Body Farm: Bones Of Betrayal Part 19

CHAPTER 40.

I CAME TO TENNESSEE ON A TRAIN FROM NEW YORK in the fall of 1943; that much of what I told you before was true. But I wasn't just coming home to Tennessee. I was sent here.

I told you my father died before my mother abandoned me in New York; that's also true. What I didn't tell you is that he was a union organizer, and he was beaten to death for helping organize a strike at a Chattanooga steel mill in 1933. He worked for the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that tended to attract socialists and communist-leaning workers.

I was only ten when he was killed, but I remember hearing him say that if Jesus had been born in our lifetime, he'd have preached the gospel of communism. He loved the Bible story where Jesus fed the mult.i.tude by pa.s.sing around communal baskets of loaves and fishes, and every time he told that story, he'd finish by saying, "Clearly Jesus was a Fellow Traveler." Not the sort of thing that's likely to win friends in the Deep South.

Most people today think the notion of an atomic bomb was completely unknown during World War II, except to a handful of brilliant physicists, but that's not true. The lid of secrecy clamped down after the Manhattan Project began, but beforehand, any physics graduate student who was paying attention knew it might be possible. In the spring of 1939, the American Physical Society had an open meeting in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., where nuclear fission and atomic bombs were hot topics of discussion. The meeting was written up in the New York Times, which reported, among other things, that it might be fairly easy to create an atomic explosion that could destroy Manhattan completely. Even decades before that-all the way back in 1914-H. G. Wells predicted that whole cities would be destroyed by atomic bombs. Oddly enough, Wells was a major influence on Leo Szilard, the physicist who persuaded Albert Einstein to write FDR that famous letter. So Szilard actually helped bring the prophecy of H. G. Wells to pa.s.s. And the prophecy of John Hendrix, for that matter.

A few years after my mother abandoned me, I started looking for my father-not literally, but spiritually and intellectually-and I seemed to find him when I started spending time with labor organizers and socialists and communists. The summer I worked in the airplane factory, one of my socialist friends introduced me to a Russian man named Alexander, who seemed very interested in my work. That was in 1939, when it was becoming clear that the Soviet Union would bear the brunt of the war against Germany. Alexander talked about how hopeless the air battle would be with the Soviets' primitive aircraft. By the middle of the summer, I was filching parts for him. By the end of the summer, he gave me a little camera, and I took pictures of engineering drawings. Alexander made me feel important and clever and brave-things I'd never felt before. "You are a citizen of the world," he told me, and I believed it. Or I pretended to, at least, because I liked how special I felt when I did things for Alexander.

In the summer of 1943, Alexander introduced me to two physicists who were going to Los Alamos. They told me that a lot of work on uranium separation was being done in Tennessee. The three of them encouraged me to go to Knoxville, get a job, and learn whatever I could about the processes. I agreed, and Alexander arranged a contact for me in Knoxville.

When I got off the train in Knoxville I asked around for work, saying I'd heard there were defense plants in the area that needed help. I was practically s.n.a.t.c.hed off the sidewalk and put on a bus for Oak Ridge. I had a ten-minute job interview, which was just about long enough to tell how I'd been orphaned in New York and how my uncle in Tennessee said I might find a job here. I figured they'd be too busy to check on me closely, and I was right.

It was my wits that got me a job operating a calutron in the heart of the Y-12 Plant. But it was luck that steered me to Leonard Novak the night he played and sang. You asked how I could not have known Leonard was gay. I did know. I also knew Leonard was marrying me to deflect suspicions about his h.o.m.os.e.xuality. But Leonard never knew I was marrying him to get information about his work. I didn't get much; maybe his lips were looser with whatever lovers he took.

But I hit the mother lode with Jonah, who was tagging along with the photographer, Westcott, the day I became the calutron poster girl. If not for Jonah, I might have had nothing to show for two years of work but dial readings and the story about Lawrence blowing up the calutron. As luck would have it, though, while Westcott was setting up the camera and lights for the calutron shoot, Jonah was flirting and bragging about how he had a bird's-eye view of the bustle and brilliance. That's when I realized he could be my eyes all over Oak Ridge. That's when I realized I had to make Jonah fall in love with me.

Once he did, it wasn't hard to plant the idea in his head that we'd have more time together if he'd dictate his history of the project and let me type it up.

I didn't dare make carbon copies; instead I took photos of Jonah's ma.n.u.script pages, just as I'd done with the engineering drawings at the aircraft plant. My film drop was in the cemetery of First Presbyterian Church in downtown Knoxville, a block behind the bars on Gay Street. I could get a ride into Knoxville just about any weekend-Leonard was working eighty hours a week, and as long as I didn't get into trouble, he felt guilty enough to let me do as I pleased. Everybody makes a big deal about how Oak Ridge was the city behind a fence, but the security guards were mainly searching guys for guns or hooch. Carloads of cute young women, out for a night on the town? The guards eyed us pretty closely, but they weren't looking for film.

By the summer of 1945, the gaseous-diffusion cascades at K-25 were finally turning out significant amounts of slightly enriched uranium, and the calutrons at Y-12 were doing a good job of turning that into bomb-grade material. Leonard's chemists at the Graphite Reactor had worked out how to create and extract plutonium, and the giant reactors out at Hanford were starting to crank that out steadily. In the two years since I'd gotten off the train, everything had come together. Groves pulled together all these theory-minded physicists and chemists, created immense factories around their ideas, and d.a.m.ned if it all didn't work just like they said it would.

And Jonah Jamison wrote it all down, the epic saga of Oak Ridge. He was a good storyteller; much better than I've ever been. I read every word he wrote, and took pictures of them all.

Until the day he caught me, just as we were nearing the end of the story.

Leonard was on a trip to Hanford-as you know-so Jonah and I had gotten careless. He'd brought the typewriter over to the house, because his metal trailer was like a solar oven. He'd told me he'd be gone all morning, so I'd laid out some pages of typescript on the kitchen table, where the light was good, and I was shooting copies with my little Minox camera. I guess I'd forgotten to lock the door, because all of a sudden it opened, and there stood Jonah, the light pouring in around him, staring at me, staring at the pages on the table, staring at the tiny camera in my hands. We stood like that for what seemed like several minutes, just looking at each other, then he stepped inside, closed the door, and grabbed my wrist with his left hand. By the way, Bill, you're right-his left arm and his grip were very strong. He bent my wrist back until I thought it would snap, and with his other hand he took the camera from me.

It was a hot day-early August, in a house with no air-conditioning. I wasn't wearing much-just a short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt of Leonard's, and it wasn't even b.u.t.toned. When Jonah twisted my wrist back, the s.h.i.+rt came open, and Jonah looked down at my body. And even though he knew I was betraying him-knew I was betraying everything he was writing about-I saw that he still desired me, at least in that moment. When I saw the hunger, that's when I knew I had a chance. Maybe he saw hunger in my eyes, too, mixed with my fear and desperation.

So we're standing there, my wrist still bent back in his left hand, my s.h.i.+rt wide open, and Jonah takes the camera from me and sets it on the table, then he slides his hand down my throat and down my body. I'm trembling, and I can see that he likes that. He's got his teeth clenched, and his nostrils are flaring, and his breath is getting ragged, and he's starting to tremble, too, and then he starts fumbling with the b.u.t.tons of the army coveralls he wore all the time.

"The bed," I say. "Please. The bed."

He picks me up and carries me into the bedroom and drops me onto the bed. He yanks down his coveralls, and he's on top of me and pus.h.i.+ng into me, biting my neck, clutching my hair. I can tell it isn't going to take him long, so I arch my back and put my arms over my head and reach under the pillow for the pistol that I know Leonard keeps there. And just as Jonah groans, the gun fires, and then everything falls silent.

Leonard got home the next day. I met him at the door with a drink and told him something terrible had happened. Then I told him I'd been unfaithful-that wasn't a surprise-and that Jonah had begged me to get a divorce so I could marry him. When I turned him down, Jonah had threatened me, I said. I pulled out the gun for protection, but Jonah grabbed it from me and shot himself.

I begged Leonard not to tell the MPs; it would ruin us both, I said, and that was true. "He's probably already been reported AWOL," I said. "What if he just stays AWOL?" He thought about it and agreed that might be best. That evening he wrapped up Jonah's body and Jonah's ma.n.u.script in an Army blanket and put the bundle in the trunk of his car.

He never told me where he went that night. He never came right out and challenged my story. But I knew, by the way he looked at me, that whatever odd affection we'd had was gone. Poisoned, the way the reactors at Hanford had been poisoned by boron. The difference was, there was no way to fix this.

A week later I realized I was pregnant. A month after that I had the abortion, and six months later I asked for a divorce. I didn't need to say why, and he didn't need to ask. We knew too many secrets about each other now, he and I. Enough to ruin each other. Our own domestic version of Mutual a.s.sured Destruction. And like the superpowers, we somehow managed to tiptoe past Armageddon.

So, there you have it, Bill. No more cliffhangers; no happy ending, either. Just an old woman reaching the last chapter in her story.

CHAPTER 41.

AND WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT STORY?" HER VOICE sounded far away. I looked around, halfway surprised to find myself sitting in a sunny living room on a bright winter morning with a silver-haired woman. In my mind, the gunshot was still echoing, the whispers of conspiracy still hanging in the heat of a long-ago August.

"I think it still has a few loose ends," I said. "Did you kill Novak, too?"

"Christ, of course not. What makes you think I would?"

"Because he was about to spill your secret to the doc.u.mentary guy?"

"I could spill his, too," she said. "And I told him I would, if he breathed a word of mine. Mutual a.s.sured Destruction, right up to the end. Leonard and I were good Oak Ridgers, in our different ways. He kept his secrets, I kept mine. Besides, where would an old bat like me get a lethal source of radiation?"

She had a point there. "Did you give the film of Jonah's ma.n.u.script to the Soviets?" She nodded. "Why didn't you go to Russia after the war? Surely you could have found a way to get there."

"Russia? Why on earth would I want to live in Russia? I was a spy, not an idiot." I had to laugh at that. "So what happens now?"

"We wait for Detective Emert or Agent Thornton to show up. I called them from the car when I got here to say I thought you'd killed Jamison. As soon as I told Emert, he said, 'Then she was the spy, too.' I didn't believe it. I guess he's smarter than I am."

"Not smarter," she said. "Less trusting." She raised her gla.s.s to her lips-she'd left the drink untouched during her story-and drank deeply. She gave a slight shudder, then drew a long breath and let it out slowly. "You're a good man, Bill. I'm going to miss you."

"Oh, I'll still come see you," I said.

"Ah, but you can't," she said. She raised her gla.s.s in my direction, then drained it. "Not where I'm going."

"Beatrice? What have you done?"

"I said there were many forms of prison, and many forms of death. Leonard died a hard death. I'll die an easy one. Vodka and Nembutal, which I bought from an obliging veterinarian last time I was in Mexico. I hear the combination's quick and painless."

Nembutal was a barbiturate, I knew-a powerful sedative, used mainly to euthanize suffering animals. I groped in my pocket for my cell phone.

"Too late," she murmured. "Far too late."

Just as I flipped it open to dial 911, the gla.s.s slipped from her hand and shattered on the terrazzo floor. In a voice that sounded sleepy and peaceful and somehow young, she murmured "Hold my hand, would you, dear? I do so hate to sleep alone."

I knelt beside her and took her hand in both of mine. She clutched my hand with both of hers, and her grip tightened. Then it slackened, and she was gone. I felt for a pulse, and there was none. Still I knelt there, her fingers laced through mine, her head leaning against one wing of the chair back. Thornton found us that way when he arrived.

"She's dead," I said.

He looked at her closely, then studied me. "What'd you do, interrogate her to death? Squeeze her hand really, really hard?"

I hesitated, unsure whether to tell him about the Nembutal. Would there be any harm in not telling him? It wasn't as if Beatrice had given away any secrets in the past half century. True, she'd murdered Jonah Jamison, but she had just executed herself. Why not leave her a bit of privacy and a shred of dignity?

Because, I realized. Because I remembered something Art Bohanan had said to me a year or so before, when he and I went to confront a man who had murdered a serial pedophile: If you cross the line once, it's easier to cross a second time, and it gets steadily easier, until finally you lose sight of the line altogether. "She killed herself," I said. "She drank vodka and Nembutal, and I had no clue until it was too late." I caught his gaze and held it. "I thought about not telling you," I said. "Seemed almost like a sleeping dog. But I couldn't let it lie."

"That's good," he said. "Otherwise it would've been awkward when I heard the recording."

"Recording?"

"We got a warrant for audio surveillance before your first visit," he said. I must have looked startled. "Leonard Novak was once a high-level atomic scientist," he explained, "and somebody killed him with an intense radioactive source. The director considered this case a high priority. He'd be very disappointed if I didn't investigate every angle thoroughly. And I'd be very disappointed if you held back the truth." He hesitated. "But I guess I'd also be disappointed if you hadn't given some thought to an elderly woman's reputation. Even if the old gal was an under-handed, soulless Commie spy."

I laughed and sighed and shook my head all at the same time. "How'd you end up as a cop instead of a diplomat?"

"Didn't want to end up huddled in an emba.s.sy compound in some plague-infested, two-bit, Third World s.h.i.+thole," he said.

"Too bad," I said. "With that silver tongue, you'd have made one h.e.l.l of an amba.s.sador."

"d.a.m.n skippy," he said. "By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if we wanted this kept fairly quiet. The Bureau and the NSA are still trying to track down quite a few Cold War spies. We might not want to let on that we're wise to Beatrice."

The logic seemed flimsy, but then I had another thought. "Agent Thornton, is it possible? Is there a bleeding heart somewhere behind that FBI badge?"

"Not a chance," he said. But I thought I saw a hint of a smile as he called for an ambulance to ferry Beatrice to the afterworld.

CHAPTER 42.

I SPENT ALL THE NEXT MORNING AND MOST OF THE afternoon at the hospital with Miranda and Carmen. A hand surgeon cut three fingers from Garcia's right hand and amputated the left hand entirely, because everything below the wrist had died. There was a good chance, the surgeon a.s.sured Carmen, that Garcia could resume his work someday, with the help of sophisticated prosthetics and extensive rehabilitation. What the surgeon didn't say was that there was also a chance Garcia might yet die from a runaway infection or internal bleeding.

Miranda's fingertips, thank G.o.d, had begun to show signs of healing. She'd lost some tissue from the tips of her thumb and first two fingers, but Sorensen predicted she'd be left with little or no permanent scarring. She was getting off far more easily than she might have. Miranda had driven Carmen to the hospital, and once Garcia was back in his isolation room, still sedated, Miranda drove her home.

The light was fading and a cold, pitiless rain had begun to fall as I parked at the library in Oak Ridge. Thornton had left a message on voice mail while I was out of signal range inside the hospital. They'd identified a suspect in the radiography-camera theft-a j.a.panese-American immigrant named Arakawa-but he had died just as the agents were about to question him. He died, said the message, of radiation poisoning.

Opening my briefcase, I removed the large, padded envelope Miranda had handed me just before my drive to Oak Ridge and stared at it again. A yellow Post-it note on the outside, in Miranda's handwriting, said, "Only grad student named Isabella who's done a thesis on Oak Ridge." The envelope itself was from UT's Interlibrary Loan service; inside was a bound copy of a master's-degree thesis, sent from the History Department at Tulane University. "The Role of National Myth in Legitimizing Ma.s.s Murder," read the t.i.tle. "From Oak Ridge to Nagasaki," the subt.i.tle added. The author of the thesis was listed as Isabella Arakawa, M.A.

My mind was careening and ricocheting in directions I didn't want it to go. One by one, the billiard b.a.l.l.s of fate seemed to be dropping into corner pockets and side pockets that were dark and bottomless. But I saw Isabella's Prius tucked into the far corner of the parking lot, and that gave me a shred of hope as I pulled in beside it and parked.

I ducked, dripping, beneath the protective overhang of the library entrance just as one of the staff was locking the door. It was the gray-haired woman who'd seemed suspicious of me the other day. "You must have heard the news," she said, with a sympathetic smile. "She's very sad. I gather she and her father were very close." The woman held the door for me and patted my shoulder as I went in. The library's interior, usually filled with light and people, was silent and dim, lit only by a few of the fluorescent fixtures.

She wasn't at her desk. I turned to the left and checked the Oak Ridge Room, but it was dark. Water dripped from my coat and pants onto the blue carpet as I tried to make the pieces of the puzzle fit together some other way, any other way.

A slight movement caught my eye. Something-someone-was within the darkened gla.s.s of the history room. It was Isabella; she was fumbling with a bag on the table. "Isabella," I called. I ran to the door and pulled, but it was locked. She whirled and faced me, and even in the dimness of the unlit room I could see the wildness in her eyes.

"Isabella, open the door," I said, rapping on the gla.s.s with a knuckle, then beating on it with the heel of my fist. She was looking at me, but also looking through me, beyond me. I'd seen versions of that distant look before. I'd seen one version in the haunted eyes of Robert Oppenheimer; I'd seen another in the vacant stare of Jonah Jamison. Without taking her eyes off me, she reached into her bag and pulled out a gun. She raised it, the barrel pointing at me, and then she turned it toward herself. "No!" I tore at the door handle with both hands. The gla.s.s door rattled and strained against the lock, and then the handle broke off in my hands, sending me staggering backward. She closed her eyes and pressed the barrel against her temple.

"No!" I shouted again. I had fallen against a table, one hand clutching at the back of a square-cornered wooden chair. I seized the chair, lifted it over my head, and hurled it at the gla.s.s. The air itself seemed to explode as the gla.s.s curtain shattered and sheeted down. I heard a scream; I didn't know if it came from her or from me or from both of us. When the cascade of gla.s.s subsided, I expected to find her down and shattered, too-b.l.o.o.d.y fragments on the floor, a bullet in her head-but still she stood, frozen, dazed. Her arms were crossed in front of her face; shards of gla.s.s glinted in her dark hair.

I sprang forward, through a wall that no longer existed. I grabbed the gun with one hand, her wrist with the other. She cried out when I pried her fingers open and wrested the gun from her. There was dismay in the cry, but there was pain, too-physical, primal, wounded-animal pain. I looked at her hand, and it was as if I were seeing a far worse version of Miranda's hand. Her fingertips were raw, oozing sores. "Oh dear G.o.d, Isabella," I groaned, staring at her hands and all the terrible things they confirmed. "What have you done?"

Tears began to roll down her face, as if shards of shattered gla.s.s and shattered lives were pouring out of her. "I never meant to hurt so many," she said. "Not Dr. Garcia. Not Miranda. Least of all you. Please believe that. Only Novak: his life for my grandmother's life. My grandmother and all the other grandmothers and grandfathers and parents and children of Nagasaki. He was the only one I meant. I thought I could keep it pure."

"Pure? What on earth does that word mean to you?" I tried to reconcile what she'd just said with what she'd done. How could grief for an unknown grandmother move her to murder an old man who had once been a cog-a crucial cog, but a cog nonetheless-in the machinery of the Manhattan Project? How could the loss of an ancestor so unhinge this bright, sensitive woman?

"It was too big for me, it got away from me," she said. "I should have known it would. I should have learned more from all this history." She reached up to the back of her neck. "Here," she said. "I want you to have this." She flinched as she fumbled with the clasp, and whimpered, and this whimper-unlike the whimper of desire I'd once heard from her-was excruciating. She lifted the silver pendant from within her s.h.i.+rt and held it out, suspended between us. "It's the j.a.panese symbol for 'remembrance,'" she said. "I had it made ten years ago," she said, "when I decided to kill Leonard Novak for my grandmother's sake. In ten years, I've never taken it off except for the night I was with you. I take it off forever now." Her tears were falling faster now, and I felt answering tears on my own face, too. "My mother died long ago. My father is dead now, too. And I am a walking ghost."

She stretched her arm toward me, offering the pendant. I reached to take it, but just before my fingers closed around it, it fell. I lunged to catch it, and in that instant she darted past me, over the ridge of crumbled gla.s.s, out into the main reading room. I turned in time to see her duck into the darkened stacks of books. I followed, racing from stack to stack, aisle after aisle, without a glimpse of her. Then I heard footsteps racing through the lobby, and the thud of a distant door banging. I sprinted after her, out into the twilight, splas.h.i.+ng through the puddles and pools acc.u.mulating on the sidewalk and the parking lot.

By the time she reached the Prius I was gaining on her. Fifty yards, now forty, now thirty. She struggled with her keys; I thought I heard another cry of pain, and I saw the keys splash at her feet. She hesitated, then spun and began running again-out of the parking lot and across the wet gra.s.s of the park behind the library. Half scurrying, half sliding, she flung herself down an embankment and into the small stream that bisected the park.

As I watched in astonishment Isabella disappeared, leaving only a black, empty circle and rus.h.i.+ng water where she had been. She had scrambled into the end of an immense pipe, which could only have been the outlet of the city's storm-sewer system.

Isabella had vanished into a subterranean maze-a labyrinth constructed beneath the very foundations of the Secret City in the year 1943.

CHAPTER 43.

I SLID DOWN THE BANK AND INTO THE ICY WATER OF the creek, which swirled around my thighs. The tunnel was a tube of concrete six or eight feet in diameter. The water pouring from it looked to be knee-deep; the blackness appeared infinitely deep.

I flipped open my cell phone and hit the call b.u.t.ton; the phone automatically dialed the last number in its memory, which was Thornton's. The call went immediately to his voice mail, which meant he was on another call. "It's Brockton," I said. "Isabella killed Novak. She knows we know. She's in the storm sewers under Oak Ridge. Between the library and the police station. I'm going after her. Tell Emert."

I snapped the phone shut and stepped up into the pipe. The water was shallower than in the creek, but it was moving more swiftly. I dug into my pocket and fished out my key ring, which had a tiny flashlight on it-one miniature bulb, about the size of the iridium pellet that had killed Leonard Novak. I squeezed the switch on the side of the case and the bulb glowed blue-white against the darkness. It wasn't much light, but then again I didn't need much light: the sides and top of the tunnel were only a foot or two away, and the bottom was hidden by the swirling water. I could see, faintly, twenty or thirty feet before the gray-white tube faded into darkness. I hoped that would be enough.

I started slogging up the pipe, upstream against the current, which resisted every step I took, shoving each foot backward as I lifted it. It was like running into the surf at the beach, except the wave never broke and every step was work. I found myself lifting my knees higher and higher, and eventually I settled into an awkward high-stepping jog, which I knew I wouldn't be able to maintain for long.

I hadn't gone far-a hundred yards? two hundred? There was no way to tell how far I'd struggled against the blackness and the current-when I came to a side tunnel angling off to the right. This one was smaller, perhaps four feet in diameter, but still large enough for a person-large enough for Isabella, and large enough for me-though it would require stooping. Which would she have taken?

I kept to the main tunnel-if I were fleeing, I'd want as much distance and as much room as I could get, and the main tunnel seemed to offer more of those. Here and there, I pa.s.sed small pipes, ranging from six inches to eighteen or twenty inches in diameter. I was grateful I didn't have to decide whether she might have taken one of those, but they posed a different sort of problem: water shot from them into the main tunnel with enough force to strike the opposite wall. I had to force my way through them, and each one battered at me icily, sapping my strength and my body heat. Desperate though she was, I was amazed Isabella could force her way through this. Was she moving in utter darkness and blind panic, or did she have some small glimmer of light, too?

I came to another side tunnel; again I chose the main line. The current was running faster now, or maybe I was just giving out. I could no longer lift my knees clear of the water; it was getting deeper and flowing faster, and I was exhausted. My teeth began to chatter. My tiny light seemed to be dimming as well, though perhaps it was an optical illusion, a trick played by the darker concrete in this section of pipe, or played by my own fatigue and despair.

And then I came to a harder choice: a Y-shaped intersection, two four-foot tunnels angling to the right and left. No main line to make the decision easy for me anymore; two choices, with no way to know what I'd find in the one I chose-and no way to know what I'd miss in the one I didn't.