Chapter 7 - The Bending Moment
Two weeks later, the cast came off, replaced by an elastic support bandage, and Wren Calloway walked into Cormac’s private study without her cane.
She was still thin, her face hollowed by the fever and the long recovery, but her step was firm. She wore a clean black wool turtleneck, charcoal trousers that hid the dressing on her thigh, and her hair had been pulled back into a severe, neat knot at the nape of her neck.
Cormac looked up from a stack of shipping manifests. He set his sharpening knife down on the desk.
“You’re walking,” he said.
“I have work to finish,” she replied, stepping up to the desk and placing both hands flat on the polished leather blotter. “Julian Delacroix filed an emergency petition with the levee board this morning. He’s pouring the north deck of Pier Seven tonight at midnight. If that concrete sets, the substandard caissons will be locked beneath twelve hundred tons of reinforced slab. Nobody will ever be able to drill a core sample without bringing down the entire wharf.”
Cormac leaned back in his high leather chair. “He’s rushing the pour to bury the evidence.”
“Exactly,” Wren said, her dark eyes flashing with cold, technical fury. “Once the deck is poured, the fraud is structural. It becomes part of the parish infrastructure. No judge will order the demolition of a eighty-million-dollar terminal based on an unverified whistle-blower audit.”
“We don't need a judge,” Cormac said.
Wren narrowed her eyes. “What does that mean?”
Cormac stood, walked to the large wall safe behind the portrait of his grandfather, and pulled out an oblong wooden box. He brought it to the desk and opened the brass hooks.
Inside lay three small, cylindrical instruments of stainless steel, each fitted with a digital readout and a six-inch probe tipped with diamond-coated tungsten.
“Ultrasonic pulse velocity meters,” Wren said, her breath catching. “Lab-grade. Where did you get these?”
“I have associates at the maritime institute in Hamburg,” Cormac said. “If you insert these probes into the inspection conduits Julian left in the main pilings, how long does it take to generate an undeniable density profile of the cured concrete?”
“Four minutes per caisson,” she answered instantly. “The data can be transmitted via satellite directly to the National Transportation Safety Board’s forensic engineering database in Washington. Once it’s in the federal cloud, Julian’s judges can’t touch it.”
“Then you have four minutes,” Cormac said.
Wren looked up from the instruments to his face. “You’re going into the terminal?”
“We are,” Cormac corrected. “Julian has thirty armed private security guards on that pier tonight. He has three mobile batch plants running around the clock. At midnight, he’ll have two barges pumping concrete directly into the forms.”
“It’s suicide,” she said. “He knows I’m with you. He’ll be waiting for an injunction.”
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“He’ll be waiting for an injunction,” Cormac said with a thin, dangerous smile that did not show his teeth. “He won’t be waiting for a tugboat.”
***
