Lethal Exposure (21 page)

The blast hurled Craig backward like a punch from a giant fist. All he could see were dazzling flames and a bright wall of light.

CHAPTER 34

Friday, 11:36 A.M.

Fermilab Accelerator, Beam-Sampling Substation

The overpressure wave hurled Craig backward into Nels Piter and slammed the battleship-steel door against the outer wall with a thunderous clang. He covered his head with his arms, sheltering Piter with his body. His ears throbbed from the boom, and heat seared his skin.

The concrete-block walls split and cracked, squirting flames like blood leaking from a cracked scab. A secondary fire crackled with plumes of greasy, noxious smoke, but the blaze found little fuel inside the blockhouse. Broken fragments of cinderblock and metal rebar rained around them like a snowstorm of junkyard objects.

Moments later, Piter groaned and rolled to the side. Craig stood up, shaking his head. His suit jacket was torn, dusty, battered, and he did his best to brush himself off.

Jackson had tumbled to the rough ground, skidding his shoulders across the gravel and into the autumn-dead grass. Now he got to his hands and knees, cradling his skull, disoriented and stunned. “Was that another antimatter release?” he asked. “Did we set one off?”

When Craig shrugged, his head throbbed with the sudden movement. His ears continued ringing. “If so, this one wasn’t as powerful.”

Piter sat down heavily on the gravel pathway, looking comical with his dapper appearance now smudged with soot and dust. “We shouldn’t go inside the rubble, in case there’s residual radiation.” He gripped his knees with long, angular hands and blinked his pale blue eyes. “We’re lucky the blockhouse walls and the heavy door were thick enough to absorb the prompt radiation—otherwise, we’d be going to the hospital like Dr. Dumenco.”

Jackson was silent for a long time. “Bretti set that up deliberately,” he said finally, keeping his voice under control. “A boobytrap.”

“Just like how he must have boobytrapped Dumenco in the beam-dump alcove,” Piter said quickly.

“After he locked me down in the tunnel, he knew we’d come looking for him. So he was waiting for us here. Could have been a diversion, or maybe he’s just homicidal.” Jackson’s voice was a growl. “That guy is really starting to annoy me.”

“After this explosion, and after shooting Goldfarb, and after dumping the lethal exposure on Dumenco, it’s safe to say he’s got a bloodthirsty streak a mile wide.” Craig placed his hands on his hips, scanning the silent prairie that stretched around them for miles. “I’ve got a gut feeling, though, that we missed him by only a few minutes.”

He heard sirens swelling in the distance, emergency response crews from Fermilab racing to the site of the explosion. Bretti had grabbed their attention, all right—but by now the grad student could be anywhere.

They would comb the area inch by inch, get all available FBI and law-enforcement personnel to barricade the exits. They had to trap Bretti here before he did anything else.

From his hiding place in the thick grass, Bretti watched the explosion. He had jury-rigged the power to disengage from the crystal-lattice the moment the substation door opened the merest crack; but he didn’t think the FBI would be so close behind him. He should have had more time, even just a few more minutes.

He hadn’t wanted to kill the agents outright—just incapacitate them, get them out of the way so he could make his last run, escape from this place forever. Of course, he had already shot another FBI agent, the curly-haired one, even though he hadn’t meant to. At this point, with everything that had happened, with everything he had already done, Bretti hoped the other agents would make a distinction between
Attempted
Murder and Murder.

But those FBI men looked really pissed off.

All the more reason to get out of the country, politically safe from any possible extradition. He’d gotten in much too deep to talk his way out, and he had to keep plunging forward no matter who else he had to step on to cross the finish line. He just wished he had a little more faith in Chandrawalia and the crackpot nuclear weapons schemes of a renegade political party.

Fermilab was already crawling with FBI, and the new explosion would only draw their attention. He had to create another diversion, a major one. Seven thousand acres was one hell of a large area to search. If he could keep them busy with several emergencies, it would dilute their manpower, limit the FBI’s ability to watch for a single man who knew his way around.

Luckily, Bretti had parked his car outside the Fermilab perimeter, near the temporary living quarters for visiting scientists. He shouldn’t have a difficult time getting there . . . if he played his cards right.

Out in the grass, the wandering herd of buffalo—great shaggy beasts as stupid as they were large—stood aligned like iron filings to a magnet, staring at the site of the blockhouse explosion, as if the loud noise had somehow penetrated their fuzzy awareness. He could get past them without a problem, given a sufficient distraction.

Taking out his disposable cigarette lighter, Bretti bent over, struck a flame, and ignited the dry grass in front of him. He checked the wind, judged which way it was blowing, and ran the opposite direction.

The flames gnashed at the dry grasses. It was about the time of the year for the community service groups, the ecology-minded volunteers, to come into the prairie restoration areas and set their autumn fires. By simulating a natural lightning strike, they burned the dry grass to promote the growth of the ecosystem they were trying to restore.

Bretti himself would be the lightning today.

He ran along, dipping the cigarette lighter to the dry vegetation, like a graffiti artist with a spray can. The flames spread like acid soaking into filter paper. Bretti crouched to ignite another flashpoint, sprinted ahead, then lit another island of dry grass.

The numerous blazes swelled rapidly. Even against the breeze the flames began to eat their way back toward him, hungrily consuming the dry fuel. Bretti ran at top speed, sweating and panting, in a direct line across the featureless prairie toward the shallow holding ponds, the accelerator ring, and the outer boundary of the site.

If everything worked right he could be home free in less than an hour.

With his head still ringing from the explosion, Craig scanned the waving, crisp brown prairie. He rubbed his nose, finding a trickle of blood from one nostril, but he figured he could survive. The grass blades spread out like a lake of kindling enclosed by the boundary of the particle accelerator. He froze, as dread formed a chip of ice in his chest.

Out in the sea of grass, another column of smoke rose. A brush fire that spread rapidly toward them.

Craig saw the figure running behind the flames. Though the prairie grass was tall, the man’s head and shoulders rose above the swaying blades once he stood up to run.

“There he is!” He grabbed Jackson’s arm.

“Let me at him.”

Craig spun about to face the Belgian scientist. “Stay here, Dr. Piter. Jackson, call for immediate backup. Tell the fire crew to worry about the grass blaze more than the blockhouse.”

Jackson yanked out his cellular phone, punched in a number for the local FBI team already responding to the explosion.

Piter smoothed his suit jacket, still trying to regain his dignity. “I’m going back to my office,” he said. “This is no game for me.”

Ignoring him, Craig ran at full speed into the grass, pumping his legs, heading toward where he had seen the figure run. But the smoke grew rapidly thicker. The flames rushed onward, pushed by a stiff October breeze.

As Craig approached the edge of the flames, he cut left, trying to find a thin patch of smoldering ground he could stomp through. The air smelled of thick pungent smoke, burning vegetation. Birds flew up from their hiding places, but the tearing-paper crackle of the blaze drowned out their squawking cries.

Jackson puffed up beside him. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you you’re not supposed to run into an oncoming flame front?” he said. “Head over to the pond. We can skirt the fire there and get past it.”

Craig saw what the other agent meant and took off, plowing through the grass, stumbling on insidious weeds, old lichen-covered branches, and rocks that protruded from the uneven ground. He swiped blades of grass out of the way like a safari explorer plunging through an uncharted jungle.

Black smoke filled the air. His quarry, Bretti, had fled far on the other side of the fire while he and Jackson struggled to continue their roundabout pursuit.

Soot and ashes and sparks flew around him, and the blaze swept toward them no matter how fast they ran. Jackson pounded Craig on the shoulder to smother an ember that had settled on his suit jacket.

The downside to the other agent’s plan about getting to the holding pond was that the vegetation also grew thickest around the water’s edge. The two agents stumbled through the weeds with the flames hot on their heels.

The rippling wall of fire approached with a hissing roar. Craig turned to see they had no choice but to head into the pond itself. Without a pause, Jackson rammed into him, knocking him down the slope toward the muddy water. Craig maintained his balance in greenish-brown pond scum up to his knees, while Jackson, overexerted, stumbled, and sat down in the water.

Kicked onward by the increasing breeze, the fire struck the obstacle of the pond and curled around it, devouring the grass at the water’s edge. Frogs hiding in the shore weeds splashed into the pond, while indigenous birds took flight. Craig ducked and kept his face low to the water.

Finally, once the fire line had passed, Craig helped Jackson splash out of the pond. Dripping, they sprinted across the burned stubble, the ground still smoldering and charred beneath their soggy shoes. Thick with smoke, the air scraped Craig’s throat and lungs raw. His eyes burned, stinging from the heat and the soot, but he kept racing toward where he had last seen Bretti.

The grass fire had already consumed an amazing section of ground. Helicopters thrummed overhead, and emergency response teams finally arrived at the newly destroyed substation half a mile behind them. Ground fire crews rushed out across the flat ground to control the blaze, but it would take them a long time to get up to speed and pull their act together.

Craig was in close pursuit now. Bretti had to be near. He staggered into the smoke, unable to see, frequently losing his balance. Once, he barely caught himself from plunging face-first into the hot embers of a burned tree.

Just ahead, though, he spotted a dim figure moving through the murk. He yanked out his handgun and bellowed an ultimatum. “Bretti! Federal agents—give up now, sir!” Craig’s smoke-clogged throat made his voice hoarse, and his words came out as a raspy croak. The soot burned his throat and eyes and nose, which were still raw from breathing chlorine gas less than two days earlier.

The fleeing suspect, barely seen, did not respond. Instead, the figure moved closer, threatening. Craig blinked his burning eyes, desperately trying to get a positive ID. “Bretti, this is the FBI!”

“Craig!” Jackson shouted from the side, and then pointed, forcing him to take a closer look. “It’s not hunting season yet.”

Craig realized that the large form was one of the domesticated male bison, its hide singed. Lost and disoriented, the beast lumbered past, snorting, its huge round eyes red-rimmed. Frightened and aggressive, the bull thundered away from the flames, avoiding their noise.

“You have a lot of faith in your firearm, if you expect a weapon of that caliber to do anything more than piss off a buffalo.”

“It’s a Sig-Sauer,” Craig said, abashed, “a little more powerful than my old Beretta.” He continued running after the fleeing grad student. They dashed across the blackened ground until finally—covered with soot and drenched with both perspiration and stagnant pond water—they reached the end of the burn zone.

Craig bent over, placing hands on his shuddering knees as he squinted into the distance beyond the Fermilab boundary, toward the cluster of buildings in Batavia, the streets, parked cars . . . a wealth of places to hide. He removed his sunglasses, blinking in the light, straining to see ahead—but he saw no sign of their suspect.

Craig took a deep breath shaking his head. Sweat dripped into his eyes from his chestnut-brown hair. Once again, Nicholas Bretti had escaped.

CHAPTER 35

Friday, 11:44 A.M.

Fox River Medical Center

On the last day of his life, Georg Dumenco’s exiled family members began to arrive—spectators at a premature wake. Paige led them in, hesitant but proud to perform one last service.

On his hospital bed, Dumenco looked hideous with his skin blistered, reddened, and sloughing off in wet flakes; it seemed a mercy for him to remain drugged, but the scientist rallied and fought, insisting on a last few hours of use out of his brilliant mind.

Upon learning that his prediction was correct after all, but that the antimatter was being bled off and thereby ruining the data from the detector apparatus, Dumenco sagged into stunned relief, as if prepared to die now that he had verified his precious theories.

The Ukrainian struggled to wakefulness and squinted at the new visitors in his hospital room, trying to see through the translucent curtain surrounding his bed. Paige thought Dumenco’s face bore a dreamlike expression, as if he couldn’t believe that his family had finally come to him, that this wasn’t just radiation-induced delirium.

Paige stood beside the visitors, trying to remain unobtrusive. This was their moment with their long-lost Georg. She had their flight schedules. The FBI had arranged for their tickets with the greatest expediency, rushing them from their hiding places across the midwestern United States.

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 chesspieces 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 shoulderblades. 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 this 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.