Greta Garbo. He almost said it out loud but caught himself. She’d probably heard it a few times before. That same mysterious face, vulnerable and unapproachable at once, the pale coloring. Soft eyes that in a split second could harden and go cold.
As Nicole sped east on the surface roads, Sheffield watched the neighborhoods fly past. Then they hit the long, empty entrance corridor to the nuke plant, the first guardhouse coming up. Layer one of security. Cameras everywhere, a couple of guys in khakis, shiny holsters with automatics, milling around the heavy steel barrier.
“Rent-a-cops,” Frank said.
“They get special training, nuke stuff. The NRC supervises them.”
“Still rent-a-cops.”
“You’re going to love the head of security. Real sweetheart.”
“That’s who we’re meeting?”
“Yup.”
Sheffield glanced down at the front of his shirt. “You should’ve told me, McIvey. I look unprofessional.”
“Would you have listened if I had?”
She stopped at the gate, lowered her window, held out her badge to the stocky guy manning the post. He stooped down, checked out Nicole, then looked across her at Frank, at his hula-girls shirt.
“He’s with me,” Nicole said. “FBI.”
Frank flipped out his ID, leaned across to show it.
The guard grunted, spoke into his handheld, and a moment later got a scratchy answer. He stepped away from the car, reached into the guardhouse to raise the steel bar, then waved them through.
Ten minutes later, after two more guardhouses, they were inside the plant’s three-story office building. Escorted by another security guy, Nicole led the way down the gleaming hallway, Sheffield keeping his eyes forward in a businesslike manner.
Coming finally to the security office, Nicole stopped, let their escort go ahead through the door while she turned to Frank.
“His name is Claude Sellers,” she said quietly. “But everyone calls him shithead.”
TEN
BEFORE HE LEFT THE BEACH, Thorn buried the pry bar in the sand near the base of a gumbo-limbo. He brushed the sand over the spot and brushed it some more. He didn’t want to go walking into the unknown with a chunk of badass steel in his hand, make the wrong impression.
He found a narrow break in the snarl of branches and headed up a sandy path that meandered through poisonwood trees and strangler figs and silver buttonwoods, the ground littered with chunks of limestone and jutting roots. High in the tamarind branches, a canopy of cobwebs and morning-glory vines was lit by the angled sunlight, and the dense smell of sulfurous fumes rose from the marine muds where dead plants and flecks of animal matter were decomposing.
Only five miles of calm waters separated this island from the mainland. Over there the land was jammed with the usual outlet malls, strip shopping centers, and franchise joints, and an endless maze of highways and turnpikes and avenues. Though Prince Key was so close by, this tangle of tamarind and capers and cabbage palm and this rocky pathway seemed marooned in another warp of geologic time. As harsh and brutish as the terrain was, to Thorn this was the only Florida that mattered, the landscape that kept his heart in tune, that hummed in his marrow. Lose these last few pockets of magic native land, and the game was over. Thorn might as well buy a golf cart and a chartreuse leisure suit, mix a pitcher of manhattans, and call it a day.
Branches snagged his shirtsleeves, scratched his skin, stabbed him below the belt. He ducked below a limb and glimpsed an open stretch to his left. Moving that way, he saw the glitter of metal and pushed through a last screen of acacia and stepped into a wide field, maybe three acres, grassy and treeless, open to the sun.
A solar panel the size of a picnic table was tilted up to catch the morning light. Beyond the panel was a twenty-foot wooden wall surrounded by a sandy pit, and a set of monkey bars. Nearby was a tall, wooden frame with a twenty-foot hawser hanging from the crossbeam, a heavy rope meant for climbing.
As he came closer to the primitive obstacle course, Thorn saw a dozen old automobile tires laid out in a hopscotch pattern, identical to the one for the footwork drills Thorn had run in his brief high school football career. There was a chinning bar, and a half dozen structures made of rough-hewn logs that seemed designed to torture various muscle groups.
He stood for a moment, taking it in, until he heard a groan coming from beyond the high climbing wall studded with handholds. He angled across the grassy meadow toward the noise. His clothes sopping, his shoes full of mush.
Behind the wall he found two men, shirtless, wearing only white gym shorts and flimsy tennis shoes. Each one stood atop a narrow balance beam that ran parallel to the other beam about two feet away. At the midpoint on each beam, the two were crouched, facing each other. They gripped wooden staffs slightly longer than baseball bats with boxing gloves lashed to both ends.