the two o’clock has four people booked. The noon has eighteen. And the one o’clock is just for the schoolchildren.”
DeCamp nodded. “Actually I’m supposed to be in Jacksonville later this afternoon, so if it’s okay I’ll tag along with the Orlando group.”
“Yes, sir.”
She handed him a packet of materials containing cutaway diagrams of the plant’s reactors, turbines, and generators, as well as a map of the site, all the buildings and their functions, including the main control room in the South Service Building, labeled, which was incredible, and DeCamp had to suppress a smile. He was here to damage the facility, and they had given him a blueprint of the bloody place.
“You’ll need this as well,” she said, handing him a bright orange visitor’s pass on a lanyard. “Please keep it around your neck and in plain sight at all times. Our Barker security people get nervous otherwise.”
“Of course,” DeCamp said.
As well they should. It hadn’t been difficult to dredge up profiles on most of the two dozen or so security people and any number of so-called security lapses over the past eight or ten years, including the shortcuts that guards on patrol routinely took, apparently because they’d wanted to get back inside and watch television. Early in 2003 some new fuel containers had been delivered to the plant aboard a flatbed truck, which was parked just outside the radiologically controlled area (RCA) fence. But the containers were sealed at only one end, and no one had bothered to search them before they were admitted too close to the containment domes and the RCA backyard and one of the fuel-handling buildings. And this had been going on for some time before that incident. The year before, Barker’s people doing access control duty let an unauthorized visitor into the protected area of the plant where he somehow managed to get inside the South Service Building without an escort and without being challenged.
The only really good improvement was the closed-circuit television system, with cameras in a lot of the sensitive areas. That information had not been available online, of course, but bin Helbawi had sent him a detailed sketch map of the camera locations, which he memorized, and for a hefty price a Swiss engineer, with whom he’d done business before, had supplied him with a device that could freeze any camera for a few seconds at a time. Disguised as an ordinary cell phone, entering 000 then * would activate the clever circuit, yet the device actually worked as a cell phone.
The tour group people, most of them middle-aged men and women, not too different in appearance from DeCamp, were passing through an electronic security arch one by one, after first putting their wallets, keys, watches, and cell phones into little plastic containers that were sent through a scanner. It was the same sort of setup used in airports, and just as easy to foil.
Putting the visitor’s pass around his neck, DeCamp joined the queue, where he placed his wallet, watch, cell phone, and money clip with a few hundred dollars into a plastic tray, and when it was his turn he stepped through the arch under the watchful eye of an unarmed security guard in uniform.
Besides the man seated behind the scanner examining what was coming through in the plastic buckets, two other security guards stood to one side as the tour group gathered in front of an attractive young woman dressed in a khaki skirt and a blue blazer with the insignia of Sunshine State Power & Light on the left breast. She was smiling brightly and DeCamp noticed the two guards watching her rather than the people in the tour group, and he thought that it was a wonder that this place hadn’t been hit yet. No one here seemed to think that such a thing was possible, let alone feasible.
“Welcome to Sunshine State Power and Light’s Hutchinson Island Nuclear Power Plant,” the young woman said when DeCamp and everyone else had recovered their belongings from the scanner. “My name is Debbie Winger — just like the movie actress.”
A few of the men in the group chuckled.
“I’ll be your guide for this afternoon’s ninety-minute tour. But before we get started I need to go over a few ground rules with you. This is a working electrical generating facility, and therefore some areas are strictly off limits — simply because they’re too dangerous. So, rule number one, everyone stick together and no wandering off on your own. Once we go out the door behind me, you’ll be given hard hats. So, rule number two is that you wear them at all times.” Her smile widened even further. “If you have a question, please don’t hesitate to ask. And the last rule is, enjoy the tour.”
TWO
Gail Newby looked down from the executive gallery at the tour group on the main floor of the South Service Building. The security people at the visitors center had presumably checked their credentials before the young tour guide had brought them over here, and when she was finished with her short spiel she would be bringing them upstairs and down the corridor past the conference room to the big plate-glass windows that looked down on the complex control room where the real work of the station was accomplished.
“Craziness,” Gail muttered, and she was reminded of her heated discussion last week with plant manager Bob Townsend about the recent spate of security lapses. As independent chief of security, which meant she did not work for Barker Security, Inc., but directly for the National Nuclear Security Administration, NNSA, it was her job to oversee the overall safety of the plant. In that she was second in command only to Townsend, a fact he had sharply reminded her of again yesterday.
At thirty-eight, she was a slightly built woman with short dark hair, coal-black eyes, and wide glasses framing her pretty, oval face. She’d graduated magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota with degrees in criminology and business, and then four years later graduated number three from Harvard’s law school. And as one of her classmates whom she’d dated during most of her freshman year said, she was definitely a case of beauty and brains if he’d ever seen one. But driven. He’d called her “the Ice Maiden,” which had stuck with her the entire four years.
Her assistant, Lawrence Wager, also an NNSA employee, came down the corridor from the conference room where he’d set up the security arrangements for the meeting of a bunch of SSP&L top brass and a NOAA egghead from Princeton, which had just started a couple of minutes ago.
“Looks like we’re running Grand Central Station,” he said, leaning on the rail next to her.
Wager, in his early forties, was an ex-New York City gold shield cop who’d been forced into retirement after he’d been shot during a domestic dispute on the Upper West Side. He and Gail got along very well because their ideas about security were practically the same. They both had the cop mentality, his from twenty years on the force, and hers because she’d been raised by her father, a Minneapolis cop who’d been killed in the line of duty, and because of her background with the FBI.
She glanced up. “You got Townsend and everybody settled in?”
He nodded. “Could be blood on the table before it’s done. She wants to close us down.”
“Never happen.”
“Why’s that?”
“First rule of business — never screw with a moneymaking concern.”
Wager, who was even shorter than Gail with a featherweight boxer’s build and the square-jawed, no- nonsense television docudrama profile of the quintessential cop that in fact had landed his face in police recruitment posters and literature all through his career, had to laugh. “Until somebody decides to build a better mousetrap. Anyway, this place gives me the willies.”
“Yeah, it affects a lot of people that way.”
“But not you.”
She shrugged. “The chances of getting hit by lightning are ten million times greater than this place turning into another Chernobyl. Our guys already know how to build the better mousetrap.”
“How about Three Mile Island?”
“Different type of reactor, along with what was probably sloppy management,” Gail said.
Because whatever disagreements she’d had, and in some ways still had, with Townsend they were never about operations, he had a first-class staff of engineers and safety experts here. But security had become a big enough concern in all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S. that the NNSA had hired people like her and Wager for
