Lethal Exposure

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “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 could 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 the 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 you 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Friday, 9:53 a.m.

  Experimental Target Area,

  Fermilab Accelerator

  Craig and Piter reached Fermilab some time before the backup agents from the FBI’s Chicago office. Using his own keys, Nels Piter took him through the access doors and beyond Restricted Area fences down into the underground experimental target channel.

  They ran down concrete stairs into the thick-walled underground tunnels. Before them sprawled low ceilings, naked pipes, and garish lights that vanished to a point in the distance, which made the high-energy facility seem to go on forever. The walls were smooth and painted a thick yellowish-white.

  Piter nodded to the left. “We haven’t used that beam-dump facility since Dumenco’s accident. No need to worry about residual radioactivity, though. It dies down quickly… well, fairly quickly anyway.”

  “You really know how to inspire confidence,” Craig answered dryly.

  In the opposite direction was the main entrance to the underground passages and the Tevatron control rooms. Technicians, graduate students, and contractors for scientific teams set up equipment for international experiments, making the underground corridors bustle like a subway station. In the midmorning rush of activity, they took advantage of the beam’s down time. People in lab coats or dark coveralls moved about in the main target areas and diagnostics alcoves, intent on their own work, trying not to get in each other’s way.

  An announcement came over the scratchy, echoing intercom that everyone was supposed to remain where they were and to offer whatever assistance the Federal agents requested. But Craig didn’t think he would find anything in the crowded areas-the Tevatron accelerator was four miles in circumference, and the experimental target tunnel was nearly a mile long.

  They briskly set off away from the main entrance. They had a lot of empty area to cover, many places to hide, many places to set a trap. What disturbed Craig most, though, was that he couldn’t get in touch with Jackson. The tall agent did not answer his cellular phone.

  Piter brushed aside his concern. “Don’t worry. With all the copper shielding, high-energy equipment, and thick walls, cell phone transmissions are difficult under the best of circumstances. It’s like being in a Faraday cage.”

  Still, it just didn’t feel right to Craig.

  Piter hurried along the tunnel at a brisk pace, puffing; sweat glistened at his blond temples. “We should first check the other beam-dump alcoves,” Piter said, out of breath. “They’re rarely inhabited and would be an ideal place to hide suspicious equipment, such as this alleged antimatter trap. Few workers ever have reason to go inside. Dr. Dumenco shouldn’t have been there either-as he’s learned too clearly.”

  Craig jogged easily alongside the dapper scientist. “Unless someone intentionally caused the crash and the exposure.” He watched for Piter’s reaction out of the corner of his eye.

  Piter snorted. “Intentionally killed him? Preposterous. I can believe someone may have wanted an experiment to backfire or be delayed, for whatever reason-but murder is another thing entirely.”

  “Yes,” said Craig in a monotone. “Yes, it is.”

  They hurried down the long corridor, running so intently that technicians and scientists hustled out of their way. A repeat of the announcement came over the intercom, and Craig knew that other Chicago agents must have arrived, descending into the tunnels of the giant accelerator. Bandaged and on administrative leave, Agent Schultz might even have used a little influence.

  Craig listened to the humming of the upper and lower accelerator rings built into the side of the corridor. The superconducting magnets throbbed, barely audible. When the Tevatron operated, the magnets formed a shaped field that curved the beam of high-energy particles in a precise circle. When the beam was on, the protons and antiprotons accelerated around and around, picking up energy with each trip through a booster. The flow was like an atomic fire hose, gushing currents powerful enough to slam a deadly dose of radiation onto anyone who stood in their way.

  As they neared the first beam-dump alcove, Craig was surprised to observe that the door had been wedged tightly shut and barricaded from the outside.

  Piter frowned. “Those doors are supposed to remain open at all times. It’s for general equipment and diagnostics storage.” He stopped in front of the barrier, shaking his head. “This makes no sense.”

  At the sound of their voices, someone pounded against the heavy door from the inside, and Craig heard a muffled yell. Surprised, he and Piter rushed forward to unwedge the lock and pry away the barricade, tugging and grunting to swing the heavy hatch open. They heard more banging, a push-and then Randall Jackson staggered out into the tunnel, blinking in the wash of fluorescent light.

  “Craig!” he said, leaning against the smooth wall for support, “I’m always glad to see you-but more so now than usual.” He panted heavily.

  “What were you doing in there? You were supposed to be looking-”

  “I was trapped!. I caught our man in the act trying to set up something. I thought he ran in here, but he tricked me. It’s Bretti-Nicholas Bretti, Dumenco’s grad student. The twerp sealed me in, and I’ve spent the last half hour just waiting here, knowing I was standing right in the high-energy bull’s-eye. Not a pleasant feeling, I can tell you!”

  “But Dumenco’s grad student is on vacation. He left days before the lethal exposure.” Piter turned pale. “And the substation explosion.”

  “I bet he never went on vacation,” Craig said. “His parents had no idea where he was. He knew that if he was out of state, we had no reason to suspect him.”

  “Until now,” Jackson growled. “I kept thinking any second the accelerator would crash and send another blast of radiation in here just like the one that hit Dumenco.”

  Jackson struggled to regain his composure. He brushed himself off and straightened his tie, as if trying to pretend he wasn’t bothered anymore. “It was like he was trying to retrieve something he’d hidden. He was carrying something, but I didn’t see what.”

  Craig swallowed hard. “An antimatter trap. It could be one of those unstable crystal-lattice traps.” Piter clamped his mouth shut, indignant at that characterization of his invention that had been Nobel Prize worthy.

  Jackson said, “If Bretti goes on the run, we’ll never catch him-and he’s already got half an hour head start, thanks to my stupid clumsiness.”

  Piter said, “I think he’ll be up top. If he’s got antimatter traps planted elsewhere, they’ll probably be in the beam-sampling substations outside.”

  “Like the one that vaporized,” Craig said.

  Jackson nodded. “Yeah-and the one where he shot Goldfarb.”

  Craig spun around. “Let’s get out of this sewer and into the open air. We’re too late to do anything down here, but we can stop Bretti at the substation before he gets away.”

  Piter huffed at the insult to his giant accelerator, but Craig paid him no attention. He turned to Jackson. “Get to a phone and have all gates and entrances to Fermilab closed off. We’ll converge on the substations around the ring. Nicholas Bretti is our man. I don’t want him slipping through our fingers now that he’s so close.”

  Carefully, feeling a shiver of awe crawl beneath his skin, Nicholas Bretti pulled the small crystal-lattice trap through the access port in the beam-sampling substation. In the garish light of the cramped and chilly blockhouse, he held up the tiny container. It would only take a few minutes to transfer its antimatter to the other crystal-lattice trap, but he would keep a tiny fraction of the p-bars embedded in the salt. They could still be useful- as a diversion. Now, for the last time, he had to cover his tracks.

  After today, he wasn’t planning on coming back. With the additional p-bars added to the antimatter already inside the main trap, it would keep even Chandrawalia off
his back.

  Bretti checked the LCD diagnostic panels on the crystal-lattice trap as he started the transfer. The solid-state diode lasers were aligned, confining the antimatter. Each p-bar oscillated in precarious balance within a tiny electropotential trap of crystalline salt molecules.

  He knew now that Chandrawalia’s pretext of needing the antiprotons for “medical applications” was just a sham, a lousy story to cover their nuclear weapon schemes. Maybe now they would be willing to pay him even more-certainly, they wouldn’t brush him off… not with this much antimatter in hand. He knew what it could do.

  Finished with the transfer, he carried the crystal-lattice trap toward the half-open door of the substation as if it were filled with nitroglycerin. He longed for a cigarette, but couldn’t take the time. If the antimatter containment grew unstable, he’d be gone in a flash of incandescent energy-himself and most of the prairie inside the Tevatron’s ring. Bretti could have calculated the exact amount of energy released from the annihilation of so much antimatter, but his stomach tightened at the thought.

  Of course, the survivors and investigators would take years to piece together what exactly had happened, what had turned most of the Fermilab accelerator into a glassy-smooth crater… if the bumbling detectives ever managed to figure it out.

  He had no idea how soon it would be before the trapped FBI agent down in the beam tunnel would be found. But the black agent had recognized him, called him by name-and now Bretti was royally screwed. He had hoped just to slip in, grab the p-bars, and duck out again. Now, he had to keep them off his trail, get the hell out of Dodge, and stay one step ahead until he could board the plane to India and demand asylum or diplomatic immunity, or whatever it was called.

  Getting away was worth sacrificing a few precious antiprotons, he decided.

  Squinting in the exaggerated shadows of the cramped blockhouse, Bretti carefully inserted the main crystal-lattice trap into a foam-padded suitcase shell, a disguise that would make it appear to be mere carry-on luggage. As far as any inspection would show, he was simply taking a paperweight full of salt. And if Chandrawalia was true to his word, he wouldn’t have trouble with any inspections at all.