Lethal Exposure

CHAPTER FOUR

Tuesday, 10:11 a.m.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Batavia, Illinois

Fermilab lay only a dozen miles from the Fox River Medical Center in Aurora. Craig sat back in the passenger seat of the rental car as he watched the farmland and the suburbs roll by. Overhead, the October sky had become a leaden gray that threatened no storm, just sunlessness.

Goldfarb insisted he knew the way just by “ Chicago instinct.” He had the radio set on a local station, and aside from hearing the latest news about the Nobel Prize in medicine, Craig tuned out the early morning chatter, instead spending his time pondering Trish’s unusual request. He wanted to get more background on Dumenco’s accident and the substation explosion, wanted a second opinion on the case…

He wanted to talk to Paige.

He still knew very little about the actual crime, or accident, or whatever had happened Sunday night. Apparently, Dumenco had been working in a small alcove in the experimental target area, which was like a “runaway truck ramp” to dampen a rush of energetic particles. When the Tevatron became unstable, an emergency shutdown dumped the beam into the target chamber where the scientist had been standing, instantly showering him with a lethal dose of high-energy particles.

At the same time, one of the dozen concrete substations along the mounded perimeter of the accelerator circle had exploded. But the blockhouses contained no explosive materials, no volatile chemicals, nothing that should have caused such a blast.

An FBI team had gone to Fermilab the previous day to begin their official investigation, since the explosion had taken place on Federal property. But they had quickly dismissed Dumenco’s “murder” as an unfortunate accident. Trish and Dumenco thought otherwise.

Before he could even begin to form an opinion, he needed to see the place with his own eyes. Craig yanked out his cellular phone and found Paige Mitchell’s work number in his pocket notebook. “I want to double check the arrangements before we get there.”

Goldfarb raised his dark eyebrows. “You have some kind of pull with Fermilab just because you know somebody in the Public Affairs Office?”

“Just drive, Ben,” Craig answered.

As the phone rang, Craig glanced at his watch. He hadn’t slept well on the plane and they had gone directly over to the hospital. His body felt achy, his eyes dry and sore, giving him the illusion that he had been working all day, though it was barely midmorning. He hoped Paige was in.

She answered the phone, cheerful and professional as usual. Her voice made Craig’s heart skip a beat. “Office of Public Affairs, this is Paige Mitchell.”

“Hi, it’s Craig. Want some company this morning?” he said, smiling. He enjoyed being able to take her off guard for once. He turned his face away from Goldfarb.

“Craig?” She recovered much more quickly than he had expected. “As in Special Agent Craig Kreident of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

“That’s me,” he said.

She finally laughed. “What do you mean, do I want company? Are you here in Chicago? Did you come to investigate the explosion? We’ve had your FBI Evidence Response Teams crawling all over here since Monday morning, not to mention our own people from the Department of Energy.”

“It’s a… a related case. Maybe. One of your scientists received a lethal radiation exposure Sunday night. Ben Goldfarb and I are heading out to Fermilab right now, from Aurora. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Dr. Dumenco? But that was just an accident. The DOE made that call right away, otherwise the whole lab would have been shut down.” Her voice became stern. “That’s not just a PR line, Craig. As far as I know, it’s the total truth.”

“I’d rather not talk about it on an unsecured channel,” Craig said. “Just give me directions on how to find you, and we’ll discuss it at the site.”

Before she hung up, Paige said, “It’ll be good to see you again, Craig.”

“Same here,” he answered, then ended the call. He smiled to himself. Glancing over, he saw Goldfarb staring at him with a broad grin on his face.

Craig snapped, “What are you looking at?”

The main entrance to the giant accelerator laboratory lay on Kirk Road and Pine Street, where the landscape opened up to a broad, flat expanse of grasses more than waist-high, dead and brown with the snap of autumn. A few surrealistic, modern-architecture buildings seemed to spring up out of the prairie.

The Fermilab site looked more like a college campus than a government research facility. It reminded him of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, where he had first met Paige-but without the ever-present security.

As Goldfarb drove to the main entrance, they passed under a bizarre metal sculpture, a three-span arch that straddled the road. Craig stared out the window, noting how the blue-painted arches looked extremely off-balance but perfectly symmetrical when viewed from directly beneath.

“Modern art,” muttered Goldfarb.

“It was ‘modern’ in the sixties,” Craig answered. “Now I think you’re supposed to call it ‘high-tech nostalgic’.”

Passing the white-lettered blue sign-UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, FERMILAB, OPERATED BY UNIVERSITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION, INC.-Goldfarb headed toward the main sixteen-story administrative building, Wilson Hall, which stood like a monolith on the flat terrain.

“At least we won’t have to go through security procedures to reach the scene of the crime,” Goldfarb observed as he approached the single tall building. A ring of colorful flags fluttered from poles, as if they had been transplanted from the United Nations building.

“We haven’t proven it’s a crime,” Craig replied. “And technically, we don’t even have a murder. ”

“Yet,” said Goldfarb.

In front of the cathedral-inspired architecture of Wilson Hall, a stainless-steel obelisk rose thirty feet out of a reflecting pond, sleek and streamlined with mathematical precision, like the gnomon of a gigantic sundial. The admin building itself was composed of two gently sloping concrete towers that curved toward each other as if they were snuggling up. The center gap was framed in glass.

“Looks like we’ve stepped onto a movie set built a few decades ago,” Goldfarb said, craning his head to look through the windshield.

Craig looked around and saw that all of Fermilab’s buildings, experimental structures, and lab complexes carried a militantly modern feel of someone too-consciously trying to make the place look futuristic: all concrete and metal and precise curves.

Goldfarb pulled up in the guest parking area, and they both stepped out of the Taurus. Craig adjusted his sunglasses, straightened his jacket, and combed his hair. He gave Goldfarb a quick warning look before the curly-haired agent could tease him about being meticulous. His attention to personal detail had nothing whatsoever to do with seeing Paige again.

“Her office is on the first floor,” he said, “on the west side.” They trotted upstairs to a concrete courtyard, then through glass doors. The Office of Public Affairs was just off the lobby.

Before they could head to her office, Paige hurried down the corridor toward them. “Hi, Craig!”

In a single, intent glance Craig took in the details of her appearance like a dry sponge doused with water. She wore a tight-fitting raspberry chenille pullover, a trim black skirt, and dark panty hose. Her blond hair had been done up in a French braid.

He waved to her, and she stepped forward to shake hands with Goldfarb before she also greeted Craig formally. Her smile was warm, and her eyes flashed in the bright lights of the lobby as she gently took Craig’s hand. She lingered, and Craig didn’t want her to let go.

Goldfarb cleared his throat; releasing Craig’s hand, Paige became all business again. “In light of your investigation, I made a quick phone call and set up a meeting with Dr. Nels Piter. He’s the Director for High-Energy Physics-the same department Georg Dumenco worked for. He can answer questions about the scientist’s work and show us where the radiation exposure occurred. In the meantime I’ll take you on a quick tour over to the Tevatron.”

“Can we see where the explosion happened, too?” Craig asked. “I really should check in with the agent in charge.”

“Right on the way,” she agreed. She snagged the keys for a government car and led them out to the rear parking lot. A fountain splashed around a rotating, welded metal sculpture of a Moebius strip, flashing the cloud-dimmed sunlight. Small, curved buildings stood spaced symmetrically behind the towering admin building, like giant stereo speakers. Signs on the structures labeled them as Antimatter Storage Rings.

Paige pointed to the sweeping, grass-strewn prairie. Craig saw power lines, trees and farm buildings in the distance, and the thin line of the highway. “From here, you can see a few Fermilab structures around the four-mile ring-the Collider Detector, the Dee-Zero detector, the Feynman Computing Center, as well as some of the concrete blockhouses and beam-sampling substations.” She climbed into the car and adjusted the seat and mirrors as she continued her canned speech.

Nearby, connected to the main underground ring, a large construction site was like a scab on the prairie, earth cleared, big machinery rolling about in the dirt, excavating, moving huge concrete tubes. Craig had read about the adjacent accelerator under construction, the Main Injector, a new loop that would increase the energy of particle collisions. Seeing all the heavy machinery and earth-moving trucks, Craig wondered how such a huge and disruptive project could be compatible with delicate diagnostics and subatomic particle tracings.

“Seems weird to have such a high-tech island in the middle of farm country,” Goldfarb said.

“For the most part, the accelerator is low-impact, environmentally. We’re very conscious around here about taking care of nature. In fact, on our Web Page, the article about Fermilab’s buffalo herd and the tallgrass prairie restoration is longer than any piece about high-energy physics.”

“ Buffalo?” Goldfarb said, buckling his seat belt as she pulled out of the parking lot. “You mean so they can stampede and help some of those particle collisions take place?”

“That’s a lame joke, even for you, Ben,” Craig said.

“The buffalo live in fenced areas on Fermilab property. Recently, some of them have been left to graze in the middle of the circle, right over the accelerator ring- and they don’t even know the difference,” Paige said. She pointed to plastic-wrapped photocopied signs tacked up on temporary wooden stakes. Prairie Harvest-next Saturday!

“There’s a great deal of work going on to restore the tallgrass prairie, the original ecosystem that covered Illinois before the settlers came. See the brown grass?” She gestured off into the distance. “In order to keep it natural, volunteer groups burn the grass every year- and we’re about ready for another torching before winter. Before that, groups of people spend the weekends trudging through the open areas, plucking seeds and filling barrels, so we can plant a broader area next spring.”

Paige drove along the narrow, patched service road past other strangely shaped facilities and unique designs. Craig asked, “Ben and I noticed all this unusual architecture. What’s with all the odd buildings?”

Paige laughed. “Indulgence, I suppose. Robert Wilson, the first director of the laboratory, was an aspiring architect. Very much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wilson designed a lot of the buildings himself. It was his opinion that a research laboratory should be an attractive cultural center in the community and the nation. He actually won a few architectural awards for the uniqueness of our design.”

“As long as it’s functional,” Craig said.

“And beautiful,” Paige added. “The buildings here serve both purposes. Though you might get a little tired of blue and orange after a while. It seems everything here is either one color or the other, down to the linoleum on the lab floors.”

She turned from the main road to a narrower access lane that followed the ring of the particle accelerator. “I’ll show you where the substation exploded. The FBI team is already running plenty of tests. That should kill enough time before our meeting with Dr. Piter underground at the Collider Detector.”

Craig stared out the window, adjusting his sunglasses. “Can you think of any connection between the explosion out here and Dumenco’s exposure in the experimental target area?”

Paige shook her head. “Not as far as anyone can tell. The accelerator experienced an uncharacteristic fluctuation, which caused an emergency shutdown to take place. But since the explosion occurred a few seconds after the emergency shutdown, it couldn’t have caused Dumenco’s accident.”

“No clue back in the substation?” Goldfarb asked.

She turned around in her seat. “Ben, there isn’t even any substation left.”

She slowed the car as they approached a sloppily erected drift fence wound with yellow police tape. The barricade blocked a large area from curiosity seekers. “This is the spot,” Paige said. “I’ve only been out here once, and it’s still incomprehensible to me. Reminds me of Sedan Crater out in Nevada, only on a smaller scale.”

Two other workers adjusted the fence, while a safety crew and some sort of administrator walked on the far side of the blast area, all wearing hardhats. An inspector holding a radiation detector crouched over a section of dirt. Craig recognized evidence technicians, FBI inspectors, and one man in a suit similar to his own.

Craig got out of the car. An FBI agent came toward him, his face round and sunburned, his pale hair blowing around his head. “This is a restricted area, gentlemen, with an investigation pending.”

Craig removed his ID wallet and badge. “Special Agent Craig Kreident, sir. This is my partner Ben Goldfarb. I checked in with your SSA.”

Ben shook his hand. “And I spoke to you yesterday on the phone.”

“That’s right. I’m John Schultz.” He studied Craig’s ID. “You’re from the Oakland office? How can I help you guys?”

“It’s in an unofficial capacity,” Craig said. “Checking into a radiation exposure, supposedly a fatal one. The victim is… a friend of a friend.”

Paige looked at him curiously.

“The Ukrainian guy, right?” Schultz asked. “His accident occurred the same night as this explosion, but the two were widely separated in distance. One event could not have influenced the other.”

“Still seems an awfully big coincidence,‘’ Craig said. ”Could we see the site of the explosion?‘’

Schultz snorted. “You can see the crater, but that’s about all. It didn’t leave very much else for us to sweep up for analysis. There’s some residual radiation around, so be careful.”

Craig looked up sharply. “A nuclear explosion?”

“No way. The spectrum is off, and nothing was activated by neutron radiation. We’ve shipped a sample back to the Hoover building for crime lab analysis.”

Craig walked up to the sagging drift fence and peered over, sucking in a deep breath of astonishment. The crater was like a glassy bowl vaporized from the dirt, as if someone from high above had stubbed out a giant cigar butt, annihilating the entire substation. The earth had been fused in the flash, the blockhouse itself totally obliterated.

“Wow-I’ve never seen anything like that,” Goldfarb said.

Agent Schultz said, “The detonation was equivalent to a few hundred pounds of high explosive-extremely high energy, with a small amount of residual radiation. It’s almost like a massive electrical explosion happened, since the power was knocked out-but the techs find no indication of a short. We can’t figure it out.”

Craig wiped his sunglasses clean as his stomach clenched with awe. He couldn’t imagine what could cause specific, incredible destruction like this.

Trish had been right to call him after all. This case was getting stranger and stranger by the moment.