Cold War pp-5 Read online

  In some cases, the obvious was the obvious. And there was the detection rate to consider.

  Finally, Gorrie couldn’t take any more of it. “Her hand was at the wrong angle,” he said. “I didnae think it could be suicide.”

  “What?” asked the walrus.

  “She was holding the gun the wrong way to have killed herself. If she were a man, perhaps, or stronger, but to have fired it the way she did, the bullet would have traveled further to the right of her head. To fire it the way she had”—Gorrie held his own hand to demonstrate—“her arm would have had to have been twisted.”

  “The autopsy says that?”

  “The report only notes the angle of the wound.”

  “And the body might not have been moved? Or the arm jerk back as a reflex?”

  “You’ll have to trust me on this, Nab. My instincts—”

  “Frank, instincts?”

  “I helped you out of the traffic division—”

  “For twenty years you’ve held that over my head. Twenty years, lad.”

  “And I’ll hold it twenty more, God willing.”

  The walrus had no argument for that. More importantly, he was finished with his Danish. He rose.

  “You have to close these cases out, Frank. The London papers are having a field day with us.”

  “I wouldnae thought you cared about a London tabloid, Nab.”

  The phone interrupted a recapitulation of the earlier lecture. Gorrie reached over and picked it up.

  It was the detective in charge of the Cameron traffic accident case. They’d just found the truck they thought had hit the council member.

  * * *

  Gorrie caught a glimpse of an ancient stone house on his right as he turned down the road near Loch Ness where the truck had been found. Fifteen years before, the stone house had been the residence of Kevin and Mary Mac-Millan; it had been the scene of the first murder he’d ever investigated. Tidy case that — wife on the floor with her head bashed in, husband holding the hammer he’d done it with when the constables rushed in. Sergeant Gorrie spent more time typing up the report with his two-fingered typing than he did interviewing the suspect.

  The truck was a year-old Ford, registered to and stolen from Highland Specialty Transport the night Cameron had been killed. It was a large diesel tractor, its front fender scratched slightly, one of its headlights smashed, and on its fender a small speckle of “something red and dried, foreign, not part of the finish”—the young detective’s exact words in his preliminary report — had been found.

  “Tip came in directing us here on the hot line,” said Lewis. “Newspapers good for something, at least.”

  The two investigators stood near the cab as one of the forensics people ran a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner across the floorboards. The exterior of the truck seemed fairly clean, not what you’d expect if it had sat on the side of the road gathering dust for a week.

  “Cleanest lorry I ever saw, inside and out,” said Lewis. “You could eat off the floor.”

  “Vacuumed?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But that’s likely blood on the fender. And the glass.”

  “Aye.”

  They could do a DNA test on the fender, and attempt to match the headlamp glass with glass at the scene. If this truck had killed Cameron, they would know it.

  “We’re under five minutes from the spot where Cameron was found,” said Lewis. He pushed back the hair on his forehead. He seemed to be combing it down to hide a bald spot, except that he had no bald spot. “If it was here the morning after the accident, two dozen constables missed it, along with myself at least twice.”

  “When do you think it was left here?” Gorrie asked.

  Lewis shrugged. “We’ll set up a barricade and ask people who pass this way going from work.”

  Gorrie stood back a few feet and surveyed the scene. The shoulder across the way was wide enough for a waiting car, easily parked in the shadow of the pines.

  Hadn’t the words Specialty Transport been on one of Cameron’s pads?

  Gorrie reached into his pocket for his notebook, though even before he opened it he realized he hadn’t written down what the council member’s pads had said.

  Bad detective work, that. What would the walrus say?

  “Sergeant, have you a phone I could borrow?” he asked Lewis.

  “It’s my personal phone, Inspector.”

  Gorrie held out his hand.

  Melanie, the sister’s American friend, answered on the second ring. Ms. Cameron was out, but she volunteered to check the pad. Gorrie listened as she pulled open the drawers.

  “Right or left?” she asked, and his heart sank.

  “Left, I think.”

  “Nothing here. Wait, I’ll try the right.”

  It was there. Halfway down the page of the second pad was the note: “Hgh Spec Trprt?”

  Highland Specialty Transport. Or highly special transportation. Or Hugh Spectre Transport.

  “There was a phone number, wasn’t there?” asked Gorrie. “Read it to me, would you?”

  He punched the number into the sergeant’s phone, even though it meant breaking his promise to the sergeant that he would only call the nearby number. A very correct though very young bureaucratic voice answered on the other end.

  “UKAE Nuclear Waste Regulation, Transport Division.”

  “Transport Division?”

  “Sir, can I help you?”

  “What precisely is it you do, son?”

  “I hang up the phone if I don’t have an explanation as to why this is not a crank call,” said the man.

  Gorrie explained who he was and why, more or less, he was calling. The young man became considerably more helpful. He believed he had spoken to Cameron, who sat on the area Land and Environment Select Committee. The council member had inquired about forms and regulations governing transport of spent nuclear fuel. The conversation had not lasted long; Cameron had been referred to Constance Burns. The head of the UKAE Waste Division liked to deal with elected representatives personally.

  “She takes all VIPs,” said the young man. “I’m not sure if she spoke to the committee member or not, just that he would have been referred.”

  “Could you tell her that I’d like a word?” said Gorrie, who wasn’t sure if he qualified as a VIP or not.

  “Afraid she’s out of the country on vacation in Switzerland. She calls in every morning and evening. Shall I give her your number?”

  “Why don’t you give me hers instead?”

  “Well, sir, our privacy policy—”

  “Come now, be a good lad,” said Gorrie.

  “Well.”

  “You never know when you might need a favor,” suggested the inspector.

  “As a matter of fact, if it was convenient, I could use one. There’s a matter of a speeding ticket.”

  “Speeding? And when were you in the Highlands?”

  “My girlfriend, Inspector, she suggested a holiday and, well, you know how it is… ”

  “You’re going to fix a ticket?” asked Lewis as Gorrie punched in the number for Ms. Burns’s mobile phone.

  “I was hoping you would,” said Gorrie.

  The phone was off-line. Gorrie left a message, then dialed the hotel next. He had the clerk ring the room, but received no answer.

  The plant manager at Cromarty Firth had emphasized how safe transporting spent uranium was. Gorrie decided to drive over to the plant and find out why the matter had been on his mind.

  * * *

  Caught unawares, reception took a few minutes to find a suitable minder to escort DI Gorrie to Horace’s office. When he arrived, he noted that the pile of papers had grown a bit, as had the smell of furniture polish. Horace himself remained unchanged, not quite dismissive, yet not what one might call polite either.

  “I can’t recall Ewie Cameron calling me. You can check the diary with my secretary,” Horace told him. He held a fountain pen in his hand, and every time he
answered a question he glanced down at the paper at the top of his desk, applying another check.

  “Perhaps I will do that,” said Gorrie.

  “Mackay called him concerning the plant?”

  “I didnae know that he did.”

  “He didn’t bring anything to me,” said Horace. “No problem was reported.”

  Gorrie nodded. There might be many reasons Mackay wouldn’t talk to Horace about a problem, starting with the fact that he thought Horace was involved.

  “I might talk to your secretary then, and Mackay’s,” said Gorrie.

  “Please,” said Horace, who now put his head down practically onto the desk, checking off a succession of blanks on the paper in a wild flurry.

  The secretary had not recorded any meeting with Mackay during the week before his death, and according to the records they hadn’t spoken outside of regular staff meetings since he had come on. Gorrie formed no judgment of that, just as he did not hold Tora Grant’s frown against her when he appeared at her doorway. Mackay had not been replaced and she was obviously overworked trying to help handle some of the paperwork. Gorrie’s first request — for a roster of the department — was met with an even deeper frown.

  “Addie at Personnel,” she said, digging her fingernails into her folded arms.

  Gorrie nodded. “Miss Grant, what is the procedure for removing waste from the reactor?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know all the steps. The procedure — you’d have to talk to the men. It’s not like taking out the trash, Inspector. Spent fuel has to be carefully handled. The regulations are enormous. It has to be cooled in one of the ponds near the reactor. The spent rods stay quite long — years.”

  “Had there been a removal since Mr. Mackay arrived?”

  “I can check the records, but I believe the last was eight months. There’s no set schedule. You see, there are so few places for it to be reprocessed, and transport is quite a procedure. The spent rods have to travel in special containers, and can only be taken aboard a special ship.”

  “Who owns the ship?”

  Grant frowned, but pulled over the keyboard to her computer. Punching a few keys, she brought up an address book.

  “BNFL. British Nuclear Fuels plc. The amount of material is very small, you understand; it’s the way it has to be transported that complicates things. Sellafield is typically where it would be sent.”

  “What happened to the man who held Mr. Mackay’s job before his arrival?”

  “Matthew Franklin transferred to UKAE — the energy commission.”

  “Hard worker?”

  “I couldn’t say. I came on with Mr. Mackay.”

  Gorrie paused, considering how to proceed. The secretary pushed a piece of hair up at the side of her head behind her ear, her whole body heaving with a sigh. She seemed a good sort, slightly bewildered by the job and loss of her boss, he thought. She had a round, attractive face, but in five years, maybe less, her looks would muddle into a sort of plainness as her hips rounded and her legs grew thick. Gorrie thought of his own wife, which made him sympathetic toward the girl.

  “Do you know who Ewie Cameron is?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Did Mr. Mackay speak of any government official?”

  Another shake.

  “Would he have?”

  “The plant manager would generally handle any important matter, I believe,” said Miss Grant.

  Mackay had not kept an appointment book, and a look back at the department phone records did not turn up Cameron’s number, nor any besides Cardha Duff’s that seemed extraordinary. The secretary’s sighs grew as she showed Gorrie through the forms and papers Mackay had been working on before he died. To Gorrie, nothing was amiss — or everything was; he couldn’t tell.

  “Specialty Transport,” he said finally, “does the name mean anything?”

  “Trucking firm that handles the spent fuel and some of the items that are bulky,” said the secretary.

  “Are there reports here that pertain to it?”

  “The traffic file,” she said, going to the files and thumbing through.

  Gorrie took the folder and opened it on the desk. Four sheets sat at the top of the folder, out of order; they had been photocopied from other reports, which themselves were copies of thicker filings. The pages documented pickup times, routes, transmittals; all had blanks in the areas for “Incidents” and “Comments.”

  “They record when the waste was picked up and when it was transferred to the next shipper,” said the secretary. “The main copies are filed with the commission.”

  “UKAE.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would Mr. Mackay be looking through them?” Gorrie asked.

  “To help plan for another shipment of spent waste, if he was. Would you mind terribly, Inspector, if I went back to work?”

  Gorrie nodded, but the secretary hesitated. “I heard — the woman Ed…”

  “Aye, Cardha Duff. I wouldn’t call it suicide,” he added. “Probably an accident due to medication.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head, then turned away quickly to her desk to have a cry.

  Gorrie went back to the documents. Except for the dates and some slight variation in the waste amounts, they could have been identical. The pickups were always made around the same time, late at night, moved by the same route, and were presented at the dock loading area roughly sixty minutes later.

  Gorrie took out his notebook. Cameron’s pad had mentioned Lin Firth Bridge. The bridge wasn’t noted here— it wasn’t much of a landmark — but the truck would have crossed over it.

  So that’s what Mackay had found.

  Gorrie took down the dates of the transport, knowing even before he checked that one would include the few days the bridge was closed.

  NINE

  93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002

  Marked against the sun’s 4.5 billion years of existence, the coming event was nothing truly anomalous, but a result of the natural interplay between its atmospheric and orbital processes.

  A body of seething gas and plasma, the solar sphere does not rotate on its axis in the same coherent way as the solid globe we inhabit. Rather, its rotation is fluid, the radiative and convective zones that compose its outer layers — and 85 percent of its radius — turning faster at the equator than at its poles. This causes its lines of magnetic force, which run longitudinally from positive north to negative south, to stretch and twist.

  The phenomenon is easily understood with this model:

  Imagine a ball sliced into three crosswise sections. Now imagine rubber bands attached to it, top to bottom, with pins inserted into each section. Give the middle slice of the ball a faster spin than the others, and the rubber bands are stretched along with its movement. Continue spinning it faster and the rubber bands coil tightly around the ball, eventually tangling and kinking up in places… assuming they have sufficient elasticity not to snap first.

  As the sun turns in its differential rotation, the lines of force running through its gaseous outer layers stretch and intertwine until they develop similar kinks — wide, swirling magnetic fields that most often occur in leader-follower pairs that are bonded by their opposite polarities and drift across the surface in unison with smaller fields strung out between them like ships in a flotilla. Attenuated lines of force bulge up from the positively charged leader fields, and are pulled back to the negative followers, forming closed bipolar loops that reach many thousands of miles outward toward the sun’s corona. Pressure exerted on the solar atmosphere by the intense magnetic fields dampens the upward flow of hot gas from the interior. The regions covered by the fields are, therefore, about two thousand degrees cooler than those surrounding them and appear as dark blemishes to observers on earth.

  These we call sunspots, and their number rises from minimum to maximum levels in eleven-to-twelve-year cycles. A typical sunspot grows in size over a period of days or sometimes months, and then shrin
ks after the cycle peaks and the bands of magnetic force unwind. A spot moving across the sun as it rotates on its axis will take twenty-seven days to complete a journey around the equator and thirty-five days to circle the upper and lower hemispheres.

  Like rubber bands, the lines of force extending upward from sunspots do occasionally snap. This happens when they stretch past a critical height 250,000 miles above the surface of the sun and break through its corona, releasing their stored energy in a fiery maelstrom of subatomic particles that lashes into outer space and goes sweeping across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

  We call these solar flares, and their emissions will bombard Earth within days if angled toward it. Major flares have been known to cover eighty thousand square miles of the sun — an area ten times larger than our planet — and equal millions of hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb blasts in strength, triggering worldwide disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field. They cannot be forecast with absolute certainty, though any significant increase of sunspot activity is considered to be a possible indicator of solar flares in generation.

  On the third day of March, during a peak in the sunspot cycle, a group of frecklelike spots that seemed the very definition of unremarkable to astronomers who routinely track them moved to the far side of the sun in their orbital course. There over the next two weeks, beyond the range of visual observation, they began to enlarge, multiply, and align in long, close-grouped strings. By the twelfth of the month the spots had become highly asymmetric; their heavy concentration resembled a spreading, blotchy rash on the hidden face of the sun. The escalated growth and proliferation would continue for several days to come.

  Again, in the long view, this outbreak was a blip. A millennial tickle in the life of the sun.

  Nothing extraordinary.

  As the time line of human history goes, it was without documented scientific precedent.