The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [76]
Shaking his head at the paradoxes that seemed to constitute his life at the moment, he trudged back toward the hospital.
Outside Burlington, Vermont, several days later, William French sat staring at his computer screen, digesting what he’d just read. He considered forwarding the information in e-mail form to the appropriate party—in this case someone from JTTF, the Joint Terrorism Task Force—but then reconsidered. He hadn’t been assigned to the Fusion Center for long, still thought it a real feather in his cap, and didn’t want to run the risk of messing it up with an avoidable stupid mistake.
Better to appear overeager than to drop the ball, and God knows, they’d been told enough times of the latter’s cost. There were posters aplenty of the smoking Pentagon and the ruins of the World Trade Center decorating the walls to make the point without any lectures.
The Fusion Center was an information-gathering point, one of several on the books or already in existence across the United States, designed to integrate and exchange any and all snippets of intelligence of any interest to law enforcement. Clearly, the stimulus and primary focus of the centers was information that might even vaguely pertain to possible terrorist activities, but no cop saw any point in stopping there, an attitude that naturally had most of the nation’s civil liberties groups up in arms.
William French didn’t care about that. A young man, upwardly mobile, already equipped with a file full of supportive letters from superiors, he was a believer in having a clean desk and in documenting where everything went as it left his hands. To say that he was as unloved by his colleagues as he was back-patted by his bosses puts it about right. To the former, he was not a cop’s cop but a pencil pusher with a gun, and a man who could get them into trouble—not just a few of them saw their jobs here with paradoxical ambivalence, as both cushy and a little embarrassing. The William Frenches of the world, tingling with efficient dedication, made them nervous.
French walked down the hall from his cubicle, printout in hand, and rapped on the door of an older man sitting glumly at one of two desks in the room. He was alone, which he preferred, since, unlike his junior associate, he felt trapped in this building and cherished all the private time he could get. His name was Milton Coven, and he had been with the FBI for more years than he wished to recall, most of them unhappy ones.
“Agent Coven?” French asked.
Coven stared up at him. “How long we known each other, Bill?”
“Six months.”
“I rest my case. What do you want?”
French blinked once, deleted from his brain what he clearly didn’t understand, and marched into the room, proffering the printout.
“This just came in from the NRC. I thought you should see it.”
Coven reached out tiredly and took it. The NRC in this alphabet-happy world was an old-timer—the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—the watchdog for nuclear reactors, waste disposal, matters of security, and just about anything else having to do with awful stuff that made your balls drop off.
He read the missive slowly, deciphering its many parts—who and where it was from, its level of importance, the topic it discussed, the date at its top, and the nature of the threat it addressed. French stood patiently in place throughout, his irritation growing.
Coven finally laid the sheet down. “Bill,” he asked, “this got you cranked up for what reason?”
French hesitated. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“You got this off the screen, printed it out, hand delivered it to me, and now you’re standing there as if you expect me to order up a fleet of black helicopters. I just wanted to hear what you know that I don’t.”
French thought for a moment. “Well, it’s an event. It might be significant.”
Coven sat back in his chair and placed the sole of one shoe carefully against the edge of his desk. “It’s a report of a single garbage bag of incredibly low-level medical waste gone missing in Bennington, Vermont.”
French nodded. “That’s right—potential makings of a dirty bomb.”
“For