Then on to the most important destination: the ABC store.
He walked into the place, which, like all liquor stores he’d ever been in — and that was many, many — was filled with a sweet aroma. Was that from the occasional broken bottle? Or maybe something about the paste used to affix the labels to the bottles? The cartons possibly.
Merritt’s gut did a happy twist when he smelled that smell and saw the rows and rows of bottles.
His friends.
It was Bulleit bourbon he selected, a fifth. The clerk, a skinny man of indeterminate race, seemed briefly surprised. In this neighborhood, most purchases would be what the bulk of the inventory consisted of: pints, half-pints and miniatures. Also, it would’ve been months since anyone had shelled out for a premium like this.
The last time he’d drunk any Bulleit was the day of his sentencing. His lawyer had not been pleased he’d shown up in court drunk. Nor had the judge.
On the way back to the motel, he was distracted by motion to his left. He paused to watch a long barge, faded green, rusty, being pushed west by a mule of a tug. It was loaded with shipping containers, baby-blue Maersks being the most common. Ferrington was now only a blip, a mile marker on the trip to and from points east and points west. Once, the town had received dozens of vessels a day, workers emptying them of certain types of cargo and loading them with others. Mostly it was iron ingots arriving and finished metal products leaving. The name of the town itself, every schoolchild here had learned, came from the atomic symbol for iron, Fe.
The barge plowed out of sight and Merritt returned to his room. He chained the door and wedged a chair under the knob. This was a notoriously popular break-in locale. He got the AC running. He set his deli purchases and the bourbon on the bedside table. He rolled onto the bed and ate his late lunch hungrily, alternating bites and gulps.
Leaning back, eyes closed, he felt his gut churn.
Maybe not a good idea, packing in the food and drink.
The sensation, which had been building, struck.
Merritt rose fast and walked into the john, where, dropping to his knees, he puked aggressively.
Rinsing his mouth, he walked back to bed, lying flat this time. After some moments he sat up and pulled the backpack close and extracted the envelopes the guard had given him.
One was the discharge order itself. Nothing of interest. Lots of “don’ts” and legalese. He opened the second envelope and withdrew four sheets of paper, stapled together. He read them carefully and slipped them back into the envelope, which he returned to the backpack.
Jon Merritt drained his glass, did the suggesting-occupancy trick again and stepped outside, making sure the door locked properly. He pulled his phone from his pocket and placed a call, surprised that he still remembered the number.
8
Four days earlier...
“I have a problem. A serious one. I need help.”
The man was short and broad, his hair brown and curly. He wore a tie-less blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled, and tan slacks. A checkered sport coat, black and white, was hung, without hanger, on a hook behind the door of the office that he and Colter Shaw sat in. His shoes were bright orange sneakers.
In the few minutes Shaw had known him, fortyish Marty Harmon had proved to be cherubic, edgy and focused as a laser gunsight, shifting seamlessly from one mode to another.
They faced each other across a battered, file-covered desk.
“You’re like a private eye?”
Shaw told him about his reward business.
Harmon offered an interested grunt. “Never heard of that.”
Colter Shaw in fact was here not in the role as a practitioner of that trade, but to consider taking on a for-hire job. A friend — Tom Pepper, a former FBI agent — had called him, explaining that the assistant special agent in charge of a Midwestern field office hadn’t been able to take on a case. Pepper had asked, was he interested?
With no good reward jobs beckoning, Shaw had thought, why not?
Harmon now rose and walked to a whiteboard. Began drawing. “First, background.”
The lecture began and Shaw listened with interest. He was learning about something he had not previously known: that there was such a thing as miniature nuclear power plants.
They were officially known as SMRs, or “small modular reactors.”
The adjective was a bit misleading, as the average SMR weighed in at about sixty tons, it seemed. Still, they were prefabricated and could be shipped intact to their destinations, making them essentially portable.
Harmon Energy Products’ version was known by the clever trade name the Pocket Sun.
In bold strokes he continued his artwork. Shaw gathered it was a cross section of one of these.
He was in an armchair that had seen better days. The springs were shot and the leather was cracked and worn where elbows and butts would wear. There was a couch too, half covered with papers and objects — metal parts, wires, solid-state boards. This was not the glitzy office of a Silicon Valley start-up, but the functional operating suite of a hardworking businessman heading up a no-nonsense Midwestern manufacturing company.
The only decorations here were a picture of the man and his dark-haired wife in her mid-forties and a large posted periodic table of the elements. On the bottom row one of these substances had been enclosed by a bright red drawing of a heart. It was the letter U.
Uranium.
The poster had been signed by scores of people, presumably employees. It would mark some significant event in the company’s history.
There were no diplomas or certificates or industry awards on the walls, which might offer a glimpse into the CEO’s bio. Shaw had, though, had his PI run a basic backgrounder. Harmon had an engineering degree from a lower state university and had founded, run and sold several other companies — of the low-tech sort. Energy, mostly. Some infrastructure. He steered clear of the press, once telling a reporter he didn’t have time for that “stuff,” appending a harsh modifier to the word. Still, Mack found a few articles, which depicted him as a workaholic and an uncompromising innovator and businessman. He himself owned a dozen patents for engineering devices, whose purposes Shaw could not figure out from Mack’s report.
As he drew on the board, Harmon continued his TED Talk. “So, Mr. Shaw, imagine! With our SMRs, developing countries can have dependable refrigeration, lighting, phones... And computers! The internet. Healthcare. There’re some sub-Saharan people’re living in the nineteenth century, and Pocket Suns can bring them into the modern era. Prejudice and idiotic ideas — about race, AIDS, Covid, STDs — only exist in the vacuum of ignorance. Give people energy, and they’ll have not only lighting, but enlightenment.”
A line from a sales pitch, but not a bad one.
“Now,” Harmon said, turning away from the board. “To the problem. There’s a little-talked-about concern in the nuclear energy world: that someone’ll steal nuclear fuel and weaponize it. It’s known as ‘proliferation.’ Pretty sanitized term, no?”
Because SMRs like Pocket Suns were often installed in countries with fewer safeguards and security staff, there was a risk someone would strip out the fuel or even steal the unit as a whole.
The nuclear material in the Pocket Suns was the same as in most reactors — U-235, enriched to around five percent, the level that met government approval. Harmon said, “To make a bomb with that kind of enrichment, you’d need the amount of fuel roughly the size of a full-grown elephant. But if you enrich to forty-five percent, then all you’d need is thirty-six kilos to make a bomb. That’s the size of a German shepherd.