Going Dark(38)

“I’ve been here before,” Frank said to Emily Sheen.

“Yeah, yeah,” Claude said. “That’s twice already you said that.”

They took seats on opposite sides of a long table in the third-floor meeting room. Across from Frank was a large window that looked down on the main floor of the control room from one story above.

Men and women in blue jumpsuits and hard hats were carrying equipment, while others in surgical smocks and paper hairnets checked gauges and consulted in small clusters near the elaborate panels and banks of computers. Dozens of joysticks rose from the command consoles flanked by banks of servers and display monitors with row after row of gauges and dials of every size and arrays of color-coded LED lights. A shift supervisor manned one vast desk, with two other equipment operators stationed at another wedge-shaped desk. The room seemed as vast and intricate as a Mars mission at NASA control.

On the walls of the conference room dozens of TV screens played black-and-white videos from all the security-cam placements around the facility. The front gate, the entry to the office building, and everything in between, including views from three cameras that were set up along the coastline monitoring the waters just offshore.

Claude took a seat alongside the woman from NRC, Emily Sheen, fiftyish, with a blocky face and blunt bangs, prematurely gray, and wearing a spongy, green suit that might’ve fit ten pounds ago.

“Actually I was here on multiple occasions,” Frank said. “First time, Freddy Manks was head of security. You were in diapers, Sellers. FBI handled the force-on-force drill, and in five minutes my team penetrated the perimeter and were having cocktails in the control room. You guys were pathetic.”

“Yeah, well, those times are long gone.”

Under the table Nicole nudged Frank’s ankle. A professional thump. Cool it. We’ve got to work with these people.

Frank believed he had a solid read on Claude. The guy was a brazen bully. The way he smiled, not quite a sneer, but a snide curl in the corner of his upper lip. As if he were tolerating humankind, but only barely. His halo of testosterone stinking up the place. And his grooming, Jesus. That Fu Manchu mustache, plucked and manicured, and the way his scalp gleamed as if he buffed it with a shoe rag.

Not to mention his outfit. A tight brown shirt with epaulets, green slacks, and a white-cord bolo tie, for christsakes, with a red stone at his throat. When Frank was ten years old and didn’t know better, he’d worn a tie like that once and got the snot knocked out of him after Sunday school. It was in-your-face dorky. Probably had a collection of string ties, his jerk-off trademark.

“All right, if everyone’s ready,” Sheen said, “let’s commence.”

If Frank could get a refund on the hours he’d spent sitting at conference tables like this one, listening to some federal hack hold forth on the trivia he or she was handsomely paid to spew, he’d be about twenty years younger. Maybe his back wouldn’t hurt so much. And maybe he’d have a kindlier view of the wonders of government service, too.

Or if he could have spent the rest of the afternoon staring across the mahogany expanse at Nicole McIvey, revisiting their evening behind the boathouse, the time would have been well spent.

But Nicole sat to his right, which allowed him only minimal glances at her profile and a few downwind whiffs of her natural odor. The woman had lathered up during their drive-around and was now giving off a sea-salty, wholesome scent that reminded Frank of sun-dried sheets.

“As you know,” Sheen said, “the NRC monitors the entire array of the nation’s nuclear materials, medical, industrial, as well as anyone using or producing nuclear fuel. We police waste disposal and decommissioning of nuke plants when they’re taken out of service. We supervise plant updating and reconstruction and watch over all private nuclear research and testing.

“But today’s topic is security. Agent Sheffield mentioned the force-on-force drills, which is, of course, our primary method of ensuring all power plants in the US are prepared to thwart attacks, and to be certain the private security forces the power companies employ are up to the task.

“The regularly scheduled drill wasn’t set to take place until eighteen months from now, but in light of the recent computer incursion, the NRC believes the timetable should be altered. We’ve decided the drill should take place in the upcoming week.”

“Your people could be ready that soon?” Frank asked.

“We’re ready now,” Claude said. “It’s you guys I’m worried about.”

“Let me get this straight,” Frank said. “You’re worried you’ve got a vulnerability and you think running a drill will find it?”