Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

“Was I resisting?” Paige asked with a raised eyebrow. “And which charms were those, exactly?”

“Oh, you know, the dedication to duty, truth, justice, and the American way. My diligence, my ability to put together the pieces of a puzzle and solve seemingly impossible crimes.”

“Oooh, you’re giving me a chill.” Paige leaned closer to him.

“Speaking of which,” Craig said, suddenly self-conscious and wanting to get down to business, “did you find anything else about Dr. Dumenco’s background?”

She wrinkled her nose as she thought for a moment.

“Well, he was an eminent scientist in the former Soviet Union, but when the Ukraine broke away from the Russian Federation, he fled to the United States. I know we offered him asylum and a very comfy and prestigious job at Fermilab.”

Craig nodded. “The U.S. did that with quite a lot of Soviet scientists. The writing was on the wall-the Berlin Wall, maybe?-when communism fell, Soviet researchers would be up for grabs. Russia was in too much chaos to pay them any more than a custodial wage, which wasn’t nearly enough.

“So other countries began to lure the scientists away. We were afraid a lot of the weapons designers, engineers, and physicists were willing to go over to the highest bidder. But as soon as this process started, the United States began to subsidize them, and to a lesser extent, grabbed everyone they could, offering them political asylum and citizenship, a good salary, and a chance to continue their work in a free capitalist society.”

“Sounds like a good deal,” Paige said, tossing her blond hair over her shoulder.

“For good reason. Less friendly countries were making overtures to get the weapons scientists- Libya, Iraq, North Korea, anybody who wanted their own private little specialist who could take advantage of previous work done in the Soviet Union. One good recruit could leapfrog a threshold country into the ranks of the Big Boys.”

“Like what we did with the German rocket scientists,” Paige said.

“Right-‘Operation Paperclip,’ people like Wernher von Braun and his crew from Peenemünde. After the fall of the Third Reich, we grabbed as many German scientists as we could before the Russians got the rest. Those refugees formed the basis of our respective rocketry programs.”

“Good analogy,” Paige said. She leaned across the table. “Dumenco came here and immediately began doing brilliant work at the Tevatron. He thrived in this place, as if he already had a good head start. You can see by the stack of breakthrough technical papers he published in the last few years, shaking subatomic physics down to the quantum level, you might say.” She sniffed at her own joke, and Craig allowed himself a smile.

“I couldn’t comprehend any of his articles,” Craig said, “not even the abstracts, although I’m a reasonably technical person.”

“Dumenco’s pushing the frontiers of science,” Paige said, “moving the borderline between the unfathomable and the simply nonsensical.”

“What does that mean?” Craig said.

“Dumenco found answers to some crucial problems in high-energy physics of the so-called ‘Standard Model,’ leading to a Grand Unified Theory. But because we can only observe indirect interactions of basic particles, even the answers are sometimes so bizarre they’re incomprehensible.”

“Then maybe I am understanding them,” said Craig, “because they are certainly incomprehensible.”

“The elegance of Dumenco’s work gained notice from the Stockholm Nobel committee,” Paige continued. “With his initial Fermilab results, he achieved breakthroughs in areas that had stymied people for years.”

“Well, what work was Dumenco doing in the Ukraine?” Craig said, flipping to the end of his dossier. “I’ve got practically every month of his employment here, but nothing about that entire earlier part in his life.”

“I couldn’t find out much about that either,” Paige admitted. “The records weren’t transferred over. I’ve uncovered nothing about his family or his education in the Soviet Union. I think he had a wife, two daughters and a son, but their whereabouts are currently unknown. He may have left them behind when he defected.”

“Our government offered this man everything he wished for,” Craig said, tapping his pen against the edge of the table. “Sure, he’s since proven himself to be a brilliant man-but on what did we base our assumption that he would make so many breakthroughs if we gave him the chance? Yet, we instantly gave him an extraordinary amount of time on the world’s largest particle accelerator, granting him all the research assistance and funding he could possibly want? Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

“Yes, I do.” Paige nodded. “But somebody must have known the work he did in the Ukraine.”

“I don’t know about you,” Craig said, “but knowing that someone tried to murder an eminent physicist currently on the short list for the Nobel Prize makes me very suspicious. Especially when I see that a large portion of his past work has been hidden under wraps.”

He tucked his pen back in his pocket. “When something is swept under the rug like that, I see a big suspicious lump. It makes me think that a few of our important answers lie there.”

Wednesday, 10:12 a.m.

New Delhi, India

Stepping nervously from the narrow air-conditioned Concord into the New Delhi airport, Nicholas Bretti felt as if he had entered another world. The sleek supersonic jet was a vision of the future, a flying metal island immaculately clean and incredibly well-maintained; but the New Delhi airport was a nightmare that couldn’t heave itself out of the past.

A mix of heat, humidity, and overpowering smells slammed into him as he stepped off the plane onto the jetway. He knew he would never be able to forget the smells. Or the people.

Bretti blinked, stumbling ahead, as if all his senses had overloaded. He lit a cigarette to calm himself. Already unsteady on his feet because of the six Grand Marniers he had downed in an attempt to calm himself, he tried to regain his full alertness. This Indian connection was important, his safety net, his only chance at escaping what he had done back at Fermilab. He wouldn’t get a second chance to make a first impression on the VIPs coming to meet him.

Swallowing hard, he looked over the jostling bodies just outside the customs area. Gentlemen in immaculate business suits elbowed beggars in torn robes. Women wore yellow and orange cloth wrapped around their bodies; dirty children without shoes or shirts swarmed about. Brownian motion, he thought, Indian motion.

People everywhere, all with black hair, brown skin. People. Noise.

The alcohol buzz wore off quickly. He had a headache, and the panic inside him turned to sour, sick despair. Was this the best future he could hope for?

The incredible humidity made his shirt go limp against him, as if he had just been steam blasted. The airport reeked of urine, mold, animal manure, and decaying garbage. Outside, vendors at stalls added their sweet and biting smells of burning incense, spices, and cooking food, perfumes, and curry.

It was a world far removed from Chicago, and even more so from the upscale neighborhood in Fairfax, Virginia, where he had grown up. Now Bretti wished he had gone back home on his supposed fishing trip after all, instead of just faking it for his alibi.

What did he care about the Indian government’s desire for antimatter, their intent to use it for medical applications? New isotopes for cancer treatments. If they made breakthroughs in medical technology, their country would make billions on the world market. The Indians weren’t really paying him all that much money, after all-and nothing was worth the crap he was going through. Especially not after shooting that FBI agent.