Crocodile Tears

night?”
    “ I saw it. What a game!”
    Soccer, cricket, tennis … whatever. Sports were their currency. Every day, the plant operators passed it between them, and Ravi had deliberately watched Wimbledon the night before so that he could join in the conversation. Even in the cool of the corridor, he was sweating. He could feel the perspiration beading on his forehead and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. Surely someone would stop him and ask him why he was still holding on to his toolbox. Everyone knew the correct procedure. It should be opened and searched, all the contents taken out.
    But it didn’t happen. A moment later, he was through. Nobody had so much as questioned him. It had gone just as he thought it would. Knew it would. Nobody had lifted off the top tray of the toolbox and discovered the twenty pounds of C4 plastic explosive concealed underneath.
    Ravi walked away from the barrier and stopped in front of a row of shelves. He pulled out a small plastic device that looked like a pager. This was his EPD—or Electronic Personal Dosimeter. It would record his own radiation level and warn him if he came into contact with any radioactive material. It had already been set with his personal ID and security clearance. There were four levels of security at Jowada, each one allowing access to areas with different risks of contamination. Just for once, Ravi’s EPD had been set to the highest level. Today he was going to enter the heart of the power station, the reactor chamber itself.

    This was where the deadly flame of Jowada burned. Sixty thousand uranium fuel rods, each one 3.85
    meters long, bound together inside the pressure vessel that was the reactor itself. Every minute of the day and night, twenty thousand tons of fresh water were sent rushing through pipes both to cool the beast and to tame it. The resulting steam—two tons of it every second—powered the turbines. The turbines produced electricity. That was how it worked. In many ways it was very simple.
    A nuclear reactor is at once the safest and the most dangerous place on the planet. An accident might have such nightmarish consequences that there can be no accident. The reactor chamber at Jowada was made out of steel-reinforced concrete. The walls were five feet thick. The great dome, stretching out over the whole thing, was the height and breadth of a major cathedral. In the event of a malfunction, the reactor could be turned off in seconds. And whatever happened in this room would be contained.
    Nothing could be allowed to leak through to the outside world.
    A thousand safeguards had been built into the construction and the running of Jowada. One man with a dream of watching cricket in London was about to blow them apart.
    The approach had come six weeks before at the street corner closest to his apartment: two men, one a European, the other from Delhi. It turned out that the second man, the one from Delhi, was a friend of Ravi’s cousin Jagdish, who worked in the kitchen of a five-star hotel. Once they had recognized each other, it seemed only natural to go for tea and samosas … particularly as the European was paying.
    “ How much do they pay you at Jowada?” The European knew the answer without having to ask. “Only fifteen thousand rupees a month, yes? A child couldn’t live on that amount, and you have a wife and a family. These people! They cheat the honest worker. Maybe it’s time they were taught a lesson… .”

    Very quickly the conversation was steered the way the two men wanted it to go, and that first time, they’d left him with a gift, a fake Rolex watch. And why not? Jagdish had done them favors in the past, giving them free food that he had stolen from the kitchen. Now it was their turn to look after Ravi. The next time they met, a week later, it was an iPhone—the real thing. But the gifts were only a glimpse of all the riches that could be his if he would just agree to undertake a piece of business on their behalf. It was dangerous. A few people might be hurt. “But for you, my friend, it will mean a new life.
    Everything you ever wanted can be yours… .”
    Ravi Chandra entered the reactor chamber of the Jowada nuclear power station at exactly eight o’clock.
    Four other engineers went in with him. They had to go in one at a time through an air lock—a white, circular corridor with an automatic sliding door at each end. In many ways it looked like something out of a space-ship, and its purpose was