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“Man, you look beat,” Brad said, “I thought your band was going to be done playing by eleven. Maybe you’d better cut out those Thursday night gigs.”
“No, it wasn’t that, I was home before midnight, but my sister Tamara called from Georgia and kept me on the line for almost two hours,” David said as he laid his head down on his desk and silently hoped that no bosses walked around the corner.
“You probably had a lot of catching up to do. When was the last time you talked to her?”
“It was just last month, but she was very upset about something she saw yesterday.”
“Oh, what was that?”
“There’s a large farm outside of Tbilisi owned by the Shengelia family. Tamara said that she saw some workers digging up radioactive containers from the fields. She said that they looked like metal milk containers and had radioactive symbols on the side of the cans.”
“I guess she would be upset, that would scare anybody,” Brad said.
“Before she called me, Tamara said that she did some research and found that back in the early seventies, the Soviet Government was experimenting with radioactivity on farm crops. They were testing to see if they could speed up the seed germination and increase the crop yield.”
“That’s just freaking wonderful, you mean that they actually buried the radioactive containers to affect the soil?”
“No, they had some equipment that would automatically induce radioactivity into the seeds before the seeds were planted in the ground. Tamara found an article that said that the Soviets returned to the farms in the late Seventies’ to retrieve the equipment.”
“I guess they must have missed some,” Brad said.
“That’s putting it lightly, they left a lot of the radioactive containers behind. And rather then store them in their barns, the local farmers were simply told to bury them. Fortunately, it looks like Shengelia kept a map of where he buried his.”
“So, maybe the government is finally going to clean things up and take the containers off his hands,” Brad said.
“I was hoping that was the case too, but Tamara said she saw some foreigners talking to Vladimir Shengelia.”
“Foreigners? How did she describe them?” Brad asked.
“This is where it gets interesting, hopefully, she’s exaggerating, but she said they looked like Mid-easterners and she thinks they might be terrorists.”
“Hell, I’d bet that if she saw me, she’d say that I look like a terrorist too.”
“The only thing that concerns me is that Tamara was positive that these people were not part of any government clean up operation. She said that she even called Shengelia, but he wasn’t very informative about who the strangers were. She also said that it’s no secret that Shengelia has been looking to sell his farm for a few years.”
“You actually think that this farmer might be trying to sell these radioactive containers?”
“I don’t know what else could be going on. If it was a government operation, it would have been on the news.”
“Maybe we should go down and to Counter-Terrorism and see if we could talk to Jack Hoskins during our break,” Brad said.
“I don’t know about that, I really don’t want to stir up any trouble, and what if Tamara was mistaken and I end up losing my job?”
“Relax, no one’s going to lose their job. They say that Hoskins is a really nice guy. At the very least, he’ll probably send a foreign operative into Georgia to look the situation over. Besides, it’s your duty to both your new country and your old country to check this out,” Brad said as he stood up and saluted.
“Great, now I wish I never told you,” David said.
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