White Collar, Green Flame - A Technothriller

by Shain Carter

  “That’s the turbo pump revving up,” Dawson told Meredith. “We should be in business in another few minutes.”

  As Dawson had predicted, after a few minutes a small green light came on.

  “Looks like it’s show time,” Dawson told the other three. Again he studied the dials and buttons, then reached out and pushed a large gray button. The console screen, which had been glowing a uniform green the entire time, flashed. The screen dimmed again, but now faint images could be seen against the uniform green background. They were indistinct blotches, like ghosts on a TV set.

  Dawson began turning dials, one at a time. As he did, the image changed, growing or shrinking, and shifting from side to side.

  “What are you doing?” Cindy asked.

  “For this to work, I need to adjust three things: the position of the sample in the beam, the focus of the beam, and the magnification factor. I’m figuring out which of these knobs does what.”

  As he spoke, the image suddenly snapped into focus. It was the entire speck of material, filling the whole screen. Dawson rapidly spun a dial and with dizzying speed zoomed in onto the central portion of the speck. When the picture stabilized, they were looking at an area littered with hundreds of small, uniform cubes, looking for all the world like a child’s blocks strewn across a floor.

  “Is that the titanium rust?” Meredith asked.

  Dawson nodded.

  “Can you tell if it’s natural?”

  Dawson nodded again. “I can,” he said, “and these particles are, without a doubt, man-made.”

  Meredith squinted at the screen. “How can you be so sure?”

  Dawson reached out and turned a knob. The image zoomed in until the entire screen was filled by just a single particle. For the most part the particle surface was smooth, but some areas were covered with what looked like tiny bits of debris.

  “Take a close look,” Dawson said, pointing to one of these areas. The debris was made up of tiny, wispy fibrils.

  Meredith shifted closer to the console. “What? I don’t see anything.”

  “Right there.” Dawson tapped the screen.

  Meredith squinted and leaned even closer. “I still don’t see anything.”

  “It says, ‘Made in Japan’.”

  In a flash, Meredith turned and hit Dawson hard on the arm.

  “I’m being serious. How do you know this stuff isn’t natural?”

  Dawson turned the knob back, zooming the image out until the screen was filled with several hundred particles, all of nearly the same dimensions.

  “For one thing, look at the uniform size of the crystals. Titanium metal is pretty resistant to corrosion, so it would take several hundred years, maybe even several thousand years, for it to completely rust away. Some of that time the metal is going to be wet, some of the time it will be dry. It’ll be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. In other words, the titanium will be corroding under all kinds of different conditions, at all sorts of different rates. So for natural corrosion, I’d expect to see all sorts of different crystal sizes.

  “On the other hand, for synthetic material, the crystals are made under very carefully controlled conditions. I’d expect them to all be the same size. Which is exactly what we have here.”

  Dawson paused as Meredith studied the screen. After a moment she nodded, and Dawson continued. “There’s something else that proves these are synthetic.”

  Dawson turned the knob again, zooming back onto a single crystal. He pointed to the fluffy debris on its surface.

  “I really wasn’t kidding about this saying ‘Made in Japan’. Titanium dioxide is used mostly as a pigment in paints. Most titanium dioxide manufacturers put a coating of aluminum oxide on their pigments to make the paint flow better. I happen to know that there’s a company in Japan that coats their pigments with a material that looks just like this.”

  Meredith studied the screen carefully, then looked at Dawson suspicion. “Just what makes you such an expert at titanium dioxide anyway?”

  Dawson shrugged. “It turns out they make the stuff by burning titanium chloride, which is a liquid, in hot oxygen gas. They do it in something called a flame reactor, which actually operates a lot like a rocket engine, except it uses titanium chloride for its fuel. Fifteen years ago a research engineer at one of the big manufacturing companies thought that they might be able to apply rocket technology to their process, so they called me out to consult. The whole thing turned out to be a bust. Their reactors were similar to rocket engines, but different enough in some very important ways that they couldn’t use any of my knowledge. Anyway, I gave them a seminar on my green flame work and they gave me a tour of their production facility, which was absolutely fascinating, and of their research lab. They showed me electron micrographs of some of their pigments and some competitive samples, including a sample from Japan that looked just like this.”

  Dawson turned to Andy and Cindy, who were mesmerized by the image on the screen. “Listen, kids, what we’re doing has to be a secret for a little while longer. We don’t want you to tell anyone else, especially your Dad. I’ll tell him tomorrow, but I want to make it a surprise. Do you promise to keep it a secret for me?”

  Both kids nodded solemnly.

  “Good. Now, do you think you can put the fossil back without your Dad finding out I took it?”

  They nodded again.

  “It’s under my bed. After lunch, after your Dad has walked back here, you two get it from my room and put it back where Andy found it. And make sure no one sees you.”

  Dawson checked his watch. It was already twenty minutes after noon. “Speaking of lunch, we’re running a little late. You guys head on down, then give me a minute to shut down. We can walk back to the dorm together.”

  Dawson took one last, hard look at the image, then began systematically pushing buttons on the console. The screen went blank and the pitch of the turbo-pump whine dropped off as the blades coasted to a stop. Dawson pushed one final button, and the vacuum in the sample chamber released with a soft hiss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  By the time they got back downstairs, the others had already left for lunch. Dawson, Meredith and the children began the long, hot walk to the dorm. Cindy and Andy led the way, laughing and racing against one another, completely unaware of the significance of what they had just seen. Meredith and Dawson walked together slowly, in silence. Dawson’s thoughts were focused on the microscope images. At the time he was quite certain that they proved that the titanium rust was synthetic, but now he was having second thoughts. After all, spending one day at a manufacturing site hardly made him an expert on titanium dioxide. Besides, the issue really depended on geology, not chemistry, since it hinged on assumptions about the way naturally created titanium rust formed. Maybe natural formation couldn’t be ruled out just because of the uniform crystal sizes and shapes.

  Meredith finally broke the silence. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  Dawson shrugged. What he was really thinking was that he needed a drink. Instead, he turned the question back to her and asked what she thought they should do. She spoke quietly, so the children wouldn’t hear her.

  “I think we ought to confront the guy. Just come out and tell him - ‘Derek, we know you faked the fossil. We know this whole program is a scam.’ Tell him it’s time to come clean with us. I think he will, when he sees that his little game is up. He’ll have to, because I’ll tell you this much - my days of designing propulsion reactors are over. I’m sure Alec, Ted and Burt aren’t going to hang around either, once they know the truth.”

  They walked in silence again as Dawson mulled over Meredith’s words. After a few minutes he told her he agreed with what she said. “But now’s not the time to confront him. We need to figure out what the hell he’s up to first, because at this point I don’t trust him to tell us the truth. Besides, I think we ought to wait and see what Ted finds out from our little outing last night.”

  They were now about a hundred
yards from the dorm. As if on cue, Ted emerged from the door and hurried towards them, half running, half skipping. Dawson and Meredith stopped and waited, letting the kids go on into the building.

  Ted’s face radiated. “I just got off the phone.” He spoke so fast that Dawson could barely understand him. “I have the new orbital elements. They’ve corrected the orbits of satellites twelve, sixteen, twenty-two and thirty-nine. Not by much, but they did it three weeks ago so by now the satellites are in much different locations than what my orbital elements would have predicted.”

  “O. K., " Meredith said. "But what’s the bottom line? Do you know where we are?”

  Ted bobbed his head up and down furiously. “Oh, yeah, of course. It was twenty-two that we saw last night, that’s why it gave such a screwy location when I used the old elements. And it was fifty-nine that I saw this morning. Its elements were still all right. Anyway, together the two sightings pinpoint our location to within five miles. It’s all settled.”

  “And the answer is?” Meredith asked in exasperation.

  Ted blinked. “Oh, right. We're in Iraq, about a hundred miles south of the Turkish border. From the map it likes like a pretty remote region, out in the middle of nowhere.” He stopped suddenly and looked around. “Which, I guess, it is.”

  Dawson let his breath out slowly as Meredith asked Ted if he was sure.

  “Absolutely. No mistake. The elements are fresh. Real fresh. And besides, the two flares agree to within about three miles, which is pretty damn good considering I was just guessing at the magnitudes. There's no question about it - we are in Iraq. If we see a few more tonight, I can pin us down to less than a mile.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Ted.” Dawson quickly told Ted about their findings with the fossil.

  “Are you sure?” Ted asked when Dawson finished. “No chance of a mistake?”

  It was the question Dawson had been silently grappling with. When he answered, he picked his words carefully. “There’s always a chance the fossil is real, but it certainly looked fake. At any rate, between this and your satellite data, I think it’s safe to say that things are not what they appear.”

  "Cool,” Ted giggled, “a bit of international intrigue.”

  Dawson glanced at the dormitory and saw George watching them through the dining room window. “We better go,” he told Ted and Meredith. “We’re attracting attention. We’ll talk to the others later, but in the meantime don’t say anything about this to anyone,” Dawson fixed Ted with a hard stare. “Anyone, got it?”

  For once Ted looked serious as he nodded his agreement.

  Later that afternoon, Dawson found himself back in the lab, trying to work his way through the day’s discoveries. He sat with his feet on the desk, staring out the window and lazily drinking from a beaker. Outside the blazing afternoon sun illuminated the mountains in a brilliant display of green, tan and, at the peaks, white. The mountains looked close through the clear air, so close that Dawson imagined he could see individual trees. Dawson stared at them, lost in thought, going through different gyrations of equally implausible scenarios that would explain Derek’s actions. He was getting nowhere with it; he just recycled the same few thoughts over and over again.

  A noise startled Dawson. He stood and spun himself around to find Andy and Cindy standing quietly behind him. Something had clearly happened. Andy was sobbing quietly, and it was all Cindy could do to keep her composure.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Cindy took a deep breath, and when she spoke, her voice trembled. “Daddy came back to the room for something after lunch. We thought he had already left for here, but he hadn’t. He caught us putting the fossil back in his drawer.”

  “And?”

  Cindy gave Andy a sideways glance. He looked at the floor and sobbed even harder.

  “He wanted to know why we had taken it. And Andy… well, both of us, really, we told him that you and Professor Nelson looked at it with the funny microscope.”

  Andy stifled his sobs and glanced up at Dawson. “We told him you thought it was fake.”

  “What did he say?”

  Andy started sniffling, and Cindy continued. “He wanted to know why you would think such a thing.”

  “And you told him?”

  Cindy nodded. “We told him that the white stuff was made up of tiny bits that were all the same size, and that you told Professor Nelson that meant it had to be fake. We also told him that you said there was something else on the outside of the tiny bits that meant they had to be fake, too.”

  “Then what?”

  “He asked if we had seen it ourselves. He asked a lot of questions about what it looked like, but we didn’t know. So then he asked if we thought that you were sure it was fake. When we told him yes, he got real mad.”

  At this, Andy nodded his head in vigorous agreement. “Real mad,” he echoed. “Last year I broke this Chinese plate that was, like, a thousand years old or something. He got mad at me then. But today wasn't anything like that. He was really, really mad today. It was scary. I thought he was going to hit us.”

  “Did he?”

  “No,” Cindy answered. “He just started calling everyone names. Weird names…” Cindy paused, trying to remember. “Sons of bitches.”

  Dawson thought about this for a moment, then asked who, exactly, he had called a son of a bitch.

  “You, Dr. Singleton, Dr. Krezler, even Professor Nelson. That didn’t make much sense.”

  Andy agreed. “She’s not anyone’s son.”

  “Anyway,” Cindy continued, "he seemed the maddest at Mr. Akbar. He talked about him for a while. He said that Mr. Akbar had made him guarantees that this couldn’t happen. He said he was going to have a long talk with Mr. Akbar and get everything sorted out. Then he left. I think he went to find Mr. Akbar.”

  Dawson considered this news carefully. With their hand tipped the whole situation changed completely. As Dawson saw it, they now had only three options. Dawson, Meredith and Ted could confront Derek now, before he had a chance to react further to their discoveries. This seemed risky, since it would back Derek into a corner, and he was unpredictable enough for that to be dangerous. Or, they could leave the complex, slipping away in the middle of the night. But being one hundred miles inside a hostile foreign country, with no provisions or clear escape plan, and with Alec in no condition for a long hike, all but assured failure. Finally, they could do nothing for the time being. That night they could tell Burt and Alec about their findings and the five of them together could work out their best plan.

  Dawson sighed. By elimination, the last was the only sensible course of action, but Dawson didn't like it. It didn’t get them any closer to the truth, or to getting out of Anjawan. But whatever they did, they needed Burt and Alec to know the situation so they could act quickly when the time came.

  Cindy and Andy stared plaintively at Dawson, and he now realized just how upset their father’s outburst had made them. After a moments reflection he thought he understood why.

  “You said he was mad at everyone?"

  They nodded their heads.

  "But he wasn’t mad at you, was he?”

  As the children thought about this their faces brightened. Dawson continued.

  “No, it wasn’t you that he was mad at. You didn’t do anything wrong, so there’s nothing for you to feel badly about. He was going to find out that we knew about this sooner or later anyway. Once he’s calmed down and had a chance to talk to George, then we can talk to him about going home. I’ll bet you two are ready to get back to the States.”

  Their faces broke out in broad smiles.

  “The first thing I’m going to do is go to the Computerama and see what new games they have,” Andy announced.

  “Not me,” said Cindy. “I’m going to swim in the pool. And take a warm shower every day. I’ve only had nine showers since we’ve been here, and the water was freezing. What are you going to do when we get back, Professor?”

  Cindy’
s question caught Dawson off guard. Without realizing it, his thoughts of post-program life had depended on the success of the messenger probe. In the turmoil of the last few hours, Dawson had completely overlooked the fact that this was not going to happen. One way or another, he now realized, he would soon be returning to South Central University.

  “Well,” he told the kids quietly, “I guess in a few weeks I’ll be teaching a bunch of spoiled, apathetic freshman remedial chemistry again.”

  They kids clearly didn’t understand this, and Dawson just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Come on.”

  The three of them walked downstairs to the offices. From the hallway they could see Ted and Meredith, looking busy, at their desks. Alec and Burt were in their office. Derek’s door was closed. Dawson quietly told the kids to go back to the dormitory, then stepped into Meredith’s and Ted’s office.

  "Meredith, I’m having trouble with my computer. It's that ‘interface fault - hardware not found’ error message that you were getting last week. Can you come up and take a look?”

  Meredith gave him a puzzled look and started to say something, then checked herself. “Sure, I think I remember how to fix it.”

  Ted looked at Dawson inquisitively and began to stand, too, but Dawson shook his head slightly and mouthed the word “later”. As Dawson reentered the hallway he saw Burt in the other room, staring through the open door at him. He had the feeling Burt had been watching him the whole time, but when Dawson looked at him, Burt quickly picked up a paper from his desk and studied it. Alec also glanced up, but turned almost immediately back to his computer screen, muttering to himself.

  When they got to the lab, Dawson told Meredith about what had happened.

  “It gets worse,” Meredith told him. “Derek came in about an hour ago. He was livid, and he called George into his office. There was a lot of shouting, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. After a few minutes they left together.”

  “Any idea where they went?”

  Meredith shook her head. After a moment she asked, “What are we going to do?”