PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies Read Free Page B

wouldn’t pay for an atomic bomb.”
    “I don’t know anything about selling this stuff ...”
    “Don’t be a fool,” Timofey rasped. “Neither do I. That’s
why I’ve come here. But you say you’re a businessman. You must have contacts, people with money, people who can get it out of the country.”
    Shiv grunted. He was just playing for time now, to assemble his thoughts and devise a strategy. The word fool remained lodged in his gut like a spoiled piece of meat.
    “Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.”
    “Make up your mind.”
    “Where’s the stuff?”
    “With me.”
    A predatory light flicked on in the hoodlum’s eyes. But Timofey had expected that. He slowly unbuttoned his jacket. It fell away to reveal an invention of several hours’ work that, he realized only when he assembled it in the kitchen the day after the accident, he had been planning for years. At that moment of realization, his entire body had been flooded with a searing wonder at the dark soul that inhabited it. Now, under his arm, a steel canister no bigger than a coffee tin was attached to his left side by an impenetrably complex arrangement of belts, straps, hooks, and buckles.
    “Do you see how I rigged the container?” he said. “There’s a right way of taking it off my body and many wrong ways. Take it off one of the wrong ways and the container opens and the material spills out. Are you aware of the radiological properties of plutonium and their effect on living organisms?”
    Shiv almost laughed. He once knew a girl who wore something like this.
    “Let me see it.”

    “It’s plutonium. It has to be examined under controlled laboratory conditions. If even a microscopic amount of it lodges within your body, ionizing radiation will irreversibly damage body tissue and your cells’ nucleic material. A thousandth of a gram is fatal ... I’ll put it to you more simply. Anything it touches dies. It’s like in a fairy tale.”
    Shiv did indeed have business contacts, but he’d been burned about six months earlier, helping to move some Uzbek heroin that must have been worth more than a half million dollars. He had actually held the bags in his hands and pinched the powder through the plastic, marveling at the physics that transmuted such a trivial quantity of something into so much money. But once he made the arrangements and the businessmen had the stuff in their hands, they gave him only two thousand dollars for his trouble, little more than a tip. Across a table covered by a freshly stained tablecloth, the Don—his name was Voronenko, and he was from Tambov, but he insisted on being called the Don anyway, and being served spaghetti and meatballs for lunch—had grinned at the shattering disappointment on Shiv’s face. Shiv had wanted to protest, but he was frightened. Afterwards he was so angry that he gambled and whored the two grand away in a single night.
    He said, “So, there was an accident. How do I know the stuff’s still good?”
    “Do you know what a half-life is? The half-life of plutonium 239 is twenty-four thousand years.”
    “That’s what you’re telling me ...”

    “You can look it up.”
    “What am I, a fucking librarian? Listen, I know this game. It’s mixed with something.”
    Timofey’s whole body was burning; he could feel each of his vital organs being singed by alpha radiation. For a moment he wished he could lie on one of the narrow beds in the room and nap. When he woke, perhaps he would be home. But he dared not imagine that he would wake to find that the accident had never happened. He said, “Yes, of course. The sample contains significant amounts of uranium and other plutonium isotopes, plus trace quantities of americium and gallium. But the Pu-239 content is 94.7 percent.”
    “So you admit it’s not the first-quality stuff.”
    “Anything greater than 93 percent is considered weapons-grade. Look, do you have somebody you can bring this to? Otherwise, we’re wasting my time.”
    Shiv took