WESLEY AND I flew back to New York that night, and arrived early because tail winds were more than a hundred knots. We went through customs and got our bags, then the same shuttle met us at the curb and returned us to the private airport where the Learjet was waiting.
The weather had suddenly warmed and was threatening rain, and we flew between colossal black thunderheads lighting up with violent thoughts. The storm loudly cracked and flashed as we sped through what seemed the middle of a feud. I had been briefed a little as to the current state of affairs, and it had come as no surprise that the Bureau had established an outpost along with others set up by police and rescue crews.
Lucy, I was relieved to hear, had been brought in from the field, and was working again in the Engineering Research Facility, or ERF, where she was safe. What Wesley did not tell me until we reached the Academy was that she had been deployed along with the rest of HRT and would not be at Quantico long.
“Out of the question,” I said to him as if I were a mother refusing permission.
“I’m afraid you don’t have a say in this,” he replied.
He was helping me carry my bags through the Jefferson lobby, which was deserted this Saturday night. We waved to the young women at the registration desk as we continued arguing.
“For God’s sake,” I went on, “she’s brand-new. You can’t just throw her into the middle of a nuclear crisis.”
“We’re not throwing her into anything.” He pushed open glass doors. “All we need are her technical skills. She’s not going to be doing any sniper-shooting or jumping out of planes.”
“Where is she now?” I asked as we got on an elevator.
“Hopefully in bed.”
“Oh.” I looked at my watch. “I guess it is midnight. I thought it was tomorrow and I should be getting up.”
“I know. I’m screwed up, too.”
Our eyes met and I looked away. “I guess we’re supposed to pretend nothing happened,” I said with an edge to my voice, for there had been no discussion of what had gone on between us.
We walked out into the hall and he pressed a code into a digitalized keypad. A lock released and he opened another glass door.
“What good would it do to pretend?” he said, entering another code and opening another door.
“Just tell me what you want to do,” I said.
We were inside the security suite where I usually stayed when work or danger kept me here overnight. He carried my bags into the bedroom as I drew draperies across the large window in the living room. The decor was comfortable but plain, and when Wesley did not respond, I remembered it probably was not safe to talk intimately in this place where I knew at the very least phones were monitored. I followed him back out into the hall and repeated my question.
“Be patient,” he said, and he looked sad, or maybe he was just weary. “Look, Kay, I’ve got to go home. First thing in the morning we’ve got to do a surveillance by air with Marcia Gradecki and Senator Lord.”
Gradecki was the United States attorney general, and Frank Lord was the chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an old friend.
“I’d like you along since overall you seem to know more of what’s been going on than anyone else. Maybe you can explain to them the importance of the bible these wackos believe. That they’ll kill for it. They’ll die for it.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “And we need to talk about how we’re going to—God forbid—handle the contaminated dead should these goddamn assholes decide to blow up the reactors.” He looked at me again. “All we can do is try,” he said, and I knew he referred to more than the present crisis.
“That’s what I’m doing, Benton,” I said, and I walked back inside my suite.
I called the switchboard and asked them to ring Lucy’s room, and when there was no answer, I knew what that meant. She was at ERF, and I could not call there because I did not know where in that building the size of a football field she might be. So I put on my coat and walked out of Jefferson because I could not sleep until I saw my niece.
ERF had its own guard gate not far from the one at the entrance of the Academy, and most of the FBI police, by now, knew me pretty well. The guard on duty looked surprised when I appeared, and he walked outside to see what I wanted.
“I think my niece is working late,” I began to explain.
“Yes, ma’am. I did see her go in earlier.”
“Is there any way you can contact her?”
“Hmmm.” He frowned. “Might you have any idea what area she’d likely be in?”
“Maybe the computer room.”
He tried that to no avail, then looked at me. “This is important.”
“Yes, it is,” I said with gratitude.
He raised his radio to his mouth.
“Unit forty-two to base,” he said.
“Forty-two, come in.”
“You ten-twenty-five me at ERF gate?”
“Ten-four.”
We waited for the guard to arrive, and he occupied the booth while his partner let me inside the building. For a while we roamed long empty hallways, trying locked doors that led into machine shops and laboratories where my niece might be. After about fifteen minutes of this, we got lucky. He tried a door and it opened onto an expansive room that was a Santa’s workshop of scientific activity.
Central to this was Lucy, who was wearing a data glove and head-mounted display connected to long thick black cables snaking over the floor.
“Will you be okay?” the guard asked me.
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you so much.”
Co-workers in lab coats and coveralls were busy with computers, interface devices and large video screens, and they all saw me walk in. But Lucy was blind. She really was not in this room but the one in the small CRTs covering her eyes as she conducted a virtual-reality walk-through along a catwalk in what I suspected was the Old Point nuclear power plant.
“I’m going to zoom in now,” she was saying as she pressed a button on top of the glove.
The area on the video screen suddenly got bigger as the figure that was Lucy stopped at steep grated stairs.
“Shit, I’m zooming out,” she said impatiently. “No way this is going to work.”
“I promise it can,” said a young man monitoring a big black box. “But it’s tricky.”
She paused and made some other adjustment. “I don’t know, Jim, is this really high-res data or is the problem me?”
“I think the problem’s you.”
“Maybe I’m getting cyber sick,” my niece then said as she moved around inside what looked like conveyor belts and huge turbines that I could see on the video screen.
“I’ll take a look at the algorithm.”
“You know,” she said, making her way down virtual stairs, “maybe we should just put it in C code and go from a delay of three-four to three hundred and four microseconds, et cetera, instead of whatever’s in the software we got.”
“Yeah. The transfer sequences are off,” said someone else. “We got to adjust the timing loops.”
“What we don’t have is the luxury of massaging this too much,” another opinion sounded. “And Lucy, your aunt’s here.”
She briefly paused, then went on as if she had not heard what the person just said. “Look, I’ll do the C code before morning. We gotta be sharp or Toto’s going to end up stuck or falling down stairs. And then we’re totally screwed.”
Toto, I could only conclude, was the odd bubble head with one video eye that was mounted on a boxy steel body no more than three feet high. Legs were cleated tracks, arms had grippers, and in general he reminded me of a small animated tank. Toto was parked to one side, not far from his master, who was taking off her helmet.
“We got to change the bio-controllers on this glove,” she said as she began carefully pulling it off. “I’m used to one finger meaning forward and two meaning back. Not the other way around. I can’t afford a mix-up like that when we’re in the field.”
“That’s an easy one,” said Jim, and he went to her and took the glove.
Lucy looked keyed up to the point of being crazed when she met me near the door.
“How’d you get in?” She wasn’t the least bit friendly.
“One of the guards.”
“Good thing they know you.”
“Benton told me they’d brought you back, that HRT needs you,” I said.
She watched her colleagues continue to work. “Most of the guys are already there.”
“At Old Point,” I said.
“We’ve got divers around the area, snipers set up nearby, choppers waiting. But nothing’s going to do any good unless we can get at least one person in.”
“And obviously, that’s not you,” I said, knowing that if she claimed otherwise I would kill the FBI, the entire Bureau, all of them at once.
“In a way it’s me going in,” my niece said. “I’ll be the one working Toto. Hey, Jim,” she called out. “While you’re at it, let’s add a fly command to the pad.”
“So Toto’s gonna have wings,” someone cracked. “Good thing. We’re gonna need a smart guardian angel.”
“Lucy, do you have any idea how dangerous these people are?” I could not help but say.
She looked at me and sighed. “I mean, what do you think, Aunt Kay? Do you think I’m just a kid playing with Tinkertoys?”
“I think that I can’t help but feel very worried.”
“We should all be worried right now,” she said, drained. “Look, I got to get back to work.” She glanced at her watch and blew out a big breath. “You want a quick overview of my plan so you at least know what’s going on?”
“Please.”
“It starts with this.” She sat on the floor and I got down beside her, our backs against the wall. “Normally, a robot like Toto would be controlled by radio, which would never work inside a facility with so much concrete and steel. So I’ve come up with what I think is a better way. Basically, he’ll carry a spool of fiber optic cable that he’ll leave behind like a snail’s trail as he moves around.”
“And where is he going to move around?” I asked. “Inside the power plant?”
“We’re trying to determine that now,” she said. “But a lot will depend on what happens. We could be covert, such as in information gathering. Or we could end up with an overt deployment on our hands, such as if the terrorists want a hostage phone, which we’re banking on. Toto has to be ready to go anywhere instantly.”
“Except stairs.”
“He can do stairs. Some better than others.”
“The fiber optics cable will be your eyes?” I said.
“It will hook right into my data gloves.” She held up both hands. “And I will move as if it’s me going in instead of Toto. Virtual reality will allow me to have a remote presence so I can react instantly to whatever his sensors pick up. And by the way, most of them are in that lovely shade of gray we made him.” She pointed to her friend across the room. “His smart paint helps him not to bump into things,” she added as if she might have feelings for him.
“Did Janet come back with you?” I then asked.
“She’s finishing up in Charlottesville.”
“Finishing up?”
“We know who’s been breaking into CP&L’s computer,” she said. “A woman graduate assistant in nuclear physics. Surprise, surprise.”
“What’s her name?”
“Loren something.” She rubbed her face with her hands. “God, I should never have sat down. You know cyberspace really can make you dizzy if you stay in it too long. Lately, it’s almost been making me sick. Uh.” She snapped her fingers several times. “McComb. Loren McComb.”
“And she’s how old?” I asked as I remembered Cleta saying that the name of Eddings’ girlfriend was Loren.
“Late twenties.”
“Where is she from?”
“England. But she’s actually South African. She’s black.”
“Thus explaining her poor character, according to Mrs. Eddings.”
“Huh?” Lucy looked bizarrely at me.
“What about a connection with the New Zionists?” I asked.
“Apparently she got associated with them over the net. She’s very militant and antigovernment. My theory is she got brainwashed by them the longer they communicated.”
“Lucy,” I said, “I think she was Eddings’ girlfriend and source, and in the end, she may have helped the New Zionists kill him, probably by way of Captain Green.”
“Why would she help him and then do that?”
“She may have believed she had no choice. If she had assisted him with information that could have hurt Hand’s cause, she may have been convinced to help them or they may have threatened her.”
I thought of the Cristal Champagne in Eddings’ refrigerator, and wondered if he had planned to spend New Year’s Eve with his girlfriend.
“How would they have wanted her to help them?” Lucy was asking.
“She probably knew his burglar alarm code, maybe even the combination to his safe.” My final thought was the worst. “She may have been with him in the boat the night he died. For that matter, we don’t know that she wasn’t the one who poisoned him. After all, she’s a scientist.”
“Damn.”
“I’m assuming you’ve interviewed her,” I said.
“Janet has. McComb claims she was on the Internet about eighteen months ago when she came across a note posted on a bulletin board. Allegedly, some producer was working on a movie that had to do with terrorists taking over a nuclear power plant so they could re-create a North Korea situation and get weapons-grade plutonium, et cetera, et cetera. This alleged producer needed technical help, for which he was willing to pay.”
“Did she have a name for whoever this was?” I asked.
“He just always called himself ‘Alias,’ as if to imply he might be famous. She bit big time and the relationship began. She started sending him information from graduate papers she had access to because of her graduate assistantship. She gave this Alias asshole every recipe you might think of for essentially taking over Old Point and shipping fuel assemblies to the Arabs.”
“What about making casks?”
“Right. Steal tons of the depleted uranium from Oak Ridge. Have it sent to Iraq, Algeria, wherever, to be made into the hundred-twenty-five-ton casks. Then ship them back here where they’re stored until the big day. And she went into the whole bit about when uranium turns into plutonium inside a reactor.” Lucy stopped and glanced over at me. “She claims it never occurred to her that what she was doing might be real.”
“And was it real to her when she began breaking into CP&L’s computer?”
“That’s one she can’t explain, nor will she supply a motive.”
“I expect motive is easy,” I said. “Eddings was interested in any phone calls to Arab nations that certain people might have been making. And he got his list via the gateway in Pittsburgh.”
“You don’t think she would have realized that the New Zionists wouldn’t appreciate her helping her boyfriend, who happened to be a reporter?”
“I don’t think she cared,” I angrily said. “I suspect she enjoyed the drama of playing both sides. If nothing else, it had to make her feel very important when she probably had not felt that way before in her quiet academic world. I doubt reality hit until Eddings started poking around NAVSEA, Captain Green’s office or who knows where, and then the New Zionists were tipped that their source, Ms. McComb, was threatening the entire operation.”
“If Eddings had figured it out,” Lucy said, “they never could have pulled it off.”
“Exactly,” I said. “If any of us had figured it out in time, this wouldn’t be happening.” I watched a woman in a lab coat maneuver Toto’s arms to lift a box. “Tell me,” I said, “what was Loren McComb’s demeanor when Janet interviewed her?”
“Detached. Absolutely no emotion.”
“Hand’s people are very powerful.”
“I guess so if you can help your boyfriend one minute and they can get you to murder him the next.” Lucy was watching her robot, too, and didn’t seem pleased by what she was seeing.
“Well, wherever the Bureau is detaining Ms. McComb, I hope it’s where the New Zionists can’t find her.”
“She’s secluded,” Lucy said as Toto suddenly stopped in his tracks and the box thudded heavily to the floor. “What have you got the shoulder joint’s rpm set at?” she called out.
“Eight.”
“Let’s lower it to five. Damn.” She rubbed her face again. “That’s all we need.”
“Well, I’m going to leave you and go on back to Jefferson,” I said as I got up.
She got a strange look in her eyes. “You staying on the security floor, as usual?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter, but that’s where Loren McComb is,” she said.
In fact, my suite was next to hers, but unlike me, she was confined. As I sat up in bed for a while trying to read, I could hear her TV through the wall. I listened to her switch channels, and then recognized “Star Trek” sounds as she watched an old episode rerun.
For hours we were only several feet apart and she did not know it. I imagined her calmly mixing hydrochloric acid and cyanide in a bottle, and directing gas into the compressor’s intake valve. Instantly, the long black hose would have violently jerked in the water, and then only the river’s sluggish current would have moved it anymore.
“See that in your sleep,” I said to her, though she could not hear me. “In your sleep for the rest of your life. Every single goddamn night.” I angrily snapped off my lamp.