by John Jonas
CHAPTER 3
Jim and Rick stood there looking at the screen, stunned. No one spoke for a full minute until Rick asked “What just happened?”
“I’m not sure but I think we just got robbed” said Jim.
Rick started shaking his head “No. Impossible. I did not just see a guy magically materialize in my vault, grab three cylinders and vanish. No way.”
“We played the video 5 times Rick, it happened. We just have to figure out what we are going to do about it.”
Rick yelled “Do about it?!? What can we do about it? Those cylinders are gone and so is the magician who took them.”
“Why don’t I put a suit on and go into the vault to make sure our eyes aren’t playing tricks on us. Physically verify they are missing. Maybe look for evidence.”
Rick said “Good idea, and while we’re at it, we need to make a copy of this video and lock it up.” He then instructed one of the guards to put the video onto a security chip and put in his office safe. He then told the guards “You three gentleman are to speak not one word of this to anybody and you will forget what you saw. I will throw your butts in jail if I even suspect one of you leaked this out. Understood?” All three nodded in unison to the affirmative.
“Okay then. Go back to the usual watch rotation, no need for all three of you here anymore.” At that, two of the guards stood up and left, leaving one on duty. Rick and Jim left the darkened room for Jim’s office. As they were walking they were both trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for what they just saw. Jim spoke up first.
“Do you think that was some sort of alien? We don’t have anything like that, something that beams people around. Do we?”
“Not that I know of, Jim.”
“Well, Melinda is going to want to know what happened. What are we going to say?” Jim was thinking about the reaction of the Department of Energy, and heck, the entire U.S. Government, the media, and the general population to the fact that some kind of alien being popped into a highly secure facility and ripped off six pounds of enriched uranium then disappeared into thin air. How will they feel knowing that some “thing” or some “being” can suddenly appear wherever “it” wants to and do whatever “it” feels like? Is this an invasion? A hundred more questions were running around in his mind when Rick said “Ms. Powell is still on her flight back from D.C. Why don’t you put a suit on and go inspect the vault? I’m going to go back through the inventory logs and double check everything.”
Jim said “Okay, but I’m going to grab some lunch first. I’ll look you up when I’m done in the vault.” Jim peeled off toward his office to check in with his secretary, Linda.
“Good afternoon Mr. Wilkins.” His secretary was sitting at her desk and probably typing up a report from yesterday. She started working for Jim six months ago and still refused to call him by his first name. A pleasant looking 28 year old, brown haired southerner from Georgia, she used to work in a different section of the Dept. of Energy up in Minnesota. After working in the harsh winters near St. Paul, she had requested and received a transfer to the warmer climate of Arizona. “Did ya’ll find out what Mr. Sorenson was so upset about?”
Jim said “Linda, this is a huge mess that’s going to get worse. If anybody calls looking for me, take a message and I’ll get back to them later. Right now I need to go up to Level 3 and grab lunch in the cafeteria.” Jim elected to not go into what happened with her and besides, the storm is really going to get bad when Melinda gets back to her office tomorrow morning.
Jim walked out of his office and jumped into the elevator just as it was about to close. He pushed “3”, closed his eyes and leaned against the wall of the elevator as it went up two floors. He briefly remembered his dream about fishing with his dad before the doors opened, and he walked out and to the left where the cafeteria door was. He could already smell the mingled food odors as he opened the door and saw that it was mostly empty. Today’s entrée was meatloaf so he ordered a small portion of that and two slices of bread and made a meatloaf sandwich. As he ate he was thinking about the meeting that was going to take place tomorrow morning and how the heck are they going to explain the theft. He also was wondering what to tell his wife, Sylvia, and IF he could tell her. Jim was thinking that Security is going to censor what is released to the public and Jim had no special privileges in that department. He doesn’t tell her everything about this place and she doesn’t ask a lot of questions about it.
After he finished eating, he got back onto the elevator and went down two levels below his office where the vault is. The elevator opened into a small lobby where a security guard sat behind a bullet-proof window with speaker built into it. Next to the window was a thick steel door with no knob. The guard looked at his computer monitor and saw that his RFID badge had been read and said “Mr. Wilkins, the security chief told me to expect you” and he heard a buzzing sound as the door next to the window opened into the lobby. Jim walked through it and the guard handed him a microphone and said “State your name and badge number, please.”
Jim did so and the guard watched as another door opened on the opposite side of the room. “Go ahead.” The guard said as he pointed at the open door. Jim walked into the other room where there were radiation suits hanging in open lockers on one side of the wall. The door closed behind him as he was reaching for a one. After putting on the suit he found a helmet sitting on a shelf and placed it on his head and secured the seal around the neck.
Looking up at the camera in the upper corner of the room, he flashed a thumbs-up and a light on the big vault door turned green. The huge door swung open so he walked in and moved over to the wall where the racks are and started counting cylinders as the door closed behind him. After only reaching 72, he started looking for anything out of the ordinary or out of place. The robotic arms were in the storage location in the corner, the controlling computer looked normal, nothing looked wrong except the three spots where the cylinders were. As he was walking past the rack where the three cylinders were taken, he saw a small object on the floor next to the base. He picked it up and held it in his hand. It was a small, half-inch long triangular shaped piece of metal. It was gold colored with a small dot in the middle. He put it in his pocket and waved at the camera and the big vault door opened, Jim walked out and removed his suit.
Jim found Rick Sorenson sitting at his desk and it was almost 4:30 in the afternoon. Jim had returned to his office and held a short meeting with the engineering team and let them go home for the day. Rick was closing some folders on his desk and had a cup of coffee in the other hand. “Did you find anything, Jim?”
“Just three empty spots, and this.” He dropped the metal piece on Rick’s desk as he sat down in the chair in front of it. Rick picked it up and examined it and said “This looks like a piece of the robotic arm; I’ll hang onto this and have the lab check it out tomorrow. I’ve written up a report for Ms. Powell and I’m going to leave it on her desk so she can read it first thing when she gets in tomorrow morning. Why don’t you go home to your lovely wife and we’ll deal with this tomorrow.” Jim agreed and left.
Jim walked into the front door of their 3 bedroom home that was a couple of blocks from the 101. Jim and Sylvia had chosen to buy a house in Phoenix because her Mom and Dad lived nearby and the school she taught at was close too. As soon as he walked in he could smell her homemade lasagna and that put a big smile on his face where a frown of concern had been all day. He found her bent over with her head in the refrigerator so he snuck up behind her and patted her behind. She straightened up and turned around and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “Hi honey, how was work?”
Jim hugged her and said “I’ll tell you later, right now I need a drink and your lasagna smells great. You want some wine?” Jim reached into the fridge and took out a bottle.
Sylvia said “Pour me half a glass and I’ll set the table.”
As they ate Jim told her about the intruder and how he and Rick watched on camera the thief appearing a
nd vanishing along with the uranium cylinders. Sylvia was skeptical at first but after they ate she seemed to appear shaken.
“I’ve never believed in alien life but this is scary.” She said. Jim assured her that they would get to the bottom of this and nobody’s going to blast the White House into a zillion pieces and Jim isn’t going to have to fly a jet fighter into a big levitating saucer. Jim went to change clothes as Sylvia put the dishes away and cleaned the kitchen. They then sat down for a quiet evening in front of the TV wall but Jim’s mind kept wandering away back to the bizarre events of the day.
Melinda Powell had gotten her Bachelor’s Degree at Arizona State but soon became a stay-at-home Mom when she married her husband Stan and had two children. She loved her two girls, Hailey, 8, and Mary, 10, and Stan could not have been a better father. Stan was a Colonel in the Army and they had a good life in New Mexico while he was stationed at the White Sands Missile Range.
When Stan was killed in a tragic accident involving a missile that was supposed to have a dummy warhead, she was forced to become a working mom. Her father was a Congressman in Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, so with his influence, Melinda was hired for the Admin job at the nuclear facility. Not having the qualifications for the job, she became proficient at fooling her coworkers into thinking she was. The job mostly called for political maneuvers and BS’ing anyway, and she was quite good at that. So when she got to her office the next day and heard about the missing cylinders, Melinda realized that she might have to do some administrating, so she got a fresh cup of coffee and sat down and read Rick Sorenson’s report. When she got to the part about the tall figure appearing and vanishing on the video, she couldn’t believe what she was reading, although Rick’s reports have always been one hundred percent accurate. Her first thoughts on this were not HOW to explain this to Washington but IF she should report it at all. She has been fearful of her job security lately and her first reaction to any crisis is to limit the damage to her reputation. As she was contemplating the report, Jim and Rick walked into her office.
Jim said “Good Morning, boss. How was Washington?”
“Cold and miserable. Tell me this is a joke.” She said while holding up the report.
Rick said “We wish it was a joke. What are we going to tell the Department?”
Melinda was still trying to decide that very question so she said “Let’s go over every detail on what happened yesterday. I want to know everything.” Rick began to describe the discovery of the missing cylinders and continued while she was listening and comparing the report in front of her. Jim also filled in a few details that he recalled, and when he described the small, triangular metal piece he found, Rick pulled out the envelope he kept it in and put it on her desk. Rick said “I thought at first this was a piece that fell off the robotic arm but it isn’t. The robot checks out okay and the lab says this isn’t made out of any element they know of. It looks like gold but seems to be harder than that. We don’t know what it is.”
Jim said “Our intruder must have dropped it. Let me have a crack at identifying it. I’ve got a new analyzer in my lab I want to try out.”
Rick handed the envelope to Jim who put it in his briefcase.
Melinda said “Okay, here’s what we are going to do. I’m going to forward Rick’s report to D.C. via email. We’ll let them deal with this on their end and they will give us our marching orders. Rick, tell all your men that they are not to discuss any of this with anyone, not even their families. We have to keep this out of the media or there will be widespread panic. Other than that it’s business as usual, okay?”
Both men agreed and the three of them discussed the rest of the day’s schedule, but Jim’s mind kept wandering, he was worried about the metal piece he found in the vault and was eager to get it to his lab. When they were finished and the meeting was over, he took the elevator down one level and entered the code by the door to his lab and walked in. The new analyzer was still boxed up, so he unpacked it and began to set it up, which took the rest of the morning and little past lunch time.
At about 3:30 in the afternoon the security alarms started going off throughout the complex. Jim had almost finished getting the analyzer hooked up to the computers so he had not had the chance to check out the gold triangle. Irritated, he walked out of the lab door and locked it. Whenever there is a security alarm, the department heads are required to meet on the ground level with the Security Chief. When Jim got to the Security Center, Rick was watching the screen on the wall which showed the featureless desert inside the perimeter fence. Jim could see that a security vehicle was in the center of the screen and two guards standing next to it. There was also someone in handcuffs being searched and he watched as the intruder was placed into the back seat and the two men get into their seats and drove through the sand toward the main road.
Jim asked “Where did he come from?”
Rick replied “We think SHE climbed over the fence. About an hour ago the front gate reported that a disturbed woman showed up and insisted on speaking to someone in charge and yelling that we were all in grave danger. It’s probably another nutcase protestor or some environmental wackjob, we’re going to file a complaint with the Sheriff and let them deal with her. She’ll be tied up in the legal system for a while, probably charged with trespassing on federal property.”
Jim spent the rest of the afternoon in his lab setting up and calibrating the analyzer. He decided that the triangle could wait until morning when he had a clear head. He locked the envelope containing the triangle in his small safe and left. As he exited the building and walked to his car he could tell that security was being extra cautious and scrutinizing all movement inside the compound. After starting his car he left the parking lot, turned right onto the highway and turned on his wristphone. “Call home.” Sylvia’s cheerful voice said “Hi, Honey”
Jim said “Why don’t I pick something up for dinner tonight? How does Chinese sound to you?”
She said “That sounds great, don’t forget the soy sauce.”
“See you in a half hour.” He always smiled when he heard her voice and couldn’t wait to spend a little quiet time with the love of his life.
Twenty five minutes later, he pulled into the driveway, grabbed the big bag off the front seat and walked into the front door. Sylvia had the news on the TV and the plates were already on the table. As he was unpacking the broccoli-beef and the Kung Pao chicken, he heard the news announcer say something about the Nuclear Materials Storage Facility. Sylvia was next to the TV so he said “Turn that up, please.” She hit a button on the remote and they could hear the pretty blonde news anchor report that a theft had occurred at the facility under unusual circumstances. Jim sat down in shock and immediately began wondering how the news station found out about it.
CHAPTER 4