Gideon had recognized it immediately, and it chilled him. “I’ve seen similar setups in historic photos at the Los Alamos bomb museum,” he said. “Old photos of the Manhattan Project. It’s a crude set of rails, poles, pulleys and ropes used to move radioactive material around without getting too close to it. Very low-tech but relatively effective, if you’re in martyr mode and don’t care about exposing yourself to elevated radiation.”
As he walked past the alcoves, peering into each, he could see more remote-handling apparatuses: crude slides and structures, pieces of shielding and lead boxes, along with discarded HE wires and detonators—and what he recognized, with another chill, was a broken high-speed transistor switch.
“Jesus,” said Gideon, his heart sinking. “I see everything here they’d need to build a bomb—including the high-speed transistors, maybe the most difficult thing to get besides the core itself.”
“What the hell’s that?” Fordyce pointed to another alcove, where Gideon could see a cage with bars and some food trash.
“Dog crate? Big one, by the size of it. Probably a rottweiler or a Doberman—to keep away the curious.”
Fordyce moved slowly, methodically, examining everything.
“There’s a fair amount of residual radiation here,” said Gideon, looking at the radmeter built into his suit. He pointed. “Over there, at that apparatus, is probably where Chalker fucked up and the mass went critical. It’s hotter than hell.”
“Gideon? Take a look at this.” Fordyce was kneeling before a pile of ashes, staring at something. As Gideon walked over, he could hear a babble of voices on the intercom, shouts and footsteps echoing from above. The NEST crew had entered the building.
He knelt beside Fordyce, trying not to stir the air and thus disturb the delicate pile. Masses of documents, computer CDs, DVDs, and other papers and equipment had been swept up into a large heap and all burned together, creating a gluey, acrid mess that still stank of gasoline. Fordyce’s gloved hand was pointing to one large, broken piece of ash at the top. As Gideon bent closer, his flashlight shone off its crumpled surface and he could just make out what it had been: a map of Washington, DC, with what appeared to be extensive notations in Arabic script. Several landmarks had been circled, including the White House and the Pentagon.
“I think we just found the target,” said Fordyce grimly.
There was a pounding of feet on the stairs. A phalanx of white-suited figures appeared at the far end of the room.
“Who the hell are you?” came a voice over the intercom.
“NEST,” said Fordyce crisply, standing up. “We’re the advance team—turning it over to you.”
In the reflected beam of his flashlight, Gideon caught Fordyce’s eye through the visor. “Yeah. Time to go.”
14
They had spent hours at the FBI field office in Albuquerque, filling out endless paperwork for a pool vehicle and expense account. Now they were finally on the road, driving to Santa Fe, the great arc of the Sandia Mountains rising on their right, the Rio Grande to their left.
Even here, they met a steady stream of overloaded cars heading the opposite direction. “What are they running from?” Fordyce asked.
“Everyone around here knows that if nuclear war breaks out, Los Alamos is a primary target.”
“Yeah, but who’s talking about nuclear war?”
“If the terrorist nuke goes off in DC, God only knows what might happen next. All bets are off. And what if we find evidence the terrorists got the nuke from a place like Pakistan or North Korea? You think we wouldn’t retaliate? I can think of plenty of scenarios where we might see a sweet little mushroom cloud rising over that hill. Which, by the way, is only twenty miles from Santa Fe—and upwind of it.”
Fordyce shook his head. “You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Gideon.”
“These people don’t think so.”
“Jesus,” said Fordyce. “We must’ve spent four hours with those damn people. And only nine days until N-Day.” He used the insider term for the presumed day of the nuke detonation.
They drove for a moment in silence.
“I hate that bureaucratic shit,” Fordyce finally said. “I’ve got to clear my head.” He fumbled in his briefcase, pulled out an iPod, stuck it into the car dock, and dialed in a song.
“Lawrence Welk, here we come,” muttered Gideon.
Instead, “Epistrophy” came blasting out of the speakers.
“Whoa,” said Gideon, amazed. “An FBI agent who listens to Monk? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“What did you think I listened to—motivational lectures? You a Monk fan?”
“Greatest jazz pianist of all time.”
“What about Art Tatum?”
“Too many notes, not enough music, if you know what I mean.”
Fordyce had a heavy foot. As the speedometer crept up to a hundred miles an hour, the agent took the portable flasher out of the glove compartment and slapped it onto the roof, turning on the grille flashers as he did so. The rush of air and humming of the tires sounded an ostinato to Monk’s crashing chords and rippling arpeggios.
They listened to the music in silence for a while, then Fordyce spoke. “You knew Chalker. Tell me about him. What made the guy tick?”
Gideon felt a swell of irritation at the implication that somehow he and Chalker were buddies. “I don’t know what made the guy ‘tick.’”
“What did you two do up at Los Alamos, anyway?”
Gideon sat back, trying to relax. The car approached a line of slower vehicles and a semi; Fordyce swung out into the fast lane at the last moment, the wind buffeting them as they blew past.
“Well,” said Gideon, “like I said, we both worked in the Stockpile Stewardship program.”
“What exactly is that?”
“It’s classified. Nukes get old like everything else. The problem is, we can’t test-fire a nuke these days because of the moratorium. So our job is to make for damn sure they’re in working order.”
“Nice. So what did Chalker do, in particular?”
“He used the lab’s supercomputer to model nuclear explosions, identify how the radioactive decay of various nuke components would affect yield.”
“Also classified work?”
“Extremely.”
Fordyce rubbed his chin. “Where’d he grow up?”
“California, I think. He didn’t talk about his past much.”
“What about him as a person? Job, marriage?”
“He started at Los Alamos about six years ago. Had a doctorate from Chicago. Recently married, brought his young wife with him. She became a problem. She was sort of an ex-hippie, New Age type, from the South, hated Los Alamos.”
“Meaning?”
“She didn’t hide the fact that she was against nuclear weapons—she didn’t approve of her husband’s work. She was a drinker. I remember one office party where she got drunk and started shouting about the military-industrial complex and calling people murderers and throwing things. She totaled their car and racked up a couple of DUIs before they took away her license. I heard that Chalker did everything he could to keep the marriage going, but eventually she left, went to Taos with some other guy. Joined a New Age commune.”
“What sort of commune?”
“Radical, anti-government, I heard. Self-sufficient, off the grid, grow their own tomatoes and pot. Left wing, but the weird kind. You know, the ones who carry guns and read Ayn Rand.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“Out west—out here—there is. There were rumors she’d taken his credit cards, emptied their bank account, and was running through the money to support the commune. About two or three years ago Chalker lost his house, declared bankruptcy. That was a real problem with his work, because of the high-level security clearance. You’re supposed to keep your financial affairs in order. He started getting warnings, and his clearance was downgraded. They moved him into another position with less responsibility.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Badly. He was kind of a lost soul. Not a strong sense of self, a dependent personality type, going through the motions of life without knowing what he really wanted. He started to cling to me, in a way. Wanted to be my friend. I tried to keep him at a distance, but it was difficult. We had lunch together a couple of times, and on occasion he joined me after work for a drink with co-workers.”