Lethal Exposure

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Dumenco’s wife, Luba, his youngest daughter, Alyx, and his son, Peter, had come from Minneapolis, while his eldest daughter Kathryn ironically had just begun college at the University of Chicago. She lived close to her father, but was discouraged from seeing him… until now, when he lay on his deathbed.

  Kathryn came forward in new blue jeans with her two hands clutched in front of her. Her straw-colored hair was cropped short, sticking out in a scarecrowish style that made her look like a waif. Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes were huge and shadowed as if she hadn’t gotten much sleep.

  Paige’s heart went out to her, though she said nothing, just watching the tableau. Living in Chicago, young Kathryn had probably learned on the news that her father was dying and had spent days in anguish wondering whether she should break the secrecy, to put her entire family at risk by going to see her father one last time.

  Luckily, Craig had taken care of that choice.

  The wife also came forward to hold Alyx and Peter tightly, both of them shuddering as they stood beside the bed rails. Luba seemed afraid to approach the radiation-damaged wreck that had once been her husband. Georg Dumenco lay breathing raggedly through an oxygen mask, his eyes darting back and forth, sometimes with recognition, sometimes without.

  Peter reached tentatively forward to touch his father’s hand, but then drew back, afraid he might cause further injury. The scientist looked so fragile, as if the soap bubble of his life could easily burst. Instead, the young man hunkered down, leaning against the visitor’s chair and began to whisper. Kathryn stood next to him, still biting her lower lip like a ghost.

  In his bed, Dumenco managed a smile.

  Because of his high-profile research, the technical papers he published, and his consideration for the Nobel Prize, Georg Dumenco would have been easy to locate. Paige was sure the family members must have followed the career of the man who had arranged for them to flee the Ukraine. But, because of the sharp and secret eyes of enforcers from the former Soviet Union, Dumenco had insisted that they never get in touch with him, never be seen with him.

  It seemed a horrible prison sentence to Paige, but the man who had tried to kill him in the hospital, who had broken into his apartment, destroyed Dumenco’s computer and incapacitated Craig and Jackson with chlorine gas, had proven such precautions necessary.

  Carrying a bag under one arm, Trish LeCroix stepped into the hospital room like a worried mother hen. Paige watched her fidget in her clean white doctor’s uniform, her figure petite, her nails done perfectly, her hair short and no-nonsense, her glasses delicate and stylish. Trish’s every move spoke of carefully planned elegance.

  Paige could see why Craig had been attracted to her, but the woman seemed more like a trophy than a human being. With her aggressive work for the PR-Cubed, her time spent studying the fallout and repercussions of Chernobyl, and her impeccable training and residency record, Trish LeCroix had many passions and convictions… and little flexibility. Craig must have just gone along with her, distracted by his FBI duties.

  Paige smiled, thinking that for being so decisive in his work as a Federal agent, where he could discern the faintest connections, Craig was naive and almost passive in personal relationships. But his slightly-embarrassed nervousness, which he always tried to hide, was one of the things Paige found most endearing about him.

  She had forgotten how much she’d missed him over the past year.

  Trish crossed her arms over her chest and scrutinized Dumenco’s family, then glanced over at Paige. She wore a sour but grudgingly tolerant expression.

  Trish reached into the bag and removed various items: an ornate gold-plated cross, framed photographs of Ukrainian churches, and colorfully enameled religious icons that looked like collector’s plates. Trish set them up on the bedside table and around Dumenco’s room, firmly pushing his stacked technical papers aside.

  The scientist’s wife nodded in gratitude, perhaps recognizing a few of the keepsakes. The younger daughter, Alyx, helped to display a few of the items, thankful for something to keep her busy. Paige stared at Trish, her blue gaze filled with questions.

  “I went to Georg’s apartment. He gave me his keys,” Trish said defensively. “I took a few things from his walls. I thought he’d be glad to have them around him.”

  Earlier, Paige had set up the polished stone chess pieces Craig had brought for Dumenco, placing them where the dying man could reach them if he wanted. Dumenco had made no move, no suggestion that he wanted to attempt a game of chess, but he seemed to enjoy looking at the pieces nevertheless, hypnotized by the way the light played across their slick curves.

  Alyx’s blond hair, longer than her sister’s, flowed down between her shoulder blades. She picked up one of the small icon paintings and clutched it as she stood beside Kathryn, looking down at her father. Luba stood stoically, gripping the shoulders of her children; she stood in silence as the boy Peter continued to talk aimlessly. Now he was saying something about various baseball teams and pitchers.

  Dumenco sat awake, watching them. His eyes were bright and sparkling. He leaned forward, reaching out with one swollen hand, then he winced as his entire body convulsed.

  As Dumenco shuddered, Trish hurried forward. She glanced down at a prep tray and selected a filled hypodermic syringe, which she prepared to inject into one of the IV lines taped to Dumenco’s arm.

  “What are you doing?” Paige asked quietly, touching her elbow.

  Trish’s dark eyes flashed. “He’s in pain-can’t you see that? I’m trying to relieve some of it.”

  “But won’t that make him unconscious?” Paige asked. “He’s barely awake now.”

  Trish kept her harsh voice low, as if to prevent the stricken family members from hearing her. “All of his major organ systems have been destroyed or damaged. I don’t know how he’s managed to last this long, but he’s literally falling apart. The pain must be excruciating.”

  “I know that,” Paige said, also keeping her voice low. “But his daughters are here, his wife, his son. You said yourself that he doesn’t have much time left, maybe hours, maybe days.”

  Trish shook her head. “He’ll never survive to the end of this day.”

  “Then leave him awake and conscious for these last few moments with loved ones he hasn’t seen in a long time.”

  “I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to ease suffering and relieve pain,” Trish said, holding up the hypodermic as if it were a dagger. “How can I let him lie here and ignore his condition when I know what agony he’s going through?”

  “What are you afraid he’s going to say with his last breath?” Paige said coldly. “Something about you? Something you don’t want anybody to hear?”

  Trish looked at her in astonishment. Paige knew all about Trish’s activist work, the lectures she had given, and how many hard-line stands she had taken… but now, all the hypothetical situations had changed, and she was faced with a real patient-and perhaps for the first time, a real man she had known very well.

  Trish backed off without answering Paige’s question. She returned the hypodermic to its tray. “We’ll leave him awake for now,” she said. “But I have to watch him very carefully.” She stood back at an uneasy distance from Paige.

  Dumenco’s family clung together at his bedside and waited for the scientist to die.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Friday, 11:57 a.m.

  Fermilab

  Craig stood on the blackened grass, angry and disheveled. Bretti had escaped from right under their noses. And the grad student now had an extraordinarily valuable-and dangerous-cache of antimatter. The sheer rarity of antiprotons made the sample Bretti carried in his crystal-lattice trap worth thousands of times more than any precious metal or gem.

  But where would he sell it?

  And, if Dumenco’s comments were correct, the crystal-lattice trap was also disastrously unstable. Bretti had a bomb large enough to take out dozens of city blocks. Did he even know?

  Behind him,
fire trucks from the towns of Batavia and Aurora formed a semicircle to contain the grass fire. Crews dressed in metallic-silver suits with full-face mask respirators dangling at their sides pushed aside a firebreak and wetted down the brown prairie as a last line of defense against the spreading flames. Other crews sprayed streams of water high in the air back and forth across the grass fire.

  Jackson trudged up, his dark face smudged with smoke and his suit jacket flapping open in the wind. Holding up his cell phone, he wiped his arm across his sweaty brow. “We’re lucky this still works. Dr. Piter is getting us Bretti’s home address from the head office- our own info on Bretti is back at the temporary command post. I’d like to be the one to catch that little bastard.”

  Craig took a deep breath, then straightened his sunglasses. “Get the Chicago office to set up roadblocks while we check out Bretti’s place. See if Schultz will send us some backup. And get a search warrant.”

  “Got it.” A cloud of smoke from the fire swirled around them as Jackson immediately started punching in numbers. The lean FBI agent held the cell phone to his ear. With the prairie fire raging behind him, he looked like a lone survivor from a bombing raid.

  Jackson pulled the rental car up to the empty curb in front of a line of duplex ranch houses. Beside him, Craig squinted through his sunglasses at the mailbox numbers out by the road. “Number one hundred twenty two should be right around the corner, on the right.”

  “You don’t think he could have found an older part of town to live in, do you?” Jackson said as he punched in numbers in his cell phone, checking on their backup. “What a bunch of dumps.”

  “He’s a grad student, remember?” Craig said. He remembered his own days of starvation wages, when even a professor’s salary seemed like a huge amount of money. A duplex like this was a nice place to live, compared with some of the student dives he had seen.

  At Stanford, while working part time for the private investigator Elliot Lang, Craig had spent many hours studying for classes, thinking through term papers, fighting boredom outside rows of apartments in San Francisco, keeping a tail on a cheating husband or a supposedly injured worker milking an insurance claim. Back then he only had to wait and watch, maybe take a few pictures.

  Now they were walking into a literally explosive situation.

  Jackson put down the cell phone. “Schultz says the backup won’t be here from downtown for fifteen minutes.”

  Craig thought quickly. They had already obtained a verbal okay for the search warrant from a local magistrate who had worked with Agent Schultz in the past. “I don’t think Bretti’s coming back here-not after what just happened out at Fermilab. But he may have left something inside that we need to know.” He recalled the vital information he had found in the abandoned home of the leader of the Eagle’s Claw militia near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. “And if Bretti’s on the run with an unstable container of antimatter, he can go a long way in fifteen minutes.”

  Jackson nodded. “Okay, let’s take a look.” He sounded anxious to get to the renegade grad student. Almost too anxious, to avenge Ben Goldfarb’s shooting.

  Craig shrugged on his suit jacket, glancing up and down at the other low-rent houses to see if they had been spotted. He straightened his tie, trying to keep from telegraphing his nervousness.

  Together, moving like two professionals, they started toward Bretti’s duplex, the left-hand side of the building. Weeds and crabgrass covered the small yard. A crumbling concrete driveway dotted with fresh oil spots ran from the street to a one-car garage. A chain-link fence split the yards in two.

  They stepped back, out of sight from the front window. Craig pressed his lips together, looked around one last time, and drew in a breath. “We’ve got to move.” He rang the doorbell, ready with one hand on his Sig-Sauer, one hand near his badge and ID wallet.

  Jackson ’s nostrils flared, and Craig looked at him firmly. “Remember the Rules of Engagement, Randall- this isn’t Ruby Ridge. The best way to help Goldfarb is to bring this dirtball in alive.”

  Jackson gripped his pistol. “I understand.” No one answered the door, and Jackson knocked, pounding hard against the door.

  Craig gestured around. “I doubt he’s here. You take the back door. Don’t wait for me to yell if anything goes down.”

  “Right. By the book.” Jackson briskly jogged around the corner, put a hand on the low chain-link fence and easily vaulted into the backyard.

  Craig tried the front door. Locked. He stepped back to kick it in, when he heard a sound just inside the front door. He placed a sweaty hand on his pancake holster, prepared to draw-

  Jackson yanked open the door, out of breath. “Back patio door was off its track.” He held his pistol with two hands, the barrel pointing up in the air.

  “Lucky for us.” Craig dropped his hand from his pancake holster.

  Jackson shrugged. “I did have to help it a bit.”

  Craig glanced around the threadbare room as he entered, seventies tract-home vintage. Starving student furniture, plywood-and-cinderblock bookshelves, orange crates covered with sheets for end tables. Empty.

  “I didn’t go through the house,” said Jackson, “but it looks like only two rooms off the main passageway.”

  They quickly secured the duplex, but Craig knew in his gut that Bretti wasn’t home. It didn’t look like he had been here for some time.

  The single bed was unmade; stacks of computer paper, journal articles, and textbooks were pushed up against the wall. A large cardboard box in one corner held copies of Physics Today and Physical Review Letters. Three empty cans of Pringle potato chips and a six-pack of Diet Pepsi sat by the nightstand. Dirty underwear was piled in a corner, but too many empty hangers dangled in the closet, some scattered on the floor. Bretti had just cleaned out his clothes.

  Craig straightened. “I bet he’s not coming back.”

  Inside the tiny kitchen, Jackson stood over a folding card table, scanning a sheaf of papers. Craig checked the date on the milk in the refrigerator; its freshness had expired a week earlier.

  Under the table was what looked like a case of booze. Craig knelt to take a closer look. “Grand Marnier-a couple hundred dollars worth there. He’s got an expensive taste for a grad student.”

  “Or was it a splurge?” Jackson asked. “Maybe he just got a nice payoff.”

  “Look at this.” Jackson handed Craig a preprinted in-flight menu. On the front was printed welcome to the concord. “What the heck is a grad student doing with a menu from the Concord? Doesn’t that thing fly into New York?”

  Craig stared at the list of Indian food, written in fancy script: Chicken vindaloo, curry vegetables, Kingfisher beer. “Goldfarb wanted me to go see it in O’Hare when I landed early Tuesday. British Airways was having a special this month, direct from Chicago to New Delhi, India.”

  “A guy who lives in a dump like this on a grad student’s salary doesn’t have any business riding on the Concord,” Jackson said. “Or drinking a case of Grand Marnier. But what’s the connection with India?”

  Craig said slowly, tentatively, “Well… India ’s a threshold high-tech country. Maybe Bretti got involved with somebody there.”

  Jackson scrounged through the papers on the table, looking for a bank statement. “I’ll bet if we pull Bretti’s finances, we’ll find he’s made several large deposits. He doesn’t seem the type to know how to cover his tracks too well. He’s an amateur at this stuff.”

  “All the more dangerous,” Craig cautioned, thinking of Ben Goldfarb. “Dr. Piter said this was only one of two places in the world that could produce p-bars- CERN and Fermilab. And with Dumenco’s new method to increase the production of antimatter, Fermilab is the only place that could make enough antimatter for profit.”

  “Are you saying there’s a black market for antimatter?” Jackson was incredulous.

  “Yes, and Bretti has a large batch to sell.” His mind’s eye saw a flash of Dumenco, lying on his deathbed, confessing to bei
ng involved in a Soviet black program to power exotic weaponry. “Think about it. He just left Fermilab and he’s on the run. Right now he’s got nothing to lose. He’ll want to get out of the country.”

  Craig stuffed the Concord menu in his jacket pocket and turned for the door. “Let’s get to O’Hare. Whatever Bretti is doing doesn’t matter as much as what could happen if that satchel of antimatter goes unstable. He could take out the entire airport in an instant.”

  Jackson raced behind him, leaving the door swinging on its hinges.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Friday, 12:17 p.m.

  Fermilab

  Back to normal, thought Nels Piter. Would things ever get back to normal? It had to be over soon. If Dumenco would just hurry up and die, the whole mess could be forgotten, cleanly and efficiently. And with the FBI agents rushing off after Nicholas Bretti, they would be satisfied with the conclusion of their case and just let the Fermilab researchers return to their experiments.

  With the imminent publication of Piter’s major new paper in Phys. Rev. Letters, and the nail-biting wait for the Nobel announcement, and Dumenco’s lethal exposure-or even worse, his insistence that Piter’s own crystal-lattice trap was flawed, fundamentally flawed- Piter felt tense to the point of nausea.

  But the Ukrainian had always caused problems for Piter-even on his deathbed.

  Waiting for the elevator door to open in the cathedral-like Wilson Hall, Piter straightened his impeccable suit jacket, adjusted his tie. He ran a hand across his hair to smooth down the locks that had been blown out of place.

  He felt dirty, sooty from the fire-he should have spent a moment in the rest room making himself presentable. He had an image to maintain in his office. He couldn’t stand having things out of place, especially his appearance-because he was very much aware that appearance was reality. He tended to avoid public rest rooms, germ-infested places all of them. He would just have to keep his dignity. That would be enough.