LITMIR.BIZ

       13

      Emma had decided that she wanted to see the facility where Mulherin and Norton worked when they were inside the shipyard – the area where Whitfield had been just before his death. Richard Miller, the shipyard’s head of security who had been at the briefing, had already left the police chief’s office and was just getting into his car when Emma stopped him.

      Miller had a head like a stubby cinder block: a square-shaped face topped by brush-cut gray hair. He had probably been a burly guy in his youth but at age fifty all the muscles had collapsed into a tire of fat around his waist. When Emma told Miller what she wanted, he told her that he had better things to do than walk her around the shipyard, at which point Emma took a card out of her purse and handed it to him.

      ‘Call that number, Mr Miller,’ she said. ‘A phone will ring in the Pentagon and someone with stars on his shoulders will explain to you why you want to be nice to me. Now I’m going to get a cup of coffee but I’ll be back in five minutes.’

      Fifteen minutes later, Emma, DeMarco, and Miller were inside the shipyard, walking toward the training facility. As they walked, Miller kept glancing over at Emma; whatever he’d been told by the man in the Pentagon had made an impression.

      To reach the training facility they had to traverse almost the entire length of the shipyard. The place was enormous and everything in it – the buildings, the equipment, the drydocks – was enormous. Miller said the shipyard’s machine shop was the biggest such facility west of the Mississippi River, and DeMarco believed him.

      Four of the shipyard’s drydocks held submarines being overhauled and one drydock held two submarines that were being dismantled. The sixth drydock, the largest one, was empty, but big wooden blocks were laid out in a pattern for a ship to set down on. A big ship – a Nimitz class aircraft carrier.

      Miller allowed them to look into a drydock holding a Trident submarine. A Trident submarine is five hundred and sixty feet long – almost the length of two football fields – and carries more weapons of mass destruction than most countries have in their entire arsenal. A Trident is a sleek, sinister-looking killing machine, and it wasn’t hard for DeMarco to imagine it sitting motionless beneath the waves, a missile hatch silently opening – and then the entire world being set on fire. But ‘Gee that thing’s big’ was the only thing he said out loud and Emma just looked at him – like he was the first idiot to master understatement.

      Miller introduced them to Dave Whitfield’s boss, the person in charge of training the shipyard’s nuclear engineers. She was a handsome, dark-haired woman in her forties named Jane Shipley and she was even taller than Emma. Shipley showed them her domain, which consisted of several classrooms, study areas for the trainees, and the ubiquitous corporate cubicles where instructors and other personnel pounded away on computers.

      Shipley pointed out the cubicle where Mulherin and Norton worked. It was located on the front wall of the building and looked just like all the other cubicles: two desks, two chairs, two phones, two computers, one filing cabinet. DeMarco could tell that Emma wanted to yank open all the drawers, but she restrained herself.

      There was also a large walk-in vault at the rear of the training area, the type of vault you would find in a bank. DeMarco could see blueprints and big books – books the size of Bibles or phone books – on shelves inside the vault. A woman – half guard, half librarian – was posted at a desk near the vault.

      ‘What do you keep in there?’ DeMarco asked Shipley.

      ‘Drawings of ships’ systems and components. The big books are reactor and steam plant manuals.’

      DeMarco remembered what Dave Whitfield had said: the reactor plant manuals told you how the ships’ reactors worked.

      Emma looked at the vault, then did a slow turn to take in the rest of the training complex. To Shipley, she said, ‘You have a lot of classified information in this facility, don’t you?’

      ‘Well, sure,’ Shipley said. ‘Our engineers are trained primarily on three different classes of ships: Nimitz class aircraft carriers, Trident submarines, and Los Angeles class attack submarines. We can’t go running all around the shipyard every time we have to prepare a class or teach a course.’

      ‘I know,’ Emma said. ‘But there’s so much information here, all in one place.’ Before Shipley could respond, Emma said, ‘Are the manuals, those reactor plant manuals, are they on CDs?’

      Miller hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s the most efficient way to update them when they’re revised.’

      ‘CREM,’ Emma said.

      It had sounded to DeMarco like Emma was either clearing her throat or uttering a heretofore unknown curse word.

      ‘What did you say?’ DeMarco said.

      ‘CREM. They have CREM,’ Emma said. Now the word sounded like a sexually transmitted disease. ‘Controlled removable electronic media. In other words, CDs and floppy discs that contain classified information. CDs that can be stolen and copied and e-mailed. CREM is a security officer’s nightmare, isn’t it, Mr Miller?’

      Miller’s mouth took a hard set, bristling at Emma’s comment. ‘We control our classified material tighter than anybody in the business, lady,’ he said. ‘Particularly since Los Alamos.’

      In July 2004, Emma explained to DeMarco later, two classified CDs were reported missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Weapons Physics Directorate – a place that designs and experiments with nuclear bombs. This was the same facility that the Chinese had supposedly infiltrated in the 1990s, making off with design information related to thermonuclear warheads. The CDs lost at Los Alamos in 2004 may simply have been misplaced – stuck in the wrong file drawer or safe – or accidentally destroyed. Subsequent investigations showed that the

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