“No souvenirs,” McGarvey warned her.
“This is my favorite picture of my father,” Gail said. “I just wanted a last look.” She put the photo and wallet back in her purse and went back downstairs and outside with McGarvey.
The noise of the angry crowd that was pressing its way past the barricades hit them at once. People were chanting, “God’s work is for God.”
At least a dozen TV broadcast trucks had moved up as well, nearly to the command post trailer, and the cameras and microphones were trained on Reverend Schlagel, who stood in the bed of a pickup truck, preaching to the crowd with a bullhorn.
“Nuclear energy is death!” he shouted. “God’s work. He created the sun and the stars — nuclear furnaces — and men whose only faith is technology have presumed to duplicate His work.”
“No! No! No!” the crowd screamed.
“What will happen at the one hundred and three remaining nuclear hellholes in operation in this country alone? More accidents? More disasters? More death and destruction? People displaced from their homes by rude beasts slinking out of Bethlehem?”
In just a few minutes he had whipped the crowd into a frenzy.
He pointed over his shoulder at the heavily damaged containment dome. “The devil’s handiwork. Is this what you want in your backyard? The sure and certain sign of the evil that walks the earth?”
“No! No! No!”
He gestured toward the National Guard troops standing by at the fringes of the crowd. “They couldn’t even protect this one hellish installation. Should the idolaters of technology, the shortsighted men and women in our nation’s capital, the fat cats at companies like Westinghouse and Mitsubishi whose only interest is that profits be allowed to build even more insults to God Almighty’s mysterious purpose for us? Construction of more than thirty of them will start this year unless we stop them. Will we allow this to happen?”
“No! No! No!” The crowd chanted. “God’s work is for God!”
“Do you think they’ll try to get inside the plant?” Gail asked. None of Schilling’s security people had come back to work yet, and even with the National Guard standing by she felt vulnerable.
“Schlagel’s not that stupid,” McGarvey said, leaning closer so that she could hear him over the roar of the crowd. “He’s here to make his point.”
“And he’s doing a fine job of it.”
Otto called McGarvey’s cell phone. “Oh, wow, Mac, they hit Dr. Larsen’s Princeton lab in the middle of the night. Trashed the place.”
Listening to the crowd it came as no surprise. “Anyone hurt?”
“No. Two guys, in and out in under ten minutes. Wiped out a bunch of computers and other equipment. One of the techies was there but she managed to stay out of their way.”
“Descriptions?”
“Nada.”
“What about Eve?”
“She and Dr. Price went out to take a look at their oil platform.”
“Has she been informed?”
“Presumably,” Otto said. “When are you coming back?”
“Tonight.”
“Talk to you in the morning.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Eve arrived with Don Price on campus that evening after missing their connection in Atlanta where they’d spent an anxious few hours in the terminal on the phone with Lisa and the rest of the team. The FBI had sent a couple of agents to the airport to ask a few questions, and provide a little security until she got on the plane, though no one was suggesting that Eve’s safety was in any doubt.
They’d cabbed it in from the airport, and standing in the doorway to her laboratory, surrounded by campus security, Princeton cops and the FBI, and her techies, Lisa on one side and Don on the other, Eve was all but overwhelmed at first by the destruction. Someone had invaded her personal space with violence and she felt physically ill, almost the same as when one of her first papers for publication had failed a peer review — for being too fringe, in the words of one of the docs who thought she was a little nutso, in addition to being a female in a man’s profession.
Lisa was physically okay, but she’d been traumatized witnessing the attack. “It made no sense,” she’d said first thing. “I mean why smash up some computers? We’ll pull the hard drives and retrieve the data. Maybe lose a half day, tops. Were they dumb, or what?”
But she’d been shaking and Eve had held her for a long moment. “Dumb.”
Aldo Bertonelli, the FBI special agent in charge from the Bureau’s Trenton office, was pleasant enough except he wanted only to ask questions but not give any answers. “I’d like you to take an inventory, if you would, Doctor.”
Eve wasn’t sure that she understood him. “Nothing’s going to be missing,” she said. “They weren’t here to steal anything from us. Hell, they could have asked and we would have shared any of the data they wanted.” She looked at the mess. “They came here to send us — send me — a message.”
“And what message would that be?”
“They call this the God Project.”
“Who are they?”
“Schlagel,” Eve said.
Bertonelli shrugged. “It’s a theory, but have you received any threatening phone calls, e-mails, or text messages that would lead you to believe such thing?”
“Bloody hell,” Eve said half under her breath. “Do you watch television at all, Agent Bertonelli? The son of a bitch is gunning for me, and he’s all but ordered his crazies to pull the trigger.”
“He’s denied any involvement, Doctor.”
“Of course he has,” Eve said, disgusted, and she was finished with the authorities, who in her estimation spent more of their time covering their own asses than actually doing real investigative work when sensitive issues were involved.
When Bertonelli and the others had gone, she shared her opinion with Don, who disagreed. “They’re doing their jobs, and you have to cut them some slack.”
“Like you did with Defloria about Vanessa?” she shot back, knowing they were two different things, not related to each other, and she immediately apologized. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Now that the police had finished their investigation, taking photographs, presumably looking for fingerprints or DNA evidence, Lisa and the others had started the data retrieval and cleanup work, which would be finished by morning.
“From their standpoint it might,” Don said, meaning, of course, Schlagel and his people.
But Eve had been looking at her techies, especially Lisa, and she was startled, almost as if she’d seen a vision of all of them lying in bloody heaps, smashed like their equipment. Only humans had no hard drives to retrieve, and she was frightened.
“I feel like we’re in the Dark Ages,” she said. “The Inquisition.”
“It’ll pass,” he said.
“Promise?”
Don nodded and smiled. “You bet,” he said, and he hugged her.
THIRTY-FIVE
