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  He’d gotten the first call eight days ago from Achmed bin Helbawi, who’d reported that everything at the plant was in readiness. The Semtex and detonators were in place along with the weapons he’d smuggled in piece by piece over the past weeks. The Saudi- and French-educated New al-Quaeda operative had worked at the plant as an engineer in the control room for ten months under the name Thomas Forcier, and already he’d built up a reputation as an intelligent, cheerful, and reliable employee. Everyone liked Tom. He’d made no enemies.

  DeCamp’s application for a tour had required a social security number, which he’d supplied under the name Robert Benson, a high school teacher from San Francisco. The name and the number were legitimate, but Benson was dead, his disappearance not yet reported because he was on vacation. In fact, that part of the op had been the most difficult to figure out. DeCamp had hacked into the databases of several San Francisco high schools before coming up with a dozen possibilities — teachers about the right size and build, who were single and lived alone. And it had taken even longer to find out who would be leaving town at the right time.

  Benson, who was a homosexual, fit the bill, and two nights before he was scheduled to fly to Hawaii, DeCamp had followed him from a gay bar back to his apartment. Posing as an interested guy from the club, DeCamp got into the apartment without a fuss, had broken the man’s neck, and then telephoned Delta Airlines to cancel his flight.

  That same night DeCamp had sealed the body in a plastic sheet with duct tape so that no odors of decomposition would escape to alert the neighbors and stuffed the body in the bedroom closet.

  He took Benson’s identification and laptop to his hotel, where in the morning he went online to apply for a tour pass, which came three days later. After he’d altered his appearance with hair dye and glasses and then Benson’s driver’s license, substituting his own photograph, he’d left for Miami to wait for the final call from bin Helbawi giving the time and date that the next large tour group was scheduled.

  The power plant’s twin pressurized water reactors, housed in a pair of heavily reinforced containment buildings like giant farm silos, dominated the facility that sprawled over an 1,100-acre site on Hutchinson Island, which looked more like some manufacturing operation than an electrical generating station. A maze of buildings were interconnected by large piping, umbilical cords that sent nonradioactive steam from inside the containment domes to the turbines and generators, returning the cooled steam back to the heat exchanger attached to the reactor. Two wide canals brought seawater for cooling from the ocean just across the highway.

  Producing 1,700 megawatts, the plant supplied a significant portion of Florida’s power needs, and should there ever be an accidental release of nuclear materials, which would happen in about four hours, more than 140,000 people in a ten-mile radius would have to be evacuated or be in trouble.

  That part of the operation was of no interest to DeCamp because by then he would be flying first class aboard a Delta jet back to Paris and from there by train to his home in the south of France where he could return to his flower gardens and pastoral existence.

  It was just noon when he presented his visitor’s pass and driver’s license to one of the women behind the counter in the busy lobby of what looked like one of the attractions at Disney’s Epcot. An animated model of the facility took up an adjacent room, and everywhere on the walls and scattered around the center were interactive flat-screen televisions, models of atoms and other displays where people, either not taking the tour or who had already been, were wandering. A group of middle school children and their chaperones were doing something at several computer screens, and overall there was a muted buzz of conversation. No one was speaking much above a whisper. Just out the door and through the secured area fences were a pair of nuclear reactors, practically atomic bombs in some people’s minds, devices that were even holier and scarier than churches. This was a place of respect and awe.

  The clerk compared the photograph to DeCamp’s face then laid it on a card reader, which was connected to a nationwide police database, something DeCamp had already done. Benson had come up clean.

  When she was finished she looked up and smiled. “You have a choice, sir. You can join the Orlando tour, which starts in ten minutes, or wait for the next regular one, which begins at two. You might want to wait because 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 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 t
hing, 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.