Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

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.

He peremptorily clasped his hands in front of him. “Good morning, Dr. Piter. Thanks for seeing us again.”

Piter appeared flustered. “It’s been quite a busy day already. I even had to have one of my graduate students show your colleague around.”

“Is something wrong?” said Craig.

“We got a long string of spurious results in the middle of the night-I’ve been here since about three in the morning. And right when we’re trying to verify the run, construction activities on the Main Injector caused a fatal fluctuation in the beam and we had to shut the Tevatron down.” He sighed. “And we’ve got more anomalies, probably caused by Dumenco’s unfortunate accident.”

The graduate students continued to peck on their screens, bypassing safety interlocks to massage their results. They seemed to be functioning well enough after the substation explosion the previous Sunday evening.

“You’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little disjointed.” Piter sounded embarrassed.

“Was there a serious problem?” Craig asked innocently. “Is this going to affect your own experiment?”

Piter’s face twisted. “While we were at dinner last night, the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, then went back down again. Unexpectedly. Actually, the increase was in line with what Dr. Dumenco had projected. But it seems quite curious that it would happen now. All by itself.”

Paige said, “Isn’t it good news to increase the antimatter production?”

Piter gave her a thin smile. “In a physics sense, of course, because the p-bars give us the opportunity for many high-energy experiments. But unless we find out why the production rate is fluctuating so drastically, it means nothing.”

Craig followed an idea that had just occurred to him. “Could antimatter have caused that substation explosion, Dr. Piter? Some sort of buildup that went critical? Wouldn’t that explain your missing p-bars from the flow?”

Piter looked sharply at him. “In theory, I suppose- but there’s no way for the antimatter to have left the main Tevatron ring and gone into the beam-sampling substation. It’s preposterous.”

“Could one of your grad students have tampered with the support equipment?” Craig spoke quietly, looking at the technicians at the control panel.

Piter suppressed a scowl, and didn’t even try to keep his voice low. “In an experiment this major, Mr. Kreident, the grad students have little real responsibility. They are just hired help, nothing more.”

“Then I see nothing much has changed,” said Craig tightly.

“Ah, you have been a graduate student?” Piter looked at him, eyebrows arched as he lifted his chin. “In the FBI?” He moved away from the console and started for the door; Craig and Paige followed.

Craig shook his head. “I majored in physics at Stanford before going on to Law School. I took a course and worked at the Linac-the Linear Accelerator-my senior year. Since I wasn’t going on to study physics, I didn’t have the pressure on me like the real grad students, but I certainly remember what it was like.”

“I see.” Piter continued down the huge opening. They walked briskly down another set of stairs to the underground entrance. Their shoes echoed hollowly against the bare cement walls. “We can go inside the Tevatron, now that the beam is shut down. We don’t have to worry much about residual radioactivity.”

Piter took a right-hand turn and stopped before another control room door. He used a badge-locked key with a magnetic strip and access code, making three attempts before he finally gained access. “Too many disconnections and supposed upgrades,” he said. “Nothing works the way it should anymore.” Ahead, the underground tunnel curved around, vanishing around a bend in the distance.

Glaring lights shone down on wide conduits mounted to the walls. Banks of superconducting magnets surrounded the beam channels, and substations, and fuse junction boxes; diagnostics stood out in regular intervals.

Technicians moved down the line, a pale young woman with dark hair and a twentysomething man with a goatee and the build of a weight lifter. The woman stopped at each junction box, checking readings as she munched from a bag of fat-free pretzels.

Craig stepped up and spoke quietly. “Dr. Piter, can you verify that you were at the lab early this morning, when you said you were called in?‘’

Piter looked up with an astonished look on his face. “Of course I can-but what on fool’s earth for?”

“Someone attempted to kill Dr. Dumenco in his hospital room this morning. The killer got away, but we have a witness.”

“Then why are you bothering me if you have an eyewitness?” Piter drew himself up to his full five feet six inch height. He purposely brushed lint from his suit and straightened his tie. “Surely they don’t think it’s me?”

“I just want to eliminate as many potential suspects as I can.” He paused. “That includes everyone, Dr. Piter.”

Piter drew his mouth tight and lifted his chin. “You may confirm my presence here with any one of those technicians. Or one of my grad students, Frank Chang- he’s showing your partner around as we speak. We’ve all been here putting in a lot of hours. I refuse to believe that you would seriously consider me, the Director of High-Energy Research, a possible suspect in any scheme to harm my esteemed colleague, Dr. Dumenco.”

“People have plenty of motives to do things out of the ordinary, Dr. Piter. How about the Nobel?‘’

Piter took a step backward and blinked. “That’s just an award, Agent Kreident. It certainly isn’t worth killing someone over! In fact, even coveting the prize is considered quite unprofessional.”

Craig just watched him, knowing that Piter coveted the Nobel a great deal.

He thought he would be going back and forth between the medical center and Fermilab quite a few more times before he had answers to this case.