“Ted wants you to go up there,” Ashley said after telling him about Jake’s death. “He said Jake called him last week. He was worried about something. Ted wants you to go see what happened.”
“Did he say what he was worried about?”
“No. Ted didn’t speak with him. He just left him a voice mail. Nothing specific.”
So, Teddy Marks gets a phone call, Jake White dies, and Terry Savoy has to interrupt his vacation to fly to the Labrador Sea in the middle of winter.
“Don’t put it down yet!” Savoy said to George Kimball, the pilot-in-command,
after getting up from the big leather seat in the cabin and entering the cockpit. “Circle a few times over the dam, as close as you can get.”
“It’s dark out. We’re not going to see much.”
“Radio ahead and tell them to turn the lights on, anything they have. Light it up.”
Savoy was KKB’s security chief. He had oversight of all security at the company’s facilities. Investigating White’s death fell into a category of responsibility he claimed to dislike, but in reality it was what kept him interested in his job. Most of Savoy’s work was numbingly routine: setting up security protocols for each facility, managing people at those facilities according to those protocols, creating screening processes for hiring employees, and establishing facility-perimeter controls. In other words, the job was boring. After a career in the U.S. Army Rangers, the private sector represented easy street, a way finally to make some money and play a lot of golf. But he paid for it, in effect, in boredom. For this reason he welcomed the chance to see and do something more challenging.
“We’re coming up on the dam,” Kimball said.
Savoy stood behind the young second-in-command and put on a set of Bose headset. The plane flew a few hundred feet above the pines, which formed a carpet of green in every direction. Soon, in the distance, the lights of Savage Island Project came into view.
From the air, the engineering challenge that the company had overcome was evident. The dam stood like a shield, a trapezoid-shaped wall of cement, stone, and steel more than half a mile high, an engineering marvel in the middle of nowhere. It cast its gargantuan height down upon the man-made lake beneath and the workers’ village. It was an intimidating sight.
The halogen lights of the dam climbed vertically like a ladder and emblazoned the back wall in yellow light. The lights ran out across the top of the structure horizontally and lit up the observation platform. The plane closed in on the massive wall then screamed over the granite precipice. Suddenly, they were out over the waters of the Labrador Sea.
Savoy shook his head. “Shit,” he whispered.
A few minutes later and a couple of more passes over the facility, the jet landed at the airstrip. A white Chevy Suburban was waiting for Savoy.
“Evening, Arnie,” Savoy said to Mijailovic as he climbed in.
The facility’s security director shook his hand. “How was the flight?”
“Not bad. How’s everyone doing up here?”
“Oh, you know, a little shocked.”
“I can imagine.”
“I’ve got you at the guesthouse. You want to go there now?”
“No,” said Savoy. “I want to see the body.”
They passed through two sets of gates and entered the outer perimeter of Savage Island Project. Mijailovic and Savoy showed their IDs at both entrances, despite the fact that the guards worked for them, and despite the fact that Mijailovic had exited through the same gates less than ten minutes before.
Savoy liked the fact they made him take out his badge.
The SUV pulled into a small concrete building next to the dam the size of a convenience store, the hospital.
Savoy found White’s corpse laid out on a metal shelf in the hospital’s morgue. The room was chilled to near freezing, but it didn’t compete with the frigid air outdoors. He walked around the perimeter of the metal table, staring at the corpse. He’d seen plenty of dead men before; this was by far the grisliest.
White was overweight and that was accentuated by the water his body had retained during the drowning. His right leg was gone, ripped off midthigh, a rough and uneven cut, presumably sliced off by one of the big rotors through which he’d been pulled. Half of White’s skull was sliced off at the top, exposing brain tissue. White’s left arm was also torn off, at the shoulder, a cleaner cut with puffy yellow hunks of fat showing under the skin.
“Have we notified his family?” Savoy asked.
“Not yet. We’ll do that today. Not that he really had a family, as such. Wife left him, sons wouldn’t speak to him.”
“They should know anyway. Unless they object, we should probably bury him somewhere out here, in the woods someplace. I think
he would’ve wanted that. It’s your call. You knew him better than anyone.”
Savoy walked out of the hospital. Although he didn’t show it, he was shaken by sight of White’s corpse.
He went to the guesthouse and took a shower then walked to the administration building, a two-story concrete box at the base of the dam. Savoy spent several hours poring through White’s office. It turned out to be an interesting expedition, not because he found anything, but because it reminded him why White was able to do all that he did. He was an unbelievably well-organized manager. Every piece of paper was filed, on a yearly basis, by subject, alphabetically, going back five years. Whatever wasn’t filed was in one of three neat stacks on his desk. In the middle of the desk was an old IBM computer.
Savoy spent some time on the computer, though it was clear the old machine hadn’t been used in a while.
“Box this up and ship it to New York City,” he said to Mijailovic. “Send it to a guy named Pillsbury in IT.”
“Will do.”
“Also, send down the filing cabinets for the last five years. Send them to my office.”
“Got it.”
The bottom drawer of the desk contained pens, paper clips, tape. The middle drawer had several cartons of Marlboro cigarettes and a few ashtrays, plus some matches. In the top drawer were photographs. Many of the dam in different phases of construction. One photo showed White with Marks, taken at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the dam. There were three photographs of his sons standing next to White on a fishing trip somewhere.
Another showed his ex-wife, a plain-looking woman with short brown hair, smiling shyly at the camera.
Savoy wasn’t a detective. He was a security expert. But he didn’t see any signs of desperation here.
As dawn approached, he asked Vida, Jake’s assistant, for some Advil.
“Did you see anything funny going on with Jake in the past month or so?” he asked when she brought Advil and a bottle of water.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” she said.
Savoy looked across the room at Mijailovic.
“He called Ted Marks last week,” said Savoy. “Were you aware of that?”
“No. But it wouldn’t surprise me. They were close. They used to be close.”
“Can you run the HR files for me?” Savoy asked Vida. “Go back a year. See if there were any disciplinary cases.”
“I’d be aware of them,” said Mijailovic.
“I still want it done,” said Savoy. Then he softened his tone. “Look, in all likelihood this was an accident. Jake fell off the dam and drowned. Got pulled through one of the turbines and thrown out the other side. Tragic and innocent. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to look at
everything,
including the files.”
“I’ll run those right now,” said Vida.
“I also want to take a walk through the dam,” said Savoy.
Savoy and Mijailovic stepped out of the small administration building. It felt even more bitterly cold outside now. The wind howled from the east and came off the Labrador Sea with a vengeance.
“God
damn,
it’s cold up here!” Savoy yelled.
“Won’t get above zero today. Wind chill makes it feel a lot worse than it is.”
Savoy looked to his left at the hundreds of neat, drab gray concrete houses where workers and their families lived.
He looked up at the dam. It stood above the small village visibly from every vantage point, water cascading through its powerful turbines. Even standing at the facility’s base, the sound of the turbines was incredibly loud. Though the big river of water shot out less than two hundred feet from where they stood, one could hardly hear the sound of the rushing water over the turbine roar.
Savoy and Mijailovic walked to the dam entrance. They displayed their security badges to the guard and placed their thumbs on a small black screen.
“Take these,” Mijailovic said. He handed him a set of headphones. “You’ll be deaf in an hour without them.”
They climbed onto the steel cage elevator. Mijailovic moved a yellow latch to send it to the top of the structure. They looked out the side as they moved up past floor upon floor of turbine rows. The dam had exactly fifty floors, and each floor was exactly sixty feet high. Each floor was a dim, cavernous pocket that housed four massive turbines.
As the elevator climbed, Savoy stared in disbelief through the grate. He’d seen the turbines before, but his memory didn’t do it justice. Caged in polymer steel behind a thick shelf of transparent carbonate plastic, each turbine stood twenty feet high, a massive churning drum of six rotor blades. These churned like jet propellers in speeds directly proportional to the amount of water running through.
Each turbine had at least one man monitoring it at all times, standing at the side of the polymer casing and inspecting the individual rotors for problems. One broken rotor, they knew, if not discovered immediately, could destroy the entire piece of hardware. Each custom-built turbine cost nearly $50 million to replace, not to mention lost revenue from electricity that couldn’t be generated.
At full capacity, the blades hummed loudly and were invisible, a whirring rush of metal cranking around as millions of gallons of water pulsated through. The sight of one of these machines was amazing. The sight of four in a row was spectacular. The thought of two hundred of them was hard to contemplate.
They exited the elevator at the top of the dam and walked into the operations center. Theoretically at least, the room was soundproof. Savoy and Mijailovic took off their headphones. You could still hear the tremendous noise of the dam, but at least now you could have a conversation.
This was the main operations center for Savage Island Project, housed in a room that looked like mission control at NASA. Nine technicians per shift kept watch over computer screens under a massive, thirty-foot flat-screen graphic display depicting the real-time operation of all two hundred turbines. In the background, the loud pounding noise of the rushing water was everywhere. None of the technicians seemed to notice.
Savoy and Mijailovic walked past the engineers and Savoy opened the steel door to the outside. They ascended the stairwell in the back of the room and went to the observation deck.
The noise, outside of the soundproof operations center, was again deafening.
Savoy and Mijailovic stared at the violent Labrador Sea. The wind ripped across the great plain of water into their faces. The vast expanse of sea spread east to the horizon. Savoy walked to the other side of the dam, stepped to the edge, and peered over the side. The sky dropped in a curved cement plain to the running river formed by the through water. The line of houses next to the river was visible but tiny, like dollhouses.
“He washed up down there,” Mijailovic yelled over the noise, pointing to the shoreline below the town. “This is probably where he fell from.”
Or jumped,
Savoy thought.
At least that’s what I’d do if I had to live in this fucking place.
Savoy zipped his parka and pulled the hood around his head. He stood at the east edge of the deck for a few minutes, staring at the sea.
“You want to go back in?” Mijailovic yelled after a minute.
“I’m going to walk the deck!” yelled Savoy. “You go ahead.”
“What are you looking for?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Savoy stepped quickly across the cement, toward the far end of the facility and Mijailovic followed. They walked for several minutes. As they approached the unprotected central part of the dam, the wind picked up in intensity and ripped across the open plain, nearly knocking them over. They saw nothing.
When they got back to the northern entrance to the dam, they descended the stairs and walked back into the operations center. In a conference room at the far corner of the operations center, Savoy sat at the table and removed his parka.
“Just so you know, I had two men walk the roof this morning,” said Mijailovic. “I’ve also done two sweeps of every floor in the facility.”
“What about a head count?” Savoy rubbed his hands together, trying to get warm.
“Done that. Every worker is accounted for.”
“Were they all here?”
“Here or on leave. As you know, we go four months on, one off. There are always some guys on leave.”
“Did you speak with the ones on leave?”
“What would be the purpose of that?” Mijailovic asked, obviously a little perturbed.
“The purpose is following protocol. A man is dead. We don’t know what happened. Any time there’s even the slightest chance of foul play, the rule book says full staff interviews, even those on leave. According to the protocol, they’re all supposed to be reachable.”