Perilous Panacea (17 page)

At the sound of Hearn’s voice, he suspected trouble. “I’ve got some good news and bad news, old chap. The bad news is in the latest newspaper story. They have your picture and have you connected with the missing material. They also have our sick friend’s picture.”

Applenu sat up, now wide awake. “How did they get that?”

“They are not really pictures, but sketches, and not very good ones. With the beards, it would be difficult to identify you, even for someone that knew you.”

“How did they connect us to this?”

“They have you connected with our late friend, whose picture they’ve had for some time. They found someone who connected the two of you to our late friend, and the story says you two are ‘persons of interest’ that the FBI wants to talk to. I think you know who fingered you.” Hearn chuckled. “You probably fingered her some.”

Patricia Hunter! They obviously traced Austin back to the Congressman’s office. Applenu had looked forward to seeing more of her, a lot more, but now he could forget it. Worse than not seeing her, where would he go once it was over? His picture was just the start of what they would discover. Where could he go? Iran? No bloody way. And what about his family? How could he help them if he had to go into hiding?

“They have your first and last name, but they only know our sick friend’s first name.”

“Well, they won’t find us, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe you should shave your beard. Do not give your name unless you have to. And then use another one.”

These days he didn’t see anyone, except when he went out to eat. He’d been out twice with the bit of stuff he met at the Howard Johnson Lounge, but not in the last few weeks. Too busy. Told her his name was Nigel Williams. American birds liked British names like Colin, Ian, Nigel, Trevor. When they started the project, Austin set him up with other alternate identifications, which he could use as required. The papers were in the knapsack with the cash.

“Keep our sick friend under cover, and get the product finished as fast as possible.” Hearn said. “In the meantime, we will give the pursuers something more to think about than looking for two people they only have some rough sketches of.”

“You also said you had some good news.”

“Check your e-mail for flight information on the arrival of your personnel into Amsterdam. Make arrangements to have someone meet them.”

“They are really getting out.”

“They will be in Amsterdam on Monday.”

As soon as he was off the phone, Applenu went to his laptop and accessed his e-mail. They were to arrive at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on Iran Air 659 at 17:20 hours on Monday. He e-mailed the information to BahAmin and told her to put their plan into operation.

- - - - -

Curt was in the computer room with Applenu when Surling burst in. Surling started to speak to Applenu, hesitated in mid sentence when he saw him without his black beard and mustache. He looked ten years younger. “You’ve got to get Drafton to a doctor,” he said, talking faster than usual. “He can barely stand up, and he’s spitting blood. Plutonium irradiation affects the immune mechanism, and…”

“It’s not plutonium,” Applenu said. “It’s a lung infection. He saw a local doctor, but we’re sending him to New York this afternoon.”

Although Curt and Surling had watched Drafton’s daily deterioration over the past week, at the words immune mechanism, Curt panicked. “It is the plutonium oxide he inhaled, isn’t it?”

“Nothing like that,” Applenu said. He rubbed a hand over his smooth chin. “It’s a respiratory infection. According to the doctor, it could become pneumonia. I’ll go send him back to his apartment.”

When Applenu left, Surling exploded. “Goddammit! Plutonium just got its first victim and ripped up our ticket to freedom. Couple a lung infection with an immune system shot to shit, and he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance. His white blood count is probably zilch.”

“Immune system means AIDS, right?” Curt said. “It’s AIDS, isn’t it?”

“What?” Surling asked, walking over to Curt.

“AIDS. With AIDS they lose their immunity to disease. I’ll get it, too. I did all those things for nothing. We’re not going to escape…I can’t sleep…I can’t live with myself, and now I’m going to wind up with AIDS. Even if I get out of here, I’m dead.”

“It’s the plutonium. His immune system is shot, okay, but from plutonium. Forget AIDS. Concentrate on finding a new way to save our asses. I was thinking maybe we could get some plutonium oxide and threaten to turn it loose on them. But how do we do that without doing ourselves in?”

“I know it’s AIDS. We didn’t use condoms because Eric said he’d tested safe.”

Surling ignored him. “I’ve thought of rigging the ventilation system—some kind of timed device. We could rig it up so it would push contaminated air at them, but they’d just evacuate the building and wait us out.”

It was Surling’s fault, Curt thought. “I can’t blame Eric. You shouldn’t have made me do it. Maybe I deserve AIDS for what I did.”

“Goddammit, Curt, snap out of it. It was either them or us. And that skinny faggot was one of them. Forget AIDS.”

Curt stared at the monitor. No answers there.

They were jerked from their thoughts by yelling in the hall. The door banged open, and Markum ordered them out.

At the end of the hall outside the chemical-processing room, Applenu and Simmons were crouched down and bent over something on the floor. A coughing Drafton lay sprawled on his back, a bunched-up white lab coat under his head.

As Curt and Surling approached, Applenu looked up. “He just keeled over. Either of you know what to do?”

“Get him to a hospital,” Surling said.

Applenu and Simmons stood up. “He keeps asking for Reedan,” Applenu said, rubbing his bare face.

Drafton saw Curt and mumbled something that degenerated into an indecipherable wheeze. Curt inched toward Drafton as Simmons backed away rapidly, obviously glad to escape out of coughing range.

Curt squatted down and saw his future self reflected on Drafton’s face, blood-laced saliva seeping from the corner of his mouth, a trickle of blood oozing from one nostril. His red, watery eyes beckoned Curt forward. Mouth quivering, his first word triggered a cough that rattled through his body in spasms, stiffening it until it seemed about to levitate above the gray-tiled floor. When the cough eased, his eyes brimmed with tears. With a blood-soaked handkerchief he swiped weakly at drool dribbling from his mouth, but he succeeded only in smearing the pink saliva across his chin.

Curt started to grab the handkerchief, but held back. He wasn’t about to touch that AIDS-contaminated rag. He wanted to run, his body shaking worse than the day Drafton got his radiation shower.

“Curt,” Drafton gasped, “I’m sorry I let you down.” He paused to force in a breath, his eyes rolling back to locate Applenu, who had stepped back to talk to Surling.

Curt leaned in closer, his ear six inches from Drafton’s mouth, Drafton’s damp breath warm on the side of his face.

Drafton squeezed back a cough. “You and Bob may be right. They might not turn you loose…I…I’m sorry I can’t help.” He began to cough.

Curt stared at Drafton and remembered the purple-blue face of the drowned man he saw on the banks of the Mississippi River when he was eleven, his only other direct encounter with death. Tentatively, he touched the back of Drafton’s hand. “You’ll be back, Eric.”

Drafton’s head rolled side-to-side on the lab coat as he fought back a cough and tried to breathe. “I always worried about that bomb. The prototypes they built…that they’ve still got in this country.” He stifled another cough, and when he saw Applenu move in behind Curt, he tried to talk fast. “Thanks for everything, Curt. I…I love you.”

Curt rubbed Drafton’s hand and stared at the empty husk that fought to remain on the floor when he coughed. When would this end? How do you respond to those words? AIDS or not, he and Surling used him, and he apologized for not helping them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Curt saw Markum and Maxwell down the hall, watching, leering smiles on their lips. No way to think straight. He asked for AIDS when he decided to do what Surling asked.

Curt started to stand, but instead reached inside himself and pulled out words that he never seemed able to use the way they should be used. Lori accused him of it once during an argument, and although he denied it and said he could use them at the right time, she was right. He couldn’t use them with his parents and hardly ever used them with Lori, even though he sometimes felt it. No, not now. This was not the time. He squeezed Drafton’s sweaty hand. “I love you, Eric,” he whispered.

Drafton’s smile barely lit his face before a new spasm rumbled through his body and shook it away.

Curt stood and looked at Applenu. “You’ve got to get him to a hospital.”

Applenu motioned to Maxwell and Simmons. “Take him to the car.”

Each man grabbed an end of the limp body, and when the middle sagged between them like a hammock, Markum grabbed the waist. Surling hustled to the other side to help. As they trudged down the hall, Surling glanced over his shoulder at Applenu. He sidled right toward the door marked OFFICE.

Markum motioned with his head for Applenu to grab Drafton. With his hands free, Markum reached into his jacket and came out with a gun. “Hold it right there, Surling.”

Surling stopped.

“Now, get back here.”

Like members of a funeral procession, Curt, Surling, and Markum trailed the three men and their burden toward the door marked OFFICE: another blocked escape route.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Surling stopped pacing and stared through the thick lead-glass window of the hot cell, trying to ignore the ache in his head from too many beers the previous night. The headache reminded him why he didn’t turn to alcohol after Al died.

Surling, Simmons, and Reedan waited in the hot-cell room for Applenu. Simmons perched on a high stool next to Surling, silently staring into the cell. To their right, Reedan sat hunched over the computer keyboard, diddling with the machine while he studied the monitor.

Since they carted Drafton away the previous day, nothing had been said about him. Surling knew why but asked anyway. “Did you get Drafton to that New York doctor?”

Simmons glanced at Surling, and then stared back into the hot cell. “He died at the apartment two hours after he left here.”

“Died,” Reedan said.

Surling watched Reedan attack the keyboard with violent keystrokes, as if trying to enter his thoughts into the computer in the next room and merge his brain with it. Whenever one of the keyboards was around, Reedan slipped behind it. Evidently, the computer did his thinking, and he’d probably let the computer do his grieving, although grieving was not what Surling called it. How do you grieve for a queer who sold his ass to help a bunch of assholes build an atomic bomb? Then again, they would be grieving for themselves soon enough.

After they carted Drafton off, Reedan crumbled like a dead cactus in the Arizona desert, just because Drafton told him he loved him. Surling couldn’t figure out whether Reedan was more torn up because of what Drafton said or because he reciprocated. Said he felt obligated. Probably wonders if he meant the words, probably wonders if he might be queer. Reedan actually expressed sorrow for how they—he and Surling—used Drafton. Used him? Misused him, according to Reedan. That, and AIDS: Reedan was convinced he would get AIDS.

Dumb fuck, Surling thought, as he watched Reedan type. What about their own deaths, which now loomed as inevitable as this bomb? What did his computer say about that?

Reedan stared at the output on the monitor, probably using the data to scare away new visions of death before they got their claws into his brain. Death’s sting, Surling thought. For an eighty-four-year-old man, death should probably always loom in the mind, but until he wound up in this hell hole, it had not dogged him. Over the last few days though, it had clung to his entire being like a constant ache. At eighty-four, maybe he should be thankful for being around this long, still able to get it up without the Viagra crap. But he was still not ready to accept the end of it all.

Surling turned to Simmons, who continued to stare into the cell, his crinkled steel-gray head shaking ever so slightly, like a leaf in a negligible breeze. “Why didn’t you take Drafton to a hospital?”

“We couldn’t.”

“So you killed him,” Reedan said, then loudly smashed three keys and watched the screen fill with columns of numbers and letters.

Reedan and computers, Surling thought. According to Reedan, computers could do anything and everything; you just had to figure out how to use them. Earlier in his rambling on about Drafton and AIDS, he said that the computer would get them out of this mess.

“How?” Surling had asked.

“I’m working on a plan.”

Maybe he could blow it like he blew Drafton, Surling thought, because it was obviously a sexual object for him. Given his obsession with the computer, he had to be completely fucked up sexually even before he ran into Drafton.

Simmons tried to get Reedan’s attention, speaking down at him. “He died. It was an accident. I liked the boy. We all did.”

When Reedan didn’t look up, Simmons turned to Surling. “They were going to take him back to New York. Nobody thought he would go that fast. He choked to death. You saw how he was coughing. He just turned blue and stopped breathing.”

Surling ignored Simmons. “Where the hell’s Applenu?” He growled as he studied the lathe, milling machine, and grinder inside the hot cell. Hooked to the computer next door, the machines in the cell were operated through the computer, just like the ones in the machine room where the non-radioactive material was processed. By machining plutonium and uranium in the isolation of the hot cell, all the excess radioactive “hot” material removed from the bomb parts would remain isolated in the cell and would not contaminate the rest of the building.

Surling grabbed two hot-cell controls on the ends of the metal arms that dangled from the ceiling like jointed metal grapevines. The feel of the cold steel manipulators in his hands revived memories of how he once maneuvered such controls like a pro, memories of long hours struggling to bring forth a bomb to save the world from Hitler. Memories of youth. Build a bigger and better bomb and save the world. They succeeded, at least in building a bigger and better bomb that blew the hell out of a Japanese city.

He glanced around the inside of the hot cell, so different from those jury-rigged boxes at Los Alamos in 1944, and so much safer. This cell consisted of a ten-by-twenty-foot room with lead-lined, concrete-and-steel walls several-feet thick that protected operators from high-energy radiation that can penetrate normal thicknesses of concrete and steel.

Surling, Reedan, and Simmons—the operators—were in a six-foot-wide room that ran the twenty-foot length of the cell. Through the three-foot-thick lead-glass window, Surling spotted the dummy steel specimen that simulated the plutonium that would eventually be transferred from the furnace room next door into the cell. It would then be put into the lathe, and the computer would take over. Today, the dummy specimen would be machined exactly like the plutonium would be machined later. Applenu insisted on a trial run for everything.

Surling turned his attention to a crescent wrench that lay on the work bench in the front part of the cell. He pulled and shoved on the control in his right hand, and a three-fingered metal hand on the end of a metal arm inside the cell dropped from the ceiling and grabbed the wrench. Another flick of the wrist, and the hand behind the window quickly traversed half the distance of the chamber to the lathe, where it fit the wrench to a nut.

While he worked the controls, he mulled over the possibility of using Simmons to escape. “Now that you’ve gotten rid of Drafton, how do you feel about killing us?” he asked as he shoved his metal-extended left arm toward the floor. On the other side of the window, a second arm descended from the ceiling toward the wrench. Surling twisted his hand, and motors in the controls whirred. Inside, the second metal hand adjusted the wrench. With a flick of his right hand and more whirring motors, the first hand fit the wrench to the nut. A twist of the wrist outside resulted in a twist of the wrench inside.

Simmons chuckled. “Nobody’s going to kill you.”

“You believe that? Drafton didn’t.”

“Sure, I believe it. If you guys are smart and don’t go to the cops…you will be…let go.”

Surling twisted the metal hands and released the wrench from the nut and lifted it into the air. He turned to Simmons, his hands gripping the controls. “Maybe they won’t need you either when they get their bomb. Maybe you’ll know too much, too.”

Simmons’s eyes registered momentary panic before he could force a loud laugh.

With a wide grin, Surling’s hands dropped from the controls to his sides. Behind the massive window, the wrench tumbled silently to the workbench, like a TV picture without sound.

“We all fall down,” he said. “Just like Drafton.”

- - - - -

Although his mind was distracted by the latest Mosely article, Rick Saul scanned the numerous e-mails with field-office reports on SWISILREC, waiting for George Spanner to return from his meeting in the Director’s office.

Spanner arrived and flopped into the chair next to Rick’s desk, happy to escape his office phone. “I just came from the Director’s office, and he and Dowel are highly pissed because the White House is highly pissed about Hughson and Mosely. They figure either you or I leaked Austin’s picture and the sketches of Applenu and Drafton.”

After talking to Mosely previously, Saul suggested leaking the photos to Spanner, who liked the idea. He presented it to the oversight committee, who rejected it. “Did you tell them we didn’t know anything about it?” Saul asked.

“I told them we didn’t give hard copies or digital copies to anyone, which sealed his case that the leak had to come from you or me. So how did she get them?”

“Did you check your e-mail recently?” Saul asked as he tapped keys on his keyboard and pointed Spanner to the screen. “Mosely forwarded this e-mail with the sketches attached. It’s from the same address as the previous one she sent with Austin’s picture. This one has a message explaining the sketches and is signed An Inquisitive Friend.”

Jeremy Slaughter appeared in the doorway and excused the interruption. “I’ve got some news on the Trojan Horse and trap door we talked about,” he said. “We found the programs on our computer. I checked with Orman at NNSA, and ours are identical to those they attributed to Austin. He obviously put it on ours when he helped us with security, and he probably used the program to monitor e-mails on SWISLREC before he cashed out. What is ironic is that the Trojan horse program is Carnivore.”

“The sniffing program the Bureau uses to monitor e-mails on ISPs?” Spanner asked.

“That’s right. But instead of installing a removable disk on the computer like the Bureau does when they get a court order to monitor someone’s e-mails, he stored e-mails in a file on our computer. Then he used the trap door to download the file and learn what is going on in the case.”

“So now we know where the leak is,” Saul said. “Our inquisitive friend knows how to get into our computer.”

“But who is it?” Spanner asked, motioning Slaughter to the other chair in the cubicle. “We agreed Austin put the Trojan horse on the NNSA computer and planned to use the trap door to follow what was going on at NNSA after he left. But if he’s dead, he can’t use the trap door.”

“That leaves three possibilities,” Saul said. “He either gave the information to somebody else, or the trap door is not the source of the leak. The only other possibility is that Austin isn’t dead.”

“That’s it,” Spanner said. “It was part of his elaborate plan, which included him faking his death with a pile of burned bones. That smart, sleazy son of a bitch is still alive and working the rest of his plan, which is to keep us jumping through hoops.”

“So he did us a favor, since we wanted to release the photos of Brian Applenu and Eric,” Saul said.

“But he accomplished his goal of stirring things up here, at DOD, DOE, and the White House, and he didn’t lose anything because he knew we would eventually release the pictures. He did give us one other thing: we now know he’s alive.”

“There are still the other two possibilities, and we’ve got a pile of Austin’s bones in the D.C. morgue,” Saul said, turning to Slaughter. “Did you trash the file of e-mails the Trojan horse program uses?”

“Not yet. We wanted to investigate the details of how it was used. We checked when it was last accessed, and that was at 05:35 this morning. So it probably won’t be accessed again today.”

“Good. I suggest we keep the program in place for now, and we monitor the file to make sure there isn’t anything in there we don’t want to get out. In addition, I will send an e-mail to George containing false information and see if it shows up in a Mosely article. That will confirm how the information is getting out.”

Spanner agreed, and they composed a message from Saul to Spanner describing how the FBI arrested two men in New York City that were alleged to be involved in the hijacking. After they finished, Spanner instructed Slaughter to send Saul all the messages in the file that had not been seen by the intruder. Slaughter agreed to set up a file to receive all field-office reports without them being sniffed by the Trojan horse program. From now on, the Trojan horse file would only contain innocuous field-office e-mails prepared to deceive the intruder.

“Can you set a trap for whoever enters through the trap door and trace them back to the computer they are using?” Spanner asked Slaughter.

“We can try, but they probably go through some other computers to make tracing them impossible.”

“We also need to send somebody to tap Mosely’s phones and try to trace the source of the e-mails, although that’s probably a lost cause. When are our people going to admit the whole story and quit hiding behind national security?” Saul asked.

Spanner laughed. “The Director says they want to keep politics out of SWISILREC, and that’s impossible if the press and congress is involved. Even so, he’s having Dowel form a committee with me and the PIO to plot ways the Bureau can enhance its image when the Administration does go public. Or when we capture the people who stole the material, whichever comes first.”

After Slaughter left, Saul turned to the computer and pointed to an e-mail that had come in just before Spanner arrived. “We might be making some progress. This e-mail is from Phoenix in response to our search for missing chemists and computer experts. The Tempe police have an unofficial report from Arizona State University of a possible missing chemistry professor.”

“Unofficial? Possibly missing?”

“Seems this Professor Surling had a consulting assignment in Philadelphia over a month ago, and the university hasn’t heard from him since. He was supposed to be gone a week. His wife says he’s not missing, because he called three times from Philadelphia to say the consulting job was extended indefinitely and not to worry. She didn’t know exactly where in Philadelphia he was. He told her it was a secret project.”

“So why are the university people worried?”

“Surling’s got five graduate students, and he’s never gone off for more than a week without leaving instructions for them. Even when he left instructions, he’d check back frequently to keep updated. This time, he hasn’t called them once.”

“Did they try to call him on his cell phone?”

“They tried, but his cell must be turned off.”

“Think he’s our man? Or is it another false alarm, like that missing computer expert we turned up last week? Must be as many kooks in colleges as there are working for the government,” Spanner said, referring to the Northwestern University professor who’d been reported missing. After checking up on him, it turned out he’d been reported missing twice before. Seems he had a habit of taking off for parts unknown without telling anyone, like the time he took a three-week train trip across Canada to Hudson Bay.