Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 30

“Very stylish,” Craig said as Paige emerged from the women’s dressing room in the Plutonium Facility. “Good to see you in your Sunday best, since you’re working overtime.”

She wore a bright orange lab coat identical to the one he himself had plucked out of the visitor’s bin inside the men’s change room. They both had snugged plastic booties over their street shoes, elastic bands tight against their ankles.

Paige rubbed her knuckles over the worn cotton fabric of the lab smock and smiled at him. “Yeah, I feel like I’m in that old rock group Devo. It’s quite the rage.”

Craig still wore his tie, but he’d left his suit jacket hanging in one of the empty lockers. He smoothed the orange lab coat, self-conscious about his appearance.

“Okay, let’s get you badged in,” Paige said, leading him to the fortress-like portal that allowed access into the Radioactive Materials Area, or RMA.

The place reminded Craig of the old Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall. A PSO waited near a metal detector, another sat inside a bullet-proof glassed-in cage. A radiation counter stood on the other side to make sure no one smuggled fissionable materials out, although Craig couldn’t imagine anyone stupid enough to stick a lump of raw plutonium in a back pocket.

“We’ve got to give you a special dosimeter for this building, a Nuclear Accident Dosimeter,” Paige said as the guard by the metal detector drew two black plastic rectangles from a box.

“What for?” Craig asked.

Paige shrugged. “If we have an uncontrolled criticality here, they can take your glowing body and determine which direction the radiation came from,” she said with a wicked smile. “It’s all routine of course.”

Craig swallowed. “Thanks a lot.”

She had showed him a safety videotape for visitors to the building, a dizzying list of the various sirens and klaxons and bleeps that signified fire alarms or radiation hazards or security breaches. Craig had already forgotten what some of the noises meant; he just knew he would run like hell along with the others to the emergency crash-out doors if anything happened.

“Well, you wanted to come in here,” Paige said. “It’s not normally on the flashy tour we give visiting dignitaries, although we’ve got the Coalition for Family Values bringing a group in next Friday. That, and the upcoming visit by the foreign nationals has got everybody working overtime to clean up the whole building. Otherwise you would have have had to wait until Monday.”

“I think it’s important that I see first-hand the place where Michaelson might have been exposed to the HF. I want to see if we can retrace his steps.”

“Right this way,” Paige said. “Just don’t expect any beautiful scenery.”

Craig passed over his guest badge and his FBI ID card to the PSO sitting in the glassed-in security cage. The guard didn’t seem impressed by Craig’s FBI status, but the investigation into Michaelson’s death had been kept quiet.

The Plutonium Facility reminded Craig of an old industrial building from the fifties, with its white-painted cinder-block walls, worn linoleum floors, and naked conduits in a jungle of pipes and wires along the ceiling.

Paige spent an hour taking him to the large lab rooms filled with banks of glove boxes: metal enclosures fronted with plexiglass panels, allowing workers to stand on the outside, thrusting their hands into thick mounted gloves for handling radioactive materials.

She showed him the room where classified parts were stored, sample mock-up pits of nuclear weapons, Nuclear Explosive-Like Assemblies, or NELAs. She led him into experimental chambers where experimenters tested techniques of isotope separation and new fabrication methods for the highly expensive and highly toxic plutonium metal.

Upon leaving each laboratory area, he and Paige stepped up to an alpha counter machine, a device that looked like an automatic shoe-shining apparatus. One foot at a time, Craig placed his booties against an angled flat grill. A silvery foil detector scanned the bottom of his foot to check if he had inadvertently stepped into a spilled radioactive substance. He placed his hands flat against an upper grill and waited for a tense second until the automatic scanner declared him free of contamination.

Paige said, “If somebody were to walk off with a chunk of material inside their lab coat, all the radiation alarms would sound off.”

Craig saw everything and heard the words Paige said, but his attention wandered to the technicians in the building. Orange-smocked employees working in their own areas talked loudly to each other over the hum of background noise, oblivious to the radiation hazard they lived with every day, grumbling about having to work on a Sunday.

“They don’t seem too concerned about where they’re working,” Craig said, nodding to two large men wheeling a metal cart down the hall.

“We have so many checkpoints and safeguards in place that sometimes they complain about not being able to get their work done,” Paige said. “Operations here are no more hazardous than on an automobile assembly line — safer, in fact, according to our accident statistics.

“Besides, while the amount of radiation in sealed sources here would give you a dose, it wouldn’t make you glow in the dark.” She added quickly, “Radiation hazards are serious, yeah, but they’re about a thousandth as deadly as popular opinion would have them be. It’s not something we should run and hide under the bed from. We’re careful.”

Craig nodded distantly. “I’ll take your word for it.”

As he and Paige walked down the corridor, Craig stopped a passing technician on impulse. “Excuse me,” he said.

The beefy man turned and set his square jaw. The chemical scent of strong aftershave wafted around him. His green lab badge identified him as Ronald Cobb. The man narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, what?”

“Were you working last Wednesday afternoon?”

The man looked at him as if trying to figure out a missing piece of information. “I didn’t leave early if that’s what you’re asking. I put in ten hours of overtime already. Who are you?”

Paige stepped in, though she looked at Craig with a puzzled expression. “This is Special Agent Kreident from the FBI. I’m with the Protocol Office. We’d appreciate it if you’d answer his questions.”

Craig continued in a reassuring voice. “I was just wondering if you remembered seeing some visitors. One would have been Associate Director Jose Aragon and the other Dr. Hal Michaelson.”

Ronald frowned. “You mean the guy who died? Tall man, right? Built like an ox?” Ronald chewed his lip as he tried to remember. “And he had a little sissy mustache, right? Pencil thin, like he drew it on with mascara? Reminded me of… what’s his name? Cary Grant.”

Craig restrained a smile. “Yes, that’s Dr. Michaelson.”

“Yeah, I saw him in here,” Ronald said. “He was with some uptight dude, leisure-suit type, slicked back hair.”

“Do you remember anything about their tour here?” Craig asked, trying to hide his excitement. “What rooms they went into?”

Ronald shrugged, then flashed a suspicious glance at Paige. “That guy showing him around didn’t seem to know a thing about this building. They went into every one of the rooms and he was yakking a mile a minute. Then they got into a big argument in the hall.”

“Do you remember where, or what it was about?”

Ronald looked sour. “We got work to do here, Mister. I can’t go keeping an eye on all the tourists wandering through, especially now that we have to make the plutonium building look pretty for the public. How many other people have to work today? Don’t you think we should be getting more than time and a half for working on weekends?” Ronald grumbled to himself. “Look, I’m busy. Got any more questions, or can I go now? “

Craig shook Ronald’s hand. “Thanks. You’ve told me what I wanted.” He made a show of taking out his notebook and squinting at Ronald Cobb’s badge. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said as he jotted the man’s name down. Ronald practically beamed with self importance as he went about his work.

“What was that all about?” Paige asked as they went to the airlock leading into another section of the RMA.

Craig sighed. “Just what I was afraid of. You’ve met Aragon. You think he could sneak in here and get some HF from one of these people? He’d stick out like a neon light.” He paused as he pondered. “I still want to run a full inventory of all the hydrofluoric acid in this building, though. Find out if anything’s missing.”

Paige looked at him skeptically. “You saw the glove boxes, Craig. Over half of them have small bottles of chemicals in there and HF is a common item. It would only have taken a teaspoon to give Michaelson a fatal dose.”

“I know it’s probably a wild goose chase, but I still want to know where it was distributed, who had access to it, and how much — if any — is missing.”

“I guess that’s a start,” Paige said, sounding pessimistic.

Craig smiled at her as they walked through the airlock door. “Yeah, it’s a start.”