Lethal Exposure

“June,” he interrupted, “I need background on Dumenco. All of it.”

Hesitation. “You have his file. I’ve given you-”

“I don’t mean the dossier Fermilab uses for its brochures. I want the real details: where he came from, who he worked for, and why he defected.”

“Craig, I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about-‘’

“June, no PR bull! I want it straight. Dumenco himself just confessed that he worked on Soviet black-program research. I know about his family, how they were hidden-”

“Craig!” June’s voice came like a shot over the phone. “Can you get to a STU-3?”

Craig answered slowly. “I can get down to the Chicago office, but that’ll take nearly an hour. I need to know now, June. I’ve got a murder, attempted murder, and sabotage to solve here-not to mention a victim who’s only going to last another day at most. I’m getting more information from the bad guys than from my own office! How do you think that affects my confidence in the FBI?”

The nurses paid him no attention, indifferent to the usual patients’ conversations. The man in the bathrobe tapped his wife’s shoulder for attention, but the woman just put a finger to her ear and kept talking away on the phone.

“Are you calling from your cell phone?”

“I’m on a land line-it’s the best I’ve got.” June waited a moment before speaking. “All right… but this is close hold.” She hesitated, then said, “The Bureau had known about Dumenco for years. Our government desperately wanted him over here because of all his former work in the Soviet Union. Fundamental stuff, ground-breaking research he could never publish openly over in Russia. We wanted him to reproduce it here.”

“In exchange for protecting his family, and getting them-and him-out of a country that was falling apart, after Chernobyl, after the end of the Cold War.”

“That’s right. Soviet weapon scientists weren’t even known until lately, and they certainly weren’t allowed to travel outside the Iron Curtain. But when you’ve attained Dumenco’s stature, you can make a few demands. He went to European physics conferences-complete with KGB escorts.

“But they couldn’t watch him every second, prevent him from passing a note to another scientist. That’s when he made his break, and he was granted asylum in the U.S. ” She paused. “We set up a coordinated effort to grab his wife, his daughters, his son. Everything was in such chaos over there at the time, it was easy to do a bait- and-switch.”

Craig pressed the heavy black phone close to his ear. “But Dumenco hasn’t exactly been hiding. He’s one of Fermilab’s pet physicists, working and publishing for seven years. The Nobel committee even has his number.”

“Dumenco knew he would always be in the limelight somewhere,” she said. “But his family was the bargaining chip, not him. Unless they were hidden, they could become pawns for the KGB, blackmail to keep him in line. We couldn’t have that, so we put them all in a modified witness protection program. Not even Dumenco knew where they were living. Under tight security, the U.S. Marshal’s office arranged for him to see his family once a year in a safe house, at a classified location.”

Craig swallowed in a dry throat. “So in order to pursue his one love in life-physics-Dumenco had to protect his other love, his family. That’s why the assassin kept trying to track down the names and aliases, why he tried to kill Dumenco before he could make any deathbed confessions.”

June kept her voice carefully neutral. “That about sums it up.”

Craig knew what he had to do. “June, you’ve got to give me detailed contact information for his family.”

“Impossible,” she was quick to say. “Absolutely classified.”

“Look, June,” he said into the phone, his voice hard, “you owe it to me, and to Dumenco. You kept information from me once in this investigation, and I’m running up against the clock. Dumenco probably won’t last through tomorrow. Give me those names and addresses. We need to get those people out here, preferably with an FBI escort, before it’s too late.”

June tried to sound soothing. “But those family members are protected and hidden, Craig. For their own safety.”

“I don’t care, June! You can do it. The family was only hidden as a safeguard for Georg Dumenco-and that doesn’t matter anymore. In another day the entire reason for isolating them is going to be in a drawer in the hospital morgue. They deserve to see him one more time-he’s their father and husband. I’m sure they’d be willing to risk it, if only to say goodbye.”

In the waiting room several people sat nervously pretending to read the old magazines scattered about on the tables. Others looked at the ancient television set; the off-kilter hue adjustment made the people on CNN look yellow-skinned and jaundiced.

A candystriper walked by with a cart bearing plastic-wrapped gifts, flowers, chocolates, and stuffed animals. The intercom broke in repeatedly, calling the names of doctors or stating nonsensical phrases; to Craig, it sounded like a conversation during the old CB radio craze in the 1970s.

He continued to wait, but June remained quiet on the other end of the line. He had experienced her cold, silent treatment before when she didn’t have a counterargument for him but still didn’t want to surrender the issue. Apparently, she thought that if she remained quiet long enough, the bothersome agent would give up.

But not this time. Craig could dish out the silent treatment as well as June could. In fact, many of his relationship problems with Trish LeCroix had stemmed from his not talking to her often enough. In this circumstance, he could use that character flaw to his advantage.

“All right, dammit,” June finally said. “You win. Give me the hospital’s fax number. I’ll transmit the list to you as soon as I get it. I can’t just look them up in a Rolodex, you know. I’m going to have to call in a lot of favors.”

“They’ll be favors well spent, June,” he assured her. After giving her the med center’s fax number, he hung up.

But as he turned away from the phones, another thought occurred to him. If Dumenco had walked a real razor’s edge, doing work but trying not to reveal too much, the secret police would have watched him-but they would never have tried to kill him in the first place. And certainly not in a slow, lingering death like radiation exposure. It gave him too much chance to talk.

The assassin Jackson had shot couldn’t be the one who had engineered the fatal accident. As Dumenco had pointed out, the Fermilab incident was caused by someone extremely knowledgeable about the inner workings of the accelerator, how to cause a fluctuation in the Tevatron, which would lead to an emergency beam dump.

Craig let out a quiet groan. He was exactly back where he had started in the first place.

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.”