Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Thursday, 6:10 p.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter

Leaning against the door frame of Dumenco’s room, Trish looked up at Craig as he returned from his phone call. Her sepia eyes were surrounded by a corona of red. “I haven’t felt this hopeless since Chernobyl.”

“Is he going to make it through the night?” Craig asked.

“Maybe, maybe not. Human endurance is not a predictable quantity. It’s just everything else on top of that-two assassination attempts, the attack on you and Jackson, your friend Goldfarb shot.” She shook her head. “I know I’m the one who asked you to look into this suspicious accident, but sometimes I wonder if I should have left things well enough alone, let Georg die peacefully rather than introducing all this chaos.”

“But doesn’t your PR-Cubed want to use him as a poignant example, a poster boy against the hazards of radiation?” Craig couldn’t keep the edge of sarcasm out of his voice. Trish had a penchant for tilting at windmills, and he knew that she had certainly found her birds of a feather in the Physicians for Responsible Radiation Research.

She adjusted her glasses. “Sure, they want to talk about him, but nobody else has bothered to come in and talk to him. The PR-Cubed is more interested in their ideals than in the real people-I see a lot of that now.”

Craig folded his arms while she spoke. She did look worn out. It reminded him very much of the way she had looked right before she packed all her belongings and drove cross-country to Johns Hopkins. Devastated from working the summer near Chernobyl, Trish had decided to specialize in treating radiation injuries. And she couldn’t do it in California.

That was when she had left him, calling herself Patrice instead of Trish… though Craig never could remember to call her by the right name. She didn’t seem to notice much.

Craig reached out to squeeze her shoulder. Trish sighed again, exhausted. “Why don’t you get some rest?” he said.

“How can you stand to live this way, Craig? Is this how things are for you now? Always unresolved, always another clue to chase?”

Craig shrugged. “Pretty much. You get used to it.”

Trish walked away toward a doctor’s lounge where she could rest.

As soon as she rounded a corner, Craig slipped through Dumenco’s door. He heard a cough and saw a feeble hand wave him inside.

The Ukrainian lay on his side, his back to the door. A light in the corner burned low, and outside the window a gibbous moon dominated the night sky. His technical papers lay in a disheveled stack, within reach, near the photos of his family. Two intravenous lines ran into Dumenco’s arm. His eyes were hollow, his limbs pale and looking like they could snap in two if he tried to lift any weight. He appeared to have aged greatly in only the last hour.

“Agent Kreident,” Dumenco said, with a forced smile that showed bleeding gums. “I would offer you another game of chess… but there isn’t enough time.” His face suddenly looked even more stricken. “I’m not going to have enough time, am I?”

Craig pulled up a chair and scooted close to the bed. “You have enough time to help me solve this case.”

Dumenco breathed in shallow gasps, as if he had great difficulty merely forcing air into his lungs. He didn’t answer.

“I need to know what you’ve been holding back. What you tell me will stay with me. I promise.”

“There… is nothing more.”

Craig waited. Moments passed, and Dumenco’s eyes flicked away, unable to hold his gaze. Craig didn’t move, didn’t say a word.

“There is no reason for you to stay,” Dumenco whispered.

Still, Craig remained silent. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, determined to wait the man out. Finally, he said, “I know about your family. I know what they mean to you, and I know the terms of your defection. I can find them for you. Bring them here.”

Dumenco closed his eyes. “My poor, sweet Luba. I cannot forgive myself for putting her through all this. But if I had left her and the children in the Ukraine…” His voice trailed off as he slowly shook his head. Tears welled in his hemorrhaged eyes as he opened them. “You do not know what it is like, to be so close to your family, yet be allowed to see them only once a year. The girls… they need a father, someone to tell them how beautiful they have become. And my son-” He paused.

“I understand why you had to do this, Dr. Dumenco.”

Dumenco struggled to an elbow. His expression, vacant only moments before, now held a new life. He reached out a bony hand to grasp Craig’s suit jacket. “Promise to let me see them one more time. Now that my pursuer is dead, you must bring my family here. Let me see Luba and my children.”

“I am already trying,” said Craig. “I’ll get your family here.” In fact, he expected a response from June Atwood any time now.

Dumenco searched Craig’s eyes for any hint of betrayal; seemingly satisfied, he relaxed back on his pillow. His cracked lips moved in a wistful smile as though he were reminiscing about a time special to him. “For years I worked at Armazas 16…” he paused, as if unsure if he should go on.

Craig nodded, encouraging him. “The Soviet Union did not even acknowledge the existence of that facility until a few years ago.”

Dumenco threw him a glance, then his eyes softened. “Yes, you of all people would know. Armazas 16 was our premier nuclear weapons design laboratory. It was an exciting place, and an exciting time. We were lavishly funded, held in high esteem. Without its massive nuclear arsenal, the Soviet Union would have been no different from any other Third World country. Only bigger, and poorer.”

Craig thought fteetingly of General Ursov and his pride in the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces.

“Back then, Mr. Kreident, weapons physicists like myself were the sorcerers-court magicians who transformed a collection of diverse and backward republics into one of the strongest nations on Earth.”

“So you designed nuclear weapons? How does that relate to your antimatter work at Fermilab?”

Dumenco shook his head, rustling the pillow. “Not nuclear warheads, Mr. Kreident. Directed-energy weapons, particle beams, and lasers-but these required massive but compact amounts of energy. We studied the use of nuclear detonations as power sources, which would of course destroy a weapon each time it was used. The United States itself advocated fielding a nuclear-powered x-ray laser in space. But I set my sights on another, more elegant solution.

“Matter-antimatter reactions could power the directed-energy weapons my nation desperately needed to counter President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars program. It was the only way the Soviet Union could stay in this new arms race. Of course, then the key question was how to produce sufficient amounts of antimatter to make such a scheme practical.”

His brow creased with concern. “If the Soviet Union had had access to the powerful particle accelerators here or at CERN, we could have gone forward with my antimatter enhancement technique. We would have been successful. We would have been able to counter your SDI, and we would have had true directed-energy weapons.” He opened his eyes as he whispered, “But perhaps it is the best for all of us in this world that we did not succeed.”

Craig put down his small notebook as everything fell in place. “So you pioneered antimatter work in the Soviet Union and brought it with you when you defected. That’s why the U.S. wanted you so badly.”

Dumenco nodded. “At Aramazas 16 I discovered the mechanism for increasing the production of antimatter, for enhancing the p-bar beam, which I am ‘rediscovering’ here. And it was at Aramazas 16 that I also built the first crystal-lattice storage device, years before the esteemed Dr. Nels Piter. But because my work was classified, I could tell no one about it.”

Craig drew a quick breath. “Does Piter know this?” The Belgian scientist was banking on his CERN development to win him a Nobel Prize. But if Dumenco had already done the work years before…

“Dr. Piter knows very little, if the truth is told. He is a talker, not a researcher. I gave up my efforts with the crystal-lattice trap-I suspect that with the present level of technology, it is too unreliable. Unstable. Unfortunately, we have not had sufficient antimatter available to test the upper limits of crystal-lattice containment. Until now. My own concepts for dramatically increasing p-bar production in the accelerator beam should have changed all this.”

With a gesture more vehement than Craig expected, Dumenco struck the papers on his bedside table. “But it doesn’t work! The Tevatron should be creating orders of magnitude more antiprotons, but they just aren’t showing up! I have checked and rechecked the experiment. It works, I know it does-but the results aren’t there!”

Craig placed a hand on the old man’s shoulder, struck to be in the presence of someone so pivotal in the course of political changes, all behind the scenes. The actions of individual people at critical times determined the flow of world events.

“I’ll let you get back to your work,” he said, cowed. Someday, perhaps, Dumenco’s discoveries would be recognized for their importance. Someday.

Craig just hoped the Ukrainian was still alive when the Nobel committee announced their choice. Georg Dumenco had earned the prize, whether or not anybody knew it.