Pig: A Thriller (37 page)

             
“Yeah, ‘we.’ Come on. You were the one pushing me to get off my cot and do something. Stop being a slug, the slow-moving elephant. Spread your wings and fly; like the eagle.”

             
“Yeah, well eagles may fly, but elephants don’t get sucked into jet intake of jet engines,” Magda demurred.

             
“You’re the one who was pushing me to help Kolya. This could be linked to his attack. They were afraid of what he’d find in the documents.”

             
“I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t help. I was asking how?”

             
“You know people in the Lab. You use them to make sure your girls are healthy. Have them analyze this oil sample. Something’s not right about it.” 

             
“Maybe. Guess it doesn’t hurt to see. What are you going to do?”

             
“I’m going back to Document Control. To check the manifest. See what’s on record for being pushed down that pipeline.”
             

             
“You look better,” Magda said, touching Snow on the arm as he went to go out the door. “I’m glad to see it. There’s a Buddhist saying: ‘After the cloudy pool of water settles, it becomes clear.’ I think things are settling with you, becoming clear.”

             
“I hear the foreigner was messing around near the pipeline recently, the Canadian. The security cameras caught him. He’s got no business being around there except sticking his nose in our business. If that’s true, I think it may be time we put him out of business. Foreigner or not.”

             
Bykov, the low-grade
siloviki
Pig was working with in this sorry business, was back.

             
“Have you replaced Musil?” he asked. “You claimed you had four people lining up to do his job.”

             
“Like I told, they were lining up,” said Pig. “We got one of the guys already working in the Lab, Arkady, to take his role. It’s perfect. We limit the exposure by having the same guy in both locations.”

             
“You got a lab guy doing the job on the pipeline? Is he qualified? Does he know what he’s doing?”

             
“Yeah, he knows what he’s doing. You think I don’t know what I’m doing? All he has to do is take the product from the lab and send it down the pipeline using the pig.”

             
“How much longer? We almost done? We can’t keep hiding the paper trail on this forever. People keep dying and someone’s going to notice. Even in Noyabrsk.”

             
“A couple more shipments from the Lab and we’re done. We sent the batches down as soon as they’re mixed. Won’t be long now.”

             
“So what do we do about the Canadian? I say we scare him off. Send some muscle with a message. Let him know how easy an accident can happen around all this machinery.”

             
“It’s a mistake. I’m telling you. I know him. It won’t work.”

             
“Won’t work, my ass. He’s Canadian, isn’t he?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Their national animal is the beaver, noted for its industrious habits and co-operative spirit.  In medieval bestiaries it was known for biting its testicles off and offering them to its attacker. I’m sure if you present our position correctly, that’s exactly what the Canadian will do, offer us his balls."  Bykov smiled.

“What’s so funny?”

“A mounted Canadian. Just what I’ve always wanted.”

“What does the police have to do with this?”

“What?”

“A mounted Canadian. The RCMP. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

“You misheard me. I said a mounted Canadian, not the mounted police. I’m gonna mount him, stiff him and put him up over the fireplace.”

“I tell you, he’s a tough fucker. We won’t be able to scare him off.” Telling Pig to do or not do something he wasn’t inclined to was like the weatherman telling a thunderstorm not to come to town.

“Snowball tough? I hear he can barely manage to climb out of bed in the morning. I’ll bet the only shot he’s seen fired in anger has been at a hockey at a hockey game.”

“He was a rodeo rider. You go climb on a two-thousand-pound bull while its testicles are being crushed with a leather  cinch and tell me how tough you have to be. If he wanted, he could have played hockey professionally in North America. You ever seen one of them get hit with a puck in the face and just go the bench and pull the teeth out himself so he can keep playing?”

“The problem is he’s not afraid to die?” Bykov asked.

“No, the problem is he’s afraid he won’t die.”

“We’ve gone too far to back out now,” warned Bykov.

“I’ve got an idea. Like you said, people keep on dying and someone’s going to notice.”

“What?”

“Anyone can commit a murder. It takes an artist to commit a suicide.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

"Say the magic word and you’ll find out."

"Gelding."

"Close enough.”

             
“It’s atomic number is fifty five, but this is an isotope of the original element.” Magda was pissed. Snow had never seen her this angry before. Never seen her this anything.

             
“What is?”

“It looks like talcum powder and glows luminescent blue. It has a half life of thirty point zero zero seven years and emits both beta and gamma radiation. Only concrete, steel or lead can block gam
ma radiation. A safe dosage is one
millisievert per year for non-nuclear workers. It’s used in medical devices and measuring gauges, like oil well logging. It’s also used to maintain atomic clocks. Even the non-radioactive form is highly poisonous.

“What? What is?”

“It’s the most reactive metal there is. In nature, it’s always combined with some other element. So once an area is contaminated, it gets attached to roofing material, concrete, even soil. It’s impossible to clean effectively. There was an accident in Goiana, Brazil from discarded medical waste. A hundred thousand people had to be screened. It took six months to clean up. It interacts disturbingly well with muscle tissue because it’s so similar to potassium, which muscles need to flex. That’s why there’s been so many sick people through the infirmary lately. There was another incident in 2006 in a junkyard in Tennessee. The United States. Two hundred thousand curies were leaking from a single cask. No one knows how it got there. It’d probably been leaking for fifty years.

“Tell me. What?”

“Cesium 137.”

Snow looked at her blankly and shook his head.

“The oil. It’s in the oil sample you gave me to have analyzed.”

“It’s supposed to be. Cesium 137 is the main chemical used in oil well logging. I see it listed in the documents all the time. It helps read the characteristics of the well hole: density, porosity, permeability, whether there’s water or hydrocarbons inside.”

“Not like this. Not this much.”

“I don’t understand. The oil’s contaminated? Pig is selling contaminated oil?”

“No. You’re right. You still don’t understand. You don’t understand how evil he is. He’s putting it there on purpose. He’s not selling the oil. He’s using it to hide the radiation inside.”

“That’s it? That’s all he’s doing? Selling radioactive material? So they can poison someone? Like Litvinenko in London and the Polonium 210?  The oligarchs are out to take over the world. Communism was out to communize it, religion to deify it, capitalism to capitalize it and scientists to quantify it. You’ve heard the joke about the definition of
perestroika
right? Where one man is demonstrating the meaning of the term to another? The man has two pails. One pail is empty and the other is full of potatoes. He pours the potatoes from one pail into the other, very satisfied with what he is doing. ‘But nothing has changed,’ complains the other man. ‘No, but what a noise it makes,’ says the first. That’s all this is. Noise. Not much different than you buying and selling contraband in the Deficit Exchange Club. It’s got nothing to do with us. Let them fight it out. All we have to do is keep out of the way. Tell him we don’t give a shit and he’ll leave us alone.”

             
“Do you know what a ‘dirty bomb’ is?” Magda asked. “We can’t leave this alone. We have to speak up. You want me to bury my head where yours is? And Pig knows it. I wish you could see him right now. He’s fucking purring, like a cat with a ball of yarn. He’s got us exactly where he wants us.”

“I can’t just go wandering around the camp asking people if they happened to see any illegal radioactive material lying around. I’ll look like that little bird in the book. You know, the one that goes around asking everyone, “Are you my mother?’”

“Nietsche’s
Being
and
Nothingness
?” Magda offered.

“No, that’s what it’s called,
Are
You
My
Mother?
It’s the first book I ever read. My mother taught me.”
             

“You’re making progress. You’re talking about her now at least.”

“A long time ago, before my Dad was sent away to the camps for finding the wrong elephant, he took me to the Moiseyev Ballet. They had a special dance where two bears would come dancing onstage, locked together in a bear hug. Everyone knew the animals were fake; the fun was in watching a pair of dancers in bear costumes fighting to get loose from each other. At the end, after the wild, orgiastic climax, however, came the truth, a truth that left us gasping in shock: it wasn't two dancers at all, but only one, on all fours, in a trick costume. The attacks on Kolya, the sicknesses in the Clinic, confusion in the labs: they’re all one, part of the same game, a game potentially worse than the 9-11 attacks in New York.”

“I think you’re exaggerating more than a little bit.”

“You think so, do you? Do you know what a dirty bomb is?”

“Something that doesn’t explode so much as give off a lot of radiation? From what I understand, it wouldn’t kill all that many people even if it went off.”

“That’s right, it’s not really a bomb at all, it’s a radiation dispersal device. Most analysts believe that only a dozen or two people would die at most from the explosion of a dirty bomb. Take a dirty bomb of ten pounds of explosives and  a pea-sized amount of Cesium 137. Not very big at all. Explode it on Manhattan Island. How many people die? Like we said, not many. But it would cause a huge effect on the economy and the living conditions of the contaminated area. It’s the terror, the disruption, the fear, not the casualties. Everything would shut down, the whole economy, transportation, medical services.

Radioactive dust will settle on people, roads, buildings. Winds will spread it even more. The sewer system and rivers more yet. Millions of people will panic trying to leave the area. How many accidents get caused? How many people die because they can’t deliver medicine, food or water? What’s the logistical plan for relocating so many people in such a short time? Remember Hurricane Katrina? This would be worse because people would be panicked. Environmental regulations require contaminated areas to be cleaned. 9-11 proved terrorists could destroy buildings in the middle of a city. With a dirty bomb, they could force us to do it ourselves on an even bigger scale. Decontaminating such large areas would be impossible. We’d have to demolish and abandon those parts of the city at our own expense. It’d cost trillions. The cost of blood tests for each person in the area alone would be prohibitive. The hospitals would be overwhelmed and shut down health care for all other reasons.

“In that incident in Brazil, decontamination took six months. The
radioactive material created five thousand cubic meters of waste. More than a hundred thousand people demanded screening. Gross domestic product dropped twenty percent. The Chernobyl accident happened in the Soviet Union a year earlier. Again, not many people died outright. Decades later, the place is still abandoned, no one can live there. We tried cleaning it up for years and eventually just gave up.

“Put one on Manhattan. Another couple in Manchester, Milan and Marseilles. Maybe another  couple in Mumbai, Manila and Moscow. What do you think would happen then? Still think this has nothing to with us? That it’s just noise that comes from pouring one bucket into another?

“That Pig is going to leave you alone knowing you know this?”

“He doesn’t know we know.
We’re safe here.”

“We, huh? Thank you very much.
When the Oracle shipped out a few extra packages from the warehouse to his family in Teesside, Pig knew. When Kolya was sitting in the office waiting for the document thief, they knew exactly what day he wouldn’t be there and broke in to take them. You went to the pig catcher, opened it up and drew off a sample didn’t you? Then, you came here. To talk to a physicist. Twice. Don’t kid yourself. Pig knows. I just figured something out. Why Pig hates me so much. ‘Cause I’m a physicist. It has nothing to do with the gulag or me being a whore. He’s scared of me. Scared ‘cause I’m one of the few people here who has the background knowledge to figure out what he’s doing. Yeah, we’re safe. Safe the way tuna fish is safe in the can.”

“And you still want to do this, knowing it’s not safe?”

“Sometimes you just got to unbuckle your pants and go looking for trouble,’” Magda quoted.

Snow looked at her, puzzled. “The Buddha?”

“Zorba the Greek.”

After he left, Snow struggled through the ice and slush back to his porta-cabin in the camp, passing Pig’s closed circuit cameras, let himself in the unlocked door, and sat stroking Scrotum’s belly, looking out the window and saying nothing a habit of his when he didn’t have anything to say. He was trying to think of Noyabrsk – of Kolya and Pig and Magda and terrorism and radiation – but his real thoughts were obsessed with depression, in the way subtitles roll along the bottom of the CNN screen. CNN: just as useless and soul destroying as depression. He tried reaching for his apathy, but it wasn’t there. What had Magda done to him?

“Cesium 137, hmm?” he finally said to the blissfully unaware cat. “Too bad we can’t put that in our mouth and eat it,”

“Where is Pig getting this stuff? The Cesium 137? It’s not something you can just go down to the Walmart and pick up. Or order online. There have to be controls.”

They were back in Snow’s porta-cabin, whispering, Magda and Snow, the lights kept down low, although there was no reason to think they were being watched.