“Or pick it up,” I said bitterly.
“Or pick it up,” he echoed. He proceeded to tell us, and to show us, the story of a pipeline welder in the mountains of Peru who — late in the afternoon of February 20, 1999—found a short length of wire cable lying on the ground. Thinking he might be able to use the cable or sell it for scrap, the man picked it up and put it in his pocket. It remained there until he took off his pants that night and draped them over the back of a chair. The man’s wife sat briefly in the chair.
Then, at 1 A.M., came a knock at the door. During the evening, the radiographer had tried to take an image of a weld. When he developed the film, he found that it was blank; unexposed. Backtracking, he checked the camera and discovered that the pigtail was gone. A frantic search began, which led to the welder’s house, where the source was recovered. The iridium had nestled against the man’s thigh for six hours; it had hovered at the base of his wife’s back for a few minutes. But in those hours and minutes, everything changed.
Twenty hours after pocketing the source, the welder entered a hospital in Lima. A red oval had appeared on the back of his right thigh, and he was vomiting. By the following day, the oval was an open ulcer, surrounded by a halo of inflammation. Within a month the crater extended almost to the bone, and infections and tissue damage were rampant. Six months after the man’s exposure, surgeons in Paris amputated his right leg and removed the right half of his pelvis — skeletal trauma that exceeded almost anything even I had ever witnessed — along with much of his intestinal and urinary tract. The man’s wife was luckier; she developed a burn at the base of her back, but it healed.
The wall went dark, but the images hung in my mind, and no one said anything for a while. Finally Emert did. “That guy lived?”
“He lived. He’s alive still,” said Thornton. “If you call that living.”
My thoughts flew from hospitals in Peru and Paris to one in Knoxville. I prayed that I had not just witnessed a preview of what lay in store for Eddie Garcia’s hands or Miranda’s fingers.
“So you guys think the gamma source in Novak’s gut was from one of these industrial radiography cameras?”
“We’re virtually sure. Field Imaging Equipment is sending somebody from Shreveport up to Savannah River to verify that.”
“And they can tell us whose camera the source came from?”
He shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. There are thousands of these cameras out there — all over the Texas oil patch and the Gulf Coast, for instance — and they’re not as tightly regulated or closely tracked as you might think. When a refinery or a pipeline-inspection contractor buys one, they’re required to register it with the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But after that?” He shrugged. “They can chuck it in a jeep and drive from one coast to the other with it. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner has to report that to the NRC. But what if nobody knows for a while? They might use the hell out of it for a week or two, then lock it away in a tool closet for six months or a year. Hell, hundreds of these cameras went missing in the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lost, mostly, but probably some were stolen.”
“Hundreds?” The number astonished me.
“Several hundred. Nearly all of them recovered since.”
“Nearly?”
“A few are still unaccounted for,” he acknowledged.
“So one of those missing Katrina cameras could have supplied the source that killed Novak?”
“Hang on,” he said, “I’ll get to that in a second. Another complication is that there’s no serial number on the source we found in Novak.”
“Garcia,” I said. “Garcia found it in Novak.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Yes, the source Dr. Garcia found in Novak. There would be a serial number on the camera, but there’s no room on the source. Which is too bad, since the source is what we have.” He shrugged again, and for some reason, I found the shrug — the even-keeled, accepting shrug — intolerable.
“Damm it!” I halfway shouted. “Isn’t there anything we can do to find out where this came from? Isn’t anybody in the government worried about these things? Isn’t anybody anywhere worried besides me?” Thornton and Emert stared at me, astonished at the outburst, and I realized that my anger stemmed not so much from the perils of portable radiography sources — peril could be found in any technology if you looked for it — but from my helplessness to do anything for Miranda or Garcia. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was out of line.”
“I understand,” he said. “You’ve got people whose health and safety have been compromised. On the bright side, we do have a couple of things that might help us narrow the search.”
“Tell me,” I said. “I could use some good news.”
“Remember, the half-life is just seventy-four days. So if you put a fresh two-hundred-curie source in your RadioGraph Elite, seventy-four days later it’s down to a hundred curies, and by a hundred and forty-eight days it’s down to fifty curies. At the end of a year, that stuff has decayed through five half-lives, so it’s down to six curies. Knowing the source in Novak was still around a hundred curies tells us something very useful.”
“It tells you the source was fresh,” I said. “And it tells you it wasn’t from one of those cameras that went missing in Katrina.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“So who actually makes the sources?” I said. “And how, and where, and when? Does this outfit in Shreveport have a reactor or a cyclotron or whatever is used to make iridium-192? Do they make big batches of these things — hundreds of things at once? — or just a few at a time? How hard can it be to track down everybody who got one sometime in the past three months?”
He smiled at the burst of questions. “It’s harder than I wish it were,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got a hundred people working on it. You know the old saying about the tip of the iceberg?” I nodded. “Well, I’m just the guy standing on top of the tip of the iceberg. Everything below is shrouded in fog.”
Just then his cell phone rang — an odd, warbling tone I’d never heard from a cell phone before. He looked startled, then murmured, “Excuse me.” He turned his back on us and spoke softly, but I could make out a few words, mostly “yes sir” and “no sir” and “thank you, sir.” He ended the call with a promise to phone with an update before the end of the day. He turned back to us, looking somewhere between embarrassed and shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I had to take that. The man calls, you answer.”
“Which man?” I asked. “Your boss? The head of the WMD Directorate?”
“His boss’s boss’s boss,” said Thornton. “The director. Of the FBI. He wants progress reports three times a day. This case is a big target on his radar screen.”
I felt a sudden tightening in my throat, and a sudden surge of hope that we’d find out who had killed Novak — and who might be slowly killing Garcia.
CHAPTER 20
The next morning Miranda and I had a short but cheerful visit at the hospital with Garcia. Garcia still looked weak, his burned hands were quite tender, and his lymphocyte count remained dangerously low, yet his spirits were surprisingly high. He was six chapters into a sterilized copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the books I’d seen on Leonard Novak’s desk. The book was propped on a reading stand, and Garcia was turning the pages with the eraser of a pencil, which he managed to grip with his bandaged right fist. “Great book,” he said. “Those Manhattan Project scientists were big thinkers. Complicated human beings, though.” I was surprised at his choice of reading material, but delighted to see him in good spirits.