Kevin Anderson - Lethal Exposure

He stepped down from the stool while holding the trap, careful not to bump it against anything. The device was designed to be rugged, but he couldn’t afford to be sloppy. If he knocked the lasers out of alignment, this cache of antimatter would be enough to wipe out several city blocks.

Bretti eased the small, cube-like container onto its side, then stepped back up on the stool to close the experimental container above. The whole apparatus weighed no more than a few pounds. Electrical wires ran from the container down to the antimatter trap. He would attach the battery and clean up the area.

In less than ten hours he’d be out of the country. And a million dollars richer.

Friday, 6:17 a.m.

Aurora, Illinois

Jackson snatched up his cellular phone on the car seat after the first shrill ring. The traffic in small, residential Batavia was almost nonexistent at this hour. It beat the hell out of putting up with the idiots driving in downtown Chicago, and for an assignment away from the Oakland area, it wasn’t bad-except for the fact that Ben Goldfarb was lying in Intensive Care.

“ Jackson here,” he said, keeping one hand on the steering wheel as he drove toward the medical center. Time was running out, not only for Goldfarb, but for Dumenco as well.

“This is Craig. Where are you right now?”

“Ten minutes from the hospital. I volunteered to watch Dumenco this morning, since the Board will still be investigating yesterday’s shooting. Agent Schultz is banged up and won’t be back on duty for a while, so I offered to help out the troops from the main Chicago office.”

“I’ll take that duty,” Craig said. “I’m trying to make some… arrangements for Dumenco in downtown Chicago, and then I have to go to a gift shop Paige told me about.”

“A gift shop?” Jackson said.

“Don’t ask,” Craig said. “It’s important. But I was planning to go through the experimental area early this morning, without Dr. Piter present, to get a fresh view on Dumenco’s accident. Can you cover that for me instead? You might see something I missed the first time.”

“That’ll be the day! Okay, I’ll grab Frank Chang, the grad student who showed me around Bretti’s cubicle.” Jackson signaled with his right blinker as Craig spoke, looking for a place to turn around. “Anything special I should be looking for?”

“Get him to take you along Dr. Dumenco’s path the day he received his lethal exposure. See if you can figure out what it would take for someone to disengage the safety interlocks. Could our hospital assassin have done it, or did it have to be an inside job, as Dumenco insists? I’m still not convinced that just anybody could work the beam controls.”

Jackson pulled onto the shoulder and slowed to a stop, preparing to turn toward the Fermilab site. A single cow stood by a barbed-wire fence, watching Jackson ’s car. “Craig,” he said, “just check up on Ben for me this morning, would you?”

“Mr. Chang, I want to go over the safety interlocks in addition to seeing the experimental target area where Dumenco’s accident occurred.”

Chang tossed his long hair over his shoulder, grinning with self-importance to be the FBI agent’s chosen escort. “You’re in luck, since we just brought the accelerator down. P-bar production suddenly shot off the scale at about five this morning, which is pretty incredible. The increase is exactly what Dr. Dumenco predicted. Something screwy is happening in the accelerator, and until the theorists come up with a good explanation, we’ll play it safe.”

Chang gestured for Jackson to follow him, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Dr. Piter’s going to have a fit when he finds out the accelerator is down again, especially because of increased p-bar production. Sometimes it seems he doesn’t want to see anything that would verify Dumenco’s work. Piter’s a… sore loser, I guess you’d say. He’s got his heart set on that Nobel.”

“What about all the construction work on this extension ring-the Main Injector. Doesn’t that interfere with your work? Lots of shutdowns?‘’

Chang shrugged. “Some of their heavy machinery screws up our delicate beam balance, but we just have to deal with it.”

Jackson followed the young man down the tunnels. He smelled ozone, lubricants, cool concrete, metal shavings. “So what’s it like working for a person up for the Nobel Prize?‘’ he asked in a forced conversational tone. ”Must be exciting.“

Chang squinted up at him. “You mean Dr. Piter? I don’t really work directly for him, he just holds the purse strings. But the man’s a slave driver, a real nano-manager, looking at administrative details down to the billionth part.” The grad student shook his head, flashing his goofy grin again. “He’s lucky to keep any grad students around.”

“So why don’t you leave, go somewhere else?” Jackson towered over the young graduate student.

Chang looked appalled. “Hey, I’ve got a chance to be in on the discovery of the century. If this p-bar enhancement really works, then we’ll be in an energy range close enough to go for the Higgs boson.” He looked at Jackson as if he expected the lean agent to share the excitement, but Jackson didn’t even know what he was talking about. “When the Main Injector comes on line next year, the whole accelerator will work in this new energy range, and we just might have a chance to detect it. Wouldn’t that be something?” Jackson blinked, but Chang’s enthusiasm was infectious.

They passed through a chain-link gate to the main beam tunnel and walked briskly down concrete steps into the long experimental target area. Their footsteps echoed against the bare walls. Industrial lights burned at intervals down the tunnel.

“Dr. Dumenco was down here during the emergency beam dump,” Chang said. “He never should have been in the area, not with the beam on. It’s a safety hazard.”

“Yes, he sure proved that.” As they walked, Jackson continued asking questions. “So what exactly happened to the guy? Some sort of an accident dumped the beam in here?”

“It does that automatically,” Chang said. “If the beam fluctuates too much, or if it’s contaminated, the system shuts down and the beam crashes down here. Dr. Dumenco happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Jackson craned his neck. The tunnel was deserted and silent, except for a low, throbbing hum.

Chang nodded to the left. “I can unlock the systems from the control room just around the corner.” He pushed away black hair that had fallen into his eyes. “Then you can look around wherever you want. There’s nothing dangerous down here anyway.” He hurried down the tunnel, disappearing into the shadows.

Alone now, Jackson looked around the huge underground facility, built to re-create conditions that had existed during the earliest seconds of the universe. But with all the concern now about social ills and poverty, Jackson seriously doubted the public would ever go for building anything so massive again-unless the benefits could somehow be more clearly explained… and scientists weren’t terribly good at things like that. He thought of the expensive Superconducting Supercollider that was supposed to have been constructed in Texas.

For now, though, the big science didn’t matter at all to Jackson -he was more interested in finding Ben Goldfarb’s assailant. Damn, he hoped his friend would come through all this.

The sound of someone shuffling across the concrete floor drew his attention, coming from farther down the curved tunnel, labored breaths, heavy footsteps, as if someone was carrying a heavy load. It was early in the morning, and few people were around. Frank Chang had gone in the other direction.