“I have no idea.”
“Fifteen.”
Larabeth sighed. She supposed he was telling the truth, but she didn't want to think about it. “This is all very educational, Trigg. But how do our government's fifty-year-old sins justify what you did? I'm sure your little display has released more radioactivity than anything else that ever happened at Hanford.”
“Are you completely certain sure that my ‘little display’ is the worst thing to ever hit Hanford? There are so many things the government has never deigned to tell us. This time, at least, the innocent parties can get the hell out. Maybe the government will reimburse them for their homes and the inconvenience. Probably not, but it could happen.”
Larabeth pushed the truck further past the speed limit. Her father always told her that arguing with a fool led quickly to becoming a fool oneself. Yet here she sat, traveling at a suicidal velocity and arguing fruitlessly with a man who wasn't a fool, but who certainly wasn't rational. She'd been arguing with him for a week now. Why? The answer was obvious. She argued with Babykiller because being angry with him kept the terror at bay.
“Are you trying to tell me that you did this to help the very people who are in danger right now? Babykiller, that doesn't make any sense.”
“No, it doesn't. I have other reasons, but they contradict the one I just gave. I read somewhere that the ability to hold two contradictory opinions simultaneously was the definition of high intelligence. I would have said that it was the definition of madness. But then I suspect that I am both brilliant and insane. What about you, Doc? You're clearly brilliant. Are you insane, too?”
“Gee, I don't know. I don't have a record of large-scale destruction. But don't change the subject. You said you had other, contradictory, reasons for what you've done. What are they?”
“I don't just despise the government. I despise our culture for consuming and consuming with no thought for the future. Come to think of it, I despise our whole goddamn species. So there is a logic to my actions.”
“Go on.” She was driven to keep him on the phone, because some irrational part of her believed that when he was talking to her, he wasn't hurting her daughter, killing her lover, or poisoning innocent bystanders. It was a stupid belief, she knew. A man like Babykiller had plenty of people to do his killing for him.
“Go on,” she repeated. “Explain to me how logical your actions are.”
“In the minimal scenario, I blow up Hanford and the government rises to the occasion and prevents extreme environmental havoc, but the publicity is so loud that they still have to reimburse everyone in the area for their losses. In so doing, they make restitution for everything they've done to those people over the last half-century. There's some poetry to that and I like it.”
“That's the minimal scenario. Are there others?”
“In the intermediate case, the situation gets away from them. Criticality event. Major radiation to the air, the groundwater, the river. Widespread evacuations. That's what made Hanford such an attractive target. The Columbia River is so convenient and it can carry death and mayhem so easily through populated areas and into the ocean.”
“And you'd like that.”
“Yeah, I'd love to see our civilization start paying the price for its indiscretions. And that, of course, leads me to the maximal scenario.”
“I can't imagine anything worse.” Larabeth was lying. Her stomach was turning because she could imagine worse things.
“Open your mind to the possibilities. Do you think Hanford is my only target? Oh, no. I'll keep hammering away. My people are already poised to trigger another disaster. Or twenty. Sooner or later, the damage to water supplies and air quality will affect the food chain. Maybe the climate. God knows the ecological balance is staggering under our cupidity already. Bringing our misbegotten species to its knees would be a fitting climax to my twisted life. I'd love to live forever but if I can take everyone else with me when I go, I'll go happy.”
Larabeth tried to make herself believe the unbelievable. The man had just finished telling her that he would love to snuff out the human species, but he would be happy if he could just destroy some individual lives while he was trying for the brass ring. That notion was so over-the-top, so insane, that she couldn't take it seriously, so she focused on an interesting, fairly rational point.
“Would you care to tell me where your people are poised to create the next disaster?” she asked.
“Oh, surely you can figure that out.” The sudden slyness in his voice caught her ear.
“No. I can't. Just spell it out for me.”
“Let's see. I can wreak the most havoc by sabotaging a heavily polluted site located on a river, so I can use the river's currents to spread the contamination. I would get the most bang for the buck, so to speak, if I chose a site distant from Hanford. Maybe one on the East Coast, so I can get some poisons into the Atlantic. Are you getting any ideas yet?”
Larabeth was silent.
“Why, Doc, I'm surprised at you. We've already discussed this target. I'm describing the Savannah River Site. Nothing could be more perfect, more poetic. I wouldn't dream of telling you what I'm going to do, so I'd better sign off. A beautiful woman like you could easily get me to talk too much. Maybe I already have. So I'm just going to ask you one question before I go.”
“What could I possibly know that would be valuable to someone as—special—as you?”
“Where are you?”
For the first time, Larabeth detected an emotion in his featureless voice. It was frustration.
She hung up the phone.
* * *
Babykiller glanced at the communications technician beside him.
“I got a lock on her location and you're not going to believe it,” the man said, still twiddling with his equipment.
Babykiller wished he had all his strength, so that he could sustain a complete tantrum. He hissed, “I do not play guessing games and I do not suffer the existence of fools who do.”
The technician suddenly acquired a tic in the muscles underlying his high, shining forehead. He removed his hands from the scanner controls, looked at Babykiller with proper respect, and said, “She's coming this way. She's hardly fifty miles from here.”
Babykiller reminded himself to excuse the technician's lapse. The man's tenure with his organization was short. He didn't realize that his state-of-the-art (and highly illegal) listening equipment was completely extraneous, useful only to prove what Babykiller already knew.
Larabeth's daughter was here. He was here, preparing to put her daughter in the worst kind of danger. Of course Larabeth would come to him.
* * *
Agent-in-Charge Chao waited in his headquarters, in the back of an unmarked van parked at the south security gate of the Savannah River Site. Agent Yancey had done well, getting advance warning of an attack on the Site. They'd only had a few hours to prepare, but maybe it was enough. Yancey and his contact, Dr. Larabeth McLeod, might well have saved the day.
Chao had sent Yancey to sit in another unmarked van, twiddling his thumbs, because the kid's antsiness was getting on his nerves. Dr. McLeod had set the rendezvous point—here at the Savannah River Site's south gate—but she hadn't shown up yet. Chao hoped she made it. He wanted to shake her hand.
Thanks to Dr. McLeod's warning, there had been enough time to search the buildings for unauthorized personnel and the parking lots for truck bombs. Chao had plain-clothes personnel planted among the Savannah River Site workers, watching for tell-tale signs of an attack from within. He had sharpshooters in the woods at every road entering the site. He had rocket launchers prepared to shoot down any helicopter that might consider repeating the trick that had doomed Hanford.
The Site's in-house security was on alert, although he wouldn't give a nickel for the whole lot. They were untrained, undisciplined, and he suspected that several of them were drunk when he arrived. Before noon. When the crisis was over, he would have their idiot supervisor Danka fire
d.
He had asked local law enforcement to get their night crew out of bed and send out everyone they had to look for anything, anything, unusual. Then he settled in to wait for a disaster that might happen now, tomorrow, or never. And, just to complicate the unforeseeable, he remembered the last sentences of his briefing for this job.
“No civilian casualties. Do you understand? None. We failed at Waco and at Ruby Ridge. We never had a chance to help those people at Hanford yesterday. Enough. You have a trained, well-armed task force. They have ignorant rabble. Subdue them.”
* * *
It was several miles to Cynthia's worksite, down a narrow, potholed road that showed its age. J.D. knew its age because Larabeth, briefing him with the thoroughness of a scientist, had told him the history of the contaminated site BioHeal was working to clean up.
In the early days of the weapons program, producing the product had been foremost. Waste disposal was necessary but inconvenient. Nuclear waste had sometimes been stored in basins like those at Hanford. It had sometimes been buried and forgotten. In comparison, non-nuclear waste was cast aside as casually as bubble gum wrappers.
Cynthia and her BioHeal group were working at a non-nuclear dump deep in the woods of the Savannah River site. It was the source of a tremendous plume of contaminated groundwater.
Larabeth had warned J.D. that he would be sneaking onto a busy construction site. Well-drilling rigs would be poking holes in the ground. Technicians would be field-testing samples while geologists monitored their work. And all those people would be starting to shut the whole operation down for the weekend, decontaminating personnel and performing equipment maintenance. Cynthia would be running the show.
The trick would be to find her and deliver the message without giving himself away as a greenhorn or, worse, as an impostor. It would be dangerous to tip his hand too soon. The goal was to let Babykiller's spy get caught up in an “emergency” evacuation a la Chapter 14 before he knew what was happening.
J.D. reviewed the plan as he drove down a fifty-year-old road built to carry trucks full of toxic wastes to the dump site. The road had seen little use since the dump was closed. A canopy of water oaks closed over him. Sometimes the road dipped downward with the land and he could see water standing between wide-buttressed cypress trees.
The countryside made him think of the Louisiana swamps, but there was a difference. The swamps at home felt wild. Sometimes he heard them calling him to step off the solid path, to pick his way on the high ground back into their wildness until the black muck claimed him. These woods called him, too, but they felt safe and green. Everywhere green. He felt secure, enclosed in a natural womb.
The transition from wilderness to work site was abrupt. He rounded a corner and the road ended in a small clearing. There was a makeshift gravel parking area to his left. To his right, there was. . .he supposed destruction was the best word for it.
The clearing was littered with fair-sized stumps and it looked like the BioHeal team spent a sizeable amount of its time hacking back the encroaching woods. Nature had done her best to heal herself after the trucks were gone and the dump was forgotten. She had evidently spread her green blanket over the scar and pretended like it wasn't there. But it was there and it would take Nature a long time to rust away the drums and break down the solvents and neutralize the acids that humans had put in the ground. She could probably do it, given time, but people were trying to learn to clean up their own messes.
J.D. watched a backhoe bite at the soil covering the hillside. Some of the soil was stained a color that couldn't be natural. The backhoe operator segregated the growing pile of stained soil from other piles that looked clean. The front-end-loader busily moved these small piles to two huge piles, covered with plastic sheets.
Another backhoe operator was industriously freeing crushed and rusted 55-gallon drums from the hillside. Some of them were still dripping God-knows-what. J.D. could see drums and pieces of drums—probably hundreds of them—protruding from the ground.
The excavation area was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape and orange traffic cones. The yellow tape also marked a narrow lane from the excavation to the far door of a small building.
Workers wearing face masks that J.D. smugly identified as Level C protection were spooning soil from the large piles into glass jars. Racks of these jars were quickly accumulating beside workers seated at a table covered with electronic equipment and more glass jars.
Another worker was walking around outside the crime-scene tape waving something that looked like a hand-held vacuum cleaner, except he wasn't waving it close enough to the ground to actually pick up anything. He carried the hand-vac, or whatever it was, over to a tiny woman who was standing outside the cordoned-off area, watching the activity.
A long black ponytail hung out from beneath her hardhat. Her face was obscured by a pair of wrap-around safety glasses and her form was covered with the same baggy blue plastic coveralls that the other workers were wearing, but J.D. knew her. He'd known her for years.
It was Cynthia.
She was standing stock-still in the midst of sheer havoc, but there was no question who was in charge. She had inherited Larabeth's air of authority, and J.D. wished he could stand there and watch her exercise it, but there was no time. She could be in danger, right this minute. All the hardworking people around her could be in danger, too. J.D. knew in his gut that there was a spy among them.
He hesitated one more moment. Larabeth had prepped him carefully. She had described the worksite in detail. She'd told him how to avoid contaminating clean areas—or himself. He just had to get to Cynthia and give her the letter.
It sounded good on paper, but he was out of his element. He didn't even know what tetrachloroethene was, for God's sake, and if he didn't get to Cynthia fast, these people were going to expect him to help clean it up. Hoping for the best, he opened the trunk of his car and pulled out his steel-toed boots, his blue BioHeal hard hat, and one of his very own disposable jumpsuits. He could at least look like he knew what he was doing.
He zipped the jumpsuit over his clothes, thankful for the .38 strapped beneath it all. Patting the gun, he prayed, Please God, give me time to get to this if I need it.
The jumpsuit was barely zipped when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Damn. He wasn't ready to respond to Cynthia, who was asking, “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I'm Jackson Sellers, reporting for work.” Mentioning his assumed name made him think of his security badge. This charade would go nowhere if she thought he was some nut trying to crash BioHeal's party. He noticed her badge was clipped to her jumpsuit. He unzipped his jumpsuit partway, reached up under it and got his badge, then clipped it to his collar. Just like hers.
Oh, hell. He guessed it was time to just give her the letter and get this thing started, so he did.
“No one told me I had a new employee coming, and Friday afternoon is a strange time to start a new job,” she said, tapping her cheek with the unopened envelope. “Your badge says 'Field Tech.' Are you here to run the OVMs? Or to help develop the new monitoring wells?”
Forget the OV-whatevers and read the letter, he thought. But he said, “I think that letter will explain everything.”
“Well, whatever it is, you'll need equipment. Come with me while I take these bailers to the equipment shack and we'll sit down, read this letter, and try to figure out exactly why you're here.”
Bailers, J.D. thought. That's what they use to get water samples out of monitoring wells. Remembering that one simple fact made him feel so competent.
She reached in her coverall pocket and underhanded something to him. It followed a lazy arc and he caught it lefthanded.
“Looks like you forgot your safety glasses. Here's an extra pair,” she said. “Don't forget them again. It's the law. Besides, there's not a thing on the Savannah River Site I'd care to have in my eyes.”
* * *
Cynthia took her time walking back to the
equipment shed. Jackson Sellers was following her like a lap dog and that was good, because she was completely pissed off at her boss. Nobody—not even Kelly—was stupid enough to send a brand-new technician, unannounced, to start work two hours before quitting time on a Friday.
She intended to get the man into the relative quiet of the equipment shed and tell him to come back on Monday when she had time to think. But not right away. She liked to let her employees know from the get-go who was in charge.
Cynthia barked an order to a busy well driller. She checked a sampling technician's quality control procedures. And she studiously ignored Mr. Sellers' polite requests that she read the letter in her hand.
Chapter 23
Babykiller waited in the security office at the southern gate of the Savannah River Site. The decor was classic government-issue, circa 1955. He drummed his fingers on the steel desk sitting on the dingy linoleum floor. The whole drab ensemble was surrounded by cinder-block walls. Every last item in the room—desk, floor, walls, and window blinds—was some shade of government gray.
He was content to wait in the dim gray room for his plan to unfold. The success of this operation would bring him satisfaction on so many levels. He would have his revenge against the almighty government that had poured enough Agent Orange over his head to give him cancer. Against environmental whackos who wept over the ethical treatment of animals but didn't give a damn about the people who got in their way. Against eminent scientists who vehemently affirmed the safety of this landfill or that nuclear power plant, but fought like madmen to keep them out of their own back yards.
He would also be taking his revenge on a few hundred thousand innocent bystanders, and even more if atmospheric conditions were right. It was regrettable, but necessary. To be truthful, he wasn't even sure how regrettable it was. He had trouble working up sympathy for people who had the audacity to live normal lives when he had become what he was.
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