Chapter 48

Four months after the ambush, nothing much of anything important had been found. I had the operations but I still had to wear the sling for another three months. This did not stop me from getting Helen pregnant again. All the rest were very happy for her, for this meant that their turn would be coming soon.

Sonny Forte gave me an unexpected call. He had been one of the people to send his sympathy for the men killed. Other than Lacroix, one of the men he had recommended to me had been killed as well. I had thanked him for finding me nothing but the best men and I did my utmost for the dead men's families.

He said to me over our satellite phone, "Alex, I have talked to Joe's family and see that you have done very well by them. I cannot think of any other employer who would have done the same thing."

"He died saving my life, Sonny. I have my own honour to think of too."

Sonny said in a pensive voice, "Honour is what I am thinking of now. I have some information that may help you but it also may not."

"What is it Sonny?"

"The man I'm talking about cannot be hurt but I think that if you question him you may find out some of the answers you were looking for."

"Who is it? I have ways of getting information without hurting the person I am questioning."

"That is very good. My brother-in-law, Carmen, was drinking with me recently. He boasted that he knew much more than anybody else. He was quite drunk and I decided to not ask him any more after he slept it off."

In a week I was in Chicago. Carmen was sleeping in a chair in Sonny's home. Sonny and only one of my security were with me. Carmen had been given a sedative and now I handed an antidote to Richard to administer. Richard Fraser had been hired the same day as Lacroix and they had been good friends.

Before Carmen awoke he was given the thiopentide. I took the disposable syringe and put it into a protected package. I never let this product out of my sight, or even the traces that could be reverse engineered.

It took only a minute to get Carmen to start talking. An associate in Philadelphia told him how he had been asked to do the hit on me. A week later the man was told that the job was much too difficult and the CIA was going to take over. The offer had come from Howard Meechum, a businessman with many links to the mob.

The questioning continued but nothing more was found relating to the attempt on my life. I didn't ask Carmen about anything else, or about his dealings with Sonny. I didn't want Sonny to hear something that would make him want to have to do something about his brother-in-law.

We left Carmen where he was and when the effects were starting to wear off we left. We had thanked Sonny and warned him that the information he had found out could get him killed very easily.

Meechum fell asleep after touching something sticky under the door handle of his car in an underground parking lot. We were there for two hours and found out a considerable amount about the man in front of us. We were in a panel truck parked nearby and beneath the building where Meechum worked. Voice recordings were made of all his various dealings with the dirty side of the CIA and the mob.

He was a treasure trove of information about a great many different odd things that had happened. He did know about the attempt on my life and listed who had put him up to it and whom he had contacted. Who actually did the job was unknown.

Meechum's fingers were cleaned as was his car and he was put back in. Rather than destroy this resource, he was given a drug which simulated a heart attack and would leave him unconscious for hours. When he awoke or was found, his doctors would tell him that he had minor myocardial infarction.

We stayed in the area for nearly a month. More people had come in to assist and eventually I had a quiet chat with Felix Backwater about the people involved in the attempt on my life. He was resistant but not up to what our drug could demand. Again I used a recording and found out many spurious facts. He had been the one to organize the hit and gave me the names and locations of the remaining men. Three more had died in or after the attack. All of them actually had jobs in the CIA; this would have been found, except that the records had been tampered with.

He told me that many influential people had banded together and got a section of the large government organization to protect them and their money. They claimed I was attacking good businesses in order to promote my own. The list ran to twenty-three people, with comments that many more supported them.

The amount of information was so great that I could not get it all at one time. I did find some good blackmail information when we discovered a goodly amount of money in foreign accounts and I even got his passwords. He did keep accessible records, because he felt that one day he would have to fight for his job the way J. Edgar Hoover did in keeping his position as the head of the FBI.

He had enough dirt on others whom he worked with in his organization that it looked like they could be convinced to do as I wished if I wanted this to happen. Apparently, there were a great many bodies buried and a lot of money made for doing it.

Backwater was left and we cleaned up as good as possible. From a hidden safe, though, we took most of his incriminating evidence and left to find the other places that he had mentioned to us. He would know something was wrong the next time he checked the contents of his safe but hopefully would not know when or how the contents disappeared.

Three of the twenty-three had been watched before because of Meechum's talk with us. We happened to get them, with some mob figures, at a meeting. This time they were simply gassed. The questioning took a long time, since I decided to talk to the five mob figures, too. Incriminating evidence was gathered on anything possible. Teams now went out and took what was needed. Some were able to go to banks and remove articles from safety deposit boxes after a chat with the manager.

After the men recovered, I talked to each when they were not under the influence of the drug. Evidence was presented to them in many forms and two had the gall to ask for their lawyer. All this was done in private, because some of the information dealt with how one or another of them tried to stab another in the back on a few occasions.

This matter was not resolved for years and in the meantime five of the twenty-three people died. They were unwilling to think rationally about the situation I had them all in. Some of their own number wanted to save their own bacon and did the deeds to keep me from exposing all of them. The black operations group and their handlers at the CIA ended up giving me a very large amount of information on what was done and what was even contracted out to the mob.

With this business partially completed, I again went after various toxic dumps that made such large headlines in my previous life. Fourteen months of my life were really wasted with the attempt on my life and the search for who was behind it. Many lives had ended, because I was not able to do what was needed soon enough.

The Presidential elections were only a year away and just before Christmas a Superfund was established to clean up the most toxic sights. Legislation had been passed to put more money into the international space station too. It had grown considerably in my absence but it had not been out of sight of the common school child. Experiments of all kinds were performed and credit given to the people who thought of them. Nobody had been back to the moon yet but a new and very ambitious venture was planned for 65.

The De Soto Company was having serious difficulties and declared bankruptcy. I had thoughts of stepping in and either saving it, or purchasing the assets. Everything was old and worn out and even though I liked the styling of the car I had to let it slide past me. Chrysler would probably still get into trouble because of bad management. All North American car manufacturers still did not respond to the market very well. I was not sure what I wanted to do but perhaps I could buy major portions of the company and get them to build what I wanted. In the meantime, I had to just wait.

On the topic of nuclear weapons I was happy to get a test ban treaty signed a full year earlier than it had happened last time. I assisted with some reactor design with the full knowledge of the western powers. I reasoned that with enough bombs to kill everybody on earth a few times over, it was now time to work at protecting ourselves from accidents.

A plane had once crash-landed and then ploughed into a Bomarc missile. The explosives had gone off but had only spread nuclear material over a hundred-yard area. I got the military to move the missiles to a less dangerous spots before the accident happened.

The designs I had given to the Russians had been altered and given to the US. It was superior to their own and I made the cost of changing over as cheap as I could.

Russia never exported its light water graphite reactors for a good reason. When they were run at low power, they were susceptible to small hot spots. This caused the water to boil. The water was itself a moderator and steam had very little of this ability. The hot spot got much hotter and boiled more water. This was called the positive void coefficient and could lead to a run-away reaction. This would end up with the reactor putting out 100 times the maximum power and blowing off the top of the reactor with steam.

The hot reactor now exposed would allow the hot graphite to burn. With the water now gone with the explosion, there was nothing to slow down the reaction. The meltdown would make clouds of radioactive smoke and dust that would spread around the world in enough time.

The only good thing about this was that at this time Russia and the world didn't have very many reactors and the Chernobyl type numbered only four. Chernobyl's first reactor had not been built till 1971. Reactors cost a lot of money to build and took a great deal of time. The fact that safety equipment could accounted for a quarter of the cost made some people want to scrimp.

There was no way I could get the existing units replaced but I could suggest all the safety measures thought of after the Chernobyl disaster. This brought on the cry of no money to do this costly undertaking. The American government was not going to help, for they figured that Russia had much more money than it let on. The idea still was to bleed the country till it went to its knees.

The pros and cons of this attitude were obvious. The Soviets had less care for safety than the West. Because of the secrecy around anything nuclear, they did not find out about western improvements in design. At one time this could have been justified but there was now a moratorium on nuclear testing, at least in the air. Some small slips were detected in underground testing. Seismic apparatus around the world detected these.

The amount of involvement I had to have was so great that I had to do this openly. Basically, I had to give Russia help in producing and retrofitting reactors in construction with an eye to safety. At present, the West was still very anti communist and wanted them to sink, if possible. They did not realize how much radioactivity could spread from disasters on the other side of the earth. The United States did not want to see this, because they had been doing a great many open-air tests and always played down the detrimental effects.

As usual, I had to go to the people and this was done on talk shows. The television audiences were told of the safety problems in western reactors. There was no freedom of information act yet and I could not call witnesses to accidents that had occurred.

I did have aggressive news reporting and many places around nuclear power plants of private or military sites were checked. The findings were shown only once, because the government and military would stop us. It was very far reaching and lawyers at the end of the show mentioned how freedom of speech would be curtailed so no further information might be dispensed.

Star Trek the movie had come out and immediately thereafter, one-hour serials were presented. The money and props made them look like 'The next generation' and the themes were similar to both. Two segments dealt with finding low-tech civilizations and what happened with their reactors. This type of reactor was frowned on and I had them display a tokamak installation for fusing two different isotopes of hydrogen.

In my old life we had found Helium III in the rocks brought back from the moon. This material had been discussed as a way of making fusion reactor but was only espoused by some of the people that were accused of being insane or worse green. This was a hidden ace up my sleeve for it would take a team of men to go to the moon to refine this material. It came from the sun and would not make it through our atmosphere to the earth's surface.

One kilo of helium III burned with two thirds of a kilo of deuterium gives us about nineteen megawatt-years of energy output. A reactor built for this reaction would be inherently safe. The worst-case failure scenario would not result in any civilian fatalities or significant exposures to radiation.

The reaction was simple because Helium III wanted one more neutron to make it even and took the loosely held one from deuterium. I could do this now for there was some of the material produced when atomic material was maintained and from natural gas wells.

I remembered reading that there was a million tonnes on the moon. It was deposited by the solar winds and held by the regolith. All you had to do was heat the soil to six hundred degrees Celsius. Going to nine hundred degrees would drive out the oxygen so the helium would be a free byproduct.

In 2004 the United States used even more energy and it could be met by twenty five tonnes of helium III. This was just one shuttle load of the material. The cost of the hydrocarbon fuel burnt was around seventy five billion of those inflated dollars. This worked out to three billion dollars a tonne.

The worldwide demand would be about one hundred tonnes to come to a figure of three hundred billion dollars. If the estimates were right about the supply, it would last for ten thousand years but humans would start using it faster and faster.

All of this meant that fusion had to be considered as an alternative. What was learned with the tokamak could easily be transferred over to the helium reaction.

The Russian character on television explained how the word tokamak came from TOroidalnaya KAmera ee MAgnitnaya Katushka or 'toroidal chamber with magnetic field'. The device was being just started in Russia now and only one small experiment had been built. I hoped that this would start a new race for electrical power technology that would replace the cold war now still in place. This race would lead to the moon and then the stars.

The story line said that the starship was now using antimatter power to operate and how early tokamak technology had lead into this. I slipped in some hints about Helium III but didn't give this outright. Graphics had been supplied and they were the best that I could remember. Billions of dollars had been spent on the tokamak but no reactor could produce more power than it.

The two stories did bring the governments of many countries down on me. The Russians had not even coined the words or the idea yet. The Americans swallowed their own propaganda and figured that the Russians were far ahead of them. They then wondered how I had come by this information. I told them that it was actually my research into two basic types of magnetic and one type of inertial confinement ideas I had. They wanted my notes on the matter and I directed them to the net, where they had been for three days.

This got some of the old die-hards very pissed off, for they wanted to gain every advantage possible.

After a few private words to the Soviets I found myself invited to a large multinational discussion. This was where a group of various engineers and politicians from western countries discussed the future of electrical generation.

This was held in the Soviet Union. This was mainly my idea, to show the world what the Soviets had done so far in tokamak technology and then show them the state of the Soviet reactors.

The tokamak was discussed in as much detail as possible. The Soviets knew that short of a miracle there would be no possibility of producing usable energy from this device. They didn't know about the Helium and I didn't want to inform them yet. Normally all of the world's oil reserves had to be in danger of depletion before the necessary money would be found. The helium rabbit I would pull out only when the time was right.

Both sides were very shocked when I used the computer and a very functional projector to show that I knew more about the subject than they considered possible. Here my background in physics was severely tested and I could only surmise on some features. I did let them know about magnesium boride that I found to be super conductive at 16 degrees Celsius. This would be very useful in making the magnetic fields for the reactors. I apologised afterwards, because I had not even published my findings yet.

My own film crews took their own shots, so that other nations were shown what was happening and not what their own governments wanted to present. When the state of the Soviet reactors was eventually unveiled, I found many worried engineers.

Soviet construction plans were brought out and I was not shy about pointing out what I saw wrong. The Soviet engineers were hesitant to contribute at first but their politicians soon gave them the go-ahead. Training was found to be very poor and the control side was very minimal, mostly due to the fact that they had little or no computers.

The seminar went on longer than expected. Nikita Khrushchev came over when he arrived in Moscow. I had met the man a few times at parties put on by the Russian Embassy and their legation to the United Nations. The man had been in control long enough to find that he was quite restricted in his powers. He, like other politicians, had to watch their step or some upstart would take over their job. Leonid Brezhnev would next year, if I had not interfered in the events of this time.

He and his experts were apprised of my opinion at gaining western money along with western technology for an upgrade to their nuclear plants. His own experts were not that adamant of all the Soviet plants being as unsafe as I conveyed. Here, there was a difference in the meaning of the word unsafe. Life was not rated as high here as it was in North America. In China, it was seen as perfectly acceptable if any project took up to five percent of the workers.

"Mr Kramer," he said, "who am I to believe?"

"Nobody is lying to you. The Soviet Union is very large and if a few reactors suffer meltdown then only a small portion of your land and people are affected. I want no meltdowns, no deaths now, or problems for future generations."

"I will take your word for this now but our reactors have very little problems."

"That may be true and it takes more than one problem to cause a catastrophe but they do occur. With a military your size and a growing economy, this sort of thing has to happen. Now it would be my turn to disbelieve if you said that nothing has happened."

He looked at the men he had brought and then said, "There have been some problems."

At the end of the seminar the Premier did ask for assistance and this, of course, had to be put off for more discussion.

Back in North Bay I didn't wait passively. Entertainment was very important to my cause. My next set of films dealt with people doing what was right. I had signed up the Beatles in 1960 and used them in some of the British movies we made. When they started to become popular, they were encouraged to tour North America. Ed Sullivan got them first one more time, as he had Elvis, Roy Orbison and many other artists that were contracted to my company.

Films were made where it took cooperation to head off a disaster and the boogieman was always some fanatic who had no concept of what was right for his country. 'The Godfather, Part II', was done in the United States, as was 'West Side Story'. The music was remembered but I had to find talented people to work with what I could recall. Both of these were altered to show at least some cooperation.

'M.A.S.H' was done on location in South Korea and revolved around all the nationalities that fought. Much of the dialogue was in English but some was done in the local dialect for authenticity. I did my best to play the war as the enemy and not any particular race.

'The Sound of Music' was done in both Germanys, with a part of the singing done in German, English and one song even in Italian. Mario, Maria, Libra and Rita Leone had minor parts in the movie and had to go on location to do them.

'My Fair Lady' was done in the United Kingdom. There was even a small part for Sir Camm, even though I had to force him into it. To be truthful, he didn't fight too hard. 'Love Story' was done in Italy and the music was a mixture of Italian and English. The music was not the same but just as good. 'The Raiders of the Lost Ark' was done in Russia, Brazil and The United States. 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' was done in France and Switzerland but again I had the film shot in different languages.

I didn't have any anti heroes, except perhaps what could be said for the Godfather one and two. Physical conflict, too, was kept to a minimal amount. I remembered all the violence on TV when I was growing up and saw its effect on the children of the world. This could be substantiated by seeing the various films from around the world and then seeing how violent the youth were after a few years of watching them. Westerns were popular and these, too, had to be toned down. The viewers even got a dose of reality when I showed how we had treated the aborigines.