Lethal Exposure (11 page)

Craig and Jackson huddled by the door, trying to draw in deep breaths, but each gasp burned. Craig’s lungs were ablaze, as if he had breathed in the acid that had been used to destroy Dumenco’s computer. Jackson retched and coughed beside him, incapacitated. Craig raised his head to the window, took another huge gulp of fresh air.

On the other side of the building, he heard a car start, then drive off. Their attacker had escaped, but Craig couldn’t continue the pursuit. He slumped back, struggling just to remain conscious.

CHAPTER 15

Wednesday, 4:33 PM

Bangalore, India

Nicholas Bretti did not loosen his grip on his airline seat until the small plane had landed safely at the Bangalore airport. He wondered if he would ever relax again, would ever sleep without nightmares, would ever stop jumping and twitching at every little unexpected sound.

It wasn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Exactly two hours after leaving Mr. Ambalal and the Liberty for All Party in New Delhi—fifteen hours after taking off from O’Hare in Chicago, and less than a day after shooting an FBI agent—Bretti was sober and ready to meet the people who had paid his bills the past year. He had to make this good, or else they would never help him out of this mess. What other choice did he have?

He worried that his reception in Bangalore would be no different from what he had experienced in New Delhi. Despite the $25,000 he had already pocketed, he was beginning to wonder if Chandrawalia would make good on his promise to come through with the rest of the money. . . .

Twenty-five grand—a year’s salary. Was that enough for the hell he had gotten himself into? Shit, no. Now it was up to the Indian government to salvage the situation, but he had no idea if they would be sympathetic.

Exiting the jet ramp into the terminal, Bretti was mobbed by a dozen children. They swarmed around him, plunging their hands into his pockets, searching for coins and jabbering the only English phrases they knew, “Please give, sir! Please give!”

Scents of incense and curry mixed with the pungent odor of unwashed bodies. Unprotected by the buffer of a customs area this time, Bretti fought his way through an ever-shifting mob toward the airport exit.

The terminal building bustled with people, some wearing sarongs, others, like the children around him, in shorts and dirty white T-shirts. He saw men, women, boys . . . but there were no little girls in sight. Maybe the families kept them locked up somewhere.

A cackling chicken flew into the air as a family tried to stuff it back into a cage at the check-in counter. A dark-robed old woman with a ring through her nose and a red mark on her forehead, clutched a baby goat to her breast.

Fifty feet away by the outside door, a man wearing a black-and-yellow splotched shirt held up a sign,
BRETTI
. Bretti made eye contact with the man, who waved for him to follow. “Here, sir!”

Bretti pushed through a forest of chattering, begging children. They all tried to touch him, all pleaded for his help. Bretti felt one hand slip into his back pocket. Grabbing a slender wrist, Bretti whirled the young pickpocket around, keyed up and angry from his long tension.

With wild black hair and a dirty face, the boy could not have been older than ten. He laughed as Bretti held him up by his arm; the boy dangled in front of the other children and tried to swipe at Bretti with his free hand.

Before Bretti could admonish the pickpocket, another hand clawed at the back of his pants. Bretti threw the boy backward, bowling over two other children behind him. He knocked the prying hands away. “Get out of here, you little bastards!” He shouted, and the kids howled with laughter.

Bretti pushed his way through the crowd, paying no attention to who he ran into or pushed out of the way. He kept a free hand on his wallet. The crowd parted as he shoved through.

The man with the sign waved out the door. He smiled beneath a scrawny mustache. “This way, please, sir.” He disappeared from sight.

Bretti pushed out of the crowded building toward a dark blue sedan with tinted windows. A driver wearing a black British polo cap stood beside the long car. When he saw Bretti, he opened the car door.

The humid air still stank outside the terminal, but at least there were fewer people. Bretti strode for the car, his skin crawling from the sheer, overpowering crowds. The driver opened the door, and Bretti dove into the luxury of the air-conditioned interior. As he relaxed back into the seat, someone pounded at the tinted window. It was the first boy who had tried to lift his wallet. The boy and two of his friends pressed their faces against the tinted window, trying to look in. They hammered with their fists, then pressed their tongues against the window, leaving long slimy wet spots.

The man with the sign slipped into car’s front seat, and the driver pulled out immediately, oblivious to the children, the people, or any other obstacle. The first man turned and grinned. “Welcome to India, Dr. Bretti. How was your flight?”

“
Mr
. Bretti,” he said sourly. The car moved slowly through road construction as they left the airport. “I have an important package in a diplomatic pouch—”

“We have made arrangements for it to be delivered, sir. Only the very best for your visit. The Sikander Research Center is only a short drive from here. You are to meet with the scientific staff before going to the Regency Hotel. Very nice accommodations—four star.”

“Great,” muttered Bretti. “Four-star.” He dreaded finding out what the Indians meant by that.

Looking through the saliva-streaked window, he spotted a gleaming, arrow-straight building that rose a hundred feet into the air, as modern as anything he would find in Chicago . . . but it was surrounded by dilapidated shacks that swarmed with pigs, chickens, and scrawny dogs. Barefoot men sat on their haunches smoking cigarettes while men in expensive suits hurried past them into the skyscraper. It was a comedy of extremes, an excess of dissonance. Two young men urinated openly against another ultra-modern building.

The limousine eased into a traffic circle behind a cart pulled by a camel. White Brahma bulls munched on grass in the center of the circle. A pair of monkeys scampered across the windshield, then dashed off onto the hood of another vehicle. Bicyclists, sandal-footed pedestrians, women in sarongs paraded in front of him. A dark
raj
wearing a British pith helmet, red jacket and white gloves nonchalantly directed traffic at the end of the traffic circle.

Bretti shrank back in his seat, overwhelmed by the people, the chaos. “This is like wandering through the movie set of
Jumanji
.”

His guide twisted in his seat. “Yes, much to see here, sir.” He hesitated, as if worried he might offend Bretti. “If I may make a small suggestion, I noticed that sir was having difficulty with our street urchins. They mean no harm. But if sir would be kind enough to keep his wallet in his front pocket, then he will not have to worry.”

Bretti grunted and transferred his wallet to his front pocket, dreading how much he would have to get used to in this crazy, mixed-up place. His stomach felt like lead—what if he had to remain here in exile for the rest of his life? Maybe even prison in the U.S. would be better than that.

The limo turned right and stopped at a gate in a high brick fence that shielded a large, enclosed compound from view. The driver flashed an ID, and the guard waved them through.

Once inside, Bretti felt as if he had been transported to another world. Yellow, red, and blue flowers provided startling color in immaculately groomed gardens arranged in curving lines that drew the eye toward a central white building, four stories tall. Neatly trimmed trees with white lines painted around their bases were widely spaced in radial lines emanating from the main building.

Bretti noticed several cottages and a dormitory beside the central building, with a volleyball net and swingsets in the rear. Three satellite dishes, each thirty feet in diameter, pointed at different azimuths. Aside from the guard that had waved them in, he saw no people, or animals. Only blessed peace and quiet.

They drove along a curving path to the front of the building. A big-boned man with a potbelly and a blue turban stepped out from under an awning as the car glided to a stop. He made no attempt to open the passenger door, so Bretti opened it himself and stepped out.

“Dr. Bretti? I am Dr. Punjab, director of the Sikander Lodi Research Institute. Mr. Chandrawalia has told us much about you.”

Bretti pressed his lips together. He was too weary and too frazzled to keep correcting these towelheads. How was he ever going to live here, settle down, adjust to this backward, noisy, crowded culture? “I’m glad to be here, finally. I’ve been told my equipment will be arriving here after me.”

Dr. Punjab led him inside the main building. “Actually, your equipment arrived several minutes ago. We had a special courier meet your plane. Would you care to inspect your device in our high bay area?”

“Sure.” Bretti followed Punjab inside the air-conditioned building, annoyed that his Penning trap was getting better treatment than he was. But he had gotten himself into this. Chandrawalia had made no promises, other than payment for the delivery of antiprotons stolen from the accelerator.

In the wide lobby, display cases showed scale models of huge capacitor banks, satellites, launch vehicles, and computer-generated images. Explanation cards beneath the models were written in nine different languages, English at the bottom.

A greeting line of eleven scientists and engineers, all but one wearing a turban, bowed and shook his hand. Everyone smiled. Bretti found most of their names impossible to pronounce, and his eyes glazed over.

Before they entered the high bay experimental area, one skinny man stepped up and said, “I am most anxious to learn about how you enhance your beam to increase p-bar production. It is a miraculous breakthrough.”

“Uh, thanks.” Bretti wondered if they would be very upset when they learned that the enhancement process had all been Dumenco’s wild theory, not his own. And that he had brought the antimatter in one of the old, simple magnetic bottles instead of a crystal-lattice trap. But all they really wanted was the antimatter, for their high-tech medical applications and cancer treatment possibilities. They’d get the rest of the p-bars later; that was the important thing.

Dr. Punjab steered him up a long flight of metal stairs to a balcony that overlooked a cavernous high bay. Punjab’s staff followed at a polite distance.

Four stories high and half a football field deep, the high bay experimental area sprawled in front of him. A yellow twenty-ton crane hung from the ceiling; white-painted concrete blocks each a yard long and two feet thick were stacked in a maze, creating small storage alcoves against the wall.

At the center of the high bay a tall cylinder stood twenty feet across with six blue rectangular arms, each as big as a boxcar, spread out radially like a six-sided star. Bretti saw the diplomatic pouch container holding the Penning trap near the central cylinder.

Dr. Punjab grasped the railing and spoke, pride evident in his voice. “This is Experiment 322, our one hundred megajoule capacitor bank. It is capable of discharging hundreds of megamperes of current in less than five microseconds to a center load—we can produce over thirty trillion watts of power here. It is the largest fast capacitor bank in the world.” He pointed at a long thin tube on the side of the bay near where Bretti’s still-crated Penning trap sat. “Our antimatter injector will dump your p-bars directly to the center of the load.”

Bretti looked out over the experimental area and sniffed. “This looks like a high-current physics experiment. What does this have to do with medical applications? How are you going to treat patients if the machine is half the size of a hospital?”

“Medical applications? Oh, yes.” Punjab smiled tightly. “This is a proof-of-principle experiment, Dr. Bretti. We have much larger plans for your antimatter.”

Bretti glanced around the bay area. “Well, use it sparingly. I’m not sure when you’ll be getting the rest.”

Punjab scowled at him. “You are not in a position to dictate terms, Dr. Bretti. Come. You must show us how to extract the antimatter.”

Bretti followed the chief scientist back down the metal stairs to the high bay floor. Whirring sounds of a machine shop came from a door at the base of the stairs. He smelled hot metal, lubricants, capacitor oils—refreshing after the nauseating smells of sardine-packed humanity. Technicians dressed in blue lab coats and orange or green pants milled around diagnostic units set in cement-block cubbyholes. Weirdly out of place, two guards with rifles sauntered along a catwalk, high above the floor.

Bretti peered at one of the capacitor boxes for Experiment 322, reading the manufacturer’s mark on the side. “Maxwell capacitors? This all seems pretty standard for a high-capacitor lab.” He glanced at the guards patrolling overhead. “Mr. Chandrawalia emphasized the need for secrecy. Why?”

Dr. Punjab studied Bretti for a moment. While the rest of his staff remained in the background, he brushed back his beard and spoke in slow, carefully measured tones. “Mr. Chandrawalia explained to you the, ah, commercial applications of what we intend to do here? Manufacture artificial medical isotopes to sell on the world market?”

“Of course,” said Bretti. “It would take years to get permission to do that at Fermilab—if they ever allowed it in the first place. The accelerator is a research tool, and if some congressman ever found out that we were pouring millions of dollars into underwriting India’s latest commercial activity, he’d have a fit. But we’re in
India
right now, and it seems a little cloak-and-daggerish to keep all this so secret.”

“We have our own reasons for operating the way we do, Dr. Bretti. There are other countries, notably Pakistan, who would do anything to ruin things for us. There is intense competition for a niche in this, ah . . .
market
.”

Bretti shrugged. India’s preoccupation with Pakistan was similar to the US and the ex-Soviet Union during the Cold War. But, whatever motivated a country wasn’t his business. As long as he got his money, he didn’t care. If they wanted guards around, they could keep them.

Punjab nodded toward Bretti’s Penning trap, still in its shipping container. “Please, we are anxious to begin our experiments. Tell us about your increase in p-bar production, how you enhance your beam. This is accomplished by a resonance change in the cross-section, is it not? Where did you get the gamma ray laser to do this? And you need to show us how to extract the antimatter from the salt trap, as well.”