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Now we know, beyond doubt, that controlled fission works, and we know that we can scale it up, bigger and deadlier. We know we can start it, stop it, speed it up, slow it down, exactly as we wish. We now know we can harness it to create slow heat or instantaneous explosions or exotic new elements. Including plutonium, which careful calculations indicate will make just as good a bomb as uranium.
“Just as good a bomb”: what an ironic, oxymoronic, and nihilistic phrase. One might as well speak of “a beautiful murder” or “excellent torture.”
Groves and his armies of construction are already building the mammoth next stage — gargantuan versions of this reactor in the Columbia River Valley, in some godforsaken part of eastern Washington. They’ll send me out to make sure it works, and it will. And within months after they start up, those reactors will produce enough plutonium to obliterate entire cities in Japan.
When I look at the face of the reactor we’ve built here — a twenty-foot-high wall of concrete, pierced by hundreds of neatly placed holes where slugs will be irradiated to create plutonium — the technician in me feels pride. A tight, tidy gridwork of tubes burrows through the heart of the reactor in a pattern dictated by meticulous science. But the human being in me screams “no!” at what we’ve done, and why, and especially at what we’re racing to do. I have no God to pray to, but if I did, I would pray for an end to this terrible endeavor, and to the war that makes such madness seem like sanity. And to my own conflicted complicity.
— LN
CHAPTER 19
Jim Emert called just as I was about to swing by the hospital and visit Garcia; he wondered if I could sit in on a Novak meeting in an hour. “Thornton says the Bureau has some leads on the radiation source.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. I figured Garcia would rather I attend the meeting than hover outside his window. Miranda was planning to visit him at lunchtime; by then she’d need a break from the skull she was reconstructing. A contractor’s crew in North Knoxville, demolishing a block of old houses to make way for another strip mall, had unearthed a human skeleton. The bones, which were old and fragile, had been no match for the bulldozer that had churned them up. An adult human skeleton normally contained 206 bones; from the construction site, we’d sifted somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pieces. Miranda had weeks of tedious reassembly work ahead.
* * *
We met in a conference room in the Oak Ridge Municipal Building. When I told Emert and Thornton what I’d learned from Beatrice about Novak’s homosexuality, the FBI agent looked intrigued; when I described his crisis of conscience over his role in producing plutonium for the bomb, he looked troubled. He scribbled some notes, and when he finished, he shook his head doubtfully. “A ninety-three-year-old,” he said. “Seems harmless and grandfatherly, right? Then you start poking around in his past and you find pictures of a murdered guy, and a secret sexual life, and misgivings about helping his country win the war. Funny what a good disguise old age can be.” He shook his head again, this time as if to shake off his concerns about Novak and to refocus on what he’d come to tell us. “Okay, so here’s the latest from our forensic rad lab in Savannah River,” he said. “It is indeed iridium-192, as Duane Johnson determined the day of the incident,” he said. “It’s a sealed, metallic point source; you guys saw it in the morgue, so you already knew that. Tiny, but hotter than hell. It was roughly ninety-eight curies at the time of the autopsy. By now, it’s down in the mid-eighties, maybe high seventies. Eight weeks from now, it’ll be at fifty curies. You still wouldn’t want to swallow it, though.”
“Or pick it up with your fingers,” I said. “Or hold it in the palm of your hand.” I was surprised at the angry edge I heard in my voice.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, looking at me with concern.
“So how the hell did it wind up in Novak’s gut?” said Emert. “Unless somebody jammed it down his throat, he picked it up and put it in his mouth and swallowed it. Any chance he might have done it on purpose? Did bomb-guilt finally get to him? Or maybe fear of spending years as an invalid with no family to take care of him?”
“The Behavioral Sciences folks don’t think so,” Thornton said. “They’ve talked to a lot of Novak’s neighbors. He was energetic and positive. The guy walked a mile or two every day; hell, he was playing tennis until a couple years ago. Only reason nobody was worried about not seeing him lately was because of the cold weather. They figured he’d come back out once it warmed up. You saw all those espionage books on his desk. I think he was on the trail of a spy, and I think that’s why somebody fed him a pellet of iridium-192.”
“I can’t figure out how they did it,” I said. “It must not have been hidden in a hunk of meat or cheese. He’d have broken a tooth or at least spit the thing out.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Thornton said. “If you’re a health-conscious old guy, what do you swallow a lot of every day?”
“Ex-Lax,” said Emert, drawing a laugh from everyone.
“Pills,” I said. “Vitamins.”
“Exactly,” said Thornton. He turned to Emert. “Remember the medicine cabinet?”
“Looked like a damn pharmacy,” said Emert. “Mostly nonprescription stuff, though. Super-omega-this and antioxidant-that and mega-ultra-prostate formula. Flaxseed and glucosamine and St. John’s wort and I don’t know what-all else. The old dude was scarfing down twenty, thirty horse pills a day.”
“The iridium source,” I said. “How big was it?”
“Not very,” said Thornton. “About an eighth of an inch in diameter. Plenty small enough to slip inside one of those capsules. I bet if we go back and look at all those bottles, we’ll find a pill bottle that doesn’t have as many fingerprints as the rest.”
“Because somebody wiped it clean after hiding the pellet inside the capsule,” said Emert.
Thornton nodded, then shifted back to the rad lab’s findings. “The half-life of iridium-192 is only seventy-four days,” he said. “So seventy-four days before the incident in the morgue, the pellet — assuming it was irradiated and fabricated that long ago — was twice that hot: nearly two hundred curies.”
“I’m assuming this thing wasn’t pried out of a household smoke detector,” said Emert.
“Not a chance,” said Thornton. “Smoke detectors use a different isotope, americium-241, and they use tiny, tiny amounts. Like a microcurie.”
“A microcurie,” the detective said. “That’s, what, a thousandth of a curie?”
Thornton shook his head. “A millionth,” he said. “A smoke detector contains one-millionth of a curie of radioactivity, and it’s mostly alpha radiation, the kind that can’t penetrate your skin or even a piece of paper. This iridium source in Novak’s gut was a hundred million times hotter, and it was spewing gamma, which can shoot through several inches of steel and come out the other side still feeling frisky.”
“What about a TheraSeed,” said Emert, “those little radioactive pellets they put in the prostates of old farts like me to shrink tumors?”
“Those are tiny,” Thornton said. “Small enough to be injected through a syringe. And they’re generally palladium-103 or iodine-125. They’re also very, very weak compared to this. You wouldn’t want your prostate to get cooked like Novak’s gut, would you?” Emert shuddered. “Speaking of medical isotopes, though,” Thornton went on, holding up an index finger to indicate that he found this an interesting sidelight, “one of the uses of iridium-192 is to create medical isotopes like palladium and iodine.” I was losing track of all the isotopes, but Thornton seemed to have no trouble keeping them straight.
“One isotope creating another,” I said. “The atomic ripple effect?”
“More like billiard balls,” Thornton said. “All those protons and neutrons and electrons and photons ricocheting around on the pool table of the universe. I’m amazed everything hangs together as well as it does. One of these days, seems like, the cosmic cue stick will strike, all the balls will scatter, and then t
hey’ll drop, one after another, into the corner pockets and side pockets of oblivion.”
“Why, Agent Thornton,” I said, “you’re a poet.”
He laughed. “Nah, it’s just smoke and mirrors. I’m desperately trying to distract you from the realization that I don’t really understand this stuff.”
Smart, poetic, and self-deprecating, to boot — no wonder Miranda seemed to be taking a shine to him. “So this iridium-192,” I said. “UT Hospital has a pretty big nuclear-medicine department. Is there any chance this iridium-192 might have come from there?”
“Yes they are, but no it couldn’t,” he said. “They do create radioisotopes there. They’ve got a cyclotron right above the morgue that Ernest Lawrence would’ve given his left nut for. But UT doesn’t use iridium-192 sources.”
“Then who does?” Emert and I asked the question at the same time.
“I’m so glad you asked,” he smiled. He tapped the cursor pad on his computer, and a washed-out blue slide appeared on the white wall behind him. Thornton pointed at the fluorescents overhead, and Emert killed the lights. When he did, the FBI logo blazed from a deep blue background.
The intro slide faded to black, and then another image faded up. It was a nuclear power plant, its iconic cooling towers sending billows of steam skyward. “The pressure vessel and the cooling-water pipes in a reactor like this are about six inches thick,” he said. “Those components have to be strong as hell, and so do the welds that hold them together.” He flashed through a series of ghostly images, X-ray-like pictures of fissures and streaks and bubbles in metal tubes; cracks and voids in seams. “These are radiographs of pipes and welds in a nuclear plant,” he said. “And this is the camera that took them.”
The next slide showed a four-wheel dolly loaded with an instrument the size and shape of a footlocker. “This is an industrial radiography camera,” Thornton said. “Think of it as a turbo-charged big brother to a medical X-ray machine. It uses gamma radiation rather than X-rays, because gamma has higher energy and can penetrate steel much better.” He flashed to a close-up view of the box on the cart; enlarged, it looked like a footlocker with dials and cables in one end. “This particular camera uses cobalt-60, not iridium, as the gamma source; this is three hundred curies, which is a good bit hotter than what we’re dealing with.”
I recalled a tour I’d taken once of TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, located downstream from Knoxville. “Nuclear plants have pretty tight security,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be pretty tough for Bubba to wheel that cart out the gate and wrestle it into the bed of his pickup?”
“You’re right. So who else uses radiographic cameras?” He flashed up a series of slides showing mammoth industrial complexes — sprawling, three-dimensional mazes of pipes and girders and steel exhaust stacks filled the wall. “Petroleum refineries. Chemical plants. Just like nuclear plants, they’re pumping nasty stuff at high temperatures and pressures, through heavy-gauge pipe. So are these guys.” He flashed rapidly through several slides showing pipelines — the Alaskan oil pipeline, a water pipeline in the West, a natural-gas pipeline. “Every pipeline company in the world worries about weld failure,” he said. “Right now, as we sit here, there are dozens of technicians — maybe hundreds — scurrying around the country taking radiographs of power plants and refineries and chemical plants and pipelines.” He paused to let that sink in. “And a lot of them aren’t using the big rig on the cart. A lot of them are using gadgets like this.” He tapped the cursor again.
I found myself looking at the legs and waist and dangling left arm of a man photographed in mid-stride. Clutched in his hand was a bright yellow gizmo whose size and shape reminded me of a construction worker’s lunch box — the black, barn-shaped kind, with a rectangular base to hold the sandwich and apple and chips and cookies, and a cylindrical top to hold the thermos. A heavy, pipe-fitting-looking extension jutted from one end of the yellow box, though, and the universal warning sign for radiation was emblazoned prominently on the side. “This camera is handheld, obviously,” said Thornton. “Very compact; very portable. The case is rugged enough, with enough shielding, to allow a two-hundred-curie iridium source to be legally transported in any vehicle.”
He flashed to another picture, this one showing a boxier gadget topped by a tubular handle. This picture showed considerably more detail. “Another handheld radiography camera,” said Thornton, “the RadioGraph Elite, made by Field Imaging Equipment Company, in Shreveport, Louisiana.” He pulled a laser pointer from his shirt pocket and traced the instrument’s rectangular outline with the dot of light. “This is fourteen inches long by five inches square — the size and shape of those newspaper boxes people out in the country put underneath their mailbox. The case is stainless steel; inside the case is a shielding block of depleted uranium. It’s small, and you can carry it by that handle, but you wouldn’t want to carry it far, because that sucker weighs fifty pounds. The manufacturer calls it portable; I’d call it luggable.”
He replaced the photograph with a cutaway drawing of the camera. Most of the interior consisted of the block of depleted uranium. A hollow tube or tunnel traced a shallow S-curve through the center of the block, and Thornton ran the laser dot back and forth along a wire nestled within that S. “This cable is called the pigtail,” he said, “and here at the end of the pigtail”—the laser dot jiggled on a small, rounded bead—“is the gamma source: not much bigger than a grain of rice, but it’s two hundred curies of iridium-192.” The bead looked chillingly familiar.
“How does it work?” Emert asked. “There’s a lead shutter at one end? It opens and sends a beam of gamma rays out the tube?”
“This is the strange part, to my way of thinking,” said Thornton. “To take a radiograph, you put the film behind the pipe, you hide behind a shield, and you turn a crank that pushes the pigtail out the end of the box. That lets the gamma rays from the source go through the pipe — and pretty much anything else nearby — and hit the film.”
“Seems kinda primitive,” said Emert.
“Kinda dangerous, too,” I added.
“Yes, it does,” said Thornton. “And yes, it is. Anytime somebody’s using one of these, it’s important to get everybody else out of the area. The people who use these things tend to get the highest annual radiation exposures of any workers in the nation — ten times what somebody at a nuclear power plant gets. And that’s if the thing’s working right. If something goes wrong, it can get real bad, real fast.” He showed a picture of a pigtail — just the wire cable and the bead of the source, detached from the camera. “Occasionally the pigtail comes loose,” he said. “The operator thinks he’s reeled it back into the camera, but instead, it’s lying on the ground, sending out all this gamma at anybody unlucky enough to come close.”
“Or pick it up,” I said bitterly.
“Or pick it up,” he echoed. He proceeded to tell us, and to show us, the story of a pipeline welder in the mountains of Peru who — late in the afternoon of February 20, 1999—found a short length of wire cable lying on the ground. Thinking he might be able to use the cable or sell it for scrap, the man picked it up and put it in his pocket. It remained there until he took off his pants that night and draped them over the back of a chair. The man’s wife sat briefly in the chair.
Then, at 1 A.M., came a knock at the door. During the evening, the radiographer had tried to take an image of a weld. When he developed the film, he found that it was blank; unexposed. Backtracking, he checked the camera and discovered that the pigtail was gone. A frantic search began, which led to the welder’s house, where the source was recovered. The iridium had nestled against the man’s thigh for six hours; it had hovered at the base of his wife’s back for a few minutes. But in those hours and minutes, everything changed.
Twenty hours after pocketing the source, the welder entered a hospital in Lima. A red oval had appeared on the back of his right thigh, and he was vomiting. By the following day, the oval was an open ulcer, surrounded by a hal
o of inflammation. Within a month the crater extended almost to the bone, and infections and tissue damage were rampant. Six months after the man’s exposure, surgeons in Paris amputated his right leg and removed the right half of his pelvis — skeletal trauma that exceeded almost anything even I had ever witnessed — along with much of his intestinal and urinary tract. The man’s wife was luckier; she developed a burn at the base of her back, but it healed.
The wall went dark, but the images hung in my mind, and no one said anything for a while. Finally Emert did. “That guy lived?”
“He lived. He’s alive still,” said Thornton. “If you call that living.”
My thoughts flew from hospitals in Peru and Paris to one in Knoxville. I prayed that I had not just witnessed a preview of what lay in store for Eddie Garcia’s hands or Miranda’s fingers.
“So you guys think the gamma source in Novak’s gut was from one of these industrial radiography cameras?”
“We’re virtually sure. Field Imaging Equipment is sending somebody from Shreveport up to Savannah River to verify that.”
“And they can tell us whose camera the source came from?”
He shook his head. “I wish it were that simple. There are thousands of these cameras out there — all over the Texas oil patch and the Gulf Coast, for instance — and they’re not as tightly regulated or closely tracked as you might think. When a refinery or a pipeline-inspection contractor buys one, they’re required to register it with the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But after that?” He shrugged. “They can chuck it in a jeep and drive from one coast to the other with it. If it gets lost or stolen, the owner has to report that to the NRC. But what if nobody knows for a while? They might use the hell out of it for a week or two, then lock it away in a tool closet for six months or a year. Hell, hundreds of these cameras went missing in the chaos caused by Hurricane Katrina. Lost, mostly, but probably some were stolen.”
