Critical Reaction (38 page)

Startled, Ryan turned. A tall man in his late sixties stood at his shoulder, with thick shoulders, sun-weathered skin, and long hair bound in twin braids.

“My name’s Ted Pollock,” he said.

“Ryan Hart. And this is my daughter, Emily.”

“Yes,” Ted said, looking at Emily. “I’ve seen your daughter before.”

Ted looked them each over silently for a moment. “Kieran’s in the back with my wife. I’ve got things to do in the barn. Walk with me.”

Without another word, the rancher left the house. Ryan and Emily followed him back into the calm air, still warm in the early evening. They matched the man’s slow gait toward the nearest outbuilding, where they stepped through a door into cooler darkness and the sudden musk of horses.

Ted walked to one of the dozens of stalls, this one occupied by a tall quarter horse. Stepping over a waist-high rope, he entered the stall and picked up a brush. “You want to know about Dr. Trân,” he said from inside the stall.

“No,” Ryan responded. “I want to know everything.”

Ted didn’t acknowledge the statement at first, but began to pull the brush rhythmically across the horse’s flank. It was several minutes before he finally asked, “Where do you want me to start?”

“Did you send Dr. Trân to me?” Ryan asked.

Ted nodded. “Yes.”

“Did you pay part of his costs?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“It seemed fair. Dr. Trân had worked for the Yakama tribe on projects through the years. You needed him to save your case. I wanted your case to be saved.”

“Kieran told you we were having trouble getting an expert?”

“He said that, yes.”

“Who do you work for?”

Ted hesitated. “Ask me again later,” he said.

Ryan thought about insisting otherwise, but after a moment
went on. “All right. Why didn’t you send Dr. Trân to Pauline Strand?”

Ted was reaching beneath the horse’s belly now, drawing the brush across it in swift, practiced strokes.

“Pauline Strand is an old friend and a fine woman. She did good work for Kieran. But she never had a chance to win the lawsuit. With or without Dr. Trân’s help.”

“And you thought we could.”

Ted set the brush aside and pulled a hoof pick from his pocket. He ran a hand along a rear leg until the horse obediently responded, raising its hoof for cleaning.

“Well, we hoped so. But Kieran’s been telling me you think otherwise.”

“That’s right,” Ryan answered. “Dr. Trân’s theory about the three explosions at LB5 and other detonation materials in the building is logical, but falls far short on proof.”

“What kind of proof.”

“The kind that Trân says we might get in a tour of the lower levels of LB5.” Ryan paused. “Or any kind that would convince Judge Johnston to allow us to take that tour.”

Ted glanced up in the dim light of the stall. “If you had that kind of proof, could you win the lawsuit?”

Ryan looked the man over. “Show me the evidence and I’ll tell you.”

They were circling here. But if Pollock had evidence that could generate an LB5 tour, Ryan wanted it. “I
can
promise,” he quickly finished, “that without the proof we’ll lose.”

Ted worked his way around the horse, cleaning each hoof in turn as he listened. “Well, let me think about that, too. Tell me what else you want to know.”

Emily spoke up this time. “Why didn’t you come to us directly if you wanted to help with Kieran’s lawsuit. Instead of making Kieran lie to us.”

Ted shook his head. “I’m not interested in the spotlight.”

“Why not?” Emily shot back. “And what do you think is going on in LB5?”

Ted patted the horse once more, then slipped past Ryan and Emily out of the stall, moving to the next one.

“Kieran places a lot of faith in you two,” he said as he began to tend the colt in the new stall. “He didn’t want us to keep anything a secret. I told him that was the price for our help.”

“That help is going to be wasted the way things are going,” Ryan pressed.

Ted looked back at Ryan for a long interval. Finally he shook his head.

“Okay.” He set his brush on a ledge and stepped back out of the stall. “Come with me.”

Ryan and Emily followed Ted to the end of the stable and into an empty stall.

On the shavings covering the stall floor sat a dark gray metallic box. Ted took from the wall a glove resembling an oversized oven mitt and some tongs. Opening the box, he put the tongs inside, pulling out a small, ragged shard of metal about the size of his hand. Ryan approached.

“Stay back,” Ted said. “It’s not very radioactive, but there’s no point in coming closer. There are no features you’d recognize on it anyway.”

Both Emily and Ryan looked at the shrapnel-like metal from across the stall until Ted set it back in the box again.

“That’s a piece of metal Dr. Trân tells us is part of what’s going on at LB5,” he said.

“What is it?” Emily asked. “Where’d you get it?”

“It’s a piece of a casing for an experimental chemical nuclear trigger,” Ted answered as he put the glove away. “We got it out on the Hanford Reservation grounds. We’re certain it came from LB5.”

Ryan’s mind was sprinting to piece all this together. So this was why Trân had been so confident in his theories. He wasn’t
relying on deductive reasoning; he had physical proof in the form of trigger-related detonation material. But then why hadn’t they come forward with it? And why did they still hesitate to give them this evidence?

He put the questions to Ted, who stared silently back for a moment. “I think that would be easier to explain if you’d take a little trip with us tonight.”

“Where?” Emily asked.

Ted looked at her, then back at Ryan. “Out onto the Hanford grounds. If your father here can ride, I’ll take you both there tonight on horseback.”

CHAPTER 43

The truck and horse trailer were headed southwest under the midnight sky darkened with a new moon. Out here on the desert, far beyond any lights of town or farms, only the ten-foot swath of their headlights pierced the surrounding black.

They’d left the Pollock ranch and driven a dozen miles or more southwest before turning onto a two-lane highway that angled back to the northwest, parallel to the Hanford Reservation grounds. In the front cab, Ted Pollock sat with a tasseled hat pulled low on his forehead. Ryan sat next to him. Ted’s twenty-five-year-old granddaughter, Heather, was in the back seat with Emily along with a slender, quiet man that Ted had introduced only as Ray.

Though he was still awaiting the promised explanation from Pollock, Ryan was content for the moment to sit silently, contemplating why he’d agreed to an incursion onto the Hanford grounds. It was obviously a breach of federal law, and so an act that could end his legal career—as well as his daughter’s, who’d insisted on coming along. The only limit Ryan had ultimately placed on the night was an insistence that Kieran remain at the Pollock ranch. He would not agree to their client risking not only the case but his already endangered job and security clearance as well.

So why
had
he taken such an uncharacteristic risk? At first,
he’d told himself it was because of the strange turn the case had taken since Taylor Christensen took the stand, and the stark evidence of the trigger casing Ted had shared tonight. But over the past hour of travel he’d concluded these were only part of the reason. The larger truth was that sometime the past few days—hearing Patrick Martin’s story and seeing Covington’s machinations—Ryan’s last hesitation about the case had slid away, replaced by his familiar drive to win. It felt as though he’d stepped into a comfortable pair of shoes he’d once thought lost.

After a quick supper at the ranch, Ted had driven this truck and trailer out to a paddock beyond the hills that surrounded the house. There in the growing dusk, Ryan made out half a dozen shaggy horses pawing at the dusty ground. They were soon joined by Heather, her black hair pulled back in a single braid. Ray had arrived shortly after. Together and without a word to Ryan and Emily, Pollock, Heather, and Ray had loaded four of the horses onto the trailer for this journey. As they worked, Ryan had tried to get more details about the trip—but each time Ted Pollock had put him off. “You’ll understand everything soon,” he’d said in a tone that made clear they’d learn nothing more just yet.

Ted was slowing the truck now, leaning into the windshield. Ryan couldn’t see what he might be looking for in the dark, as nothing about the shadowy road or its borders looked any different than what he’d seen for the past hour. But Ted recognized something, because he eased the truck over onto the shoulder at a spot where the ditch had flattened nearly to ground level. There wasn’t another headlight visible on the highway in either direction as Ted drove carefully across the nearly level ditch, out toward the desert to the north.

Once they were fully off the highway, Ted let out a sigh of relief before glancing at Ryan.

“You wanted to know what’s going on in LB5?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Alright. Dr. Trân believes that the casing I showed you is part of a project to develop a chemical trigger for a nuclear weapon.”

“Develop one?” Ryan shook his head in surprise. “Trân said there might be trigger materials in the LB5 lower levels. I thought he meant they were being stored there.”

“No,” Ted said. “We think it’s a lot more ambitious than that.”

“Why make a trigger in a decommissioned lab building?” Emily asked. “Doesn’t the government have plenty of labs to work on nuclear defense projects?”

“Not the government,” Ted answered, his eyes again focused on a trail only he could see in their low headlights. “Covington Nuclear.”

“You’re saying Covington’s working without government sanction,” Ryan said.

Ted nodded.

“Why?”

“Because it would mean a lot of money to Covington if they succeeded. The government would pay a great deal for a chemical trigger able to detonate a nuclear reaction in a small bomb; things a large one can’t on a battlefield.”

“And no one has done it before?” Ryan asked.

Ted shook his head. “Not according to Trân. Not one nearly as small as that casing shard implies. And we believe Covington’s very close, if they haven’t already succeeded.”

“Why wouldn’t the government just hire Covington to make the trigger?” Ryan asked.

They hit a small bump and Ted braked gently, glancing over his shoulder worriedly toward the horse trailer and slowing their pace to a near glacial speed. “Because they’ve officially told the world they haven’t, and won’t. Though that doesn’t mean the government would turn down the technology if it was presented to them complete.”

“Then what happened last October?” Emily asked.

Ted glanced at Emily in the rearview mirror. “We believe Covington did its work on the trigger project at LB5 at night so that project personnel could come and go with little visibility. Using these grounds was illegal: we figure it violated at least a dozen federal laws and maybe a couple of international treaties. The explosion happened because no one had predicted the Vat 17 problem. Nobody expected pressure or heat from the chemicals in that tank to occur in the first place, let alone reach the basement through the connecting tubes. Very bad timing.”

“And the radiation?” Emily asked. “Where’d that come from?”

“That’s why Dr. Trân thinks they’re close,” Ted said. “He says that at late stages of testing, they’d have small quantities of plutonium present to test the trigger mechanism’s success in producing a micro reaction. Dr. Trân believes the plutonium was too close to the trigger when Vat 17 accidentally detonated it. The explosions spread the radiation to the third-floor corridor.”

Ryan’s initial surprise at this explanation was fading, replaced by a sullen realization of how long he and Emily had been kept in the dark by Ted Pollock and Dr. Trân, and manipulated to serve this man’s ends.

“So tell us why you’re doing whatever you’re doing,” Ryan demanded. “Why are you getting involved in Kieran’s lawsuit? What’s LB5 to you?”

They were easing forward at no more than five to ten miles per hour, as Ted appeared to search for a landmark.

“I’ll tell you after I’ve shown you what we’ve come to see,” he answered distractedly

Ryan had opened his mouth to say no when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He glanced into the back seat. It was Emily, clearly anticipating what he was about to do. In the near darkness of the cab, he saw her shake her head gently with an imploring look.

Ted slowed the truck further, then braked. “We’ll walk from here,” he said, shutting off the ignition. The headlights he left on.

Ray was out of the truck immediately, heading to the rear of
the trailer, while Heather walked out past the pooled light of the headlamps and into the blackness ahead. “I’ll go prepare the fence,” she said softly to Ted as she went by him.

Ted turned back to Ryan and Emily as he led them to join Ray at the trailer. “We convinced Hanford to give us a contract,” Ted said. “A contract to pick up stray horses that wander onto the Hanford Reservation grounds and trip their security motion detectors. The fact is, there aren’t that many mustangs left in this area to be a real problem. But the Hanford engineers and security don’t know that. And Hanford doesn’t have the budget to keep up the fence lines like they did back when production was on. It wasn’t too hard to make it look like horses broke onto the grounds every few months. For two years, we’ve released horses onto the reservation land and forced Hanford security to catch and release them outside the fence line.

“Finally, we approached them and got the contract to pick the horses up west of here, where they run naturally to a water hole. We tell them we sell the horses out east. In fact, we trailer the horses off the reservation grounds, but keep them in the paddock at our ranch. Two years of that and it’s gotten to be routine: Hanford expects horses to get onto the grounds every few months. Once they were used to it, we started going in with the mustangs we released.”

Ray was leading the first of the four horses off of the trailer, a rope slung around its neck. Ted took the rope from Ray, handed it to Emily, then joined the man in getting the rest of the horses off of the trailer. When all four horses were on the ground, Ted handed one of the ropes to Ryan, then gestured into the darkness where Heather had disappeared. “The fence is about a hundred yards that way,” he said.