“Normally they’re just at the main gate and patrolling the site. Budget cutbacks. It’s cheaper to have an automatic system than it is to keep guards in every building. Oh, and you should know that we don’t call them guards — they’re Protective Service Officers. PSOs.”
Craig looked into her blue, blue eyes. “PSOs. I’ll remember that… Paige.”
“Very good!” She smiled. “And we don’t have secretaries, either. They’re all Administrative Assistants.”
He rolled his eyes, just barely. “I see. I suppose you don’t have janitors either?”
“Custodians.”
“Gardeners?”
“Botanical resource specialists.”
His eyes widened, but she laughed. “Just kidding. Come on, now that you’re badged I can take you over to T Program.”
Craig slid a small notebook out of his suit pocket and clicked a pen. “Could you tell me what the ‘T’ stands for?”
Paige shook her head. “Not in a million years. A lot of our programs and divisions have letters, but nobody alive knows what they mean.” She put a finger to her lips, and her face softened into a mischievous expression. “I think if you arrange all the letters into an anagram, you can spell the words to the Mr. Ed theme song.”
“What?” Craig asked, completely baffled.
Paige sighed. “You don’t have a sense of humor, do you, Mr. Kreident?”
“Not on duty, ma’am,” he said.
They both chuckled lightly. “All right, that’s a start,” Paige said. “Let’s go. I have a government van.”
They passed the defeated-looking news crew on their way out; the group sat sullenly in the corner while the lead reporter spoke into a public phone.
Stepping outdoors, Craig fumbled in his shirt pocket to put on sunglasses. The glare wasn’t too bad today with a high, thin overcast, but he knew he’d have a headache within minutes if he didn’t cut the light.
Paige led him to an old-model Chevy van with the number 2 painted on the hood. “Climb on in. The T Program complex is halfway across the lab.”
As soon as Craig buckled his seat belt, Paige pulled out of the small badge office parking lot and headed for the guard shack at the main gate.
“Ready for the standard visitor briefing?” Paige kept her hands on the wheel as they waited for several bicyclists to go by. “LLNL was originally an old Naval Air Station. After Los Alamos built the first atomic bomb, Edward Teller — one of the scientists who developed the H bomb — wanted to establish a sister lab to compete in designing nuclear weapons, to serve as a ‘peer review,’ like in a normal university, only at the secret level, of course.”
Paige pulled up to the badge checkpoint, and the guard — Protective Service Officer, Craig corrected himself — reached through the window to touch their badges and wave them on.
Driving off, Paige said, “The PSOs are required to touch each badge, supposedly to make sure they actually notice you. You won’t find a real heavy security presence here, though — visible, but not obtrusive.”
“Reminds me of Quantico,” said Craig. “The Marines were always running around, training for one thing or another.”
Paige threw him a sideways glace. “Quantico? You don’t look like a Marine.”
“The Bureau also has a training facility there,” he said. He stared out the window. The Lawrence Livermore Lab looked like a typical university campus — plenty of green space, people oblivious to everything around them as they walked in deep discussion, bicyclists riding by on battered red bicycles issued by the government.
“I’ve never been out here before, but I was expecting this place to look like a ghost town. The newspapers have been talking about the Lab losing so much nuclear weapons work with the test ban moratorium and the end of the Cold War. It looks like a busy farmer’s market in a small town.”
Paige slowed at a traffic circle before answering. “Designing nuclear weapons used to be our flagship, but we saw the writing on the wall years ago. We’ve still got some of the best research facilities in the world — and that’s no exaggeration.
“We’ve spent a lot of effort turning them to dual-use technologies, letting our researchers apply for patents, setting up CRADAs with industry — that is…” She paused a moment to remember the acronym. “Cooperative Research And Development Agreements for marketing our aerogels and multilayered materials and other breakthroughs. We’ve had big programs in biomedical research, computer code development, fusion power.
“One of our biggest investments some years back was the Laser Implosion Fusion Facility, which should have been the cornerstone for cheap and clean energy. A billion-dollar program, overall, but thanks to the usual nearsightedness of annual budgets, the last sliver of funding was cut before the scientists could even turn on the machine.” She sighed. “A lot of people here are bitter about that. It was Dr. Michaelson’s pet project before he went to work on the disarmament team in the former Soviet Union, and then came back to set up T Program here.”
As Paige talked, they drove to another badge checkpoint, a gate leading deeper into the Lab. “We were just out in the Limited Area, where no classified work is done. A lot of our programs don’t require security clearances, and those employees wear red badges. Now we’re going into the Restricted Area, where you need a security clearance to enter. Everybody who works here has a green badge.
“Inside the T Program central computer complex, our Plutonium Facility, and a few other heavily secure places, there’s one more level of security, another CAIN booth that allows access only to those people with a programmatic justification to enter. Those places are called Exclusion Areas.”
“I see,” Craig said. “And Dr. Michaelson was found in an Exclusion Area?”
Paige nodded, and Craig thought of the highly unusual acid burns on Michaelson’s face and hands and wondered how they could have gotten there. If Michaelson was indeed murdered, he supposed the Exclusion Area limited the number of suspects.
After the PSO at the second checkpoint touched their badges through the open van window, Paige drove into the Restricted Area, beyond another perimeter of chain-link fence. They passed modernistic buildings with smoked-glass windows, but most of the facilities were low modular structures, inexpensive trailers hooked together into complexes. She pulled into a narrow parking lot filled with other government cars, trucks, and small white Cushman carts.
“Sorry I went into rah-rah mode about the Lab,” Paige said as she parked the van. “It’s just my canned speech. This is T Program here.”
Craig climbed out and looked at a cluster of white modular buildings. Paige came around to meet him, then she led him down a bike path toward the T Program trailers.
A new sign with fresh blue paint stood in a flower bed outside the front trailer. T PROGRAM: VIRTUAL REALITY CENTER. A wide band of yellow plastic tape lay draped across the main door to the complex, printed with the repeating words DO NOT ENTER: CONSTRUCTION SITE.
Paige stepped over the fluttering tape and opened the door to the lobby. “It’s the best we could do,” she said. “We didn’t have any Police Line tape.”
“I don’t see any security guards to keep people out.” Craig looked around in dismay, thinking of all the damage that could already have been done.
“With the CAIN access, we don’t need them, remember? Nobody but T Program people can get in here.”
Craig took off his sunglasses and made a noncommittal sound. “But this a potential crime scene. What if the T Program people are the ones we need to worry about?”
Paige looked at him long and hard, appraising him. “Do you really think there’s a possibility this wasn’t an accidental death?”
Craig shrugged. “It’s hard to imagine how somebody could have gotten acid all over himself and not sounded the alarm.”