Pi Day Doomsday

WINDFALL

Poole spent much of the night studying the video, yet the meeting started on time, as usual. In a larger mirrored interview room, still in the SID Lab, nine uniformed and civilian members assembled around the large table. In the air, heavy with grave matters, they discussed everything from the deciphered clues and newly discovered information to their picks for the upcoming March Madness games. Briscoe, again, was conspicuous by his absence.

New to the taskforce roster were representatives Captain Edgar Bell from the U.S. Navy, Commander Roger Norton, NWS Seal Beach and Ensign John Dover, U.S. Coast Guard Station, Laguna Beach. Dr. Charles Gruber, MD, Ph.D. O.C. Nuclear Forensics Lab, was also in attendance at Poole’s invitation.

Across the narrow end of the room hung a seventy-inch flat screen television, normally used for replaying crime scene videos and viewing training documentaries. Today it was a remote-viewing, time-traveling window into the SJC Starbucks’ parking area; a victimless crime scene, but one of telling importance.

She motioned to Keller to start the video. The room lights dimmed. The screen flashed brightly. The wide screen transported them there. They were looking down onto the street from a vantage point just under the Starbuck’s sign. Taken by a newly upgraded HD security camera, it showed a black-and-white CHP cruiser pulling into a parallel parking space behind a red-curbed hydrant space near the entrance of the store. A uniformed traffic officer reached across the car’s cabin, rolled down the passenger window a few inches, then did the same for the driver’s window, exited the car, locking it, and went inside.

Other than time-clock digits ticking up rapidly in the screen’s upper right corner, the view appeared frozen. Two minutes and thirty-two seconds passed; a black compact had idled by, one customer had entered the store, and two had exited balancing steaming white-and-green cups in drink carriers. Then, from the left side of the screen, a black Prius slowly pulled up beside the hydrant, behind the cruiser, and stopped.

Riveted to the scene, taskforce members shuffled their chairs, leaning forward to better view the unfolding visual.

The Prius’ door flew open; a hunched-over individual in a black hoodie shuffled out to the curb and up to the cruiser’s passenger door. Black cane in one hand, plastic baggie in the other, the figure emptied the baggie through the cracked window, crouched over, turned toward the camera and returned to the Prius. All within twelve seconds on the advancing time clock. The last frames of the video showed the Prius pulling from the space and driving off down Ortega.

Before Keller could switch the lights on, Gruber exclaimed, “I know him! I know that person. Go back and freeze the image where he turns toward the camera.”

Amid gasps and whispers from the team, Keller backed up the video and stopped; a cloaked face was barely visible as he turned back to the Prius. Unmistakably resembling Hannibal Lecter, he was missing the face grill. His lightly-tinted aviator glasses though, viewed from above, provided the same effect.

“Yes, that’s him. He’s a nuclear physicist, like me. I–I’ve seen his photograph in my journals. He won a Nobel Prize. H-his name is Simon something.” He raced through his speech, stuttering, stammering, and paused. “I can’t remember his last name.”

At the head of the table, Poole quietly opened her laptop, brought up a Google search screen and keyed in SIMON NOBEL PRIZE PHYSICIST. The results screen, listing nearly a million entries, told the story. Two Nobel laureates named Simon, one from Switzerland, the other, an American, filled the results. “His last name is Fogner,” she said, then remembering, stopped. Making a subconscious connection, she grabbed her scribbled-up evidence copy, looked at the byline, and saw it: From Gin Nose. All the letters were there, anagrammed to Simon Fogner.

‘It’s all here. He’s our man.” Reading from the Google page, she scanned the first few listed search results.

Shaking her head at the amazing goldmine of information, she hit the PRINT button, sending the Google page to a nearby laser printer, and excused herself momentarily to make copies. “I can’t say it better than this. I’ll return shortly with copies for everyone.”

Gruber’s revelation had broken the case wide open. Every loose end was tying up. She had all her questions answered but one: where? Now she needed to find Fogner, interrogate him, and locate and disarm Adam, not a simple task. Soon she would have to move her command to the Pacific Ocean. That’s why she asked the seafaring forces to her meeting. Twenty-one days seemed a reasonable amount of time to find and disarm the bomb, but there was absolutely no room for error. Although she knew searching the ocean floor for an object the size of a coffee table could take weeks or even months, she had selected the best experts in the area to up her odds.

DHS Agent Lashawn Gibbs was messaging on her cell phone, as were most of the other team members, when she returned with a short stack of papers. Passing them around the table she said, “While I was out, I took the opportunity to alert our Sheriff’s Office of our discovery. I faxed them a copy of this, too. Sheriff Victor is assembling his SWAT team for a visit to Fogner’s residence in Dana Point. Not his normal team, but the Special Response Team your agency supported with the Lenco BEAR, a few years back, Agent Gibbs.” She knew their BEAR, an acronym for their Ballistic Engineered Armored Response vehicle, could carry fifteen personnel and withstand direct attack from machine guns and assault rifles, but was powerless against nuclear attack: it would vaporize in microseconds.

Gibbs looked up from her phone and smiled. “This is what we anticipated would eventually happen. You can’t stop a war on society with a BB gun.”

Nodding to Gibbs, she continued, “Thank you. Unfortunately, it has come to pass.”

Returning to her chair, she glanced around the table, noticing many of her new team were lost in the details. The new evidence confused them without the background leading up to this point.

“Okay folks, I see that I’m remiss in not bringing you new military members up to speed on this case. You will be given a dossier on the proceedings of our meetings before you leave today. Right now, you need to know we suspect this person, Fogner, has planted a bomb offshore of the Los Angeles’ coast. Not just any bomb, but a thermonuclear warhead. According to his threat, it’s set to explode March fourteenth, pi day of this year.” She held up a copy of the new Google search page. “Up until now, we’ve been at a loss as to why he picked that day for his threat. It appears from this information, he has a score to settle, and pi day is the perfect day for his revenge.” Her voice trailed off. “He’s become a raving psycho maniac.”

Ensign Dover, Coast Guard Station Laguna Beach, motioned for attention.

“Yes, Ensign?”

“John Dover, Laguna Beach Coast Guard,” he said. “Am I to assume the radioactive boat I towed from Aliso Beach yesterday belongs to Fogner. Briscoe wouldn’t tell me… and I’m beginning to see why. This is a very dire situation.”

“Yes, we believe it does. But Briscoe didn’t know of Fogner’s existence yesterday; we had not yet indentified him. Our cursory inspection of the boat showed the HIN and CF number had been scraped from the hull, illegally of course. Its intense radioactivity limited our investigation to five minutes before our dosimeters alarmed. Then we checked with the DMV and they do show a blue-on-white Sea Ray registered to a Fogner, but there are no direct ties to the boat you recovered. We like to assume it’s his boat; I’d hate to think there are two radioactive crazies wandering around out there.”

Commander Norton, Naval Weapons Station, Seal Beach, following the conversation, interrupted. “So this boat is radioactive because Fogner used it to drop a nuclear warhead into the Pacific. Right? Where and what kind of warhead?” He stared at Poole, smiled and said, “I have a feeling we’re going to be tasked to find and neutralize it.”

Before she could answer, Gruber spoke, “The warhead appears to be a modified W-88. I know that from my analysis of the radioactive debris Officer Briscoe wore into my lab last night. He had fallen in the boat and later rubbed his hands over a suspicious depression, picking up numerous isotopes on his clothing and hands. I found Pu 239, Li 6, Deuterium. and Tritium on his hands, body and in his urine. Those isotopes coupled with his estimation of a hull-depression diameter at twenty inches and depth of a half-inch tells me I’m looking for an eight-to nine-hundred pound, twenty-inch diameter warhead. I looked it up in the Federal Nuclear Warhead Registry and bingo, the W-88 popped up.”

“What’s the yield of the W-88?” Norton asked.

“A half megaton or so, plus any modifications he made. Compare that to the twenty-kiloton Fat Man that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945 and you get the picture. It will be twenty-five times more destructive. Los Angeles will cease to exist as will much of southern California. I estimate a one-to two-hundred foot wall of radioactive seawater will wash over us seconds after the explosion. There will be no survivors.” He cast his eyes down, looking at his notes. Then energized again, he added, “Now, as to what you’ll be looking for? A two-foot diameter truncated cone roughly six feet in length. About the size of a human body lying on the ocean floor in a one-thousand square mile area. Or, if we’re unlucky, stuck nose down on the silt and mud. Then it would be only a few feet tall, like a chopped tree trunk.”

She sat listening to the incomprehensible interchange, fiddling with her notes, arranging the papers on the table into neat stacks, looking at her chipped fingernail. Not something she wanted to hear at all, she began to imagine evacuation. Evacuation of the entire population of southern California. How will that happen? Surely, Gibbs and her DHS would have a plan for that.

“--find a needle in a hay stack while we’re at it, Lieutenant Poole?”

She flinched at her name, pulled back to the stark reality of Norton’s words. “I’m sorry. I’m just having a little trouble wrapping my mind around all this,” she said. Flashing her attention to Lashawn Gibbs, she asked, “Is your agency in Washington prepared for this? How is our Homeland Security going to handle it, Agent Gibbs.” Her change in tone was evident to everyone, even herself. “Are they going to send support for our ominous situation?”

Gibbs shrugged her shoulders. “Only if you ask for help, Lieutenant. They try not to chase phantom threats around the country until there’s a well-defined risk. Do you have that? Everything looks circumstantial to me right now.”