As the story took on a life of its own, reporters and news anchors began to speculate about whether Dr. Novak had absorbed enough radiation during his decades of work in Oak Ridge to become a hazardous source himself. It was a medical version of the glow-in-the-dark cliché, and it was the same question Emert had asked. Then they began to speculate that he might have been poisoned with polonium-210, as former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko had been in the fall of 2006. After a parade of experts had refuted the glow-in-the-dark theory, polonium seemed to become the media’s prime suspect. REAC/TS took blood samples from everyone who’d been in the morgue during the time the body was there—eleven additional people—and from the five other police officers who’d been at the pool.
Like some insidious form of contamination, the polonium theory spread from one news outlet to another. Polonium-210 was a potent source of alpha radiation, the stories pointed out, and although alpha particles could not penetrate skin—they would, in fact, bounce off clothing or a sheet of paper—the particles were dangerous if inhaled or ingested. Soon the stories were focusing on possible sources of “the polonium.” Early on, most stories hinted that the polonium must have come from Russia, where nearly all of the world’s polonium-210 was produced. Soon, though, enterprising journalists were pointing out that polonium-210 was found in antistatic brushes widely used by photographers and darkrooms to remove dust from camera lenses and enlargers. The media spotlight swiftly swiveled toward the Staticmaster brush—available from Amazon.com for $34.95—which contained five hundred microcuries of polonium-210, or about one-sixth of a potentially lethal dose. Within hours every camera shop in Knoxville had sold out of Staticmaster brushes, as journalists raced to prove their resourcefulness and bravery by acquiring and brandishing an actual source of polonium. My favorite story was the one that showed the Staticmaster brush approaching the lens of the television camera itself, looming ever closer and blurrier, until finally the brush blotted out the lens entirely, just as the reporter hinted at dark deeds investigators hoped to bring to light.
By the late-night newscast on WBIR, Special Agent Charles Thornton himself—wearing a navy blue suit and sporting a businesslike gold tie cinched tight at his collar—was addressing a crowded press conference. Although he could not, Thornton said, comment specifically on any current investigation, he assured the cameras that the FBI took very seriously any actual or threatened crimes involving radioactive or nuclear materials, and was committed to investigating and preventing any such crimes. Thornton regretfully declined to take questions, including a shouted question about whether the FBI had removed radioactive material from UT Medical Center. Immediately after he ducked that question, though, the station aired a brief, fuzzy video clip—I gathered it had been shot by a hospital employee with a cell phone video camera—showing Thornton and two dark-suited agents wheeling a cart onto the loading dock at the back of UT Hospital and lifting a dark, square container into the trunk of a black sedan. Fuzzy though the video was, I recognized the box. It was the lead-lined shipping case where Duane Johnson and Hank Strickland had secured the tiny pellet of iridium-192 that had killed Dr. Leonard Novak. The pellet that might yet kill Dr. Eddie Garcia.
CHAPTER 9
FOR SIXTY-FIVE YEARS, LEONARD NOVAK LIVED ATOP Black Oak Ridge—the ridge John Hendrix had prophesied about and the ridge that later inspired the city’s name. Like thousands of other workers who descended on the wartime city-in-the-making, Novak had moved into a mass-produced house that had been knocked together in a matter of days. The walls were made of “cemesto,” structural panels formed from cement and asbestos sandwiched around a fiberboard core. Such carcinogen-laden building materials would never pass environmental muster these days—in fact, renovating or demolishing a cemesto house these days was considered riskier than living in one. But Oak Ridge was born of wartime urgency, and cemesto houses—trucked to Tennessee in modules that could be quickly connected—allowed the Manhattan Engineer District to build the city in record time. Local lore held that children walking home from school during the war years often got lost, because whole new neighborhoods would have sprung up during the hours between the Pledge of Allegiance and the end-of-the-day bell.
The people in cemestos were the lucky few. Shared dormitory rooms, small trailers, camplike “hutments,” and flimsy “Victory cottages” were far more common. The cemestos were reserved for the people higher in the scientific or managerial or military food chain, and the higher your rung on the ladder, the higher your house on the hill. “Snob Hill,” those who lived down in the valley called it.