November 4, 1943
It is thrilling. And it is horrifying.
We have built the world’s first plutonium production reactor, and it works. It is a huge leap, technologically, beyond the Chicago pile. It is far bigger in scale and far more complex than Fermi’s simple, can-we-do-it? experiment. It has been built to operate not for a few experiments, but for many years.
And it has been built with the dreadfully single-minded purpose of making implements of wholesale death.
Fermi’s makeshift reactor had the rationalization of research attached to it. It was a scientific gamble, and no one knew whether it could sustain a fission reaction. We all had the luxury of being eager and excited when it succeeded.
Now we know, beyond doubt, that controlled fission works, and we know that we can scale it up, bigger and deadlier. We know we can start it, stop it, speed it up, slow it down, exactly as we wish. We now know we can harness it to create slow heat or instantaneous explosions or exotic new elements. Including plutonium, which careful calculations indicate will make just as good a bomb as uranium.
“Just as good a bomb”: what an ironic, oxymoronic, and nihilistic phrase. One might as well speak of “a beautiful murder” or “excellent torture.”
Groves and his armies of construction are already building the mammoth next stage — gargantuan versions of this reactor in the Columbia River Valley, in some godforsaken part of eastern Washington. They’ll send me out to make sure it works, and it will. And within months after they start up, those reactors will produce enough plutonium to obliterate entire cities in Japan.
When I look at the face of the reactor we’ve built here — a twenty-foot-high wall of concrete, pierced by hundreds of neatly placed holes where slugs will be irradiated to create plutonium — the technician in me feels pride. A tight, tidy gridwork of tubes burrows through the heart of the reactor in a pattern dictated by meticulous science. But the human being in me screams “no!” at what we’ve done, and why, and especially at what we’re racing to do. I have no God to pray to, but if I did, I would pray for an end to this terrible endeavor, and to the war that makes such madness seem like sanity. And to my own conflicted complicity.
— LN
CHAPTER 19
Jim Emert called just as I was about to swing by the hospital and visit Garcia; he wondered if I could sit in on a Novak meeting in an hour. “Thornton says the Bureau has some leads on the radiation source.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. I figured Garcia would rather I attend the meeting than hover outside his window. Miranda was planning to visit him at lunchtime; by then she’d need a break from the skull she was reconstructing. A contractor’s crew in North Knoxville, demolishing a block of old houses to make way for another strip mall, had unearthed a human skeleton. The bones, which were old and fragile, had been no match for the bulldozer that had churned them up. An adult human skeleton normally contained 206 bones; from the construction site, we’d sifted somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pieces. Miranda had weeks of tedious reassembly work ahead.
We met in a conference room in the Oak Ridge Municipal Building. When I told Emert and Thornton what I’d learned from Beatrice about Novak’s homosexuality, the FBI agent looked intrigued; when I described his crisis of conscience over his role in producing plutonium for the bomb, he looked troubled. He scribbled some notes, and when he finished, he shook his head doubtfully. “A ninety-three-year-old,” he said. “Seems harmless and grandfatherly, right? Then you start poking around in his past and you find pictures of a murdered guy, and a secret sexual life, and misgivings about helping his country win the war. Funny what a good disguise old age can be.” He shook his head again, this time as if to shake off his concerns about Novak and to refocus on what he’d come to tell us. “Okay, so here’s the latest from our forensic rad lab in Savannah River,” he said. “It is indeed iridium-192, as Duane Johnson determined the day of the incident,” he said. “It’s a sealed, metallic point source; you guys saw it in the morgue, so you already knew that. Tiny, but hotter than hell. It was roughly ninety-eight curies at the time of the autopsy. By now, it’s down in the mid-eighties, maybe high seventies. Eight weeks from now, it’ll be at fifty curies. You still wouldn’t want to swallow it, though.”
“Or pick it up with your fingers,” I said. “Or hold it in the palm of your hand.” I was surprised at the angry edge I heard in my voice.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, looking at me with concern.
“So how the hell did it wind up in Novak’s gut?” said Emert. “Unless somebody jammed it down his throat, he picked it up and put it in his mouth and swallowed it. Any chance he might have done it on purpose? Did bomb-guilt finally get to him? Or maybe fear of spending years as an invalid with no family to take care of him?”
“The Behavioral Sciences folks don’t think so,” Thornton said. “They’ve talked to a lot of Novak’s neighbors. He was energetic and positive. The guy walked a mile or two every day; hell, he was playing tennis until a couple years ago. Only reason nobody was worried about not seeing him lately was because of the cold weather. They figured he’d come back out once it warmed up. You saw all those espionage books on his desk. I think he was on the trail of a spy, and I think that’s why somebody fed him a pellet of iridium-192.”
“I can’t figure out how they did it,” I said. “It must not have been hidden in a hunk of meat or cheese. He’d have broken a tooth or at least spit the thing out.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Thornton said. “If you’re a health-conscious old guy, what do you swallow a lot of every day?”
“Ex-Lax,” said Emert, drawing a laugh from everyone.
“Pills,” I said. “Vitamins.”
“Exactly,” said Thornton. He turned to Emert. “Remember the medicine cabinet?”
“Looked like a damn pharmacy,” said Emert. “Mostly nonprescription stuff, though. Super-omega-this and antioxidant-that and mega-ultra-prostate formula. Flaxseed and glucosamine and St. John’s wort and I don’t know what-all else. The old dude was scarfing down twenty, thirty horse pills a day.”
“The iridium source,” I said. “How big was it?”
“Not very,” said Thornton. “About an eighth of an inch in diameter. Plenty small enough to slip inside one of those capsules. I bet if we go back and look at all those bottles, we’ll find a pill bottle that doesn’t have as many fingerprints as the rest.”
“Because somebody wiped it clean after hiding the pellet inside the capsule,” said Emert.
Thornton nodded, then shifted back to the rad lab’s findings. “The half-life of iridium-192 is only seventy-four days,” he said. “So seventy-four days before the incident in the morgue, the pellet — assuming it was irradiated and fabricated that long ago — was twice that hot: nearly two hundred curies.”
“I’m assuming this thing wasn’t pried out of a household smoke detector,” said Emert.
“Not a chance,” said Thornton. “Smoke detectors use a different isotope, americium-241, and they use tiny, tiny amounts. Like a microcurie.”
“A microcurie,” the detective said. “That’s, what, a thousandth of a curie?”
Thornton shook his head. “A millionth,” he said. “A smoke detector contains one-millionth of a curie of radioactivity, and it’s mostly alpha radiation, the kind that can’t penetrate your skin or even a piece of paper. This iridium source in Novak’s gut was a hundred million times hotter, and it was spewing gamma, which can shoot through several inches of steel and come out the other side still feeling frisky.”
“What about a TheraSeed,” said Emert, “those little radioactive pellets they put in the prostates of old farts like me to shrink tumors?”