“I can understand how you feel about Christmas,” Hail sympathized. “I lost my entire family a few years ago as well.”
Hail watched Kara for a reaction and was surprised to see very little.
Kara said, “As you may have guessed, I already know a lot about you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about your loss.”
Hail nodded his head once in place of a thank you, and took a sip of his drink.
Kara took her first sip of her own drink and made a face.
“Too strong?” Hail asked.
“A little,” Kara said. “I’m not used to drinking and it always catches me off guard.”
“I would assume that being a CIA agent would create a lot of missions where you would have to drink.”
“Yeah, but mostly champagne or wine. The hard stuff is… well… hard.” Kara gave a little giggle.
“So how did your parents pass on?” Hail asked, “If you don’t think that’s too personal?”
Kara hesitated and then said, “Yes, I do think that is too personal.”
Hail was surprised by her reaction but tried not to show it.
Hail said nothing.
Kara took another sip from her drink and didn’t make a face this time.
She asked, “So how exactly did you become a Gabillionaire?”
“You don’t have that information in your files?” Hail inquired.
“Sure, but I wanted to hear it from you. Get the real poop as they say.”
Hail considered giving her a little of her own medicine and saying he thought that was too personal, but instead said, “It’s pretty simple. I’m a garbage collector.”
“Are you now?” Kara responded suspiciously. “I’ve never met a garbage collector that had his own Gulfstream.”
“Well that just depends on what type of garbage you collect. I collect nuclear waste.” Hail confessed.
“And that pays well?” Kara asked, already knowing the answer, but still wanting confirmation.
“The collection part doesn’t pay well. Matter of fact, it’s downright expensive to do the collecting. You need big cargo ships to pick up the stuff and you need to haul it across many oceans. Then of course, you have to reprocess the nuclear waste.”
“Reprocess?” Kara inquired. “How does that work?”
“We reprocess the nuclear waste into what we call a fuel bundle. It’s probably our best kept secret and that’s how we make our money. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t readily give out blueprints of our wave reactors either, but the real heart of the technology comes from the science of packing the fuel bundle.”
“I thought that the fuel was just a bunch of nuclear waste, so why does it matter how it’s packed?”
“It’s real important. Pack it right and a wave reactor can run for ten years on a single fuel bundle. In some cases, it will put out enough energy to power half of a small state. Do it wrong and you don’t get the initial reaction that starts the burn process, or the reaction dies out somewhere inside the bundle. Either way, it’s no bueno.”
“So why is your reactor so special? I’m just not getting it,” Kara said.
Hail explained, “Consider that conventional reactors only use about one percent of their energy potential. My reactor design is fifty times more efficient, but it still requires a nuclear reaction to make it work. Conventional reactors require enrichment. My reactor doesn’t. It runs off of mostly depleted uranium, which is a byproduct of nuclear enrichment. With just my reactors and the world’s supply of depleted uranium, that would be enough fuel to power every country in the world for the next 100,000 years. But we also repurpose old fuel rods, liquid radioactive waste and such, and it all gets burnt in the reactor.
Hail looked at the woman to see if she was following along. She still looked interested so he continued.
“But the wave part of the wave reactor is the most important. To start the power flowing, a small piece of enriched uranium ignites the nuclear reaction which starts the burn on one side of the fuel bundle. After the reaction is started, it burns through the bundle as if it was a wave washing over the sand. That’s where the term traveling wave reactor comes from. The reaction starts on one end of the bundle and keeps burning depleted uranium and converting it into low level plutonium until it gets to the other end. It’s beautiful. Twenty years from now, every country will have one of my reactors and oil producing nations will have to figure out how to sell sand for a living.”
Hail realized he was talking a lot, probably more than he should. But his traveling wave reactor was his baby and he loved talking about it.
“So, how did you become a gabillionaire again?” Kara asked. She understood the technical stuff that Hail was explaining, but she was more interested in the man than his machine.
“In a nutshell, I get my nuclear waste for free and I resell it along with my reactors to countries who want cheap power.”
Kara was quiet and had apparently run out of questions. They both took another drink and stared off in no particular direction. The plane flew on.
Kara tried to drain even more drops out of her empty glass. Hail stuck out his hand and waited for Kara to place her glass into it. Instead, she placed it back into her lap. Hail lowered his hand.
Hail pulled at his tie and loosened it from around his neck. He then stood and began to take off his suit jacket.
“If you don’t mind, I’m going to go change into something more comfortable. You hate to fly and I hate suits.”
Hail reached down and set his half empty glass on the coffee table. He retrieved a small remote control from a slot on the side of the table and handed it to Kara.
“We have a lot of movies and we even get a live satellite feed for network TV, if you’re interested.”
“Of course you do,” Kara said cynically. “This plane has everything except a pilot.”
The Gulfstream touched down on the Dakhla Airport in the Western Sahara of Morocco for refueling. Kara was shaken badly, knowing they were being landed via remote control by some kid in some city she could barely pronounce.
Once the airplane had made its way to the terminal, Kara asked Hail, “Why did you tell me that there was no pilot flying the plane? Especially after you knew how nervous I was about flying.”
Hail thought about it for a moment.
“There are probably a few reasons. One reason, and this should now be very apparent to you, I am a devious asshole and enjoy watching people squirm. I don’t know why. It’s not an admirable trait. But my father was the same way, the devious asshole thing. He liked watching me squirm, so maybe that has something to do with it. Secondly, I’m nervous flying as well. So knowing that you were much more nervous about flying than I was, made me feel better about my own failures. You know, like I’m not alone in this world.”
Kara looked at Hail like she wanted punch him.
“And third,” Hail continued, “at some point, if we are going to work together, we have to trust one another. Not mentioning to you that there was no pilot on the plane seemed like a lie of some sort. You know ― the opposite of telling your wife she looks great in something that looks terrible on her. But the real reason goes a little deeper than that. You not only have to trust me in the operation that is coming up, but you also have to trust my technology as well. Completely. Trust it with your life, because a lot of lives will depend on it. And I could think of no other way to show you how well our technology works other than proving it to you during a live fifteen-hour demonstration. It doesn’t matter if it is a Gulfstream or a HobbyZone Sport Cub. All the same aeronautic and communication rules apply.”
Kara looked out the window at the Dakhla airport and its surroundings. Nothing but sand and brick and boxy looking cement buildings and asphalt and more sand. She suspected that anything that was the color of green on the outside of the plane had been imported from regions that grew more stuff than just sand.