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“Hundreds?” The number astonished me.
“Several hundred. Nearly all of them recovered since.”
“Nearly?”
“A few are still unaccounted for,” he acknowledged.
“So one of those missing Katrina cameras could have supplied the source that killed Novak?”
“Hang on,” he said, “I’ll get to that in a second. Another complication is that there’s no serial number on the source we found in Novak.”
“Garcia,” I said. “Garcia found it in Novak.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Yes, the source Dr. Garcia found in Novak. There would be a serial number on the camera, but there’s no room on the source. Which is too bad, since the source is what we have.” He shrugged again, and for some reason, I found the shrug — the even-keeled, accepting shrug — intolerable.
“Damm it!” I halfway shouted. “Isn’t there anything we can do to find out where this came from? Isn’t anybody in the government worried about these things? Isn’t anybody anywhere worried besides me?” Thornton and Emert stared at me, astonished at the outburst, and I realized that my anger stemmed not so much from the perils of portable radiography sources — peril could be found in any technology if you looked for it — but from my helplessness to do anything for Miranda or Garcia. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was out of line.”
“I understand,” he said. “You’ve got people whose health and safety have been compromised. On the bright side, we do have a couple of things that might help us narrow the search.”
“Tell me,” I said. “I could use some good news.”
“Remember, the half-life is just seventy-four days. So if you put a fresh two-hundred-curie source in your RadioGraph Elite, seventy-four days later it’s down to a hundred curies, and by a hundred and forty-eight days it’s down to fifty curies. At the end of a year, that stuff has decayed through five half-lives, so it’s down to six curies. Knowing the source in Novak was still around a hundred curies tells us something very useful.”
“It tells you the source was fresh,” I said. “And it tells you it wasn’t from one of those cameras that went missing in Katrina.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“So who actually makes the sources?” I said. “And how, and where, and when? Does this outfit in Shreveport have a reactor or a cyclotron or whatever is used to make iridium-192? Do they make big batches of these things — hundreds of things at once? — or just a few at a time? How hard can it be to track down everybody who got one sometime in the past three months?”
He smiled at the burst of questions. “It’s harder than I wish it were,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got a hundred people working on it. You know the old saying about the tip of the iceberg?” I nodded. “Well, I’m just the guy standing on top of the tip of the iceberg. Everything below is shrouded in fog.”
Just then his cell phone rang — an odd, warbling tone I’d never heard from a cell phone before. He looked startled, then murmured, “Excuse me.” He turned his back on us and spoke softly, but I could make out a few words, mostly “yes sir” and “no sir” and “thank you, sir.” He ended the call with a promise to phone with an update before the end of the day. He turned back to us, looking somewhere between embarrassed and shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I had to take that. The man calls, you answer.”
“Which man?” I asked. “Your boss? The head of the WMD Directorate?”
“His boss’s boss’s boss,” said Thornton. “The director. Of the FBI. He wants progress reports three times a day. This case is a big target on his radar screen.”
I felt a sudden tightening in my throat, and a sudden surge of hope that we’d find out who had killed Novak — and who might be slowly killing Garcia.
CHAPTER 20
The next morning Miranda and I had a short but cheerful visit at the hospital with Garcia. Garcia still looked weak, his burned hands were quite tender, and his lymphocyte count remained dangerously low, yet his spirits were surprisingly high. He was six chapters into a sterilized copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the books I’d seen on Leonard Novak’s desk. The book was propped on a reading stand, and Garcia was turning the pages with the eraser of a pencil, which he managed to grip with his bandaged right fist. “Great book,” he said. “Those Manhattan Project scientists were big thinkers. Complicated human beings, though.” I was surprised at his choice of reading material, but delighted to see him in good spirits.
After leaving the hospital, we returned to the bone lab. We’d just started reconstructing the cranium of the North Knoxville skeleton when Chip Thornton came knocking on the door. “Wow,” he said. “Skeleton in a kit. Looks like fun.”
Miranda made a face at him. “You came to help?”
“Yes,” he said. “Okay, no, that’s a lie. I was in the neighborhood and figured it was just as easy to relay this in person as on the phone.” That’s a lie, too, I thought. You figured you’d stop and flirt with Miranda. “We’ve had some people digging out old security files,” he said, “and they found an interesting note in Dr. Novak’s. Apparently there was some suspicion at the time that Novak was a homosexual. Army intelligence recommended that he be removed from the project as a security risk, but General Groves himself nixed it — he wrote that Novak could consort with farm animals as long as he produced sufficient plutonium in the reactors in Oak Ridge and Hanford.” Miranda looked appalled. My guess was that her disgust had less to do with the notion of interspecies love than with Groves’s readiness to ridicule the scientist at the same time he was depending on him.
“Poor Novak,” she said, confirming my thinking. “What on earth was he doing in the boonies of Tennessee?”
“It’s where the project was,” said Thornton. For such a smart guy, he had an unfortunate tendency to take things too literally at times. “Groves picked Oak Ridge as the main site for the Manhattan Project for a bunch of reasons,” he said. “Far enough inland that the Germans and Japanese couldn’t possibly attack it. Isolated enough to stay below the radar screen. Good access to rail lines and cooling water and hydroelectric power and a civilian workforce.” I nodded; I’d read this in several of the history books I’d hauled back from the Oak Ridge library in the past week. “I don’t know if this was another factor in the selection,” he went on, “or just something that Groves came to appreciate as the project progressed, but folks in Appalachia tend to be pretty tight-lipped.”
Miranda pursed her lips, then said, “Yup.” Thornton and I laughed.
“Conservative, too,” he said. “Oak Ridge was practically the polar opposite of Los Alamos. Los Alamos was filled with loose-lipped liberals, from the top down. Hell, up until Groves put him in charge of Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer gave money to Communist causes. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, was a member of the Communist Party. So was his younger brother, Frank. So was Oppenheimer’s girlfriend, until she committed suicide.”
“Wait, wait,” said Miranda. “Girlfriend as in ‘before he married Kitty’? Or girlfriend as in ‘running around on Kitty’?”
“Maybe both,” said Thornton. “He was engaged to a woman named Jean Tatlock before he married Kitty, and he stayed in touch with her occasionally afterward. One of the creepier things in Oppenheimer’s file is a report by an army intelligence agent, Boris Pash, who followed Oppenheimer from Los Alamos to Berkeley in June of 1943. Pash watched Oppy go inside Tatlock’s apartment, wrote down what time the lights went out, and then wrote down what time they came out of the building the next morning.”
“Yuck,” said Miranda.
“It might seem intrusive,” conceded Thornton, “but these guys were working on a life-and-death, fate-of-the-nation project. Oppenheimer was in the most sensitive position of all the scientists. And Berkeley, where he and a bunch of other Los Alamos scientists came from, was a hotbed of communism. You think Berkeley was leftist in the 1960s and 1970s, you should’ve seen it in the thirties and early forties.”
“If t
he choice is between peeping Toms and left-wing liberals,” said Miranda, “I’ll take the Berkeley crowd any day.”
“Swell place,” said Thornton, “if you like Marx and Lenin.” I heard a faint warning bell begin to ring in the back of my mind, but I shrugged it off. “Oppenheimer and the people he brought to Los Alamos were brilliant, no doubt about it,” the agent continued. “They were the ones who put the pieces of the bomb together. But Los Alamos leaked like a sieve. Oppenheimer ran Los Alamos sort of like a university physics department. He held seminars where people talked openly about the bomb. He gave folks a mimeographed handout—The Los Alamos Primer, it was called — that summed up everything they knew about how to build an atomic bomb.”
“Probably helped speed things along,” said Miranda. “Synergy, cross-fertilization of ideas, intellectual critical mass — all that stuff we liberal ivory-tower types believe in, you know?”
