Page 50 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Okay, that’s not heart attacks.’

‘I don’t know.’ Shenkov looked as though he would have liked to say something else. ‘Listen, I know I said that we would just have to see what the coroner said, but I didn’t expect it to be a flat-out lie. I don’t care how well Moscow wants these figures to be hidden – we clearly have something around here that’s so radioactive it’s killing people within days. It must be a specific place, or people would be dropping like flies, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Valery said. ‘Yes, I agree. And probably not inside the city.’

‘If we can find it and seal it off, we’d be saving a lot of trouble. The more people die, the more attention is going to fall on coroners’ reports and figures. It’s people from the village at the moment, but if this radioactive place, whatever it is, is anywhere near here, it’s only a matter of time until something happens to one of our researchers. There will come a point when blowing up a newspaper editor’s house won’t stop people asking questions, and … we can’t let people panic. Moscow is never going to evacuate anyone, not from here. They’d bring in the army.’

Valery nodded and said nothing, because he could hear that Shenkov was talking himself into something, much more than he was asking anything.

‘If you were to look at the body,’ Shenkov said, tentative now, ‘is there anything that might tell you … I don’t know, what kind of radiation it was, how he was exposed … ?’

‘Yes. Lots of things. Shall we go?’

‘You don’t have to.’ His eyes flicked to Valery’s cast, then up and down the rest of him, or rather down and down. Valery was a head smaller. He didn’t often look at himself in the mirror, but he knew he looked fragile, even from his own point of view, never mind Shenkov’s.

‘I know.’

‘I’m not asking you as a KGB officer.’

‘Yes, don’t be so bloody wet,’ Valery said, and started down the corridor to keep him from arguing any more.

The morgue was in the same low building as the infirmary, all stainless steel and very, very cold; the heating pipes didn’t even run through. The body was in a drawer, along, Valery noticed, with quite a few other labelled drawers. If the population of City 40 was a hundred thousand, like Shenkov had said, the premature death rate must have kept all the morgues busy. Valery perched on a stool and read over the coroner’s report. It said very little. Natural death. There wasn’t even a mention of radiation exposure.

‘Can you do an autopsy?’ Shenkov asked quietly. Two of his men had put the body on the autopsy table.

Valery looked, meaning to say it would be useless to do the autopsy again if the coroner had already removed organs during the first one, but the words died when he saw there had been no autopsy.

Not only had there been no autopsy, but there were no radiation precautions whatsoever. The body was covered by a sheet, not a hazmat bag. There were no lead screens. No protective equipment for people working in here. Nothing.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. Something odd was going on. Either the coroner had failed to notice that the man had obviously died of radiation sickness and put herself and her entire staff at risk of contamination; or, she knew exactly what had happened already and that it wasn’t dangerous. He couldn’t see, though, how it could possibly not be dangerous. ‘But if he died from contact with something in the woods, he’s radioactive. You shouldn’t be in here.’

‘What about you?’

‘If I get sick, I do,’ said Valery. ‘Outside please.’

‘Have you done this before on an irradiated … body?’

‘Often,’ said Valery. ‘Go.’

It didn’t take him long, because there wasn’t much left to look at. The organs were in a state, and under a microscope the marrow and blood were barely recognisable. There was a window that looked out into the corridor, so Valery reported as much as he pulled off the mask and gown. He looked round for somewhere to get rid of them, then slung them into the incinerator.

‘So it’s definitely radiation,’ Shenkov said through the glass.

‘He got a dose of about five hundred roentgen over a short period of time,’ Valery said. He had to pause, because he had not found what he expected to find. Since the day the body had turned up, he had been sure that Sasha had fallen ill in the forest, found a hospital somehow, and left again. But that was not what had happened. ‘I think it was injected,’ he said at last. ‘There are puncture marks on his arms.’

Shenkov looked confused too. ‘Someone injected him with … ?’

‘Yes. With a radioactive isotope. I think it’s polonium. That explains why they’re not taking any radiation precautions in here.’ He motioned around. ‘Polonium is an alpha emitter. Human skin blocks it, so if it’s inside him, it isn’t dangerous to anyone coming into contact with the body.’

Valery realised too late that he was doing the opposite of shedding light on the subject. ‘If skin blocks radiation, then why is it dangerous?’ Shenkov asked.

‘Alpha radiation, only alpha,’ Valery said. ‘Alpha radiation is when the radioactive atoms chuck whole helium atoms out – that’s like throwing cannon balls. They’re too big to get through the spaces between the atoms of most substances, so that sits on surfaces. That’s why we hose things down that have been exposed. It only kills you if it gets in you. Gamma radiation isn’t particles, it’s very very high-frequency light. It’s light-speed cheese wires cutting through you.’

‘I see.’ Shenkov paused. ‘Where do you get polonium? Is it in the ground here?’

‘No,’ Valery said, feeling heavy now. ‘No, you have to extract it from a reactor at exactly the right point, or it fissions into caesium.’

‘Then I don’t understand.’