They were officially known as SMRs, or “small modular reactors.”
The adjective was a bit misleading, as the average SMR weighed in at about sixty tons, it seemed. Still, they were prefabricated and could be shipped intact to their destinations, making them essentially portable.
Harmon Energy Products’ version was known by the clever trade name the Pocket Sun.
In bold strokes he continued his artwork. Shaw gathered it was a cross section of one of these.
He was in an armchair that had seen better days. The springs were shot and the leather was cracked and worn where elbows and butts would wear. There was a couch too, half covered with papers and objects—metal parts, wires, solid-state boards. This was not the glitzy office of a Silicon Valley start-up, but the functional operating suite of a hardworking businessman heading up a no-nonsense Midwestern manufacturing company.
The only decorations here were a picture of the man and his dark-haired wife in her mid-forties and a large posted periodic table of the elements. On the bottom row one of these substances had been enclosed by a bright red drawing of a heart. It was the letterU.
Uranium.
The poster had been signed by scores of people, presumably employees. It would mark some significant event in the company’s history.
There were no diplomas or certificates or industry awards on thewalls, which might offer a glimpse into the CEO’s bio. Shaw had, though, had his PI run a basic backgrounder. Harmon had an engineering degree from a lower state university and had founded, run and sold several other companies—of the low-tech sort. Energy, mostly. Some infrastructure. He steered clear of the press, once telling a reporter he didn’t have time for that “stuff,” appending a harsh modifier to the word. Still, Mack found a few articles, which depicted him as a workaholic and an uncompromising innovator and businessman. He himself owned a dozen patents for engineering devices, whose purposes Shaw could not figure out from Mack’s report.
As he drew on the board, Harmon continued his TED Talk. “So, Mr. Shaw, imagine! With our SMRs, developing countries can have dependable refrigeration, lighting, phones... And computers! The internet. Healthcare. There’re some sub-Saharan people’re living in the nineteenth century, and Pocket Suns can bring them into the modern era. Prejudice and idiotic ideas—about race, AIDS, Covid, STDs—only exist in the vacuum of ignorance. Give people energy, and they’ll have not only lighting, but enlightenment.”
A line from a sales pitch, but not a bad one.
“Now,” Harmon said, turning away from the board. “To the problem. There’s a little-talked-about concern in the nuclear energy world: that someone’ll steal nuclear fuel and weaponize it. It’s known as ‘proliferation.’ Pretty sanitized term, no?”
Because SMRs like Pocket Suns were often installed in countries with fewer safeguards and security staff, there was a risk someone would strip out the fuel or even steal the unit as a whole.
The nuclear material in the Pocket Suns was the same as in most reactors—U-235, enriched to around five percent, the level that met government approval. Harmon said, “To make a bomb with that kind of enrichment, you’d need the amount of fuel roughly the size of a full-grown elephant. But if you enrich to forty-five percent, then all you’d need is thirty-six kilos to make a bomb. That’s the size of a German shepherd.
“See this.” After scratching his upturned nose, he indicated his diagram, which looked like a bell jar, inside of which were clusters of thin vertical pipes. At the bottom of each was a small box. It was to one of these that he now pointed. “This’s the S.I.T., or ‘security intervention trigger.’ My most brilliant engineer came up with the idea. If someone moves a Pocket Sun without authorization or tries to break into the fuel compartment, the S.I.T. blows the uranium pellets into dust and floods them with a substance I’ve invented, a mesoporous nano material. It binds with the uranium and makes it useless in weapons. No other SMR manufacturer has anything like it.”
The cherub suddenly vanished; his other side—the angry side—emerged.
He leaned slightly forward and pointed a blunt finger for emphasis. “We do spot inventories. A few days ago the auditors found components’d gone missing, along with some mesoporous material. Somebody here is making an S.I.T. He’s—or she’s—going to sell it to a competitor. They have to be stopped. Agent Pepper said this’s the sort of thing you could do. Twenty thousand if you catch him and recover the trigger, Mr. Shaw. I’ll pay expenses too.”
Shaw considered what he was hearing. “You think it’s going overseas. If it were a U.S. competitor you could just sue for theft of trade secrets and patent infringement. Get a good lawyer and you could probably close them down.”
For a time, after college, Shaw had worked in a law office in California. He liked the challenge of the law, though he decided that however mentally stimulating the profession was, office jobs were a poor fit for someone known as the Restless Man.
Harmon said, “Exactly right. I know my competitors in the States. It’s not them. Look, we’re a small company, running on fumes. The S.I.T. is one of the few things that differentiates us. It’s a huge selling point. Somebody else gets it, undercuts our price, we’re gone. And I’m the only manufacturer who’s planning installs in the Third World. And, okay, let’s be grown-ups. I want to make somechange myself. Too many people apologizing for capitalism. Bullshit. I make profits, I sink them into the next big thing, employing workers, making products that people...” He stopped himself and waved his hand, as if swatting away a hovering lecture.
“Tom Pepper told me the local FBI can’t handle it.”
A grimace. “Backlogged. And the Ferrington PD? They’ve cut staff by fifty percent. I even said I’d contribute a shitload to the benevolent fund. But they can’t keep up with drugs, homicides and domestics. A missing gadget’s not even on their radar.”
Shaw said, “I’ll take the job.”
The man strode forward and, though diminutive, delivered a powerful handshake.
Harmon returned to his desk and made two brief calls, summoning people.
No more than five seconds passed before his door opened and a tall woman walked inside. Her long black hair was tied back with a blue scarf, which matched the shade of her studious eyeglasses. High cheekbones, generous lips. She wore a tailored suit. Shaw wondered if she’d been a fashion model.
Harmon introduced Shaw to his assistant, Marianne Keller. “Mr. Shaw’s going to be helping us with the trigger.”
“Ah, good, Marty.” Her face bloomed with relief. Shaw supposed that a company like this fostered a sense of family. A betrayal stung them all.
“Anything he needs for expenses, carte blanche.” Then he frowned. “Okay with no private jets?”
“Off the table,” Shaw assured him.