Ground Zero (The X-Files) (9 page)

At the time, the evacuation efforts had been undertaken at enormous cost. For years the Bikini Islanders had petitioned the United States and the United Nations to be allowed to return to their homeland, but only after the United States footed the atrocious bill to remove the residual radioactivity from their coral reefs, their beaches, their jungles. Thinking of the island photographs on Dr. Gregory’s walls, as well as the satellite images and weather projections in his lab office, Scully inspected the exhibit with greater interest. In 1971 the Bikini Atoll had been declared safe, and the islanders were allowed to return. But tests in 1977 showed that the atoll still seethed with

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dangerous levels of radiation, and the inhabitants were forced to evacuate again. Residents of Eniwetok Atoll, which also was used for a prolonged series of hydrogen bomb tests, returned to their homes in 1976, only to learn that a nuclear waste dump on the islands would remain contaminated for thousands of years. In the early 1980s it was found that residents of islands even one hundred and twenty kilometers away from the original tests had developed an unusually high incidence of thyroid tumors.

Shaking her head, Scully moved on to the worst part of all, the centerpiece of the museum—a gallery of gut-wrenching photos showing the blasted remains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, burned corpses left in the wake of the fireball that had blazed across Japanese skies a half-century before. Some of the bodies had been incinerated so completely that nothing remained but greasy shadows of black ash splashed against the walls of surviving buildings. Worse even than the corpses were the blistered and suppurating survivors. As Scully looked at the photos she noticed an unsettling familiarity between those bodies and the corpse of Dr. Emil Gregory in his own radiation-washed laboratory.

“Yes, Agent Scully?” a woman’s terse voice said. Scully turned to see Miriel Bremen, a tall woman with short, wavy mouse-brown hair cut in an unflattering squarish style. Her chin was long, her nose pointed, and her gray eyes seemed weary. She was not an attractive woman, but her bearing and her voice bespoke a no-nonsense quality of intelligence.

“So now what did we do?” Miriel said impatiently, not allowing Scully to speak. “I’m getting tired of all this harassment. We’ve filed the appropriate papers, given the required notices, obtained

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the correct permits. What on earth has my group done to attract the attention of the FBI?”

“I’m not investigating your group, Ms. Bremen,” Scully said. “I’m looking into the death of Dr. Emil Gregory two days ago at the Teller Nuclear Research Facility.”

Miriel Bremen’s cool mask cracked, and her whole body sagged. “Oh,” she said. “Emil…that’s different.”

She paused, gripping the receptionist’s table with one hand and took a deep breath. Becka Thorne watched to see if she could help, then surreptitiously disappeared to attend to the photocopy machine. Miriel glanced around as if for reassurance at the posters of Nagasaki victims, at the forlorn Bikini Islanders.

“Sure, let’s talk, Agent Scully—but not here.”

73

TEN

Triple Rock Brewery and Cafe,

Berkeley, California

Wednesday, 1:06 P.M.

Miriel Bremen led the way to a small microbrewery and restaurant only a few blocks’ walk from the heart of the university. Scully followed Miriel through the wood-framed glass doors into a room full of booth tables layered with a thick armor of glossy varnish, and a bar lined with empty stools. The droning background noise of pedestrians on the sidewalk and constant traffic on the main streets faded as they stepped inside.

Metal signs advertising long-out-of-business beer manufacturers from the 1940s and 1950s covered the walls. Above the brass-railed bar, a chalkboard listed the four handmade brews on tap. On the back wall, next to a dartboard and pool table, a large green slateboard suggested deli sandwiches, hot dogs, nachos, or salads from the food-prep window.

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“You order food over there,” Miriel indicated a smaller counter. “Vegetarian chili is their specialty, but the soup’s pretty good, too…and of course a sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich. People come here for the beer. Best you’ll find anywhere.”

She left Scully to prop her briefcase in one of the booths far from the door and gestured with her shoulder at the list of house beers on tap. “What are you having?” Miriel said.

“The stout is to die for.”

“I’ll just have an iced tea,” Scully said. “I’m on duty.”

Miriel frowned at her. “Listen, Agent Scully—the whole point of going to a microbrewery is to taste some decent beer. This isn’t Budweiser Lite, you know. They’d probably throw us out on our ears if we ordered iced tea in here.”

Scully didn’t think the manager would do any such thing, but the place did remind her of her student days enough that she felt a pang inside. She wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but Scully couldn’t afford to scorn an overture of friendship, if she wanted Miriel to open up and answer probing questions.

“All right, let me try one of the stouts, then. But just a small one—and only one.”

Miriel forced a faint smile onto her hard face. “That’ll be up to you to decide.” She went to the bar while Scully perused the list of sandwiches. “Get me a hot dog and a cup of chili,”

Miriel called back. “I take it Uncle Sam is paying?”

“I am,” Scully said, noting the prices and realizing that they both could get by on less than ten dollars for lunch. When they returned to their table, Scully sat down, reaching across the table to pick up her pint of dark malty stout. “Looks thick enough to hold up a spoon,” she said. 75

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She took a sip and swallowed, surprised at the
density
of the drink. The taste was overpowering, almost chocolaty. A true liqueur of a beer, not the light, sour-tasting stuff she occasionally drank very cold out of a can at picnics or birthday parties. Scully raised her eyebrows and nodded in approval at the woman in the seat across from her. She tried to think of where to begin, but Miriel pre-empted her. The protester seemed to have no problems with self-expression, bypassing time-consuming pleasantries and the dance of conversational give-and-take before Scully could get around to the real questions.

“So, let me tell you why I think you’re here,” Miriel Bremen said. “It’s one of two possibilities. Either you think I, or someone from my protest group, has in some way caused the death of Emil Gregory—or you’ve been stymied by your escorts at the Teller Facility, your lack of appropriate security clearances, and your inability to access classified documents. Nobody’ll tell you anything, and you’ve come to me thinking I have some answers.”

Scully spoke slowly. “A little of both, Ms. Bremen. I’ve completed the autopsy on Dr. Gregory. There’s little doubt as to the primary injuries that resulted in his death, but I haven’t yet been able to determine how they came about. What could Dr. Gregory have stumbled into that caused his death?

“I’ll have to admit that your protest group does have a credible motive for wanting Dr. Gregory out of the picture, so I have to look into it. I also know that Dr. Gregory—a man you worked with—was involved in some sort of classified weapons project, something called Bright Anvil. But nobody will tell us what that is. And here you are, Ms. Bremen, at the intersection of both of my lines of investigation.”

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“Well then, let me tell you something,” Miriel Bremen said, folding her hands around her pint of dark beer and taking a long swallow. “It sounds clichéd to say that I have nothing to hide—but in this instance I truly don’t. It works to my benefit to tell more and more people about what’s really going on at the Teller Nuclear Research Facility. I’ve been trying to blow the whistle on them for the past year. Here, I brought along some of our group’s brochures.” She reached into her pocket and handed over two of the hand-folded, photocopied pamphlets that some volunteer had no doubt designed on a personal computer.

“Back when I worked at the Teller Facility, I was quite a devoted assistant to Emil Gregory,” she said, settling her long chin into her hand. “For many years he was my mentor. He helped me through the politics and the paperwork and the progress reports so I could do some real work.

“Your imagination is probably going to blow this out of proportion, thinking we were lovers or something—but that’s just plain wrong. Emil was old enough to be my grandfather, and he took an interest in me because he saw that I had the talent and the enthusiasm to make a good partner. He coached me, and we worked well together.”

“But you had some sort of falling out?” Scully said.

“In a sense…but not exactly the way you might be thinking,” Miriel said, then sidestepped the question. “You want to know what Bright Anvil is? It’s an unorthodox type of nuclear explosive. These days, despite the end of the Cold War and the supposed downscaling of nuclear weapons development, we’re still designing new ones. Bright Anvil is a very special type of warhead using a technology that…” She paused, then stared at the walls, her

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eyes unfocused, as if she was thinking of anything but the decorative metal signs.

“A technology that…?” Scully encouraged. Miriel sighed and met Scully’s gaze. “It’s a technology that seems to operate beyond the laws of physics, as I know them—and I do know physics, Agent Scully. I’m not aware of how much physics they taught you in your training as an FBI agent, but—”

Scully interrupted her. “My undergraduate degree was in physics. I spent one year here at Berkeley before I transferred to the University of Maryland. I wrote my thesis on Einstein’s Twin Paradox.”

Miriel’s eyes widened. “I think I might have read that.” She contemplated. “
Dana
Scully, right?”

Scully nodded, surprised. Miriel sat up and looked at her with greater respect. “That was interesting stuff. Okay, now I know I don’t have to put it in kindergarten terms—but I wish I could, because I don’t understand it myself.

“The whole Bright Anvil Project was funded by non-traditional means, invisible on the ledger sheets, money skimmed from other projects, to pay for new tests, cutting-edge research, unorthodox concepts. Bright Anvil was never listed on any budget submitted to Congress, and you won’t be able to track it down.

“Emil had worked in the nuclear weapons industry for decades. He was even at the Trinity Test, back in 1945.” She smiled wanly. “He used to tell us stories….” Her lips trembled for just a moment, but she covered it by eating some of her vegetarian chili. “But by now he was at the end of his career. He thought he was hiding it from all of us, but I don’t think he was in very good health.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Scully said.

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Miriel nodded, but asked no further questions. “Emil wanted to do something important to end his career on a high note. He wanted to leave a legacy behind. But all the work he’d been doing in the past decade or so was just ‘fine tuning a paper bag,’ as we physicists call it.

“Then Bright Anvil fell in his lap. Someone else had done the preliminary physics. We got designs for exotic, high-energy, pulsed-power sources. It was a done deal. The components worked. I couldn’t figure out
how
or
why
—but Emil didn’t worry about that. He got all excited. He saw how such technology could be used to create a fundamentally new kind of warhead. Emil took it and ran with it.

“Even from the start, I had my doubts—but I kidded myself. I followed along because Emil had done so much for me. This was our new project. I helped him run simulations, scenarios that had little likelihood of ever coming about for real. But the more I worked with it, the creepier it became. Bright Anvil was just too weird. It didn’t seem to come from any physics I was ever taught in school. No technology I know can do what it does. Some of the components of the device were fabricated elsewhere. We never knew where or how—we just
received
them from the program offices in Washington.”

Miriel finished off her beer. She glanced over at the bar as if she wanted to order another one, but instead settled back to look across the table where Scully sat in rapt attention. Miriel leaned over, placing her elbows on the polished tabletop.

“I’m a scientist by training. But for me to understand, my science has to have some foundation. And Bright Anvil has no scientific basis that I can grasp. It’s something so exotic I couldn’t conceive of it with my wildest imagination. So I backed off, I raised too

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many objections, and in the process made a lot of enemies.

“Then, in one of those serendipitous occurrences, I went to a conference in Japan. Just out of curiosity I took a side trip to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—you know, a weapons researcher’s pilgrimage. Both cities have been rebuilt, but it’s like putting makeup over a scar. I began to check into things. I read the literature that I’d studiously avoided before, not wanting to look too closely at my own conscience.

“Do you know what they did to the Marshall Islands with the nuclear tests in the fifties? Do you know the horrible aboveground tests they did out in Nevada, staking out livestock at various distances from Ground Zero just so they could analyze the destructive effects of the blast and flash on living tissue? Do you know how many Pacific Islanders were booted off their homes, their peaceful idyllic island existence destroyed, just so somebody could blow up a big bomb?”

“Yes,” Scully said. “I know.”

Miriel Bremen shoved her plate away, having finished most of her lunch. She brushed off the front of her shirt. “I apologize. I was giving you a sermon.” She nudged the Stop Nuclear Madness! brochures across the booth closer to Scully.

“Read these if you want more information about it, and about us. I won’t take up any more of your time.” She slipped out of the seat.

Scully glanced down and saw that she had eaten only half of her own meal. Miriel Bremen had already ducked out the door, leaving Scully alone in the restaurant before she could think of an intelligent follow-up question. Considering what she had just learned, Scully picked up her sandwich and chewed slowly.