“Anyway, the Guard let him go,” Horakova went on, “But BOSS ended up filing a report and making a file on him in case he showed up again in a different and more sinister context. Lying about an NVA past was considered a sign of potential trouble, and of course people who think their alleged service as a combat blogger during the Struggle wasn’t sufficiently rewarded can start bearing a grudge against the Party that gets them into trouble. In those early days we kept track of a lot of people with grudges, mostly people who had lost relatives on the Union side during the war and might be looking for revenge. You think that might be the case here?” Horakova asked, nodding in Speidel’s direction. “He’s born a grudge all these years because we wouldn’t give the Button to a keyboard commando?”
“Mmmm, maybe,” said Campbell. “How about his Luftwaffe service during the Seven Weeks? Was he lying about that?”
“No, Cathy checked with the Air Command personnel center. That’s straight up,” Horakova told him.
“Okay, well, he’s kept his nose clean for twenty-eight years, so we won’t brace him with it now. Being a jackass a quarter of a century ago doesn’t necessarily translate into strangling a woman last night.”
“He does have the technical skills to make something like that devilish X-ray bomb,” pointed out Horakova.
“True, but how does that play out? He gives it to Bella Sutcliffe or she steals it from him and so he strangles her and then doesn’t retrieve his infernal machine? I’m not saying forget him, I’m just saying something weird is going on here, so let’s try to figure out how deep it is before we dive in. We’ll keep all this in mind if his name keeps popping up. Come on.” The two of them walked back over to where Speidel sat at the table. “Mr. Speidel, thank you very much for your co-operation. I think you can get on up to Helena how.”
“Thanks, Colonel,” said Speidel, getting up, obviously relieved. “I wish I could be more help. She was a nice lady, even if she was a bit loud.”
“You’re sure you can’t think of anything else, anything she said or did that might be significant?” pressed Jason.
“Yesterday she asked me if I could get her a plug-in Tesla UPS receptor for her laptop, so she could use it in the field,” said Speidel. “She said she was having trouble with the battery or something. I said she could buy one in any hardware store, but she could also buy a perfectly good battery for any American make of PC in that same hardware store.”
After Speidel left, Horakova looked at Campbell. “She wanted a plug-in remote receptor, the kind we use to power small appliances in the field off the Tesla band. You want to bet her personal computer is in perfect order?”
“Now we know how she was going to power up the X-ray bomb,” said Campbell grimly. “She was going to use a five-credit UPS receptor from Northwestern Auto.”
“So if she got the device from Scorpius, to use however the hell she was going to use it, why didn’t he just spend the five C’s and give her the power source himself along with the machine?” asked Horakova. “It can’t work without juice.”
“There was a source somewhere,” said Campbell. “Remember, Whistler from the bomb squad said there was enough residual radiation to indicate it had been fired up within the past day. So what happened to that power source?”
“She stole it from Scorpius, but she forgot to get the UPS with it?” wondered Horakova. “Scorpius stole it back from her?”
“Still not enough data to speculate,” decided Campbell. “Let’s go and see the Wyrick woman at the site. Maybe they’ve uncovered a Cro-Magnon Jacuzzi.”
XXVIII
THE SCORPION’S STING
(32 years, seven months, and nine days after Longview)
All war is based on deception.
—Sun Tzu
By the time Robert Campbell and Tom Horakova arrived out at the Lost Creek dig site, university Chancellor Jason Stockdale was already there, and they brought him up to speed in the Shack. Jason’s face was grim. “Okay, granted I’m not that much of a science nerd myself, but I think I can hazard a guess as to what kind of nefarious use the X-ray machine might have been intended for. I want to confirm it with an expert, though,” he said. He picked up his phone and hit a speed-dial. “Ally, could you ask Doctor Wyrick and Doctor Haskins to step up here, please? Thanks.” He hung up the phone. “That’s a strange device for anyone in this century to know how to put together, though. Let me ask you something. Could you tell if it was made here in the Republic?”
“Pretty sure,” said Campbell. “It would have been hard for Customs to miss any of these folks bringing in something like that at the airport, and as a clincher the input socket is one of our three-pronged 220-volt kind.”
“Maybe that’s why Bella was asking Speidel about where she could buy a local power receptor,” suggested Tom.
“Yeah, I remember when we switched over,” chuckled Jason. “Quite a boost for our own home-grown electronics industry here in the NAR, making sure American appliances can’t run here without an adapter. Better than a protective tariff. Surely you can track down who purchased the components? I mean, who the hell makes vacuum tubes any more?”
“We can try, although somebody who was really mechanically inclined could probably find a way to make them from scratch,” said Campbell. “It’s not as if we’re anal records-keepers like the Americans, where any time anybody buys a pack of clothes pins it goes onto a computer database somewhere. We’re free in every sense of the word here; we don’t monitor our people’s lives and activities on a minute-by-minute basis.”
“No suspects at all?” asked Jason.
“This guy Speidel from NP&L is a definite maybe, but we don’t have any evidence against him other than the fact that he talked to the dead woman out here and last night in the Fairmont bar,” said Tom Horakova. “He said she initiated the contact, and we can’t prove otherwise.”
“I had MacPherson and Botha give his room an extra-meticulous toss while they were all out by the pool,” said Campbell. “Nothing unusual. A minor political beef twenty-eight years ago isn’t much to hang an espionage charge on without some kind of indication he’s held a grudge against the Party for not acknowledging his heroic contribution to the Revolution. It would help if we find he’s done something suspicious a bit more recently, but so far we’re coming up dry.”
“I told my people back at the office to start digging into his past,” said Horakova. “But to tell the truth, he doesn’t strike me as the type. His one run-in with state security was a generation ago, and there’s been no indication of a bad attitude since then. Plus even then it had to do with him being a wannabe, not a doer. If Speidel was some kind of long-term sleeper he wouldn’t have made that mistake and brought attention on himself back then. He would have done everything he could to blend in. Sure, maybe he might have brooded on his imagined wrongs and worked up a sense of grievance against the Party and the Republic, and somehow gotten in touch with the ONR since then. It’s been known to happen. But I think in Speidel’s case, if he had it in him to be a for-real player on either side, he wouldn’t have tried to claim a false prestige and heroism that wasn’t his. Just a feeling.”
“And why would he kill the Sutcliffe woman right in the same hotel where he was staying, knowing he’d be pointing a finger right at himself?” asked Stockdale, ruminating. “Why not wait until he could at least try and arrange some kind of alibi?”
“It might have been some kind of spur-of-the-moment thing that couldn’t wait,” suggested Campbell. “Like a float, back in the old days?”
“I don’t care what you see on TV, floats weren’t spur-of-the-moment impulse killings,” said Jason. “Not usually, anyway. They were planned expeditions by an NVA team into an area likely to be target-rich, in order to seek out and terminate targets of opportunity and keep the enemy off-balance, because they never could surround everybody and everything with bodyguards and Bremer walls. The classic example would be the sniper teams who went out hunting and probably di
d more to drive the Americans batshit and clear the Northwest of shitskins and other undesirables than almost anything else we did. Once niggers and Mexicans understood they couldn’t step outside their doors without risking a bullet in their heads, California or Baltimore suddenly started looking a whole lot more attractive. But the Volunteers carefully scouted each shot, always with a spotter and usually a driver as well, always with an eye on escape routes and contingency plans. A good floater team never pulled a trigger or tossed a cocktail until they knew exactly how they were going to un-ass the area and what they would do if anything went wrong. The bad ones didn’t come back. What I’m saying is that if this Scorpius is an actual ONR-trained operative, I doubt he’d lose his head and impulsively strangle one of his assets, then leave a crucial piece of equipment in her room for us to find.”
“Two ONR spies falling out? Over what?” asked Horakova. “And why didn’t he remove the X-ray device from her room? The body wasn’t found for hours, so he had plenty of time, and surely a spy knows how to pick a lock on a hotel room door? You’re having her room dusted for prints, aren’t you?”
“Mac is,” said Campbell. “It’s part of the routine. As to your question, I can think of a couple of reasons why he didn’t remove the infernal machine. First, maybe he didn’t know she had it. Second, maybe he didn’t want to remove it. Maybe he planted it there in the first place. She didn’t bring it into the lodge in her suitcase, because someone took her clothes out and tossed them on the closet floor, so whoever placed the metal briefcase inside the suitcase, it was done sometime last night after she checked in.”
“Why would the killer put that weird thing into a place where he knew we’d find it right away?” asked Horakova.
“Maybe because it is a weird thing,” replied Campbell moodily. “Maybe this whole business is nothing but an elaborate diversion to get us off chasing our tails looking for who bought or made the components for this archaic machine, while Scorpius gets on with whatever he’s really planning.”
“What about the murder?” asked Tom.
“Nothing lends credibility to a red herring like a dead herring,” replied Robert Campbell grimly.
“You mean this character may have killed her just for window dressing?” asked Tom in disgust.
“Sounds like an American to me,” said Jason with a nod. There was a knock on the Shack door, which he opened. “Doctor Wyrick, Doctor Haskins, thanks for taking the time. Please come in.”
“Have you found out who killed Bella?” asked Amanda Wyrick anxiously.
“We will,” promised Campbell.
“Right now I have a question for you,” said Stockdale. “Both of you are familiar with radiocarbon dating. I need to ask you, what effect would prolonged exposure to X-rays have on the kind of artifacts we’ve been finding out here, as far as their accurate carbon-dating goes?”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Haskins, puzzled.
“What are you talking about? Does this have something to do with Bella’s murder?” asked Amanda Wyrick.
“I’m afraid so,” said Campbell. “I’ll explain in a bit, but it suddenly hit me what you’re talking about, Jason, and I think you may be on to something. Could you describe to me what would happen if the artifacts you’ve seen here so far and possibly even the whole site itself were exposed to large amounts of X radiation?”
“Uh, how powerful, and for how long?” asked Haskins.
“I’m not sure, exactly, but we’re talking a lengthy dose produced by four large Röntgen tubes operating off a 220-volt current.”
“Uh, well, it’s a radiometric dating method that uses the radioisotope carbon-14 to estimate the age of carbon-bearing materials up to sixty thousand years,” the Englishman replied. “Beyond that age it gets a bit dodgey, because it’s based on the carbon isotope’s half-life, that is to say its natural rate of decay. It works best on organic material, obviously, such as bone and wood and coprolite, but it can also work on most crude metals because they have carbon content from primitive smelting techniques used in the Bronze Age or medieval times, and also from all kinds of carbon-bearing particulates that have bonded or adhered to the metal down though the millennia. No good on stone, though; we have to determine the age of stone artifacts from the age of the surrounding earth strata and the other artifacts we find in the vicinity. Circumstantial evidence, so to speak, which has always been a problem with the Solutrean hypothesis, because most rocks are by definition untold millions of years old, unless they are newly formed from volcanic magma, of course. Sorry, I’m babbling like an egghead. Dragging myself kicking and screaming back to your question, Chancellor, as to X-rays, in any carbon-dating attempt they would bugger up the whole process.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Jason with a nod.
“Could you explain that on a ten year-old level, for the benefit of Captain Horakova and myself?” asked Campbell.
“Right,” Haskins said. “Let’s see—the element carbon has two stable isotopes, Carbon-12 and Carbon-13, and one unstable one, Carbon-14, which has a half-life of five thousand, seven hundred and thirty years, meaning that if you start with an ounce of Carbon-14 today, you will have half an ounce fifty-seven centuries and three decades from now. By unstable isotope I mean Carbon-14 leaks sub-atomic particles. In other words, it’s radioactive, although not at a level dangerous to life like, say, uranium or plutonium. The steady state radioactivity concentration of exchangeable carbon-14 is generally reckoned at 14 dpm, disintegrations per minute per gram.”
“Maybe you should have asked for a five-year-old level, sir,” said Tom.
“We can date anything organic by measuring how long the carbon in it has been rotting. How’s that?” asked Haskins.
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Campbell.
“I repeat, Carbon-14 half-life decay is in fact a kind of radiation, although occurring at such low rates and at such a low energy level that, although it goes on all around us, it is not harmful and is in fact responsible for some of the normal low-level background radiation which exists everywhere on earth. This Carbon-14 decay radiation consists of electrons and electron anti-neutrinos, which barely penetrate the layer of dead skin cells on our bodies and do no harm. X-rays, on the other hand, are electromagnetic waves like radio waves or visible light, except at extremely high frequencies and short wavelengths. X-rays are generated when fast-moving electrons strike a metallic surface in a vacuum. Unlike Carbon-14 decay radiation, X radiation is very penetrating and can be dangerous because each X-ray photon has enough energy to break ionic chemical bonds. When this happens inside the human body, DNA molecules are broken or modified, and other serious damage is done to living cells. Hence we get effects like radiation burns, radiation sickness, and genetic mutations, and all that lovely kind of thing. Fortunately, elements of high atomic and therefore molecular density, such as lead, can be used to shield people from X-rays and gamma rays. Of course, none of this is really my field,” Haskins concluded modestly.
“Of course,” agreed Campbell, his mind numbed.
“Can you give me some idea of what this is about?”
“We found a machine in Bella Sutcliffe’s room that seems to have been put together in somebody’s garage,” Campbell told them. “It was in a standard-sized metal briefcase for tools and samples and electronic gear, of the type a number of your people brought with you, and which to be fair a number of people here in the Republic also carry. The briefcase contained four apparently home-made vacuum tubes, actually Röntgen tubes. They were completely unfocused and unshielded with lead or anything else, and if anyone had hooked the thing up to a socket or a Tesla UPS receptor, it would have sat there glowing and spewing X-rays all over everywhere.”
“Good God, that would be incredibly dangerous!” gasped Haskins. “Your average medical X-ray exposure in a hospital or dentist’s office is only a microsecond, and even then technicians have to wear lead aprons and other protective gear to guard themselves from cumulative exposu
re. A few minutes of unshielded exposure at the level you’re talking about would kill people!”
“At first we thought that was the idea,” said Campbell. “But now I’m not so sure. Maybe human beings were not the intended primary targets. Suppose someone could have irradiated some or all of the Lost Creek artifacts, either here or at the UM lab, with even a few minutes of raw X radiation?”
“Accurate carbon-dating would be impossible,” said Haskins immediately. “There would be no way to measure the Carbon-14 isotope’s natural decay due to the molecular damage caused by the irradiation.”
“Don’t archaeologists take X-rays sometimes?” asked Tom Horakova. “I seem to remember seeing some shots taken inside King Tutankhamen’s noggin and the Iceman of the Alps.”
“Performed with proper medical equipment, and even then only after a full analysis of everything else has been done,” said Haskins. “That’s why it took about four years to discover that Őtzi the Iceman was killed by an arrow.”
“You said Bella had this machine in her room?” demanded Dr. Wyrick incredulously. “That’s impossible! Some of us would have noticed if she’d been lugging around a portable X-ray device between Harvard and here!”
“We think it was placed there last night, ma’am, either by Bella herself or by her killer.” said Campbell. “It appears to be of local manufacture. How exactly it came to be there and for what use it was intended, we don’t know.”
“You think Bella was planning to sabotage the excavation by contaminating the artifacts?”
“Ma’am, I don’t know,” Campbell repeated gently. “I hope it turns out there’s some other explanation. I know she was your friend.”
“A friend of many years,” said Wyrick. “She was one of my first undergraduates at Harvard, and we went on digs all over the world together. Colonel Campbell, I know you’re a policeman, and like all policemen the world over I’m sure you hear this all the time, but I simply cannot believe that Bella was involved in anything like you imply. She had—issues, yes. She was very careless in her personal relationships with men and she was disorderly and reckless in other ways, and she didn’t approve of your Republic or of your, ah, racial beliefs, but she was genuinely devoted to the study of the past. In her work she was completely professional. She just wouldn’t deliberately contaminate a site or its findings, not to make a political point!”
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