“Garcia,” I said. “Garcia found it in Novak.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Yes, the source Dr. Garcia found in Novak. There would be a serial number on the camera, but there’s no room on the source. Which is too bad, since the source is what we have.” He shrugged again, and for some reason, I found the shrug—the even-keeled, accepting shrug—intolerable.
“Damm it!” I halfway shouted. “Isn’t there anything we can do to find out where this came from? Isn’t anybody in the government worried about these things? Isn’t anybody anywhere worried besides me?” Thornton and Emert stared at me, astonished at the outburst, and I realized that my anger stemmed not so much from the perils of portable radiography sources—peril could be found in any technology if you looked for it—but from my helplessness to do anything for Miranda or Garcia. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was out of line.”
“I understand,” he said. “You’ve got people whose health and safety have been compromised. On the bright side, we do have a couple of things that might help us narrow the search.”
“Tell me,” I said. “I could use some good news.”
“Remember, the half-life is just seventy-four days. So if you put a fresh two-hundred-curie source in your RadioGraph Elite, seventy-four days later it’s down to a hundred curies, and by a hundred and forty-eight days it’s down to fifty curies. At the end of a year, that stuff has decayed through five half-lives, so it’s down to six curies. Knowing the source in Novak was still around a hundred curies tells us something very useful.”
“It tells you the source was fresh,” I said. “And it tells you it wasn’t from one of those cameras that went missing in Katrina.”
“Bingo,” he said.
“So who actually makes the sources?” I said. “And how, and where, and when? Does this outfit in Shreveport have a reactor or a cyclotron or whatever is used to make iridium-192? Do they make big batches of these things—hundreds of things at once?—or just a few at a time? How hard can it be to track down everybody who got one sometime in the past three months?”
He smiled at the burst of questions. “It’s harder than I wish it were,” he said. “That’s why we’ve got a hundred people working on it. You know the old saying about the tip of the iceberg?” I nodded. “Well, I’m just the guy standing on top of the tip of the iceberg. Everything below is shrouded in fog.”
Just then his cell phone rang—an odd, warbling tone I’d never heard from a cell phone before. He looked startled, then murmured, “Excuse me.” He turned his back on us and spoke softly, but I could make out a few words, mostly “yes sir” and “no sir” and “thank you, sir.” He ended the call with a promise to phone with an update before the end of the day. He turned back to us, looking somewhere between embarrassed and shell-shocked. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I had to take that. The man calls, you answer.”
“Which man?” I asked. “Your boss? The head of the WMD Directorate?”
“His boss’s boss’s boss,” said Thornton. “The director. Of the FBI. He wants progress reports three times a day. This case is a big target on his radar screen.”
I felt a sudden tightening in my throat, and a sudden surge of hope that we’d find out who had killed Novak—and who might be slowly killing Garcia.
CHAPTER 20
THE NEXT MORNING MIRANDA AND I HAD A SHORT but cheerful visit at the hospital with Garcia. Garcia still looked weak, his burned hands were quite tender, and his lymphocyte count remained dangerously low, yet his spirits were surprisingly high. He was six chapters into a sterilized copy of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of the books I’d seen on Leonard Novak’s desk. The book was propped on a reading stand, and Garcia was turning the pages with the eraser of a pencil, which he managed to grip with his bandaged right fist. “Great book,” he said. “Those Manhattan Project scientists were big thinkers. Complicated human beings, though.” I was surprised at his choice of reading material, but delighted to see him in good spirits.
After leaving the hospital, we returned to the bone lab. We’d just started reconstructing the cranium of the North Knoxville skeleton when Chip Thornton came knocking on the door. “Wow,” he said. “Skeleton in a kit. Looks like fun.”