Lethal Exposure (9 page)

Georg Dumenco had fallen prey to his own scientific curiosity. Had his work at Fermilab condemned him to death? Had his research made him the target for reprisal by another researcher? Had he come too close to discovering something others wished to keep hidden, one of his former connections in the Soviet Union perhaps?

“Please, let us get back to my room,” Dumenco said, preoccupied again. He seemed to heave off the unpleasant thoughts and tossed them aside like debris. “I still have a lot of work to do. I should devote my energies to that which is most important.”

She reached the hospital’s rear entrance. The glass doors swooped open automatically. “Important, Georg? Is it really that important.”

He looked up at her earnestly. “My antimatter production rate is far lower than expected, at a level close to that observed by Dr. Piter in his CERN work—which cannot be correct.” He snorted at the thought of his rival. “That means there is a fundamental flaw somewhere in the experiment. If I can solve this one problem, then I can die happy.”

They reached his room, and he began to climb out of the wheelchair even before she had brought it to his bed. He handed her his coat, already distracted, as he reached for the papers on the tray table. “Now, leave me to my data please. There isn’t much time.”

Trish turned to leave him alone in the room.
No,
she thought,
there isn’t much time.

CHAPTER 11

Tuesday, 9:23 P.M.

Fox River Medical Center

Late that evening Paige Mitchell met Craig in the hospital cafeteria. It remained open all night for hospital staff, though visiting hours were long over.

Goldfarb lay in his hospital bed unconscious, on the edge of death. Craig had already spent hours outside the ICU, pacing the floor. He had tried to construct a plan of action, but he kept coming up against a brick wall. The only thing he could do was focus on the Dumenco case, which now included the attempted murder of a federal agent as well.

Craig sat in an orange plastic chair, pulling himself close to one of the Formica-topped tables. While waiting for Paige to join him, he set his briefcase on the tabletop, saw that the surface was of dubious cleanliness, and brushed it off with a spare napkin.

In a moment of stunned respite, Craig sat at the cafeteria table and withdrew his folders of paperwork, skimming notes from his conversations with Dumenco as well as the maps, brochures, and other information he had gathered about Fermilab, the beam-sampling substations, and the Ukrainian scientist’s prior work.

The preliminary summary Agent Schultz had given him about the explosion showed no evidence of bomb residue or chemical byproducts—nor had the dogs found stashed explosives in any other substation, not even the one where Goldfarb had been shot.

The detonation pattern at the crater did not match any known bomb configuration, shaped charge, or high-energy-density material. The background radiation levels showed an elevated background neutron count, as if from induced radioactivity. And there was that strange power failure at about the same time.

Yet the substation had exploded almost simultaneous with the accident that had exposed Dumenco to two thousand Rads. And Goldfarb had been shot in another one of the substations. Foul play was clearly involved, but he couldn’t figure out how. Could it be related to Dumenco’s current research? The Ukrainian seemed to think so.

Perhaps the dying scientist was right when he had compared his situation with the great mathematician Fermat. If he didn’t achieve this breakthrough before he died, it might be many years before someone else could continue his work—even Nels Piter, whose past work in high-energy physics competed with, if not outright contradicted, Dumenco’s theories. . . .

Before he could become completely absorbed in the case, Paige set her tray next to his. He had asked for only a cup of hot chocolate, but instead she carried two plates of food she had gotten from the cafeteria grill.

“You haven’t eaten yet, Craig,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Here, get some nourishment inside you.”

His stomach growled, but his expression reflected dismay as he looked down at the plate: a sausage in a bun smothered with onions and sauerkraut and doused with spicy brown mustard. “I can feel my arteries hardening just looking at it,” he said.

“It’s Chicago cuisine,” Paige said. “The world’s best bratwursts.”

Despite his comment, the food smelled delicious. “If I eat this, you’re going to put
me
in one of the hospital rooms—or is that your intent?”

“Nonsense. When in Rome. . .” She smiled slyly. “Just take a bite.”

Craig picked up the messy bun and brought it close to his mouth. Then he paused. “How’s bratwurst different from any old sausage?”

Paige grinned. “I’m afraid that’s classified information.”

“A secret recipe?” he asked.

“No—it’s just if you knew what was in it, you’d be sick.”

“I can take it,” Craig said. “I’ve seen enough gruesome crime scenes in my day.”

Paige picked up her own bratwurst and took a huge, sloppy bite, closing her eyes to savor the taste. She wiped the juices from her mouth. “You know that stuff called ‘meat byproducts’ they put in pet food?”

Craig nodded, already suspicious of her answer.

“Well, the parts of the meat that aren’t good enough to be called ‘byproducts’ are set aside for bratwursts.” She took another bite to cover her impish smile.

Craig finished his bratwurst quickly, not regretting a moment of it. He licked his fingers and wiped his hands and face with several napkins. “Trish would fall over in a dead faint if she saw me eating this.”

Paige studied him, her blue eyes narrowing slightly. “Do you care what Trish thinks about the food you eat?”

Craig sensed a hesitation in her voice. “I used to, although she did have my good health in mind. But not anymore.”

“I see,” Paige said. “So that’s why you dropped everything to fly across country, just to lend your hand unofficially on a case that wasn’t even
yours
until your partner got shot.”

Craig’s thoughts scrambled as he tried to find a way to salvage the conversation; finally he saw a way out. “Well, it gave me an excuse to come and see you, didn’t it?”

Paige laughed. “Good save, Craig.”

They fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Craig finally asked, “So . . . do you like it out here? No regrets about leaving California?”

“Oh, I’ll always miss California, but Fermilab has a lot of character, a certain charm . . . if you give it a chance. Of course, I haven’t been out here all that long, less than a year. Last winter was pretty rough.” She looked over at him. “And this is my first murder case at Fermilab. But I’ve worked well with the FBI before.”

Craig smiled back at her. “You seem to be getting along with your coworkers,” he said, then took a sip of his hot chocolate. The sweet richness added a strange counterpoint to the spicy, savory sauerkraut, onions, and mustard. “Rubbing elbows with that Dr. Piter.”

Paige flushed. “We’re just friends,” she said a little too quickly. Craig decided not to press the issue, but Paige felt the need to keep talking. “He’s a brilliant scientist, well respected, good-natured, certainly nice enough to spend a little time with. Of course, it seems a bit like dating a walking encyclopedia.” Her teeth flashed in a bright smile. “But what girl can resist that suave European charm?”

Craig wadded his napkins, suddenly very much needing to find a place to throw them away. “You didn’t have much difficulty resisting the charms of an FBI agent last year.”

“Was I resisting?” Paige asked with a raised eyebrow. “And which charms were those, exactly?”

“Oh, you know, the dedication to duty, truth, justice, and the American way. My diligence, my ability to put together the pieces of a puzzle and solve seemingly impossible crimes.”

“Oooh, you’re giving me a chill.” Paige leaned closer to him.

“Speaking of which,” Craig said, suddenly self-conscious and wanting to get down to business, “did you find anything else about Dr. Dumenco’s background?”

She wrinkled her nose as she thought for a moment. “Well, he was an eminent scientist in the former Soviet Union, but when the Ukraine broke away from the Russian Federation, he fled to the United States. I know we offered him asylum and a very comfy and prestigious job at Fermilab.”

Craig nodded. “The US did that with quite a lot of Soviet scientists. The writing was on the wall—the Berlin Wall, maybe?—when communism fell, Soviet researchers would be up for grabs. Russia was in too much chaos to pay them any more than a custodial wage, which wasn’t nearly enough.

“So other countries began to lure the scientists away. We were afraid a lot of the weapons designers, engineers, and physicists were willing to go over to the highest bidder. But as soon as this process started, the United States began to subsidize them, and to a lesser extent, grabbed everyone they could, offering them political asylum and citizenship, a good salary and a chance to continue their work in a free capitalist society.”

“Sounds like a good deal,” Paige said, tossing her blond hair over her shoulder.

“For good reason. Less friendly countries were making overtures to get the weapons scientists—Libya, Iraq, North Korea, anybody who wanted their own private little specialist who could take advantage of previous work done in the Soviet Union. One good recruit could leapfrog a threshold country into the ranks of the Big Boys.”

“Like what we did with the German rocket scientists,” Paige said.

“Right—’Operation Paperclip,’ people like Wernher von Braun and his crew from Peenemünde. After the fall of the Third Reich, we grabbed as many German scientists as we could before the Russians got the rest. Those refugees formed the basis of our respective rocketry programs.”

“Good analogy,” Paige said. She leaned across the table. “Dumenco came here and immediately began doing brilliant work at the Tevatron. He thrived in this place, as if he already had a good head start. You can see by the stack of breakthrough technical papers he published in the last few years, shaking subatomic physics down to the quantum level, you might say.” She sniffed at her own joke, and Craig allowed himself a smile.

“I couldn’t comprehend any of his articles,” Craig said, “not even the abstracts, although I’m a reasonably technical person.”

“Dumenco’s pushing the frontiers of science,” Paige said, “moving the borderline between the unfathomable and the simply nonsensical.”

“What does that mean?” Craig said.

“Dumenco found answers to some crucial problems in high-energy physics of the so-called ‘Standard Model,’ leading to a Grand Unified Theory. But because we can only observe indirect interactions of basic particles, even the answers are sometimes so bizarre they’re incomprehensible.”

“Then maybe I
am
understanding them,” said Craig, “because they are certainly incomprehensible.”

“The elegance of Dumenco’s work gained notice from the Stockholm Nobel committee,” Paige continued. “With his initial Fermilab results, he achieved breakthroughs in areas that had stymied people for years.”

“Well, what work was Dumenco doing in the Ukraine?” Craig said, flipping to the end of his dossier. “I’ve got practically every month of his employment here, but nothing about that entire earlier part in his life.”

“I couldn’t find out much about that either,” Paige admitted. “The records weren’t transferred over. I’ve uncovered nothing about his family or his education in the Soviet Union. I think he had a wife, two daughters and a son, but their whereabouts are currently unknown. He may have left them behind when he defected.”

“Our government offered this man everything he wished for,” Craig said, tapping his pen against the edge of the table. “Sure, he’s since proven himself to be a brilliant man—but on what did we base our assumption that he would make so many breakthroughs if we gave him the chance? Yet, we instantly gave him an extraordinary amount of time on the world’s largest particle accelerator, granting him all the research assistance and funding he could possibly want? Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

“Yes I do,” Paige nodded, “but somebody must have known the work he did in the Ukraine.”

“I don’t know about you,” Craig said, “but knowing that someone tried to murder an eminent physicist currently on the short list for the Nobel Prize makes me very suspicious. Especially when I see that a large portion of his past work has been hidden under wraps.”

He tucked his pen back in his pocket. “When something is swept under the rug like that, I see a big suspicious lump. It makes me think that a few of our important answers lie there.”

CHAPTER 12

Wednesday, 10:12 A.M.

New Delhi, India

Stepping nervously from the narrow air-conditioned Concord into the New Delhi airport, Nicholas Bretti felt as if he had entered another world. The sleek supersonic jet was a vision of the future, a flying metal island immaculately clean and incredibly well-maintained; but the New Delhi airport was a nightmare that couldn’t heave itself out of the past.

A mix of heat, humidity and overpowering smells slammed into him as he stepped off the plane onto the jetway. He knew he would never be able to forget the smells. Or the people.

Bretti blinked, stumbling ahead, as if all his senses had overloaded. He lit a cigarette to calm himself. Already unsteady on his feet because of the six Grand Marniers he had downed in an attempt to calm himself, he tried to regain his full alertness. This Indian connection was important, his safety net, his only chance at escaping what he had done back at Fermilab. He wouldn’t get a second chance to make a first impression on the VIPs coming to meet him.

Swallowing hard, he looked over the jostling bodies just outside the customs area. Gentlemen in immaculate business suits elbowed beggars in torn robes. Women wore yellow and orange cloth wrapped around their bodies; dirty children without shoes or shirts swarmed about. Brownian motion, he thought,
Indian
motion. People everywhere, all with black hair, brown skin. People. Noise.

The alcohol buzz wore off quickly. He had a headache, and the panic inside him turned to sour, sick despair. Was this the best future he could hope for?

The incredible humidity made his shirt limp against him, as if he had just been steam blasted. The airport reeked of urine, mold, animal manure and decaying garbage. Outside, vendors at stalls added their sweet and biting smells of burning incense, spices, and cooking food, perfumes, and curry.

It was a world far removed from Chicago, and even more so from the upscale neighborhood in Fairfax, Virginia where he had grown up. Now Bretti wished he had gone back home on his supposed fishing trip after all, instead of just faking it for his alibi.

What did he care about the Indian government’s desire for antimatter, their intent to use it for medical applications? New isotopes for cancer treatments. If they made breakthroughs in medical technology, their country would make billions on the world market. The Indians weren’t really paying him all that much money, after all—and nothing was worth the crap he was going through. Especially not after shooting that FBI agent.

Bretti wanted just to turn around, climb back aboard the Concord, and go back to Chicago. But he was trapped here, maybe for the rest of his life. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

He wavered, then swallowed the sour taste of chicken vindaloo from the onboard meal that crawled up his throat. Drawing deeply on his cigarette, he tossed the butt to the floor and ground it out.

“Excuse me, Dr. Bretti?” A man’s high-pitched voice startled him, piercing through the drone and clangor of so many people.

Bretti whirled unsteadily. The man was dressed in white cotton pants and tunic with a matching white hat; brown plastic glasses made his eyes large and goggling. His full mustache curled up nearly to his nose.

“Dr. Bretti? My name is Rohit Ambalal, from the People’s Liberty for All party.” He carried a blue soft-sided briefcase. “I am here to expedite you through customs. Come this way. Quickly please.”

Ambalal motioned Bretti toward a red door to the right of a long line by the customs table. A military guard in a khaki uniform with red-and-black rank insignia stood by the door, eyeing them.

Bretti’s mouth felt dry and cottony as his guide started for the red door.
People’s Liberty for All party
? he thought. What the hell is this? Did it have something to do with his contact, Mr. Chandrawalia?

Perspiration soaked his shirt, as much from anxiety as from the oppressive humidity. The military guard made him very uneasy. Bretti swallowed, but his throat was dry. He tried to think, but could dredge only a little of the background that Chandrawalia had told him some months before. India’s leadership tottered back and forth among the dozens of political parties; no ideology held a convincing grip on the nation’s government. He hoped he wasn’t going to be caught up in some sort of power struggle.

The military guard crushed out his cigarette and stared at Bretti. The bespectacled guide stopped and turned to Bretti. “Dr. Bretti, we must hurry. Your flight to Bangalore leaves soon, and you must clear customs before you board the plane. I will try to expedite matters, but there are people who must ask you some questions.”

He had no suitcase, no extra clothes—nothing but what he wore. With a wallet stuffed full of rupees from the embassy, he’d planned to buy clothes in India. With nothing to declare, he should sail through customs.

Except for the Penning trap, still in the diplomatic pouch.

What if one faction didn’t know what the other was doing
? Would he wind up in some flea-bitten jail, like that guy in
Midnight Express
? After growing up in the Washington DC area, he’d lived around military people all his life—he shouldn’t feel threatened. But Bretti had never tried commercial espionage before, never shot a man, never fled the scene of a crime.

What would these people do to him? He certainly couldn’t count on his own government to help.

“Dr. Bretti?” Ambalal folded his hands across the soft-sided briefcase, genuinely upset at Bretti’s reluctance to follow. “We must process your paperwork, and I must see to the diplomatic pouch. Quickly now.”

Behind Bretti, the doors to the Concord sealed shut; in front of him spread the long customs line and the mass of shoving people. He had to trust someone, and he couldn’t think straight, thanks to the Grand Marnier and his panic. Chandrawalia had too much at stake not to ensure his safety. He had to count on that.

Bretti forced himself to move toward where the guard held the red door open. Inside the claustrophobic room, two men sat at a long brown table. A large mirror—one-way, no doubt—took up a good part of the wall on his left, next to another red door that led to the open terminal.

Both men at the table wore open-collar short-sleeved shirts and no-nonsense expressions. One man was small, old, and bald; the younger man wore a dark beard. The bearded man nodded for Bretti to take a seat as he spoke in a high, piping voice. “Dr. Bretti, welcome to India. It is a rare occasion that we are blessed with a distinguished visiting scientist. And one sponsored by a consulate, no less.”

“It’s
mister
,” said Bretti, looking down at his hands. “I’m not a PhD yet.” Someday soon he’d have that union card so he wouldn’t be sniffed at by so-called experts in the scientific fields. He’d worked his butt off for seven years as a grad student, living on slave wages, while Dumenco followed his esoteric goals and treated him like a barely competent manservant.

He suspected that sponsoring professors kept people like him sweating out their servitude to boost their own egos, delaying the award of doctorates. Too many people would give anything to get through a program at Fermilab.

But as much as he wanted that title, Bretti also knew it was meaningless unless it was earned. Truly earned. He recalled the time he had come home from school in third grade, crying because he had lost a spelling bee. Trying to comfort him, his mother had cut a ribbon from blue construction paper and pinned it on him—declaring him a winner.

Getting the crap beat out of him the next day in school for bragging about the fake award had brought the point home too well.

Maybe after all he had done for them, the Indians would take him on. Bretti could help Chandrawalia’s group with their so-called medical applications for the p-bars. After the appalling events of the past couple of days, he needed a fresh start, a fresh home, and a fresh identity . . . somewhere far from FBI investigators and extradition treaties.

The guard took his position by the door, while Ambalal stood like a mother hen at Bretti’s side. All the while the bald man sat observing. No one made any introductions.

The bearded man frowned and put down the papers he had been studying. “Ah,
Mister
Bretti, then. It is my understanding you will be conferring with a high-energy research group in Bangalore. This is quite an honor, especially if you are not a full scientist.” He knitted his thick eyebrows together. “Tell me, please, why our consulate would sponsor someone such as yourself to speak with this esteemed group?”

Bretti glanced up sharply. “Wait a minute. I didn’t say I wasn’t a scientist. I’m just not finished with my degree, and I don’t believe in calling myself something I haven’t earned. It’s not right.”

The mustachioed party man spoke up behind him. “Dr. Bretti is here on invitation from the Chicago consulate office. He is a personal guest of Mr. Chandrawalia, the deputy head of mission. This gentleman is from America’s Fermilab and he has valuable skills to assist India’s national researchers.” He placed a sinewy brown hand on Bretti’s shoulder. “That should be enough for you.”

Taking strength from the man’s statement, Bretti faced the two men at the table. “That’s right. I’ve coauthored numerous publications in highly respected journals—check them out yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“Your position in science is not in question,
Mister
Bretti,” said the beard, “but rather why such a distinguished diplomat as Mr. Chandrawalia would take such a personal interest in your visit. What precisely do you intend to discuss when you are in Bangalore?”

Bretti shifted his weight in the unsteady chair, listening to the faint groan of metal and plastic. The cold sweat crawled down his back, making his shirt even more clammy. “Why are you interrogating me? I was invited here, by Chandrawalia at your embassy, just as the gentleman said. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

The quiet bald man finally spoke up in a voice too deep for his small size. “We must be sure that the purpose of your visit is purely scientific and not political. You are not here for political purposes, are you?”

Bretti sighed, suddenly relieved. “Is
that
what this is about? I’m not interested in politics, I’m a scientist. I don’t give a rat’s ass about what your country does, or who influences whom. All I’m doing is, uh, giving a talk and delivering scientific equipment. Nothing more, nothing less. Okay?”

The bearded man scribbled some notes, then glanced over to his bald companion. The small man nodded curtly. “You are not staying in India very long, Mr. Bretti?”

Bretti didn’t know how to answer that. What if they offered him political asylum? He couldn’t go back to the United States until the dust settled. “I’m heading back home as soon as I can.”

“Enjoy your stay,” the bearded man said. “But please watch your company.” As he turned, the guard strode over and opened the second red door for him. The bearded man and his bald partner gathered their material and exited, with no words spoken between them.

The military officer once again showed yellow teeth as he motioned for Bretti to leave. Shrugging, but feeling safe for the first time since he had landed, Bretti followed his guide out of the room into a long hallway that led into the main terminal complex.

Bretti turned to Ambalal. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Mr. Chandrawalia is not only a well-respected diplomat, but he is strongly allied with our People’s Liberty for All party.”

“So?” said Bretti.

“India’s political system is an alliance of many parties, none with a clear majority. Any time a minority party such as ours attempts something out of the ordinary, suspicions are raised.” They stopped just outside the main terminal area where a mass of people congregated. “Information is power, and if you as a foreigner can supply information to another party, such as People’s Liberty for All, then you are a valuable asset.”

Bretti’s head pounded. It was a crazy country where even
medical research
was a political item. Maybe they were only going to cure cancer for the people in their own party.

Ambalal hustled him along. “They will leave you alone so long as they remain satisfied that you pose no threat to the balance of power.” Glancing at his watch, he fumbled inside his soft-sided briefcase and pulled out a ticket. “You have less than an hour before your plane leaves for Bangalore. Please proceed to the gate while I check on the diplomatic pouch. I must make sure your scientific equipment is transferred to the plane.”