Craig Kreident #1: Virtual Destruction (27 page)

Craig wondered if Lesserec had even known that Michaelson was preparing to fire him.
 
Did that mean that Lesserec himself might be a suspect as well?

Craig had scanned a photocopy of the old fax Michaelson had sent from his on-site inspection tour in Eastern Europe upon learning that LIFF funding had been cut.
 
Michaelson had pleaded and cajoled and intimidated an entire list of congressmen and senators, wielding endorsements and support from other scientists.
 
He had hopped a flight back to the United States weeks before his Moscow assignment ended, leaving the inspection team in the hands of his deputy, Diana Unteling.

Craig kept staring at the behemoth building, and the empty facility seemed to yawn in front of him.
 
It had all been for nothing.
 
After ten years and a billion dollars, the LIFF had been shut down before it could even be turned on.
 
The debacle had cost the Lab Director his job and several congressmen their careers.

Such a failure would have destroyed most people utterly, Craig thought, but Michaelson, with his pit-bull persistence and refusal to accept the inevitable, had risen like a phoenix from the ashes with T Program, his wild and unorthodox proposal to use virtual reality sensors for remote but on-site inspections anywhere in the world, anytime.

Meanwhile the LIFF sat like an enormous mausoleum too immense to be ignored.

Craig ducked his head and stepped inside the gigantic echoing space.
 
He snapped off his sunglasses and tucked them in his suit pocket while waiting for his eyes to adjust.

The place smelled like old oil and cool musty air.
 
He heard the rattling hum of generators and a sound of someone driving a forklift at the other side of the bay, moving pallets of supplies.
 
Here, though, he seemed to be alone.

Catwalks laced the ceiling four stories overhead, but a spherical stainless-steel vacuum vessel—large enough to hold a house—occupied the bulk of the interior.
 
He had seen schematics of the test chamber, so he recognized the hundreds of coolant conduits, the long tubes of laser amplifiers, diagnostic ports tapped at random places inside the welded metal plates that formed the walls.
 

Once the initial sight of the awesome high-tech apparatus wore off, Craig noticed other things that seemed out of place.
 
The concrete floor of the giant facility was not clean and uncluttered for scientists to walk around and take measurements.
 
Instead, much of the empty space was stacked high with crates of decommissioned machinery; identifying labels had been stenciled on the sides of the wooden slats, and shipping tags dangled from staples on the planks.
 
Pallets filled with cases of photocopier paper stood taller than Craig’s head.
 
Under the weak yellow-orange light, most of the LIFF apparatus appeared smudged and covered with dust.

As he stared at the enormous, somehow disturbing, machinery, Craig thought about how José Aragon had supposedly brought the entire project to ruin and how a vengeful Hal Michaelson had attempted to get even with him.
 
Yet somehow, through a labyrinth of reasoning that only government officials could fathom, Michaelson and everyone else associated with the LIFF had been severely chastised—while Aragon blithely found himself promoted.

He shook his head.
 
The dispute over the LIFF, as described in Michaelson’s sequence of inflammatory memos, had not managed to convey the sense of majesty and high stakes Craig felt upon standing inside the actual facility.
 
The place reeked of high hopes and lost dreams.

Inside the echoing LIFF hangar, Craig wondered if this could be sufficient cause for a murder.

CHAPTER 27

Friday

Security Office

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Paige Mitchell drove past the guard shack poised at the Lab’s south gate, then hung a hard left in her MG.
 
The old security headquarters stood just outside the sprawling complex, still in use but waiting to be torn down.

After parking in one of the Government Vehicle Only spots out front, she entered the World War II vintage wooden building, which had originally been built as barracks long ago when the site had been a Navy base.
 
It did not surprise Paige to see business-suited defense contractors standing in a long line beside construction workers, gangly teenagers employed part-time, and a pair of nattily dressed new graduates recruited to work at the lab, all processing forms for temporary clearances.
 
Paige stepped around the line and rapped her knuckles on a door to the left of the counter.
 
The door opened after she knocked twice more.

“Hi, Jeannie,” Paige said.

“Paige, thank goodness it’s you!”
 
The short, frumpy woman looked up at her, then turned to motion her into the back room.
 
“I was ready to strangle the next reporter who barged in on us.”

“Pretty busy, I take it?”

Jeannie smiled wanly.
 
“I remember how bad it was a few years ago when the public learned about the enhanced neutron weapon we were working on.
 
Now everyone’s sniffing a scandal over what happened to Dr. Michaelson yesterday.
 
Is that why you need those CAIN booth records?”

“Yeah.
 
I’ve been babysitting the FBI agent conducting the investigation.
 
He’s a bull in a china shop.
 
Nearly ripped the head off one of the T program scientists this morning.”

“Maybe you should have let him.
 
Michaelson trained all his people to be as arrogant as he was.”
 
She chuckled.
 
“You didn’t expect me to have those records pulled already, did you?
 
You just called this morning.”

Paige shook her head.
 
It would certainly have been nice, but she knew how complicated it could be to access records from storage, especially from the Lab’s “new, state-of-the-art” tracking software.

“I’d like to get an estimate on when you’ll have them, though.
 
Things are happening pretty fast, and it would be nice to have an answer for the FBI agent when he asks.”

“Just a minute,” Jeannie said, moving slowly over to her desk and terminal.
 
The long string of pearls dangling below the wattles of her neck seemed to drag her shoulders down.
 
She could barely find a workspace in and around all the potted plants gracing her desk.
 
“Let me check the status of the job order.
 
Somebody’s probably on break.”

Hollywood had convinced the public that security people would be hard to get along with, but Paige enjoyed working with the security department.
 
They were ultimately responsible for literally millions of classified documents stored at Livermore, some of which could cause “grave damage” to national security.
 
The security people scoped for leaks, espionage, or attempts by Third World countries to steal nuclear weapons designs.
 
But that didn’t mean security personnel couldn’t be professional and courteous when she submitted a legitimate request.

Jeannie stood up from her terminal, reappearing from behind a tall spider plant.
 
African violets and begonias seemed to thrive in the warm exhaust from the computer fan.
 
“Bad news,” she said.
 
“They’re still having problems with the new database over in the green area.
 
You might want to check back on Monday.
 
Yours will be the first printout, once we get back online.”

“Thanks, Jeannie.”
 
Paige wasn’t happy, and she knew Craig would complain, but arguing would only do harm.
 
And she knew that no one would even dream of working through the weekend.

Other people came in full of bluster, demanding action Right Now—and they invariably had to wait the longest.
 
Paige accomplished much of her business through an exchange of brownie points, remembering birthdays, buying donuts to show her appreciation.
 
When she asked for favors in return, she usually got them.
 
Jeannie just might pull off a miracle, and she certainly wouldn’t drag her feet.
 
Once she got the CAIN list, Paige would go to the nursery and buy Jeannie a nice little plant to add to her collection.

She left the rickety security barracks and drove back inside the fence, returning to the T Program area.
 
Lab management claimed to be doing everything possible to help with the investigation, but she supposed that didn’t extend far enough down the food chain to bypass normal bureaucratic holdups.

#

Stepping through the CAIN booth into the T Program trailers, Paige saw that the door to the white-walled VR chamber was closed.
 
Several people congregated around Michaelson’s office door at the back.
 
She wondered how long they normally remained at work on a Friday afternoon.

Making her way around the computer equipment and the cluttered tables, she stepped up to the two FBI agents she had met earlier with Craig.
 
They nodded and moved aside, granting her access to Michaelson’s office.

A short, thin man not much older than herself sat on the edge of Michaelson’s desk.
 
Dressed in slacks and a knit shirt, he held a sheaf of papers that was crammed full of inventory numbers and arcane titles.
 
She recognized him from the Classification Office, but he had tucked his badge into his shirt pocket, and she could not see his name.

Looking hot and uncomfortable, Craig Kreident rocked back in a chair and listened with a vacant expression.
 
But he looked at Paige and smiled with something akin to relief.

The man from the Classification Office said, “I told you, this is a straightforward process.
 
I’ve gone through Dr. Michaelson’s entire repository and there are nearly fifty classified memos missing, all of them transmitted from DOE headquarters.
 
And that’s only the documented list—who knows how many Secret Work Papers are gone?”
 
He looked accusingly at old Tansy Beaumont, who looked back at him with her wrinkled face as if she had just swallowed a dill pickle whole.

Craig’s gray eyes seemed to focus away from the wall and back on the document control officer.
 
“That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?
 
So many missing papers, and all of them originating from the same place?”

Tansy Beaumont shrugged.
 
“Not if Dr. Michaelson kept them all in the same folder.
 
He took classified work home a lot of the time.
 
He wasn’t supposed to, but nobody dared tell him what to do.
 
Not more than once, anyway.”

The document control officer looked shocked, as if gnarled old Tansy had just told him she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

“So, any idea what’s in those memos?” Craig asked, changing the subject.
 
“Tansy, did you type any of them?”

She blinked her dark eyes.
 
“No, sir!
 
I had enough to do around here just keeping the forms filled out and doing travel papers and telling everybody on the phone that Dr. Michaelson didn’t want to talk to them.
 
He always wrote his own memos, never let me see them.
 
Probably never even ran a spell-checker.”

Craig sighed.
 
“Since they were to DOE headquarters, could it have something to do with espionage and nuclear secrets?
 
Sounds important to me.”

 
Paige interrupted.
 
“Craig, let me straighten you out—off the record, of course, because it would get them all up in arms to hear this.
 
But the people back at DOE are basically a bunch of beancounters—half of them spend their days writing endless and opaque procedures we all have to follow, and the other half conduct audits so they can ding us about the stuff we aren’t doing well enough.
 
It’s mostly self-generated reporting.
 
None of the critical research is done back there, and our status reports are usually watered down by the time they get through that bureaucracy.”

“Hah!” Tansy Beaumont said with a laugh.
 
“Dr. Michaelson never even submitted status reports!”

Paige kept her attention on Craig.
 
“What I mean is that messages from DOE headquarters are things like program plans and budgets.
 
More often than not, they’re probably handwritten faxes, outlining funding strategy.”

Craig frowned, chewing over the information.
 
“Then why on Earth are they classified?”

Paige smiled.
 
“So the press—or even worse, God forbid, Congress!—won’t get hold of it.
 
You’d be surprised at what headquarters classifies.”