by Jan Coffey
“I can’t,” she murmured. “I know I can’t.”
Picking up the axe in the other hand, she started down the hallway toward the lab, pausing only to throw the gun into a trash room.
She had just one thing now she needed to do…seal the sample containers.
In a minute she was standing at the door of the test lab. She punched in her code, and the lab doors opened. Going in and closing them behind her, she activated the locks and assessed the situation.
Inside the first room of the lab area, two cameras were mounted high on the walls. Poking them with the axe, she managed to smash them both. Next, she moved to the computer and started bringing up the security parameters for the test lab.
The people who’d been sent down here had detailed knowledge of the facility. They had the codes to get in and out of every room. They knew the layout of the facility better than she did.
The first thing she had to do was change every password and access code.
While waiting for the files to upload, she checked her connection to the New Mexico Power R & D group. There was no live help online.
“Of course not.”
She opened a new email message.
I am in the URL adjacent to Test Drift facility at WIPP. Killers on site. Please help. Marion. She addressed it to her department head at the College of Engineering, UC Davis. She had to tell someone that she was still alive.
With her finger on the send button, Marion paused. She didn’t know where the idea came from. But all of the sudden, it made sense.
She opened her cell phone and turned it on. The battery was nearly dead. Pulling up Mark’s cell phone number, she sent the email to his number. Wherever he was, he’d get it as a text message.
Marion didn’t have time to try to remember anyone else’s email. The security screens had come up. She tried resetting the passwords. A dialogue box immediately popped up. She didn’t have authorization to make the change.
“No,” she moaned aloud. She had forgotten that she was only a peon in this project.
Her next priority was to start the cementation steps. She turned on the equipment.
She then looked around her in growing panic. They might think she had a machine gun, but that wouldn’t stop them forever. Clearly, they were experienced killers who’d faced weapons before.
The walls of the test labs were layered concrete, lead, and steel. The doors were lead and steel, as well. But she had no way of locking them out, short of knocking out the power. And if she did that, she wouldn’t be able to complete the cementation process.
As lame as it seemed, moving furniture in front of the door appeared to be the only possible way she could think of to slow them down.
Marion knew they were going to get to her eventually. But before that happened, she would secure these test samples…or die trying.
CHAPTER 72
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Legal or criminal.
Nellie Johnson knew how laws were made. She’d seen firsthand how the power company coaxed and lobbied and bribed legislators into passing laws that favored their self-interest. She knew how it all worked. Right and wrong had very little to do with legal and criminal in the real world.
So long as Nellie felt there was a justifiable motivation behind an action, she didn’t bother with the formality of how that action was perceived under the law.
Even killing Fred Adrian was justifiable. Young people were sent to war to die every day. And not just in America’s defense, but in defense of America’s business interests. Maybe that was the same thing, she reasoned. Killing and dying in the interest of business. That was the real world. They were doing the same thing here.
They would never have been able to buy Fred’s approval to kill the nuclear project. He had to be taken out of the picture. The same applied to the R & D people in the plane. Nellie was even okay with Cynthia’s accident, despite the fact that she liked her personally.
This latest decision regarding the elimination of Marion Kagan before the experiment could be made secure…that she couldn’t understand.
Martin Durr sat in his mansion back East without a care in the world. It wouldn’t bother him if New Mexico disappeared off the face of the earth. He had nothing to lose. Nothing at stake. He just didn’t care.
But Nellie cared.
There were three suitcases open on her bed. She’d already called a limo service and booked her seats on a flight out.
She called her mother in Albuquerque. Angela Johnson’s answering machine picked up. Nellie tried her cell phone next, and when there was no answer, she tried the home number again, this time instructing her mother to pick up.
Angela didn’t bother to answer her phone whenever one of her favorite television shows was on. A second call and Nellie’s voice bellowing into the answering machine always worked like a charm, though.
Angela answered.
“I’m picking you up in two hours, and we are heading to the airport,” Nellie said into the phone.
“Who died?”
“No one, not yet. But if you’re not ready to leave with me by the time I get there, you will die.”
The first suitcase was jammed full. Nellie pushed the top down and sat on the edge, closing the locks.
“Stop with the dramatics,” Angela told her.
Nellie could hear the TV blasting in the background. “Turn the darn thing off, mother.”
The sound seemed to go up rather than down.
“I’m giving you time to pack some of your stuff,” she said aloud into the phone. “But if you’re not ready when I get there, I’m taking you with only the clothes on your back.”
Nellie started filling up a second suitcase. Other than the sound of the television set, she could hear nothing else on the other end.
“Mother, did you hear me?” Nellie asked.
There was nothing.
“Mother?” she screamed.
The sound of TV died. “I was waiting for the commercial to mute the sound,” Angela told her. “So what were you saying?”
The door bell rang. Nellie figured it had to be the limo service. Tucking the phone between her neck and shoulder, she closed the second suitcase and pulled them off the bed.
“I’m picking you up in two hours. We are getting on a flight to New York City,” she said into the phone.
“What for?”
“It doesn’t matter what for,” Nellie told her. “I’m just telling you to pack and be ready. I’ll tell you more when I get there. Please pay attention. This is very important, mother.”
The doorbell sounded again.
“How long do I pack for?” Angela wanted to know.
Nellie started pulling the suitcases toward the front door. “I don’t know. Two weeks, three weeks…maybe more.”
“That’s way too long. I can’t go away for that long and not tell…”
Nellie dropped the phone on a table as she reached the front door. She knew how her mother was. She was a chatterbox and had a zillion friends. If she knew what was going on, half the fifty-five and over population in Albuquerque would know in a matter of minutes. With the resulting traffic, Nellie and her mother would never get to the airport in time.
She looked out the security peephole. A man in driver’s uniform was in the hallway. She opened the door.
“You can take these two bags to the car. I have one more suitcase that will be ready in a sec…” Nellie stopped, looking at the silencer of the gun aimed at her heart.
She didn’t have time even to turn around.
Angela Johnson’s voice could be heard on the phone.
“…can’t just get up and go like that. Seriously, Nellie. Who died?”
CHAPTER 73
Roswell, New Mexico
Dealing with the Department of Energy was giving Mark Shaw a colossal headache…and he was only a listener on the field conference calls. Special Agents Harvey and Botello had spoken to four different people within the DOE bureaucracy, and
they still didn’t have the right person who could tell them what they were looking for.
The good news was that the message was getting across. Everyone was trying to help. Finding the right person, however, was the challenge.
The way Mark understood it, the underground facility dated back to the early 1980s, and there were numerous engineering groups who’d been involved with it over the years. To obtain the official copy of the facility drawing, they were initially told they’d need to wait until tomorrow morning, during business hours. To get what they were looking for any sooner, they would have to find one of the engineering project directors who’d actually been involved in the latest stages of the site development.
No one, however, seemed to be able to come up with a name, and there seemed to be no quick answer.
Agents Harvey and Botello were trying to convince the current person on the phone to authorize overtime and bring someone into the print room to pull the files of the WIPP facility. As the agents were playing their best good cop/bad cop routine, Mark felt his cell phone vibrate.
He looked down at the display. He had a text message.
Mark opened the phone to read it.
“Marion,” he said aloud, forgetting the other conversation. “She’s alive.”
Both FBI agents stared up at him.
“I have a text message from Marion Kagan. It’s right here. It was sent only a minute ago from a New Mexico Power Company email address.”
Harvey was telling the DOE engineering director to hold the line.
“What does it say?” Botello asked.
He read it aloud. “I am in the URL adjacent to Test Drift facility at WIPP. Killers on site. Please help. Marion.” Adrenaline surged through him. He had to do something right now.
“What’s URL?” he asked the DOE engineer they had on the phone.
“Underground Research Lab.”
“Is there an underground lab attached to the Test Drift facility?” he asked in a rush. “How do I get there? Where’s an entrance? How do I get down?”
“I don’t know there is an underground lab next to that facility,” the person on the phone said.
“Then you better find out,” Agent Harvey barked into the phone. “And if there is one, find out how we can get into it. We’ll call back in five minutes. See what you can find out.”
They ended the call.
“I know you need to wait for a search warrant,” Mark told the agents. “But I’m a private citizen. I’m going to WIPP right now. I’ll break into the place if I have to, and you can arrest me later. But I can’t wait around anymore. We have reason to go in there. She needs help.”
No one argued with him. Botello was the one who spoke up.
“Come with me. I’ll arrange for your transportation.”
“He should be armed,” Harvey recommended.
“I’ll make those arrangements, too.”
Mark looked at the two agents, surprised that they were taking a chance of being named as accessories to what he was doing.
Harvey stood in front of him. “Raise your right hand. I am hereby deputizing you as a federal agent. Your assignment is to maintain surveillance of that WIPP facility until the search warrant arrives.”
“But what you do when you’re there…” Botello shrugged. “If you determine that you need to go in because a crime is being committed…well, you do what you need to do. You’re a trained law enforcement officer.”
“But we need to keep a direct line of communication open,” Harvey ordered.
Mark knew that the agents understood what he was going to do. FBI procedures would not allow them to storm that facility without a plan worked out for going in and coming back out. And that wouldn’t happen until they had complete authorization for their actions. It was understood that, officially, they hadn’t heard him say what he was going to do. That part of the conversation had never taken place.
CHAPTER 74
Nuclear Fusion Test Facility
Four hours and ten minutes.
The process was an extremely slow one. Marion didn’t know if she had enough time to finish cementation sealing of all the containers. The whole effort would be for naught if someone busted into the lab and killed her before she was finished, anyway.
Still, Marion argued with herself that each container sealed would lesson the risk of explosion and…if it all went up…reduce some fraction of the long years of nuclear contamination.
Step by step, she told herself. Just keep going.
Nonetheless, she was surprised the killers had not stormed the lab yet.
“Don’t think about them,” she told herself. “Think about what you’re doing.”
She looked through the special, layered glass window of the test housing of the sample containers. The cementation process was primarily used for casting inside a hazardous material shipping container. Using the overhead lifts, Marion maneuvered into place all the supplies she needed, including a number of larger containers, and starting the mixing.
The entire process was fairly straightforward. The cement-like homogeneous aggregate material was prepared by combining inorganic compounds with water. The mixture was then poured into the space between an inner storage containment vessel—in this case the individual test samples—and a larger, outer container. Once the test samples were encased, she needed to vibrate the mixture inside the larger container to eliminate and fill void spaces, and then begin the subsequent process of curing, baking, and cooling to solidify the material. This solidified material formed a protective enclosure around the test sample containers. That would stop them from emitting the hydrogen gasses that would start the chain reaction of explosions.
Because of the size of the fixtures and the ovens, Marion knew she could only go through the process one container at the time. She had done the calculations and knew which of the nine test samples was most critical. That was the one she started with.
Marion put on the gloves and protective clothing. As much as the chance of ever getting out of this facility alive was nearly nonexistent, she had enough fear built in not to skip any safety steps.
She checked the watch right before she took out the first container out of the case. Three hours, fifty-five minutes.
The cement mixture was ready. She placed the first test sample in the larger container and started the pouring process.
The computer beeped. An e-mail. Elbow deep in the project, Marion looked over. She couldn’t leave what she was in the middle of, but her hopes buoyed tremendously.
Someone had answered her.
CHAPTER 75
Nuclear Fusion Test Facility
Ground Level
Even in the daylight, anyone wandering though the Chihuahuan Desert—that vast, arid land of red sand and clay, dotted with the dagger-like clumps of lechuguilla, prickly-pear cactus, honey mesquite, and ubiquitous desert scrub—would think the two-story concrete building was just a deserted relic of another era. A line of rusted garage doors faced a square patch of cracked tarmac that one might assume had once, long ago, been used as a landing pad. A broken down barbed wire fence identified the boundaries of the facility. On the roof, an old crane sat, barely visible from the ground.
Behind the building, out of sight of the dirt road, an SUV was parked, the driver standing beside it. The tip of the cigarette glowed as the man smoked.
Night had fallen quickly, and the darkness had swept across the desert before his very eyes. Nearly an hour ago, he’d been told to come out and have the car ready. The rest of them were supposed to be out in minutes. Nothing had happened since.
The man turned to the building as one of the garage doors opened spilling light into the darkness.
“What’s the holdup?” he asked.
“Jay is still not up.”
“Has anyone called him?”
“He’s not answering,” the one who’d came out of the building explained.
“How about the cameras?”
“Something w
ent wrong. The rest of us are going down.”
The driver knew he wasn’t being told everything, but that suited him just fine.
“I’ll stay here,” the driver said quickly.
He’d seen the greenish color in the faces of the two who’d first came up. Those dead bodies must be stinking the place up down there.
“I want you wait inside so you can hear the phone. In case we need you.”
The driver pocketed the car keys and followed the other man in. He didn’t care where he waited, so long as he didn’t have to go down into that facility.
CHAPTER 76
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
Chain link fence with rolls of barbed wire on top. A security post and a gate. Dozens of buildings spread out over a few acres. Spotlights illuminated every corner, making the facility shine like the moon in a dark sky.
Parked behind a low rise next to the other FBI vehicles who’d set up surveillance on the facility, Mark Shaw was feeling a bit overwhelmed. He had no idea where to even start looking for Marion. He looked down at his phone to see if there’d been any other messages from her. None.
He looked down at the drawings that they’d received from TMC Corp. They’d gone through it with a fine-tooth comb, and there wasn’t a single area where they could pinpoint any research lab.
Mark decided he had to get past the security gates. Once inside, he hoped that Harvey and Botello would have more specific information for him from the DOE.
He got out of the car and joined the other agents who were waiting in the darkness. He already knew everyone here was expecting to have a search warrant in hand by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. To Mark, though, that was a life time away. Killers on site.
