Lethal Exposure

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The dying scientist seemed to have trouble focusing on the names. Craig pushed the list closer, and Dumenco stared at the words. Then tears gushed out of his hemorrhaged eyes. He trembled on the bed, glancing at the names, then over at the framed snapshots Craig had taken from the dresser drawer in his apartment.

  “One name, then a city written down. Who are they, Dr. Dumenco?” he said. Trish looked over his shoulder, wide-eyed.

  “My… my family,” the scientist said. “My family’s new names… all of them.” He drew a deep, shuddering breath. “They have been in hiding. They were supposed to be-” He shook his head. “They were supposed to be safe, safe from people like him.”

  He slumped into the bedsheets and continued weeping. “My family.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Thursday, 5:01 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  In the aftermath of the shooting in the hospital, the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility swarmed to the Fox River Medical Center, armed with interview questions and forms to be filled out.

  Though he hated to have cameras shoved in front of his face, Craig had made the appropriate statements to the reporters, explaining about the ongoing investigation into the soon-to-be-fatal radiation exposure of Nobel Prize contender, Georg Dumenco. An as-yet-unidentified assailant had twice attempted to kill the physicist in the hospital before being killed himself. The assailant was now the prime suspect for having caused the original radiation accident, as well as the devastating substation explosion, and the shooting of Agent Ben Goldfarb.

  With forced patience, Craig spoke to the reporters because he wanted to protect Jackson. He took the hard way out with the toughest questions, just answering “no comment,” knowing that the press would speculate like crazy-but even if he had wanted to answer in full, Craig still didn’t know how the pieces fit together, what the assassin had been after, why the man had carried the aliases of Dumenco’s family hidden by the State Department.

  Craig went to see Goldfarb again, trying to escape from the insanity, but the curly-haired agent just lay motionless. Julene had fallen asleep in a chair at his bed-side, while the two little girls kept themselves quietly occupied with a game of Trouble they had found in the hospital’s game cabinet.

  While Jackson met with representatives from the Office of Professional Responsibility, giving his detailed statement, Craig paced the halls. Should he go back to Fermilab? Did Paige have anything else for him, any new statement from Nels Piter?

  He passed by a waiting-room lounge, pausing long enough to watch a few seconds of Headline News. The Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm had announced their selection for the Prize in Literature, an Eskimo whose poetry had described the plight of the vanishing harp seal. The newscaster speculated on when the few remaining Prizes would be announced; Craig hoped Dumenco lived long enough to learn of their decision.

  After the second assassination attempt, Trish remained terribly shaken and refused to leave Dumenco’s side. Surrounded by guards and doctors, the physicist seemed distressed and claustrophobic. Craig wondered if the PR-Cubed people had any greater involvement, if Trish still knew more information she kept hidden from him.

  Why was it everyone wanted him to solve this case, but no one would give him all the data he needed? None of it made any sense. Craig pressed his fingers against his temples, rubbing the skin there to make his headache crawl slowly away. He knew he was still missing a key piece of the puzzle.

  And then his cell phone rang.

  Craig fumbled with the tiny receiver as he flipped it open; one of the nurses glared at him, ready to scold him for using the cell phone inside the hospital, but he moved quickly toward the door to a smokers’ courtyard. “Hello?” There was static on the line.

  “Special Agent Kreident? This is General Ursov speaking. How are you today, my friend?”

  Craig stood at Dumenco’s bedside, livid with anger. “You’re not being honest with me!” he said, trying to keep his voice down from an outright shout. He shooed the doctors and orderlies out of the way, while the guards stood at the door.

  Trish stepped toward Craig. “What are you doing?” He held up a finger and Trish pulled herself upright, flustered at his harshness.

  The Ukrainian scientist squirmed in pain on the hospital bed, somewhat delirious. His crimson eyes took a long time to focus on Craig.

  “I just learned of your black-program research for the Soviet military,” Craig said. “Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

  General Ursov had been coy, giving few specific details but confirming that Dumenco had indeed been a key physicist developing directed-energy weapons for the Soviet military. But he and his family had defected to the West during the breakup of the USSR. While he himself had retained a relatively high profile, Dumenco’s family had never been seen again.

  “Has someone tried to kill you because of your weapons research?” Craig demanded. “The classified work you left behind in the Soviet Union? Is that what they’re after? Is that why someone exposed you to radiation in the Fermilab accelerator?”

  “Perhaps,” Dumenco croaked. “Probably not.” His eyes rolled, leaking fluid that might have been tears or just mucous from damaged membranes. “They didn’t want me to talk about the things I had discovered. I had sworn to keep that work secret. But after my accident, they were afraid, afraid I would talk on my deathbed.” He shook his head. “But I had promised not to reveal what I know, and I am a man of my word.”

  “And you haven’t revealed anything. But I’m not asking for classified results, Professor. I’m asking for help.”

  Dumenco was quiet for a long time. He looked to Craig, but could find no empathy.

  Dumenco’s lip trembled. “When I came here I had to… leave my family. Your State Department changed their names to keep them safe. I thought if I remained silent about my research, then the secret police might leave me alone, might leave… them alone.”

  Craig held up the folded sheet of paper found in the assassin’s pocket. “Then why do you think he had this list? To mail them Christmas cards? I don’t think so.”

  Dumenco looked devastated at the revelation. “Even I didn’t know where they were located. I haven’t seen them in a year. Names changed, they moved to different places, an odd stepchild of your U.S. Marshal witness protection program.”

  Craig stiffened as the appalling truth hit him. June Atwood hadn’t told him any of this. Dumenco had kept quiet all these years, and his family had been in hiding, with new lives set up by the Bureau itself!

  Trish hurried around to check on Dumenco’s IV drip, monitoring his vital signs with the apparatus, but she just wanted to get closer to the old man, trying to offer comfort by her presence.

  “So why did this man try to kill you? How did he get into Fermilab, and how do you think he triggered your radiation exposure? Was he a hired-gun from the former Soviet Union, someone leftover from the KGB?”

  “My work at Fermilab was beginning… to reproduce some of my efforts in the Soviet Union. I should have known it would draw their attention.” Dumenco swallowed hard. “But this man could not have operated the Tevatron-it is much too technical for him. He couldn’t have caused the accident.”

  Craig stood back crossing his arms over his chest angrily, but knowing that while the scientist was stubborn, he did at least seem sincere. This entire situation in the hospital might be irrelevant, or at least merely tangential to the original radiation accident.

  But if that were true, then who had actually triggered the experimental failure that had caused the beam dump in the first place? What was the explanation for the vaporized blockhouse? Did it have something to do with antimatter storage, or the Nobel Prize? Who had shot Goldfarb, and why? And how was that connected with all this?

  Trish injected Demerol and sedative into the IV. Dumenco watched her with faint suspicion, glancing around the entire room as if a play of light, a dance of shadow might hide another killer. Trish turned
to Craig, anger apparent on her face. “That’s enough, Craig. He needs to rest.”

  “No,” Dumenco said, the panic rising on his face. “No rest. I have to understand… these test results.” He clawed over for the well-thumbed data printouts from his p-bar experiment. “They’re wrong, and I don’t know why.” He looked at her with a martyred expression. “If I’m going to die for this, at least I want to be right.”

  “You have to sleep, Georg,” Trish soothed. “You can do it in the morning.”

  If there’s going to be another morning for him, thought Craig. He looked down at the list of names of Dumenco’s hidden family members. He would leave Dumenco for now. He had other questions to ask-and SSA June Atwood was damned well going to answer them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Thursday, 5:32 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  After much practice Craig had learned how to keep his frustration in check when he talked to the Boss Herself, June Atwood. Usually. After the stress of the past few days, though, with time running out for Dumenco, with the chlorine gas attack on himself and Jackson, and with Goldfarb barely clinging to life, Craig had had enough of tact.

  He strode swiftly down the hall, already arguing in his mind. If Dumenco had been involved with the State Department for many years, the Bureau must have a file on him a mile long.

  So why hadn’t Craig been given a heads up? Of course, he had horned in on this case, coming in through the back door, screwing up the bureaucracy. But that was no excuse.

  Craig went to a bank of pay phone booths. The land line would be safer than his cell phone, and he wasn’t supposed to use his cell phone in the medical center anyway.

  A lone blond nurse with her hair pulled back in a French braid glanced at Craig as he fidgeted at the phone, waiting for June to answer. A woman with a high-pitched voice squawked at the adjacent booth while an old gentleman dressed in a blue bathrobe waited behind her.

  June answered breathlessly. “Craig! I just heard about Jackson and the shooting. Is everything all right-”

  “June,” he interrupted, “I need background on Dumenco. All of it.”

  Hesitation. “You have his file. I’ve given you-”

  “I don’t mean the dossier Fermilab uses for its brochures. I want the real details: where he came from, who he worked for, and why he defected.”

  “Craig, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about-‘’

  “June, no PR bull! I want it straight. Dumenco himself just confessed that he worked on Soviet black-program research. I know about his family, how they were hidden-”

  “Craig!” June’s voice came like a shot over the phone. “Can you get to a STU-3?”

  Craig answered slowly. “I can get down to the Chicago office, but that’ll take nearly an hour. I need to know now, June. I’ve got a murder, attempted murder, and sabotage to solve here-not to mention a victim who’s only going to last another day at most. I’m getting more information from the bad guys than from my own office! How do you think that affects my confidence in the FBI?”

  The nurses paid him no attention, indifferent to the usual patients’ conversations. The man in the bathrobe tapped his wife’s shoulder for attention, but the woman just put a finger to her ear and kept talking away on the phone.

  “Are you calling from your cell phone?”

  “I’m on a land line-it’s the best I’ve got.” June waited a moment before speaking. “All right… but this is close hold.” She hesitated, then said, “The Bureau had known about Dumenco for years. Our government desperately wanted him over here because of all his former work in the Soviet Union. Fundamental stuff, ground-breaking research he could never publish openly over in Russia. We wanted him to reproduce it here.”

  “In exchange for protecting his family, and getting them-and him-out of a country that was falling apart, after Chernobyl, after the end of the Cold War.”

  “That’s right. Soviet weapon scientists weren’t even known until lately, and they certainly weren’t allowed to travel outside the Iron Curtain. But when you’ve attained Dumenco’s stature, you can make a few demands. He went to European physics conferences-complete with KGB escorts.

  “But they couldn’t watch him every second, prevent him from passing a note to another scientist. That’s when he made his break, and he was granted asylum in the U.S. ” She paused. “We set up a coordinated effort to grab his wife, his daughters, his son. Everything was in such chaos over there at the time, it was easy to do a bait-and-switch.”

  Craig pressed the heavy black phone close to his ear. “But Dumenco hasn’t exactly been hiding. He’s one of Fermilab’s pet physicists, working and publishing for seven years. The Nobel committee even has his number.”

  “Dumenco knew he would always be in the limelight somewhere,” she said. “But his family was the bargaining chip, not him. Unless they were hidden, they could become pawns for the KGB, blackmail to keep him in line. We couldn’t have that, so we put them all in a modified witness protection program. Not even Dumenco knew where they were living. Under tight security, the U.S. Marshal’s office arranged for him to see his family once a year in a safe house, at a classified location.”

  Craig swallowed in a dry throat. “So in order to pursue his one love in life-physics-Dumenco had to protect his other love, his family. That’s why the assassin kept trying to track down the names and aliases, why he tried to kill Dumenco before he could make any deathbed confessions.”

  June kept her voice carefully neutral. “That about sums it up.”

  Craig knew what he had to do. “June, you’ve got to give me detailed contact information for his family.”

  “Impossible,” she was quick to say. “Absolutely classified.”

  “Look, June,” he said into the phone, his voice hard, “you owe it to me, and to Dumenco. You kept information from me once in this investigation, and I’m running up against the clock. Dumenco probably won’t last through tomorrow. Give me those names and addresses. We need to get those people out here, preferably with an FBI escort, before it’s too late.”

  June tried to sound soothing. “But those family members are protected and hidden, Craig. For their own safety.”

  “I don’t care, June! You can do it. The family was only hidden as a safeguard for Georg Dumenco-and that doesn’t matter anymore. In another day the entire reason for isolating them is going to be in a drawer in the hospital morgue. They deserve to see him one more time-he’s their father and husband. I’m sure they’d be willing to risk it, if only to say goodbye.”

  In the waiting room several people sat nervously pretending to read the old magazines scattered about on the tables. Others looked at the ancient television set; the off-kilter hue adjustment made the people on CNN look yellow-skinned and jaundiced.

  A candystriper walked by with a cart bearing plastic-wrapped gifts, flowers, chocolates, and stuffed animals. The intercom broke in repeatedly, calling the names of doctors or stating nonsensical phrases; to Craig, it sounded like a conversation during the old CB radio craze in the 1970s.

  He continued to wait, but June remained quiet on the other end of the line. He had experienced her cold, silent treatment before when she didn’t have a counterargument for him but still didn’t want to surrender the issue. Apparently, she thought that if she remained quiet long enough, the bothersome agent would give up.

  But not this time. Craig could dish out the silent treatment as well as June could. In fact, many of his relationship problems with Trish LeCroix had stemmed from his not talking to her often enough. In this circumstance, he could use that character flaw to his advantage.

  “All right, dammit,” June finally said. “You win. Give me the hospital’s fax number. I’ll transmit the list to you as soon as I get it. I can’t just look them up in a Rolodex, you know. I’m going to have to call in a lot of favors.”

  “They’ll be favors well spent, June,” he assured her. After giving her the med center’s fax
number, he hung up.

  But as he turned away from the phones, another thought occurred to him. If Dumenco had walked a real razor’s edge, doing work but trying not to reveal too much, the secret police would have watched him-but they would never have tried to kill him in the first place. And certainly not in a slow, lingering death like radiation exposure. It gave him too much chance to talk.

  The assassin Jackson had shot couldn’t be the one who had engineered the fatal accident. As Dumenco had pointed out, the Fermilab incident was caused by someone extremely knowledgeable about the inner workings of the accelerator, how to cause a fluctuation in the Tevatron, which would lead to an emergency beam dump.

  Craig let out a quiet groan. He was exactly back where he had started in the first place.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Thursday, 6:10 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  Leaning against the door frame of Dumenco’s room, Trish looked up at Craig as he returned from his phone call. Her sepia eyes were surrounded by a corona of red. “I haven’t felt this hopeless since Chernobyl.”

  “Is he going to make it through the night?” Craig asked.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Human endurance is not a predictable quantity. It’s just everything else on top of that-two assassination attempts, the attack on you and Jackson, your friend Goldfarb shot.” She shook her head. “I know I’m the one who asked you to look into this suspicious accident, but sometimes I wonder if I should have left things well enough alone, let Georg die peacefully rather than introducing all this chaos.”

  “But doesn’t your PR-Cubed want to use him as a poignant example, a poster boy against the hazards of radiation?” Craig couldn’t keep the edge of sarcasm out of his voice. Trish had a penchant for tilting at windmills, and he knew that she had certainly found her birds of a feather in the Physicians for Responsible Radiation Research.