hormones worked in the body was still shrouded in mystery. Though the body converted T-4 into T-3, many patients — including Ferguson — reported that they felt considerably better on a combination. Only a few doctors believed them and were willing to experiment with different dosages; Zeist was one.
“Thing is, Doc, I have a meeting I have to catch. I’d appreciate it if you could write me the prescription. If you want to up the T-3 slightly, I can try it.”
“You interpreted the lab numbers.”
“Dr. Zeist showed me how,” said Ferg. It was a lie — Ferguson had done his own research, and in any event it wasn’t rocket science — but Ferguson knew the fib would make Yollum feel better.
“I’m not saying the protocol is bad. But if you’re having trouble remembering to take the second pill, it’s going to do more harm than good. The replacement drugs are also a kind of chemotherapy for you, and considering the size of the tumor and the scans—”
“I know what the statistics are,” said Ferg. He tried smiling, but he was starting to run low on patience.
Yollum clearly had a lecture on the tip of his tongue about how slow-moving his type of thyroid cancer was, how even someone diagnosed with Stage IV had a chance of surviving five years after surgery and even beyond — but he stowed it at the obvious tone of impatience.
“I’ll write the prescription.”
“I need the lab report back,” said Ferguson. “I found it useful to hold on to copies of my stuff.”
“Of course. I’ll have the office staff make a copy. Bob, you’re due for another scan.”
“Yup.”
“Did you want to set that up now?”
Did he want to? No. The scan itself was a major hassle — you drank a bunch of radioactive iodine and lay in a claustrophobic machine while a special camera climbed over your body and hunted for stray thyroid cells, which by definition would be cancerous. Then you tried not to get close to anyone for the next few days, since you were radioactive. But that was the easy part — in order to do the scan with a high degree of accuracy, you had to go off the thyroid medicine for several weeks. It was like signing up for clinical depression.
“How about the shots?” said Ferguson, suggesting an easier protocol.
“You really have to have a clean scan first, usually two. Maybe next time.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ferg. He wasn’t sure whether to bother with the scan or not; according to all the studies, further treatment didn’t affect survival rates, which pretty much meant they were useless.
“You probably want to discuss it with Dr. Zeist. Come into my office, and I’ll write the prescriptions for you. Government worker, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” said Ferg, pulling on his shirt. “Pay sucks, but you can’t beat the health plan.”
4
To get into the Cube, Corrine Alston had to run a gamut of security checks, then stand in a small booth that looked a little like a stainless-steel shower stall that checked for high-tech transmitting devices or bugs. Corrine swore she could feel her skin tingle as she stood in the device, and when she came out her ears were ringing.
Her guide walked her down the hall of the unpretentious building, which was housed in a corner of an industrial complex not far from the Beltway in Virginia. They were on the ground floor, but the elevator they entered went in only one direction — down. When it stopped, they walked down another hall, past several locked doors, then to a stairwell guarded by two Special Forces soldiers in civilian clothes. This stairwell led down to the operations floor, where a secure conference room and a somewhat smaller operations room used to communicate with SF units and officers in the field was located.
Corrine’s ID and thumbprint were scanned at the top of the stairs. She was then waved ahead without her guide, who lacked the extremely limited clearance needed to descend the steps.
After such a variety of high-tech precautions, the room itself was remarkably plain. There was a whiteboard at the front, an old-fashioned projector, and a small computer projector. A laptop sat on one of the two tables; the man in charge of the briefing used it to project slides onto the whiteboard. The only person in the room that Corrine recognized was Daniel Slott, the deputy director of operations for the CIA. He sat with his arms folded on his lap at one corner of the first table, his gray-speckled goatee shimmering with the reflected light from the computer slide projector.
Slott introduced Corrine to the others, stating her title and adding that she had just returned from interviewing the prisoner at Guantanamo. He gave no explanation for her presence. Though his tones were politic and soothing, the audience would have had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to realize he resented her being there.
“Just to give a little background on how serious the matter is,” said Slott, turning to Jack Corrigan, “could you please review the slides on reactor waste.”
“Sure thing,” said Corrigan.
Slott had told him they’d be spoon-feeding a guest from the White House, and so he had dusted off his full set of PowerPoint slides on the waste at Buzuluk. He liked the second slide especially — it showed a pile of reactor rod assemblies on the ground that reminded him of the Tinker Toys he’d had as a youth — except that these were glowing on a clandestinely exposed gamma-ray-sensitive film.
Corrigan quickly went through the background on the experimental reactors built by the Russians and moved on to the waste material stored at the site. A typical reactor fuel load would consist of anywhere from ten to nearly two hundred fuel elements or assemblies; in general these were rods (usually though not always clad in zirconium) that contained uranium oxide pellets. A high percentage of the uranium in these pellets — 3 to 4 percent, similar to the amount in Western commercial operations — were 235U. Once inserted in the reactor, they were made to undergo a chain reaction that produced a number of by-products, including weapons-grade plutonium.
Not all of the reactors were configured as the ones indicated in his slides, Corrigan hastened to tell Corrine, but this footnote led to another slide indicating how dangerous plutonium was as waste — ten-millionths of a gram would cause cancer if inhaled.
Corrigan clicked into another series of slides on the waste by-products that had resulted from the experiments and reactor production. He especially liked the strontium-90 slide, since it illustrated how strontium could replace calcium in bones. The slides explained that the fuel assemblies themselves became potent radiation emitters, as the cobalt, iron, manganese, and nickel in the rods as well as the stainless steel interacted and transformed during the process. He touched briefly on the difference between alpha waves, which to be honest Corrigan himself didn’t totally understand.
Alpha radiation — actually a helium atom — was easily stopped in the environment, though once in the body it could do very serious damage because it tended to ionize or remove electrons from other elements. Beta radiation in high doses could cause burns; it was emitted during radioactive decay, and, like alpha radiation, was usually a threat once a substance containing it entered the body. Gamma radiation was a problem on a different order — its high-energy, short-wavelength energy penetrated just about anything, even several feet of concrete. Though often compared to X-rays, in general, gamma radiation occupied a different part of the energy spectrum.
The effect of the different radiation-producing materials varied greatly, depending not only on the type of radiation emitted but how the radiation was “received” by the body. Massive external doses could kill immediately, but effects of smaller doses over time were more complex. Strontium in the body, for example, would replace calcium in the bone. There it could cause bone tumors and leukemia. Irradiated iodine might cause thyroid cancer, and on and on, as the slides indicated, documenting radiation amounts and the damage likely at various distances and exposures.
Ferguson had seen these slides several weeks before, and so he turned his attention to
