Perilous Panacea (14 page)

Spanner spun his chair to the side and stared at the seashore picture on the wall. He sighed. “It’s an eye-opener when you rub elbows with this country’s movers and shakers. I enlisted in the army right out of high school. From what I saw there, most of the low-level officers and noncoms were some of your everyday Joes, your ordinary and extra-ordinary fuck-ups, bumbling along, barely keeping things running. I figured they were there because that’s the only people they could get to stay in the army. I figured those same people would have been at the bottom of the heap outside the military, and most of the high-ranking officers, your colonels and generals, the ones your ordinary nineteen-year-old private didn’t come in contact with, they must be the sharp ones who ran the show. I also figured people in high places in government and industry, those that ran the country, were sharp, and that’s why things stayed on an even keel.”

Spanner spun his chair back around to look at Saul. “I found out a long time ago it isn’t that way. The same bumbling assholes and fuck-ups that were sergeants and second lieutenants are now the colonels and generals. They’re also the big shots running this country and, I assume, running the world.”

He sighed, his face a tired red mask. “Sometimes I think the higher up you get in the government, the worse it gets. These guys get themselves elected to the senate—or to the presidency, for that matter—and they come in here knowing everything there is to know about running the government. They don’t want any mere government workers like us messing up their heads with facts. A bunch of them ‘high government officials,’ as the media call them, just have a meeting and decide what’s best for everybody. Most times that’s fine, because they’re just playing with themselves. But at times like this, the system scares the shit out of me.”

- - - - -

Things were looking up at last, Saul thought, as he hustled back into his office late in the afternoon, hoping to catch Spanner before he left for his five o’clock meeting. They had their best live lead yet, thanks to Patricia Hunter, a secretary in Congressman Morgan’s office. It turned out Austin fixed her up with a friend of his, a Brian Applenu. In his late twenties or early thirties, Applenu told Hunter he worked as a scientific attaché at the British Embassy. They went out four or five times, and then Applenu went back to Britain. She was waiting for him to return.

The phone rang. It was Mary. “Rick, we need your help. We’ve got sources at the Pentagon and at DOE, but we need facts.”

“A lack of facts never stops anybody in this town, much less your senator.”

“The Senator is going to be interviewed by Sheena Mosely, and he will hold a news conference. Our sources gave us information that wasn’t in Mosley’s piece. We now know there were three trucks in the hijacked convoy. We want you to verify the numbers.”

“Talk him out of the interview, Mary. This is not your everyday political bullshit. It’s serious. Throw in the typical public reaction whenever they hear the word nuclear, along with the press, and there’s no way to gauge what the people who’ve got the bomb material might do.”

“What do you know about the people with the bomb material?”

“Nothing. But you never know how a media story might spook them. Then what?”

“So you’re not going to help. Well then, we’ll see you in the newspapers.”

Chapter Nineteen

“You’ve got to admit it worked better than we planned,” Surling said, pouring coffee for them both. They were on a coffee break in their quarters. “He’s making plans for the two of you when the job’s finished.”

Curt wanted to smack the smug expression off Surling’s face. “You said it wouldn’t come to sex.” What a two weeks, he thought. Kissing Drafton was one thing, but now Drafton showed up in the computer room every night, a blanket stuffed into a large briefcase. First, he convinced Applenu he needed Curt to make some calculations for plutonium-conversion reactions and that they could do it after normal working hours. Then he told whoever was on guard duty they weren’t to be disturbed in their “work.”

“I can’t keep doing it,” Curt said. “What do you call it? Whoring?”

When Drafton first told him they were going to meet, he let Surling convince him of the necessity of it, a life-or-death situation. Mentally, he pumped himself up and did it. It’s a job, just like becoming a consultant when you really wanted to build robots: you go out and do what’s required. Anything the client wanted, you delivered. You whored. In consulting, it was either whore or go back to working for someone else and have still less time for robot design. Necessity, the mother of invention: just like the prostitutes promenading most city streets seeking to feed their kids or their drug habit.

“Whatever it is, the alternative’s a lot worse,” Surling said.

“But you don’t have to do what I’m doing. What’s so pathetic is the guy needs me. He was shattered by Derek’s death, and I’m his savior. He talks about us being partners for life.”

“It’ll get us out of here. That’s what matters. Hey, have you ever needed anybody?”

Curt considered the question, another of the innumerable personal questions that invaded his mind the past weeks. Before this, he’d wasted little time pondering non-technical questions. He left feelings to Lori.

“I probably haven’t needed anyone until now. Ever since my leg was demolished, I’ve been busy making my own breaks and trying to take care of myself.”

One lousy farm accident ruined his basketball career and propelled him toward Miami Beach and Drafton. Of course, the accident gave him his successful career and Lori, when she strolled into his hospital room one afternoon, looked at his leg hoisted up by the rope hanging from the ceiling, and said, “Scott can be such an asshole.” Her brother Scott’s reckless driving flipped him off the hay truck and shattered his leg and knee.

Now, for the first time, he needed her. He wanted her to be pregnant. This time he would not miss the experience. But would his head hold together until the baby came? Would he be there when the baby came?

Surling stared at his coffee. “That was me once. I had everything and didn’t need anybody to get in the way of what I was doing. Then Al died. I lost one of my most important possessions, and up until then I didn’t even know it was important.”

“Al?”

“My son. After he was killed, everything I was busy with seemed pointless. My life’s work was just a big mindfuck boiling down to so much egotistical, self-serving bullshit. I was like Drafton, I needed something…somebody, and there wasn’t anybody there. They all left while I was writing my books and papers, studying nuclear chemistry. My daughters were married, and my wife was torn up about Al. She and I had gone our separate ways years before. She had friends to help her get through it. I didn’t have anyone, not even her.”

Curt stared at Surling, wondering if he should go to him like he went to Drafton. Surling’s words echoed Lori’s complaints about his too many trips and too many late hours. God, he wanted just one of those nights back that he passed up for a session on the computer.

Surling tried to look Curt in the eye. “Drafton needs you, but we need Drafton more.”

Curt wondered why he wanted to please Surling. Did he remind him of Dad? When Curt turned five, Dad began molding him into a basketball star. From grade school through college, up to the time of his accident, Dad was his wise coach and cheerleader. The accident devastated Dad, and then transformed him. Would Curt’s death have affected him more?

The day after doctors told him Curt’s basketball career was over, he showed up at the hospital drunk, ready to sue Lori’s father. Two days later, sober, he told Curt they’d prove the doctors wrong. By the time Dad got around to a lawyer, Curt would not go along with the suit, because he and Lori were in love. Ironically, Lori’s father didn’t want her to have anything to do with Curt either. His reason, according to Lori: “He comes from a family of losers.”

Curt wanted to prove to Surling he would do anything to save their lives, but for the first time in ten years of proving he wasn’t a loser, his mind was a hopper full of uncertainties and fears that he wanted to empty and forget. “I’m trying, Bob. My wife: what about her? Drafton keeps saying I’m bisexual, like Derek. He keeps saying he loves me.”

“It’s survival. Your wife will understand.”

“Will she? I sure don’t.”

Surling tried to laugh. “What if it was Erica Drafton, a good-looking blonde? You’d make a token protest and then fuck her. You’d understand that, but your wife would have a harder time.”

“You don’t understand. How would you get yourself up for a homosexual act? For awhile last night, I thought I wouldn’t be able to, you know, get it up.” He pictured the scene, recalling Markum’s comment about Surling doing it “doggy” style. “I finally decided to let myself go. I just let Drafton take over. But this is what slays me: I think I enjoyed some of it. Will Lori understand that?”

“Maybe that’s the best way. Enjoy it. Fantasize about an Erica.”

“Don’t you have a conscience? A person can’t mess with his head and come out okay.”

Surling reached out and patted Curt’s hand. Curt jerked away.

“It’ll be okay. What’s more obscene: you giving Drafton a blow job or these guys building atom bombs that blow away a few hundred thousand people? Think about that.”

Bob Surling turned professor and explained how he and Drafton had precipitated plutonium oxalate from nitrate solutions, separated the precipitate with a centrifuge, put it in a furnace, and fired it to get plutonium oxide. They put the oxide in a reaction vessel with calcium metal and reduced oxide to plutonium metal.

“Drafton is up there right now taking more oxide out of the furnace. Then we’ll make more metal, from which we will make a plutonium casting that you will help them machine. After that, an atom bomb is a slam dunk.”

Surling stood to go for more coffee. “Everything worked so well in the process that Applenu had Beecher come in and take before-and-after photos and videos as if they were going to publish the…”

Surling was interrupted by a muffled pop from outside the room. An alarm growled to life in the hall.

“Was that an explosion?” Surling asked, setting down the coffee pot and heading for the door. “It’s got to be a radiation alarm in the chemical-processing room. Drafton’s up there.”

He banged on the door. After a short wait, Markum appeared, but blocked the doorway.

Curt went to stand beside Surling. He sniffed for smoke, hoping. Nothing in the air but the normal mustiness.

Maxwell shouted from somewhere in the other hall, his words indecipherable over the roaring alarm. Applenu and Simmons hustled up the other hall toward the chemical-processing room. Applenu yelled for someone to shut off the alarm. Markum shoved Surling and Curt back into the room and slammed the door in their face.

Like an angry, wounded giant that finally gives up his ghost, the alarm sputtered and died. The door opened, and Markum, his face pale, ordered them out into the ten-foot-wide hall and shoved them toward the intersecting hall that ran the length of the building. To the right, the hall was bounded by the machine room on the left and the wall of their quarters on the right, and it ended at a door with an attached warning:

EMERGENCY EXIT

ALARM SOUNDS WHEN DOOR OPENS

Markum forced them the other way, past the computer room (next to the machine room) and the hot cell on their right, and on the left was the shower room, then a solid metal door marked SUPPLIES, and one with a frosted-glass window marked OFFICE.

Applenu waited in front of the dark-green door at the end of the corridor, the entrance to the chemical-processing and furnace rooms. “It’s Drafton,” he said, his black eyes like beacons energized by panic, the wild-eyed gaze of a man plunging from a forty story building. “There was a bloody explosion in the furnace room.”

Relief flooded Curt’s body. With Drafton dead, his nightmare ended. Only the nightmare of Surling’s prediction of sure death for the both of them remained.

“How the hell did that happen?” Surling asked.

“Who knows, but what do we do now?”

Simmons and Maxwell stood next to Applenu and kept glancing down the hall toward the exit.

Surling yanked open the door. “Let’s go.”

Applenu’s head jerked back as if hit by an invisible fist. “No bloody way, mate. All our radioactive materials are in those two rooms. That bloody shit can kill you.”

Surling glared at him, started to enter, and then turned to Curt. “Come on.” When Curt didn’t move, Surling grabbed his arm and jerked him through the door.

To get to the furnace room and Drafton, they had to go through the chemical-processing room. Before that, they had to pass through an airlock, a device that prevented the transfer of radioactive contamination from the chemical-processing room to the corridor.

This airlock was an eight-foot-square room under negative pressure with two air-tight doors, one to the corridor and the other to the chemical-processing room. One wall contained bins with protective suits to wear inside the chemical-processing and furnace rooms whenever a danger of contamination existed. After working in a contaminated area, the suits were disposed of in airtight bins in a roped off area on the other wall.

Surling and Reedan slipped into bright yellow coveralls that fit like a baby’s pajamas and covered them from their feet to their necks. Sleeves tied off tight at the wrists. They tied a yellow “cape” around their necks and snugged a yellow hood to their heads. After pulling on long yellow gloves, they donned black breathing masks with a canister filter that protruded from their right cheek like a bulbous growth, giving them the appearance of moon men.

Surling grabbed a gray, lunch-box size instrument with a dial on top and a microphone-shaped probe attached to the box by a three-foot cord and led Curt into the chemical-processing room. Halting just inside the door, Surling reached as far forward as possible with the probe and checked the dial. After another step and another check of the dial, he motioned Curt into the room.

Glass and metal chemical-reaction vessels stood undisturbed on shelves and work benches. Also undisturbed was the atmosphere chamber, its glass windows dark in the center of the room. The long black rubber gloves used to manipulate toxic material inside the chamber hung limp from entry ports, like the hands of strangled occupants unable to escape from within.

In the far corner, unopened shipping containers with their yellow-and-red triangular radioactivity warning labels triggered chills in Curt’s spine. Across the room, another air-lock door beckoned, the only barrier between them and Drafton in the furnace room.

When he worked at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant, Curt rarely strayed from his computer, staying as far as possible from radioactivity. His secret: he was scared of the stuff, and that terror now threatened to paralyze him. He watched Surling, hoping he would turn back. What if the radiation counter didn’t work and the room was full of radioactive particles? What if the filters in their masks were not the right ones? Nausea knotted his gut, crowding in beside the fear and uncertainty that seared his insides the past weeks. Applenu wouldn’t come in. What did he know?

Surling inched his way toward the bank of instruments on the wall with the airlock door, his probe arm sweeping the air in front of him, scanning for an invisible hazard. After checking the instruments on the wall, he peeled off his mask and motioned for Curt to do the same.

Curt hesitated and then stripped off the mask, allowing the air-conditioned room to cool his sweat-soaked face.

“Nothing got into this room yet,” Surling said. He waved at the dials on the wall. “But the activity in the furnace room is ten-thousand times higher than it was this morning. It’s the alpha radiation from the plutonium.”

Surling studied the gauges, his nose practically scraping the wall as he tried to see without the glasses he couldn’t wear under the mask. He flipped a switch on the wall, cleared his throat, and called into the intercom speaker, his voice calm. “Are you there, Eric?”

Like bodies down the escape chute of a crashed plane, Drafton’s words hurtled through the wall. “The vacuum furnace exploded open, and the powder just rushed out at me.”

“Did you get a critical mass together?” Surling turned to Curt. “A critical mass could set off a miniature atomic explosion.”

“No way,” Drafton said. “We checked those calculations too many times. The glass viewing port failed. The glass didn’t cut me, but plutonium oxide powder flew out at me, all over me and into my face. Bob, I breathed in a lot of fine powder.” Drafton paused, his next words squeezed through the wall like tooth paste from an almost empty tube. “I’ll…I’ll die…from lung cancer.”

“You’ll be okay, Eric.”

Surling turned to Curt. Without glasses, his blue eyes stared. He motioned Curt to the speaker. “Eric, Curt is here.”

“Curt. Hey, thanks for coming, buddy.”

Curt struggled to erase thoughts that wished Drafton dead. Back to his job, he thought. “We’re here to help, Eric.”

“Is Brian there?”

Surling winked at Curt and shouldered him away from the speaker. “Applenu’s not here. Curt and I will get you out without spreading radioactivity beyond that room.”

“Thanks. I’m in the airlock. I put my clothing in the contaminated containers and showered. How long before I…before I die, Bob? I’m only twenty-eight. I’ve…we’ve got plans.”