Endangered Species (23 page)

“No.”

“Me, either.” A deep breath. “I’ve asked the search team to go over Simon’s cabin with a toothbrush. They should be up there by now.”

A knuckle rapped on the interoffice door behind Mallory, and the agent said, “Come!”

A woman leaned in, not glancing at Wager. “Mr. Stribling from DOE is here, sir.”

“Send him in, Connie.”

It wasn’t one man; it was two. The first, hesitant, paused in the doorway, his light-brown eyes magnified by thick glasses as they studied first Mallory, then Wager. The second man wore a uniform of varying shades of tan and had a shoulder patch crammed with atomic energy symbols and the letters RFSF. His heavy-lidded eyes looked suspiciously at Wager before settling on Mallory.

The man with the glasses said uncertainly, “I’m Milton Stribling?”

Mallory stood to shake hands and introduce himself and Wager. The uniformed man said that his name was Lieutenant Walters and he was with the Rocky Flats Security Force. He didn’t shake hands.

“Thank you both for coming in,” said Mallory. He pushed a pair of uncomfortable metal chairs up to the desk and tapped the papers on the desk. “Do either of you recognize the building portrayed by these drawings?”

Walters didn’t look at the plans. “Is it a Rocky Flats installation?”

“We don’t know, Lieutenant. That’s what we’re asking you.”

Stribling ran a hand across lank blond hair that was combed to part over his left ear. “Well,” he said nervously, “let’s see.” He was almost as tall as Mallory and had a bony face with prominent cheekbones and a cleft in the tip of his nose. That nose now bobbed up and down over the drawings as the man tilted his head to bring them into the focus of his thick lenses. Walters, too, leaned over to study the diagrams. He wasn’t as tall as Stribling but had a much heavier build.

Stribling’s lenses lifted toward Mallory. “Do you have any other floor plans?”

“No. Just this.”

“Well, this is only the ground level. If you had other levels, I could be more definite.” The lenses turned toward the uniformed man. “What do you think, Walters? Three seven one?”

“Yeah. … Could be.” He asked Mallory, “You people pull another raid? You still trying to prove we’re burning plutonium waste at night?”

“I’m not with the agency’s Denver Office, Lieutenant. I didn’t have a thing to do with challenging your security procedures or operations.” A jabbing forefinger emphasized his words. “And let me impress upon you, I am not running a drill or an exercise. I am—we are—investigating a serious threat to national security. It has already involved one homicide, and that’s why Detective Wager is here!” Mallory’s voice softened. “Now, we both would appreciate your cooperation, and I’m certain neither of you wishes to impede a murder investigation. Do these diagrams fit any building at Rocky Flats?”

After a brief silence, Stribling cleared his throat. “If it’s the building I think it is, most of the structure’s underground.” He looked at Walters for support, and the uniformed man nodded shortly.

“What building’s that?” Mallory asked.

“It looks like Building 371.” He oriented one of the aerial photographs to the diagram and pointed to a structure. “This one.”

“What’s in that building?” asked Wager as Mallory circled the spot with a red marker pen.

“It’s a plutonium-recovery facility. The old chemical-process facilities—purification. It’s where the americium 241 was washed out of the buttons and clean plutonium reinstalled.”

“You’d better detail that for us, Mr. Stribling,” said Mallory.

“Buttons are what we call the plutonium triggers. They have a field life of five or six years. After that, too much americium 241 builds up. Then they’re brought back to the Flats and purified.”

“You mean old plutonium triggers to hydrogen bombs are worked on in that building?”

Stribling seemed surprised that Mallory didn’t know that. “Sure. Purified plutonium’s too expensive just to dispose of. And difficult too.”

“The triggers are stored there as well as worked on?”

“Not on this level. The storage vaults are underground.”

“How big are those things?” Wager asked.

“Two and a half kilograms. About the size of a softball.”

Wager blinked. “Small enough for somebody to carry, then?”

Lieutenant Walters spoke up. “If they could carry a ton of lead to wrap it in. Nobody—I mean nobody!—gets past the sensors if there’s a click of radiation on them.”

Stribling added, “We’ve drastically upgraded our personnel security procedures to guard against any inventory discrepancy.”

“Goddamn right!”

Mallory asked, “What happens to the plutonium after it’s cleaned?”

Stribling answered that one. “When the triggers are cleaned, the purity is tested in Building 559. Then the material is fabricated into new triggers in Building 707. The completed unit is shipped to Amarillo, to be installed in the warheads.”

Wager blinked. “You have a lot of plutonium in those buildings too?”

Stribling shrugged. “What’s a lot? It’s enough to do our work. The main plutonium vaults are still here in Building 371: four stories underground—lead-lined walls of ten-foot-thick concrete.” He explained, “Building 371 is the old purification unit. We’ve been working on a new one for years.” His finger touched another structure in the photograph. “Building 771. But so many additional safety restrictions were added that construction got far behind, so we haven’t moved into the new vaults yet. And now, with all the uncertainty about continuing operations at the plant …”

“You mean Building 371 is still in operation?”

The man shoved his glasses up his nose with a forefinger. “Nothing’s in operation now; we’ve been on hold since 1989. But the vaults and glove boxes are still there, of course. We use a tunnel system to move the plutonium back and forth from the vaults in 371 to the operations in 771 and 707. But as I say, we’re not doing much at all out there now.”

“And all that stuff’s secure?” asked Wager.

For the first time, Stribling looked uncomfortable. “We’ve had no incidents of security lapses or sabotage.” He added bravely, “There have been a few problems in the safety sector.”

Walters spoke up. “Nothing serious—nothing like the anti-nuke people want everybody to believe.” He glanced at Mallory. “Or even what the FBI—the local FBI—accuses us of.”

Stribling spoke quickly. “That’s true. But regulations have become much more stringent.” He hesitated and then went on. “There have been some … well, some resultant health implications. However, we now have a new primary contractor for operations, EG and G, and it looks like the problems of degraded personnel areas are being cleaned up.”

“‘Degraded personnel areas’?” Wager asked.

“Areas of possible emissions hazards due to structural inadvertencies.”

While Wager tried to figure out that phrase, Walters spoke up. “We’ve upgraded our security as well. Almost doubled our manpower, in fact.”

“I read something about waste disposal problems,” said Mallory.

“Well, yes, waste disposal is another factor.” Stribling nodded. “That’s another reason we’ve suspended operations.”

“How’s that?” asked Wager.

“The radioactive waste …we’ve been shipping it to Idaho for temporary storage, but the governor there stopped accepting it. The anti-nuke lobby’s pretty strong out there. So we sort of have a backlog piled up. But the new geological disposal facility in New Mexico has just been approved, and it shouldn’t take us long to move the hot waste once the GDF is in full operation.”

“Where’s that stuff stored?”

“In the white boxes.” said Walters. “They’re in a secure area.”

Stribling looked at Mallory. “Oh, it’s not plutonium—as I’ve told you, that’s scrubbed and reused. At over a hundred dollars a gram, we recycle the plutonium and guard strictly against any inventory discrepancy. No, the hot waste is made up of the cleaning materials—what’s left from scrubbing the plutonium. Water and other liquids: nitric acid, hydrochloric acid. But that material’s no problem—it’s really routine. It’s just that nobody wants the waste.”

“So this radioactive waste is just sitting out there?” Wager asked.

“No.” Walters mimicked Wager’s voice: “It’s not just sitting out there. Like I just said, it’s in a secure area.”

“That’s true,” said Stribling. “And it’s not really a problem once it’s buried. The new GDF facilities will seal it underground for twenty-five thousand years—that’s its half-life.”

“It’s not kept in this building, though?” Wager pointed at the diagram.

“No. With that building, the real problem is plutonium dust. That’s the problem wherever any millwork is done. To control that, all plutonium-handling facilities are constructed with a series of negative air pressure zones from the vault to the glove boxes and then to the outside. That way, any draft will suck dust back into the building and into the air filtration system. Plus, every glove box has its own individual filter, and then the collective air is filtered through a four-stage system before it goes out the exhaust stacks.” His finger gestured at the tall chimneys that, in the aerial photograph, threw narrow black shadows, like daggers, across the buildings’ flat roofs and onto the ground.

Walters added, “That exhaust is monitored constantly by the Waste Management Division. So is any water effluent—all the water in our evaporation ponds gets checked hourly.”

It was Stribling’s turn. “For both radioactive and hazardous wastes, including heavy metals such as cadmium and chromium. But I have to admit, we have had occasional unscheduled events in the plenums.”

“What’s an ‘unscheduled event’?”

Stribling eyed Wager. “Small internal fires caused by spontaneous combustion.”

“What happens then?”

“The automatic sprinklers come on, and the fire’s put out. The fires are in contained areas, but that’s where adverse health outcomes have occurred most often. Ninety-eight percent of plutonium radiation is alpha particles, and if it gets in the lungs or in a tiny open wound in the skin, it settles in the bone marrow. However, if we get to an exposed subject right away, we can prevent terminal health outcomes. Surgical incision of any open wound is effected immediately. And of course we have a whole array of monitors, alarms, chirpers, badges, and so on to detect any airborne leaks at the earliest possible moment.”

“As well,” added Walters, “as two doctors on duty during the day shift and medical technicians twenty-four hours a day, trained to handle radioactive problems.”

“What about the plutonium in the vaults?” Wager asked. “Isn’t that a possible problem too?”

Walters snorted something, and Stribling’s voice covered the sound. “They’re four stories underground, encased in concrete and lead. The viewing windows for the XY retrievers are double-paned glass blocks several inches thick and filled with water. Nothing and nobody can get to them.”

“But what would happen,” insisted Wager, “if a bomb went off in one of those buildings or it caught fire?”

Stribling smiled. “It won’t, of course. There’s no possibility of an energetic disassembly in these structures. But site selection was a major consideration in locating the plant there in the fifties. The site selection team determined that the wind patterns wouldn’t blow the smoke toward Denver.”

“What about Broomfield? Westminster? Thornton?” Those were only a few of the Denver suburbs Wager could think of that had grown up since the fifties. They and other new bedroom communities lay directly east of the plant.

Lieutenant Walters shook his head; the possibility was highly unlikely, but since Wager asked: “In a worst-case scenario, they would of course have to be evacuated. But the chances of something like that are absolutely negative.” He added, “Besides, we’ve recently inaugurated a Terrain Responsive Atmospheric Code computer program for predicting plume flows as part of our emergency preparedness program. We can foretell which way pollution from the plant will travel.”

Foretell, Wager thought, but not forestall. The prevailing winds blew west to east—out of the mountains and across Rocky Flats toward the sprawl of homes and shopping centers that made up the northern half of the greater Denver area. In fact, the whole Front Range, and Rocky Flats especially, were famous for chinook winds, which had occasionally gone off the scale at a hundred fifty miles an hour. And despite Walters’s assurance about the wind patterns, Wager remembered smelling the smoke of prairie fires that had settled over his downtown Denver neighborhood when he was a kid. Fires that had occurred in that area before it was fenced off and made secret.

A plume of radioactive smoke that might settle over one hundred thousand people? Two hundred thousand? A cluster of municipalities and unincorporated suburbs with not even a coordinated radio network, let alone a single disaster plan. There might be panic, Wager knew, but there wouldn’t be evacuation. And it would certainly make headlines—bigger than Chernobyl—and last for twenty-five thousand years. “You’re just sixteen miles from here, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“Could someone sabotage this building?” Mallory’s finger tapped 371, and Wager figured the FBI agent was thinking the same thing.

Walters was indignant. “No way! We have very elaborate physical defenses around the plant. In addition, every member of our security force is a graduate of the Department of Energy’s Central Training Academy at Kirtland Air Force Base. We’re trained in firearms, explosives, sniper tactics, computer security, crisis negotiations, and preemptive identification. And we’re in constant readiness. I have every confidence that our security force can handle any attempt against the facility!”

Stribling gave a slightly offended smile. “We’re not amateurs out there, Agent Mallory. After all, we’re not unimaginative, and we do know what the risks are. More, perhaps, than anyone else. And because of that, we protect against them.”

The tiny buzz from the overhead light fixture filled the silence following Stribling’s speech. It was true, Wager thought. Stribling, Walters, and their fellow workers out at the Flats knew a hell of a lot more than he did about what was at stake. But Wager couldn’t help thinking “what if.” What if someone—Libeus King, for example—did breach the security?