Craig Kreident #1: Virtual Destruction (20 page)

Paige shook her head.
 
“Not in a million years.
 
A lot of our programs and divisions have letters, but nobody alive knows what they mean.”
 
She put a finger to her lips, and her face softened into a mischievous expression.
 
“I think if you arrange all the letters into an anagram, you can spell the words to the Mr. Ed theme song.”

“What?” Craig asked, completely baffled.

Paige sighed.
 
“You don’t have a sense of humor, do you, Mr. Kreident?”

“Not on duty, ma’am,” he said.

They both chuckled lightly.
 
“All right, that’s a start,” Paige said.
 
“Let’s go.
 
I have a government van.”

They passed the defeated-looking news crew on their way out; the group sat sullenly in the corner while the lead reporter spoke into a public phone.

Stepping outdoors, Craig fumbled in his shirt pocket to put on sunglasses.
 
The glare wasn’t too bad today with a high, thin overcast, but he knew he’d have a headache within minutes if he didn’t cut the light.

Paige led him to an old-model Chevy van with the number 2 painted on the hood.
 
“Climb on in.
 
The T Program complex is halfway across the lab.”

As soon as Craig buckled his seat belt, Paige pulled out of the small badge office parking lot and headed for the guard shack at the main gate.

“Ready for the standard visitor briefing?”
 
Paige kept her hands on the wheel as they waited for several bicyclists to go by.
 
“LLNL was originally an old Naval Air Station.
 
After Los Alamos built the first atomic bomb, Edward Teller—one of the scientists who developed the H bomb—wanted to establish a sister lab to compete in designing nuclear weapons, to serve as a ‘peer review,’ like in a normal university, only at the secret level, of course.”

Paige pulled up to the badge checkpoint, and the guard—Protective Service Officer, Craig corrected himself—reached through the window to touch their badges and wave them on.

Driving off, Paige said, “The PSOs are required to touch each badge, supposedly to make sure they actually notice you.
 
You won’t find a real heavy security presence here, though—visible, but not obtrusive.”

“Reminds me of Quantico,” said Craig.
 
“The Marines were always running around, training for one thing or another.”

Paige threw him a sideways glace.
 
“Quantico?
 
You don’t look like a Marine.”

“The Bureau also has a training facility there,” he said.
 
He stared out the window.
 
The Lawrence Livermore Lab looked like a typical university campus—plenty of green space, people oblivious to everything around them as they walked in deep discussion, bicyclists riding by on battered red bicycles issued by the government.

“I’ve never been out here before, but I was expecting this place to look like a ghost town.
 
The newspapers have been talking about the Lab losing so much nuclear weapons work with the test ban moratorium and the end of the Cold War.
 
It looks like a busy farmer’s market in a small town.”

Paige slowed at a traffic circle before answering.
 
“Designing nuclear weapons used to be our flagship, but we saw the writing on the wall years ago.
 
We’ve still got some of the best research facilities in the world—and that’s no exaggeration.

“We’ve spent a lot of effort turning them to dual-use technologies, letting our researchers apply for patents, setting up CRADAs with industry—that is . . .”
 
She paused a moment to remember the acronym.
 
“Cooperative Research And Development Agreements for marketing our aerogels and multilayered materials and other breakthroughs.
 
We’ve had big programs in biomedical research, computer code development, fusion power.

“One of our biggest investments some years back was the Laser Implosion Fusion Facility, which should have been the cornerstone for cheap and clean energy.
 
A billion-dollar program, overall, but thanks to the usual nearsightedness of annual budgets, the last sliver of funding was cut before the scientists could even turn on the machine.”
 
She sighed.
 
“A lot of people here are bitter about that.
 
It was Dr. Michaelson’s pet project before he went to work on the disarmament team in the former Soviet Union, and then came back to set up T Program here.”

As Paige talked, they drove to another badge checkpoint, a gate leading deeper into the Lab.
 
“We were just out in the Limited Area, where no classified work is done.
 
A lot of our programs don’t require security clearances, and those employees wear red badges.
 
Now we’re going into the Restricted Area, where you need a security clearance to enter.
 
Everybody who works here has a green badge.

“Inside the T Program central computer complex, our Plutonium Facility, and a few other heavily secure places, there’s one more level of security, another CAIN booth that allows access only to those people with a programmatic justification to enter.
 
Those places are called Exclusion Areas.”

“I see,” Craig said.
 
“And Dr. Michaelson was found in an Exclusion Area?”

Paige nodded, and Craig thought of the highly unusual acid burns on Michaelson’s face and hands and wondered how they could have gotten there.
 
If Michaelson was indeed murdered, he supposed the Exclusion Area limited the number of suspects.

After the PSO at the second checkpoint touched their badges through the open van window, Paige drove into the Restricted Area, beyond another perimeter of chain-link fence.
 
They passed modernistic buildings with smoked-glass windows, but most of the facilities were low modular structures, inexpensive trailers hooked together into complexes.
 
She pulled into a narrow parking lot filled with other government cars, trucks, and small white Cushman carts.

“Sorry I went into rah-rah mode about the Lab,” Paige said as she parked the van.
 
“It’s just my canned speech.
 
This is T Program here.”

Craig climbed out and looked at a cluster of white modular buildings.
 
Paige came around to meet him, then she led him down a bike path toward the T Program trailers.

A new sign with fresh blue paint stood in a flower bed outside the front trailer.
 
T PROGRAM: VIRTUAL REALITY CENTER.
 
A wide band of yellow plastic tape lay draped across the main door to the complex, printed with the repeating words DO NOT ENTER: CONSTRUCTION SITE.

Paige stepped over the fluttering tape and opened the door to the lobby.
 
“It’s the best we could do,” she said.
 
“We didn’t have any Police Line tape.”

“I don’t see any security guards to keep people out.”
 
Craig looked around in dismay, thinking of all the damage that could already have been done.

“With the CAIN access, we don’t need them, remember?
 
Nobody but T Program people can get in here.”

Craig took off his sunglasses and made a noncommittal sound.
 
“But this a potential crime scene.
 
What if the T Program people are the ones we need to worry about?”

Paige looked at him long and hard, appraising him.
 
“Do you really think there’s a possibility this wasn’t an accidental death?”

Craig shrugged.
 
“It’s hard to imagine how somebody could have gotten acid all over himself and not sounded the alarm.”

The T Program lobby was no larger than an oversized closet with a chair, telephone, and an LLNL phone book.
 
Set into one wall was a reflective glass door like an airlock.
 
The words CAIN ACCESS had been stenciled on the front.
 
The other walls held a safety bulletin board, an equal opportunity flyer, and a large green EXCLUSION AREA sign.

Paige opened the heavy CAIN booth door on the far wall and unclipped the badge from her blue blouse.
 
“We do this one at a time, just like you did at the badge office.
 
Stick your badge in the reader, key in your PIN, and the other door will open.
 
You’ll hear the click.
 
Just watch me.”

Paige’s expression became stern as she stood with the door half open.
 
“I should warn you that if you make a mistake with your PIN, the booth will flood with colorless but deadly nerve gas.
 
Can’t trust those old bomb designers, you know.”
 
She slipped in and closed the door.

Craig stood appalled, then realized she was joking.
 
Paige Mitchell seemed to enjoy testing how stuffy he could be.
 
He could see only her hazy outline inside the booth, but he heard a succession of beeps as she keyed in her PIN.
 
After an unlocking clunk he lost sight of her outline as the door on the other side of the booth opened.

He pulled at the door and stepped into the booth as the heavy door shut, sealing him in.
 
Behind a glass panel, two TV cameras peered at him.
 
A silvery LCD display above the magnetic strip reader blinked PLEASE INSERT YOUR BADGE.
 
Craig punched in his PIN and the inner door clicked, allowing him to join Paige.

He found himself in an open trailer space broken by islands of low office cubicles and offices with doors on the far wall.
 
Randomly arranged tables served as holding platforms for computer workstations, bundles of wires, circuit boards, bound preprints of scientific papers, users manuals, and stacks of floppy disks.
 
He could smell burned insulation, solder, and cleaning chemicals.

Down one carpeted hall in the back of the trailer, a large room stood partially open like a bank vault.
 
He recognized instinctively the centerpiece of the laboratory area—the VR chamber—but he also saw the yellow CONTRUCTION AREA tape that had once been stretched across the door opening to seal the crime scene—now, though, it lay discarded on the floor.

Craig stepped toward the chamber, anger sharpening inside him just as a man in his mid-twenties sauntered through the open vault door.
 
The young man stepped on the yellow tape as if on purpose and moved toward one of the office cubicles, shuffling papers.
 
Craig burned the image of the man into his mind: pale skin, red hair, and the beginnings of a paunch.
 
He wore jeans and an ash-gray t-shirt with a garish drawing of
Nexus
, apparently some comic-book superhero.

The man looked up, noticed Craig and Paige, and altered his course to come over to them.
 
“Oh.
 
You the FBI guy?
 
I can always tell visitors around here because they’re the only ones who wear monkey suits.”

Craig stiffened within his dark suit.
 
“Yes, I’m from the FBI.
 
And you are . . . ?”

The red-headed man held the sheaf of papers like a shield and did not offer his hand.
 
“Gary Lesserec, the one who’s trying to hold this program together in the middle of a shitstorm.
 
I’m the only one who knows what’s going on, now that Michaelson bit the big one.”

“Excuse me, but was that the VR chamber I saw you exit?”
 
Craig narrowed his eyes, feeling a growing uneasiness.

Lesserec said flippantly, “That’s where we work, you know.”

Craig nailed him with his gaze.
 
“So you blatantly crossed a crime scene line.
 
I see.
 
Are you aware of the penalties you could now face, Mr. Lesserec?”

Craig didn’t wait for the red-headed man to answer, turning to Paige.
 
“The guards should have sealed this building the moment Dr. Michaelson’s body was found, and it doesn’t look like they did a very good job.
 
If a felony was committed here, no one should have been given the chance to tamper with the crime scene.
 
It’s been hours since Michaelson was discovered—how much has been changed?”

“Wait just a minute!”
 
Lesserec tossed the papers down on an equipment-strewn table, where they lay on top of the clutter.
 
“This is my lab, Mr. FBI, and our whole team has an impossible challenge to meet, thanks to Michaelson.
 
The President of the United States and the whole world is counting on us, and we can’t just go on vacation because somebody wants to make a Federal case over a heart attack.”

Craig kept his cool with an effort.
 
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mr. Lesserec, but I’ve got a job to do.
 
I am declaring the VR chamber off limits to
everyone
as of this moment.
 
Paige, I want you to see that a permanent, uh, PSO is stationed right outside the door.
 
Mr. Lesserec and his team members are not—I repeat,
not
—allowed to set foot inside until I have declared the area clear.”