Brodie ducked inside, grateful to be out of the wind and the stinging hail whipped in on its leading edge. A single round LED light set into the roof cast a harsh yellow glow around the concrete walls, and the closed doors of what looked like an elevator.
He recognised Jackson immediately from Brannan’s description. Tall, gangly, wiry ginger hair spraying out from beneath the hood of his parka. His face was the colour of ash, and nervous green eyes darted from Brodie, to the outside dark and then back again.
‘Jackson?’ Brodie asked unnecessarily.
The other man nodded. ‘I don’t want to be involved in this.’
Brodie said, ‘Mr Jackson, you’re involved whether you like it or not.’ He tipped his head towards the elevator doors. ‘Where does the lift go?’
‘More than half a kilometre down a lead-lined shaft to the deepest level of the storage tunnels below. It’s designed for escape rather than entry. Though those of us with security clearance have access badges on our key rings.’
‘You didn’t come up in it, then?’
‘Good God, no. It wouldn’t be safe down there.’
‘Why not?’
Jackson rubbed his face with spindly white fingers. ‘Look, I only ever spoke to Mr Younger on the basis of complete anonymity.’
‘He was a journalist, Mr Jackson; I’m not. And if you don’t want me to arrest you for his murder, I suggest you start talking. And fast.’
Indignation exploded from wet, purple lips. ‘I didn’t kill him! Why would I kill him? Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious.’
‘Then who did, and why?’
‘I’ve no idea who.’ He hesitated. ‘Someone who didn’t want him publishing his story.’
‘And what story would that be?’
Jackson shook his head in slow desperation. ‘I can’t.’
And he wasn’t prepared for the force with which Brodie banged him up against the wall. The policeman breathed in his face. ‘My pathologist was murdered yesterday. And someone tried to kill me today, Mr Jackson. If you don’t tell me what’s going on here...’ He didn’t need to frame the threat in words. Its implication was clear enough.
Jackson shook himself free of Brodie’s grasp. ‘Okay!’ He almost shouted. He straightened his parka and breathed deeply, trying to figure out where to begin. Finally he said, ‘Do you remember a story in the media about six months ago? It was on the radio and TV. An earthquake in the West Highlands.’
Brodie shrugged. ‘Vaguely.’ He thought about it. ‘But the only reason that would have made the news is because you hardly ever get earthquakes in Scotland. And, as I recall, this one wouldn’t even have made rings in a cup of tea. So no one made very much of it.’
‘No, they didn’t. But they should have.’
Brodie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It was a shifting of the tectonic plates on either side of the Great Glen Rift. Not far north of where we are now.’
Brodie stuck out a lower lip. ‘Great Glen Rift? I’ve no idea what that is.’
‘It runs roughly in a line from Fort William to Inverness, Mr Brodie. Effectively along the length of the Caledonian Canal. If you look at Scotland from space, it appears divided along that line into two parts.’ He paused. ‘Well, actually, it is. Sort of. And six months ago, the plates on either side of that divide shifted sideways. It wasn’t a huge movement, and there wasn’t that much felt above ground. But...’ he shook his head in hopeless despair, ‘there were fractures in the bedrock on both sides. Deep down.’
An unthinkable realisation began to dawn on Brodie. He pointed towards the floor. ‘You mean down there?’
Jackson nodded. The ashen hue of his face was touched now by a green that almost matched his eyes. It spoke more than anything he could have put into words. He said, ‘You know how the waste from Ballachulish A is disposed of?’
‘Not in detail. Only that tunnels were excavated five, six, seven hundred metres down to store the stuff.’
Jackson screwed his eyes shut for a moment before opening them again to stare wildly at Brodie. ‘We borrowed the idea from the Fins. You drill half a mile down into the bedrock, and excavate tunnels that fan out into a network of galleries. Radioactive waste from the reactor is put into boron steel canisters, which are then enclosed within corrosion-resistant copper capsules. Individual holes are drilled in the galleries. The capsules are placed into the holes, and then backfilled with bentonite clay.’ He paused to draw breath. ‘A permanent solution. The stuff is entombed forever. No further human or mechanical intervention is required, because the waste is now one hundred per cent inaccessible.’
Brodie thought about it. ‘There must be a limit, though, to how much stuff you can put down there.’
‘Of course. But there’s enough capacity to store waste from the plant until 2120, when they’ll seal it permanently and Ballachulish A will be decommissioned.’
Brodie said, ‘And nobody foresaw the possibility of an earthquake?’
The shaking of Jackson’s head was laden with sadness. ‘That’s just it. They did. In the early stages, the Scottish Government commissioned a feasibility study into the whole waste-storage plan. The final study included a report which outlined the possibility of damage if there were any tectonic shifts in the Great Glen Rift. It did make it clear that such a thing was highly unlikely. The remotest of possibilities, Mr Brodie. I mean, almost certain never to happen. But, still, in the greater scheme of things, not impossible.’
‘And they ignored it?’
Jackson’s purple lips were tinged with white as he pressed them together in a grim line. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Well, what exactly?’
‘If you look at the records in the government archive, Mr Brodie, you’ll not find that report. It’s not there.’
Brodie let disbelief escape from his lips in a breath. ‘They buried it.’
‘An inconvenient truth. Any further investigation into the possibility of tectonic shifts, or the damage that might result, would have taken years. The whole Ballachulish A project would have been put on ice. Might never have happened.’
The silence that fell between them then was broken only by the sounds of the storm raging outside and the wind that whistled in the half-open door and blew about their legs. The enormity of what Jackson had just told Brodie was slowly sinking in. But the reactor operator wasn’t finished.
‘The energy minister responsible for driving the whole nuclear project through the parliament in Edinburgh in the thirties gambled everything on Ballachulish A. It was going to be Scotland’s energy future. And it was the rock upon which she built her whole career.’
Brodie looked at him. ‘She?’
‘The first minister. Sally Mack. Hoping now that the great Scottish voting public are going to re-elect her, forever grateful that power in Scotland doesn’t have to be rationed like it is in so many other parts of the world.’
Brodie said, ‘So she doesn’t want this coming out before the election. In, what...’ he checked the date on his watch, ‘less than a week from now.’
‘And with good reason. If it was revealed that she deliberately concealed a report warning of exactly what has happened, it would sink both her and her government.’
‘And what exactly has happened?’
Jackson’s breathing was shallow now as fear devoured oxygen and energy. ‘No one knows for sure, Mr Brodie.’ He steeled himself to say it. ‘But radiation is leaking from the tunnels. A lot of it.’ He raised his eyes towards the ceiling as if in silent prayer to make it all go away. Then refocused on Brodie. ‘We figure that a fracture in the bedrock somewhere down there has damaged some of the boron steel canisters.’
Brodie frowned. ‘Surely a radiation leak would trigger an alarm system of some kind?’