sharp. “Cool,” he said. “You want me just to open them, or do you want me to take stuff out, too?”
“Just open them for now. I need to do an inventory.”
Carolyn’s head tilted curiously as she took in the pile of junk. “Is that the gear?”
Nick smiled proudly. “Yep. We should have enough Level A entry stuff for three people. Suits, air packs, and tools.”
Jake shook his head in wonderment. “Where’d you get it?”
Nick frowned playfully. “Well, I can’t say for sure. But I did happen to mention to your uncle that there’s an EPA training school in Edison, New Jersey, that has a ton of this kind of crap. If a few sets disappeared, they probably wouldn’t even know they… were missing.”
Jake smiled. “And I’m sure that Harry has lots of friends in New Jersey, huh, Carolyn?”
Carolyn blushed and set her jaw. “He has business acquaintances all over,” she said defensively.
“And I know for a fact he can be very persuasive,” Nick added.
It was like old times, mining each other’s comments for maximum sarcasm. A playful enmity naturally existed between entry types, who tended to be rowdy, and toe-the-line administrative personnel like Nick, but Carolyn had always been the exception. Little Miss Safety, as the guys used to call her. Whereas the Silverados would forever ignore Nick’s daily safety briefings-belching, farting, and grab-assing through every session-Carolyn was always the one to stand and tell everyone to shut up. There’d be groaning and smart-ass remarks, but Nick always figured them to be grateful to her in the end. They still got to be macho pigs, even as they absorbed the information that would ultimately keep them alive. Not because they wanted to hear that crap, you understand-real men breathed smoke and ate nails, don’t you know-but because the wimpy lady said they had to. Everyone saved face.
God, that had been a good group of people. They’d worked hard, partied hard, and accomplished some pretty impressive feats together. What a waste.
As Travis set to work across the room on the boxes, the adults sat down in their impossibly uncomfortable chairs. Nick said, “Let’s begin.”
“Thanks for doing this, Nick,” Carolyn said, straight from the heart. “I can’t begin to guess why you’d put yourself on the line like this, but many, many thanks.”
Nick’s eyes softened, clearly moved. “I should have made this happen a long time ago,” he said. “I can’t compete with the hell you two must have been living, but that day ruined my life, too.”
“We didn’t do it, you know,” Jake said abruptly. Then he looked embarrassed. “You never asked, but I thought I should tell you, anyway.”
Nick smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. Actually, I never thought otherwise.” The comment hung in the air for a moment. Clearly, there was more, but it would remain unsaid.
Nick smiled. “Well, whoever’s setting you up for this has done one hell of a job.” He turned to Jake. “Tell me about this body in the magazine.”
Jake explained.
“You heard him mention the body, too?” Nick asked Carolyn.
She nodded. “Absolutely. You mean you didn’t?”
Nick shook his head. “We weren’t allowed on the ops channel, remember? Sean Foley was project manager, and he didn’t want me interfering. Said if he wanted my input, he’d ask for it.” The story stirred some old emotions, but Nick still found his way back to the task at hand.
“So do you think someone was monitoring the radio?” he went on. “That he heard you find the skeleton, and he just started shooting?”
Jake shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he planned from the very beginning to kill everyone there.”
Carolyn cut the chat session short. “Okay, guys, speculate on your own time. We’ve got a job here. Nick, you’re the techno wizard. How likely are we to live till tomorrow if we go through with this?”
Jake shot her a disapproving look, then nodded toward Travis, who seemed oblivious to it all, lost in a sea of cardboard. The kid had enough to worry about without her posing questions in those terms.
“Actually, I think this’ll be a fairly safe entry,” Nick said cheerily. “But then again, I thought it could be done safely back in ’83, too. We’ve got Level A gear just for the hell of it, but the real hazard this time is particulate, I think. No gas hangs around intact for fourteen years, and whatever liquids might have survived have long since evaporated; maybe even biodegraded. But that still leaves a shitload of really nasty dust, dirt, and soot. We sure as hell don’t want to breathe any of that.”
“Why?” Travis asked, looking up from his boxes. “What’ll happen?”
So much for being oblivious, Jake thought.
Nick caught the look and smiled. “Well, Travis, we don’t know for sure. Depends on what was in there to begin with and how it mixed during the fire. I’d expect some pretty severe respiratory distress. Maybe some systemic problems, too. Liver and kidneys, probably. Virtually everything affects them.”
“That means you’d have trouble breathing and get really sick,” Carolyn translated, earning herself a look that said, I’m not stupid.
“What about security?” Jake asked. “How big a problem will that be?”
Nick ruffled through his papers until he came up with the one he needed: an aerial photograph of the magazine and the surrounding area. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too big a deal,” he explained. “There’s a general philosophy within the agency that people are not inherently suicidal. By putting up two concentric fences, here and here”-he pointed with the tip of his pencil-“and by posting signs every ten feet that say something like, ‘Extremely Hazardous Area, You’ll Die if You Go in Here,’ we thought we’d pretty much discourage people from entering.”
Everybody smiled.
“So, that in mind, no one saw a compelling need to have a resident security guard. Not only would it be a waste of time, but over twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, who knows? Maybe he’d pick up an unmonitored exposure to something.”
Carolyn was incredulous. “You mean, no one even watches the fence line?”
Nick shook his head. “Not exactly. If you look here on the map, you’ll see that the old access road system- built in God knows when-still exists.”
Clearly, Nick saw far more on the photograph than Jake did. Even as he followed the pencil, he still couldn’t see what he was talking about.
“This road here is the closest one to the exclusion zone, about a hundred yards away, while this one here”-he moved the pencil-“is farthest away at about a half mile. We decided early on that it made sense to use the roadways as natural barriers and to build the outermost fences alongside them. Thus, three times a day, a rent-a- cop buzzes the place to look for any problems.”
Carolyn interrupted. “Problems like…?”
Nick shrugged. “I don’t know. Anything, I guess. Holes in the fences? Birds falling out of the sky?”
The bird imagery made Travis giggle in the background.
Jake turned in his chair to face his son. “You’re welcome to come on up here and join us, pal,” he said with a grin. “Hate to have you straining your ears.”
Travis flashed a sheepish smile, then returned to his cutting. “No, that’s okay. I’m fine.”
“I don’t suppose you have a schedule for when those guards come?” Carolyn wanted to know.
Nick shot her his coyest smirk and held up another piece of paper from the stack. “Suppose again, Mrs. Donovan,” he said. “So what time is it now?” He looked at his watch. “Two o’clockish. Next patrol is at three, and the one after that isn’t till nine. I say we make our entry at three-thirty, do what we have to do, then be on our way back to Little Rock before dark.”
Jake looked over to Carolyn, who met his eyes with an uneasy glare. So this was it. All the years, all the running, all the new identities, and all the lies ultimately came down to a simple decision just to go for it. Could it possibly be this easy?
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Jake said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
