Chapter 25 - The midnight perimeter
The security checkpoint at the entrance to Parcel 4 was fortified like a military installation.
Chain-link fences ten feet high, topped with coiled razor wire, blocked off the entire three-acre waterfront lot. Halogen floodlights mounted on portable diesel generators blared their harsh white glare across the wet asphalt, casting long, sharp shadows through the pouring rain.
Two armored private security SUVs were parked nose-to-nose across the main gate. Four guards in tactical windbreakers, carrying sidearms and heavy flashlights, stood beneath a canvas canopy, checking the manifest of every cement mixer and flatbed truck that entered the perimeter.
A hundred yards out into the dark harbor water, the massive industrial drilling barge was tethered to the rotting timber piers of the old dry dock. The steel derrick rose seventy feet into the rainy night, its heavy hydraulic winches groaning as a six-foot-wide diamond-tipped casing was lowered toward the murky water.
I stood in the darkness across the avenue, sheltered behind the brick facade of an abandoned cold-storage warehouse, holding a pair of high-powered binoculars.
Beside me stood Peter Callahan, wrapped in an oilskin coat, his breath smelling of menthol lozenges and pipe smoke. In the shadows behind us was an old commercial utility van Callahan had kept parked behind his marsh cabin—a faded plumber's van that looked completely invisible in this industrial wasteland.
"Look at the barge deck," Callahan whispered, pointing a gnarled finger through the rain. "See those yellow pressurized tanks lashed to the superstructure?"
I adjusted the focus of the lenses. "I see them. What are they?"
"Liquid nitrogen," Callahan muttered grimly. "Diane Vance isn't stupid. She knows the canisters down there are degraded. She brought in cryogenic freezing tanks. The plan is to pump liquid nitrogen into the drill hole as they breach the bunker, freezing the soil and the canisters solid before the gas can expand, then filling the void with quick-setting slag before it thaws. If the freeze fails... the whole harbor blows."
"It’s an insane gamble," I said, lowering the binoculars.
"It’s an arrogant gamble," Callahan corrected. "Rich people don't think disaster applies to them until the roof falls in."
My phone—which I had retrieved from the library garage after swapping SIM cards—buzzed in my pocket. I brought it to my ear.
"Thomas?" Marcus’s voice sounded clearer now, but strained with exhaustion. "I’m in Green River. Sarah is asleep. I did what you asked. I contacted Assistant U.S. Attorney Miller. I told him we had evidence of hazardous chemical storage under an active federal infrastructure project."
"What did he say?"
"He said that without physical chain of custody on the evidence, an unverified diving log from twenty-six years ago isn't enough to issue a federal seizure warrant against a sitting state transit commissioner. He needs photographic proof of the canisters or a verified chemical sample from the test bore. He warned me that if this is an attempt to stall municipal eminent domain, he’ll have us both disbarred by Friday."
"He won't have to disbar us," I said coldly. "Because by Friday, Diane Vance will either be in federal custody or half this waterfront will be evacuated."
"Thomas, don't do something you can't undo," Marcus pleaded. "Arthur Whitmore just signed the surrender of the Elmwood deeds an hour ago from his hospital bed. His lawyers forwarded the documents. You have your house back. You have your father’s name cleared of the bankruptcy fraud. You don't have to be a martyr."
"Arthur was the shield, Marcus," I repeated the words from my father’s letter. "My father died because he wouldn't let them poison this city. If I take the house and walk away, I’m no better than Arthur."
I hung up and turned to Callahan. "Where is the drainage outflow pipe you used in ninety-eight?"
Callahan grinned in the dark, showing a mouthful of crooked, tea-stained teeth. "Under Pier 3. It’s an old storm runoff conduit from the forty-three shipyard. The mouth is three feet underwater at high tide, but tide’s going out right now. It drops straight into the sub-basement of the municipal pump station."
"The pump station connects to the dry dock bunker?"
"Connects right to the inspection tunnel," Callahan said. "That’s how Vance’s people brought the canisters in without using the public cranes. But there’s a problem, Thomas."
"What problem?"
"The pump station was sealed with three-inch steel blast doors after your old man drowned. And the only set of keys that opens that mechanical vault was kept in the private safe of the Transit Director."
"I don't need a key," I said, reaching into the van and pulling out an industrial acetylene cutting torch and two pressurized oxygen bottles we had loaded an hour ago. "I just need twenty minutes without a security patrol spotting the blue flame."
May you like
Callahan looked at the torch, then looked up at my face. The skepticism in his eyes slowly transformed into something resembling respect.
"Julian would have been proud of you, kid," the old diver muttered, grabbing the regulator hoses. "He’d think you were out of your damn mind, but he’d be proud."
