Ghadab had to want more than simply killing him and Chelsea. He wanted Armageddon and would never settle for mere revenge.
Oh…
“We need to get to Cambridge,” Massina told Boone. “Fast.”
Given that the attacks in downtown Boston were barely an hour old, Cambridge was almost supernaturally calm. True, there were plenty of police and other security types scattered around the MIT campus, but there was still a queue in front of the coffee truck parked outside the building.
Under extreme protest, Boone dropped Massina off near the building and squealed off to find a parking spot in a nearby lot. Though he’d promised to wait, Massina walked briskly past the guards at the front and around the corner to the side door. Here, he showed the man his license — and the card that indicated he was a member of the board of trustees.
“We’re going to have to pat you down,” said the guard. “Could you take your sweatshirt off?”
“Gladly,” he told the officer, who was an MIT employee. “I just want you to know, I have a prosthetic arm, and the surface was damaged. So you’ll see metal. It will look a little strange.”
The guard gave him a funny look and took a half step back, as if he were expecting a trick of some sort. Massina took off the sweatshirt and lifted his arms. He had been able to get a temporary repair to the prosthetic, which gave him better control and mobility in the arm and hand, but not a lot of strength.
Meanwhile, two other guards looked on from the vestibule nearby, more out of curiosity than concern. Behind them stood a pair of National Guardsmen with M4s.
The pat down was quick and light.
“You can, uh, put down your arms,” said the guard, handing back the sweatshirt. “You’re here to do what?”
“I’ve come to see Jack, the student manager?”
“You know the way?”
“I’ve been here once or twice.” Massina had actually been in the building at least three dozen times over the past five or ten years.
“You’re Louis Massina, right? The robot guy.”
“That’s me.”
The guard nodded. He gave him a visitor badge and a small detector that would keep track of the radiation he was exposed to. Massina clipped it to the pocket of his jacket, then walked across the hall to the stairs.
“You better come with me,” said Massina.
“I can’t leave my post without permission and—”
“Screw permission,” said Massina, starting down. “It can’t wait.”
They called the building the Blue Mushroom, partly because the containment vessel that covered the nuclear power plant was blue and partly as a very twisted joke. It looked more like a water tank than a mushroom, and as a piece of architecture it was about as interesting.
But the Blue Mushroom’s purpose had nothing to do with architecture. The plant was one of a small number of research facilities around the country constructed in the 1950s and early ’60s. Besides having helped educate several generations of nuclear engineers, the reactor could be credited with saving a number of lives: its radioactivity had played a role in various cancer therapies.
Like every nuclear power plant in the U.S., it had been designed in such a way that a nuclear explosion was impossible; nearby residents had far more to fear from the butane tanks on their barbecue grills than the plant.
But just because it couldn’t explode didn’t mean it couldn’t present a danger. As Fukushima, Chernobyl, and even Three Mile Island showed, there was always a slight possibility of an accidental release at the plant or, far worse, a meltdown that would irradiate the area. To guard against that admittedly remote possibility, nuclear power plants had layers and layers of precautions and were subject to constant monitoring. The Blue Mushroom was no different.
The reactor control room looked as if it were the set for a slightly dated sci-fi movie. Banks of wall-to-ceiling green metal cabinets lined the walls, housing different instruments and monitoring systems. Lit by overhead fluorescents, the floor shone; there was a slight hint of ammonia in the air, as if the room had just been sanitized. Ordinarily, the control room was staffed by one or two students; today there was only one.
“You need to shut the reactor down immediately,” announced Massina. He was alone; the guard had remained upstairs. “Begin the shutdown procedure.”
“Who the hell are you?” asked the student.
“Shut it down.”
The student stepped in his way. Another came down the hall behind him, an AR-15 in his hand.
“Who’s in charge?” asked Massina.
“I’m in charge,” said a man, rising from behind the console on Massina’s right. “I’m so glad you finally figured it out. I was concerned that I wouldn’t have the pleasure of seeing you off.”
It was Ghadab min Allah, with a grin on his face and a long combat knife in his hand.
109
The safety protocols put into place because of the emergency meant the helicopter had to land a good distance from the van. Rather than waiting for one of the state troopers to ride him down to the site, Johnny decided to run. And run he did, his prosthetic legs carrying him at a tremendous clip, moving so fast that if he were competing in the Marathon he surely would have set a world’s record.
He smelled it first: a bag of fertilizer dumped in a charcoal grill.
The thick black smoke from the explosion and fire had dissipated, but what looked like a gray mist hugged the charred remains of the truck and two vehicles it had rolled into as it exploded. The intense fireball had scorched the ground and nearby vegetation; trees some thirty yards away were scarred black, and the pavement was a slick black splotch, still sticky with the heat.
Three men and one of the women who’d been at the barrier were lightly wounded in the explosion, cut and bruised, but otherwise the only casualties were the people in the van.
The nuclear power plant was safe, though at the moment that was little consolation to Johnny.
As he approached the van, one of the police supervisors, a lieutenant, put his hand out to stop him.
Johnny stopped and held up his credentials, but the lieutenant didn’t budge. “My — my, uh, wife, was the hostage,” said Johnny.
It was the only word strong enough to let him through, Johnny intuited. And at the moment, he couldn’t have felt any more pain than if it’d been true.
The lieutenant stared at the credentials balefully, then put his radio to his mouth and called in the ID. He held his other hand to his ear, listening on the earpiece.
“I have to see,” said Johnny, starting past. “Let me. I’d do the same for you.”
“Yeah, OK,” the lieutenant told the others. “Let him. But listen, it’s a crime scene,” he added. “It’s a crime scene.”
Johnny barely heard. He knew he should prepare himself for the worst, but there was no way to do that. There was no way to prepare, period.
So he just walked.
Two National Guardsmen were standing near the back of what had been the van. It was open, burned-out, empty. Johnny walked to the front cab and peered in. The van had turned over as it exploded and landed on its roof. The driver, burned to a skeleton, hung from the seat belt, bits of fabric glued to the bones and skull.
“Where are the other bodies?” Johnny asked, staring.
“Other bodies?” One of the soldiers walked over to him. “Sir?”
“The woman. The hostage.”