She spotted the digital recorder sitting atop a pile of other items in her bag. She’d forgotten all about it, and she felt a touch of melancholy at the thought that Corwin’s voice was on there, engaged in one of the final conversations of his life. Though she would never admit it to anyone, she knew she had grossly misjudged him. If she’d taken the time to really examine Corwin from all angles, consider all possibilities, would it have been that hard to spot what was brewing under the surface? Or would it all have remained concealed under his veneer of politeness and projection of untouchability?
Whether Corwin hated his father or not, she couldn’t say. Even with the benefit of hindsight and the added clarity of what he’d written in his letter to her, she could not venture a guess about that. But it was obvious that Andrew hated what his father had done… and when the opportunity arose, Andrew had taken action to expose him.
I so misjudged him.
The guilt that flowed from this confession, she sensed, had its origins in a simple question — if she had studied the man evenhandedly from the start, had spotted the fortuity of his intent and worked with him to achieve mutually beneficial goals, would the calamitous events of this day have occurred? Maybe not. The lightning still would have struck, but everything that happened afterward… Maybe Reactor 2 would have been shut down today. If she had already released the exposé material that Corwin provided — hell, even just a fraction of it — the whole plant probably would have been taken offline pending a full investigation. Perhaps the Feds would have forced a stem-to-stern upgrade of the facility that included lightning rods in all sensitive locations. At the very least, Corwin would have had to present an emergency-response plan for approval that, in turn, would have enabled them to handle the accident more effectively.
The job of any good journalist was to inform the public, and she thought she’d been doing that. She was sure of the integrity of her actions when she began digging into Corwin Energies. She smelled a rat and was determined to flush him out. But in real life, the children of rats weren’t necessarily rats, too, right? She remembered the sons of Bernie Madoff reporting their father and his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme to the FBI immediately after Madoff revealed it to them. It had never occurred to her that Corwin might be like that.
But then there was all the other stuff, too, wasn’t there? The Saturday mornings distributing food in South Philly. The homes he helped build with Habitat for Humanity. And the two months he spent administering medication to village children in Burundi. Weren’t you impressed by the way he didn’t just write checks like so many of his kind but instead went right to the heart of the crises and actually got his hands dirty? Or were you too busy explaining away these things as PR strategy?
And there was the truth of the matter. She was sure he was just trying to perfume the wretched legacy spun by his father; heck, maybe it was even on the father’s instructions. Sure, they all did that, didn’t they? They were all rats, right?
Tell the public everything. Promise me…
“I will,” she said softly. “And I’ll try not to make the same mistake in the future.” That, she decided, was how she would make it up to him.
Her cellphone vibrated; a text message. She didn’t need to look to know it was Darren Marcus, pushing her for another blog entry. She hadn’t posted in a while and the public was getting upset. They’re worried for you, he wrote, I’M worried for you. Are you okay? His phony concern was particularly irritating, and it took all the strength she had left to keep from letting him know precisely what she thought of him. She wrote back that she was preparing another entry that would be posted shortly, that she wanted to get the words just right. When Marcus wrote back asking what, exactly, she meant by that, she ignored him.
A man sitting at the front of the bus stood up, turned to face everyone, and removed his oxygen mask. It was Gary Mason, the amiable plant manager. In the weak light of the cellphone he held in one hand, he looked drawn and ashen.
“I have news,” he said, checking the little screen as he spoke. “The leak from the containment vessel in Reactor Number 2 has finally been suspended. There will still be some incidental leakage until the damaged vessel can be permanently capped. But this secondary leakage will be fractional compared to what was liberated from the system today. Capping measures will likely commence at once.”
There was no immediate reaction to this information; not even a stray, halfhearted clap.
“How did you finally stop it?” a woman toward the front asked.
“A combination of factors. The sand and clay we dumped into the exposed core certainly helped, as did the boron. But the turning point came when we brought in a tanker truck filled with more than five thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen.”
“So the driver had to get close to the site of the explosion?”
Mason shook his head. “No, we had two of our people operate the vehicle. They were dressed in the appropriate gear. They got the hoses in place, opened the valves to release the nitrogen, and the radiation levels immediately began dropping. More sand and clay were dumped in a few hours later, and now we’re trying to figure out how to cap it permanently. Concrete or graphite, something along those lines.”
“What about the radiation that’s already escaped?”
“While this is a very early estimate, it appears that, taking the path and strength of the storm into consideration along with the amount of fissile material that is believed to have escaped, the larger cities in relatively close geographical proximity to the incident site will not experience major irradiation. These include Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as their nearby towns and villages. Public water supplies appear to be unaffected, as well as farmlands, livestock, key tourist areas, and so on. The radiation will be dispersed by the storm system to such a degree that it will not pose a significant threat when it reaches those places.”
“The town of Silver Lake and a few of the surrounding communities, however, have become heavily irradiated, and—” he faltered, staring at his phone, unwilling to look anyone in the face “—may not become habitable again for some time. A full, uh… a full estimate of that damage will be forthcoming.”
Mason drew a shaky breath. There were sniffles and whimpers all around, and some people hugged each other for comfort. Marla’s first thought was that all of her possessions were here, and that she wouldn’t be allowed near them for decades. A sinking feeling began creeping in, but she fought it off using the same method as always, by letting go of the personal issues and shifting to an academic focus. She debated whether or not to parse the information she’d just received into another blog entry. It was exactly the kind of data she should be distributing, exactly what all those millions of insatiable followers were clamoring for. And it would serve the secondary purpose of shutting her editor the hell up. But her heart just wasn’t in it.
Mason continued. “We will be stopping so that each of you can undergo a brief decontamination process, followed by more detailed treatment at one of the nearby hospitals. I don’t know which at this point. And then there is, uh… just one more thing…” He held up a finger. Then he looked down and covered his face with his free hand, and his big body shuddered as he tried with only partial success to stifle an upsurge of despair. After an unbearably long pause, he gathered himself just long enough to announce that Andrew Corwin’s body had been recovered at the scene and officially pronounced dead.