Wounded Earth (29 page)

It was time to go. She closed the front door, turned the key in the lock, and walked away.

J.D.
pulled up to the line of cars at the second Savannah River Site security checkpoint. He felt like he looked nervous. He checked himself in the rear view mirror. Yes, he did look nervous. There were even beads of sweat popping out on his forehead. And his shaved head looked stupid. He checked the ID badge clipped to his shirt pocket. There was a picture of a bald guy on it. He guessed he looked like the picture, more or less. It had gotten him through the first checkpoint, several miles back.

He cut the air conditioner and rolled the window down. A few minutes waiting in the car in this heat would make the perspiration plausible. He pulled up to the window and held his badge up for the guard to see. The guard reached out and said, “Hand me your badge, please.”

Jesus. Just what he needed. A guy who cared about his job. He unhooked the badge and told himself not to worry, because he had what it took to pull this scam off. He wore a badge that had already fooled one person. He had a briefcase full of papers bolstering his claim to be Jackson Sellers. And he had the guts to participate in this baldfaced, not to mention illegal, deception. He handed over the badge.

“Would you mind parking over there and stepping into the guard shack?” the man asked.

Yes, indeed, he did mind. He looked around. There were long lines of cars backed up in either direction. It would be tough to get away, unless he put this thing in four-wheel drive and went off-road. Might as well go in the shack and see what the gentleman wanted. After all, he had a stack of papers to prove he was who he said he was. Or, more correctly, to try to prove he was someone he wasn't.

He parked and sauntered into the guard shack as if he were unconcerned about the problem. He decided against acting annoyed by the delay. No sense in stirring up trouble.

He waited inside the door while his guard scrutinized another man's picture ID. The other guard, monitoring traffic flowing the opposite direction, was more his kind of guy. He sat by his window, elbows on the counter and chin supported by one palm. He glanced at ID badges and motioned each driver through with just a lazy wave of his free hand. Some cars he evidently knew on sight. These he just waved through without checking.

It was a 50-50 shot—J.D. got a conscientious employee when he could just as easily have gotten a casual good-old-boy. All because he happened to be driving in the wrong direction.

The conscientious one finished giving his other victim a thorough scrutiny, then he turned back to J.D. He looked at the photo ID, then at J.D., then back at the photo ID. Then he said, “We just have one problem here.”

J.D. started fumbling with his folder full of papers.

“Your ID is out of date. You must not work here often.”

“No," J.D. said. "It's been a while.”

“That's what I thought. I know the faces of most regular employees, and the names of quite a few. Anyway, we need a current ID. If you'll just put that stuff down and step over here—” J.D. reached for his briefcase, to pull out a copy of Jackson Sellers's birth certificate, but the guard kept talking, “—we'll take your picture, make you a badge, and send you on your way.”

A few minutes later, they handed him a fresh badge, still warm from the laminator. The picture was abominable; He looked startled, his brow was still damp with sweat, and he was bald. But it was definitely him. He could come and go at will now, without worrying about the checkpoints. He shook hands vigorously with the by-the-book security guard and sprinted back to the car. If everything else went this well, he'd have Cynthia safe by sundown.

* * *

Larabeth turned off the car radio when she crossed the South Carolina border. The news from Hanford sickened her and she could stand no more.

She'd driven like a wild woman all day long and she thought she had a prayer of intercepting J.D. Babykiller was welcome to call her now. It was too late to stop her. In a perverse way, she hoped he would call. It had felt so good to hang up on him.

The phone rang shortly afterward. Larabeth liked to think that he was chafing because, for the first time in a long while, he had no idea where she was. And he had no idea where J.D. was. He knew exactly where Cynthia was, but Larabeth knew how to fix that.

She answered the phone, saying only, “Yes, Trigg. What do you want?”

“I just wanted to make sure you were listening to the news. I told you long ago to watch the papers, but this thing at Hanford is so big that the papers can't keep up. Dead people, evacuations, potential—what is the word? Potential criticality events.”

“I hope you fry for what you've done, Trigg.”

“Larabeth, you never do take time for the gentle amenities, do you?” The voice was relaxed, self-safisfied. “You just plunge straight to the nitty-gritty.”

“I'd expect you to appreciate my coming straight to the point.”

“There's some truth in that, but with you I vastly prefer to dance around the point awhile. It's more entertaining.” His voice stretched lazily, like a satisfied cat.

“Sorry, but I don't care to dance around the point. Did you bomb the K-Basins at Hanford?”

“Very well. I am the responsible party. Are you duly impressed?”

Larabeth thought of the “Hot Zone” and the National Guard and the Columbia River and the evacuation of Richland and blew her stack. It was the only reasonable thing to do.

“Why? I don't understand why. What did the people who work at Hanford and live downstream and breathe downwind do to you?”

“But, Doc, what did those self-same people ever do to avoid their fate? The defense people and the energy people and the bureaucrats in Washington have been poisoning them for fifty years, and they never even had the good grace to say ‘Boo’. Did you know that the acid used to extract plutonium for the very first atomic test is still stored at Hanford? And have you ever heard of the Green Run?”

“Radioactive waste isn't one of my specialties.”

“Let me educate you. In 1949, our government—the one who prided itself on being ever so much more correct than the Soviets—decided to give Russian manufacturing methods a try. They processed ‘green’ uranium instead of giving it a rest period to make it safer. In the process, they released thousands of curies of radioactive iodine. And how many curies were released during the Three Mile Island incident?”

“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.