other trait, he was steady. He was a man who could be counted on in an emergency, like now.
“Hotline.”
Gail turned back to the phone. “This is Gail Newby, Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Station. We have trouble of an unknown nature developing. We haven’t been able to raise our control room crew for the past twenty minutes, nor has an attempt to override the security lock on the access door been successful.”
The rapid response team concept had been developed to counter the threat of a nuclear attack by terrorists, by detecting the arrival of nuclear materials and/or complete weapon assemblies primarily by ship, but also by airplane, by car or truck, or even by foot or horseback across the Mexican border, or by snowmobile across the nearly three thousand mile, mostly unguarded border with Canada. It had not been designed to counter an attack on a civilian nuclear facility. After 9/11 the thinking had always been that such threats would come from the air.
“Are you under attack at this moment?”
“All I know is that our control room crew does not respond.”
“Can you shut down the reactors from elsewhere?”
Gail could see the man sitting at a desk in Washington, the Situation Book open in front of him. But so far as she knew this scenario wasn’t there. “I think so. But if the reactors go critical a lot of people will get hurt. A lot of civilians downwind.”
“Stand by,” the hotline supervisor said, and the line went dead.
“Come on,” Gail muttered impatiently. Two security technicians monitoring the closed-circuit television monitors were looking at her. They hadn’t been told exactly what was going on yet, but they had eyes and they could see that the Ice Maiden was agitated about something.
The hotline super was back. “I’m dispatching our team from Miami. They should be with you shortly. In the meantime contact your local authorities, and prepare to evacuate the facility.”
“What about the FBI?” Gail asked, allowing herself a small bit of relief. Something was being done.
“I’m on it.”
Gail broke the connection and speed-dialed Larry Haggerty, who headed up the small unit within the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Department that was tasked to protect the plant in case of an emergency, but mostly to coordinate the evacuation. Like the NNSA, everyone had expected an attack to come by air.
“We have a possible situation developing here.”
“Okay,” Haggerty said, and she could see him suddenly sit up. They’d worked together since Gail had been assigned to plant security, and although his persona and drawl were of the southern cop, he was sharp. “You have my attention.”
“We’ve been locked out of our control room, and there’s been no response so far. One of our rapid response teams is coming up from Miami, but I’d like you to stand by in case we have to bug out of here.”
“I’m on it. What else?”
“If there’s an actual problem, I might have a suspect for you.”
Wager came back with Strasser.
“On site now?”
“No, but I’ll get back to you with a license number as soon as I can. But first we’re going to try to take a look at what’s happening down there.”
“Talk to me, darlin’,” Haggerty said. “What’s your gut telling you?”
“I’m worried, Larry.”
“Keep me posted.”
“Will do,” Gail said and she broke the connection.
“What’s going on?” Strasser asked.
TEN
McGarvey said the same words he’d been saying for the past eighteen months. It was as if he were in a tightly scripted play that was so well rehearsed he wasn’t listening to himself, not even gauging the reaction of the seven rapid response team recruits standing around the suitcase nuke.
The picture of his wife’s tearful face as she said goodbye to him at Arlington National Cemetery after their son-in-law’s funeral was permanently etched in his brain. She had been just perfect to him at that moment, her eyes red and moist but still expressive and beautiful, clear windows into her sweet heart.
Less than five minutes later she and their daughter, Elizabeth, were dead, and the following weeks in which he went berserk, in which he’d become a killing machine — something he still was — had passed in a blur. But he’d extracted his revenge, and it was enough; it had to be enough because he was alone more completely, at a much deeper level than he’d ever been alone. And now this work with the NNSA was something like a balm to his spirit, so that at times like this he could switch to autopilot and simply cruise.
“But what you’re talking about is racial profiling,” Ainsle protested and he glanced at the others to back him up.
“You’re damned right he is,” Lundgren said. “Little old ladies with white hair usually aren’t the ones who go around blowing up airplanes or smuggling nuclear materials into the country. It’s why we take a closer look at men in their early twenties to mid-forties, heavy five o’clock shadows, maybe Muslims, maybe not, because chances are if you’re looking for a terrorist he’ll be in that group.”
“Okay, how do we stop a nuclear attack?” McGarvey asked.
“By disarming nuclear devices. We have some pretty neat gadgets that can interfere with firing mechanisms. Shut the weapon down even if it’s gone into countdown mode.”
“But first you have to find it.”
“We work with customs and with air marshals and the Coast Guard,” Ainsle said, a little more sure now that his argument was the correct one. “It’s not perfect, but we can put detectors aboard airplanes that will pick up radiation signatures from a couple thousand feet up.”
“You have to have to have a reasonably good suspicion that there might be a nuclear device let’s say in Boston’s south side, or maybe somewhere in the Mall in Washington. You can’t simply fly over every part of every city twenty-four/seven,” McGarvey said, trying to keep a reasonable tone. But it had been the same with just about every group he and Lundgren had trained. Scientists were bright, a lot of them so bright they were starry-eyed idealists.
“That’s the job of the CIA overseas, and the FBI’s counterterrorism people here in country.”
“So you’re saying that your only job is to detect and disarm nuclear devices that someone else will tell you are here and point you in the right direction,” Lundgren said.
“What are we doing here today?” McGarvey asked. “What can we say that will make your jobs a little easier, make you a little more effective as a team?”
Ainsle shrugged. “I don’t have the faintest idea, none of us do, except that we were ordered to meet with you if we want to be on one of the teams.”
“Fair enough,” Lundgren said. “So listen to the man. We’ve already established that he’s faced this sort of a thing before in such a way that none of you read about it in the newspapers. If you open your minds you might learn something that’ll save a lot of lives, possibly your own.”
It was busywork, McGarvey had to keep reminding himself. The Company shrinks said that he needed to keep his mind occupied if there was to be hope he wouldn’t go around shooting people. But all the bad guys weren’t dead. There would always be a never-ending supply trying to knock down our gates.
“We’re here to sell you on a mind-set,” McGarvey said. “A way of looking at your environment — your
“You’re telling us to stay loose, stay flexible,” Ainsle said. “And you’re right, we saw that when you showed up out of nowhere and pointed a gun at us. Won’t happen again. We’ve learned that lesson.”
Christ, McGarvey thought. They all came from the same mold. “Four points not negotiable,” McGarvey said.
