Lethal Exposure

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Don’t,” said Jackson quietly as he leveled his handgun at Bretti. He remained utterly firm in his stance.

  The grad student drew himself up and jutted his chin, poking out the goatee. “You wouldn’t shoot me with all these people here.” He took a step backward.

  “Try me,” said Jackson coolly. “You shot my partner, remember?”

  From the look in the other agent’s eyes, Bretti decided to believe him.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Friday, 5:32 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  In Dumenco’s room, the silence of death felt like a heavy shroud. His family members stood around the bed, stunned and quietly grieving.

  Paige felt out of place as she looked at the destroyed man. Yet, she realized that death had come as a relief to him. Through a sheen of tears, she saw the polished stone chess set Craig had given him, the icons and crosses and framed Ukrainian cathedrals Trish had retrieved from his apartment.

  She had not felt so confused, or devastated, since her father had died, nearly four years ago. The anger and frustration from feeling helpless-and, now, knowing what Nels Piter had done to Dumenco-nearly overwhelmed her. She’d thought she would have been able to handle Dumenco’s death better with his family here- but she was wrong.

  Kathryn and Alyx stood close with their mother, holding each other, relieved to have visited their lost father one last time. Young Peter, barely a teenager, looked the most stricken of all those by the bedside. “But I haven’t finished telling you, Father,” he said. “I had so much more to say. We didn’t even thank you for bringing us here to America…”

  Ashen-faced, Trish turned away from the scientist’s body and picked up her clipboards, jotting down notes, filling out the death certificate, trying anything to avoid concentrating on what had just happened. “It was so senseless,” she muttered. “Another one for the books, for the database. But we still don’t know how to do anything about such radiation exposures.”

  Nels Piter looked awkward at the edge of the doorway, and Paige didn’t know what to do, how to deal with him. He had just confessed to causing the accident that had resulted in Dumenco’s lethal exposure. Murder. Should she call hospital security? She didn’t think the Belgian scientist was a particular risk for wild flight- he had admitted what he’d done, after all. She could wait for Craig, she supposed.

  No one paid attention to Piter, no one even seemed to notice him. At the doorway he crumpled up the telegram into a hard little ball and threw it into the waste-basket before he stumbled out into the hall.

  Paige followed hesitantly, though she could see he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He shuffled aimlessly down the hall with his head low, his shoulders slumped. This wasn’t the self-confident man she had known for nearly a year, the handsome, sometimes abrasive, always quick-witted professor. A Nobel nominee.

  This man looked defeated. A far cry for someone just achieving his lifelong dream.

  Paige stopped to retrieve the paper, snatching it out of the trash, thinking it might be an important souvenir. But as she unfolded it and straightened the wrinkles, she glanced down at the text, reading the words there with widening eyes.

  The elevator doors by the nurse’s station opened. Craig and Jackson tumbled out, headed directly for Dumenco’s room. Paige wondered as an afterthought if they had recovered the antimatter-but it all seemed insignificant now with Dumenco’s death.

  Craig ran past Piter, his chestnut hair flying and his tie flipped over his shoulder. He skidded to a stop on the hospital’s old linoleum floor; Jackson pulled up beside him.

  “We captured Nicholas Bretti,” Craig said. “He’s the one who shot Ben Goldfarb and stole the antimatter. It should only be a matter of time before he confesses to having killed Dumenco.” Then he recognized the Belgian’s stricken expression and looked up to see Paige also standing there stunned. “Are we too late-?” Craig hurried into the Ukrainian’s room.

  Jackson remained in the hall, silent for a moment, then he turned back for the elevators. He opened and closed a sinewy fist, as if still trying to massage tension out of his muscles. “I’ll go check on Ben.”

  Paige held up the telegram as Piter sat down dully in one of the visitor’s chairs. “Nels-you did it.”

  The physicist didn’t respond. He looked down at the floor as if she was flouting the accusation. But she meant the telegram, not the lethal exposure.

  “Nels, you let Dumenco think he had won. This telegram from the Stockholm committee congratulates you for winning the Nobel Prize. You’re a Nobel laureate, not Dumenco. You did that for him.” She felt exhausted, drained. “You let Dumenco die thinking it was him, validating all the black-program work he had done for the former Soviet Union.”

  Piter looked up, stung. His eyes were red, his face drawn in long lines. “I always thought that winning the Nobel Prize would mean everything to me.” He shook his head. “But instead it means nothing.”

  Paige frowned. “You gave a dying man his final wish. He died peacefully because of you-”

  “He died because of me!” Piter wavered, then seemed to wither. “My research was shit. I tried to push the envelope farther than anyone else, and instead I built a crystal-lattice trap that had been invented years before, in a country that was falling apart!” Piter was almost sobbing.

  Craig came back out of the hospital room, looking devastated and angry. “I should have shot Bretti when I had the excuse,” he said bitterly. “He never even came to see all the grief he caused.”

  Paige stood next to Piter, who sat helplessly in a chair. “It wasn’t Bretti,” she said, looking at the lethargic Belgian, knowing he wasn’t up to repeating his confession. She explained everything Piter had said, while Craig listened in amazement.

  Piter looked down at the floor and spoke in a whisper. “Who in his right mind would ever have thought it was possible to generate billions of times more p-bars than had ever been produced before? As long as it only needed to hold small amounts of antimatter, my crystal-lattice trap worked perfectly. But as soon as a threshold was reached, it became unstable. Dumenco knew about it all along. I should have discovered that flaw, but I was too blind, too confident-and now my life’s work was for naught.”

  Craig stood tall, intimidating. He started to withdraw his handcuffs, prepared to make an arrest.

  But Piter hadn’t finished talking. He looked up, and his voice took on a desperate edge. “It wasn’t my fault Dumenco was in the area! I didn’t know he was in there. He knew the beam dump was off-limits, but the new construction allowed people to circumvent the safety interlocks. He wanted to check out his detectors personally, because he knew the data were wrong. He knew he should have detected more p-bars.”

  “Because Bretti stole them,” Craig said.

  Shaking his head, Piter drew in a deep breath. “Dumenco knew a lot more than any of us.”

  Craig said, “I’m going to have to arrest you, Dr. Piter.”

  “I was only trying to delay his results until the Nobel committee made the selection. If Dumenco couldn’t show results that verified his underlying theories, the committee would choose me.” He looked down at the floor and whispered, “The greatest day of my life. And it doesn’t mean a thing.”

  Paige looked at Craig and crossed her arms over her blouse. She was struck by the difference in the two men. Unlike Nels Piter, Craig was strong under pressure, silent, thoughtful, unassuming… yet extremely confident in his abilities.

  The year that they had spent apart had validated her impressions of him, and now seeing Craig come through this stressful week unwavering only made her more certain of his character.

  And her growing feelings for him.

  She placed a hand on Craig’s shoulder. “Try to keep his arrest quiet until the Stockholm committee can be informed. If word leaks out that he’s won the Nobel, reporters are going to swarm over him like flies.”

  Craig nodded, looking at her with an unreadable expression. “Okay,
Paige. If that’ll help you out.”

  Then he led the handcuffed Nobel laureate toward the side exit.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Friday, 5:47 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  Craig stood by the hospital room door, waiting as Dumenco’s family paid their last respects. A single light on the dresser cast moody shadows throughout the room as the sun set over the oak-shaded Fox River. The medical equipment and diagnostics had been shut down, and for the first time since Craig had been there, the room seemed peaceful.

  Dumenco’s wife Luba sat by her dead husband, gently stroking his hand. She moved her lips close to his head, silently whispering a prayer. His two daughters stood by the window, quietly comforting each other. Peter stared vacantly at his father, as if he could not fathom that the man was dead.

  Craig waited patiently, not wanting to disturb the family in their grief. He would have time later to try and understand the remaining loose ends. He could see why Paige had avoided spending more time in the hospital room, not because she didn’t like Trish-he’d seen Paige take care of herself-but because of the memory of her own father’s death.

  Now, though, with Bretti’s capture, Dumenco’s death, and Piter’s confession, things could finally return to normal for Fermilab.

  Craig missed spending time with Paige, and it hadn’t struck him until now how much he really missed her. This was the third major case they had worked together, and each time he discovered more about the intelligent, exuberant Protocol officer. And he wondered how she viewed him.

  Earlier, after he had taken Nels Piter into custody, she met him in the hospital lobby and ran a hand through her blond hair. “You’ve been through a lot today.”

  “So have you.” He paused.

  Paige gave a small smile. “I’m fine.” She hesitated. “How’s… how’s Trish?”

  He smiled wryly and placed an uncertain hand on her shoulder. “I need to have a talk with her. In fact, I should have done this when I first got here.” Rubbing his hand down her arm, he turned to go, heading back to the Intensive Care ward. That had been an hour earlier.

  Now, a movement in the dark corner of Dumenco’s room caught his eye. Trish. A glint of light reflected off her glasses. She stood with her arms folded across her breasts, intently watching the family’s reactions, as if she were comparing them against some set standard.

  Trish slowly looked his way. Her face lacked expression. She stared at him for a moment, and he gestured with his chin to the door. He followed her out into the hall. Trish lounged back against the wall, her head tilted up and her eyes closed. “It’s always hard when someone dies,” she said.

  “You look like you took it pretty well.”

  “I have to. It’s the nature of the game.”

  “You always could be detached.” Craig braced himself.

  Trish glanced sideways at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Craig chose his words carefully. “When you first called, asking me to come out here, I thought you might have a deeper interest in this than you said. But now your reaction is so clinical. Judging from the passion you put into some of your PR-Cubed opinion pieces, I thought you’d be railing up and down the halls.”

  An orderly walked past the elevators; nurses’ voices came from around the corner.

  “Strictly professional,” she said. “I see now that a lot of the PR-Cubed soapboxing was just… words, nothing more.”

  “How so?” Craig asked. “What made it change for you?”

  Trish spoke in a small voice. “It’s so hard, day after day, seeing people die. I do everything I can for them, work myself ragged. I use every known technology trying to save someone, and then they die for no apparent reason. You have to keep it all inside-aloof, not get involved. Otherwise you’d be racked with grief. I have to be detached, damn it. Don’t fault me for it.”

  Craig set his mouth as the words struck home. His own career was much the same, seeing people die, many of them innocent victims of circumstance. If he were to get personally involved, he’d never be able to do his job. “I do understand,” he whispered.

  “I doubt it.” Trish setting her mouth in a firm line, dismissing him.

  Craig remained quiet, unwilling to fight about it. He’d already had that experience too many times with her. Instead, he leaned over and put an arm awkwardly around her. “But it wasn’t your fault. And we never would have caught Bretti-or Dr. Piter for that matter- unless you chose to get involved and called me.” He hesitated. “You’ve always been involved. I realize that now. It’s your way, and you won’t ever change-not for Dumenco… and not for me.”

  He drew her close, and for the first time in years smelled her hair. He felt Trish nestle into his arms, and he held her tight.

  But he felt nothing for her except pity; pity that she had chosen to excel in a field where she would always feel the pain of other people, no matter how far she tried to distance herself from it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Friday, 9:38 p.m.

  Fox RiverMedicalCenter

  Craig stood by Julene Goldfarb’s side, a hand on her shoulder as they looked down at her husband’s hospital bed. Paige waited directly behind him, and Jackson knelt with one knee on the floor in front of the bed-the tall, lanky black agent looked very uncomfortable in the awkward position. Ben Goldfarb’s two girls fidgeted on chairs at the other side of the room, doing their absolute best to be good and stay quiet. Outside, a powdery snow whipped against the windows.

  Craig felt a flash of dèja vu-four hours ago he had stood with another family, two floors away, as they grieved over Georg Dumenco’s death. Luckily, this situation wasn’t nearly so tragic.

  Craig watched his short, curly-haired partner wince as he tried to roll over on his side. Hanging from supports above the bed, two intravenous tubes ran into his arm, while others disappeared under the sheets. The numerous tubes and diagnostics made Goldfarb look like a mannequin supported by thick strings.

  Jackson stood up, helped position his partner, then stuffed a pillow behind him to support Goldfarb while lying on his side.

  “Thanks,” whispered Goldfarb. “I feel like one of those lab rats.”

  “I’m not sure the doctors want you to be off your back, Ben,” said Julene.

  Goldfarb snorted, then started coughing as it tickled his throat. “Everybody wants me off their back.”

  “Sounds like he’s in pretty good shape to me. ” As Paige leaned over to Craig, he caught a hint of White Shoulders perfume; he felt strangely giddy with her face so close to his.

  Jackson turned to the dresser and picked up a paper Starbucks cup covered with a white plastic lid. “Brought you something, big guy.” Removing the lid, he waved the cup under Goldfarb’s nose. “Bet you hadn’t tasted this for a while.”

  Goldfarb’s eyes lit up. “That coffee smells heavenly. Bring it over here!”

  “Randall Jackson!” Julene leaned over to pluck the coffee cup away. “You know he’s not supposed to have any caffeine.”

  “I was just going to let him smell it, ma’am,” protested Jackson, taking the cup back with a swift movement. “Let him inhale.”

  “Starbucks is potent enough to have a jolt just in the fumes,” Goldfarb said wistfully.

  “Mom! Mr. Jackson’s spilling on me!” Goldfarb’s oldest girl pushed back in her chair as Jackson swung the hot cup of coffee over her. Jackson put a hand under the cup to keep the liquid from sloshing out.

  Craig started to laugh when his pager beeped. Digging it out of his suit jacket, he checked the number. June Atwood, calling to check in.

  Craig dialed the number from Goldfarb’s bedside phone. June sounded anxious and curious. “I got your summary of the events regarding the incidents at Fermilab-but you didn’t tell me how Ben is doing!”

  Craig smiled at the clear concern behind her stern voice. “I told you it was an incomplete report, June.” He glanced at the commotion in the room. Jackson alternated
between sweeping the coffee under Ben’s nose and keeping it at bay from Julene. Julene resorted to folding her arms and staring coldly at him.

  “I think Ben’s made it over the hump. Remember how much he moaned about breaking his pinky finger in Nevada -he’ll probably milk this for a promotion, or at least a bonus.”

  “He’s lucid?” asked June. “Is anything the matter? I can hear some sort of commotion in the background.”

  Craig smiled. “Uh, it’s nothing. Just a difference in opinion on post-traumatic recovery procedures. He’ll be fine. Another few days and he’ll be able to fly home.”

  “I really should have come out myself.” June sounded guilty.

  “ Jackson coordinated everything at the hospital. And you wouldn’t have been able to do anything out here- Jackson wouldn’t have let you. They’re quite a team.”

  “You all are. Including that Ms. Mitchell. I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

  Uh, oh, thought Craig. “Uh, I doubt you’ll have a chance to do that, June,” he said. “She’s working out here in Fermilab.”

  Paige looked at him curiously. Craig just shrugged.

  “For the time being,” said June dryly. “But we’ll see about that.”

  Now Craig was really confused. “What do you mean?”

  June sighed. “I don’t know how you two manage to do it, but the breakthroughs you and Paige Mitchell have made on the last few cases-even though you’ve been thrown together by circumstances rather than any conscious design-have gained attention as a model for inter-agency cooperation. Both rhe Attorney General and the Department of Energy have already spotted an opportunity.”

  “An opportunity? What are you talking about?” His boss must have been working on this behind the scenes for a long time, completely without his knowledge.

  “An opportunity to quickly solve high-tech crimes, just like the ones you’ve been working on with Ms. Mitchell. We feel that such a cross-disciplinary government team will not only get the job done because of your joint experience base, but it also costs less money than creating a separate agency. In short, you and Mitchell working together-with assistance from special agents such as Jackson and Goldfarb-is a good idea.”