Pig: A Thriller (38 page)

“Barely. It’s use is fairly common. Like you said, it’s used in well-logging instruments for petroleum drilling all over the world. Hospitals use it in cancer therapy machines and blood stabilizers. Once it’s out there, no one controls those. Wait, are you seeing a connection here?”

“Oil wells? Hospitals? No.”

“Who has authority to purchase equipment for those two functions here, in this camp? Who orders the medical equipment? Who orders the drilling supplies?”

“I don’t know? The warehouse? The Oracle?”

“He just stores them. Who would be able to authorize either purchase and make it legitimate?
             
“Pig? The Doctor –“

“You can stop right there. No need to continue the list. Like I said, it’s not two bears dancing, it’s one. How much do you want to bet there’ve been orders put in for far more drilling and medical equipment than this camp needs? That the equipment is being re-routed, broken down and the cesium removed, then sold on the black market? The shit’s water soluble. All you’d have to do is dissolve it in a liquid, then think of a way to transport it unseen to where someone’s waiting. Precipitate it out and they’ve got their Cesium 137.”

“The pipeline. Using the pig to separate off a small batch of oil with the cesium dissolved in it. It travels all the way through Europe, right through Customs, with no one ever knowing. From there, you could even package it up as cases of motor oil and send it anywhere in the world. Listen to us. This is ridiculous. Who’d believe us? It sounds like a James Bond novel.”

“Proof. We need proof. We need purchase orders. Invoices. Orders showing where each batch of oil in the pipeline got sent. Records of who bought it and when. Pity we don’t know anyone with access to the records, huh?”

“They’re missing. Stolen. They made sure of that.”

“But everything’s backed up isn’t it? Electronically and in the archives? It has to be. It’s an international regulatory standard for the ISO certifications. If someone knew exactly what they were looking for…”

“Someone, huh?”

Someone found what Snow told them he was looking for…….. Since Snow (or Kolya, when he wasn’t busy dying and able to come into work) was the one who assigned the identifying numbers to document in the first place, he knew roughly where everything should be: the purchase orders for medical and drilling equipment, the lab reports on each  batch of  oil sent down the pipeline, invoices stating who each shipment was being sent to and for how much. It was a simple matter to flip through each section in sequence and note which numbers were missing and write them down. With the numbers safely written down on  a notebook in his pocket, he walked over to the Archives Section and spoke to someone  there. Someone got him to fill out the appropriate form. No one questioned his right to access them. He was simply filling in misplaced records. Someone went and accessed the missing records and made copies for him. Someone dutifully filed the originals back where they belonged and logged the fact that new copies had been made and distributed to Document Control.

And someone noted all this and told Pig, who had put a flag on the files in question to see if someone every showed up and showed an interest in them.

At two thirty in the morning, Snow suddenly woke. That wasn’t unusual. He often woke up near that hour, his mind churning, unable to shut off the what-ifs, the accusing voices that somehow always found a way to make things his fault. What was unusual was that he’d gone to bed feeling good. And woke up that way. There were no voices echoing round his head this morning. So what had woken him? Scrotum was perched comfortably on top of his chest. Nothing unusual there. He had to pee. That was it. It wasn’t Scrotum, but his bladder that had woken him. Without bothering to put on a robe or slippers (right! As if a cowboy would be caught dead in either), he padded along the trailer wall to the bathroom. He could see his breath rising in the frigid air. The first tinkle splashed back at him. The toilet bowl had frozen over. Stuffing his bare feet into a pair of felt overboots, he cracked open the closed door and went outside for a whiz. Scrotum jumped off the bed to join him.

Outside, the gas flares were lighting up the processing facility, the uneven orange glare helping him pick his way to an unmarked snow bank, the gases expanding in the cold air as the flames heated them up. The smell of rotting cabbage filled the air. Tracing his name in a steaming arc of yellow into the snow bank, the burning combustion of the flare, shrill and insistent as a jet engine reving for take-off, made sure Snow never heard the click of the cabin door as it locked firmly behind him. He was trapped outside in the sub-zero weather in his underwear.

His first thought was how embarrassing it was going to be when someone came out and found him in his gaunche.

His second thought was that didn’t remember setting the lock on his door.

Snow’s third thought is that it is not outside the realm of possibility that he was about to freeze to death.

His fourth thought is that he didn’t much care.

Luckily, Scrotum did. He went leaping through the snow and out the camp into town, not stopping until he reached Magda’s place, where he immediately set about yelping the strange baby-crying cat dirge that makes one teeth ache like chewing on tin foil. Magda took one look at Scrotum caterwauling outside her door, put on her winter clothing and rushed back behind the cat to Snow’s porta-cabin.