed her FM radio. “Security Center, this is Newby.” They had a copy of Benson’s driver’s license, but before she called the Florida Highway Patrol, she needed the license number on the blue Taurus. She had an incredibly bad feeling about this situation.
“I was just going to call you,” Wager came back. He sounded excited. “We have what might be a developing situation in the main control room.”
“Shit, shit,” Gail swore. She keyed the FM. “What?”
“No one’s answering the phones, and the observation blinds have apparently been locked from the inside.”
“I’m on my way.”
SEVEN
DeCamp got off the island highway at Jensen Beach a few miles south of the plant, and once on the mainland headed for I-95, keeping a few miles per hour over the speed limit, while at the same time clamping a lid on his feelings of triumph.
It wasn’t the money, exactly, though two million euros was significant, it was the almost rapturous feeling of accomplishment he felt when an operation of his design worked. It was almost like a drug to his system, really, and it was something he’d never shared with anyone before, not even with his comrades in the Buffalo Battalion, not even after a battle from which they’d emerged victorious, everyone pumped with adrenaline.
No deaths had been necessary this time, except, of course, for the four engineers and their supervisor plus bin Helbawi in the control room, and for the other people in the power plant when the reactors melted down, releasing a lot of radiation into the atmosphere, and for possibly tens of thousands directly downwind, but he’d not had to go in with a squad strength force of specialists like in the old Battalion days and risk casualties.
He had no ill will toward the local authorities who would have been involved in just such a firefight, but the operation this afternoon had been clean; it had been even elegant in its simplicity. And that was something he’d admired ever since the colonel had taught him the concept, simple moves in hand-to-hand, simple moves in the field, no wasted efforts, no unnecessary casualties to reach an objective. And it all had made perfect sense to him then as it did now.
Merging with traffic heading south on I-95, he took an encrypted sat phone from his bag on the passenger side floor and speed-dialed a number that connected him with an automatic rerouter in Amsterdam that would use a different satellite to connect with a number in Dubai. The two-second delay in transmissions was nothing more than a minor irritation.
Gunther Wolfhardt answered in English on the first ring. He’d been expecting the call. “Yes.”
“One hour, forty-five minutes.”
“Troubles?”
“None.”
“The operation has taken longer than we originally expected.”
This type of questioning was something new, bothersome. “It is what it is.”
“And what of your team?” Wolfhardt asked. Although DeCamp never discussed his methods, or the names and qualifications of any team members he used — if any — the German had to believe that the operation was more than a one-man job.
“Untraceable.”
