Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 22

As she drove in darkness to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Diana Unteling thought of how familar the mentality had become. Whatever the verdict on Hal Michaelson’s death, she knew that everyone from Congress to the radio talk shows would rip apart every strand of his life like medieval medical researchers with a brand new cadaver.

A top political appointee always attracted sharks. She was used to that. But the feeding frenzy over Hal’s death wouldn’t be confined to the Beltway, and any scandal would send ripples into the lives of anyone he had known. It was the Washington Way — people had to have a scapegoat, and the Administration had already proved its willingness to drop controversial appointees at the first smell of trouble. Someone was bound to find out, and her career would be ruined.

Unless she could obliterate the link between herself and Hal. Having the affair exposed would not only trash any chance of her advancement in the Department of Energy, but would also cast a black stain on Fred’s Coalition for Family Values. She could stand the pain herself, but she wouldn’t allow her husband to be hurt.

Holding the rental car’s steering wheel with one hand, Diana unsnapped the DOE Headquarters badge from her neck chain, leaving the green LLNL badge, dosimeter, and master key. Showing the DOE badge might make someone remember her presence this late at night.

Only the main East Avenue gate remained open after hours. As she approached the guard kiosk, a PSO stepped slowly out of the shack. He held a styrofoam cup of coffee in his left hand and looked bleary-eyed as Diana handed over her green badge.

Diana smiled briefly, but said nothing. “Have a good one,” the guard muttered, then waved her on as he climbed back into his chair.

Diana rolled up her window as she pulled onto the site. Back when she had started working here, in the frenzied days of nuclear testing, a regular subculture had developed from all the teams working through the night. She herself had been involved in some of those crash programs with impossible deadlines. Even with the work slowdown, though, enough scientists kept odd hours that she would attract no attention.

Under the orange sodium streetlights, the narrow tree-lined roads were deserted. She held out her badge to the PSO waiting at the gate for entrance into the Restricted Area around T Program. Few lights burned in the office buildings and trailers. Parking the car in the deserted lot outside the VR complex, she switched off the ignition and sat waiting in darkness. She breathed deeply, trying to gather the courage to go ahead.

Meanwhile, she knew her husband slept alone in their large house in Arlington, busy but content. As his Coalition had grown, Fred had become more beatific, satisfied with the progress he had made, with the people he helped.

Diana attended all the appropriate social functions with him, kept herself in the right limelight. Fred gave her everything she needed, but during a long and lonely assignment in the former Soviet Union she had let Hal Michaelson sweep her into an affair through the force of his will. They had been intense but infrequent lovers for years — and if Fred ever learned of it, the news would destroy him personally, and it would unravel the Coalition, his life’s work.

She couldn’t imagine what memorabilia Hal might have kept of their time together… but in light of his death, any thread pointing to Diana Unteling would be magnified. Within days the news would be plastered across the pages of the Washington Post.

Unless she could fix it.

She drew in a breath and opened the car door. The sound echoed against the trailer walls, very loud in the night stillness. She walked briskly to the main entrance of the T Program trailers. Yellow construction tape barricaded the entrance, but she ducked under the flimsy ribbon and yanked on the door handle. Locked.

She had never seen the facility locked before, and a rush of prickly sweat tingled against her skin. The fact that Livermore security would actually lock a door to an area already protected by CAIN access made her realize that they were treating Hal’s death with an unusual degree of suspicion. Not a good sign. She fumbled with the key dangling behind her badge, access Hal had given her more than a year ago. She had to move fast.

Through the cramped “holding tank” lobby, Diana entered the glassed-in CAIN booth, slid her badge through the reader, and keyed in her code number. When the opposite door clicked open, she slipped into the dim labs of T Program.

She stood waiting for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dimly lit room. Only three of the fluorescent light panels in the ceiling shed a garish glow onto the clutter, throwing long shadows from the equipment-filled tables, into the partitioned cubicles.

Even in the dark the place looked as it had the last time she had been here… what, over a year ago now? But the major advances had not been in the outer appearance of the VR chamber or the supporting apparatus, but rather in both the software and in the microsensors that shuffled the information required by the chamber.

The Virtual Reality chamber itself stood sealed at the far end of the room, taped shut with more yellow CONSTRUCTION AREA strips. She was relieved to see no guard standing bored and alone in the deserted lab. But she didn’t need to get into the chamber itself — just into Hal’s files.

She made her way slowly toward the back, bumping discarded junk on the floor, catching her shoe on loose cords. She felt like a blundering drunk in an obstacle course.

She passed a table with three modern workstations, each more powerful than the Cray supercomputers that only a few years ago had been the flagship of the weapons design program. A glint of stray white light reflected off a framed photo on the table: Gary Lesserec and his bimbo girlfriend.

Diana’s face clouded over. It wasn’t right that this squeaky little man would still be alive when Hal, with all he had to offer, was gone. Lesserec should have been the one laying face-down on the carpet in the VR chamber.

She hurried to Hal Michaelson’s office door. Yellow construction tape blocked the entrance, but at least she had a key to his office door. She didn’t hesitate to peel away the strips, allowing her access — carefully, though, so she could replace them when she was finished.

Diana squeezed through a gap in the tape and flicked on one half bank of lights in Hal’s office. She went to the window and fiddled with the miniblinds to block the light from alerting any outside observer wandering by.

Hal’s office was a disaster area — as usual. Volumes marked with yellow Post-It notes were shoved at all possible angles into the bookcases; stacks of journal articles, preprints, and unmarked floppy disks covered the desk and credenza. His bulky classified document repository stood behind the door, five feet tall and three deep, like a thick-walled black file cabinet.

Diana spun the dial and tried the first combination she could think of: her birthday. Seconds later she satisfied herself that no permutation of the numbers would work.

Bastard, she thought. Diana tried his birthday — it was more like Hal to think of himself instead of her anyway — but still without any luck. A few more dates also refused to work: the date they met, the date the nonproliferation treaty he negotiated was signed, even the date they had first made love. Still nothing.

She thought of yet another place she could look for the combination. Hal was always preoccupied, often forgetful — he would have jotted the combination down somewhere. She felt sure of it.

Diana pulled back Hal’s desk chair and powered up his workstation. The dim room filled with the glow from the screen. When the request for a password came up, she hesitated. Same problem. No telling what he might have put in, but she didn’t kid herself into thinking Hal would have used something from their relationship.

She racked her brain, trying to think what he found whimsical. He had taken pride in claiming that he had all the physical constants memorized, and she might be able to find them in the scores of books lying around the office. But she didn’t have time to go scrounging around the room, looking up arcane numbers. Or maybe it was something serious, a mnemonic that he might base on an elegant formula, or event in history.

But Hal would have been wary about what he kept on his computer anyway, especially surrounded by a bunch of hackers who, once they knew the boss was away, might use roughly ten percent of the world’s supercomputing power to dig out their boss’s password. That would be just like Gary Lesserec. No password would be safe working in a place like this.

Diana sighed and slumped back in her chair. The words on the screen still waited for her: PLEASE ENTER PASSWORD.

It was a ridiculous request in a place where no password was safe. And then it hit her, just what Hal would have thought.

She reached out and tapped the ENTER key.

The word WORKING appeared in the center of the screen, and within seconds, she had access to his entire file base. So he didn't use a password. And it would have driven the hackers nuts trying to find it.

She rummaged through Hal’s files and found a document titled IMPORTANT DATES. She found the repository combination at the bottom and recognized the numbers immediately, feeling a warm, bittersweet thrill. Hal had chosen their room numbers from the hotel in Moscow where they had started their affair. So gruff and arrogant Hal Michaelson had been sentimental after all! She felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes.

Diana opened the repository on the second try and started pawing through his files. Most of the folders were stamped SECRET/RD, NOFORN, or NO CONTRACTOR. Scarlet lines encircled the pages; dates, document numbers, and classifying authorities were rubber-stamped on the front.

She skipped past the technical reports. Lab overviews, stockpile numbers, and design criteria were all grouped together, but nowhere did she find any of the memos they had exchanged, the love letters from early in their relationship, sealed away in tighter security than any safe deposit box. Except for now.

By the time Diana reached the bottom drawer, she was sweating — a deep, oily perspiration that seeped from her armpits, born from fear of not finding the dozens of documents that would incriminate her. Her knees and feet ached from the awkward position bending over the packed files, sifting through page after page.

She considered going through the pile of classified documents again, but she knew she had not missed anything. Hal’s repository was not so extensive, and it only dealt with his latest interests.

Which obviously didn’t include her.

She looked up, startled at a sudden noise. Had she really heard anything, or was it just nerves?

The FBI had already been called in to do a preliminary investigation on Hal’s death. What if somebody had already been through this place, taken away the folders that didn’t belong? What if, even now, the phone was ringing at her home in Arlington. Fred would roll over, answer it, and innocently tell them that she had gone to Livermore several days ago, before Hal Michaelson’s death?

She struggled to her feet and nudged the heavy drawer shut with her leg. Her breath came in quick, laborious gasps. She ran a hand through her gray-flecked blond hair. What did he do with those damned memos? He could have shredded them, of course, but that wasn’t like him.

At the time it had been a cute game Hal and Diana had played — passing classified love letters through the system, absolutely sure that no one else in the world would be able to intercept them.

She’d kept her own copies of the letters in her personal repository back in the DOE Headquarters building — but now she knew that was a huge mistake. She had to get back home and destroy them. Now. Right away.

She tried going through the files in his desk drawer, but still she found nothing. She turned off Hal’s workstation, pushed the chair back to where she had found it, and flicked off the lights.

She felt sick to her stomach as she fought through the yellow construction tape back out of his office. Her fingers shook as she clumsily pushed the construction tape back against the door frame in a reasonable semblance of what it had looked like.

If the FBI had found the letters already, how long would it be before she was subpoenaed?

She stumbled through the obstacle course back toward the CAIN booth. Her elbow hit a stack of papers that hissed to the floor. Diana held a hand to her face and fought back a panicked outcry. She knelt and gathered up the papers, stacking them roughly on the table. Nobody could tell the difference with all this mess. Patting the top to ensure it was stable, she used her outstretched hands as a guide in the dimness until she reached the exit.

She didn’t look behind her as she trotted to her car. No one would remember that she had come here — with 8,000 people working on the Livermore site, the night guard couldn’t possibly know she wasn’t a regular employee, so long as she had the right badge….

The drive back to the Sheraton seemed to take forever. She had to pack up and leave for D.C. first thing in the morning. No one but Fred even knew she had come out to Livermore. Her DOE staff knew how to reach her through the skypage, and they had left her alone. As far as they were concerned, she was visiting the San Francisco DOE office; and if she filed no travel voucher, no one would suspect.

Reaching the Sheraton and kicking off her shoes in the room, she called TWA to make her reservation for the next flight departing for the east coast. She couldn’t stay here any longer. She was through with Livermore forever.