Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

Craig stood back crossing his arms over his chest angrily, but knowing that while the scientist was stubborn, he did at least seem sincere. This entire situation in the hospital might be irrelevant, or at least merely tangential to the original radiation accident.

But if that were true, then who had actually triggered the experimental failure that had caused the beam dump in the first place? What was the explanation for the vaporized blockhouse? Did it have something to do with antimatter storage, or the Nobel Prize? Who had shot Goldfarb, and why? And how was that connected with all this?

Trish injected Demerol and sedative into the IV. Dumenco watched her with faint suspicion, glancing around the entire room as if a play of light, a dance of shadow might hide another killer. Trish turned to Craig, anger apparent on her face. “That’s enough, Craig. He needs to rest.”

“No,” Dumenco said, the panic rising on his face. “No rest. I have to understand… these test results.” He clawed over for the well-thumbed data printouts from his p-bar experiment. “They’re wrong, and I don’t know why.” He looked at her with a martyred expression. “If I’m going to die for this, at least I want to be right.”

“You have to sleep, Georg,” Trish soothed. “You can do it in the morning.”

If there’s going to be another morning for him , thought Craig. He looked down at the list of names of Dumenco’s hidden family members. He would leave Dumenco for now. He had other questions to ask-and SSA June Atwood was damned well going to answer them.

Thursday, 5:32 p.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter

After much practice Craig had learned how to keep his frustration in check when he talked to the Boss Herself, June Atwood. Usually. After the stress of the past few days, though, with time running out for Dumenco, with the chlorine gas attack on himself and Jackson, and with Goldfarb barely clinging to life, Craig had had enough of tact.

He strode swiftly down the hall, already arguing in his mind. If Dumenco had been involved with the State Department for many years, the Bureau must have a file on him a mile long.

So why hadn’t Craig been given a heads up? Of course, he had horned in on this case, coming in through the back door, screwing up the bureaucracy. But that was no excuse.

Craig went to a bank of pay phone booths. The land line would be safer than his cell phone, and he wasn’t supposed to use his cell phone in the medical center anyway.

A lone blond nurse with her hair pulled back in a French braid glanced at Craig as he fidgeted at the phone, waiting for June to answer. A woman with a high-pitched voice squawked at the adjacent booth while an old gentleman dressed in a blue bathrobe waited behind her.

June answered breathlessly. “Craig! I just heard about Jackson and the shooting. Is everything all right-”

“June,” he interrupted, “I need background on Dumenco. All of it.”

Hesitation. “You have his file. I’ve given you-”

“I don’t mean the dossier Fermilab uses for its brochures. I want the real details: where he came from, who he worked for, and why he defected.”

“Craig, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about-‘’

“June, no PR bull! I want it straight . Dumenco himself just confessed that he worked on Soviet black-program research. I know about his family, how they were hidden-”

“Craig!” June’s voice came like a shot over the phone. “Can you get to a STU-3?”

Craig answered slowly. “I can get down to the Chicago office, but that’ll take nearly an hour. I need to know now , June. I’ve got a murder, attempted murder, and sabotage to solve here-not to mention a victim who’s only going to last another day at most. I’m getting more information from the bad guys than from my own office! How do you think that affects my confidence in the FBI?”

The nurses paid him no attention, indifferent to the usual patients’ conversations. The man in the bathrobe tapped his wife’s shoulder for attention, but the woman just put a finger to her ear and kept talking away on the phone.

“Are you calling from your cell phone?”

“I’m on a land line-it’s the best I’ve got.” June waited a moment before speaking. “All right… but this is close hold.” She hesitated, then said, “The Bureau had known about Dumenco for years. Our government desperately wanted him over here because of all his former work in the Soviet Union. Fundamental stuff, ground-breaking research he could never publish openly over in Russia. We wanted him to reproduce it here.”

“In exchange for protecting his family, and getting them-and him-out of a country that was falling apart, after Chernobyl, after the end of the Cold War.”

“That’s right. Soviet weapon scientists weren’t even known until lately, and they certainly weren’t allowed to travel outside the Iron Curtain. But when you’ve attained Dumenco’s stature, you can make a few demands. He went to European physics conferences-complete with KGB escorts.

“But they couldn’t watch him every second, prevent him from passing a note to another scientist. That’s when he made his break, and he was granted asylum in the U.S. ” She paused. “We set up a coordinated effort to grab his wife, his daughters, his son. Everything was in such chaos over there at the time, it was easy to do a bait-and-switch.”

Craig pressed the heavy black phone close to his ear. “But Dumenco hasn’t exactly been hiding. He’s one of Fermilab’s pet physicists, working and publishing for seven years. The Nobel committee even has his number.”

“Dumenco knew he would always be in the limelight somewhere,” she said. “But his family was the bargaining chip, not him. Unless they were hidden, they could become pawns for the KGB, blackmail to keep him in line. We couldn’t have that, so we put them all in a modified witness protection program. Not even Dumenco knew where they were living. Under tight security, the U.S. Marshal’s office arranged for him to see his family once a year in a safe house, at a classified location.”

Craig swallowed in a dry throat. “So in order to pursue his one love in life-physics-Dumenco had to protect his other love, his family. That’s why the assassin kept trying to track down the names and aliases, why he tried to kill Dumenco before he could make any deathbed confessions.”

June kept her voice carefully neutral. “That about sums it up.”

Craig knew what he had to do. “June, you’ve got to give me detailed contact information for his family.”

“Impossible,” she was quick to say. “Absolutely classified.”

“Look, June,” he said into the phone, his voice hard, “you owe it to me, and to Dumenco. You kept information from me once in this investigation, and I’m running up against the clock. Dumenco probably won’t last through tomorrow. Give me those names and addresses. We need to get those people out here, preferably with an FBI escort, before it’s too late.”

June tried to sound soothing. “But those family members are protected and hidden, Craig. For their own safety.”

“I don’t care , June! You can do it. The family was only hidden as a safeguard for Georg Dumenco-and that doesn’t matter anymore. In another day the entire reason for isolating them is going to be in a drawer in the hospital morgue. They deserve to see him one more time-he’s their father and husband. I’m sure they’d be willing to risk it, if only to say goodbye.”

In the waiting room several people sat nervously pretending to read the old magazines scattered about on the tables. Others looked at the ancient television set; the off-kilter hue adjustment made the people on CNN look yellow-skinned and jaundiced.