Frank took a close look at each of their vests, checking the battery packs, the Velcro fasteners, making sure their white, reflective armbands were in place. When he got to Nicole, she was slipping her phone in her trousers pocket.
“You were making a call?”
“Texted my dog-sitter. Told her I won’t be home tonight.”
“You have a dog?”
“A corgi. Why?”
“What’s his name?”
“Max. Jesus, you want to polygraph me about my dog?”
Frank turned to the group. “Make sure your phones are off. We’re not on the grid tonight. All the way off, not just silent.”
When they’d finished checking, he raised a hand for quiet. “Okay, I promise, this is the last time.”
To a chorus of groans, he did one more step-by-step repeat of the attack plan. A variation of one of Nicole’s scenarios. Very basic: concussion grenades for distractions, slip past the sentries, more grenades, more distraction, move into the control room and take over.
If all went well, no lasers were fired. Rub Sellers’s face in how his crew of rent-a-cops were so grossly incompetent, even with advance warning they couldn’t stop a group of hostiles coming through the front door. The best possible outcome, besides wholesale changes to security procedures at Turkey Point, would be that Sellers was demoted to latrine duty for the rest of his days.
But something told Frank this simple plan he was selling to his guys was going to be bumpier than he was making out. Yeah, Frank had high confidence in his guys’ superiority to the security team at Turkey Point, and he was changing things up, running a hurry-up offense that should have them on their heels, but all afternoon he’d been having the same gut quivers he’d felt out on Prince Key just before Nicole reached for the ice chest. Then a minute ago, catching her with her phone, the quivers ticked up a notch.
As the men were buckling into their seats and Nicole settled behind the wheel, his phone buzzed in his pants pocket. Frank disobeyed his own order. He huddled behind a light pole out of view of the truck. Angie Stevens.
“You find something?”
“I found something. How’d you know?”
“A guess, Angie. What is it? Another software bomb?”
“A virus.”
“Can you fix it?”
“It’ll take time. A virus spreads and hides. This has gotten into so many nooks and crannies it would be weeks to find it all, and if I missed a scrap of code anywhere, it would take hold again and mutate.”
“This is in the closed loop?”
“Correct. The network that runs internal plant operations.”
“So how does it get set off? Someone inside?”
“Could be that, or could be it’s triggered by some other signal. Like a surge of data, a flicker in the power source. I haven’t figured that out.”
“Solution?”
“Quarantine.”
“Put a tent over a nuke plant? What is that? Shut it down?”
“Just until all the software can be scrubbed.”
“Jesus, shut down the whole plant?”
“If you’ve got a better idea…”
“Can’t do that, Angie. You keep working, just do your best.”
The ride down I-95 at ten-fifteen on a Tuesday night was slow going. Must’ve been a concert at AmericanAirlines Arena downtown or some damn thing. His four guys were telling jokes in the backseats. A gorilla and a nun are sitting at a bar. When that one’s done, Dinkins starts with an old favorite, an Irishman and a Brit and a Scotsman stumble into a pub, Dinkins nailing the accents. The guys laughing from the beginning at the elaborate setup.
Nicole looked over at Frank, alone with him in the front seats. “That talk Portia gave you.”
Frank said nothing, watching the traffic breaking up ahead as they left 95 and headed west on the Don Shula Expressway.
Nicole said, “There’s another side to the story.”
“This probably isn’t the time.”
The guys were fully engaged with the joke-off in the rear seats. A priest stumbles into a brothel. Voices quieting down as the humor turned smutty.
“Just so you know, Frank. There is another version. I’m not the person Portia told you about. She twists everything to fit her political agenda. Every successful woman is a slut, except for her.”
“Let’s do this later.”
She was in the speed lane, clipping along well over the limit. “Fuck it. Believe what you want to believe.”
“Everything okay up here?” Dinkins was leaning forward, hands on the back of their seats. His face between them.
“We’re cool,” Frank said.
Dinkins gave Sheffield a long look, then sat back in his seat.