Dr. Bill Brockton is in the middle of a nuclear-terrorism disaster drill when he recieves an urgent call from the town of Oak Ridge-better known as Atomic City, home of the Bomb, and the key site for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bill and his assistant Miranda Lovelady rush over to find a body frozen facedown in a swimming pool behind a historic, crumbling there. The body happens to be that of a renowned physicist and designer of a plutonium reactor integral to the Manhattan Project and that he didn't drown, but died from a searing dose of radioactivity.