Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Tuesday, 9:23 p.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter

Late that evening Paige Mitchell met Craig in the hospital cafeteria. It remained open all night for hospital staff, though visiting hours were long over.

Goldfarb lay in his hospital bed unconscious, on the edge of death. Craig had already spent hours outside the ICU, pacing the floor. He had tried to construct a plan of action, but he kept coming up against a brick wall. The only thing he could do was focus on the Dumenco case, which now included the attempted murder of a federal agent as well.

Craig sat in an orange plastic chair, pulling himself close to one of the Formica-topped tables. While waiting for Paige to join him, he set his briefcase on the tabletop, saw that the surface was of dubious cleanliness, and brushed it off with a spare napkin.

In a moment of stunned respite, Craig sat at the cafeteria table and withdrew his folders of paperwork, skimming notes from his conversations with Dumenco as well as the maps, brochures, and other information he had gathered about Fermilab, the beam-sampling substations, and the Ukrainian scientist’s prior work.

The preliminary summary Agent Schultz had given him about the explosion showed no evidence of bomb residue or chemical by-products-nor had the dogs found stashed explosives in any other substation, not even the one where Goldfarb had been shot.

The detonation pattern at the crater did not match any known bomb configuration, shaped charge, or high-energy-density material. The background radiation levels showed an elevated background neutron count, as if from induced radioactivity. And there was that strange power failure at about the same time.

Yet the substation had exploded almost simultaneous with the accident that had exposed Dumenco to two thousand rads. And Goldfarb had been shot in another one of the substations. Foul play was clearly involved, but he couldn’t figure out how. Could it be related to Dumenco’s current research? The Ukrainian seemed to think so.

Perhaps the dying scientist was right when he had compared his situation with the great mathematician Fermat. If he didn’t achieve this breakthrough before he died, it might be many years before someone else could continue his work-even Nels Piter, whose past work in high-energy physics competed with, if not outright contradicted, Dumenco’s theories…

Before he could become completely absorbed in the case, Paige set her tray next to his. He had asked for only a cup of hot chocolate, but instead she carried two plates of food she had gotten from the cafeteria grill.

“You haven’t eaten yet, Craig,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Here, get some nourishment inside you.”

His stomach growled, but his expression reflected dismay as he looked down at the plate: a sausage in a bun smothered with onions and sauerkraut and doused with spicy brown mustard. “I can feel my arteries hardening just looking at it,” he said.

“It’s Chicago cuisine,” Paige said. “The world’s best bratwursts.”

Despite his comment, the food smelled delicious. “If I eat this, you’re going to put me in one of the hospital rooms-or is that your intent?”

“Nonsense. When in Rome…” She smiled slyly. “Just take a bite.”

Craig picked up the messy bun and brought it close to his mouth. Then he paused. “How’s bratwurst different from any old sausage?‘’

Paige grinned. “I’m afraid that’s classified information.”

“A secret recipe?” he asked.

“No-it’s just that if you knew what was in it, you’d be sick.”

“I can take it,” Craig said. “I’ve seen enough gruesome crime scenes in my day.”

Paige picked up her own bratwurst and took a huge, sloppy bite, closing her eyes to savor the taste. She wiped the juices from her mouth. “You know that stuff called ‘meat by-products’ they put in pet food?”

Craig nodded, already suspicious of her answer.

“Well, the parts of the meat that aren’t good enough to be called ‘by-products’ are set aside for bratwursts.” She took another bite to cover her impish smile.

Craig finished his bratwurst quickly, not regretting a moment of it. He licked his fingers and wiped his hands and face with several napkins. “Trish would fall over in a dead faint if she saw me eating this.”

Paige studied him, her blue eyes narrowing slightly. “Do you care what Trish thinks about the food you eat?”

Craig sensed a hesitation in her voice. “I used to, although she did have my good health in mind. But not anymore.”

“I see,” Paige said. “So that’s why you dropped everything to fly across the country, just to lend your hand unofficially on a case that wasn’t even yours until your partner got shot.”

Craig’s thoughts scrambled as he tried to find a way to salvage the conversation; finally he saw a way out. “Well, it gave me an excuse to come and see you, didn’t it?”

Paige laughed. “Good save, Craig.”

They fell into an uncomfortable silence, and Craig finally asked, “So… do you like it out here? No regrets about leaving California?”

“Oh, I’ll always miss California, but Fermilab has a lot of character, a certain charm… if you give it a chance. Of course, I haven’t been out here all that long, less than a year. Last winter was pretty rough.” She looked over at him. “And this is my first murder case at Fermilab. But I’ve worked well with the FBI before.”

Craig smiled back at her. “You seem to be getting along with your coworkers,” he said, then took a sip of his hot chocolate. The sweet richness added a strange counterpoint to the spicy, savory sauerkraut, onions, and mustard. “Rubbing elbows with that Dr. Piter.”

Paige flushed. “We’re just friends,” she said a little too quickly. Craig decided not to press the issue, but Paige felt the need to keep talking. “He’s a brilliant scientist, well respected, good-natured, certainly nice enough to spend a little time with. Of course, it seems a bit like dating a walking encyclopedia.” Her teeth flashed in a bright smile. “But what girl can resist that suave European charm?”

Craig wadded his napkins, suddenly very much needing to find a place to throw them away. “You didn’t have much difficulty resisting the charms of an FBI agent last year.”

“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.”