Ground Zero (The X-Files) (7 page)
“Sure.” Dooley took the card and offhandedly opened up the center desk drawer already cluttered with pens and rulers, push pins, paper clips, and other debris. He tossed the card inside, where he would probably never be able to find it again, even if he wanted to.
Mulder didn’t get the impression Bear Dooley would want to.
“Thank you for your time, Dr. Dooley,” he said.
“That’s
Mister
Dooley,” the engineer said, then lowered his voice. “Never finished my Ph.D. Been too busy working to worry about things like that.”
50
GROUND ZERO
“I’ll let you get back to your project then,” Mulder said, and slipped out into the hall, where the construction workers continued to rip out sheets of asbestos-containing material behind thin curtains of plastic.
51
Gregory Residence, Pleasanton, California Wednesday, 10:28 A.M.
The key fit the lock, but Mulder knocked loudly anyway, pushing the door open a crack before poking his head inside.
“Ding, dong—Avon calling,” he said.
Emil Gregory’s home greeted him with only a shadowy silence.
Beside him, Scully pursed her lips. “There shouldn’t be anyone here, Mulder. Dr. Gregory lived alone.” She opened the folder that she had been holding against her dark blue jacket. “It says in this report that his wife died six years ago. Leukemia.”
Mulder shook his head, frowning. He thought of the terminal cancer Scully had found while doing the autopsy on Gregory’s body the previous afternoon. “Doesn’t anyone die peacefully in their sleep of old age anymore?”
The two of them hesitated outside the cool, dusty house that sat alone at the end of a cul-de-sac. 52
GROUND ZERO
The architecture of Gregory’s home seemed out of place compared to the neighboring houses, its rounded corners and curving arches reminiscent of a Southwestern adobe mansion. Colorful enameled tiles lined the front doorway, and grapevines coiled around an arbor that shaded the porch area.
After waiting a few extra seconds, Mulder pushed the door all the way open. In the foyer, they walked across large, cool terra-cotta tiles and took two steps down to the main living level.
Though Gregory had died only a day and a half before, the place already had an abandoned feel to it, like a haunted house. “Amazing how fast that oppressive atmosphere can settle in,” Mulder commented.
“It’s obvious he was a bachelor,” Scully said. Mulder looked around and saw no particular untidiness to the house. In fact, it reminded him of the condition of his own apartment much of the time. He wondered if she was somehow ribbing him.
The main room had all the usual furniture—sofa, love seat, a television, a stereo set—but it didn’t look as if it had been used terribly often. On the coffee table in front of the sofa a pile of old magazines lay partially buried under a dozen technical reports bearing the logo of the Teller Nuclear Research Facility and several more from the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. The pale tan walls had a smooth and buttery appearance, like soft clay. Alcoves molded around a fireplace displayed an assortment of small knick-knacks. Painted Anasazi pots sat on small shelves; bright spirit-catchers decorated the walls. A wreath of dried red chili peppers hung centered over the mantel.
The entire house had the authentic Santa Fe 53
THE X-FILES
flavor, but Mulder got the impression these decorations must have been artfully arranged by Dr. Gregory’s long-dead wife, and the old scientist had not had the stamina or the incentive to redecorate the main part of the house in his own style.
“After he lost his wife, Dr. Gregory didn’t seem to have any interests aside from his work,” Scully said, flipping through the dossier again. “According to this record, he took a two-month leave of absence to arrange for the funeral and to get his mind back on things—but apparently he didn’t know what to do with himself. Since his return to work at the Teller Nuclear Research Facility, his employee file is stuffed with commendations. It seems he threw himself into his research with complete abandon. It was his entire life.”
“Any record there of what he was really working on?”
Mulder asked.
“Because his project was highly classified, it doesn’t specify.”
“Same old story,” Mulder said.
In the kitchen Scully found several bottles of prescription pain killers on the countertop. She shook them and studied the labels. Some of the bottles were half empty.
“He was taking some pretty heavy medication…analgesics and narcotics,” she said. “The pain from his cancer must have been incredible. I haven’t gotten his personal medical record unsealed yet, but Dr. Gregory undoubtedly knew he only had a few months to live.”
“Yet he still went to work every day,” Mulder said. “Now that’s dedication.”
He wandered around in the empty house, not sure what he was looking for. He crossed the living room and stepped down a side hallway that led to the back bedrooms and study. Along these walls, in
54
GROUND ZERO
the private part of Gregory’s home, was a completely different style of decoration.
Framed photos adorned the wall in a haphazard arrangement that implied a man with a hammer and a nail, but without the patience or desire to use a yardstick and level. It looked as if the photos had been mounted as Dr. Gregory collected them over the years, one at a time, and placed wherever he found room.
Each image was different, yet with one striking similarity: the repetitive fury of huge atomic mushroom clouds, nuclear blasts, one after another—some more powerful than others. Mulder spotted a desert backdrop behind some of the blasts, while many others showed the ocean and Navy destroyers. Teams of scientists, identifiable in their cotton shirts and black-rimmed glasses, smiled for the camera beside military officers and other men in uniforms.
“And to think some people collect paintings of Elvis on black velvet,” Mulder said, studying the mushroom clouds. Scully came up beside him. “I recognize some of those pictures,” she said. “Classic photos. Those were the Marshall Islands hydrogen bomb detonations of the mid-fifties. These others…I think they were aboveground blasts at the Nevada Test Site, a few shots from Project Plowshare.” She stared at the photos. Mulder looked at her, surprised by the disturbed expression on her face.
“Something wrong?”
She shook her head, then tucked a strand of light auburn hair behind her ear. “No…no, it’s not that. I was just remembering that, according to his file, Dr. Gregory had worked on nuclear weapons since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was present at the Trinity Test, then worked at Los Alamos.
55
THE X-FILES
He took part in many of the H-bomb detonations in the fifties.”
Mulder stared at what appeared to be the largest mushroom cloud, an enormous eruption of water and fire and smoke out in the ocean. It looked as if an entire small island had been vaporized. Handwritten on the bottom border of the glossy were the words “Castle Bravo.”
“Must have been quite something to see,” he said. Scully gave him a quick surprised look. “Not something I’d ever want to see,” she said.
He quickly ran a hand through his mussed hair. “Rhetorically speaking, I meant.” He read the strange names scrawled on each of the photos. They had been written with different pens but obviously by the same hand. Some of them had faded over the years; others had retained their color and darkness better.
“Sawtooth”
“Mike”
“Bikini Baker”
“Greenhouse”
“Ivy”
“Sandstone X-ray”
“What’s this, some kind of code?” Mulder said. Scully shook her head. “No. Those were the names of the test shots, different bomb designs. Each one was given a kind of nonsense name. The tests themselves weren’t a particular secret, just the details of the device, time, anticipated yield, and core assembly. One whole series of underground blasts out at Nevada was named after California ghost towns. Another series used the names of various cheeses.”
“What a bunch of funny guys.”
Mulder left the photo gallery behind and stepped 56
GROUND ZERO
into the large, disorganized office where Gregory had done his work at home. Despite the clutter of papers, notes, and books scattered in various piles around the room, he suspected that Dr. Gregory could have found any item at a moment’s notice. A den or an office in the home was a man’s private sanctum, and, despite the random appearance of all the paraphernalia, over the years the old scientist must have gradually arranged it exactly the way he wanted. Now, seeing unfinished ideas jotted down on yellow legal pads and in bound lab notebooks, Mulder experienced the poignant sense of a life suddenly stopped. It was as if an amateur filmmaker had placed his videocamera on PAUSE
while Dr. Emil Gregory did an EXIT STAGE LEFT, leaving all the props in place and untouched.
Mulder carefully looked at the notes, papers, technical reports. He found a stack of colorful travel brochures for various small Pacific islands. Some were flashy and produced professionally while others appeared to be crudely made by people who didn’t exactly know what they were doing.
“You don’t expect to find anything here, do you?” said Scully. “It’s unlikely that Dr. Gregory ever took any classified work home.”
“Probably not,” Mulder said. “But he was brought up during the Manhattan Project days. Security was a little more lax than it is now, since everyone was working on the same team against the same bad guys.”
“And here we are still building bombs to fight against the bad guys—yet we’re not at all certain who the bad guys are anymore,” Scully said quickly, almost as if by reflex. Mulder looked sidelong at her, raising his eyebrows. “Was that an editorial comment, Agent Scully?”
57
THE X-FILES
She didn’t answer. Instead she picked up a framed certificate that had been taken off the wall and set atop one of the low bookshelves. Mulder could still see the naked nail on the wall where it had hung.
“I wonder why he took this one down,” she said, tilting it so he could see.
The certificate was a competently made printout from a laser printer with a logo designed with a low-end computer art program—just a joke, but someone had obviously spent a lot of time on it. The symbol in the center of the parchment was a stylized bell with a clapper dangling beneath its shell. Superimposed on top was the slashed circle of the universal
“No” symbol. The words underneath read, “This prestigious NO-BELL prize awarded to Dr. Emil Gregory by the Bright Anvil Project staff.”
“No-Bell prize,” Mulder said with a groan. “The strangest part, though, is that Bear Dooley—Dr. Gregory’s number one man—insisted to me vehemently just yesterday that the Bright Anvil Project doesn’t exist. Who signed that certificate?”
Scully glanced down. “Miriel Bremen—the woman who used to work for Gregory but then quit to become a protester.”
“Ah,” Mulder said. “Based on this, and what Bear Dooley told me yesterday, I think it’s time we spoke with Miriel Bremen. The offices of the protest group are in Berkeley, aren’t they? Not far from here.”
Scully nodded, preoccupied. Her answer surprised him.
“I’d like to go see her by myself, Mulder.”
“Any particular reason why you’re giving me the afternoon off?”
She shook her head. “Old stuff, Mulder. Nothing to do with this case.”
58
GROUND ZERO
Mulder nodded slowly. He knew enough not to push her when she didn’t want to come out with what was bothering her. He trusted his partner to tell him in her own time. 59
Teller Nuclear Research Facility
Wednesday, 12:08 P.M.
Two days of maniacal asbestos-removal construction—
de
struction, actually—had left a disconcerting whitish film all over Bear Dooley’s desk, his notebooks, his computer terminal, and his telephone.
Using an industrial-strength paper tissue, he wiped down the exposed surfaces, telling himself that it was probably just flakes of drywall, gypsum from the plasterboard, nothing hazardous. All of the stray asbestos fibers would certainly have been removed with meticulous care. The contractors were, after all, government employees.
That thought sparked uneasiness in him all over again. Dooley wanted his old office back. He passionately disliked these temporary quarters. He felt as if he were camping in his own workplace. “Roughing it,” Mark Twain would have called it.
Such distractions annoyed him. The Bright 60
GROUND ZERO
Anvil project was too important for him and his coworkers to “make do” while the investigation into Dr. Gregory’s death continued. What did that have to do with the progress of the test? Who set the priorities around here, anyway? The project had a very narrow window of time, and conditions had to be exactly right. A murder investigation could continue indefinitely, regardless of the time of year or weather conditions. Just let Bright Anvil go off without a hitch, he thought, and the FBI agents could have all the time they wanted. He glanced at his watch. The new satellite images were ten minutes overdue. Dooley reached for the phone, then heaved a sigh of disgust. It wasn’t his own phone in his own office with numbers preprogrammed on the dialing pad. Instead he had to ransack the desk drawers for a facility phone book and flip through the pages until he found Victor Ogilvy’s extension. He punched it in, rubbing his fingers together and looking at the fine white dust he had picked up. Scowling in disgust, Dooley wiped his hand on his jeans. The phone rang twice before a thin voice answered.
“Victor, where’s that weather report?” he said without wasting time on greetings or cordialities. His young assistant could certainly recognize his booming voice by now.
“We’ve got it, Bear,” came the researcher’s nasal reply. “I was just double-checking and triple-checking the meteorological projections. Uh, I think you’ll like them this time around.”
“Well, get ’em over here,” Dooley said, “so I can check them a fourth time. Things have to be exactly right.”
