Lethal Exposure Read online

  “ 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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday, 11:23 a.m.

  Collider Detector at Fermilab

  Once Craig followed Paige and Goldfarb into the experimental area, he felt as if he had entered another world, one detached from the prairie above them, away from the buffalo and tall, waving grass. This was the business end of the laboratory, the reason why Fermilab existed in the first place. Craig couldn’t tell how thick the concrete walls were, but they sprawled up in massive blocks, as if formed from an enormous mold.

  “Feels like we entered the bowels of a power plant,” Goldfarb said.

  The low ceilings were strung with piping and electrical conduits. The air smelled of cement, grease, and metal. An oppressive background of white noise droned around them.

  Craig tried to reach a chain-link gate before Paige, so he could hold it open for her, but she beat him to it. After she telephoned in for access to the next section of tunnel, they walked briskly along the sealed concrete floor toward the Collider Detector. Racks of machinery and diagnostics stood next to a large cylindrical apparatus that resembled an iron lung.

  “Nels!” Paige called, raising her voice to be heard over the background drone echoing in the confined tunnel. She moved to meet a dapper-looking, thin man who wore a lab coat like a costume over his brown suit. He stood behind the apparatus, glancing over the shoulders of the technicians actually running the diagnostics. His face and hands were tanned, his thinning sandy hair neatly combed. The man didn’t seem to belong down here at all with the intent technicians in their casual flannel shirts and old jeans.

  His face brightened upon seeing her. Craig fought off his instinctive and immediate reaction to dislike the man.

  “Craig, this is Dr. Nels Piter, one of our most respected scientists at Fermilab.” Paige reached out to brush her fingers against the scientist’s sleeve. “At CERN he made quite a name for himself with his crystal-lattice trap storage device.”

  Nels Piter reached out to shake Craig’s hand with a soft, cursory grip. Craig spotted a gold Rolex watch on the man’s wrist. “That was just my early work. I’v
e moved on to other things now.”

  Craig fished his FBI ID from his jacket. “Thank you for taking time from your schedule to see us, Dr. Piter.”

  Piter waved the FBI credentials away. “Any friend of Paige’s is certainly a friend of mine.” He slipped into a pleasant, chatty demeanor as he tried to establish rapport with the two FBI agents.

  Craig encouraged the man to talk-it always amazed him how much people would reveal about themselves without being prodded. He quickly discovered that Piter, a native Belgian, had worked for years at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. His early research there had gained him attention from this year’s Nobel committee.

  “So, do you actually do much science anymore, Dr. Piter?” Craig asked. “Or are you primarily involved in managerial functions?‘’

  The Belgian smiled tightly. “Ah, Agent Kreident, a scientist is a scientist is a scientist, no matter what the surroundings. Perhaps I am more concerned now with details of an administrative nature, but we do what it takes to get the job done, even if that entails tedious paperwork.” When Piter smiled, he had amazingly white teeth. His pale blue eyes kept flicking back to the technicians, to the work.

  Piter adjusted his lab coat, trying to make it neat over his jacket. On closer inspection, Craig saw that the brown suit was tailored of a tightly woven wool fabric, and the suit’s cut and hang were impeccable. He wore polished brown shoes with little tassels; the other technicians wore workboots or tennis shoes.

  Piter cleared his throat, getting down to business. “Paige tells me you’re operating under certain time constraints, and so am I. Experimental deadlines are approaching, and I’m expediting things so one of our research groups can get a final paper submitted to Physical Review Letters before the end of the week. I think it’s best we get started right away.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Goldfarb said.

  The technicians suddenly chattered among themselves, rising half out of their chairs. They scrambled with controls, watching oscilloscope traces on their monitors overlaid on computer-generated statistics.

  “What is it, Chang?” Piter turned, concerned and flustered. He spoke to one of the technicians. “More beam variation?”

  A young man with long hair neatly tied in a ponytail, called over his shoulder. “We’ve got it under control.”

  Piter turned apologetically to Paige and the two FBI agents. “The Tevatron has been touchy for the last day or so. The heavy construction is causing all sorts of problems, and our only consolation is that when the Main Injector is finished we’ll have even higher energies at our disposal.”

  “You’ve trained your technicians well,” said Craig, watching the long-haired man quickly check over a bank of diagnostics.

  “Graduate students,” corrected Piter curtly. “Mr. Chang and the others are working on their Ph.D. thesis topics. Their degrees ride on the success of this experiment.”

  “Did the explosion at the substation cause any problems?” Craig asked. “We saw the crater.”

  Piter sighed, maintaining his sidelong glance toward the grad students’ station. “Luckily, with more than three meters of dirt berm and the concrete shielding of the buried tunnels, neither the Main Ring nor the Tevatron suffered significant distress. My technical crew checked the bending magnets to insure that the vacuum pipes are sealed down to correct operating pressure. We’ve verified that the data ports, computer links, and optical diagnostics are all up and running. So far, the beam seems clean and consistent.”

  “Can’t have a dirty beam,” Goldfarb muttered.

  As if to bely Piter’s optimism, the grad students scrambled over each other to correct alignments and alter power outputs and sensitivities in probes within the flow.

  Piter continued, “The FBI team out at the crater, however, wanted us to shut down the accelerator, the colliders, everything, while they investigate.” He chuckled scornfully. “Obviously, that is impossible. Every airport in the country doesn’t shut down because of one plane crash. Hundreds of people here and around the world depend on the results from these test runs. No technical flaw could have caused the explosion, and so there’s no reason to put our work on hold.”

  The graduate students settled down, and Piter relaxed visibly. “My office is fielding phone calls from irate researchers, to crackpot groups that claim we’re leaking radiation into the environment, to the Physicians for Responsible Radiation Research-we were unfortunate to experience an accident while their annual gathering was taking place in Chicago.”

  Craig kept his face expressionless, knowing that Trish LeCroix had come here for the PR-Cubed conference, and that she had stumbled into Dumenco’s case.

  Paige took charge. “Nels, it would be very helpful if you could show us where Dr. Dumenco had his accident. Is the area safe, or are you running fixed-target experiments?”

  “Those areas aren’t online yet.” He touched Craig’s elbow, guiding him down the claustrophobic tunnel. “Right this way, Agent Kreident. We’ll need a car. I’d like to be outside and away from all this noise and clutter.”

  They parked outside another low building like a Quonset hut with curving channels on its roof and brilliant orange exterior walls framed with deep blue: Fermilab colors. An offshoot beam pipe from the Tevatron deflected high-energy particles away from the main stream and shot them a quarter mile down to the experimental target area.

  Inside the locked building and underground again, Craig squinted down the long, garishly lit tunnel. Access doors, chain-link gates, and interlock codes prevented Piter from letting them inside until he had bypassed numerous safety procedures. “It seems kind of deserted around here for all the repair activity,” Craig observed. “Where is everybody?”

  Piter’s eyebrows shot up. He had removed his out-of-place lab coat and now wore only his well-fitted suit jacket. “I suppose it does look deserted to a nontechnical person, but you must remember the sheer size of our facilities.”

  Craig bristled with irritation-Piter had no idea that he had completed extensive scientific training.

  “We have teams out in the diagnostic alcoves, a few in the beam-sampling substations around the Main Ring, but most of us just get our results and work in our offices. We’re interested in the data, not the… the hardware.” He said it like a dirty word. “Most of the people you’ll see here are contract workers for the Main Injector construction. Normally, this is a fairly quiet place.”

  “Unlike some other labs,” Paige said. Craig caught her smiling as he noted the reference to their previous work at the Lawrence Livermore Lab and the Nevada Test Site.

  As they walked down the long tunnel, their footsteps echoed in the enclosed space. Given an active imagination, night shadows, and a sickening fear after receiving a radiation exposure, Craig could imagine how Dumenco could have become suspicious, even paranoid. The place was so empty.

  “Was this Dr. Dumenco’s experimental area?” Craig asked. “Did he work with any of the technical people directly?”

  Piter swelled with pride. “Many of the graduate students and faculty members are continuing the work I started at CERN. Georg preferred to work alone, or with a very small crew. One of his graduate students, Nicholas Bretti, has been here for many years.”

  Craig turned to Goldfarb. “Make a note for us to talk to Bretti.”

  Paige interrupted. “I already checked, after you called this morning. He’s on vacation and not expected back for a week or two.”

  Piter frowned, his lips pale with distaste. “Other than that, I can’t say that Georg has made many professional relationships. He’s the type who wants all the credit for himself, if you’ll pardon my being so blunt.”

  Goldfarb flipped open a small notebook and looked at the Belgian scientist. “Why do other researchers have so many people working for them, Dr. Piter? Are their experiments more important than Dumenco’s?”

  Piter paused in his tracks and brushed a hand down his suit jacket. �
�It’s not a matter of importance. As Director of High-Energy Research, I allocate people and money to projects. If successful, the experiments continuing my own work could have profound scientific consequences. It is just that their work is much more manpower intensive than Dumenco’s-they need the entire Tevatron.”

  They reached a thick conduit that ran out of the concrete wall and splayed into several smaller pipes leading in different directions down branched tunnels. Piter pointed out a jumble of equipment. “When the Tevatron is running in fixed-target mode, the beam can be diverted to this location. The particles strike various targets with sufficient energy to create a shower of subatomic particles. We trace the collisions, looking for the secrets of the universe.”

  “Unless some guy happens to be standing in the way,” Goldfarb said.

  Nels Piter bridled. “Dr. Dumenco risked a great deal by working in here when the accelerator itself was running. Our safety interlocks are normally impossible to circumvent, but many of them have been kludged together so we could keep the Tevatron running during the Main Injector construction. Dumenco himself subverted the mechanisms designed to protect him, and unfortunately he is paying the price for his foolishness.”

  Craig noted the man’s indignance with interest. “You don’t think the substation explosion was meant to cause Dr. Dumenco’s exposure?”

  “Absolutely not!” Piter said, lifting his chin. “The two incidents are totally unrelated.”

  Goldfarb dutifully scrawled a few comments on his notepad; Craig knew, though, that nobody would ever be able to read the words. “So if Dr. Dumenco was working on something different from the other experiments, what was he doing, exactly?”

  “Well, it’s very technical,” Piter said evasively. “Dumenco was attempting to radically increase the number of p-bars present in our beam-”

  “You’re going to have to define ‘peebars,’ please,” Goldfarb said. Craig suppressed a satisfied smile to see his partner playing the dummy and drawing the Belgian out. Paige seemed to know exactly what they were doing, but Nels Piter didn’t catch on at all.