Critical Reaction (40 page)

Ted nodded and eased himself down onto the ground.

Ryan settled onto the dirt beside him. “I still need to understand something else, Ted. You still haven’t explained why you’re all wrapped up in this.”

Ted picked up a rock and began tracing in the dirt. “It’s a hobby,” he said.

Ryan shook his head. “I’m serious. You’ve got me and my daughter up to our eyeballs in this thing, including breaking federal law to be out here.”

Ted nodded without looking at Ryan. “I suppose I owe you that.” He gestured toward Heather. “My granddaughter here, she’s got a degree in environmental health. My wife—you didn’t meet Doreen, she’s in Toppenish just now. She’s a traditionalist with the tribe, but she’s got some paper to hang on her wall, too. I’ve done a little studying of my own.”

“That tells me where you got the skill for this,” Ryan pressed. “It doesn’t tell me why.”

Ted smiled as Emily stepped near to join them. “Pushy, aren’t you. You sound like a lawyer.” He paused. “Have you heard of the rapids they called Celilo Falls on the Columbia?” he asked.

Emily said that she had.

“Well, growing up,” Ted began, “most of my people spent their summers at camps on the river, camps like Celilo Falls. Celilo means ‘water on the rocks’ in the Yakama language. It was a fast rapids below the joining of the Snake and Yakima rivers with the Columbia. We’d net and spear salmon and sturgeon all summer long. Eels if we could get them. We ate them all summer, and air dried some for winter—and for our feasts. Went there every summer, until the government built a dam that drowned the reaches in the 1950s.”

He looked up at Emily. “Commercial fishermen were already becoming common all along the Columbia by then, diminishing our take. But it was that dam that ended it all for me. Took away a piece of our life. Except that wasn’t all. This land, all of it, used to be Yakama land, before the 1855 Treaty. Even after the Treaty, the Yakama retained hunting, fishing, and gathering rights out here. Then when Hanford was built in 1944, they put a fence around it. That closed dozens of other Yakama fishing
sites on the Columbia. Yakama gathering and hunting sites out here were made off limits. Then they started making their plutonium right here, up wind from the reservation, using the Columbia for cooling water and dumping tons of radioactive effluents into the river. All this land around us and the river became one big unofficial dumping ground.”

Ted tossed away the stone. “I remember once at our Celilo camp, before the dam, my dad walking with me back to our tent after a night of listening to elders tell stories. We both smelled of campfire smoke, and I was still wrapped up with their tales of chasing horses and riding these hills. My dad bent down and pointed toward the camp, then leaned close, so close I could feel his lips brush my ear, and whispered, ‘Remember this, son. Remember this, because it’s passing.’”

He paused. “Well, he was right. It was passing. With the coming of Hanford, building the dams, they were changing everything out here.”

The night grew silent. Heather was looking away, across the desert. Ryan wondered what she thought of her grandfather’s words. Did she feel the loss of a place she’d never experienced herself? That her children would never experience?

Ted grunted. “Production at Hanford finally stopped for good in the late eighties and they tell us, someday, we may retrieve our fishing and hunting rights out here—if they ever get it cleaned up. Get back a little bit of what they took away. Well, that’ll never happen if they start treating this like a nuclear dumping site again, or start using Hanford for nuclear research again, like Covington’s been secretly doing these past seven years. You ask me why we’re all wrapped up in this? To make sure it really does stop and there’s something left for them to return to the Yakama.”

“So are you working for the Yakama Nation?” Emily asked.

In the faint starlight, Ryan saw Ted shake his head. “That’s a political question now, isn’t it,” he said. “I don’t get into politics. I’m just a rancher.”

Ryan’s stomach twisted at the futility of it all. “Look, Ted. If we bring out the truth through Kieran’s lawsuit, everybody wins. Wolffia gets shut down; there’s more scrutiny on the cleanup and no more research at Hanford. But we can’t do that unless you give me the shard and let me use it to persuade the judge to allow an immediate inspection of LB5. If you’re worried about them emptying this site, I could ask her to send magistrates to protect this place pending the inspection.”

“What are the chances of her granting that request?” Ted asked.

Ryan thought for a moment. “Fifty percent.”

“You sound like a weatherman,” Ted said. “I won’t put all our work at risk on that kind of confidence.”

The fact was, Ryan had no clue whether the judge would order magistrates out on reservation grounds based on a radioactive hunk of metal. With Judge Renway, the chances had been zero. With Johnston?

“Did you have anything to do with Renway dropping off the case?” Emily suddenly blurted out as though the thought had just occurred to her.

Good question
, Ryan thought approvingly. Ted shrugged. “I have a cousin who works at Park National Bank,” he said. “He told me about orchard land owned by the judge.” Ted went on to explain the reasons for the judge’s withdrawal.

Ryan scrutinized Ted as he finished his explanation. “That was risky. Renway could have gone to the FBI and tried to run you and your cousin down for collecting his private documents.”

“Judge Renway is old,” Ted responded. “Like me. I can remember when he was appointed. If he came after us, his ‘conflict’ would have come out anyway. Maybe other things he’s done for Hanford. Why risk a lifetime legacy as a judge? I thought he’d choose the easy path and just step down from Kieran’s case.”

Ryan thought longer about how they could use the information about this debris site in their case. “I need time to think if
there are other options,” Ryan insisted wearily. “I can’t give this evidence up. And I still want to convince you to give me that shard you have in the stable.”

Ted sighed. “It’s getting late,” he said, the age in his voice more evident now. “I’m old and I’m tired. You think while we finish the ride home.”

CHAPTER 44

Ryan sipped his orange juice, struggling to wake up. He’d gotten only a few hours of sleep last night. Most of the remainder of the short night after returning from the Pollock ranch had been spent studying the ceiling, the case wearily circling in his mind.

He’d come up with no new ideas to move the court to allow the inspection, or to satisfy Ted enough to release the shard. Until he did, they’d have to keep things going like the last week: keep taking testimony from more workers and avoid resting Kieran’s case until they had a plan to convince Judge Johnston to allow the LB5 inspection.

They could probably buy two days, maybe three. If he hadn’t learned how to delay after twenty years in courtrooms, Ryan thought, he’d be a sorry excuse for a trial attorney.

He headed upstairs to wake Emily and hit the shower. He also needed time to stop at a coffee shop on the way to the courthouse. This was at least a two-cup morning. He’d need that much caffeine to dance in front of the judge, jury, and Covington’s counsel for the long day ahead.

His office phone rang as Adam was finishing packing a briefcase before heading for the morning’s final debriefing of the
Project team. Adam looked at the caller ID screen. It was Vice-President Foote’s office.

“Adam Worth here,” he answered.

“Hello, Mr. Worth? This is Mr. Foote’s secretary. Mr. Foote requests that you come to his office.”

Adam looked at his watch. “Uh, I have a meeting. Is it possible—”

“Mr. Foote requests that you come immediately,” she interrupted.

Adam said he would, then hung up.

What could be so urgent? His reports to Foote on the Project had been uniformly positive the past couple of weeks. The information about the trial was more of a problem, but Adam had shared little of his unease about what was happening at the courthouse with Foote, and none of the detail.

Five minutes later, Foote’s secretary waved him into the inner sanctum with a gesture of her hand. Adam straightened himself and passed through the door.

“Come in, Adam,” the VP said, adding unnecessarily, “and close the door.”

“Adam,” Foote began before he could even reach his seat. “I just got a disturbing call. It relates to your lawsuit.”

Your lawsuit
. When had this become Adam’s lawsuit?

“The call came from the inspector’s office at the regional DOE office, Seth Varney. I don’t hear from the man very often. As long as our reports meet muster, they typically let us go about our business. But apparently they’ve had a rep at the trial every day the past week and a half. Varney said that your opponents’ expert and Mr. Martin are creating some concerns about the thoroughness of Covington’s inspection reports regarding the October explosion.”

Adam restrained the “I told you so” response that came to his lips.

“Adam, Mr. Varney wants his man to conduct an inspection of LB5. In particular, they want to inspect the lower levels of
LB5, which have apparently been the subject of much discussion in your trial.”

“We can’t do that, sir,” Adam shot back. “You know we’ve finished the last successful test, but we haven’t removed the equipment. And we made improvements down there since the October explosion: stronger containment walls, a longer glove box and chamber. We couldn’t explain those improvements in a closed facility. And since we claim that place hasn’t been used since the eighties, and wasn’t touched by the explosion, we couldn’t begin to explain why the place was emptied and cleaned up.”

This was a disaster, Adam thought. The plan was to complete the testing and then slate LB5 for demolition, taking it down before anyone visited the closed lower level of LB5. But they’d assumed there were still weeks to get that done.

“I am aware of the significance of this request,” Foote said, his face unmoving. “Is there time to reconfigure the lower levels of LB5 to a condition approximating how they should have looked before Project Wolffia began?”

Adam knew that was impossible, despite how much Foote despised that word. “No,” he said simply. “It would take months.”

Foote raised his eyebrows. “Then what do you suggest?”

Adam’s mind flew through options: razing, discarding. It was not possible to prepare LB5 for a DOE inspection. If they could do that, they could have caved to Hart’s requests for an inspection at trial. Short of another explosion down there, he could think of no way to cover up the changes they’d made to the space.

Another explosion.

“Sir,” Adam said. “There is one possibility. It has risks.”

He expected Foote to ask for a definition of
risks
. He didn’t. Instead, the vice-president took Adam’s measure across the desk.

“When I hired you for this project,” Foote began, “you were finishing that particle reactor work in Georgia. You recall that?”

Adam nodded, wondering why the VP was gearing up for another lecture.

The vice-president returned the nod. “You’d done a fine job. Hit your targets on budget. But one day while I was reviewing your work and considering you for Project Wolffia, a Covington compliance auditor called to tell me he’d discovered a problem. It was an unusual expenditure, fairly well hidden, which the compliance officer traced to an engineer at another company.”

The roller coaster of Adam’s mood these past few weeks was launched again with a sickening jolt.

“We both know who I’m talking about, don’t we, Adam,” Foote went on. “The man you bribed for confidential, proprietary software the other company wouldn’t sell or license to us.”

This was a lead-up to termination, Adam thought. Maybe extortion. But why now?

“I didn’t condone it,” Foote said, frowning, “and my first inclination was to have you fired. But you didn’t steal money from Covington. You stretched the rules to complete a project important to the company. So I buried it.”

Foote straightened an already stiff posture. “I buried it. Because that was what I wanted for Project Wolffia. Somebody
that
dedicated to success. You know as well as I that this project, though critical for America, is not a legal undertaking. I needed someone who believed enough in our cause to accept the gray area we’re operating in and see it through—even when lines had to be crossed. You do still believe in what we’re doing, don’t you, Adam?”

This again. “Yes,” Adam answered firmly.

“And we’re so close.”

“Yes.”

The unmistakable crease of a smile appeared on Foote’s face, so unusual that Adam doubted it at first.

“Adam, don’t tell me about the risks. I don’t expect you to be a Boy Scout. Do what you must, within reason. Just keep this DOE inspection from destroying everything when we’re so close.”

CHAPTER 45

Emily was taking the testimony today, moving slowly and steadily, just as Ryan had asked. Strangely, Eric King was absent this morning for the first time, leaving his associate taking notes and preparing for cross-examination.