“Try beryllium, americium, and plutonium besides the depleted uranium,” he said. “Those rounds were made of U-238 dross from the enriched stuff we processed here.”

“So it’s ironic that I’m here,” I said.

“Irony has nothing to do with it. And neither does depleted uranium, I don’t think. I asked for you because of your credentials.”

“So I gathered. When you sent a check for twenty grand and a request for an interview, I figured there was more to it than you asking how I’ve been. This is about Rocky Flats, right?”

“It is.”

“Then I don’t understand how you expect a civilian investigator, an outsider, to accomplish anything here, considering your safeguards and security requirements.”

“Felix, it’s precisely because you’re an outsider. A known quantity I can trust. For example, three weeks after you took the Blanford case, you traced them to their hideout in St. Lucia and found their stash of embezzled monies on Vanuatu.”

“How’d you learn about that?” I asked.

“The Patriot Act,” Gilbert replied smugly. “Ask the right questions and it’s amazing what can be learned. Your reputation is impressive.”

“Okay, so I do a good job,” I said. “What does this have to do with me being here?”

Gilbert walked over to a map of Rocky Flats on the wall adjacent to his desk. He pointed with his pen to a collection of black rectangles inside a crooked trapezoid on the map. “This is the Protected Area.”

“The 700 series of buildings,” I said. “Where you manufactured plutonium detonators from enriched uranium. I did my homework.”

“Good. The situation…” he drawled, pausing to indicate that by situation he meant problem, “began here.” He tapped his pen against the rectangle labeled Building 707.

“And this situation is?”

Gilbert turned from the map. “We were finishing the final survey of Building 707 for decontamination and demolition when…” Gilbert cleared his throat. “We had an outbreak of nymphomania.”

Nymphomania? Rocky Flats was getting weirder by the minute. I cupped my hand behind an ear and tipped my head. “What? Run that by me again.”

“It began with rumors of a few of our women employees rushing home to their significant others and leaving them exhausted. After a week or so, more of the women began engaging in coitus with their coworkers-in closets, conference rooms, secure chambers within the protected area. Even the most reticent were affected. My own secretary, a Sunday school teacher, is on administrative leave because of this.”

“I hope she’s okay.” Though I wasn’t sure how she could’ve hurt herself, other than getting a sore vagina.

“She’s fine. It’s her poor husband who couldn’t keep up. Threw his back out.”

“My condolences.”

“We’ve worked hard at recruiting women, and damn if it hasn’t backfired on us. Half of our guard force is female, and in case you didn’t notice, none of them are on duty. It’s played hell with our productivity, our morale, and our security. Two, make that three weeks ago, one of our female guards got the itch, which she satisfied at gunpoint with a victim.”

“Must’ve been one hell of a scandal.”

“You’d think so,” Gilbert said. “But God watches out for drunks, fools, and DOE. Turns out the visitor was a senior auditor from the Office of Management and Budget. He was going to ream us about our property accountability-or lack thereof-when the guard pulled him over and had her way with him. What could have been a disaster for us became instead a delightful encounter for some wonk from OMB. On the street he’d pay five hundred bucks for treatment like that. Here he got it for free.” Gilbert sighed. “That was the most extreme example.”

“So what’d you do?” I asked. “Let these women screw their brains out on government time?”

“What was the alternative?” Gilbert replied. “Fire fifty percent of our workforce? DOE wants full disclosure of our activities-except for the embarrassing stuff.” He fidgeted with the knot of his tie. “At first we thought we’d just let the women get it out of their systems. To accommodate their needs, as it were,” he cleared his throat, “we had open purchase orders with every lifestyle store in the metroplex. Vibrators, dildos, lube by the gallon, condoms by the gross. We even had copies of the Kama Sutra delivered in bulk.”

“Fortunately, we discovered an ally among the pharmaceuticals.” Gilbert opened a side drawer to his desk and produced a small plastic bottle. He shook the vial, rattling the green-and-white pills inside. “A daily dose of sixty grams of selective serotin reuptake inhibitors. Fluoxetine hydrochloride. Prozac.”

Gilbert put the bottle away. “Now we have plenty of happy women and very few horny ones. Rumor has it the holdouts were tramps to begin with.”

“So, is the outbreak, if you want to call it that, contained?”

“Yes.” Gilbert unfolded a paper from a folder. “This shows how the outbreak spread.” The chart was a spiderweb of lines linked to circles that denoted each affected individual. “Here in the center are the first three women contaminated. Since we didn’t know they had been exposed to something transmittable, we didn’t have the foresight to quarantine them.”

“How was it spread?”

“We’re not sure. Perhaps by casual contact, a handshake for example. Maybe by airborne transmission. The outbreak has been contained, meaning no new instances of, er, the nymphomania.”

“And the women contaminated now are under medical supervision?” I asked.

“Yes. Fortunately the outbreak seems to have passed. Most of the women affected are on medical leave or have been transferred.”

“Then case closed. What do you need me for?”

“To find the cause.”

“Gilbert, this sounds like a job for the Centers for Disease Control. You need teams of viral pathologists and microbiologists-not me.”

Gilbert returned to the map. He jabbed at Building 707. “Something happened here that triggered the outbreak. On Valentine’s Day, no less. The first women infected were part of the survey team.”

“So what’s keeping you from finding out?” I asked. “You’re responsible for the goddamn cleanup. Right?”

“Right. And wrong,” Gilbert replied wearily. “The audit trail ends the day before the surveillance.”

“What do you mean, ends?”

“The paperwork was done, all right. I just can’t find it. All the files from the final phase of the Building 707 reclamation are gone.”

“This sounds like more than missing paperwork,” I said. “This is a turf battle within DOE, and I’ve learned to stay out of family fights. If DOE is comfortable with this fabrication, then why do you care?”

Gilbert’s fist tightened. The heavy smell of cabbage-almost artificially strong-tainted his perspiration. He either needed to ease up on the kimchi or try a better deodorant.

“I didn’t come to DOE from a weapons background,” he said. “I came from the environmental side. Believe it or not, some of us at DOE do care about the Earth. And besides that, I’m not going to hang for someone else’s mistakes.”

“Fair enough,” I replied. “Now tell me, how far can a private investigator poke into business here?”

“Your cover would be that you’re a nuclear health physics consultant.”

“Why not up the stakes and pass me off as a two-headed plastic surgeon? What do I know about nuclear health physics?”

“You don’t have to know anything. Just talk bullshit and you’ll fit right in.”

“What about a security clearance?”

Gilbert pulled a form from the folder on his desk. “With your top-secret army clearance, I was able to fast-track you a DOE Q-clearance.”

“I only had a secret clearance in the army.”

Gilbert shrugged. “Somebody made a typo. By the time the Office of Internal Security finds out, you’ll be done and out of here.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence, but the more I hear, the more I think your optimism might be a little misplaced.”