Lethal Exposure (19 page)

CHAPTER 31

Friday, 6:17 AM

Aurora, Illinois

Jackson snatched up his cellular phone on the car seat after the first shrill ring. The traffic in small, residential Batavia was almost non-existent at this hour. It beat the hell out of putting up with the idiots driving in downtown Chicago, and for an assignment away from the Oakland area, it wasn’t bad—except for the fact that Ben Goldfarb was lying in Intensive Care.

“Jackson here,” he said, keeping one hand on the steering wheel as he drove toward the medical center. Time was running out, not only for Goldfarb, but for Dumenco as well.

“This is Craig. Where are you right now?”

“Ten minutes from the hospital. I volunteered to watch Dumenco this morning, since the Board will still be investigating yesterday’s shooting. Agent Schultz is banged up and won’t be back on duty for a while, so I offered to help out the troops from the main Chicago office.”

“I’ll take that duty,” Craig said. “I’m trying to make some . . .
arrangements
for Dumenco in downtown Chicago, and then I have to go to a gift shop Paige told me about.”

“A gift shop?” Jackson said.

“Don’t ask,” Craig said. “It’s important. But I was planning to go through the experimental area early this morning,
without
Dr. Piter present, to get a fresh view on Dumenco’s accident. Can you cover that for me instead? You might see something I missed the first time.”

“That’ll be the day! Okay, I’ll grab Frank Chang, the grad student who showed me around Bretti’s cubicle.” Jackson signaled with his right blinker as Craig spoke, looking for a place to turn around. “Anything special I should be looking for?”

“Get him to take you along Dr. Dumenco’s path the day he received his lethal exposure. See if you can figure out what it would take for someone to disengage the safety interlocks. Could our hospital assassin have done it, or did it have to be an inside job, as Dumenco insists? I’m still not convinced that just anybody could work the beam controls.”

Jackson pulled onto the shoulder and slowed to a stop, heading toward the Fermilab site. A single cow stood by a barbed-wire fence, watching Jackson’s car. “Craig,” he said, “just check up on Ben for me this morning, would you?”

“Mr. Chang, I want to go over the safety interlocks in addition to seeing the experimental target area where Dumenco’s accident occurred.”

Chang tossed his long hair over his shoulder, grinning with self-importance to be the FBI agent’s picked escort. “You’re in luck, since we just shut the accelerator down. P-bar production suddenly shot off the scale, which is pretty incredible, exactly as Dr. Dumenco predicted. Something screwy is happening in the accelerator, and until the theorists come up with a good explanation, we’ll play it safe.”

Chang gestured for Jackson to follow him, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Dr. Piter’s going to have a fit when he finds out the accelerator is down again, especially because of increased p-bar production. Sometimes it seems he doesn’t
want
to see anything that would verify Dumenco’s work. Piter’s a . . . sore loser, I guess you’d say. He’s got his heart set on that Nobel.”

“What about all the construction work on this extension ring—the Main Injector. Doesn’t that interfere with your work? Lots of shutdowns?”

Chang shrugged. “Some of their heavy machinery screws up our delicate beam balance, but we just have to deal with it.”

Jackson followed the young man down the tunnels. He smelled ozone, lubricants, cool concrete, metal shavings. “So what’s it like working for a person up for the Nobel?” he asked in a forced conversational tone. “Must be exciting.”

Chang squinted up at him. “You mean Dr. Piter? I don’t really work directly for him, he just holds the purse strings. But the man’s a slave driver, a real nanomanager, looking at administrative details down to the billionth part.” The grad student shook his head, flashing his goofy grin again. “He’s lucky to keep any grad students around.”

“So why don’t you leave, go somewhere else?” Jackson towered over the young graduate student.

Chang looked appalled. “Hey, I’ve got a chance to be in on the discovery of the century. If this p-bar enhancement really works, then we’ll be in an energy range close enough to go for the elusive Higgs boson.” He looked at Jackson as if he expected the lean agent to share the excitement, but Jackson didn’t even know what he was talking about. “When the Main Injector comes on line next year, the whole accelerator will work in this new energy range, and we just might have a chance to detect it. Wouldn’t that be something?” Jackson blinked, but Chang’s enthusiasm was infectious.

They passed through a chain-link gate to the main beam tunnel and walked briskly down concrete steps into the long experimental target area. Their footsteps echoed against the bare walls. Industrial lights burned at intervals down the tunnel.

“Dr. Dumenco was down here during the emergency beam dump,” Chang said. “He never should have been in the area, not with the beam on. It’s a safety hazard.”

“Yes, he sure proved that.” As they walked, Jackson continued asking questions. “So what exactly happened to the guy? Some sort of an accident dumped the beam in here?”

“It does that automatically,” Chang said. “If the beam fluctuates too much, if it’s contaminated, the system shuts down and the beam crashes down here. Dr. Dumenco happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.”

Jackson craned his neck. The tunnel was deserted and silent, except for a low, throbbing hum.

Chang nodded to the left. “I can unlock the systems from the control room just around the corner.” He pushed away black hair that had fallen into his eyes. “Then you can look around wherever you want. There’s nothing dangerous down here anyway.” He hurried down the tunnel, disappearing into the shadows.

Alone now, Jackson looked around the huge underground facility, built to recreate conditions that had existed during the earliest seconds of the universe. But with all the concern now about social ills and poverty, Jackson seriously doubted the public would ever go for building anything so massive again—unless the benefits could somehow be more clearly explained . . . and scientists weren’t terribly good at things like that. He thought of the expensive Superconducting Supercollider that was supposed to have been constructed in Texas.

For now, though, the big science didn’t matter at all to Jackson—he was more interested in finding Ben Goldfarb’s assailant. Damn, he hoped his friend would come through all this.

The sound of someone shuffling across the concrete floor drew his attention, coming from farther down the curved tunnel, labored breaths, heavy footsteps, as of someone carrying a heavy load. It was early in the morning, and few people were around. Frank Chang had gone in the other direction.

“Mr. Chang?” Jackson called out. He looked around. Nothing. He saw only the series of lights that disappeared in the distance, darkness and a cold silence like a held breath. He took a step forward, his brow furrowed. “Who’s there?” He felt his weapon in its pancake holster at his hip. “This is the FBI—stop and identify yourself.”

Without warning he heard the sound of feet slapping against the concrete floor—someone turning around and running away through the darkness.

Jackson set off after the footsteps. “Stop!” Why would someone would be skulking around in the tunnels where Dumenco had been zapped, so long before work hours?

As he ran, the tunnel gently curved ahead of him, and Jackson never quite seemed to reach a place where he could see his fugitive. He heard panting breaths over the background hum of the machinery. “Hey!”

Somewhere ahead the shadowy figure stopped. He heard a key scraping against metal followed by the unmistakable creaking of a heavy door swinging out. He saw a young, disheveled man with flushed skin, sweat-plastered dark hair, and a scruffy goatee—and he recognized the face of Dumenco’s grad student Nicholas Bretti, the man who was supposedly on a vacation fishing trip, but who had been impossible to locate. And Bretti was here—at Fermilab, in hiding! The young man vanished ahead, running in full panic.

“Nicholas Bretti! FBI—I know you! Stop right now!” Jackson sprinted into the uneven light. He still couldn’t see Bretti. He almost ran past a dark shadow at the side of the tunnel until he recognized an opening.

Breathing hard, Jackson cautiously placed a hand on the metal door to a diagnostics alcove and tried to peer through the darkness into the side chamber. Nothing. No sound, no light.
Where’s the light switch?

He tightened his fingers and wondered if he should draw his weapon—but other than the sound of someone running away, there had been no indication that this situation threatened his life.

Ever since Ruby Ridge, FBI guidelines had been crystal clear about the use of deadly force, and this instance certainly didn’t qualify. Especially after shooting Dumenco’s would-be assassin yesterday, Jackson couldn’t take any chances.

But then somebody—maybe even more than one person—had tried to kill Georg Dumenco. And someone had shot Goldfarb, someone had attacked him and Craig with poison gas. Perhaps it had been Bretti.

Jackson took a cautious step into the darkened room. “This is the FBI. Special Agent Jackson—come out and identify yourself.” He heard breathing, a skittered footsteps—and his own heart pounding.

Jackson felt cold sweat form at his brow.
Man, I wish I had a backup right now
. In his mind’s eye he saw Goldfarb being shot all over again . . . except this time it was
him
.

He cautiously reached out with his right hand to pat the alcove wall for a light switch. Again, nothing. He swept his arm in a half circle against the wall and finally found a control box. Fumbling, he switched it on, at the same time drawing his weapon and crouching, ready for the worst.

A row of overhead fluorescent lights flicked on, dim at first, but throwing enough light to show equipment jumbled across the floor. A dozen gray metal carts held oscilloscopes, computers, users’ manuals, and instruments. A large-diameter pipe ran through the room about ten feet off the floor, one of the conduits for the high-energy beam from the giant accelerator. He heard a low-frequency throbbing, seemingly from the large conduit.
The beam channel
? Was the accelerator running again?

“Identify yourself.” Remaining in a low crouch, Jackson swept his outstretched gun hand around in a semicircle. Inside the room he heard no sound of movement. He had been tricked, somehow. Bretti wasn’t here.

Jackson purposely tried to slow his breathing—but he knew his body was kicking into high gear, dumping adrenaline into his system. His heart pounded as he inched into the alcove. The place looked like a high-tech junkyard, a cross between a futuristic lab and a storage facility for computer nerds. Red and green lights glowed from every panel—taking data?

Jackson spotted an emergency phone on the wall to his right. He edged over, keeping his eyes on the equipment in the alcove, wondering where Bretti could have gone. He wouldn’t allow himself to get in the same situation as Goldfarb without a backup.

He glanced at the digits while punching in the numbers for Craig’s cellular phone. He looked up but could see no movement. Three cheerful tones played, then a metallic voice: “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not valid. Please dial 8 to access numbers outside the laboratory.”

Jackson swung his attention back to phone—

The lights clicked off, plunging the alcove in darkness. He heard someone moving, gasping deep breaths, then the heavy metal door slammed, sealing Jackson inside.

Stumbling forward, holding his handgun in front of him, Jackson made his way toward the door. He tried to keep low, not sure if anyone remained in the room. He couldn’t be more than ten feet from the door, but it seemed a mile away.

His knee struck something hard—one of the metal carts. A sharp edge cut his knee. Finally, he crashed into the door, found the handle. Pushed—

Nothing. Some kind of locking mechanism had fallen into place, and he was trapped.

Then he heard the low frequency thrumming grow louder in the conduit running across the room. Had the accelerator powered up again? Icy sweat bristled on his brow as he pounded on the sealed door.

His situation must have been just like Dumenco’s, just before he received his lethal exposure.

CHAPTER 32

Friday, 8:43 A.M.

Fox River Medical Center, Intensive Care Unit

Despite intensive searching, the FBI computer files had no match for the fingerprints found on the bleached-blond assassin Jackson had shot in the hospital. Craig looked down at the faxed notice he had just received from FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC and frowned.

He hoped June Atwood wasn’t holding out on him again this time.

He crumpled the fax and turned to Trish who stood next to him in Dumenco’s room. From her mannerisms, her extreme attentiveness, she seemed more like a grieving friend than a concerned doctor. Even after all of her ministrations, the dying man had entered his final stages and she could do little to help him.

Less than a week ago he had been a driven, intelligent physicist on the verge of winning a Nobel. Day by day, he had disintegrated.

Trish looked at Craig for support, but he found it hard to credit her grief for what it was. Once, she’d been the most intimate friend Craig had ever had. But even before their breakup, though, Trish had spent so much time with her impassioned causes, her intense medical studies, her outspoken work with the victims of Chernobyl . . . he wasn’t even sure he knew who she was anymore.

Dumenco tried to sit up, coughing. Fluids had leaked into his lungs, and each breath was labored. Trish had muttered something about him developing ARDS—adult respiratory distress syndrome—secondary to his sepsis. His words were now heavily accented and difficult to understand.

“I feel . . .
detached
, Dr. LeCroix,” he said. “My body is fighting off a thousand infections, as if I’m rejecting my own internal organs.”

Trish bent closer to him. “That’s a good way of describing it.”

“Having trouble thinking, too. Connections aren’t fitting together right in my thoughts, leading to nonsense.” He coughed out a small laugh. “Maybe
now
I’ll be able to understand quantization. . . .”

It seemed important for Dumenco to give Trish all the data he could, describing his symptoms in excruciating detail day by day as he degenerated. He meant to leave one last legacy to science. Looking pained, Trish wrote down the notes he dictated.

Craig could hardly bear to watch. Awkwardly, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the gift he had bought at a strip mall. He stepped forward, placing the flat, squarish box on the table beside the hospital bed, weighing down the sheafs of experimental papers.

“I brought you something, Dr. Dumenco,” he said. As the scientist turned his attention, Craig opened the ends of the deceptively heavy cardboard box. Moving gingerly, he slid out a small but beautifully polished chessboard made of alternating squares of onyx and jade; two smaller boxes in his jacket pockets held the tissue-wrapped chessmen.

“I remember our first conversation, Doctor. You’re right, you should have a chance to play one last game on a fine chess set. My gift to you.”

The Ukrainian’s eyes, hideously damaged and barely able to see, filled again with tears. He reached a swollen hand toward the polished chess king. His fingers looked like pieces of meat that had begun to rot.

Dumenco spoke, having trouble forming each word, as if the thoughts kept eluding him before he could manage to get them out. “I’m afraid . . . I would not be a worthy opponent for you, Agent Kreident. A good investigator like you, sharp-witted . . . more than a match for me.”

“On the contrary,” Craig smiled, “judging from our previous game, I think the stakes now are a bit more even.”

Working diligently to distract himself, Craig set up the pieces on the slick stone board, though he didn’t know if Dumenco had sufficient dexterity to move them.

Trish watched him curiously. Behind her delicate glasses, her rich brown eyes held a warm and grateful expression.

The door opened and Paige Mitchell entered, escorting a shaken-looking Nels Piter. The Belgian scientist’s suave dress and cultured appearance looked disheveled, as if too much had been weighing him down for a few days.

Recognizing them, Dumenco grew indignant. “Come to see me off, Nels?”

Paige stepped forward. “Dr. Piter wanted to see you. He has something I think you’d want to hear.”

Craig wondered if the Nobel Prize committee had announced their decision. But the administrator scientist had something else in mind. “Professor . . . we’ve gathered some strange data at the Tevatron. Of course you wouldn’t find them surprising.” He stopped, at a loss for words.

When Piter paused, Dumenco closed his eyes and whispered, “My results. The p-bar production rate . . . far too low. Should be higher. Has to be higher. Something is wrong with the data, not the experiment.”

He glanced at where his papers lay stacked under the chessboard. Craig didn’t think Dumenco had touched them in the previous day, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the scientist had memorized enough data to work out the difficulties with no other tool but his own degenerating mind.

“I’ve been tracking the data myself,” Piter said with an effort. “Until recently, they seemed to fit within the parameters I had predicted, proving that your gamma-laser enhancement technique was ineffective.” Piter swallowed. “Until this morning.”

Dumenco jerked his hand sideways in a spasm that knocked the papers and the chessboard off the table and onto the floor. Paige and Trish bent over quickly to pick up the mess, but Dumenco only had eyes for the other scientist.

Craig watched the confrontation between the two titans of science. Even on his deathbed, Dumenco doggedly defended his work. “Your predictions were incorrect,” he muttered. “
Wrong
.” His swollen hand clenched into a fist, and the skin cracked. He didn’t even feel the pain.

Trish stood up, her hands full of scattered papers. “Calm down, Georg. Don’t overexert yourself.”

Piter shook his head. “You had no data to back up your predictions, and yet you still insisted. I thought you were irrational, self-centered, and blind to the self-evident data—a disappointment to science.”

“The data was wrong,” Dumenco said, somewhat petulant.

Now Piter looked upset, and he stepped closer. “But how could you
know
? This morning the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, reaching the levels you had predicted all along. I shut down the beam until we can understand the mechanism, discover what is happening. But with this result you’ve at least proved your theory viable. How did you know it would happen?”

With a great effort, Dumenco sat up in the bed, leaving stains on the crisp sheets. “You do not understand, Nels—I have already
done
these experiments at Aramazas 16. That was the work that brought me to the attention of your United States government. I already
know
the correct results . . . .” He flopped back against the pillow.

Piter looked at him in stunned horror and dismay as Dumenco continued in a weak whisper. “I could not tell anyone about it, so I had to reproduce all the experiments here, from first principles.”

Piter took a step away from the bed, stricken. Paige looked from one scientist to the other, then at Craig. Craig tried to remain unobtrusive, attentively watching as the discussion unfolded, hoping some crucial clue would slip out.

“But how?” stuttered Piter. “The Soviets never had an accelerator large enough to act as a seed for your experiments.” Then he stopped himself. “Unless your enhancement technique worked from the start!”

“My work was to produce antiprotons to—” he hesitated, as if unwilling to fully explain to Piter. He struggled up in his bed. “I already knew what I was doing when I came here to Fermilab. I had good results at first, but when I went into full-scale production with the gamma-ray laser increasing the cross-section, a large fraction of my new p-bars . . . disappeared somewhere.”

Piter was intent now, his face flushed. His thin lips formed a concerned line, as if his whole world was falling apart. “But why haven’t I ever heard of your early work? Why didn’t you publish your results?”

“Those experiments were highly classified . . . for other purposes. My work ultimately came to naught because we did not have a way to store the additional p-bars efficiently. We did not have a mature enough technology to overcome a saturation instability.”

Dumenco paused, then laying back on the bed, whispered, “And neither do you. Your crystal-lattice trap comes close—but it is still unstable. Dangerously unstable. Your solid-state lasers are an improvement over our old cross-feeding laser system, but you need to have them phased together better. Otherwise, your trap easily saturates and becomes unstable. We learned this long before you invented your design.”

Piter reeled. Craig knew that Dumenco had struck the Belgian scientist to the core—the crystal-lattice trap for holding large quantities of antimatter was the breakthrough on which Piter had staked his reputation, the basis for his Nobel nomination. But the world had—supposedly—never produced enough antimatter to test it fully. And Dumenco had just claimed Piter’s precious device would fail.

Craig drew a quick breath. “Dr. Dumenco, if you said your new technique was producing a lot of antimatter, but the data didn’t show it—is it possible the antimatter was diverted somehow, taken away before it could interact with the data-collection diagnostics?” Both Piter and Dumenco looked at him skeptically. He continued, “Could it have been collected in one of your crystal-lattice traps, skimmed out of the accelerator beam downstream somehow? And if the crystal-lattice trap is so unstable, could that have caused the explosion in the beam-sampling substation?”

“Preposterous!” Piter sniffed.

“Yes, it is possible,” Dumenco said slowly. He looked over at Craig, raising a finger as he stated his theory, letting the thoughts roll off as fast as they came to him. “If someone is indeed diverting antiprotons from the particle accelerator into a crystal-lattice trap, the best place to store them would be in one of the beam-sampling substations, or in one of the beam-shunt passages. But the trap is unstable. If the lasers ever became misaligned, or experienced a rapid current flux. . .”

Piter swallowed hard, looking defeated. “You mean, like in an emergency beam dump?”

Dumenco nodded vigorously. “Yes! Even a microgram of antimatter would have caused such a devastating explosion. It would leave a glassy crater, and the electromagnetic pulse it generated would knock out electrical power systems for kilometers around.”

“Just like we saw,” Craig said, growing excited. “And Ben Goldfarb got shot in one of those substations.”

Dumenco looked over at Piter again. “If your results suddenly showed a dramatic increase in p-bar production this morning, that means another . . . diversion trap has been removed. The beam fluctuations we observed early yesterday morning could have been due to the crystal-lattice trap saturating.”

“But why would somebody want to steal p-bars?” Paige asked.

Piter looked down at her, and his voice had a sort of condescension, a withering disappointment because she didn’t intuitively know the answer to her own question. “It’s
antimatter
, Paige. Extremely rare, extremely difficult to create. It has thousands of high-technology uses.”

“I sent Jackson over there earlier to look around,” Craig said in alarm. “If somebody is trying to leave with an antimatter trap, we can catch him, see what he intends to do. I need to call for backup.”

Craig snatched the sunglasses out of his pocket and pointed to Piter. “Let’s go out there, Dr. Piter, now that we know what to look for. Maybe that’s what Goldfarb stumbled onto.”

Flustered, Nels Piter turned and followed him out of the room.