“Only on paper,” she said. “I have maps. Well, the Oak Ridge Room has maps—the old Manhattan Project drawings from when they first laid out the roads and sewers. I’m probably the only person alive who thinks a 1945 map of the storm-sewer system is interesting.”
“Some of us like dead people, some of us like sewer maps,” I said. “It takes all kinds. I find it interesting that you find those interesting.”
She pointed to an opening in the treeline. “There’s the sidewalk up to my street,” she said. “Thanks again. It was lovely.”
Before I knew it was happening, she made a quick move toward me and kissed my cheek. Then she darted away, through the gap in the trees, into the darkness.
“Wait,” I called. “Your pizza.”
I listened for footsteps, but all I heard was the winter wind soughing through the empty arms of the branches. The wind was chilly, but my cheek felt warm.
CHAPTER 27
THE VEHICLES BEGAN GATHERING JUST INSIDE THE security checkpoint on Bethel Valley Road at 10 A.M., which was late enough to let the morning ORNL traffic die down and—mercifully—allow the sun to knock the frost off the morning. I’d called Thornton and Emert the night before, and—at their insistence—had phoned Arpad as well to see how quickly we could orchestrate a search near the old uranium bunker.
An ORNL security vehicle was already waiting, idling on the shoulder of the road, when Miranda and I cleared the checkpoint. I tucked in behind the white SUV and shut off the engine. Miranda fished a sheaf of folded pages from her pocket. “Here, read this,” she said.
I unfolded the page. It appeared to be a printout off the Internet—a biography of George Kistiakowsky, the Los Alamos explosives expert who had triggered the blowup between Miranda and Thornton. A small photo of Kistiakowsky, at the top of the article, showed a balding man with deep-set eyes and a slightly sour expression, or maybe just a serious one. The photo was Kistiakowsky’s ID badge photo from Los Alamos. I scanned the beginning of the article. “Hmm,” I said. “Another Russian.”
“What, you thought ‘Kistiakowsky’ sounded Irish?”
“I dunno; maybe Polish,” I said. “I’m just saying, there sure were a lot of comrades running around Los Alamos.”
“No way this guy was a Commie,” she said. “He was an anti-Commie, see?” She pointed to a paragraph describing how Kistiakowsky had fought in the White Army against the Reds before escaping to the West. “But skip ahead, to page two,” she directed. During the Cold War, page two informed me, President Eisenhower had asked Kistiakowsky to improve America’s planning for nuclear war. Despite resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Strategic Air Command, Kistiakowsky had overhauled the war plans and created the National Nuclear Target List—a coordinated list that assigned specific Soviet and Chinese targets to specific U.S. bomber wings and nuclear-armed sub-marines.
I was puzzled by Miranda’s excitement. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This guy’s career seems to embody everything you’re opposed to. The National Nuclear Target List? I’d think you would consider that a doomsday to-do list.”
“It is,” she said, “but look.” She pointed triumphantly to the last paragraph of the bio. Kistiakowsky ended his career, the article said, by leading a group called the Council for a Livable World, opposing nuclear testing and campaigning to ban nuclear weapons. She’d highlighted the paragraph in pink—a fitting color, I thought—and added a note in the margin reading, “Great minds think alike!”
“Congratulations,” I said. “That’s some major ideological ammo you’ve got there—ten megatons, at least. You gonna drop that on Thornton today?”
She shook her head. “No need to,” she said, smiling slightly. “It came in the mail the day after the flowers. He highlighted that part. He wrote that in the margin.”
The age of miracles was not over after all, it seemed. Then, somewhere underneath my initial surprise and delight, I felt the stirrings of something unpleasant. Was it jealousy? Surely not. I shook it off.
Just then Arpad’s Subaru wagon arrived from the opposite direction, making a tight U-turn to pull in behind the security SUV and my UT truck. A couple of minutes later Emert’s Oak Ridge police car arrived, followed shortly by a white Ford F-150 pickup. The Ford had an extended cab, a shell over the bed, and an abundance of decals and bumper stickers reading K-9 and SEARCH & RESCUE.
Arpad got out of the Subaru and came to my window. “That’s Cherokee, the cadaver dog, in the white truck,” he said.
“No kidding,” I said. “He’s a good driver.”
“You want to come meet him?”