Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

the cylinder once. It popped up from the middle to reveal a digital readout. She waved it around me and then moved to the building. She lowered the device and scanned the closed doorway. She turned and showed me the reading. There were numbers, they didn’t mean anything to me.

I said, “So what?”

“Normal reading. Baseline gamma radiation, okay?”

“Okay.”

Chapman twisted the lipstick case one more turn and it clicked. She showed me the readout. The numbers had gone way higher.

She said, “Now I’ve switched the selector to find alpha rays.”

“Whatever you say.”

“There is an elevated concentration, but we are still outside the building.”

Chapman teased open the door and we went in. Darkness until our eyes could adjust. Then I could see. No machinery like in the first building. I thought I was looking at an empty space, but then I saw what was in the middle of it. A cube the size of a large room. It looked solid. Like you couldn’t move it with a tank. Chapman ushered me to a round door, like a submarine hatch. She held up the lipstick device and showed me the reading. More numbers, higher than before.

She said, “Right now, standing here, we’re being exposed to about the same amount of gamma radiation as we’d get from a full body CT scan.”

“Is that a lot?”

“Not too bad, but you wouldn’t want to stick around long. That’s out here. Inside that we’d be toast in an hour. Look at that door. It’s a military grade seal. You open that and step inside, you got a fifty percent chance of dying within a month.” She looked at me critically. “Personally, I think you’d survive, Keeler. You seem like a resistant organism.”

I said, “I’ll take that as a compliment. What is it in there, a storage facility?”

She shook her head. “They’ve extracted the reactor from the submarine. From the descriptions I gathered from those people, I’m willing to bet that they’ve managed to create a high neutron flux reactor in there.”

I said nothing.

Chapman turned the selector on her radiation detector once more. She got down low to the ground and waved it over the floor. Then she stood up and showed me the reading. I had no idea what the numbers meant, but they were high.

She said, “Alpha particles. Extreme concentration.”

“What does that mean?”

It’s a radioactive substance, mostly comes off of decaying radioactive materials, uranium for example. It isn’t dangerous to us, being on the floor. That’s because alpha particles don’t travel well. But if it gets inside of you it is dangerous. If it gets in you, then dangerous is an understatement.”

I said, “So?”

“So, this is not just the traffic in nuclear materials anymore. I think they’ve been using the salvaged reactor to produce Polonium-210. You know what that is?”

“Assassination weapon used by your countrymen. Killed some guys in London. But the assassins got caught. Polonium has killer stats, 250 billion times more toxic than hydrochloric acid, if I remember correctly.”

Chapman said, “Your recall is fine. Technically, one gram can kill fifty million people. If you can get it in them, because the other thing about Polonium-210, it needs to be put into a body. Like I just said. The particles can’t penetrate skin.”

I said, “As far as I know, it’s only produced in Russia.”

Chapman said, “Yeah, until now that is.”

I was thinking about the sick people I had seen, and the ones who remained. The cube had rust build up from the humidity of ocean air. This was not a recently installed facility.

I said, “They got the reactor out of the sub a while ago. This looks well established.”

“They told me it was finished a year ago. Which means they’ve had a year to harvest polonium.”

“How much of it could they make in a year?”

She shrugged. “Maybe half a gram. They would have it stored in here. Something like a tiny vial in an extremely secure case. Once in a while they get to add a milligram. One milligram, enough to kill 50,000 people.”

“How much can they sell a gram of that stuff for?”

She shrugged. “Priceless. Thing about Polonium is that it is virtually undetectable. That case in London was the exception, and they wanted the British to know about it. Like a warning. But other incidents go undetected. Very few people will have the interest or ability to look for alpha particles when a dead guy turns up, unless he’s an oligarch or a known spy in some major city like London.”

“How much could they get for that stuff?”

She smiled. “How much is it worth to kill your enemies without anyone being able to prove it was murder?”

I said nothing.

Chapman said, “Legitimate polonium for research labs goes for five grand per micro-curie, which is one millionth of a gram. Non-legit stuff would go for five times that at least.”

I did the mental math. “Which makes it 25K per millionth of a gram. You’re talking billions.”

Chapman nodded. “The perfect assassination tool, Keeler. Accessible only to the nuclear powers, and they aren’t selling. How much would everyone else pay for it? Billions.”

I thought aloud. “This has been completed for a year, which means that nobody needs to handle nuclear materials anymore. It’s all safely tucked away inside that new thing they built.”

Chapman said, “High neutron flux reactor”

“Whatever.” I was thinking about the group of toothless people, the radiation sickness. “A year is a long time. Those people couldn’t have gotten radiation sickness from handling the nuclear materials. They’d be long dead.”

Chapman looked at me, surprised. “Who said that they got sick from handling materials?”

“It’s what I figured.”

She shook her head slowly, her eyes fixed on mine. “Oh no. These people got sick because they’ve been used as human guinea pigs to test the product. They were drifter types picked up by a team of recruiters. People who could just be disappeared without issues. Some of them were used to demonstrate it to clients.”

I said nothing for a while.

She nodded. “They used it on George too, as