Goodbye California Read Online Free PDF

don’t have to repeat myself.’
    ‘Men of compassion, no doubt?’
    ‘Of course they are.’
    ‘They took my wife, and a stenographer–’
    ‘Julie Johnson.’
    ‘Julie Johnson. When our hi-jacking thieves start feeding those ladies through a meat grinder what do you think is going to win out–your friends’ high principles or their compassion?’
    Jablonsky said nothing. He just lost a little colour.
    Ferguson coughed in a sceptical fashion, which is a difficult thing to do, but in his line of business he’d had a lot of practice. ‘And I’d always thought you were devoid of imagination, Sergeant. That’s stretching things a bit, surely.’
    ‘Is it? As security chief it’s your job to vet everybody applying for a job here. This stenographer, Julie. What’s her background?’
    ‘Typist making a living. Shares a small flat, nothing fancy, with two other girls. Drives a beat-up Volkswagen. Parents dead.’
    ‘Not a millionairess doing the job for kicks?’
    ‘Kicks. No chance. A nice girl, but nothing special there.’
    Ryder looked at Jablonsky. ‘So. A stenographer’s pay-cheque. A sergeant’s pay-cheque. A patrol-man’spay-cheque. Maybe you think they’re going to hold those ladies to ransom for a million dollars each? Maybe just to rest their eyes on after a long day at the nuclear bench?’ Jablonsky said nothing. ‘The meat grinder. You were talking about this plutonium.’
    ‘God, man, have you no feelings?’
    ‘Time and a place for everything. Right now a little thinking, a little knowledge might help more.’
    ‘I suppose.’ Jablonsky spoke with the restrained effort of a man whose head is trying to make his heart see sense. ‘Plutonium–Plutonium 239, to be precise. Stuff that destroyed Nagasaki. Synthetic–doesn’t exist in nature. Man-made–we Californians had the privilege of creating it. Unbelievably toxic–a cobra’s bite is a thing of joy compared to it. If you had it in an aerosol in liquid form with freon under pressure–no one has as yet got around to figuring out how to do this but they will, they will–you’d have an indescribably lethal weapon on your hands. A couple of squirts of this into a crowded auditorium, say, with a couple of thousand people, and all you’d require would be a couple of thousand coffins.
    ‘It’s the inevitable by-product of the fissioning of uranium in a nuclear reactor. The plutonium, you understand, is still inside the uranium fuel rods. The rods are removed from the reactor and chopped up–.’
    ‘Who does the chopping? Not a job I’d fancy myself.’
    ‘I don’t know whether you would or not. First chop and you’d be dead. Done by remote-controlled guillotines in a place we call the “canyon”. Nice little place with five-foot walls and five-foot-thick windows. You wouldn’t want to go inside. The cuttings are dissolved in nitric acid then washed with various reactive chemicals to separate the plutonium from the uranium and other unwanted radioactive fission products.’
    ‘How’s this plutonium stored?’
    ‘Plutonium nitrate, actually. About ten litres of it goes into a stainless steel flask, about fifty inches high by five in diameter. That works out about two and a half kilograms of pure plutonium. Those flasks are even more easily handled than the uranium drums and quite safe if you’re careful.’
    ‘How much of this stuff do you require to make a bomb?’
    ‘No one knows for sure. It is believed that it is theoretically possible although at the moment practically impossible to make a nuclear device no bigger than a cigarette. The AEC puts the trigger quantity at two kilograms. It’s probably an over-estimate. But you could for sure carry enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb in a lady’s purse.’
    ‘I’ll never look at a lady’s purse with the same eyes again. So that’s a bomb flask?’
    ‘Easily.’
    ‘Is there much of this plutonium around?’
    ‘Too much. Private companies have stock-piled more