“Get over it, Stanley,” Doyle said with an edge to her voice. “The priority now is to keep from doing any additional harm until the lockdown is lifted. There can’t be much time left.”
“It’s been hours already!” the Senator groaned.
“Harris said he’d lift the lockdown as soon as he confirmed the plane crash wasn’t an attack,” Adonia pointed out. “We don’t have any idea what’s going on outside, but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it when we get to the guard portal.”
“Maybe we should go all the way through to the lower level. The main cavern is the most secure zone in the facility,” van Dyckman said. “We’ll be safe there.”
Doyle gave him a withering look as they hurried down the incline. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Stanley. You think Valiant Locksmith is the big dog in the Mountain, but other programs have been here for forty years or more. A lot of it isn’t under your jurisdiction.”
He blinked at her. “What do you mean? Hydra Mountain is mine — by Presidential order. Your old DOE weapons programs only had a small presence here, storing spare parts for the national labs. The U.S. isn’t even building nukes anymore, so whatever leftover weapons work may still be in this facility is irrelevant at best.”
Doyle rounded on him, but Adonia cut them off in a low but forceful tone. “Quibbling will get us killed. Do you really think the safety and security systems are going to get any simpler as we head deeper into the Mountain?”
Van Dyckman seemed surprised at her insubordinate tone, considering he was so much higher up the political chain, but Doyle cut him off before he could speak. “Put a lid on it, Stanley. She’s right. We need to get to the guard portal.” With a quick glance toward Adonia, the older woman hurried ahead, confident the others would follow.
Adonia looked at van Dyckman to gauge his reaction and saw him scrunching his forehead, as though he strained to control his anger. She imagined that so many parts of his career had begun to unravel on a day that should have been his triumph; in his high-level DOE position, van Dyckman had rarely been put in his place. Reporting directly to the young Secretary of Energy herself, he’d probably thought he was the fair-haired boy, a seasoned politician compared to her, who knew how to play cutthroat games. After all, he was responsible for running a neat and politically feasible solution to the nation’s nuclear waste crisis.
Adonia guessed that she and the others were supposed to see the true worth of Valiant Locksmith and shower him with accolades for solving a desperate crisis… but now his solution was falling apart in front of his sponsor, his old lover, and his greatest critic.
He strode off after Doyle, ready to go on the attack, but Adonia caught him. “No more discussion, Stanley. Save it for when we get to the guard portal.”
She needed to give him something to do, to reaffirm his sense of importance, to distract him. Behind them, Shawn and Garibaldi helped Senator Pulaski along. Adonia turned to van Dyckman. “Stanley, please help with the Senator. It’s going to take all of us to get him through this, and you’re still going to need his support after all this is over.”
It took a moment, but van Dyckman forced a nod. “I know he’s… challenging, but he’s always been that way. He’s an extremely important man. This program’s future may depend on him, but Victoria keeps finding fault with everything we’re trying to do.” He shook his head. “I still don’t understand why Harris even made her part of this review team.”
“Rob must have had his reasons,” Adonia said. As Shawn and Pulaski caught up, she, too, wondered why in the world such a disparate team had been pulled together in the first place. There had to be a deeper reason than just a simple inspection. What did Harris really have in mind?
19
As they approached the guard portal, the passageway was cluttered with even more piled materials, which they had to dodge. Adonia was surprised to see how much construction was still taking place inside the Mountain.
The facility had been mothballed for years, and when the DOE took over the site and reconfigured the storage chambers for Valiant Locksmith, she knew that substantial modifications would have been necessary. But according to Stanley, the Mountain had been reopened for over a year. If a steady flow of nuclear waste had been arriving for secure storage, the facility should have been finished and approved for operations. Even if Valiant Locksmith was deeply classified, no program was too important for DOE lawyers to waive safety regulations.
So what was van Dyckman still building down here?
She imagined that even as he helped the agitated Senator along, van Dyckman was brainstorming how they could salvage the review.
Victoria Doyle shot a dissatisfied scowl back at them, and Adonia didn’t know how to read the increasing tension. She could tell the Undersecretary had some deep animus toward Stanley, which was more than scientific or political rivalry. This was personal.
As she caught up to Doyle, she remembered hearing the rumors during her own short stint at DOE Headquarters, of the poorly concealed affair between the two energetic rising stars. Supposedly, their relationship had begun back when van Dyckman was still Pulaski’s congressional Chief of Staff and before Doyle received her appointment as Undersecretary to administer the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration. Both of them were ambitious and could use each other’s connections. Victoria gained influence and incomparable access to a powerful senator, while Stanley received unique insider information about one of the executive branch’s most important agencies, responsible for nuclear weapon development. It wasn’t a starry-eyed romance, but more of a high-level, mutual partnership with benefits.
Much younger at the time, idealistic, and determined to make a difference, Adonia had kept her head down and focused on her job. For her own part, she had been enamored with then — Lieutenant Colonel Shawn Whalen during their days at the National War College.
But when the President had commended Stanley for his role in “saving” Granite Bay after the extremist attack, his affair with Victoria Doyle had flared out and fizzled. He was rumored to have tested his connections with the President, and had overreached in an attempt to get himself appointed as the next Secretary of Energy. Instead, that position had been given to a high-profile young public defender. And, adept at the high-stakes game of political maneuvering herself, Victoria had blocked Stanley’s other ambitions, landing him a mere assistant secretary job as a consolation prize.
Now, another piece fell into place for Adonia. Unbeknownst to anyone due to SAP security, he must have been offered that role because it included the covert and vital responsibilities of being the Valiant Locksmith national program manager. Not a consolation prize at all.
In effect, it appeared that Stanley had won that battle. If Valiant Locksmith succeeded in mitigating the nuclear storage crisis, then his coveted position of Energy Secretary was well within his grasp. But in order to achieve his triumph, he still had to move a hundred thousand tons of high-level waste into the decommissioned weapons facility — safely, securely, and under the public’s radar.
No wonder van Dyckman was on edge as this celebratory inspection tour turned into a debacle at every turn. His entire career hinged on the success of this review.
Now it all made sense to Adonia. Judging from the Undersecretary’s body language, she realized that Victoria Doyle hadn’t had any idea what Stanley was up to here in the Mountain. After their affair, she must have thought she had trounced van Dyckman, relegating him to political Siberia. Now she would have realized that the importance of Valiant Locksmith placed him in day-to-day contact with the President and the White House.