Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

As he turned to leave, Trish followed him out. He faced her. “And what do you have to tell me? I can see that you’re hiding something. Did you see something this morning?”

“No, Craig,” she said, her face flushing. “I didn’t.”

He frowned at her. “I know you too well for that, Trish.” But she just met his gaze with stony silence. He had seen the same sort of doggedness when she had moved away from California, leaving everything they had and going on her own to Johns Hopkins.

He shook his head in disgust. “Everyone around here is a marvel of cooperation.” As he passed the hospital security officers and the FBI man outside the door, he snapped, “I want this guard to be airtight!”

Craig looked at his watch, then back at Trish, giving her the brush-off. “Paige is picking me up to go to Fermilab. I have another meeting with Dr. Piter.” At least Paige was interested in solving the case.

He glanced back at the closed door to the Ukrainian’s room. “Dead men tell no tales,” he said to himself, shaking his head. “But dying men aren’t much help either.”

Thursday, 9:07 a.m.

Fermilab

Hanging up the phone, Randall Jackson couldn’t decide whether to be frustrated and angry… or elated at having found a solid lead. Regardless, he couldn’t wait to tell Craig. At the least they’d meet that afternoon in Ben Goldfarb’s hospital room, as they had agreed.

Dumenco’s graduate student and assistant, Nicholas Bretti had been gone on vacation in West Virginia for the past week. He had not called his advisor, had not shown that he even knew about Dumenco’s lethal exposure, though the story had been on most of the major news media.

Explainable enough, Jackson thought, if Bretti was out on a family fishing trip, on the deep lakes and icy rivers in the isolated West Virginia mountains, as he had told his colleagues. Jackson himself rarely watched the news when he was on vacation.

But Bretti’s family had no idea where their son was. No, they did not know that he was on vacation, and the last time he and his father had gone fishing was when he had been twelve years old.

Jackson had thanked them, hung up. And let his suspicions grow.

Nicholas Bretti was not where he had claimed to be, and perhaps he held other secrets as well.

Jackson flipped through a stack of lab notebooks in the cluttered cubicle while Nels Piter’s grad student Frank Chang watched by his side. The hardback notebooks had cloth spines and numbered, lined paper inside-not the typical cheap, spiral bound college special Jackson had used as an undergraduate. But each volume had NICHOLAS BRETTI stamped proudly on the front. Other than the notebooks, the cubicle office held nothing but physics texts, journal articles, preprints, and equipment manuals.

Frank Chang seemed a nice enough guy, with a goofy, friendly grin. With his long hair and small metal glasses, he looked like he belonged more at Berkeley than in the Midwest. And at least he was thoroughly impressed, if not intimidated, by the FBI badge.

Frank Chang stifled a yawn. “Sorry-had a wild night last night.” He tossed his long hair over his shoulder and pointed to the top notebook. “If Bretti wrote anything worth keeping, it would be in this stack. That’s the most important thing we learn in grad school-document the hell out of everything.”

Jackson flipped through the pages. Nothing in here made sense-equations, columns of numbers, scratched-out formulas, “diffusion rates” and “annihilation operators.” Craig had directed Jackson to Piter, who had in turn assigned Frank Chang to show him around Bretti’s office-a cubicle shared with two other grad students. The tiny room looked more like a repository for missing paperwork than an office.

Jackson looked up, frustrated at not being able to decipher Bretti’s scratchings. It reminded him of trying to work with those computer jocks at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab-introverted geniuses. “So what’s in here? What was Bretti working on?”

Chang grinned. “The same thing every other graduate student has been working on since Nels Piter blew in from CERN-crystal-lattice traps. Antimatter holding devices. Here, I’ll show you.” Chang waved Jackson over to another desk inside the cubicle. He picked up a small white cube the size of a sugar lump encased in some sort of plastic. One side of the plastic had an array of tiny pin points. “This is a salt crystal, an imperfect one, but it’s still useful to show how the trap works.”

Jackson turned the feather-light cube in his hand. “This is salt?”

“Yeah, simple table salt. Sodium chloride. We grow them in the lab. But when we get a good one, we can fix it in a plastic mount, like this one. The tiny pock-marks you see in the plastic are actually banks of solid state lasers-there’s another array at right angles to this one, fixed on the perpendicular wall. When the lasers are turned on, they create resonances in the salt crystal, and it allows us to store one particle of antimatter at each molecular lattice site. That way, the antimatter won’t react with ordinary matter-it would destroy itself if it did. This is a much more efficient way of storing p-bars than using a big old magnetic bottle. And it all comes from Dr. Piter’s work at CERN.”

“Antimatter? How dangerous is this?‘’

Chang shrugged. “Not very. But only because we can’t produce very many antiprotons. At least not right now. That’s what Bretti was working on with Dr. Dumenco.”

Jackson held the salt crystal up to the light. The whole thing weighed less than his watch. “Then what’s the big deal? Can this tiny crystal hold very much? An ounce or two?”

Frank Chang looked shocked. “Agent Jackson, if every available lattice site in that little crystal contained an antiproton, it would hold nearly three kiloton’s equivalent of nuclear explosive energy-one sixth the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.”

“Are you all right, Craig?” Paige asked after she had parked her red MG sportscar beside the concrete towers of Wilson Hall.

Unlike Trish, she had allowed him to drift in his mental world during the drive through the midwest prairie, strip malls, suburbs, and morning truck traffic. Trish, on the other hand, would have insisted he share every thought and force him out of his introspection into an extroverted therapy session.

“Just having trouble understanding people,” he said. From his law school days in Stanford, Craig knew that a dying man’s deathbed confession held far more weight than a normal statement. If Dumenco would only be straight with him, it would make much more sense in the long run.

The wind swirled red and yellow leaves around their feet as Paige led him behind the administrative building into one of the experimental buildings. Blue and orange walls, linoleum, and plumbing adorned the inside of the industrial laboratory setting. Craig buttoned his suit jacket as they walked in, searching for Dr. Piter.

“Nels is under a lot of pressure too, Craig,” Paige said. “The Nobel Prize means a lot to him. It must be sobering to know that you only have one chance to obtain the most important goal in your life.”

“Tell that to Dr. Dumenco,” Craig said dryly.

They passed down one flight of stairs below ground, to a computer-run control room. Painted cinderblock walls gave way to poured concrete tunnels, heavy technical equipment, and more chain-link fences and gates. Technicians and other grad students manned the consoles, touching the screens of colored flow charts. The air-conditioning was on high to cool the electronic equipment.

Piter waited for them. He wore a disheveled white shirt, a rumpled tan suit, a loosened brown tie-a curiously sloppy appearance for the meticulous Belgian scientist. Craig immediately noticed the shadowed rings around his eyes.