“Some of us like dead people, some of us like sewer maps,” I said. “It takes all kinds. I find it interesting that you find those interesting.”
She pointed to an opening in the treeline. “There’s the sidewalk up to my street,” she said. “Thanks again. It was lovely.”
Before I knew it was happening, she made a quick move toward me and kissed my cheek. Then she darted away, through the gap in the trees, into the darkness.
“Wait,” I called. “Your pizza.”
I listened for footsteps, but all I heard was the winter wind soughing through the empty arms of the branches. The wind was chilly, but my cheek felt warm.
CHAPTER 27
The vehicles began gathering just inside the security checkpoint on Bethel Valley Road at 10 A.M., which was late enough to let the morning ORNL traffic die down and — mercifully — allow the sun to knock the frost off the morning. I’d called Thornton and Emert the night before, and — at their insistence — had phoned Arpad as well to see how quickly we could orchestrate a search near the old uranium bunker.
An ORNL security vehicle was already waiting, idling on the shoulder of the road, when Miranda and I cleared the checkpoint. I tucked in behind the white SUV and shut off the engine. Miranda fished a sheaf of folded pages from her pocket. “Here, read this,” she said.
I unfolded the page. It appeared to be a printout off the Internet — a biography of George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos explosives expert who had triggered the blowup between Miranda and Thornton. A small photo of Kistiakowsky, at the top of the article, showed a balding man with deep-set eyes and a slightly sour expression, or maybe just a serious one. The photo was Kistiakowsky’s ID badge photo from Los Alamos. I scanned the beginning of the article. “Hmm,” I said. “Another Russian.”
“What, you thought ‘Kistiakowsky’ sounded Irish?”
“I dunno; maybe Polish,” I said. “I’m just saying, there sure were a lot of comrades running around Los Alamos.”
“No way this guy was a Commie,” she said. “He was an anti-Commie, see?” She pointed to a paragraph describing how Kistiakowsky had fought in the White Army against the Reds before escaping to the West. “But skip ahead, to page two,” she directed. During the Cold War, page two informed me, President Eisenhower had asked Kistiakowsky to improve America’s planning for nuclear war. Despite resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Strategic Air Command, Kistiakowsky had overhauled the war plans and created the National Nuclear Target List — a coordinated list that assigned specific Soviet and Chinese targets to specific U.S. bomber wings and nuclear-armed sub-marines.
I was puzzled by Miranda’s excitement. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This guy’s career seems to embody everything you’re opposed to. The National Nuclear Target List? I’d think you would consider that a doomsday to-do list.”
“It is,” she said, “but look.” She pointed triumphantly to the last paragraph of the bio. Kistiakowsky ended his career, the article said, by leading a group called the Council for a Livable World, opposing nuclear testing and campaigning to ban nuclear weapons. She’d highlighted the paragraph in pink — a fitting color, I thought — and added a note in the margin reading, “Great minds think alike!”
“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s some major ideological ammo you’ve got there — ten megatons, at least. You gonna drop that on Thornton today?”
She shook her head. “No need to,” she said, smiling slightly. “It came in the mail the day after the flowers. He highlighted that part. He wrote that in the margin.”
The age of miracles was not over after all, it seemed. Then, somewhere underneath my initial surprise and delight, I felt the stirrings of something unpleasant. Was it jealousy? Surely not. I shook it off.
Just then Arpad’s Subaru wagon arrived from the opposite direction, making a tight U-turn to pull in behind the security SUV and my UT truck. A couple of minutes later Emert’s Oak Ridge police car arrived, followed shortly by a white Ford F-150 pickup. The Ford had an extended cab, a shell over the bed, and an abundance of decals and bumper stickers reading K-9 and SEARCH & RESCUE.
Arpad got out of the Subaru and came to my window. “That’s Cherokee, the cadaver dog, in the white truck,” he said.
“No kidding,” I said. “He’s a good driver.”
“You want to come meet him?”
“Sure,” I said. “Miranda? Want to meet the famous Cherokee?” We walked back toward the truck; as we passed the Oak Ridge police car, Emert and his boss, Lieutenant Dewar, opened the front doors and fell in behind us. The ORNL guard leapt out and joined the procession.
The driver’s window on the Ford whisked down. “Uh-oh,” said a folksy voice from inside. “Looks like I’m in big trouble.” The door opened and a man stepped out and raised his hands in the air, then laughed and shook hands all around. Cherokee’s chauffeur — his trainer and handler, Roy Ferguson — stood a little over six feet tall. He looked about sixty; he wore bifocals and a scholarly look — not surprising, since he had a Ph.D. in education — but he talked and joked like a country boy. Roy and his wife Suzie owned a business, 20/20 Optical, in Sevierville, but it was hard to imagine how their volunteer activities left time to fit eyeglasses. They raised guide dogs—“leader dogs”—for the blind, Arpad said, and held Lion’s Club fund-raisers to save eyesight in developing countries. They also worked with a search-and-rescue team to find missing people, dead or alive. Normally Roy would have been accompanied by five or ten other team members, but in this case Arpad and Thornton and Emert preferred to keep the search as low-profile as possible.
Thornton’s unmarked FBI sedan showed up ten minutes after everyone else. The agent pulled alongside the group chatting by the road and rolled down his passenger window. “Hey, guys,” he called out. “Sorry I’m late. There was a wreck on I-40, and it took me a while to get past.”
“You should ask Uncle Sam to give you a blue light,” I said, though I was pretty sure he had one in the glove box, or a pair built into the grille of the car.
“Nah,” he said, “that would just give me an exaggerated sense of self-importance.” He flashed a crooked, self-deprecating grin that could have been lifted straight from the face of Indiana Jones, and I started to forgive him for keeping us all waiting. Then I noticed him reach down toward the console and hoist a big Starbucks cup to his lips. He tipped the cup only slightly, which meant that it was still nearly full. A wreck on I-40—yeah, right, I suddenly thought. That coffee’s probably still piping hot. And he probably practices that grin in front of the mirror.
The rest of us returned to our vehicles, and with the Lab’s security guard in the lead, our caravan headed west on Bethel Valley Road toward the main complex. Well before we got there, though, the white SUV turned right, up a gravel road marked WALKER BRANCH WATERSHED. The single lane of gravel meandered beside a small stream — Walker Branch, I guessed it to be. A few hundred yards later, we reached a small clearing tucked into the base of the ridge. Parked along a gravel pad were a handful of vehicles, including two government-green pickup trucks labeled TENNESSEE WILDLIFE RESOURCES AGENCY. Across the road from the miniature parking lot was a blue corrugated-metal building which could have passed for a machine shop or farm building, except for the state seal and TWRA logo beside the windowless steel door. The security guard parked in front of the door, turned on his flashers — maybe out of habit, or maybe to tell the rest of us that he’d only be a moment — and ducked into the building. He emerged a minute or so later, accompanied by a uniformed TWRA officer, who glanced at our convoy, waved us on casually, and then disappeared back into the metal building.