She continued, “We’ve got EPA, NRC and AEC inspectors on the way. But—” She glanced down at the boat. “They’ll find the same things we just did. And we’ll get the green light to start up again.”
Then Shaw told himself: Stop it.
Referring not to his government regulators or corporate operations but Shaw’s own debate about her eye color.
“Who’ll replace him?” he asked.
“The board’ll be meeting to make a pick. There’s talk that Allison Parker’d be a good choice. No management experience but she knows the product better than anybody. And”—a smile—“the business of atomic energy’s been a man’s world forever. It’d be good for a female to be the face of HEP. But nobody’s asking my opinion. I’m like you, Colter. Just hired help.”
Shaw noted, across the street, an FPD Crime Scene van parked in front of a gloomy alleyway on Manufacturers Row. A plain-clothed detective was interviewing some men who appeared to be homeless.
“What happened there?”
“Drug deal gone south, I heard.”
Shaw said, “Thought maybe that serial killer resurfaced. The Street Cleaner.”
“No, she’s still at large.”
Shaw’s brows furrowed.
“Oh, didn’t you know? It’s a woman. So says the DNA. Rare. But we girls can get up to bad business too, you know.”
Shaw laughed. For a brief time, he’d wondered if Jon Merritthimself might be the Street Cleaner, taking his job as Vice officer one step over the line. But he’d given the theory only thirty percent and then discarded it entirely.
“What about the bait?” he asked. “The fake S.I.T. trigger?”
“Went live last night. In Dubai. That’s an international hub. It’ll be going elsewhere. We’ll find it.”
Then Nilsson was saying, “Now. About my text.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“We owe you some money.”
He’d forgotten that finding and guarding Allison Parker and her daughter was a job. The man hiring him was in jail, as was the keeper of the petty cash purse, Marianne Keller. Shaw supposed, though, that there was somebody in accounting who could arrange payment.
But Nilsson had another agenda.
“How’d you like to triple it?”
“Hm.”
“I’m in touch with somebody in Interpol.”
Shaw knew the organization. It was not, as many people thought, a law enforcement agency itself. It was an intelligence clearinghouse sharing information about crime and criminals among overseas law enforcement departments.
“They caught some intel from a source in Eastern Europe. Money went into a secret account in Siberia.”
Though obviously not all that secret.
“The recipient was supposed to steal a proprietary component from a manufacturing company in the U.S. The Midwest.”
“In the nuclear reactor business, by any chance?”
She continued, “The thief blew the job. But his bosses gave him a second chance. If he couldn’t get the part this time, he was to—quote—‘significantly disrupt’ the company. He would not be given another opportunity.”
“Abe Lincoln.”