Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 27

Paige Mitchell drove past the guard shack poised at the Lab’s south gate, then hung a hard left in her MG. The old security headquarters stood just outside the sprawling complex, still in use but waiting to be torn down.

After parking in one of the Government Vehicle Only spots out front, she entered the World War II vintage wooden building, which had originally been built as barracks long ago when the site had been a Navy base. It did not surprise Paige to see business-suited defense contractors standing in a long line beside construction workers, gangly teenagers employed part-time, and a pair of nattily dressed new graduates recruited to work at the lab, all processing forms for temporary clearances. Paige stepped around the line and rapped her knuckles on a door to the left of the counter. The door opened after she knocked twice more.

“Hi, Jeannie,” Paige said.

“Paige, thank goodness it’s you!” The short, frumpy woman looked up at her, then turned to motion her into the back room. “I was ready to strangle the next reporter who barged in on us.”

“Pretty busy, I take it?”

Jeannie smiled wanly. “I remember how bad it was a few years ago when the public learned about the enhanced neutron weapon we were working on. Now everyone’s sniffing a scandal over what happened to Dr. Michaelson yesterday. Is that why you need those CAIN booth records?”

“Yeah. I’ve been babysitting the FBI agent conducting the investigation. He’s a bull in a china shop. Nearly ripped the head off one of the T program scientists this morning.”

“Maybe you should have let him. Michaelson trained all his people to be as arrogant as he was.” She chuckled. “You didn’t expect me to have those records pulled already, did you? You just called this morning.”

Paige shook her head. It would certainly have been nice, but she knew how complicated it could be to access records from storage, especially from the Lab’s “new, state-of-the-art” tracking software.

“I’d like to get an estimate on when you’ll have them, though. Things are happening pretty fast, and it would be nice to have an answer for the FBI agent when he asks.”

“Just a minute,” Jeannie said, moving slowly over to her desk and terminal. The long string of pearls dangling below the wattles of her neck seemed to drag her shoulders down. She could barely find a workspace in and around all the potted plants gracing her desk. “Let me check the status of the job order. Somebody’s probably on break.”

Hollywood had convinced the public that security people would be hard to get along with, but Paige enjoyed working with the security department. They were ultimately responsible for literally millions of classified documents stored at Livermore, some of which could cause “grave damage” to national security. The security people scoped for leaks, espionage, or attempts by Third World countries to steal nuclear weapons designs. But that didn’t mean security personnel couldn’t be professional and courteous when she submitted a legitimate request.

Jeannie stood up from her terminal, reappearing from behind a tall spider plant. African violets and begonias seemed to thrive in the warm exhaust from the computer fan. “Bad news,” she said. “They’re still having problems with the new database over in the green area. You might want to check back on Monday. Yours will be the first printout, once we get back online.”

“Thanks, Jeannie.” Paige wasn’t happy, and she knew Craig would complain, but arguing would only do harm. And she knew that no one would even dream of working through the weekend.

Other people came in full of bluster, demanding action Right Now — and they invariably had to wait the longest. Paige accomplished much of her business through an exchange of brownie points, remembering birthdays, buying donuts to show her appreciation. When she asked for favors in return, she usually got them. Jeannie just might pull off a miracle, and she certainly wouldn’t drag her feet. Once she got the CAIN list, Paige would go to the nursery and buy Jeannie a nice little plant to add to her collection.

She left the rickety security barracks and drove back inside the fence, returning to the T Program area. Lab management claimed to be doing everything possible to help with the investigation, but she supposed that didn’t extend far enough down the food chain to bypass normal bureaucratic holdups.

Stepping through the CAIN booth into the T Program trailers, Paige saw that the door to the white-walled VR chamber was closed. Several people congregated around Michaelson’s office door at the back. She wondered how long they normally remained at work on a Friday afternoon.

Making her way around the computer equipment and the cluttered tables, she stepped up to the two FBI agents she had met earlier with Craig. They nodded and moved aside, granting her access to Michaelson’s office.

A short, thin man not much older than herself sat on the edge of Michaelson’s desk. Dressed in slacks and a knit shirt, he held a sheaf of papers that was crammed full of inventory numbers and arcane titles. She recognized him from the Classification Office, but he had tucked his badge into his shirt pocket, and she could not see his name.

Looking hot and uncomfortable, Craig Kreident rocked back in a chair and listened with a vacant expression. But he looked at Paige and smiled with something akin to relief.

The man from the Classification Office said, “I told you, this is a straightforward process. I’ve gone through Dr. Michaelson’s entire repository and there are nearly fifty classified memos missing, all of them transmitted from DOE headquarters. And that’s only the documented list — who knows how many Secret Work Papers are gone?” He looked accusingly at old Tansy Beaumont, who looked back at him with her wrinkled face as if she had just swallowed a dill pickle whole.

Craig’s gray eyes seemed to focus away from the wall and back on the document control officer. “That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it? So many missing papers, and all of them originating from the same place?”

Tansy Beaumont shrugged. “Not if Dr. Michaelson kept them all in the same folder. He took classified work home a lot of the time. He wasn’t supposed to, but nobody dared tell him what to do. Not more than once, anyway.”

The document control officer looked shocked, as if gnarled old Tansy had just told him she wasn’t wearing any underwear.

“So, any idea what’s in those memos?” Craig asked, changing the subject. “Tansy, did you type any of them?”

She blinked her dark eyes. “No, sir! I had enough to do around here just keeping the forms filled out and doing travel papers and telling everybody on the phone that Dr. Michaelson didn’t want to talk to them. He always wrote his own memos, never let me see them. Probably never even ran a spell-checker.”

Craig sighed. “Since they were to DOE headquarters, could it have something to do with espionage and nuclear secrets? Sounds important to me.”

Paige interrupted. “Craig, let me straighten you out — off the record, of course, because it would get them all up in arms to hear this. But the people back at DOE are basically a bunch of beancounters — half of them spend their days writing endless and opaque procedures we all have to follow, and the other half conduct audits so they can ding us about the stuff we aren’t doing well enough. It’s mostly self-generated reporting. None of the critical research is done back there, and our status reports are usually watered down by the time they get through that bureaucracy.”

“Hah!” Tansy Beaumont said with a laugh. “Dr. Michaelson never even submitted status reports!”

Paige kept her attention on Craig. “What I mean is that messages from DOE headquarters are things like program plans and budgets. More often than not, they’re probably handwritten faxes, outlining funding strategy.”

Craig frowned, chewing over the information. “Then why on Earth are they classified?”

Paige smiled. “So the press — or even worse, God forbid, Congress! — won’t get hold of it. You’d be surprised at what headquarters classifies.”

The document control officer looked decidedly uncomfortable.

“So what does that really mean about the missing memos?” Craig asked, turning to the fidgety man.

“I suppose it could mean that Michaelson might have tossed everything he got from DOE into the burn bag without even reading it.” He made an expression of disgust. “Possibly without even documenting them as destroyed.”

“That’s the type of guy he was,” Tansy said, putting in her two-cents’ worth.

“But we don’t know that for sure,” Craig persisted.

The thin man looked sour, but conceded. “That’s right.”

Craig thought for a moment. “Who else would have had access to these memos?”

“Nobody. Except for the Associate Director, no one else at LLNL has a need-to-know once DOE HQ documents are received.”

Paige spoke up suddenly. “José Aragon is Michaelson’s Associate Director.”

“Was.” Tansy looked around. “Dr. Michaelson’s upper management right now is God and nobody else.” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “‘Course, that’s pretty much the way he worked when he was alive, too.”

The two FBI agents on either side of Paige exchanged glances. Craig straightened. “Would Michaelson have realized these classified memos were numbered and inventoried?”

The document control officer gave a weary grin. “We’ve been on Michaelson’s case since day one. Why do you think this entire program is in an exclusion area? Not because their virtual reality work is any more classified than other programs. No, Michaelson racked up so many security violations he would have been tossed out years ago — if he’d been an ordinary employee, that is. They put him here, behind a second fence, so he didn’t have to be so careful.”

Craig tapped his fingers on Michaelson’s desktop. “So, did he know the memos were inventoried or not?”

Tansy answered. “I doubt if he cared much either way.” She extended her finger toward Craig like a grandmother lecturing. “I suppose you could believe they were stolen if you want — but my guess is that Dr. Michaelson just took them home to work on them, and got killed before he could bring them back. Why don’t you go out to the ranch and take a look around his desk there?”

Craig pushed up from his seat and shook the document control officer’s hand. “I appreciate your time. Could I get a copy of those missing document titles?”

“No problem. I’ll burn a copy right now and fax it back to the STU phone here?” He raised his eyebrows questioningly at Tansy.

“I’ll give you the number,” she answered and led him out of Michaelson’s office.

Craig looked at Paige. “What’s a STU?”

“Secure telephone unit. A phone for classified conversations and faxes.”

Craig laughed. “With all these acronyms, this case is getting more complicated than one of my patent law classes at Stanford!” He motioned to the two FBI agents. “Paige, have you met Special Agents Jackson and Goldfarb?”

She nodded to them. “Yes, we met in the VR chamber, after you and I returned from Mr. Aragon’s.”

Craig shook his head and flopped back down into the chair. “That’s right, I must be going crazy. In only two days, this is the goofiest investigation I’ve ever conducted. It’s like pulling teeth trying to get information from people, and we’re all supposed to be on the same team — PSOs ‘sanitizing’ the site of a mysterious death for classified material before anybody got a look, Lesserec and his weird priorities, and now Michaelson and his missing documents. I came here to investigate a murder and uncovered Peyton Place instead.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Did you get that computer listing of who used the CAIN booth?”

Paige felt her cheeks grow warm. “I’m working on it, but the database is down. We’ll have it by Monday.”

“It takes three days just to get a computer listing?” Craig said in disbelief, shaking his head.

“And these guys pulled off the Manhattan project?” muttered Jackson. Goldfarb snickered.

“All right, let me think.” Craig lifted his head and rubbed at his eyes.

Paige felt sorry for the man. He’d been going at full speed all yesterday and today. Maybe she could haul him out somewhere, get him to exercise, or maybe just kick back and relax.

“All right, Jackson — did you and Goldfarb go through Michaelson’s house?”

“We went over and knocked this morning, but nobody was home. The guy lived alone, I take it,” said Jackson.

“Okay.” Craig looked as though he had made up his mind. “With these missing documents we can probably get a search warrant PDQ. Paige, do you know where Michaelson lived? Once we get that list of document titles, we can take a look around. Tansy told me she’s got a spare key.”

“Guy must have really trusted his secretary,” Goldfarb muttered.

“Administrative assistant,” both Craig and Paige said in unison, then they laughed.

“If we find those missing classified memos, we might find a link to all this,” Craig said.