The Agent's Daughter (16 page)

He understood that expression. “Don’t worry.
It is just a brief meeting to recap my trip for the rest of the
group. I will be back in a couple of hours. I know today is the day
for driving lessons, and Angela told me about your get-together
tonight.”

Her dad could not bring himself to use the
word ‘date’ yet.

He gave Melina a one-armed hug and a kiss on
the top of the head. “See you in a couple of hours.”

Evan looked over at Angela and smiled. He
pointed at her and then gave her a thumbs-up.

Angela smiled at him as he turned and walked
out of the room.

…………………………
.

Evan sat in the main video conference room
at the agency and went through his mission report on a laptop
computer. He was not happy about being at work, especially after he
promised Melina that they would start her driver training. But the
President had asked for a debriefing on the data gathered during
the mission, and it was hard to tell her no. Mission debriefing
meetings like this involved just a few people as the agency kept
the information about missions to a need-to-know basis. Arthur
Glass and William Mason were already seated, but the meeting was
running late because David Winfield had not yet arrived. He had
been working overnight in the tools lab to analyze the data from
the scintillation detector that Evan had carried with him on the
mission for signs of radiation.

The President, who took advantage of the
delay to make some phone calls, could be seen on the video screen
hanging up her phone. “Are we about ready over there?” she
said.

“
Not quite, Madam
President,” William said stiffly. “Just a few more minutes, David
is finalizing his report on the data. He was up all
night.”

“
That’s quite all right,
William,” she said. “I know he is working hard on it.”

There followed an uncomfortable silence.
Evan was still looking at his notes. William looked at Arthur Glass
and shrugged.

Finally, President Stone broke the silence.
“Does anybody have anything good planned for this weekend?”

Arthur spoke up, “I am going fishing out on
Lake Grapevine tomorrow.”

“
Fishing, you say,”
President Stone said in a playful, mocking tone. “Getting a head
start on retirement, I see. Is anyone else doing anything exciting?
How about you, Evan?”

Evan looked up from his notes. “Yes, I have
an exciting, white-knuckle afternoon planned. I am going to help my
daughter practice her driving.”

More silence. No one wanted to touch a
conversation that involved Evan, his family, and driving.
Mercifully, the silence was broken this time by David entering the
room.

“
Sorry I’m late,” he said
as he rushed to a chair and sat down. “Bad traffic. A mail cart
crashed on the third floor.”

Evan smiled and went back to his notes.

William looked around the room. “Okay, let’s
get started. David, go ahead and tell us what you have found.”

David stood up and walked over to the
speaker’s area of the room. “First of all I would like to apologize
formally to Evan for the glider malfunction. I know we were on a
tight schedule, and we had a limited time to check it out, but that
failure was unacceptable. I am sorry.”

Evan and David had already spoken about this
and Evan had told him that it was okay, but David wanted to
acknowledge the failure in front of the President. It was clear the
mistake still bothered him.

He continued, “I promise that I will
investigate what went wrong and let you know what the reason for
the failure.”

“
That won’t be necessary,”
William said. “You have more important work to do than try to
figure out what went wrong with a glider we won’t use
again.”

David mustered a half-smile and continued.
“If there is a silver lining to the glider malfunction, it is that
we got much better data from the scintillation detector than we
would have if he just had flown over the base. Evan spent a fair
amount of time on the top of the reactor building, so we got
extensive data from there. But the real bonus is that while trying
to get away, he carried the detector all throughout the base. We
got readings for those places as well.”

“
I don’t understand,”
Arthur said. "How does the detector being carried around help?
Doesn’t the detector just give you an indication of how much
radiation it has seen in total?”

“
Most detectors work that
way, but this one is a little more sophisticated. This detector has
a sensor that records maximum radiation levels over time. With
Evan’s help, I was able to reconstruct a timeline of his
whereabouts on the base for the entire time he was on the Malaz
base. Then I was able to correlate that timeline with the time in
the detector. From that, we have a picture of the radiation levels
wherever he went.”

“
How is that going to
help?” William said dismissively. “Either the reactor has fuel, or
it doesn’t.”

David continued. “If we just had the
readings from the top of the reactor building, I would have said
that there was no radiation on that base. The readings from the top
of the roof read near zero. However, after going over all of the
rest of the data from the detector, I found an enormous spike in
the radiation levels once Evan got to one key spot on the base. The
area around the helicopter pad. It had been exposed to a large
amount of radiation.”

“
Do you have any theories
why the radiation only exists at the helicopter pad?” the President
asked.

“
My guess is that they
must have flown in some uranium via helicopter. Now they would have
transported them in radiation-shielded containers, but they may
have had to transition them from one set of shielded containers to
another set. Perhaps from temporary containers to permanent ones.
During this transition, the uranium would be temporarily unshielded
and would contaminate any area exposed. It is this radiation that
our detectors picked up at the helicopter site.

“
So you think that they
flew in some uranium and stored it in shielded containers on the
base instead of loading it into the reactor?” Arthur
asked.

“
That is what the data
tells me,” David said.

The President shifted in her seat. “Does the
radiation level indicate that they would have enough radioactive
material to build a weapon?”

David looked at the President. “The level of
radiation indicates that they would have enough material for
several weapons.”

The room was silent as everyone thought
about the implications of what David had found.

“
This makes no sense,”
Arthur said. “Why would they go to the trouble of hiding it on the
base? Once they put the uranium into the reactor, there would be no
way to hide it. Why would they delay loading the fuel into the
reactor?”

Evan leaned back in his chair. “It’s almost
as if they knew that we would be checking their radiation levels
and wanted to wait until we stopped looking.”

“
Are you saying that they
were tipped off that we were sending in a detector?” William
asked.

“
I’m not much of a
conspiracy theorist. It just may be that they were being cautious,
but it seems odd that they would hide it rather than use it unless
there was an upside to hiding it.”

William looked at Evan and rolled his eyes.
“Is there anything else to report, David.”

“
No. I have told you
everything I can discern from the data.”

“
Thank you, David,”
William said. “Is there anything else you need from our group,
Madam President?”

“
No, William,” she said as
she got up from her chair to leave. “In light of this news, I shall
be spending the afternoon with my advisors from the satellite
reconnaissance group. I will let you know if I need your group for
anything. ”

Evan and David got up to leave and walked to
the door ahead of the others. Once they reached the hallway and
were sufficiently far enough away from William, David put his hand
on Evan’s shoulder and stopped him. Then he took a shiny piece of
metal out of his pocket and showed it to Evan.

“
Do you know what this
is?” David said.

“
I don’t recognize it,
what is it?”

“
It is a guide pin for the
wing-unfold mechanism on your glider. It should have been attached
to the glider before you left. Its job was to stop the wings
unfolding at exactly the right point. Without it, the wings would
continue to unfold too far and then the wings would
snap.”

“
That’s kinda what
happened,” Evan said.

“
The pin was in place when
we finished the final assembly of the glider and put it into the
MAC-25 for shipment. It is part of our checklist to verify that
critical parts are installed. I found this pin in the back of a
drawer in the toolbox in the lab. I think somebody removed it on
purpose.”

“
Why didn’t you say
something at the meeting?” Evan asked.

“
I didn’t want to say
anything until I knew more,” David said, putting the guide pin back
in his pocket. “Maybe somebody did accidentally miss a step in the
procedure, but I’m still looking into it.”

Evan thought about what David said for a
moment. “Do you have a list of people that had access to the lab
past the time that you loaded the glider into the MAC-25?”

“
I checked the security
logs for the lab. Six people either were in the lab or came in
later. Three lab technicians, William Mason, Karl Becker, and
me.”

“
Karl Becker? What was he
doing in the lab? He doesn’t have a mission planned,” Evan
said.

“
He came in to have one of
the technicians replace the battery in his watch. You can’t just go
to the mall and have the battery replaced in one of the agent
watches.”

“
Did you show the pin to
William?”

“
Yes, he said that I must
have forgotten to install it on the glider and that I was to stop
wasting time worrying about my mistake.”

Evan put his hand on David’s shoulder.
“William is right. There is no way that we can know for sure what
happened so I wouldn’t spend any more time thinking about it.”

Both men continued to walk down the hallway.
David continued to stew about the guide pin. Evan had to get him to
take his mind off it.

“
Say, David,” he said.
“What’s the deal with our kids tonight? Going to a
movie?”

David’s face brightened at the thought.
“That’s what Alex said. Melina is going to call him this afternoon
and firm up the plan.”

“
I’ve got to tell you,”
Evan said. “I’m not too thrilled with my daughter starting to go
out with boys, but it makes me feel a lot better that the boy she
is going out with is your son.”

“
Thank you,” David said.
“For the kind words about my son … and for not being mad about the
glider.”

As two men came to the elevator at the end
of the hall, Evan stopped to wait for the elevator and David
continued toward the lab. As he passed, Evan gave him a pat on the
back.

…………………………
.

Evan and Melina walked toward the car parked
in front of their house. Melina was headed for the passenger side,
but as they approached the car, Evan tossed her the keys. Melina
stopped in her tracks, surprised.

“
You want me to start
driving now?” she said.

Melina understood that they were going to
practice her driving while they were going to see her mom. But she
also knew that it was a long drive. She had been taking driver
training at school since the start of the school year and had
already made some drives in the school car, but nothing even close
to the distance from her home to the hospital.

“
I want you to start
driving in an area that you are familiar with,” he said. “Let’s
just see how far you can go.”

Melina walked over to the driver’s door,
pressing the button on the keychain to unlock the doors on the way
there. They got in, settled into their seats, and buckled their
seatbelts.

“
Before we get going,”
Evan said. “I want to find out where you think your driving skills
are at this point.”

Melina thought for a moment. “We spent the
first couple of months of class in the classroom learning the
traffic laws and seeing movies about what not to do. And we have
been out in the school car six times. There are three students in
the car when we go out, so I get to drive about ten minutes each
time. I have driven all over the city but not on the freeway.”

“
All right,” he said.
“Start the car, drive down the street, and make a right turn at the
end of our street.

Melina looked over at Evan and gave him a
look. “Dad, I don’t need directions yet. I know how to get out of
our neighborhood.”

“
I’m sorry kiddo. Go
ahead.”

Melina started the car,
moved the shift lever to
drive,
and put her foot on the accelerator. The car
lurched forward with the awkward jerk that is characteristic of a
new driver.

“
Mirrors!” Evan yelled as
he grabbed onto the passenger door handle.

Melina slammed on the brakes. The car
screeched to a halt. “What?”

“
Your mirrors. You did not
check the car’s mirrors to see that it was safe to move away from
the curb. If someone were already driving down the street behind
you in our direction, you would have driven right into the side of
their car.”