Lethal Exposure

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Craig shook his head in disgust, and he tossed a last glance at the photos of Dumenco’s wife and children. The frames stood on the data printouts from his Fermilab antimatter experiment. Craig couldn’t imagine the scientist doing any deep mental calculations in this state of mind.

  “If you have anything to tell me, Dr. Dumenco, we’ll have other agents standing by. They can get in touch with me,” he said with a bitter voice. “Meanwhile, I have a case to solve, with or without your help.”

  As he turned to leave, Trish followed him out. He faced her. “And what do you have to tell me? I can see that you’re hiding something. Did you see something this morning?”

  “No, Craig,” she said, her face flushing. “I didn’t.”

  He frowned at her. “I know you too well for that, Trish.” But she just met his gaze with stony silence. He had seen the same sort of doggedness when she had moved away from California, leaving everything they had and going on her own to Johns Hopkins.

  He shook his head in disgust. “Everyone around here is a marvel of cooperation.” As he passed the hospital security officers and the FBI man outside the door, he snapped, “I want this guard to be airtight!”

  Craig looked at his watch, then back at Trish, giving her the brush-off. “Paige is picking me up to go to Fermilab. I have another meeting with Dr. Piter.” At least Paige was interested in solving the case.

  He glanced back at the closed door to the Ukrainian’s room. “Dead men tell no tales,” he said to himself, shaking his head. “But dying men aren’t much help either.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Thursday, 9:07 a.m.

  Fermilab

  Hanging up the phone, Randall Jackson couldn’t decide whether to be frustrated and angry… or elated at having found a solid lead. Regardless, he couldn’t wait to tell Craig. At the least they’d meet that afternoon in Ben Goldfarb’s hospital room, as they had agreed.

  Dumenco’s graduate student and assistant, Nicholas Bretti had been gone on vacation in West Virginia for the past week. He had not called his advisor, had not shown that he even knew about Dumenco’s lethal exposure, though the story had been on most of the major news media.

  Explainable enough, Jackson thought, if Bretti was out on a family fishing trip, on the deep lakes and icy rivers in the isolated West Virginia mountains, as he had told his colleagues. Jackson himself rarely watched the news when he was on vacation.

  But Bretti’s family had no idea where their son was. No, they did not know that he was on vacation, and the last time he and his father had gone fishing was when he had been twelve years old.

  Jackson had thanked them, hung up. And let his suspicions grow.

  Nicholas Bretti was not where he had claimed to be, and perhaps he held other secrets as well.

  Jackson flipped through a stack of lab notebooks in the cluttered cubicle while Nels Piter’s grad student Frank Chang watched by his side. The hardback notebooks had cloth spines and numbered, lined paper inside-not the typical cheap, spiral bound college special Jackson had used as an undergraduate. But each volume had NICHOLAS BRETTI stamped proudly on the front. Other than the notebooks, the cubicle office held nothing but physics texts, journal articles, preprints, and equipment manuals.

  Frank Chang seemed a nice enough guy, with a goofy, friendly grin. With his long hair and small metal glasses, he looked like he belonged more at Berkeley than in the Midwest. And at least he was thoroughly impressed, if not intimidated, by the FBI badge.

  Frank Chang stifled a yawn. “Sorry-had a wild night last night.” He tossed his long hair over his shoulder and pointed to the top notebook. “If Bretti wrote anything worth keeping, it would be in this stack. That’s the most important thing we learn in grad school-document the hell out of everything.”

  Jackson flipped through the pages. Nothing in here made sense-equations, columns of numbers, scratched-out formulas, “diffusion rates” and “annihilation operators.” Craig had directed Jackson to Piter, who had in turn assigned Frank Chang to show him around Bretti’s office-a cubicle shared with two other grad students. The tiny room looked more like a repository for missing paperwork than an office.

  Jackson looked up, frustrated at not being able to decipher Bretti’s scratchings. It reminded him of trying to work with those computer jocks at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab-introverted geniuses. “So what’s in here? What was Bretti working on?”

  Chang grinned. “The same thing every other graduate student has been working on since Nels Piter blew in from CERN-crystal-lattice traps. Antimatter holding devices. Here, I’ll show you.” Chang waved Jackson over to another desk inside the cubicle. He picked up a small white cube the size of a sugar lump encased in some sort of plastic. One side of the plastic had an array of tiny pin points. “This is a salt crystal, an imperfect one, but it’s still useful to show how the trap works.”

  Jackson turned the feather-light cube in his hand. “This is salt?”

  “Yeah, simple table salt. Sodium chloride. We grow them in the lab. But when we get a good one, we can fix it in a plastic mount, like this one. The tiny pock-marks you see in the plastic are actually banks of solid state lasers-there’s another array at right angles to this one, fixed on the perpendicular wall. When the lasers are turned on, they create resonances in the salt crystal, and it allows us to store one particle of antimatter at each molecular lattice site. That way, the antimatter won’t react with ordinary matter-it would destroy itself if it did. This is a much more efficient way of storing p-bars than using a big old magnetic bottle. And it all comes from Dr. Piter’s work at CERN.”

  “Antimatter? How dangerous is this?‘’

  Chang shrugged. “Not very. But only because we can’t produce very many antiprotons. At least not right now. That’s what Bretti was working on with Dr. Dumenco.”

  Jackson held the salt crystal up to the light. The whole thing weighed less than his watch. “Then what’s the big deal? Can this tiny crystal hold very much? An ounce or two?”

  Frank Chang looked shocked. “Agent Jackson, if every available lattice site in that little crystal contained an antiproton, it would hold nearly three kiloton’s equivalent of nuclear explosive energy-one sixth the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

  “Are you all right, Craig?” Paige asked after she had parked her red MG sportscar beside the concrete towers of Wilson Hall.

  Unlike Trish, she had allowed him to drift in his mental world during the drive through the midwest prairie, strip malls, suburbs, and morning truck traffic. Trish, on the other hand, would have insisted he share every thought and force him out of his introspection into an extroverted therapy session.

  “Just having trouble understanding people,” he said. From his law school days in Stanford, Craig knew that a dying man’s deathbed confession held far more weight than a normal statement. If Dumenco would only be straight with him, it would make much more sense in the long run.

  The wind swirled red and yellow leaves around their feet as Paige led him behind the administrative building into one of the experimental buildings. Blue and orange walls, linoleum, and plumbing adorned the inside of the industrial laboratory setting. Craig buttoned his suit jacket as they walked in, searching for Dr. Piter.

  “Nels is under a lot of pressure too, Craig,” Paige said. “The Nobel Prize means a lot to him. It must be sobering to know that you only have one chance to obtain the most important goal in your life.”

  “Tell that to Dr. Dumenco,” Craig said dryly.

  They passed down one flight of stairs below ground, to a computer-run control room. Painted cinderblock walls gave way to poured concrete tunnels, heavy technical equipment, and more chain-link fences and gates. Technicians and other grad students manned the consoles, touching the screens of colored flow charts. The air-conditioning was on high to cool the electronic equipment.

  Piter waited for them. He wore a disheveled white shirt, a rumpled tan suit, a loosened brown tie-a curiously sloppy appe
arance for the meticulous Belgian scientist. Craig immediately noticed the shadowed rings around his eyes.

  He peremptorily clasped his hands in front of him. “Good morning, Dr. Piter. Thanks for seeing us again.”

  Piter appeared flustered. “It’s been quite a busy day already. I even had to have one of my graduate students show your colleague around.”

  “Is something wrong?” said Craig.

  “We got a long string of spurious results in the middle of the night-I’ve been here since about three in the morning. And right when we’re trying to verify the run, construction activities on the Main Injector caused a fatal fluctuation in the beam and we had to shut the Tevatron down.” He sighed. “And we’ve got more anomalies, probably caused by Dumenco’s unfortunate accident.”

  The graduate students continued to peck on their screens, bypassing safety interlocks to massage their results. They seemed to be functioning well enough after the substation explosion the previous Sunday evening.

  “You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little disjointed.” Piter sounded embarrassed.

  “Was there a serious problem?” Craig asked innocently. “Is this going to affect your own experiment?”

  Piter’s face twisted. “While we were at dinner last night, the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, then went back down again. Unexpectedly. Actually, the increase was in line with what Dr. Dumenco had projected. But it seems quite curious that it would happen now. All by itself.”

  Paige said, “Isn’t it good news to increase the antimatter production?”

  Piter gave her a thin smile. “In a physics sense, of course, because the p-bars give us the opportunity for many high-energy experiments. But unless we find out why the production rate is fluctuating so drastically, it means nothing.”

  Craig followed an idea that had just occurred to him. “Could antimatter have caused that substation explosion, Dr. Piter? Some sort of buildup that went critical? Wouldn’t that explain your missing p-bars from the flow?”

  Piter looked sharply at him. “In theory, I suppose- but there’s no way for the antimatter to have left the main Tevatron ring and gone into the beam-sampling substation. It’s preposterous.”

  “Could one of your grad students have tampered with the support equipment?” Craig spoke quietly, looking at the technicians at the control panel.

  Piter suppressed a scowl, and didn’t even try to keep his voice low. “In an experiment this major, Mr. Kreident, the grad students have little real responsibility. They are just hired help, nothing more.”

  “Then I see nothing much has changed,” said Craig tightly.

  “Ah, you have been a graduate student?” Piter looked at him, eyebrows arched as he lifted his chin. “In the FBI?” He moved away from the console and started for the door; Craig and Paige followed.

  Craig shook his head. “I majored in physics at Stanford before going on to Law School. I took a course and worked at the Linac-the Linear Accelerator-my senior year. Since I wasn’t going on to study physics, I didn’t have the pressure on me like the real grad students, but I certainly remember what it was like.”

  “I see.” Piter continued down the huge opening. They walked briskly down another set of stairs to the underground entrance. Their shoes echoed hollowly against the bare cement walls. “We can go inside the Tevatron, now that the beam is shut down. We don’t have to worry much about residual radioactivity.”

  Piter took a right-hand turn and stopped before another control room door. He used a badge-locked key with a magnetic strip and access code, making three attempts before he finally gained access. “Too many disconnections and supposed upgrades,” he said. “Nothing works the way it should anymore.” Ahead, the underground tunnel curved around, vanishing around a bend in the distance.

  Glaring lights shone down on wide conduits mounted to the walls. Banks of superconducting magnets surrounded the beam channels, and substations, and fuse junction boxes; diagnostics stood out in regular intervals.

  Technicians moved down the line, a pale young woman with dark hair and a twentysomething man with a goatee and the build of a weight lifter. The woman stopped at each junction box, checking readings as she munched from a bag of fat-free pretzels.

  Craig stepped up and spoke quietly. “Dr. Piter, can you verify that you were at the lab early this morning, when you said you were called in?‘’

  Piter looked up with an astonished look on his face. “Of course I can-but what on fool’s earth for?”

  “Someone attempted to kill Dr. Dumenco in his hospital room this morning. The killer got away, but we have a witness.”

  “Then why are you bothering me if you have an eyewitness?” Piter drew himself up to his full five feet six inch height. He purposely brushed lint from his suit and straightened his tie. “Surely they don’t think it’s me?”

  “I just want to eliminate as many potential suspects as I can.” He paused. “That includes everyone, Dr. Piter.”

  Piter drew his mouth tight and lifted his chin. “You may confirm my presence here with any one of those technicians. Or one of my grad students, Frank Chang- he’s showing your partner around as we speak. We’ve all been here putting in a lot of hours. I refuse to believe that you would seriously consider me, the Director of High-Energy Research, a possible suspect in any scheme to harm my esteemed colleague, Dr. Dumenco.”

  “People have plenty of motives to do things out of the ordinary, Dr. Piter. How about the Nobel?‘’

  Piter took a step backward and blinked. “That’s just an award, Agent Kreident. It certainly isn’t worth killing someone over! In fact, even coveting the prize is considered quite unprofessional.”

  Craig just watched him, knowing that Piter coveted the Nobel a great deal.

  He thought he would be going back and forth between the medical center and Fermilab quite a few more times before he had answers to this case.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Thursday, 1:03 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter,

  Main Cafeteria

  “Have lunch with me,” Craig said to Trish, gesturing toward the cafeteria. “It’s hospital food, but it’s the best I can do right now, considering Jackson is meeting me here at three. And I’m paying. I owe you anyway, because you won our bet.”

  “Our bet?” she asked with an uncertain smile. She adjusted her delicate glasses, falling into step beside him.

  “When you first called me on the phone, you swore that this case would be unlike any of the others I’ve worked on. You were right.” He held open the swinging cafeteria door for her. The food inside smelled as if it had gone through an automatic dishwasher, but his stomach rumbled anyway.

  “So I get fine hospital dining,” she said, arching her eyebrows. “Good thing I’m not normally a gambling woman.”

  In the cafeteria line they each took a tray and studied the unappealing selection of foods. Craig refused to take one of the bowls of jiggling, brilliantly colored Jell-O, choosing tapioca pudding instead. He ladled out a serving of mushy spaghetti and meatballs. Trish looked at him sidelong, and Craig decided it might be better if he didn’t eat the meatballs after all. Trish chose a dubiously fresh salad, a helping of fruit cocktail, and a carton of skim milk.

  They settled down at a table at the far end of the cafeteria. Craig scanned the mix of doctors, nurses, volunteers, and families visiting patients. The noise droned around them, giving them complete anonymity. He still had the nagging suspicion that she knew or suspected something about that morning’s attack, and he decided to follow his intuition.

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently,” Trish said, self-consciously removing her glasses.

  Craig swallowed hard. That was a bold move for opening their first real one-on-one conversation in some time. “Then how come you never called me until a murder case forced you to?”

  “Me?” Trish blinked. “How come you never called?”

  Craig looked away, studying the gelatinous red
and white swirls of the alleged spaghetti. He searched for the right words, but Trish had his thoughts in too much of a turmoil. Things had changed. They were two different people from the years they were together at Stanford.

  Finally, she answered her own comment. “You’re right. We promised not to get into that finger-pointing thing, but I had hoped you would send me a letter… or something. I really did want to be friends.”

  “Well, my caseload has been very full,” Craig said with forced enthusiasm. “You know me, devoted to the FBI.”

  Trish took a bite of her salad. “And I’ve been intently involved with my own research. Johns Hopkins isn’t any more relaxing than your Bureau.”

  “I don’t suppose it is,” Craig said.

  “Because of my specialty I’m in intermittent demand, whenever a radiation accident happens. But my work with the PR-Cubed keeps me on the go constantly. We’re still doing follow-up and tracking of all the studies we did in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Remember when I went over there as a pre-med?”

  “How could I forget?” Craig said. For months she had been wrapped up in her own thoughts, or bombarding him with stories of what she had experienced there. She had merely been a junior member of the team, a relief worker interviewing residents who had lived in the densest fallout plume from the nuclear reactor disaster. It had been her job to keep massive statistics, chronicling the overwhelming tide of medical problems from the Chernobyl survivors.

  “The Ukraine is a beautiful country, like our Midwest. It’s the breadbasket of what used to be the Soviet Union… but that power plant accident was the greatest man-made disaster in history. The fallout spread from the Ukraine into Belarus, even around the world in the jet stream.” She shook her head, blinking her dark eyes as if to wipe away haunting memories.

  Then she leaned forward, fixing him with her gaze. Craig felt a sense of dread as he wondered what she was about to confess.