2
RESOURCE RECOVERY
“Compliance?”
Marianna hung in the lightless shaft straining her ears for an answer. None came. The onrushing elevator car was very close now. She could make out the low-watt service lights set into the frame of its roof. Only seconds left.
She couldn’t die like this. Do something!
“Compliance?” What was the guy’s name again? “Whitehead? Talk to me — I, I’ve got a situation here.”
“Keep your pantyhose on, Bonaventure,” a voice crackled over her headset, “We’re coming to get you.”
Daring another glance down, scarcely daring to hope, Marianna could see the elevator slowing, slowing, easing to a stop inches below her feet. A muffled clang and a hatch opened in its roof.
Light poured up out of the hatch, catching Compliance’s angular features from below and twisting them into something vaguely Mephistophelean. He reached up for her.
“Thought it’d be quicker this way,” he said, helping her down into the car “No telling how long till the stickyweb broke. Then — splat!”
He wasn’t bothering to hide his smirk. She wouldn’t put it past him to have arranged that business with the elevator just now deliberately. A field agent’s way of showing the desk jockey with the fancy job-title her real place in the order of things.
Assistant Director, CROM Reacquisition. What a crock!
She was silent the whole ride down to ground level, afraid that if she spoke her voice might tremble. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the man from Compliance, just kept her eyes straight ahead. From the burnished surfaces of the elevator doors a woman in black body armor glared back at her — tall, slim, dark-haired, young.
Above all, young. Too young, maybe, to hack it, out here in the field.
The doors slid open. She followed Compliance out into a double-height lobby newly festooned with Day-Glo Police Line — Do Not Cross tape. They walked through the exit doors and out into the late afternoon heat.
Marianna jerked a thumb back at the growing police presence. “Have you talked to NYPD?”
“We can’t bring the cops in on an extraction. You know that.”
“Dammit, I’m not talking about need-to-know! The cops run a river patrol, don’t they? If not them, the Coast Guard. Somebody’s got to’ve seen which way they went.”
Compliance paused beside the car. “Face it, Bonaventure — that prole is long gone.”
She got in and waited till he’d joined her. “You’re calling it a handoff, then?”
“Yeah, might as well make it official. But —” His hand hovered over the STU-IV keypad. “You sure we don’t want to get our story straight first?”
She shook her head. “We’ll play spin control some other time. Just log the handoff so I can get started fixing this.” If it was even fixable. If the black hats hadn’t already won, like they had eleven years ago.
With a shrug, Compliance punched in the code and nodded to her to jack in. Handshake tones fluted in Marianna’s headset as the Secure Terminal Unit negotiated a one-time encryption, then: “Critical Resources Oversight Mandate. How may I direct your call?”
“Uh, this is Whitehead, New York Compliance office. I need to make a field deposition.”
A momentary pause, then: “Recording.”
“Right. As of —” He glanced at the dashboard clock. “— 5:23 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, July 27th, Compliance Directorate is transferring anti-proliferation action 04-057, Galina Postrel’nikova, to Reacquisition. Hardcopy follows.”
If it hadn’t been her case before, it sure as shit was now.
“Line’s still up,” Compliance was saying, “Want to talk to your boss?”
“In a minute.” Marianna tabbed down the passenger-side window and stuck her head out. Her dark brown eyes made a futile scan of the empty sky.
Where in hell could her prole be going?
Natalya Petrovna Zolotova clutched frantically at the harness straps as the ultralight looped high out over waterfront towers and atriums toward the broad sweep of the river hundreds of meters below. She shrieked as the flimsy craft lurched sickeningly in the updraft from a rooftop airconditioning unit, stifled another scream when it dipped unexpectedly on entering the regime of cooler air over the water.
The rushing airstream bore her small cries away, rendered her terror inaudible even to herself.
Certainly the pilot gave no sign of having heard her. Natalya risked a glance over to where he hung suspended alongside her, so close she could have reached out and touched him. Not that she would have dared. If possible, she feared this grim-visaged man, this Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze, more than she feared falling into the river below.
And with good reason. He had killed that woman back there on the roof. Shot her as casually as one might shoot a stray dog.
Surely it had been a woman. The visor had concealed her face, but the body, stance, and voice were unmistakably female. The woman’s shouted English had gone by too quickly to register, but her brandished weapon had made the meaning only too clear: Natalya was being arrested. But for what?
All she had done — all! — was to leave Rusalka that morning and, on her way through customs, show the counterfeit passport she had been given. The passport with the photograph of Natalya’s own face above that other woman’s name. Galina something.
Yes, it had been wrong. But it had been her only chance to disembark and explore the great city rising into the sky beyond the 39th Street pier.
And besides, what choice had she had? A lowly clerk-typist dared not disobey the orders of Vadim Vasiliyevich Merkulov, head of security for all of Grishin Enterprises International, and the third most powerful man on Rusalka.
Rusalka. Natalya squinted against the wind and turned her gaze upriver, up to where Rusalka’s shimmering white form towered over the ferries and dayliners, a visiting queen holding court amid the plebian denizens of the waterfront.
Any moment now, the glider would swing north toward the great ocean-going yacht. And once Natalya was back onboard, things would be all right again. It could all be fixed. Forged passports, a broken corpse at the bottom of an elevator shaft — no matter: GEI, the all-powerful Grishin Enterprises International, could fix anything.
Pray God, let it be so! Natalya willed her right hand to release its deathgrip on the strap. Just long enough to make sure that Mama’s locket was still securely nestled beneath her blouse. She clasped it to her heart for a moment, feeling its surprising weight again. Yes, thank God, it was still there — still safe.
A foolish indulgence. The simple silvery locket hanging in the window of the Eighth Avenue pawnshop had been priced at an unthinkable hundred and twenty-five dollars. And, bargain as she might in her halting English, the aged proprietor had refused to part with it for less than ninety.
“Pure silver,” he had claimed. But it didn’t have the feel of the silver tableware aboard Rusalka — too heavy. Could it be silver-plated lead? Fearful of being swindled in this strange city, Natalya had hesitated. But when the locket had opened to reveal, of all things, a little Orthodox cross engraved on the inside of the lid, she knew she was lost.
It would make a perfect gift for Mama — a gift to commemorate her youngest daughter’s day in New York.
A day that was ending. Natalya would be home soon. She braved a look down to see if they’d begun their descent. She saw huge tankers and container vessels plying the river below, each attended by a retinue of tugs. Saw the wakes of small, swift powerboats tracing their obscure calligraphies across the placid surface. Watched the pastel green of the Statue of Liberty, luminous in clear afternoon light, pass below immediately on her right.
Surely that was wrong. They must have missed their northward turn, continued out over the river and angled south. The expensive apartment buildings crowding the far shore, almost directly ahead of them when the flight began, had slid off northwards. In their place, the shoreline ahead now held what seemed to be an old, unreconstructed industrial quarter.
They were already much lower. The little motor was laboring to clear the roofs of the abandoned wharves lining this stretch of riverbank. They could not be going very much farther, but where —?
They spiraled downward into a wasteland of rusted storage tanks, junk-strewn empty lots, the burnt-out hulks of factories and warehouses — a no man’s land transected by truck-filled highways. Here and there, last-gasp urban renewal strove to stem the tide of post-industrial blight, manifesting in compact corridors of incongruously bright and cheery buildings cordoned off from the pervasive decay.
The ultralight was vectoring toward one of those islands of order amid the chaos.
Very close, almost directly below them now, she could see a wide, flat roof with a name painted on it in large white letters. In the Latin alphabet, of course, as everything here was, but Natalya could read it well enough: RESOURCE RECOVERY SYSTEMS, Inc.
And beneath that, somewhat smaller: BAYONNE NJ ENTERPRISE ZONE.
And beneath that? A logo of some sort. She couldn’t make it out from this angle, but its shape and color looked right. Her heart lifted in hope.
The ultralight overshot the roof and looped back toward it, lower and slower now, heading into the wind.
She started at a sudden sound. Her companion — silent ever since they had taken off from the tower — was shouting something at her.
“Lower your legs and push back on the control bar,” he was bellowing over the howl of the wind. “No, like me. Watch, do as I do.”
Natalya tried to copy his movements, letting her legs hang down as she straightened her arms against the control bar. The craft’s nose rose into the air. Their airspeed dropped to a stall as they skimmed the rooftop, its tarred blackness very close now, mere centimeters from the soles of their shoes. Closer, closer. Contact!
She nearly stumbled as her feet skidded on the bumpy surface, but the pilot compensated, taking the brunt of the landing with knees flexed and feet spread wide. He stood there a moment, then held the wingframe aloft with one arm as he shrugged out of his harness, motioning her to do the same.
Natalya looked around for the logo she’d glimpsed from the air a moment ago.
The mottled, uneven texture of the tarred roof made for a poor canvas. Even so, the bold, stylized lines were instantly recognizable: the great blue globe crosshatched with white striations of latitude and longitude, the continents of Europe and Africa outlined in a verdant green. And embracing the whole, completely obscuring the equator, an image out of myth — the emerald coils of a world-encircling serpent, its fangs sinking into its own tail. The crimson letters GEI arced over the north pole like an aurora.
At that moment, the corporate icon looked so radiantly beautiful she could have knelt down and kissed it. She slipped a hand beneath her blouse to pat the little locket once more in thanks.
Natalya had made it back safe after all.
“You rang, Jonathan?”
Knox looked over at his display and saw Finley ‘Mycroft’ Laurence peering at him from a conferencing window. Half an hour. Most callers wouldn’t have rated so quick a callback. Wouldn’t have rated real-time at all, just a GIF of an old TV test-pattern and instructions where to send an email. Mycroft didn’t waste bandwidth on nonessentials, a category that, for him, included most social interactions. Knox was one of the few he deigned to favor with his full telepresence.
And what a telepresence! Weathertop’s image enhancer had gone all-out today, painting Mycroft in straw hat, candy-striped jacket, and white ducks, and then bluescreening him into a scene of punting on the Thames.
But the dark, solemn face made an odd contrast with the whimsical Jerome K. Jerome virtuality: In the eighteen months since Knox had last seen him (it doesn’t pay to abuse some privileges), Mycroft had aged. The lines of the lean, regular features seemed incised a little deeper, the grizzled hair peeking out from under the boater had gone grayer, playing catch-up with his scraggly salt-and-pepper beard, and the piercing brown eyes behind the granny glasses were rimmed with circles darker than the mahogany of his cheeks.
They’re working him too hard.
It was hard not to. Mycroft was too damned useful. Not to mention lucrative: If Knox’s billing rate was exorbitant, Mycroft’s was astronomical. You could buy a Bentley for what two weeks’ worth of Finley Laurence’s time would cost you. A well-accessorized Bentley.
Mycroft’s official title — vestige of a time when Richard Moses had foolhardily let his top people make up their own job descriptions — was Senior Vice President for Intractables. Unofficially, he was Archon’s one-man Research Department. Best in the business, if you could get his attention. Knox knew the magic words.
“Hi, Mycroft. I’ve got a puzzle for you.”
Mycroft couldn’t conceal the gleam in his eye, but all he said was “Timeframe?”
“ASAP — Yesterday, if possible.”
“Time travel?” Mycroft shipped his computer-generated oars and cocked an eyebrow, “I believe you want Mr. Wells — Mr. H. G. Wells. Given my current workload, I’m not sure I could help you with future deliverables, much less past ones.”
“This is just a quick hack-and-slash. You’ll be done in less time than it would take you to convince me you haven’t got time to do it.”
Mycroft sighed. “Perhaps a quick look. Search parameters?”
“I haven’t got much, just an email address. But I have faith in you.” Not only was Mycroft a world-class net warrior, he came equipped with an eidetic — what used to be called a photographic — memory to boot. If an elusive factoid couldn’t be found on the web, it was probably catalogued and cross-referenced in the capacious vaults of Mycroft’s cerebral cortex. His quirky brilliance, coupled with his self-imposed exile to a hilltop in rural North Carolina, had earned him his office nickname: The original ‘Mycroft’ was Sherlock Holmes’s smarter, reclusive brother.
“And the address is?”
“Oh, sorry: reack2@crom.doe.gov.”
“doe — as in Department of Energy?”
“The very same,” Knox said, “— crom looks to be one of their subagencies, but there’s no hotlink for them on the DOE homepage, and all my searches come up empty.”
“And your interest in this crom is, if I might ask?
“They hijacked my email. I want to know why. I want them researched with extreme prejudice.”
“You can’t imagine any reason the Energy Department might be after you?”
“Not offhand. I’m all paid up on my utility bills. Oh, and — Mycroft? There’s one other search criterion.”
“All grist for the mill, Jonathan.”
“Right. I’m particularly interested in any connection between this crom crowd and an outfit goes by the name of Grishin Enterprises International. Them, I could find. They’ve got a corporate website at www.gei.ru.”
The “dubbya-dubbya-dubbya” keyphrase inadvertently triggered the desktop’s speech recognizer. A browser-window popped up to display the GEI homepage. Knox left it open. He’d already paid the site a cursory visit, but a re-look couldn’t hurt.
“ru for Russia?” Mycroft was saying, “Mightn’t this have to do with your former life?”
Knox didn’t answer immediately. He was looking at the homepage logo now filling the browser window: The stylized image of an Ourobouros, crushing the world in its great green coils.
Boris Petrovich Volin watched instant replay of the ultralight landing on the rooftop of his plant. Nicely done, that. He spoke the words that switched his large-screen monitor back to real-time display. Now it showed a uniformed guard escorting pilot and passenger down the access stairs toward the headquarters suite. Volin leaned forward, taking the opportunity to study his guests.
The woman was nondescript, hardly worth a second glance. A dumpy dishwater blonde waging her lonely battle with middle age, and losing.
Her companion was another story altogether.
Perhaps it was just the contrast with the pallid skin and hair of the woman, perhaps some trick of the stairwell lighting or the closed-circuit video, but the man seemed ... dark. A darkness somehow more than physical, though it started with physical attributes, with the black leather flight jacket hugging the hulking frame, with the swarthy complexion of the grim, heavy-boned face, the straight, sable hair and black slashes of eyebrows and mustache, the empty black eyes.
Darkness personified. Volin repressed a shudder.
He swiveled in his chair and called up the instructions he had been emailed regarding this visit. What was the man’s name again? Ah, yes, Geladze, Yuri Vissarionovich Geladze. A Georgian — that explained it. Explained both the dusky Transcaucasian cast of his features and the aura of a ferocity barely held in check.
Volin had keyed his monitor off and was striding out from behind his rosewood desk by the time the visitors were shown into his suite. His Armani suit rustled silkily as he extended a hand.
“Welcome to Resource Recovery Systems. Boris Petrovich Volin, General Manager, at your service. We have been expecting you.”
“Very pleased. Zolotova, Natalya Petrovna.” The woman all but curtseyed. Her dark companion merely grunted.
The woman looked simultaneously shaken and relieved. Good. More manageable that way. Merkulov had chosen well: She seemed only too willing to be led by the nose, like a lamb to slaughter. Only too willing to take everything around her at face value.
Including Volin himself. Not that he did not look the part of a chief executive for a major GEI subsidiary: Tall and slim and polished, his angular features framed by wavy brown hair just going gray at the temples — certainly neither he nor his operation bore any resemblance to the low-tech competition in the greater metropolitan area’s thriving waste-disposal business. Still, if pressed, he might have acknowledged more than a little kinship with his rivals of Sicilian extraction, under the skin.
“Your driver just phoned in,” Volin said, “He has encountered congestion at the Lincoln Tunnel.” He smiled an apology. “— Unfortunate, but only to be expected during peak traffic hours on a weekday. We now estimate your vehicle will not arrive for another forty-five minutes.”
The dark man shrugged and nodded, the barest minimum required to keep up his side of the charade. The woman, predictably, acquiesced.
“Since you must wait in any case, please permit me to show you our facility.” Volin grasped the woman’s arm and motioned her companion to follow.
The flooring underfoot changed from noise-absorbent parquet to ringing steel grating as they walked out into the main bay of the plant and up onto a narrow catwalk. Ten meters below them, the floor was crisscrossed by a maze of color-coded piping, most of it leading into a mammoth stainless-steel cylinder standing on end in the middle of the hall. At evenly-spaced intervals along the catwalk, eight enclosed tubes angled down like opaque water-slides to intersect the top of the cylinder. Every surface in the room sparkled and shone in the overhead fluorescent lighting, lending the facility an air of obsessive cleanliness.
“Just a skeleton crew on duty this afternoon.” Volin leaned on the catwalk’s rail and indicated three workers in Day-Glo orange envirohazard bunnysuits tending widely-scattered control stations down on the plant floor. “All reliable men. In view of the sensitivity of your presence here, the rest of the day shift has been sent home early.”
“Night shift?” the dark man said in Georgian-accented Russian. He could speak after all.
“Instructed not to arrive until eight p.m. — I trust that is satisfactory?” Would a hired killer appreciate the economics of the situation? “We here at RRS are, of course, eager to support the goals of the parent organization in any way we can. But that does not relieve us of responsibility for our own contribution to the GEI bottom line. And canceling tonight’s shift altogether would have had an unacceptable impact on quarterly earnings.”
Volin trailed off. The man was staring at him now.
He swallowed. “It — it would have meant shutting down the catalytic reactor, you see,” pointing at the huge cylinder, “— and we would then have lost a good ten hours, and many kilowatts, cold-starting it back up to operating temperature.”
The dark man made no reply, simply continued to fix him with that baleful glare.
A palpable silence descended, stretched out uncomfortably.
“You must understand,” Volin began again, “how essential it is to keep a plant like ours running continuously. Our EPA-approved recycling process involves immersing hazardous waste in a ‘bath,’ as it were, of molten iron. As has long been observed in steel mills, red-hot iron possesses solvent and catalytic properties able to break down organic waste products into their component elements. In a triumph of Russian metallurgy, our Resource Recovery business unit has harnessed this effect in the service of environmentally-friendly conversion of toxins into useful raw materials.
“This means, however, that it is far more energy efficient, far more profitable, to maintain the bath at constant temperature on a twenty-four-by-seven duty cycle. It becomes prohibitively expensive to allow the reactor to cool down overnight, only to reheat it next morning to the melting point of iron, or higher.”
“Higher?” Did the gravelly voice betray a hint of interest for once?
“Well, yes. Normal operating range is around fifteen hundred fifty degrees Celsius, but we can bring the bath all the way up to seventeen hundred for special decontaminations — chemical demilitarization of VX nerve gas, for instance.”
The woman paled.
“No, no, nothing like that going on right now,” Volin said, all reassurance. “Today’s run is quite routine: carcinogenic byproducts from local pesticide and chemical plants. Never a dearth of dioxins and PCBs here, you know. Here in New Jersey we are sitting on a gold mine of toxic waste.”
The dark man spoke again: “This waste goes in how?”
“You see these eight chutes?” Volin pointed to the tubes angling down to the giant cylinder. “They empty out over the molten metal pool at the core of the reactor vessel. We simply load them with hazardous material, solid or liquid, and let gravity do the rest.”
“Show me.”
“Of course. If you will just step this way.” Any moment now. Why was the man waiting? Surely he intended to do it before —
Volin led them to where the catwalk flared out into a rectangular balcony. To their right, thick red piping ran up vertically from the floor below, then elbowed toward a chamber occupying the center of the platform.
Volin strode over to the chamber’s solid steel door. “Behold: the Vestibule to Hell!”
He chuckled at his small joke, then sobered when no one joined him. “Nothing so dramatic, actually. Merely an airlock. The hazmat is loaded through this outer portal into the holding chamber —” Volin entered a code into a keypad set into the jamb, and the door swung open soundlessly to reveal a cubical interior two meters on a side. “Then, when the run is ready, the chamber is sealed, the floor retracts, and the material slides down the chute into the bath. Any questions?”
“No,” said the dark man.
And with that, he seized the woman by the nape of her neck and hurled her bodily into the chamber. He swung the heavy door closed on the beginnings of her scream.
He turned to Volin. “How long?”
“To, um, ah, cycle through, you mean?” Volin was having trouble getting the words out. “— As, as soon as an airtight seal is reestablished. Twenty seconds, no more. Y-you can watch the countdown on the display over here.”
He led the dark man around to a control console built into the right side of the chamber. Away from the incoherent sobs and frantic pounding now issuing from the other side of the door.
Alive! She was going into the bath alive! Volin’s stomach heaved. He fought to keep his rising gorge down, fearful of losing control in the other’s presence.
Calm, calm. Nothing too unusual here. After all, total, traceless obliteration of inconvenient bodies was RRS’s most lucrative sideline, a premiere service offered to a select East Coast clientele.
But up until now the bodies had always been dead first!
Oh, Volin understood the logic of not simply putting a bullet through her brain: Someone at the top, perhaps Arkady Grigoriyevich himself, had required there be no evidence of this woman’s passing, not even so much as a spent cartridge casing. But surely she could have been stabbed or strangled or — anything but this!
The futile pounding ceased; in its place, an equally futile pleading began. The woman had evidently understood enough of Volin’s orientation lecture to guess what would happen once the airlock’s cycle completed, and its second door — the entire floor of the loading chamber — swung open to dump her down the steeply-sloping shaft.
Then she had no need to guess. The countdown stood at zero.
Yuri watched status lights flashing red, indicating the load chamber’s second, inner door was swinging open. Above the blaring of the klaxon he could hear a series of clangs as the floor retracted, then a dull thump as the woman dropped into the lance.
The engineers who designed the Resource Recovery plant had seen no need to soundproof the walls of the chute feeding into the molten metal bath. Until today all of the bulk solids slated for destruction had gone mute and unprotesting down its throat to the inferno. So it was perhaps understandable if the heat insulation lining the chute could not contain the echoing wail that accompanied Natalya Petrovna Zolotova’s scrabbling slide toward the red glow of the bath below. A wail that rose freakishly in pitch as the cascaded ventilation system pumped hydrogen into the tube in place of oxygen.
Out on the plant floor, two of the orange-suited workers raised their heads at the surreal scream. Yuri glared down at them. They quickly bent to their instruments again.
Yuri turned back to the RRS manager. The man’s face was ashen. With all his fine talk of quarterly earnings and EPA approvals, the administrator here had forgotten what business he was in. No matter. The squeamishness of others was what ensured there would always be a market for Yuri Geladze’s services.
He looked the man in the eye. “I must see.”
“S-see?”
“See her die.” Yuri said. Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin, CEO of Grishin Enterprises and their mutual employer, had ordered Yuri to confirm personally that the Galina stand-in was gone without trace. Now there was a man who did not flinch from what must be done.
“We, we cannot really see into the reactor vessel, as such,” the manager stammered, “It is much too hot inside for conventional optics.”
Yuri frowned. The man added hastily: “There is a monitoring capability employing high-resolution ultrasound. It can image both above and below the surface. Will that be satisfactory?”
“Show me.”
In response to the manager’s keystrokes, the console’s main display came to life. Grayscale images depicted the interior of the cylinder below them in ghostly relief.
“I-I think we should see — Yes, there!” The manager pointed to where a writhing shape, rendered in halftones, plummeted from a dark aperture near the top of the screen into the molten metal occupying its lower half.
The liquefied iron was far denser than water, its surface tension much higher. That made for an unexpectedly small splash, followed by a slow but inexorable engulfment of the thrashing victim. The briefly thrashing victim. Like a worker caught in a steel-mill spill, she might last a second or two but the outcome was never in doubt.
The woman’s mouth was locked open impossibly wide, as if for one last scream. Nothing came out — her lungs and diaphragm, together with the rest of her soft thoracic and abdominal organs, had already burst and dissolved in the metallic flux. Bodily fluids vaporized into gouts of superheated steam. Sudden gaseous ventings animated what was left of the limbs in a grisly parody of life. Finally, the spinal column collapsed, scattering vertebrae like poker chips and plunging the skull itself into the incandescent broth.
Yuri watched the skeleton dissociate into individual bones. They bobbed a while on the red-hot surface before they too dissolved. He shrugged. He had seen worse. Had done worse.
“No burning?” he asked idly.
“No, no, of course not.” The manager removed his spectacles and wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his expensive-looking suit jacket, “The whole decomposition process takes place in a reducing atmosphere. Burning is impermissible: there can be no oxidation whatsoever, or we would lose our EPA certification as a nonincinerative waste-disposal technology.”
Yuri turned back to the display.
“The bones are the last to go,” the manager was saying quietly. “Those, and the teeth, of course. Almost pure apatite: the same material rocks are made of.” Color had returned to his cheeks. He no longer looked as though he were going to faint or vomit. This part he would have seen many times before.
“What is that?” Yuri pointed to a small blob on the screen. It was sinking slowly through the melt, jostled from side to side by convection currents.
The manager put his spectacles back on. “I — hmm, I don’t know. Most metal objects lose their integrity in the bath. But there are tapping nozzles installed in the base of the reactor unit for just such eventualities. If you will wait a moment, we shall see.”
The manager dispatched one of the orange-clad workers to retrieve the curious object from where it had settled at the bottom of the reactor tank. Yuri continued to watch the now-unchanging display.
“Yes, here it is.” The manager took a silvery lump from the worker’s gloved hand. Its true shape was hard to make out, so much iron had congealed around it in its trip through the molten bath.
“What is it?”
“It appears to be a, ah, pendant of some kind.” The manager handed it to Yuri. “The woman must have been wearing it beneath her clothes.”
Yuri lifted it to the light. It was still warm to the touch. “Silver?” he asked.
“What? No, no, silver would have dissolved. No, my friend, from its weight, its color, and especially its high melting point, I would say this is made of purest platinum.
“Keep it, if you like. A souvenir of your visit to Resource Recovery Systems.” The manager smiled wanly. “— It is worth more than gold.”