Now, Marla began taking pictures of the damaged floor. “Even the Corwins won’t be able to buy their way out of this,” she said as she clicked away.
A text from her editor arrived with a soft ping.
Three million followers now. IN-CRED-I-BLE. Do you think you’ll be able to get to everything before the evac?
Marla thought about the evacuation and chuckled to herself. They probably wouldn’t bother to evacuate me anyway, she thought with grim amusement. They’d leave me behind. According to Darren Marcus, a small but fairly vocal slice of those three million followers were calling for her head, including pro-nuke types, anyone related to or good friends with a Corwin Energies employee, and a fair number of politicians, including Pennsylvania’s Governor Kent. There was also a swarm of attorneys coming out of the woodpile to offer their services free of charge, eager to attach their names to the high-profile lawsuit that was heading Marla’s way. She found that amusing as well.
“That’s about it,” Ellerton said, wringing his hands as if sanitizing them with invisible gel.
“You don’t have to be nervous,” Marla told him, and was slightly surprised at how concerned she had suddenly become for Ellerton’s feelings. In that moment, it occurred to her that she had gone from fearing the man to genuinely liking him. “You’re doing the right thing. What Leo Corwin has done is pure evil. He’s repeatedly put his employees and the citizens of Silver Lake at great risk, all for the sake of increased profits. I’m not against making a buck; I like having money in my account just like everyone else. But when you’re already worth millions and you play Monopoly with people’s lives just to pile up a little more, that’s not a capitalistic instinct, that’s an illness.
“The public has every right to know what’s going on here. Like I said before, I wouldn’t be surprised if the investigation into what’s happening today turned up something Leo Corwin did, or didn’t do, as the chief cause of it.”
Ellerton nodded. “He didn’t put up lightning rods. Three different companies approached him with bids to do it back in the midnineties, but he didn’t want to spend the money.”
“The plant manager, Gary Mason, told me that lightning rods aren’t required by law.”
“They’re not.”
“So, of course Corwin wouldn’t bother. Look at all the things he didn’t do that were required by law.” Marla shook her head in disgust. “I’m going to bury those two. I’m going to personally see to it that nothing like this ever happens again. And if that means ruffling a lot of feathers, too bad. How many innocent people will need to be literally buried because of what’s happening right now? Because of the Corwins’ greed? A hundred? A thousand? Even one is too many.”
Ellerton’s hands were rolling around each other again. “I agree.”
Marla looked at him and softened. “It’s going to be all right, don’t worry.”
“I hope so.”
“It is,” she stressed. “I didn’t mention you in any of my posts, and I didn’t take any pictures of you. I always protect my sources.”
“But people here have seen us together.”
Marla thought about it, and he was right — during their travels around the plant, they had encountered a few employees here and there. And as time passed and Marla’s blogs drew more attention, the reactions of those employees became more pronounced and, in some cases, menacing. One man in a white lab coat stopped in mid-jog from high on a catwalk and pointed at them. And when a small cadre of engineers entered the reactor room where the boric-acid corrosion occurred, Marla was certain she heard the phrase There she is! In such instances, Marla and Ellerton avoided eye contact or any acknowledging gestures and walked briskly to the nearest exit.
Ellerton’s cellphone trilled, as it had several times during their tour. He always checked the caller ID, but never answered. This time he did, walking a few feet away from his guest. He did more listening than talking, and spoke in hushed tones. The look of grainy bewilderment on Ellerton’s face after the call ended made Marla think of a child who has lost his mother in a department store.
“Is everything all right?”
“Uh… yeah, fine.” He patted his lips thoughtfully with one finger. “There’s one more thing I think you should see.”
“Okay.”
He led her back to the subterranean storage area where the fenced-off supply area camouflaged the dry-cask repository. Nearby was a glass-walled partition surrounding a bank of older computers. Most sat crookedly, with cables hanging over outdated CRT monitors. Marla’s curiosity was piqued when Ellerton tapped a six-digit code into the keypad by the door. An electronically locked door to protect a collection of aging computers?
Ellerton led her to the computer at the back and sat down in a worn office chair, one of several in the space, all with broken backs and torn upholstery. With the push of a couple of buttons, the computer came to life. The desktop pattern was a simple field of faded blue, and there were only two icons visible: My Computer and the Recycle Bin.
The security guard navigated to an apparently empty folder named “Firefox Updates,” then clicked the button for “Show hidden files, folders, and drive.” A.zip archive named “Most Recent Firefox Updates” appeared.
“Can I assume that’s not actually Firefox updates?” Marla asked.
“That would be an accurate assumption, yes.”
He opened the file, which was password protected, then got up and gestured for Marla to sit. She did so and looked at the screen. Nothing in her professional experience could have prepared her for what she saw next.
It was the kind of material prosecutors didn’t even dare dream about. There were before-and-after spreadsheets showing the accounting that the elder Corwin had reported to the Feds, and the actual figures, the ones he’d kept to himself. Other spreadsheets illustrated a complex tax-evasion scheme where Corwin paid freelance workers in cash and then had the charges routed through a third-party vendor that was actually a dummy company set up by him in Brussels in 2004.
She saw emails between Corwin and middlemen representing three different uranium dealers in Africa and Central Asia, all of whom were embargoed by the NRC due to possible connections to paramilitary groups in the Middle East. Emails between Corwin and attorneys from many firms, concerning everything from getting out of liability suits to a copyright infringement claim that he’d stolen the core idea for a new kind of pump that was being developed by a group in Colorado.
There were fabricated purchase orders and a scanned check stub from Corwin’s personal account made out to an expert in corporate sabotage back when he was competing for the utility rights to two counties in northern Pennsylvania. Another stub showed payment to a woman who had infiltrated Greenpeace on Corwin’s behalf in 2008.
When Marla got to the sound files — which included eleven between Leo Corwin and Governor Kent — she looked up at Ellerton with her mouth shaped like a capital O.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“I have never seen this much hard evidence of corruption before. Never.”
“Well, now you have.”
Ellerton reached over her, took the mouse, and launched the web browser. Ironically, it was Internet Explorer, not Firefox.
“You have online storage somewhere, I assume. FTP, cloud, whatever.”
“Sure.”
“Upload the.zip file.” He stepped back a few paces. “Go ahead, I’m not going to look.”
Marla didn’t hesitate — she navigated to her iCloud site, entered her username and password, and began the upload. In spite of the wealth of incriminating material, the file was only 110 megabytes and took less than two minutes to copy over. She logged off and exited the browser.