Jonathan Franzen - Purity

There had been a time when taking in a houseguest would have inhibited Leila and Tom; when they’d drawn the blinds and curtains and walked around his house naked for the pleasure of entrusting each other with the sight of their no longer so young bodies; when the refrigerator door and the living-room floor had been viable surfaces against which to brace herself for him. Although that time was long gone, they’d never formally acknowledged its passing — so much remained unspoken behind the glare on Tom’s glasses — and Leila couldn’t help feeling hurt that he’d unilaterally acknowledged it by inviting the girl to live with him.

Fusion chain reactions were natural, the source of a sun’s energy, but fission chain reactions weren’t. Fissile plutonium atoms were nature’s unicorns, and nowhere in the universe could a critical mass of them naturally assemble itself. People had to force it to occur, and to force the mass further, with explosives, into a superdense state in which the chain reaction could proceed through enough generations to ignite fusion. And how quickly it all happened. Jiggling atomic droplets of plutonium ingesting neutron newcomers, cleaving into smaller atomic droplets, spewing further neutrons. Skinless people staggering down the street with their entrails and eyeballs hanging out …

They should have had a baby. In a way, it was an immense relief not to have had one, not to have brought another life to a planet that would be incinerated quickly or baked to death slowly; not to have to worry about that. And yet they should have done it. Leila loved Tom and admired him beyond measure, she felt blessed by the ease of her life with him, but without a child it was a life of leaving things unspoken. Of cuddling in the evening, watching cable dramas together, inhabiting broad areas of agreement, avoiding the few hots spots of past disagreements, and drifting toward old age. Her sudden ardor for Pip was irrational but not senseless, not sexual but intense; compensatory. She didn’t know what exactly would come of permitting a newcomer into the nucleus of her and Tom, but she pictured a mushroom cloud.

* * *

Three and a half weeks after Pip moved in, Leila went to Washington. Along with the warhead story, she was reporting a statistics-driven piece about the lax enforcement of tax law in the tech industry. All the Washington hotels in her permitted price class were dispiriting, and she was staying in one of them. She would have liked to go home to Denver sooner, but her favorite senator, the most liberal member of the Armed Services Committee, had promised her fifteen Friday-afternoon minutes before he followed the rest of Congress out of town. She’d arranged the meeting in person, with his chief of staff, so as not to leave a phone or email trail. Since the advent of NSA dragnets, she’d operated more and more by Moscow Rules. Members of Congress were especially attractive sources, because they weren’t polygraphed.

Working her Pentagon contacts, some of whom she’d known since her Post days, she’d pieced together a sanitized version of what had happened in Albuquerque. Yes, ten B61 weapons had been trucked to Amarillo for scheduled refurbishment and circuitry upgrades. Yes, one of them had turned out to be an unarmed facsimile normally stored on the base near the real weapons, for use in training the accident-response team. Yes, bar coding and microchip self-identifiers had been tampered with. Yes, there had ensued eleven days when a real weapon was off the grid and presumably stored in a poorly secured shed. Yes, heads had rolled. Yes, the weapon was now “fully accounted for” and had never been less than fully safed. No, the Air Force would not provide any details of the theft or disclose the identity of the perpetrator(s).

“There’s no such thing as ‘fully safed,’” Ed Castro, a nukes expert at Georgetown, had told her. “Safe from detonating if you whack it with a hammer, sure. Safe from circumventing the code mechanisms, probably. We also suspect that later-generation bombs ‘poison’ their own cores if you tamper with them. But the thing about mid-period weapons like the B61 is that they’re sickeningly simple at heart. All the really high technology comes in prior to the assembly of the weapon. Creating and refining the plutonium and hydrogen isotopes: unbelievably difficult and costly. Designing the lens geometry of the high explosives: difficult. But putting the pieces together and making them go boom? Sadly, not so difficult. If you’ve got time and a couple of PhDs, reverse engineering the ignition circuitry is eminently doable. The result won’t be so elegant and miniature, and the yield might be reduced, but you’ll have a working thermonuclear weapon.”

“Who would want one?” Leila said, half rhetorically.

Castro was the kind of quote hound reporters loved. “The usual suspects,” he said. “Islamic terrorists. Rogue states. James Bond movie villains. Would-be extortionists. Conceivably antinuke activists hoping to prove a point. These are the end users, and thankfully they’re a fairly feckless lot. The more interesting thing to think about is who their potential suppliers would be. Who’s really good at getting and moving stuff they’re not supposed to have? Who goes around collecting that kind of stuff in case it comes in handy?”

“The Russian Mob, for example.”

“In the years before Putin took over, I used to wake up in the morning and marvel that I was still alive.”

“But then the Russian Mob became indistinguishable from the Russian government.”

“The kleptocracy has definitely improved nuclear security.”

Reporting was imitation life, imitation expertise, imitation worldliness, imitation intimacy; mastering a subject only to forget it, befriending people only to drop them. And yet, like so many imitative pleasures, it was highly addictive. Outside the Dirksen Building, on Friday afternoon, Leila saw other Hill reporters milling in little clouds of self-importance that she could discern because she was inhabiting one herself and was affronted by the sight of others. Had they, like her, removed the batteries from their smartphones, to hide their location from the dragnet? She doubted it.

The senator was only twenty-five minutes behind schedule. His staff chief, apparently preferring deniability, didn’t join him and Leila in his office.

“You’re annoying the Air Force,” the senator said when they were alone. “Nice work.”

“Thank you.”

“Obviously we’re strictly on background. I’m going to give you the names of other people who’ve been briefed, and you need to leave an electronic trail of contacting every one of them. I want this story told, but it’s not worth losing a committee seat over.”

“Is it that big a deal?”

“It’s not that big a deal. Medium-size, maybe. But the mania for secrecy is out of control. Are you aware that the agencies don’t just number and watermark the classified reports we get now? They do something with the spacing between the letters of each copy — the kerning?”

“Kerning, yes.”

“Apparently it creates a unique signature for each copy. In Technology We Trust. Need to put that on the new hundred-dollar bill.”

Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.

“So you could have heard this from any number of people,” he said when she’d written down the names. “The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard. That’s where the whole country is right now.”