The Overlook by Michael Connelly

cases. Things went sideways in Echo Park—a little thing you dragged Agent Walling into. You were off the job a few months while that was, uh, cleared up and now you’re back and assigned to Homicide Special.”
    “What else?”
    “Harr—”
    “What else?”
    “Okay. The word I got is that you can be difficult to get along with—especially when it comes to working with the federal government. But I have to say, so far I don’t see any of that at all.”
    Bosch figured that most of this information had come from Rachel—he remembered seeing her on the phone and her saying it was her partner. He was disappointed if she had said such things about him. And he knew that Brenner was probably holding back most of it. The truth was that he’d had so many run-ins with the feds—going back well before he ever met Rachel Walling—that they probably had a file on him as thick as a murder book.
    After a minute or so of silence Bosch decided to change direction and spoke again.
    “Tell me about cesium,” he said.
    “What did Agent Walling tell you?”
    “Not much.”
    “It’s a by-product. The fission of uranium and plutonium creates cesium. When Chernobyl hit meltdown, cesium was the stuff that was dispersed into the air. It comes in powder or a silver-gray metal. When they conducted nuke tests in the South Pacific—”
    “I don’t mean the science. I don’t care about the science. Tell me about what we are dealing with here.”
    Brenner thought for a moment.
    “Okay,” he said. “The stuff we’re talking about comes in pieces about the size of a pencil eraser. It is then contained in a sealed stainless steel tube about the size of a forty-five-caliber bullet cartridge. When used in the treatment of a gynecological cancer it is placed inside the woman’s body—in the uterus—for a calculated amount of time and it irradiates the targeted area. It is supposed to be very effective in quick doses. And it is the job of a guy like Stanley Kent to make that calculus—to run the physics down and determine how long a dose is called for. He would then go and get the cesium out of the hospital’s hot safe and deliver it in person to the oncologist in the operating room. The system is set up so that the doctor administering the treatment actually handles the stuff for as little time as possible. Because the surgeon can’t wear any protection while performing a procedure, he’s got to limit his exposure, you know what I mean?”
    Bosch nodded.
    “Do these tubes protect whoever handles them?”
    “No, the only thing that knocks down the gamma rays from cesium is lead. The safe they keep the tubes in is lined with lead. The device they transport them in is made of lead.”
    “Okay. So how bad is this stuff going to be if it gets out there in the world?”
    Brenner gave it some thought before answering.
    “Out there in the world it is all about quantity, delivery and location,” he said. “Those are the variables. Cesium has a thirty-year half-life. Generally, they consider ten half-lifes the safety margin.”
    “You’re losing me. What’s the bottom line?”
    “The bottom line is that the radiation danger diminishes by half every thirty years. If you set off a good amount of this stuff in an enclosed environment—like maybe a subway station or an office building—then that place could be shut down for three hundred years.”
    Bosch was stunned as he registered this.
    “What about people?” he asked.
    “Also depends on dispersal and containment. A high-intensity exposure could kill you within a few hours. But if it’s dispersed by an IED in a subway station, then my guess is the immediate casualties would be very low. But a body count is not what this would be about. It’s the fear factor that would be important to these people. You set something off like this domestically and what’s important is the wave of fear it sends through the country. A place like Los Angeles? It would never be the same