Free Perilous Panacea by Ronald Klueh

some employee was forever trying to get his share. In Washington, it was either stolen government property or some government-type using his influence one way or another to get a little something on the side, like some congressman forcing his affections on one of his female employees.
    Since arriving in Washington eleven months ago, Saul had spent his eight-to-ten hours a day in the Bureau’s Crime Records Division manipulating murder, rape, and robbery statistics on a computer. Everybody said getting called to Washington put you on the Bureau fast track, but for Saul, it was a boring track. At times, even Spokane looked good.
    Saul didn’t understand why Spanner brought him along on this case, especially considering the two men across the table. Kraft was Associate Administrator for Defense Nuclear Security for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of DOE, and the man next to him, Doyle Logson, was Director of Security for DOD.
    “So what do we do?” Spanner asked, his fleshy face reddening, a spark kindled in his pale-blue eyes. “You’ve lost—whatever lost means—some nuclear material and you don’t want us to investigate too closely, at least not so anyone around here gets any dirt on him.”
    “You know what we mean, George,” Logson said, smiling like he did every time he spoke, a smile that squeezed his eyelids into a caricature of a skinny, baldheaded Chinaman, although he was as white as most Civil Service employees at his level.
    Saul figured Logson’s emaciated look came from an addiction to jogging. Once he started to jog, his face shrank or his ears grew. Logson’s bald head reminded him of his own mop of curly brown hair. Mary claimed he wasn’t balding, but how do you measure recession? Every picture of his father Saul had ever seen showed him with an extremely high forehead.
    “This is complicated,” Logson said. “It involves a large amount of sensitive material.”
    “Large amount? Sensitive material?” Spanner’s short gray hair and pink face labeled him the twenty-seven-year Bureau veteran he was. He jogged, but it didn’t budge the extra thirty pounds he carted around on his five-nine frame.
    Saul leaned forward, realizing he should have expected something big when a senior supervisory agent like Spanner abandoned his desk to trek out to Germantown, and they wind up faced with two high-ranking bureaucrats.
    “First, we don’t understand how three truckloads of SNM became involved. We usually ship only one at a time.”
    “S-N-M?”
    “Special nuclear material.”
    “Special?” Saul said quietly, not sure if he should get involved in the questioning or let Senior Agent Spanner do all the talking. “Does special mean somebody could make bombs with it?”
    Kraft nodded. “The shipments carried both plutonium and enriched uranium.” He proceeded to lay out the scenario that somehow involved changes in the shipment contents made by unknown persons. All of the material was bomb grade, and it was considerably different from the original manifest.
    “We haven’t been able to determine who authorized changes in the shipment,” Kraft said. “Then there was the convenient computer crash. This happened during the cyber-terrorist incident that hit the internet and all those other computers four weeks ago?”
    Logson explained that the computer crash happened about thirty minutes after the shipment left the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant in Tennessee headed for Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. DOE’s super computer in New Mexico crashed, just like thousands of computers around the world. Before the computers went down, Albuquerque had direct voice and computer communication with the convoy. They were tracking it by GPS. All contact was lost when the computer went down. When the computer came back online over two hours later, they were unable to reestablish contact. GPS contact was also lost. The three trucks had disappeared.
    Spanner shook his head. “Unless