Superpowers 1: Superguy

by T. Jackson King

  “Screw this,” she whispered to herself. “Let’s see what’s at the bottom of the list.”

  Janet reached up and finger-flipped the PDF to its last page. There were several youths with W names. No X, Y or Z names, thank the Goddess. Last in line was a Jeffrey Montgomery Webster, age 23, six feet three inches, 160 pounds, single, now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The file photo of the young man showed him to be lanky with straight black hair, blue eyes and wide shoulders. Kind of attractive in a way. The image was a year old, taken at his college graduation from UNM. He wore a nice blue suit in the picture. The LANL initials next to his name ID’d him as someone whose parents had worked at the lab. She reached up and touched the blue Bio line below his name. A new window opened to the left of the PDF listing.

  “Only son of John and Elaine Webster,” she murmured to herself, taking care to mask her voice from hearing by the other work stations of the intelligence unit.

  Very interesting. While the pic showed Webster as black-haired, earlier images of him showed him with red hair. Unusual since the images of both parents showed them to be black-haired people. Was he ashamed of being a redhead? Was he a de novo genetic mutation since redheads are not normally the offspring of black-haired people? He had the blue eyes associated with North European redheads. But his skin was not milky-white or pale, unlike the skin of most redheads. He actually showed a mild tan in his college photo. Which made her wonder whether young Webster would have any of the health limitations associated with red hair, like increased pain sensitivity and skin cancer likelihood. But red hair was a recessive trait caused by the gene MC1R, she recalled from her college genetics studies. Which made him an unusual redhead, in view of his physical variations from the standard pattern.

  She frowned as she looked below the parental images, each marked Deceased. The father had worked in the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Facility building of the Plutonium Science and Manufacturing section of the Weapons Programs division. He held a Q clearance with TS//RD and SCI annotations. He’d been assigned to the X Division of the lab. Webster senior had passed his most recent SSBI review. The mother had been employed doing database management at the Chief Information Officer’s building. Her DOE clearance was L level with S//FRD annotation. She’d passed her last Periodic Reinvestigation. The father held a Ph.D. in nuclear physics while the mother had earned a master’s in information technology. More interesting, both parents had traveled overseas several times, taking young Jeffrey with them on later trips. She tapped on the blue Details line for the parents. Another window opened to the right.

  Those trips had included visits to London, Paris, Tokyo, Rome, Florence, Geneva, Berlin before the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, and a visit to Prague of the old Czechoslovakia, back when that nation was part of the Warsaw Pact. While the trips were listed as international nuclear physics conferences, where the father often gave approved papers, still, either parent could have been approached in Prague or Berlin. Or even Geneva, in view of that city’s status as the host of the European headquarters of the United Nations. There were plenty of spy-type people attached to embassies in Geneva.

  A radiation icon beside the names of both parents caused her to tap it.

  “Damn!” she muttered, then looked up to see if any co-worker had noticed her blurting of an expletive. Her cubbyhole occupied one corner of the inner work space of the fourth floor. To her left and right ran open walkways that separated the outer rim of offices and the inner cluster of work stations occupied by analysts like herself. Across from her were three work stations with open entries. The work space of her friend Helen Watanabe was dark. Helen was off today. To the right sat heavyset Richard Daunton, a young Mormon who clearly aimed to please their boss Joshua. To the left was trim, athletic Joshua Donohue, a former high school quarterback whose high grades at Purdue had earned him the attention of bureau recruiters. Joshua was leaning forward, his attention focused on his own large flatscreen, fingers tapping on his keyboard. Neither Joshua nor Richard looked her way. Taking a deep breath, she looked back to her own screen and focused on what had surprised her.

  The rad icon had taken her to a Medical Records window that covered both parents of Jeffrey Webster. It indicated that the two adults had gone hiking in a nearby canyon and had wandered into a part of the lab’s Area G, one of the zones where transuranic wastes had been dumped from WWII and Cold War weapons research. This Area G held dispersed plutonium residues and other heavy elements that came from plutonium pit production work at the lab’s building PF-4. Both parents had breathed in contaminated air and had residue on their clothing, according to a note from the 80s. They’d gone through decontamination and reprimands had been entered into their lab personnel files. Strangely enough, neither parent had signed up for medical assistance like that offered to Downwinders who’d been rad exposed during nuke bomb tests in Nevada, or to rad emissions at the Hanford, Washington nuke production facilities. Why not?

  Janet tapped the Details line and scanned their medical records. The mother Elaine had died from cervical cancer during Jeffrey’s senior year at high school, while the father had been killed by a drunk driver just after the youth’s graduation from UNM college in Albuquerque. She tapped closed the parental med window, then the parental work history window and went to the image of Jeffrey Webster. She tapped open his Medical Records page.

  A healthy young man with no serious illnesses or injuries was reported. He’d gotten measles at a young age and had fractured his left forearm at age six. No indication of opiate use after the casting of the arm. And the guy still had his appendix. She winced at her own memory of the pain of having it removed. Sitting up too quickly after her operation had pulled on the stitches. Still, she was back home within a day after that operation. This Webster youth had never been operated on or admitted to a hospital. She tapped shut the youth’s Med page and tapped open his Social and Education icons.

  Strange. Jeffrey Webster had never opened his own Facebook page, unlike scores of his fellow supersmart students at Los Alamos High School. Nor had he ever been on Snapchat or any of the other online socializing pages like 4chan, 8chan and Redditt. He did have a Twitter account that had little info on it. But . . . she tapped a Tracking icon on her screen . . . he had maintained his parents’ Facebook page. There were no new entries on that page since his father’s death. But her Tracking worm said young Jeffrey visited his parents’ Facebook page a few times each week, using a four year old Vaio laptop.

  She tapped the computer icon and sent her worm to the Vaio. Jeffrey’s computer history showed regular visits to BBC Online, other news sites, local forest and state park info sites, some online shopping on Amazon for tools, outdoor gear and a watch, but no personal emails to friends or fellow graduates of the high school. Nor were there any chat links to UNM, where he’d earned a B.Sc. in information technology. So he knew the basics of computers. Another icon tap told her the guy did not own a normal Android or iPhone, but possessed only the simplest Kyocera cell phone. Its location signal was operational, she saw. Cell phone towers in Santa Fe showed the phone location as downtown, near his work place at the REI retailer.

  What were his social activities from high school onward?

  Almost nothing. He’d taken a Mercedes Johnson to his high school prom, then a month later they had broken up, according to an entry from the analyst who had compiled the PDF listing of lab adult children. No girlfriend since then. No online accessing of porn sites. No computer roaming of dating sites like Match, eHarmony, Tinder, OkCupid or Zoosk. Hmmm. What did he do for a sex life? She knew from her own college years that young men of Jeffrey’s age were hormonally driven sex seekers. Yet he had no girlfriend, let alone a wife. Was he penniless? She tapped the Tracker icon.

  No. His only credit card was from Wells Fargo in Santa Fe, the bank into which his REI paycheck was electronically deposited. Plus a debit card. There were no other Visa, American Express or MasterCard accounts for him. His Social Secu
rity survivors benefits from his mother’s death had ended at age 19. Had his parents accumulated a secret pile of money that he had inherited? She tapped the Income icon within the Social page. Then she ordered her tracking worm to open the youth’s checking and savings accounts at the bank.

  A total of $1,473 showed in his savings account, while his checking account showed a recent payroll deposit. That moved his checking account to a total of $1,193. Enough to pay his $800 monthly rent at an older condo apartment complex. And enough for food and utilities if he ate simply.

  Too basic to be believed.

  She sat back from her screen, thinking over what she had learned about Jeffrey Montgomery Webster.

  He was a loner, with no aunts or uncles listed. His parents had no other children. He’d earned top grades in elementary and junior high school, then in high school his grades had dropped to Bs and a few As. His intelligence report from seventh grade showed him with an IQ of 148. Highly gifted, she recalled from her college psych class report on the Stanford-Binet Fifth Edition testing scheme. He’d visited nine foreign countries with his parents, plus trips in the US to the Grand Canyon, Empire State Building, St. Louis, Yellowstone National Park, the Houston space center and other parks and national forests. He’d never been to Moscow or Beijing or Tehran. The sale of his parents’ home had gone to pay off debts of his father, after the man’s highway death. Both parents had been the high IQ types common in Los Alamos, and their son had done well at local schools. Except for the slight drop in grades in high school. Why had that happened? He had the brains to make the National Honor Society. But he’d never joined any of the debate or AP classes at his school. Curious. She tapped on the Social icon.

  He’d attended the Los Alamos Unitarian Church with his parents, another factor common among lab scientists. And at present he worked as a retail clerk for the REI business in Santa Fe, a larger city not far from Los Alamos. She’d noticed on his Social page that Jeffrey had attended the local Buddhist temple several times, then had attended talks by some local gurus and self-proclaimed shamans. But he’d never become a rabid follower of any social or religious group. All right. But why did she have a feeling in her gut that something was not right about one Jeffrey Webster? He was not just loafing around like so many of her generation, hoping to win the lottery or get assigned the dream job they never earned by hard effort. He worked. He paid his bills. He used his cell phone for local calls, nothing international. There were no calls to a secret girlfriend. He had never written a letter to the editor. His senior year UNM thesis had been focused on the International Genome Project and the computerization of the resulting genetic data. There was nothing illegal or suspicious in his recorded activities. That in itself made her wonder about him. Why hadn’t this supersmart young man moved into a real career?

  She sighed to herself. Jeffrey was less controversial than Gloria Chén, who had graduated from LAHS the same year he had. Like many young people who’d grown up in Los Alamos, she was very smart and highly competitive in school activities. And she had earned a UNM degree in COBOL programming and gone on to work at Honeywell in Albuquerque, doing computer database tweaking. She had a future ahead of her. This Jeffrey did not. Why not?

  Well, she really wanted to get out into the field. Was the puzzling history of this Webster youth a basis for asking her girlfriend Beverly in the Terrorist Screening Center for an outside assignment? Maybe she could travel to Los Alamos and investigate Webster for potential foreign agent knowledge. His parents’ overseas travels were more controversial than the travels of Chén’s parents. Then again, it was common for most national lab employees to travel overseas to scientific conferences. And a third of the adult employees had prior service in the Air Force, Army or Navy. Not so for Webster’s parents. They had both grown up in a small town in Iowa, gone to undergrad and then graduate school in that state, been a couple since starting college, then had waited until the mother was 30 to have their first and only child. Not so unusual in today’s world. But the parents had been children of the 60s and 70s, the era of Hippies and political rebels. Yet they were both listed as Independent voters. Which made them unusual for the early 80s, when they’d first gone to work at Los Alamos. What else was unusual about young Webster’s parents?

  That was it. The parents. Their son was so bland socially that she could not justify a field trip to check him out. But his parents, now, with their visits to Prague, Berlin and Geneva, those visits she could highlight in her analytical report. Beverly owed her a favor, thanks to the tip she’d passed on to her friend. There had been a Russian woman scientist who’d entered the US on a visitor’s visa, then had overstayed her visa. Janet had been roaming outside of her lab datafiles and had taken note of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement visa entry records. One cold day in March she’d noticed the lack of an exit record for the Russian woman. Her heads-up to Beverly had enabled the operations people in her girlfriend’s section to track the Russian, document her visits to Brookhaven and the Princeton Plasma Physics lab, and catch her in cell phone chats with American scientists asking for access to the lab computers, supposedly for research purposes. The Russian had been arrested, then deported after State lodged a complaint with the Russian embassy in D.C. Beverly owed her.

  Janet touched on the Word icon and began typing her Analysis report on the strange activities of Elaine and John Webster, former employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the potential for foreign agent contacts with them. She smiled to herself. She would get around Lederberg one way or another!

  CHAPTER TWO

  The REI break room was empty. I walked over to my locker, opened it and pulled out my lunch bag. Then I grabbed an empty chair and sat at the lunch table. My lunch bag held a diet pop, a ham and cheese sandwich, and some chewy meat strips that were not made with sheep brains. Paying attention to the contents of food containers is a lesson I learned from my Mom, may her spirit find rest wherever she might be. The lunchroom door creaked open and in walked Billy Jackson, whose retail spot was in the ski equipment section. He’s a skinny guy whose rooster tail hair looks like an old-fashioned Mohawk haircut. Usually he’d a happy-go-lucky guy with a big smile for everyone. Now, he looked distracted, glancing down at his smartphone, then up to the flatscreen TV that was stuck to the wall above the microwave counter. Billy walked over, grabbed the TV control unit off the microwave, aimed it at the screen, clicked it, and came to sit next to me. His lunch pail clanked on the plastic table top as he looked at the TV, waiting for the screen to brighten and show an image.

  “Hey Billy. What’s up?” I said, pulling out my diet pop and opening it for a sip.

  “Hi Jeff. There’s a terror thing on top of the Empire State Building,” Billy said distractedly, nodding at the TV that now brightened with the CNN logo and a talking head who was soundless thanks to the mute having been set by the prior user. Behind the talker was an aerial image of the round spire on top of the building. Billy aimed the control unit and pressed something. “Let’s hear what they’re saying. My iPhone carried news about three women being held hostage by some guy yelling Allah stuff and ordering other tourists to leave the observation room up top.”

  I put down my pop and watched the TV.

  “Five minutes ago a bearded man holding a shotgun took captive three women visiting the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building,” said a young blond as the aerial image zoomed in from what appeared to be a news helicopter. “Called the Top Deck, the 102nd floor room is fully enclosed, unlike the open balcony on the 86th floor. The elevator operator is reported to have brought down twelve tourists who had paid for a VIP pass to the building’s topmost floor.”

  I woke up at the aerial imagery and the news report. My parents had taken me to the building for my fifteenth birthday as part of a family outing to New York City.

  “File footage of the room at the top of the spire is now displaying,” said the woman, identified at the bottom of the screen as CNN senior domestic reporter Leslee
Howden. Behind her part of the video wall showed still footage. The other part of the wall held a moving image. “A live image from local station WABC is also showing.”

  “Wow,” said Billy. “Look at that copter shot!”

  The copter’s camera person had zoomed in close to the wide windows of the 102nd floor, above which rose the antenna that broadcast TV and FM to all of lower New York state. It was full daylight, though dark rainstorm clouds hovered nearby. One window showed three young to older women pressed up against the window. They were tied to each other by ropes around their necks, with the black tube of a shotgun pushed against the head of the woman closest to a bearded young man who was looking at the hovering copter. The man was speaking into a cell phone, looking angry.

  “All floors of the Empire State Building from the 86th floor and above are being evacuated by express elevators,” the CNN woman said, then touched her right ear. “Uh, CNN’s senior terrorism reporter Jack Wilshire is calling in to me. He is just outside the building. Jack, terrorists usually kill everyone when they hit a spot. This guy has taken some hostages. Any idea on why he’s doing this?”

  The face of a middle-aged man now appeared to one side of the TV screen even as the copter close-up of the captive women filled the other side of the screen. He stood outside at street level, near the entrance to the Empire State Building. Yellow tape was strung across its entrance and dozens of police and some firemen formed a half circle just outside the yellow tape. Going inside were SWAT types carrying rifles and wearing black combat outfits. Two frowning men in black suits followed them.

  “Hello Leslee,” said Wilshire. “My sources in the NYPD tell me the city’s terrorism unit is entering the building. A SWAT unit is also entering to establish control of the building’s interior from the 86th floor and up.” The man stopped talking and looked down at his own smartphone, then up. “Uh, the elevator operator who takes people from the 86th up to the 102nd floor is reported to have told building security that the man yelled ‘Allahu akbar’, pulled a shotgun from under his rain cloak, then tossed a rope around the necks of three nearby women. The operator says the man yelled something about releasing jihadists held by the US.”