oversight. These tours were her one bone of contention with Townsend, who had bent under pressure from Homeland Security to allow public tours in order to prove that there was nothing to fear from a terrorist attack.
The New al-Quaeda had some sophisticated people out there looking for the right opportunity to strike the U.S. in a way that would be on par with 9/ll. The CIA had been warning the director of U.S. Intelligence that the terrorists had become almost frantic in their efforts to hit us, because since bin Laden had faded from sight al- Quaeda had lost its luster. The opportunity was ripe for something to happen, even though the Agency was expending a great deal of its resources to stop such an act, which in itself was worrisome to Gail. The CIA had blinders on, paying too much attention to the evolution of bin Laden’s followers instead of monitoring the bigger picture, looking for our weaknesses, watching for the unexpected attack to come from a completely unexpected direction.
It was the same mistake her father had made that had cost him his life. He’d been working street crimes, and he and his partner had been tracking the small-time drug dealers, trying to follow the links up to the big suppliers. The night he was killed in downtown Minneapolis near the old Greyhound bus depot, he had been dressed as a hustler in a flashy suit and gaudy gold jewelry, talking with one of the small-time street dealers, pressing the kid for a big score. So big it would have to go to one of the suppliers.
A bus had dropped off a load of passengers and as some of them began to straggle out of the depot, a street bum came up behind an old woman struggling with her suitcase, knocked her to her knees, and tried to grab her purse.
Gail had heard the story from her dad’s partner at the funeral, but it wasn’t until she’d become a cop herself that she’d been able to see the file. The woman had screamed for help, and her dad, figuring being a Good Samaritan was better than being supercop, turned away from the drug deal to help the woman.
But the street bum, who’d had a long record of petty thefts, public drunkenness, and urinating in front of a school bus loaded with kids, was armed with a .38 Midnight Special, which he pulled and fired, one shot hitting Officer Newby in the heart, dropping him on the spot.
Before the bum got three steps, Officer Newby’s partner shot and killed the man, but by then it was far too late.
It was a mistake that had cost him his life when Gail was nine years old, and every day of her life since she had been angry with him for leaving her so soon, leaving her to a mother who became a drunk and who’d slept with any man who would have her until sclerosis of the liver ended her life. And every day of her life she’d desperately wanted to prove that she was a better cop than he had been. Her near-manic drive had put off just about every man she’d ever met, except for one, and he’d been the exception. Perhaps he’d even been a father figure. But he had been in the middle of dealing with his own personal tragedy, so she’d known even though she’d thrown herself at him that they could never have a real relationship. And maybe she’d been punishing herself again.
Christ, there were days like this when all that past came roaring at her like a jumbo jet, so that she had trouble not despising who and what she had become.
The tour guide pointed toward the open stairway from the entry hall and she started her group that way.
“Want me to tag along with them?” Wager asked.
She had gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and now she was bitchy. It was nothing more than that. She shook her head. “We have to put up with this sort of thing, no getting around it.”
Wager knew her moods. “I’ll keep an eye on the monitors,” he said. “But from here they look harmless.”
“Yeah,” Gail said. “If you need me I’ll be outside, seeing how our guys are doing.” She often wandered around the facility, carrying her FM communications radio that not only kept her in touch with the Barker guards, but could also monitor any of the closed-circuit television cameras. Since she’d started her unannounced patrols the security force had definitely sharpened up, not that they were all that bad before.
Wager went back to the security suite at the far end of the corridor, and Gail waited for the tour group to come up to the second floor and walk past her. The tour guide nodded and smiled.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Newby,” she said brightly.
Gail nodded, but kept her eyes on the nineteen people in the group. Most of them were from the Orlando Chamber of Commerce, but four of them were add-ons, whose names and backgrounds Homeland Security had vetted. Ordinary-looking people. No Arab males with serious five o’clock shadows. No one wearing bulky clothing that could conceal explosives. No one who looked away, or looked frightened, or nervous or ill at ease. No one who looked the slightest bit suspicious.
But she couldn’t relax, couldn’t just go with the flow. It was one of the parts of who she was that she didn’t find appealing. A friend had once said that being around her for any length of time was like biting on tinfoil. It probably wasn’t an original line, but it had made Gail wonder that if her friends had that sort of an opinion of her, what sort of image was she projecting? When she thought she was smiling, maybe in fact she was frowning. A defense mechanism against hurt?
When the group had passed, she put on her hard hat and headed downstairs.
THREE
The group stopped at tall plate-glass windows that at this moment were closed by blinds on the inside, and DeCamp glanced back to where the woman had been standing by the rail, but she was gone. It was the expression in her eyes, the way she had scrutinized everyone, frowning a little, clearly disturbed about something that had attracted her attention.
He hadn’t risked looking at her for more than a split second, nor had he taken the chance to read her name tag, but he was fairly certain she was security, possibly NNSA. And had she remained at the rail, watching them, it would have made things difficult. It would have been risky to slip away at this point, he would have had to wait until they were outside before he could change badges and go around to the back of the building. Every mission contained the possibility of the unexpected. It couldn’t be helped.
The tour guide pushed a button on a small remote control device and the blinds opened on a room below on the main floor about fifty feet wide and twice that long that looked like something out of science fiction. Rack- mounted equipment with dozens of monitors and controls covered the front wall, faced by a pair of horseshoe- shaped desks, each manned by two men dressed in spotless white coveralls. The desks were equipped with several computer monitors and keyboards that were used to control the reactors.
A supervisor dressed in a dark blue blazer stood near his own desk directly below the window and between the two control positions. He was talking on the telephone.
“This is the heart of our facility,” the tour guide began.
DeCamp had remained at the back of the group throughout the tour so far, and no one had paid much attention to him. Directly overhead, one of the closed-circuit television cameras, its red light illuminated, was angled toward the people standing in front of the viewing window. He turned his head as the camera panned from left to right so that whoever was watching would not get a good frontal image of his face.
“Both of our nuclear reactors are controlled by the four operators and one supervising engineer you see on duty below. The room is manned twenty-four/seven as you can imagine, and the primary purpose of most of what you’re seeing is safety.”
The camera panned back to the center of the group and came to rest, the red light still on. Someone was looking for something or someone, and DeCamp thought it might be at the orders of the woman at the rail. But if she’d become suspicious, even had a hunch, she would have either stopped the group and asked to see their IDs, or she would have turned everyone back. To do otherwise, especially in this building, would have been more than foolish.
“The panels on the back wall look complicated,” the tour guide was saying. “And they are, but put simply they’re each divided into three parts. The first controls the reactor itself, along with the coolant, in this case seawater, and the steam generator, which you will see a little later. The second is used to operate the steam lines that feed the turbine, which generates the electricity we produce. We’ll be going to the turbine room, and believe
