Alexandria, Virginia
USA
Jon Smith kept his pace slow and steady as he walked down the hallway. The woman at the front desk had told him the man he was looking for would be in the first lab past the offices, but who knew there would be so many damn offices?
Ironically, the stitched-up hole and titanium screws in his back weren’t bothering him all that much. It was the shattered ribs. Deep breaths were completely impossible, and just getting out of bed was a project that involved him sliding off the mattress and onto the floor.
Still, it was good to be out and moving around—particularly with no one trying to kill him.
He stopped in front of an open door and tapped quietly on the frame. The woman inside glanced up from her computer. “Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Greg Maple.”
“You’re on the right track,” she responded with a smile. “Keep going. First lab you come to.”
“Is it much farther?”
She seemed confused by the question, examining his broad shoulders, narrow waist, and tan face. “About twenty-five yards. Do you consider that far?”
Yes, he thought. His favorite twenty-five-mile trail-running loop suddenly seemed easy by comparison.
“Thanks for the info.”
It was right where she said it would be. The wall on the right turned to glass, displaying a large room tangled with unfathomable machinery, insulated pipes, and electrical cables. Maple was alone at the center wearing an old pair of slacks and an even older sweater. It was impossible to see what was spread out on the table in front of him, but he was tapping himself in the head with a pencil, pondering it intensely.
Smith went through the door and closed it behind him. “Hey, Greg.”
“Jon? Man, I haven’t seen you in forever!” Maple said, throwing his arms wide and approaching with a broad smile.
Smith held out a cautionary hand. “Whoa, Greg. Broken ribs and stitches.”
He stopped. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I was doing some diving off the coast of Japan and got hit by a boat. Spent some time in a coma as a John Doe in a hospital near the coast.”
It wasn’t a perfect cover story, but so far everyone was buying it.
“Jesus, man. I’m sorry. Not as bad as that time I went overboard in the strait, though. At least the Sea of Japan’s warm.”
Smith grinned by way of response. Maple was a naval academy graduate and former sub driver who had gone on to get a PhD in nuclear engineering. Now he consulted for various defense contractors designing the power plants for a variety of seagoing weapons systems. If anyone understood the ways atomic containment could fail, it was Greg Maple.
“Hey, what do you say I take you to lunch, Jon? Celebrate your narrow escape from the Grim Reaper?”
“Sounds great,” Smith said, holding up the briefcase gripped in his good hand. “But before that, I was hoping you could look at something for me.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“First, you have to agree that this is just between us.”
“Okay.”
“Seriously, Greg. You can’t talk to anyone about this. Not your wife, not your mother, not your priest. Are we clear?”
“Jesus, Jon. Fine. Scout’s honor.”
Smith handed him the case and he was about to open it when Smith stopped him. “It’s radioactive.”
“Radioactive? A little out of your wheelhouse, isn’t it?”
“Let’s just say I’m branching out.”
“Okay. No problem.”
They walked to the other end of the lab and Maple put the briefcase into a lead glass enclosure. He used a couple of joysticks to control the mechanical arms inside with impressive precision. A moment later the latches were popped and the case was open.
“It looks like garbage,” he said, raising the bag of debris and laying it on a small platform.
“It’s steel, concrete, and plastic,” Smith said. “Try to break it. Hit it with something.”
Maple glanced at him, a little confused, but then he used the mechanical claw to tap a piece of concrete about the size of a golf ball. It immediately crumbled. Similar tests on the steel and plastic provided the same results.
“What happened to it?” Maple asked.
“You tell me.”
He put a few pieces of debris on a tray. “Let’s take a look through the scope.”
There was a monitor and keyboard next to the joysticks and Maple punched in a few commands. A moment later a hazy image came up.
“This is the steel,” Maple said, tapping the screen. “High-quality stuff. But look to the left where the texture changes. Let’s zoom in a little more.”
Oddly, as the magnification increased the image came into better focus. What had looked like haze from a distance read as countless individual pockmarks up close.
“Hello…” Maple said, squinting at the image.
“So that’s what’s causing the structural weakness in the material, Greg? All those little holes?”
“It’s a good bet. This kind of steel should appear pretty smooth at this magnification.”
“Could radiation have done the damage?”
“No,” Maple said, absently. He increased the scope’s power again and the uniformity of the damage disappeared. Some of the pockmarks were round and milky in appearance, while others appeared to have collapsed in on themselves.
“Let’s take a look at the concrete.”
They found the same kind of damage in both it and the plastic samples.
“Where did you get this?” Maple asked, panning the scope back to the steel.
“It’s not really important.”
“It would help to give me some context.”
“I’m concerned it might influence your conclusion.”
He let out a long breath, still staring at the screen. “Can I bring some other people in on this?”
“Absolutely not.”
Finally he dropped into a chair and looked up at Smith. “You’re not giving me much to work with, Jon. You’re starting to sound like those military intel guys.”
“Call me a utility infielder.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, if it wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t need you, Greg. Why don’t you just give me your first impression?”
The engineer chewed his lip for a moment. “It’s not radiation damage. You can take that to the bank. I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and I can guarantee you I’ve seen everything radiation can do to construction materials. It’s weird that the damage is so similar in such different mediums. Can you tell me if they all came from the same place?”
“They did,” Smith said. “Is it possible that it was sabotage?”
“With what? A death ray?”
“You tell me.”
Maple pointed to the screen again. “Look at the pattern of damage. It’s from the outside in on some samples and coming from a single side on others. Nothing from the inside out.”
“So it was attacked by something. Like it was facing a radiation source and that source slowly penetrated.”
“It’s not radiation, Jon.”
Smith leaned into the screen. “In a way, it looks like a biological attack. An infection. A bacteria attacks the tissue and multiplies, moving inward as it goes.”
“So you think your concrete got a cold?”
“Just thinking out loud. What about some kind of corrosive liquid—an acid. It gets on the material and essentially soaks in, weakening it as it goes.”
“A reasonable guess, but there’s no real indication of that kind of fluid movement. And again, the damage in all three materials looks so similar. If you dump the same acid on concrete, steel, and plastic, you don’t get the same result, right? The plastic maybe gets melted, the steel gets etched, and the concrete just gets a stain. Obviously, I’ll run some tests but I can tell you that this isn’t like any chemical agent I’ve run across. My gut says no.”
“What else does your gut say?”
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the image on the screen. “That you’ve found something very new. And very dangerous.”