Craig Kreident #1: Virtual Destruction (13 page)

“Hey!” he said, “What’s going on?”

Bodie unclipped one of the quart-sized metal cans and reached in, wearing his rubber glove.
 
He pulled out one of the small nickel-plated plutonium buttons from its wire cage bin—a small hemispherical disk about as big as a silver dollar.
 
He flashed it in the light.
 
“Hoo, it’s still warm.
 
That’s nice.”
 
Bodie made a great show of tightening his rubber glove.
 
He held the metal button up to Duane’s face.

“Plutonium,” he said in an evil whisper.
 
“Valuable stuff.
 
This is what they make the atomic bombs out of.
 
Highly radioactive.
 
You can feel the heat from the radiation.”
 
He smiled, then reached forward to yank the waist band of Duane’s trousers, reaching through the open flaps of his lab coat.

Duane squirmed.
 
“Stop it!” he said, but Bodie just snickered, grabbed the elastic of his briefs and dropped the slick plutonium button down into Duane’s underwear.

Terror flowed like lava through him.
 
He couldn’t believe what Bodie had done.
 
He could feel the plutonium button, heavy metal dropping down into his crotch.
 
It was warm
—it was warm, hot with the radiation!

He screamed.

He could feel the crackling neutrons or gamma rays or whatever they were called sizzling around his testicles.
 
He yowled another soul-wrenching scream and writhed, thrashing about like a snake.
 
The plutonium button still clung to his groin.
 
Duane howled as if he were being eaten alive.

In sudden shock, Bodie’s two friends simultaneously released his arms and stepped back, looking confused.
 
Bodie also lurched backward and slapped Duane on the face.

“Criminy, Duane!
 
Can’t you take a joke?
 
That’s not nice.”

Duane reached his hand down his pants, still sobbing, frantically grabbing for the hot piece of metal, which he tore out of his waistband and hurled to the other side of the vault where it clanged and clattered against the metal cages.
 
He tried to shout obscenities at Bodie, but his mouth would make only wordless noises.

“Come on, Duane,” one of Bodie’s friends said.
 
“It’s all right, for Pete’s sake.
 
The thing’s shielded.
 
Nickel plated.
 
You didn’t get any dose.
 
It’s safe.
 
Jeez, what a baby.”

But Duane never believed any of that.
 
He fled the vault leaving his cart in the hall.
 
He ran down the corridors turning left and right, not sure where he was going until finally he stumbled to the lunch room.
 
He grabbed his jacket and left the facility, taking sick leave for the rest of the afternoon.
 
He did receive a reprimand from his supervisor the following day for not logging and securing the radioactive samples on his card.

Again being stupid and naive, he had reported the incident to his supervisor.
 
Because of a long list of other infractions, Bodie was fired, his goon friends placed on temporary suspension.

And Duane’s car had been smashed with a sledgehammer in the middle of the night, a brick thrown through his living room window.
 
Threatening phone calls for weeks, and the police wouldn’t do anything.
 
He never told everything to Rhonda, just that one of the guys at work didn’t like him.
 
Rhonda couldn’t believe he would let some bully terrorize them, and she kept mocking his manhood.

Later, when Rhonda had gotten pregnant, Duane spent many sleepless nights biting his nails and afraid that some lizard-faced mutated monster might be growing within her womb.
 
He tried to convince himself that would never happen.

At first, baby Stevie had seemed normal, and Duane had felt frigid relief for a few months . . . until the mysterious symptoms of cerebral palsy started to show up.
 
The doctors insisted that Stevie’s condition had nothing to do with exposure to radiation in Duane’s job at the Plutonium Building.
 
In fact, they were
too
quick to say that, no doubt to prevent Duane from suing the Livermore Lab for wrongful exposure to harmful substances.

But Duane
knew
, no matter what the doctors said, no matter how safe everything supposedly was, he
knew
. . . and now Ronald had been playing games with radiation again.

Duane looked down at his green laminated badge.
 
Year after year he had put up with this torture.
 
No one would ever leave him alone.
 
He wasn’t as big or as tough or as confident as any of the others, but Duane wasn’t helpless.

He kept telling that to himself as he went back to his workstation still shaking, still afraid, hoping to get even with Ronald, or his buddies, or even Ralph Frick, or any of the other ones who preyed on his day after day.

It didn’t really matter to him.
 
He just had to prove that he wasn’t helpless.
 
He kept telling it to himself.

I'm not helpless
!

CHAPTER 13

Wednesday

Building 332

Plutonium Facility

Five minutes late, Hal Michaelson drove his government vehicle—a cream-colored Ford Escort—to the small portal building that granted access into the Superblock, the section of Lawrence Livermore Lab encased within double ultra-tight security fences.
 
Passing deeper and deeper through tightening rings of Lab security, he felt as if he were penetrating one of those dolls-within-dolls-within-dolls Russian toys he had picked up during his time on the disarmament team in the former Soviet Union.

At this level of security, though, the guards were heavily armed and authorized to use deadly force.

José Aragon was already waiting outside the gate, pacing back and forth in his dark green leisure suit and maroon tie.
 
His hair had been slicked back immaculately and his face beamed when he saw Michaelson, stretched back in a huge grin as if his face were made of plastic.

The Associate Director motioned him toward a vacant “Government Vehicle Only” parking spot and hurried over to open the door for him.
 
Aragon was an
AD
for God’s sake, Michaelson thought; he didn’t have to act like a bellboy.

“Thanks for coming, Hal,” Aragon said breathlessly.
 
“Let’s go right in.
 
I’ve got the paperwork finished.
 
We can give you a full-fledged tour of the Plutonium Facility.
 
You’ll see everything you need to know for your demo.”

Michaelson extricated his large body from the small Ford and stood looking down at the much shorter man.
 
“I thought Lesserec was taking care of all this.
 
Why do I need to waste my time here?”

“Oh, Hal!” Aragon said, “It’ll be good for you to see things first-hand.
 
It’s been a long time since you’ve been in this area, and I want to show you all of the improvements we’ve made.”

“Improvements?” Michaelson said, then snorted as they walked toward the tan portal building that stood in front of the chain-link fence.
 
“I thought the Plutonium Facility was shutting down.”

Aragon raised a hand.
 
“Not shutting down—defense conversion,” he said.
 
“Dual-use technologies.
 
Ways we can take advantage of what we already have in place, even after the end of the Cold War.
 
The Livermore Plutonium Facility is one of only two of its kind in the entire country.
 
We can’t afford to lose this one.”

“Right, right,” Michaelson said.
 
“Save the patriotic speech for later.
 
I don’t have much time.
 
Got a meeting with the Lab Director at 4:30.”

They entered through the door, passed their badges to
 
the guard sitting behind a glassed-in enclosure, and then walked through a sensitive metal detector before retrieving their badges.
 
Then they stepped through a second set of doors to the outside, on the other side of the Superblock fence now.

The Plutonium Facility itself was flat and practically featureless, the ugliest building in the entire square-mile lab: gray concrete splotched with age discolorations, veined with electrical and ventilation conduits running up the flat cement sides.
 
Flashing yellow and magenta lights announced alarm or preparatory conditions inside the building.
 
Crash-out escape doors allowed emergency exit from the inner laboratory rooms if a criticality alarm should sound.

“Just a sec,” Aragon said as he scurried across the asphalt courtyard to one of the building’s side doors.
 
“I have to check something.
 
Wait for me here.”

As he ducked inside, Michaelson stood under the warm afternoon sun, frowning.
 
It was just like Aragon to make
him
wait.
 
The boob could never get things right.
 
He’d proven that amply enough in the past.

Fifteen years earlier Michaelson had made his name at Livermore by launching the prestigious, big-budget Laser Implosion Fusion Facility: a groundbreaking, technological demonstration project that had implications for cheap and safe power generation to meet the nation’s needs for the next century or so.

Michaelson had built the LIFF into one of Livermore’s flagship projects with the full press treatment, brochures, tours, demonstrations, and high hopes.
 
But, as had happened so often throughout his career, Michaelson encountered severe difficulties with top management.
 
At the peak of the LIFF project, Michaelson had become incompatible with the then-Director of the Lab.

He had found himself quietly transferred to a new position as the head of a high-visibility on-site inspection team in the former Soviet Union.
 
As a disarmament expert who dominated the news, Michaelson captured the public spotlight—but in the eyes of Livermore management, their loose cannon was safely distant in the Ukraine, working with his dedicated team of inspectors, including his personal deputy, Diana Unteling. . . .

The LIFF had been left in the untried hands of José Aragon, a bright-eyed “yes man.”
 
Michaelson suspected Aragon had climbed up the ladder simply because of his minority status . . . and had continued to rise as people promoted him to get him out of their hair.

It had taken Aragon only a few months to trash the LIFF.
 
Because he was not a scientist, because he did not understand the real issues behind the project, Aragon had unknowingly misled Congress, made impossible concessions and unrealistic promises, and mixed up details . . . all of which led to missed deadlines—and the bad luck began to spiral.
 
Any
non-scientist might have screwed up just as much, but Aragon had been in the hot seat.

While in Kiev, Michaelson had gotten a tip-off from one of his former workers about how badly Aragon was screwing things up.
 
Enraged, Michaelson had flown back directly to Washington, leaving Diana Unteling in charge of the disarmament team.
 
He rushed like a hero to the rescue, barging into Congressional hearings, pulling strings, making phone calls, shouting at the right people, pleading with others, trying to save the LIFF funding from being canceled.
 
All to no avail.

The ripples of scandal had caused a great shakeup at Lawrence Livermore.
 
The Director himself was “promoted” to DOE Headquarters in Washington.
 
Michaelson was removed from the disarmament team because of his “notorious lack of responsibility and blatantly abandonment of the inspection team.”
 
And the huge and expensive LIFF, nearly completed, was mothballed without ever being switched on.

Aragon, the incompetent boob who had caused it all, found himself promoted to Deputy Associate Director, then Associate Director.
 
Would miracles never cease
? Michaelson thought.

He himself had been demoted to group leader, but Hal Michaelson had enough pull and enough connections that—starting from a scratch—he created a new project based on his on-site inspection experience halfway around the world.
 
With a mere scrap of discretionary funding from the Lawrence Livermore overhead budget, Michaelson had launched the groundbreaking work for his virtual reality on-site inspectors.
 
Now T Program had the enormous prestige of full presidential backing with an upcoming landmark demonstration.

And he was stuck waiting outside the Plutonium Facility, looking at his watch, and cursing José Aragon’s name.