by Peter Riva
He opened the film bag, extracted the vacuum bag again, and taking the pistol-like tool, stuck the ultrathin needle all the way in and squeezed the trigger. He withdrew the needle. Suddenly a drop fell into the waiting bowl, but the bag held, resealed itself. Sam smiled. “Must be a Mylar bag. Police did a good job, looks like—ah, no wait, they would have had Max at the University of Zurich handle it, I’m certain. He’s the only one with heavy water around there.” He jumped up, lifted the computer screen, and took one of the phone books from underneath. Sam was so tall he had the monitor raised up with phone books. Handing one to Pero he said, “See if you can find his number if we need to ask him anything.”
The directory was titled IAEA Directory, Worldwide and had the slogan “Atoms for Peace” diagonally across its cover. The IAEA is the International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s a branch of the UN headquartered in Vienna, Austria. They track and log every safe atomic use, worldwide. Pero looked up the University of Zurich and quickly found only one professor, first name Max, in their nuclear medicine Center for Radiopharmaceutical Sciences. He told Sam he had the number. Sam responded with, “We’ll call him in a moment.” Pero wasn’t sure he wanted Sam to do that at all.
Sam was busy concentrating. With his hands in the box, he took the resealed police vacuum bag and placed it in the Russian lead bag, cloth covered and sealed it up.
He peered inside through the glass, making sure he had what he wanted. “See, Pero, there’s debris in the collection chamber of the syringe? Okay, now to flush.” He clicked on an orange icon on the computer and a red liquid sprayed the inside walls of the chamber. “Iodine,” he told me. The red spray was followed by clear liquid vapor. The washing stopped and it seemed to have a drying cycle underway. Like a washing machine, it went through its thing. The empty rubber gloves were moving their fingers all by themselves and looked a bit eerie. There was a small digital timer on the screen, showing 5:35 counting down; a little more than five minutes to go. Pero was shifting his weight from side to side in anticipation. “We have to wait Pero, or I can’t handle that sample.”
“No, that’s fine Sam. I was just amazed. Will we be able to tell where it came from? So far, I’ve been told that it’s U234, unstable, and from no known reactor.”
“They couldn’t match output signature?”
“Nope. But I suspect they were limited in their lab.” He watched Sam’s face.
He frowned, nodded, and said, “Then it’s time to tell me which lab they used, Pero.”
Pero trusted le giraffe, always did. He used to protect smaller kids and never, never once, turned away a kid in need. He was that type—geeky, strong, stable, and kind. His only flaw was curiosity. Pero had welcomed that right now, and Sam had a better brain than he to figure this thing out. “Labs in Mannheim. Mil Intel stole it from the Zurich police evidence room …”
“They did them a favor, they’d all be showing symptoms by now.”
“Well, they stole it for someone, ordered from Washington, and tested it in government labs in Mannheim.”
“Ah … the Air Force labs, pretty sophisticated. They deal with atomic triggers for the nukes they keep there. We’re not supposed to know, but scientists are recruited from time to time. Their specialty is pretty obvious. Hmm, if they couldn’t identify it …” Sam was, if anything, the master of logic, “Then maybe it’s from a time before they built the damn things,” he meant nukes. “A lot of that pre-reactor material is logged here, all the way back to some of Marie Curie’s lab samples. It was how pre-CERN got its first funding, from the watch industry—the radium used with paint to make the numbers glow at night was originally developed from a Marie Curie sample. We’ll see if we have a match in a minute.”
“Thanks, Sam, but I really don’t want …” he cut Pero off with a wave of his hand. Pero wanted to keep Sam from getting too deeply involved. To Pero, that seemed increasingly impossible.
“But, Pero, the gold part has me confused. Let’s assume they had this label on some gold. Odds are the whole thing was radiated, you’re just seeing the label, but the gold will be contaminated as well. It may not give off as many rems, though. The salts—like you’d find in printer’s inks—tend to absorb vast amounts of radioactivity, a factor of two hundred or more compared to gold, I think.
“But it’s pointless radiating gold like this unless you want to declare it useless for the jewelry industry. But sitting in a bank as an asset, it’ll never be used, so no one would care. Why radiate it? And when? You remember Goldfinger? The premise was silly. Anyway, gold would delay the half-life, acting as a shield.” Pero remembered giraffe standing up in the movie theater in 1965 telling the audience “Who cares? Radiate the ingots, they’re only an asset, no one will be handling them.” James Bond couldn’t hear him. A theater full of students didn’t want to. They all told him to shut up and sit down, peppering him with candies.
“Sam, I don’t have answers, I only have threats to me and my friends, real and serious.” Pero lifted his shirt and showed him the healing wound.
He peered, close. “Nasty. Hurt much? What did you do, glue it together?”
“Yes, superglue.” Sam laughed. Pero gave a lopsided smile, “Yeah, well, Sam, it was all I had.”
“You were always practical Pero, you can figure anything out. Infected?” He pressed the skin around the cut.
“Ouch, no, not yet, but I think it is beginning to be. I am taking antibiotics.”
“Good idea. How’d you get it?”
“You really want to know? Your innocence story won’t wash if I tell you.”
“Pero, this stuff is too hot to pretend scientific curiosity anymore. I should have hit that button,” he pointed to a blue button by the doorway frame, “a few minutes ago when I took a reading. It’s the protocol here. But I know you. So, shoot, we’re in this together now.”
Oh, no, Pero thought, here we go again. Friends who ask to be involved. Let’s hope I didn’t endanger this kind soul, at least unnecessarily. Pointing at the wound area, “The head of the TruVereinsbank did that yesterday. A man called Tische. He’s ex-Stasi, or anyway I think he’s somehow connected with them. He wants the sample back or everyone dies.”
“Pero, if you give this back to him, more will die. Let’s find out what it is first, then we can go from there. Hey, while the box is drying, maybe we can find out if we can see anything.” He put his hands back in the gloves and removed the vacuum bag from the Russian lead bag. He placed it up against the left side of the box. He removed his hands.
From across the room, he brought a stereoscope with a downlight. He placed it up against the box and adjusted the diopters, got the focus clear.
“Holy shit.” He sat down. His face was white. “Pero, tell me what you see.”
Pero peered into the eyepieces. He was looking at a Swastika, surrounded by a circle. There was a portion of one next to that. The piece they were looking at was maybe a sixteenth of an inch wide stuck to the inside of the vacuum bag. It looked, to Pero anyway, like a portion of a finely printed official something … a bank note. It had to be. “It’s maybe a Reich Mark?”
“Pero, now is the moment you hope Tim Berners-Lee’s new program works.”
Tim Berners-Lee was the inventor of the World Wide Web—spawning the Internet, mapping pathways and methods of handling packets of information across a net of like-thinking computers. Pero smiled and asked, “What is the wunderkind’s new invention?”
“Un-traceability of requests. No traces, none. It doesn’t use code, it doesn’t mask, it simply cleans up after itself, erasing all trails, like a scout covers horse trails with a branch of leaves, only much more perfectly. He’s given it a nickname: Tonto. He’s a Lone Ranger fan.”
Sam typed in a search on the CERN home page and, in seconds, a list of possible answers came up, appearing as icons. He ran his pointer over them, one at a time. As he did so, a window appeared with the contents listed … a search engine within a search engine. “Ah, here we
are.” He double clicked. A page filled the screen, he clicked on an entry, and there on the screen was a picture of a Reich Mark. He zoomed into a corner and, matching what they had both seen, the little swastikas were all neat and tidy in a row, black on a red background.
While Sam put his hands back into the gloves and re-bagged the sample, he said, “Pero, the junk in here is, at least in part, money. Nazi money from pre-1945. It’s not a label unless they used money as a label, which I doubt.” The clock timer got down to zero. “Okay, now. Let’s see if we can analyze the sample.” He lifted out the needler and motioned Pero over to the other side of the lab. Inset in the wall was a gold-mirrored window, semi-transparent. He flicked a few switches, and it became smokily transparent. “Not as good as the Type Ten-B box glass, but effective shielding, effective enough I think for this small sample.” He inserted the needle into a rubber plug in the wall and pressed the trigger forward, releasing the sample into … where?
“Sam, where’s it going?”
“This is connected to a spectrometer, a separator and sequencer and, a radiometer. All automatic, our latest toy. We love it. We’ll get the reading over there,” he nodded his head back at the computer, now balanced more precariously than before on the remaining directories. “If it’s known to us, we’ll find a match. Now, what it is, exactly that the paper has absorbed, that’s a mystery, so far. You know, putting it into the heavy water may have been a very bad idea. Sometimes fissionable material is best left alone, not turned into a solvent. The good doctor at Zurich would have no way of knowing that. He doesn’t usually play with nuke material.” They went back to the computer, sat on the stools, and waited. After a moment’s silence, Sam asked, “You met anyone since?” Both men knew he mean since Pero’s wife had passed.
“No, I don’t think so. Addiena was unique.”
“Yeah, well stop trying to replace her.” It was a simple, scientific, logical statement.
“How about you Sam?”
“Yeah, one of the technicians here and I were close for a while. She went off with the aluminum supplier, guy who sold us more tubes for the accelerator.” He meant the impeccably fabricated conduits with a perfect vacuum inside, surrounded by powerful electromagnets. Inside the tubes, Sam’s stream of electrons or protons or whatever whizzed around at near the speed of light before impacting on the target—like the helium bubble they had walked past before. “Zarah wasn’t happy with my work hours.” He smiled, “Who is? That and I am always broke.”
“You are known for it, Sam, always were.” He had a habit of buying stuff he needed for his passion, to hell with budgets. Pero was pretty sure the equipment he could see all around in the office room was Sam’s. It had that feeling of Sam, a bit untidy but very efficient, strung together loosely but strong, reliable.
“Yeah, well, I don’t mind being poor, but a little sex now and then doesn’t hurt.” Then he remembered something. “Zarah used to complain that I shouted out equations in my sleep. It freaked her out.” He laughed. “It got worse, I asked her to write them down, they could be useful. That’s when she left. So I got a voice-activated tape recorder instead.”
“Stranger bedfellow.” They were both laughing. The years peeled away, they were teenagers again, sharing secrets. Pero had an idea he could pay Sam back a little.
“Sam, while we’re waiting for your gadgets to do their thing, want to have a look at something?” He took out the special phone. “I don’t know how it was done, but the infrared port was used to encrypt this, something fancy—right up your alley, heavy math.”
Sam took the phone and put it on the desk. From the center drawer he took out a wire with a USB plug and stuck it in the front of the computer. The other end was a red ball. “Infrared USB port.” He explained. He clicked the mouse to activate a recording program, infrared selected as in-port, and then pressed a few buttons on the phone. Nothing happened. “Whoever did this was good. It’s not on the sim card, it’s internal. Let’s try …” He pressed a few more buttons. Nothing happened. “Hmm … no, wait, it can’t be that easy …” he pressed a few more buttons and moved the satellite antenna at the same time. Suddenly a stream of data poured onto his screen. “This is clever, really clever. He wrote code to prevent this being used by the satellite phone, only by the cell phone, but it’s invisible unless the satellite antenna is up and the satellite functions are not working. A fail-safe dead end. Clever man, clever. Now, let’s see what we have pulled off …” he started scrolling down the code on his screen. Suddenly he stopped and turned to face Pero.
“Pero, where did you get this?” His voice wasn’t, angry but it wasn’t friendly either.
Pero knew better than to lie to his friend. “Sam, there’s a new woman, not a man, who’s working on a film project I am producing in Berlin. She’s a genius with sound. She programmed his phone so that the cell phone would also be encrypted. The other part is State or CIA, I suspect, their phone.”
He breathed out. “You’re CIA or State?” Pero nodded. “Me too. Been writing this stuff for them for twenty years. That’s my code I am looking at, but it’s been altered. It is genius all right and,” he was peering at the screen, nose almost touching, “Pero, if I didn’t have this, I couldn’t break it. Rotating integers, binary logarithms. NSA ain’t going to like this one bit.” The National Security Agency had massive supercomputers checking every phone call, every email for terrorist or other information. Electronic intel they called it. Pero called it a total wiretap—congressional authorization intact.
“Sam, don’t stop her. Okay? Say nothing, please. She’s okay, one of us.” Pero used the term the friends had used way back when to tell their other friends that they had a new friend they could trust. “I’ll make sure you meet her when this is over. You can exchange codes.”
“She cute?” That was Sam, through and through. Always eager, always, well, a boy.
“Yeah Sam, she’s cute, very.”
“Oh damn, I see it in your eyes, you’re making a play for her. Oh, no Pero, not twice. First you get Addiena now you’ve got … hell, what’s her name anyway?”
“Susanna Reidermaier.”
“Young, tall, boobs?”
Pero answered automatically. “Yes, no, yes. Ah, can we get back to business?” He had seen the screen change over Sam’s shoulder.
“Yeah, sorry. But you will tell me later, won’t you, and her eyes?”
“Oh, an amazing blue … damn. Sam, won’t you ever grow up?” He smiled at his friend who was such a teenager at heart.
“Oh, God, I hope not. I’ll stop wondering then, hate that.” He got busy with the computer.
In a few minutes, he had rearranged long complex chemical equations on the screen overlapping one with another. Although Pero had no idea what they meant, it was plain to see Sam was moving an equation from a library list on the left and dropping it over the blinking equation on the right. Suddenly, he dropped one over, and the blinking stopped and the computer gave a significant sounding beep. “There’s one.” He carried on. Within ten minutes, he had all three matches. “Okay, now let’s see the history of these little beauties. He clicked on each library match on the left, pushed the F-six and the screen went blank for a second. Then up popped an Internet browser and then an Adobe Acrobat reader … six windows cascaded across the screen. He read them off from the top, one web page and the longer pdf file read in Acrobat to match.
“Okay, the first one is an analysis of the primary ingredient here, common calcium salt, calcium carbonate, common to the Alps, Northern Alps, the border of Switzerland and Germany. Not the Italian stuff, which has sulfur in it, the Dolomites and all that. The pdf says it is common enough in the Jura too. The whole of Lac Leman and Lake Constance is full of the stuff, soluble in water. This is what’s melted in that heavy water in your bag. It’s highly radioactive, contaminated. But stable even if it kills you.
“The second one is a signature of Uranium 234 straight out of the textbook, nothing fancy�
�but there’s not much Uranium here, it’s hardly distinguishable from the melted salts in the heavy water. That salt can absorb anything really, concentrated, deadly. The isotope signature shows the Uranium was crudely refined—see?” he pointed at the screen, but Pero couldn’t see anything understandable. “There are tons of impurities. It’s why I can get such a perfect match. This stuff matches the sample Niels Bohr took when he escaped from Denmark to the US. It’s Nazi experimental stuff. They stopped that program in 1943 … lack of scientists. Some key scientists they mistakenly sent to concentration camps where they died. Others, like Bohr, were helped to escape by the partisans and the Allies. Bohr, in case you’ve forgotten your physics lessons, Monsieur Baltazar,” he imitated their physics teacher, “was the inventor of heavy water, which made all of our research possible. Without him we’d all go the way of Marie Curie, radiated to death.”
Pero felt like teasing Sam, “And the third Sam? Monsieur Turner qui, encore, dors en classe!” Pero imitated the same teacher reprimanding Sam, constantly, for sleeping in class. Sam often did, only because he was so far ahead of the curriculum anyway. The teacher knew it, but it was a love-hate thing. That same teacher had, in an unexpected gesture, written to CERN that they should grab Sam at age eighteen before the US military did. He knew a superb mind when he taught one. And Vietnam was hardly the place for a gangly six foot eight genius. Pure science was.
“Ah, Monsieur Baltazar, the third one, there’s the problem. It’s from here. Or it was. It’s watch-making grade radium that we used to supply before World War Two, before we became CERN. As I told you, it’s a Marie Curie legacy, radium used in watches. It even has paint residue in it.”