Murder on the Metro

by Margaret Truman

“Like what?”

  “Exactly how blowing up Y-Twelve is going to kill five million people. That’s what the professor will be able to tell us.”

  Sister Mary Alice looked across the seat at him. “The professor?”

  CHAPTER

  65

  NEW YORK CITY

  They found him, again with his pigeons on the roof.

  “You’re late, Brixton,” he said, looking up from tending to one of their cages.

  “You were expecting me?”

  “Ever since our last meeting ended. Definitely seemed we were at the start of something that would require my expertise again before we reached the end.” He regarded Lia Ganz, then Sister Mary Alice. “You’ve got company today, I see.”

  Brixton introduced them both to him.

  “A nun and a Mossad agent?”

  “Retired,” Lia Ganz elaborated.

  “I’m not,” Sister Mary Alice chirped.

  “Makes for strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?” the professor said to Brixton. “So what can I do for you today?”

  It was drizzling, but none of them was dressed for the weather, even the professor, who lived in the building. In fact, Brixton noted, he seemed to be wearing the same clothes he had been the other day.

  “I want to give you a hypothetical,” Brixton told him.

  “Hypothetical,” the professor repeated, getting the point. “I’m all ears.”

  “Say you’re storing more than a hundred thousand pounds of highly enriched uranium in a secure facility. Say somebody, terrorists, want to blow it up. What happens?”

  “Not very much, compared to what most would expect.” The professor finally turned away from the cage he was cleaning, careful not to disturb the pigeons currently roosting inside. “You’re thinking, How can that be, right? That much of the prime ingredient behind nuclear weapons goes boom and the survival rate is somewhere around a hundred percent? Come on, you’re thinking.”

  “You’re right.”

  “And here’s your answer. Highly enriched uranium emits extremely low levels of only alpha radiation, which can easily be shielded. Unlike plutonium, the radiological hazards of handling highly enriched uranium are relatively low.”

  “Even though it can be used as a nuclear explosive material, making it one of the most dangerous substances on earth?” wondered Lia Ganz.

  “Correct,” the professor said, letting a bird climb onto his arm. “Because exposure to HEU is not inherently dangerous, and certainly not fatal. It’s not like they can turn it into the mother of all dirty bombs.”

  He began to feed the pigeon from bird snacks piled in his lapel pocket. Two more birds joined the first on his arm.

  “So, assuming they intend to blow Y-Twelve up,” the professor continued, “there must be something else here we’re not considering.”

  “I believe I may be able to be of service there,” said Sister Mary Alice. “Let’s start with the site’s history.

  “Y-Twelve was built secretly over a two-year period as part of the Manhattan Project, and its existence wasn’t publicly acknowledged until the end of the Second World War. By then, the secret city had a population of seventy-five thousand. Few of its residents had been allowed to know what was being done at the military site, which included one of the largest buildings in the world. Y-Twelve processed the uranium used in Little Boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Seven decades later, the facility remains the only industrial complex in the United States devoted to the fabrication and storage of weapons-grade uranium. Every nuclear warhead and bomb in the American arsenal contains uranium from Y-Twelve.”

  “You might also mention, Sister,” the professor picked up, “that Y-Twelve isn’t lacking in the quantity of security so much as the quality. There are over five hundred security officers authorized to use lethal force, five armored vehicles, miniguns that can fire up to fifty rounds per second and shoot down aircraft, video cameras, motion detectors, four perimeter fences, and rows of dragon’s teeth—low, pyramid-shaped blocks of concrete that can rip the axles off approaching vehicles and bring them to a dead stop. The Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission have proclaimed it to be one hundred percent secure, without explaining how an eighty-year-old woman penetrated all that security with bolt cutters.”

  “I was eighty-three at the time,” Sister Mary Alice noted. “And I didn’t even need those bolt cutters to penetrate all that security.”

  “Then how’d you get in?” the professor asked her.

  “I took the train.”

  CHAPTER

  66

  NEW YORK CITY

  And I’m not talking about Amtrak, either,” Sister Mary Alice continued.

  “What are you talking about?” Brixton asked her.

  “A secret tunnel that can be accessed from a few miles away. That’s how I got into the complex. The story about the bolt cutters was concocted to cover up the truth and because the powers that be had to hide the tunnel’s existence at all costs.”

  “Why?” Lia Ganz asked her. “It’s not like what they’re storing at Y-Twelve is a secret.”

  “Unless they’re storing something else there,” the professor interjected.

  He returned the four pigeons currently perched on his arm to their cage and collected four more in virtually the same positions in their place, turning toward Sister Mary Alice.

  “That’s it, isn’t it, Sister?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t even know myself, until I spent a month watching the place. People were coming out who never went in. And I had a source who eventually told me about the existence of the tunnel.”

  “I didn’t know nuns had sources,” said the professor.

  “He was a fellow activist. I didn’t believe him at first, thought it was just a harebrained conspiracy theory. Until he told me what the actual freight they were bringing into Y-Twelve was, to be tucked away in five underground levels that were originally constructed to handle additional stores of highly enriched uranium, enclosed by bedrock and reinforced steel and concrete.”

  The professor stroked one bird’s head, then the next. “Don’t tell me: nuclear waste.”

  “A million of tons of it by now, maybe even more.” Sister Mary Alice nodded. “And it appears I don’t have to tell you, because you already know.”

  “The plan for years was to create a repository for the waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada,” the professor explained to Brixton and Lia Ganz. “When that fell through, the Department of Energy was left scrambling to find a replacement. Does that accurately sum things up, Sister?”

  “Pretty much on the nose, yes,” Mary Alice Rose told him, “at least according to what I was able to find out. Besides being weakly radioactive, uranium is a toxic metal likely to affect the function of the liver, kidneys, heart, and other organs. When you add a million tons of nuclear waste to the mix, you’re looking at the ultimate dirty bomb. Triggering an explosion with a fraction of that size of high explosives, and you’d have your three to five million deaths, Robert. And that figure may turn out to be conservative.”

  “Because of the resulting radioactive cloud spreading,” concluded Lia Ganz.

  “Indeed,” the professor noted. “And notice I didn’t mention anything about the cloud dissipating. That’s because highly enriched uranium has a higher atomic weight than nuclear waste product. The molecules of the waste will bond to those of the HEU, creating a toxic, deadly cloud that won’t be going away anytime soon.”

  “No wonder they had to make you effectively disappear, Sister,” Brixton managed, through the fog that had suddenly enveloped his thinking.

  She nodded, unflappable as she’d been since Brixton and Lia Ganz had rescued her from her federal marshal escorts. “I interpret what I’m hearing to mean that those five million deaths, at minimum, aren’t going to necessarily be immediate or even close to it. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more people died from the effects of the radiation than the actual blasts themselves.”


  Impressed, the professor grinned at her as he continued feeding the new set of pigeons roosting on his arm. “No offense meant, but that’s not language normally used by a sister of the Immaculate Conception.”

  “No offense taken, and I have a master’s degree in cellular biology from Boston College.”

  “You’re no stranger to science, then.”

  “Far from it. My father was a molecular biologist. I got my first microscope for my fifth birthday, around the same time my parents became heavily involved with the Catholic Worker Movement. So activism, you might say, runs in the family.”

  The professor’s quizzical, taut expression suggested he was studying her, trying to make sense of the aging nun who’d been arrested staging numerous protests over her life, but only one that had landed her in jail. “Now, let’s get back to those five million deaths,” he said, prodding Sister Mary Alice. “How big is this train?”

  “A few years back, eight freight cars, to conform to the size of the underground loading platforms, both at the entrance to the tunnels and beneath the facility itself.”

  Brixton weighed that in his mind. “And if those cars were all loaded with drums filled with high explosives…”

  “The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in World War Two,” the professor picked up from there, “contained the equivalent of two hundred and seventy tons of high explosives. Eight train cars filled with C4, thermite, or one of the newer experimental explosives would at least approximate, or even exceed, that.”

  “Spewing a million pounds of radioactive waste into the air. ‘Ultimate dirty bomb’ would seem to be an understatement,” said Lia Ganz, not bothering to hide the fear in her voice.

  “Indeed,” acknowledged the professor. “One study found that over the course of a year, one milligram of uranium oxide emits three hundred and ninety million alpha particles, seven hundred and eighty million beta particles, as well as associated gamma rays, for a total of more than one billion high-energy, ionizing, radioactive particles and rays that may produce extensive biological damage to a person’s ovaries, kidneys, lungs, lymph nodes, blood, bones, breasts, and stomach, not to mention fetuses. That’s one single milligram, mind you. And you know the most important component of all in this?”

  “All that concrete,” Sister Mary Alice said, even though the question had been aimed at Brixton.

  The professor nodded, even more impressed with her than before. “The very concrete you chipped away at, once you penetrated the Y-Twelve facility. Every hammer strike would have produced a fissure of concrete dust into the air. Multiply that to the nth degree and you’d have—”

  “A toxic dust cloud,” Sister Mary Alice completed. “Utterly massive in size.”

  “I’d estimate a half-mile radius, though I’m tempted to revise that to as much as a mile, potentially steadily expanding from there, depending on wind and other climate factors.” The professor swung back toward Brixton. “Remember all the people fleeing from that debris cloud after the Twin Towers collapsed?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Multiply that effect by maybe a billion and add in deadly radiation to the mix. And since the facility is located in Tennessee…”

  “What?” Ganz prodded, when the professor’s voice tailed off.

  “You may want to cover your ears for this, Robert,” he advised, then continued as Brixton mocked that notion. “This time of year, the dust cloud would ride the same steering winds that drive spring storms up the East Coast. No one living in the entire so-called Acela corridor would be safe. Upon further review, I’d say the number of casualties might well be closer to ten million over time.”

  Brixton had to remind himself to breathe.

  “And I haven’t gotten to the financial costs of this, or the fact that large swaths of areas would become uninhabitable for decades due to lingering radiation, and that includes major metropolitan centers. The devastation would be incalculable. The country would never be the same, at least not in any of our lifetimes.”

  “That’s not saying a lot, in my case,” Sister Mary Alice remarked.

  “If you can survive federal prison, Sister,” said Brixton, “you can survive anything. And we need to get back to Washington. According to that recording Kendra Rendine got a hold of, zero hour is tomorrow, and we’ve got to stop it.”

  “They wouldn’t risk carting the explosives in any sooner than necessary,” the professor noted. “My guess is that they’ll bring them in tomorrow morning and disperse the drums through all five underground levels to maximize the explosive effects.”

  “There’s something else,” Brixton told them all. “Tomorrow is Vice President Stephanie Davenport’s funeral.”

  CHAPTER

  67

  WASHINGTON, DC

  Let us pray,” the Reverend Francis Tull said.

  He squeezed the hands of President Corbin Talmidge and First Lady Merle Talmidge at the round table in the White House residence that was used for their weekly prayer meetings.

  “Lord, give us the strength to persevere against our enemies and be strong enough to do the hard thing. For in the hardest of things we show our undying love for You, O Lord. In those moments we are Your most faithful of servants, forever devoted to keeping Your word and remaking this world in Your image. ‘And walk in the way of love,’” Tull continued, squeezing the hands clutching his harder as he quoted from Ephesians, “‘just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.’”

  Both the president’s and the first lady’s eyes were squeezed tightly closed, Tull’s too. He was the son of one of the most famous men of God, if not the most famous, of all time. A man who’d built an empire of devoted followers and worshippers long before the age of the televangelist took hold. But Francis Tull possessed none of his father’s charm, conviction, or even business sense. He’d been bleeding donations since an initial spike that had followed the great man’s death. His piety was threatened by scandals, he had a son who wouldn’t talk to him and had fallen victim to drugs, and his lawyers were currently fighting a losing battle with the IRS over the Tull church’s tax-exempt status. If the Talmidges hadn’t welcomed him into their fold and into the White House, providing a much-needed lifeline to resurrect his flagging reputation, Tull hesitated to think where he’d be right now. They’d even managed to make that IRS investigation go away.

  “‘So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many,’” he continued, quoting the Book of Hebrews, “‘and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.’

  “O Lord, hear us on this blessed day, for that salvation is what the sacrifices that are to come require. As is Your word, many must die so that more might live, and live their lives true to that word.”

  Tull separated his hands from the president and first lady, opening his eyes toward the heavens, as he quoted from First Kings.

  “‘Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.’” He waited for the first couple’s open eyes to regard him before he resumed. “Now, in a coming dawn, another burnt sacrifice will be upon us, one certain to extract a terrible toll that will threaten the faith of all but the most chaste and deserving of Your faith and wisdom. They shall walk the scorched earth and the fires shall tremble under their step, only the residue of smoke left in the wake of the true lot among us who are righteous. Help us, O Lord. Guide us in this time of upheaval and sin and answer the prayers of those who’ve stepped forward to those who keep Your word. ‘Their work will be shown for what it is, because the day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work,’” Tull finished, quoting from First Corinthians. “Amen.”

  Corbin and Merle Talmidge opened their eyes.

  “That was fun,” said the president. “Especially the part about
fire.”

  “Bless you, my son,” Tull said, touching his shoulder.

  “Are you my father? You don’t look like my father.”

  The first lady took her husband’s hand and squeezed it affectionately to distract him. He smiled at her.

  “Can we pray again?” he asked both of them.

  “You should pray in silence,” Tull told him, “so you may hear God speak to you.”

  “Just me?”

  “Just you.”

  The president squeezed his eyes closed again.

  “I can be with you when the fateful hour arrives, to offer comfort,” Francis Tull offered the first lady.

  “Your presence would provoke suspicion, Reverend,” Merle Talmidge cautioned. “Let’s make it after the fateful hour. Your comfort will be needed for years to follow.”

  “‘Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire,’” he said, quoting from the Book of Exodus, as he patted the back of her hand tenderly. “‘The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently.’ This country is that mountain. Yours is a holy mission, undertaken to assure His word is not squandered.”

  “You would bless a mission certain to cost millions of lives?”

  “‘And He does great wonders, so that He makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men.’ From the Book of Revelation, Madam First Lady. The earth was forged and preserved in fire. That fire can take many forms, like the one that is soon to be upon us.”

  “You haven’t warned any of your people, of course,” Merle Talmidge said.

  “I serve the Lord, not them. And to let that word leave this holy house with me would be to rebuke the word of God and prove myself unfit to be His vessel. It is not my place or within my power to bless your holy mission. But I can, and have, blessed you in the time of strife and sin that requires true courage to act. Luke chapter one: ‘Do not fear, for you have found favor with God.’ And from Proverbs: ‘Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the Lord will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being snared.’”