Chapter 9

Loyola

4/28/49 Construction of new facilities at SSTB completed at cost of $480 million. Sandia Corporation formed as a subsidiary of the West Electric Company.

3/17/50 Responsibility for operation of SSTB transferred from AEC and The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to Sandia Corporation. Salton Sea Division established within the Plant Engineering and Maintenance organization to handle base operations such as administration, maintenance and security. Test Operation Division of Field Test organization continued to handle all test activities.



The windshield was really dirty. He was surprised that it was dirtier on the inside. They should make windshield wipers for the inside. Sam was in his car at his office parking lot. He had forgotten what he was doing here. Did he just come back from an appointment? From lunch?
His head hurt. He looked in the rearview mirror. His face was swollen on his forehead and his left cheek. There was dried blood on his chin. He remembered what happened. They had left the car and air conditioning running. They must have had some regret. Even left the window cracked. They could have left the radio on, though. The clock read 5:06pm.

It had been four hours since he was at the impound lot, three hours since he gave Ed Neely and Bob Stewart a ride. He glanced towards the passenger side seat. There was a manila envelope. He reached over and opened it. Inside were many bills, all hundreds. It took him a several times to count them, his head rolling and throbbing, making it hard to concentrate. When he counted $10,000 two times in a row he figured that was the right amount. He was sort of honored that they tried to pay him off. It was also probably a bribe to back off.

He went home and didn’t wake up until 10:00 the next morning. He had already missed a day of surveillance and couldn’t afford a repeat. Alan Turing didn’t get his daily phone call from Sam the previous evening and would no doubt be pissed. Sam had to come up with an excuse.

Sam was out of the house in 30 minutes. Samantha would have left the house already and so Sam would have to guess where she was. He drove by the places she had been frequenting lately, the abandoned yacht club and old Navy base, finding her at neither. But Sam did notice something at the yacht club; the number of plastic panels had doubled since he was there the previous week. She must have been working during the weekend – that would be the only way she could have covered so much of landscape with plastic. Did Alan follow her himself while Sam was off for the weekend? Sam found that hard to visualize, a little too down and dirty for the assistant publisher.

A few panels on the edge had flipped up from the wind. He got out of his car and pounded six of the stakes back into the ground. He then drove off thinking of other places Samantha might be.


Doug went through the online job listings. CNBC droned in the background, his favorite ambient channel. The doorbell rang. He opened the door to find Samantha Turing standing on this front step wearing the same green dress as when he last saw her. He pulled her in the door and the two of them didn’t get out of bed for six hours.

Doug hadn’t seen her for three weeks and he did nothing in the meantime. His job search was losing its luster as the degrading process of interviewing was now in its third month. He had heard that a job search would take one month for every $10,000 in salary you wanted. He didn’t know if that included sales jobs since so much of your salary was made up of commission. He really didn’t have to do it either, thanks to his considerable savings gleaned from living in down-market housing – which made the job search chore that much more annoying. So he sat watching a lot of TV, the Green Hornet on FX, The Weather Channel, The Travel Channel, the world all in beautiful approximation. Samantha’s husband’s usual business trips had not been as frequent, and while he was home there was no way she would be sneaking out. There had been a few furtive phone calls from her cell phone. She would call Doug, then hang-up – that would let him know that she could talk. Doug would then call her back keeping the conversation from showing up on her bill. He would talk for an hour or so or until her cell battery would run out. But now she was here for at least two days while Mr. Turing went to Santa Fe for some industry conference that Doug imagined consisted of well-off establishment guys drinking single-malt scotch while congratulating each other for having enough taste to become successful. Later, in their $500 a night rooms, the successful guys would drive their seed into gorgeous, poorly educated woman. They would be certain, right at the point of ejaculation, that all their hard work, all their sacrifices had been well worth it. If Doug could keep that vision in his mind then he didn’t have to feel so bad about what he was doing with Mr. Turing’s wife.