And smooths the, well, thin hair of the woman with the thinning hair. When Patuk had gotten ready for this assignment he’d been surprised that—shall we say—nuclear power plants were so easily attacked. The primary and emergency cooling systems are extremely easy to switch off, he’d read in a Tor forum, if you knew a few basics of nuclear science. Or you’re a decent engineer. Fine, something different. Plutonium was the magic word. The streets are paved with plutonium, so to speak. In doctors’ offices, hospitals, and. Right here, in this isotope lab, where they’re making some shit or other. And where this unattractive person works as the overnight security guard. They can’t even afford an IT-managed fully automatic surveillance system. But plutonium in old cabinets. Like in the developing world. Patuk touches the desperate woman’s body parts. He knows his audience. They love to be touched. They’re a certain age. That is, an age at which they can imagine the end. When the skin, yeah, well. No longer young, anyway. Nothing more is going to happen for the next thirty years. Poor, mad woman. Patuk caresses her knee. Even if he doesn’t have at his disposal the intellectual acuity to cause an atomic reactor to melt down, he’s enough on the ball to have found this facility here and picked up the overnight security guard. On the floor is a metal canister with a radioactive warning sign. Patuk assumes it is plutonium. He’d looked up images online beforehand. He has no idea. He’s a moron. He doesn’t even know that terrorism is something from a completely different era. Inside the metal canister are probably the cylinders with the fissile material. You shouldn’t touch it without gloves. Though best not to touch it at all. Patuk has forgotten what he saw online on the subject. Too much information. It’s all making Patuk exhausted. That he now has this fucking plutonium, assuming, that is, that there is some in the container, and that he thought it would be easy to build a dirty bomb, some sort of cannon that you can put in the bed of a pickup truck and then off with the thing to—let’s say—Oxford Street on a Saturday. Anticipated damage in the billions, the temporary sealing off of square kilometers of the city center, decontamination costs, cancellation costs, depreciation of residential and commercial property. Victims with serious radiological poisoning, considerable psychological effects on parts of the populace, which is to say: radiophobia. But Patuk has no idea how you build a cannon or where he’s supposed to get a pickup truck. Patuk grits his teeth with rage at these complications. Every fucking thing is online, and yet he can’t find a stupid tutorial on building a bomb. He’ll just have to pour the stuff into the ventilation system of a department store. Can you pour the stuff? Surely. Patuk doesn’t think any further. He sees death, chaos, and security forces shooting him. He’ll go down in history like Mohamed Atta. He tickles the woman with the thinning hair under the chin, takes the canister. “I’m off,” he says. And he goes.