Perilous Panacea (15 page)

Drafton’s talk of plans only half registered on Curt’s brain, his attention hijacked by radiation-warning signs all around. Got to get out of here, he thought.

“Have you checked yourself with the radiation counters?” Surling asked.

“My body’s okay, but when I breathe into the counter, it goes off scale.”

“That’ll die down.” Surling’s voice was firm, his unseeing blue eyes staring at Curt. “They can use calcium compounds to remove plutonium from your body.”

As Surling droned on about possible treatments, fear liquefied in Curt’s spine, its chill coursing into his legs and igniting the shakes. Although he had not spent much time around radioactive materials, he knew the dangers of breathing plutonium-oxide particles. A controversy raged about how large a particle inside the lungs was necessary to cause cancer. The amount argued about was the difference between a microgram and a tenth of a microgram, the difference between a gnat and a gnat’s head.

Curt shuffled toward the door to the outside, steadied himself against it, and held his breath, not trusting the counters. For the last several days, his mind had been locked in a battle with itself, trying desperately to eliminate terror that gripped his gut like flesh-eating bacteria: Miami Beach, Beecher’s fist in the stomach, Surling’s predictions of doom, and lover’s trysts with Drafton. Now all that fear focused itself in the yellow-and-red radiation signs that stared from all directions like waiting vultures.

“Bob, let’s get out of here.”

Ignoring Curt, Surling instructed Drafton to put on clean clothing and come out.

Curt swallowed to force back the nausea and gain control of his voice. “Bob, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Easy, Curt. We’ll get out now.”

For Curt, stepping into the hall was like coming down from the thin air of the Himalayas. Although weak from the trip, he could breathe again.

Applenu paced just outside the door. Halfway down the hall, Simmons, Maxwell, and Markum huddled against the wall next to the door marked OFFICE, throwing panicky stares at Reedan and Surling, then down the corridor toward safety.

“Is it bad?” Applenu asked. “Is the project shot?”

Surling’s face reddened. “The first thing you’ve got to do is get that young man to a doctor, a specialist that treats radiation poisoning. His lungs need to be flushed—irrigated. Calcium compounds can eliminate radioactive material from his system through the kidneys and bowels. Then he’ll…”

“Okay,” Applenu said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Surling called Perk Simmons from down the hall and handed him the radiation counter with instructions to check Drafton and see that he got an emetic and his beard and head shaved. Like a cornered dog about to take a beating, Simmons’s eyes, mostly white, darted to Applenu, who nodded his approval to Surling’s instructions.

A flustered Drafton staggered from the chemical-processing room. Without any clothes under his floppy white coveralls, his body seemed to have shriveled. His gaze shuttled between Curt, Applenu, and Surling, searching for something. Then he fixed on Simmons, who shuffled toward him with the detector.

Simmons halted at well over arm’s length from Drafton, stretched forward, and ran the detector the length of his body. He breathed into the counter, and Simmons’s head snapped back like the end of a bullwhip.

“Curt, come here,” Drafton called over Simmons’s shoulder, his sad brown eyes filled with the longing Curt saw when they were together. Love, maybe?

Curt hesitated. Why wasn’t he dead? He sucked a breath to gear his mind back to his job, and he started toward Drafton.

Applenu stepped in front of him. “Stay here.” He turned and walked slowly toward Drafton.

“Brian, I want to talk to Curt.”

“Later, mate.”

Drafton looked at Applenu, his eyes pleading. “Where were you, Brian? Why didn’t you come in and get me?”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Drafton’s voice quivered like a faraway radio station. “I’ll get lung cancer.”

“Take it easy, mate. First, we’ll empty your stomach and get rid of any plutonium oxide you might have swallowed. We’ll flush your nose. It’s a good filter. You’ll be okay.”

“I want to talk to Curt.”

“Later.”

Applenu signaled down the hall to Markum to take Curt and Surling to their quarters.

Inside their room, Surling flopped on one end of the couch. “He doesn’t have a snowball’s chance.”

“Lung cancer?”

“He won’t live long enough to get lung cancer.”

Curt slumped onto the other end of the couch. Now he believed. Deep down, he always knew Surling was right, but he wanted to believe otherwise. Just as they had to sacrifice Drafton for the success of the project, they had to kill him and Surling. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

Surling ignored him. “He won’t live long enough to help us escape. He was our only ticket out of here.”

Chapter Twenty

When Saul crawled out of bed at 6:30, Mary was already gone, and he remembered she had mentioned a breakfast meeting. On the kitchen counter, he found the Washington Post on which Mary had circled a front-page story with a broad black marker, and using the same pen, she wrote, “I’ll call you.”

ENOUGH WEAPONS-GRADE NUCLEAR MATERIAL STOLEN FOR 6-TO-20 BOMBS—Hijacking of Nuclear Material was Inside Job

Sheena Mosely

Washington (AP)—The AP has learned…

“Holy Shit,” he mumbled. “How the hell did she get Austin’s name?” And they had a picture of him to boot, the same NNSI badge picture the FBI had.

As if that was not bad enough, Hughson had injected himself onto the scene:

In an interview yesterday in his Capitol Hill office, Pennsylvania Senator Stanley Hughson, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, discussed the consequences to be expected from this incident. Hughson has been a critic of the Gordono Administration’s stance on nuclear weapons, and he pointed out the irony in this “regrettable incident” in that when the cold war ended, the U.S. spent many millions to ensure the former Soviet Union’s weapons would not fall into the wrong hands. “While that was going on,” he said, “we evidently ignored our own vulnerabilities.

Hughson then turned on the bullshit, talking about North Korea, Iran, Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and how they were all after the bomb. The final paragraph should scare the shit out of a lot of people, Saul thought.

Finally, Hughson recalled a suggestion by Richard L. Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus and a former weapons scientist who helped develop the hydrogen bomb. Garwin believes the best way to deliver nuclear weapons is to smuggle them into the enemy’s country and place them in the enemy’s major cities. Then, in time of war, safe delivery is assured, and it could not be thwarted by a missile defense system. Garwin suggested this scenario during the height of the cold war, suggesting at the time that the U.S. and Russia may have already deployed such weapons. Since the cold war has long passed, Hughson suggested North Korean, Iranian, or Al Qaeda agents may have hijacked the nuclear material as part of a Garwin-type scenario.

- - - - -

Applenu waited in his rental car parked next to an empty phone booth outside The Pantry, a convenience store near the center of town. Whenever he tried to contact Sherbani, he wound up waiting. According to Austin when they set up the system of numbered phone booths, Sherbani could not use cell phones to talk to them—too easily monitored. Once more he glanced down at the passenger seat, where Sheena Mosley’s story naming Austin stared back. He wondered what Austin would do in this situation.

He called Sherbani two hours after Drafton dragged his bumbling arse out of the furnace room, but Sherbani wasn’t there. Applenu had no idea who he reached at the number with a New York area code. He assumed it was someone from Iran’s United Nations delegation. Whoever it was gave him the number for the next phone booth and said Sherbani would call in three hours.

Afterwards, he went back to the factory, and he and Simmons dressed out in protective clothing and surveyed the furnace room. It was bollocked up alright. Fortunately, before he and Hearn started the project, they prepared for every eventuality, including this one, and he knew what to do. To accomplish the decontamination, he got Lormes to assign Markum and Maxwell to him; with their help, he estimated the room could be decontaminated in a couple of days.

The phone rang, and Applenu hustled out of his auto and into the booth. He debated whether to tell Sherbani the accident would make it necessary to call off the project, but he knew Sherbani wouldn’t accept that decision. Also, if it was discontinued, he would not get his family out of Iran.

“You wished to talk to me,” Sherbani said.

Applenu described the Drafton situation in cryptic words and told how he had Simmons, Markum, and Maxwell working on decontamination. “We need Drafton, because he’s the only one besides Surling who knows the techniques for processing the material, but the bloke insists he needs medical treatment to speed removal of ingested material. Bloody Surling fed Drafton a lot of balls that experts can do that.”

“So take him to a doctor.”

“We can’t. It wouldn’t be anytime before the Bobbies were involved.”

“Let Mr. Lormes find him a doctor. That is why we hired him. He has many resources. Find out what kind of doctor Mr. Drafton expects to see and what such a doctor would do. Then let Mr. Lormes have one of the doctors he has at his disposal carry out the procedure.”

“Drafton will know the difference.”

“A man weighted down by uncertainty sees only the extended helping hand. By the way, did you see the newspaper stories? Do they not spread havoc in the councils of our adversaries like I said they would? One senator fights another, and the White House is doing everything possible to hush it up. We have a saying: You cannot see your enemy if your friends stand in front of you.”

“You should have waited until they got closer to us.”

“You produce the product. We will keep them from ever getting close. Are you still getting pictures and videos of everything you do?”

The pictures again, Applenu thought. The last three times they talked, Sherbani asked about the pictures and videos. Why? “Beecher is taking pictures and making videos of everything.”

“Good. Those pictures will help agitate our adversaries. The chaos we have sowed up to now is minor compared to what we have in mind.”

Applenu took a deep breath. “One more thing,” he said. “I want my family out of the country and in Amsterdam by the end of next week, or I walk away from the project.”

“I told you that…”

Applenu hung up before Sherbani could finish his reply.

- - - - -

Saul picked up the phone and hoped it wasn’t Mary again, or Uncle Nathan, both of whom called earlier to get him to give Senator Hughson something he could use to get into the papers and on TV. Most of the rest of the morning he and Spanner wasted time meeting with Associate Director Herbert Dowel trying to figure out the Mosely leak and how she got Austin’s name and picture. They also had to convince Dowel they were not the leak source.

It was Kyle Orman, NNSA’s computer expert, who had just returned from Albuquerque. “We found out that the Kirtland computer crash during the hijacking wasn’t due to the cyber attack. It was caused by a Trojan horse and a trap door.”

Although Saul was familiar with the term, Orman explained that the “Trojan horse” was a program surreptitiously installed on the Kirtland computer sometime before the hijacking. The program was set to cause a computer crash at 18:57 hours on June 6, the same time the world-wide cyber attack began. “The program took control of the computer and kept it off line for two hours, after which the program shut down, and the computer could again be brought back on line.”

“Are you saying the computer was programmed by the Trojan horse program to go down at the exact time of the cyber attack and come back on when the attack ended to make it look connected?” Saul asked. “Austin did this? When?”

“Who else could have done it?” Orman asked. He explained how Austin spent a week at Kirtland six weeks before the hijacking. “Ostensibly, he was there to help the Kirtland computer department bring their computer in compliance with his revisions of the overall NNSA security and transportation system. While he was there to help them improve security, he had complete access, and it was simple for him to load the Trojan horse program to subvert security.”

“How could he know that far ahead of time that he would want it to shut down on a given date and time?”

“That’s where the trap door came in.” Orman explained that the trap door allowed unauthorized access to the computer to someone with another computer outside of Kirtland “Once he knew the time and date of the cyber attack, he used the trap door to get into the computer and entered the date and time information into the Trojan horse program.”

“The bastard.”

“Based on what Austin did at Kirtland, we went through NNSA’s computer programs,” Orman said, “and we also found a Trojan horse and a trap door program. This Trojan horse was different. It allowed an unauthorized person with another computer outside of NNSA to enter the computer and act as system manager, which would allow him to access passwords and other people’s files.”

“Why would Austin do that?” Saul asked.

“You tell me. You’re the FBI.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Immediately after Drafton’s accident, Surling and Reedan were confined to their quarters. They waited and talked, ate lunch, and waited some more. Finally, Surling declared cocktail time. After two beers, Surling stretched out on his cot and smoked a cigarette, watching as Reedan went to the refrigerator for his third beer. There was always plenty of beer when they were off work. Beer and magazines of all kinds constituted their recreation, and the evening meal usually included wine. Part of their captor’s plan seemed to be “Keep ‘em stoned” when not working. More and more, he and Reedan accommodated their plan.

Surling studied his cigarette and wondered why he had begun to smoke again. Then again, why not? He glanced at Reedan, who sat at the table nursing his beer. Maybe the beer would get his mind off Drafton, he thought. That’s all he talked about. Surling remembered the punch line from an old joke that summed up Reedan’s attitude toward himself: “I built all those bridges, but nobody called me a bridge builder. I sucked one cock, and I’m forever a cocksucker.”

To get Reedan thinking about other things, Surling turned the conversation to Reedan’s desire to be an MIT professor. “Once, a university like MIT was a good place to be, like when I first started teaching,” Surling said. “But the whores fucked it up.” He put the dig into Reedan about the bureaucracy now entrenched in academe, as impenetrable as any bureaucracy Reedan had escaped when he left the weapons plant.

It was comprised of technological whores who weren’t interested in teaching or research. They obtained science or engineering degrees because those degrees held the promise of good-paying management and government jobs, and they spent their time deluging the scientific staff with paper to “assure that the institution lives up to its commitments.” Most young professors arriving on the scene joined right in.

Reedan protested Surling’s gloomy picture, and a lively discussion ensued. Turned out Reedan liked teaching, but for him a MIT professorship was a ticket to launch his career as an entrepreneur. He and another MIT professor had plans for a robot for nano-metallurgical applications. They figured to follow in the footsteps of many others who used MIT as a stepping stone to their own company.

“So you’ll build your robots and become rich.”

“I’m not sure what I want anymore. Before Drafton, I had time to think, and it dawned on me that one of my goals in everything I’ve done for the past ten years was to prove to my father I can make a success of something besides basketball and to prove to my father-in-law that I’m not a loser. I figured money was the only thing they’d understand.”

Perhaps Reedan was a little more complicated than the whores, Surling thought. The whores eschewed deep thinking, having no thoughts beyond their next promotion. Reedan reminded him more and more of his own son.

“You’ve probably noticed my limp,” Reedan said. “It’s the result of an accident on my father-in-law’s farm between my sophomore and junior years in college. Before that, my dad and I had our minds set on a pro basketball career. Lori came to see me in the hospital, and against both our dads’ wishes, we wound up married. Her dad never thought I was good enough for her. Mine figured I’d never amount to anything other than a basketball player.”

“So you’re going to become a millionaire to prove both of them wrong?”

“Stupid, isn’t it? I can see now what I’ve been doing wrong, especially with my family. Until Drafton, I was starting to look forward to the new baby—instead of seeing it as an intrusion on my career. I realize now that’s how I looked at Beth. Then along came Drafton…and now I can’t even sleep anymore.”

Surling saw himself forty years earlier, but when it came to his family, he never took the time to think things out. “You’ll forget Drafton,” he said, “and you’ll succeed with your robots. Your dream won’t give you time to think about other things. And if you don’t fuck it up, you’ll have your family to help you.”

“Like you’ve got your family, getting caught in bed with a non-technological whore. You don’t seem to enjoy your career, always knocking the university, knocking your fellow scientists.”

“Things change when you get older. They shouldn’t, but you don’t plan on your son dying before you do either.”

He told Reedan about that day he remembered as vividly as he remembered Drafton’s pained voice from the furnace room this morning. The call from the detective came to his office at ten-thirty at night; his son’s roommate had found his body hanging from a tree in the back yard of their rented house. Before that call, the most anxiety he’d known was when he realized he was going bald. Perhaps a stronger man would have pushed on as before. He couldn’t concentrate anymore. After that, he just went through the motions.

“What about your wife?” Reedan asked. “Why go to prostitutes, at eighty-four years old, yet?”

“I’d been too busy for her before that. She raised the kids, although I thought Al and I were getting along better just before he died. After his death, she had her church and her friends. They helped her, but I wasn’t into the religion thing. It wasn’t prostitutes then, just other women to help me forget.”

How many times had he asked himself why he did it? He remembered the first one, Ellie Hendrix, his wife’s good friend. Three days after the funeral, she found him at home alone. She burst into tears and grabbed him, pulling her soft and warm body into his. After holding on to him for a minute or more, her lips found his, and the next thing he knew, they were sprawled on the couch, half undressed. It happened several more times before guilt consumed Ellie. By then, he’d discovered that Joan Bracher also wanted to help him forget. Trouble was, he couldn’t.

“Why don’t you go to a marriage counselor?” Reedan asked. “Or just get a divorce?”

Surling stood and went for a beer. How easy the solution sounded to someone who knew he could do anything, except forget his homosexual acts. He now felt a twinge of remorse over the fact that he suggested to Drafton how he and Reedan could get together: “Just tell Applenu you need Reedan to make some calculations,” he had told him, and Applenu bought it. Remorse or not, Drafton would never have helped them if he and Reedan hadn’t been intimate. Now Drafton would not be able to help.

“Maybe I should have tried to save you from the Drafton thing. All he probably needed was sex. I could have seduced him, as torn up as he was. God knows, I’ve developed more lines of bullshit than a Chicago politician. When you’re like me, what’s the difference between fucking a man or a woman?”

Surling was glad to see Applenu and Lormes arrive with dinner, this one catered by Markum and featuring a New York strip. Just as there was always plenty of beer after work, they always ate well, too.

“We invited ourselves to dinner to discuss the accident,” Lormes said as he poured dark-red wine into plastic glasses. He looked at Surling. “Drafton told Brian you think he needs a doctor.”

What were these guys after now? Surling wondered.

“He doesn’t need just any doctor. He needs one that specializes in radiation medicine. Plutonium can be eliminated from the body with the right treatment. The sooner it’s eliminated the better chance he’s got.”

“The longer cancer can be delayed,” Applenu said, his mood as dark as his beard. Lormes chewed and listened, the wrinkles around his mouth rolling like constantly shifting sand dunes. “Do we really know if he inhaled that much plutonium oxide?”

“That’s why he needs medical help. They can determine how much he ingested.” Surling explained urine and feces analyses and chemical treatments to speed elimination through those routes.

“I think we’ve got someone who can do that,” Lormes said to Applenu.

Surling understood: they were picking his brain so they could get a doctor to convince Drafton he was okay. “You’ll need a specialist on treating radiation sickness.”

Applenu perked up and turned to Lormes. “We’ll acquire the expertise.” He waved his hand as though his fork were a magic wand. “How do you think we did all this, the whole operation, the hot cell, atmosphere chambers, the ventilation system that kept the radioactivity confined to one room? Government labs don’t have better facilities. I took Simmons, Markum, and Maxwell into the furnace room this afternoon to start decontamination. We will have it decontaminated by tomorrow night. If we can do that, we can bloody well acquire the medical knowledge we need for Eric.”

Lormes smiled. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Brian. It’s just a minor setback.”

Surling sipped wine. “You don’t have time to acquire that expertise. Granted, maybe we’re talking about the difference between ten and twenty years before cancer strikes. But if he ingested enough plutonium oxide particles, he might not last more than a few weeks.”

“Cancer doesn’t strike that fast,” Applenu said.

“The greatest danger is his immune system. Irradiation knocks the hell out of the white blood cell count. After that, a minor infection could kill him.” Surling chewed his steak and watched Applenu and Lormes digest the new information. “Since Drafton has the expertise on the processing equipment, you’re going to need him.”

The light areas of Applenu’s face darkened, as if a shadow had passed over it. He put down his fork.

Lormes wiped his wrinkled mouth with his napkin and turned to Applenu. “I’ll make sure Drafton gets out here tomorrow morning. You and Simmons can learn his job. Meantime, I’ll find a doctor for him.”