Kevin J Anderson, Doug Beason
Lethal Exposure
A book in the Craig Kreident series
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously published.
To Kathy Dyer and Leslie Lauderdale, who have spent many hours reading our draft manuscripts and offering their suggestions as test readers to make the books as good as they can be.
– KJA
To the men and women of the FBI-with special thanks to Tom and Bob, for taking the time to help us get this right.
– DB
We’d like to thank all those who have helped to make this book possible by offering their expertise, suggestions, and enthusiasm: Dr. Henry G. Stratmann, Dr. Steve Howe, Kevin Mengelt, Bill Higgins, Darren Crawford, Todd Johnson, Tom Stutler, Ginjer Buchanan, Catherine Ulatowski, Lillie E. Mitchell, Angela Kato… and of course, Rebecca Moesta Anderson and Cindy Beason.
Any mistakes, though, remain our own.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imaginations, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and is beyond the intent of the authors. India ’s “ Liberty for All” party and the research laboratory portrayed in Bangalore do not exist. The views expressed herein are purely those of the authors, and do not reflect in any way those of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the FBI, or the United States of America.
“Big science projects-in particular, these immense particle accelerators that involve hundreds of scientists and hundreds of millions of dollars to field an experiment to detect one elusive particle-are the nation’s last payback to the [Manhattan Project] physicists for winning World War Two.”
Off-the-record interview, 1993
White House Science Office
“Using one of the world’s most powerful research tools, scientists at Fermilab have made yet another major contribution to human understanding of the fundamentals of the universe.”
– Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary, March 1995, on the discovery of the top quark
“We have much to learn… and more of nature’s best-kept secrets to explore. We look forward to beginning a new era of research with the Tevatron, making the best use of the world’s highest-energy collider.”
Fermilab Director John Peoples
March 1995
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, 8:23 p.m.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
Batavia, Illinois
A whirlwind of high-energy particles coursed underground along the four-mile circular path. With each pass through the booster, superconducting magnets pumped the particles to higher and higher energies until they collided with a counter-rotating beam at nearly the speed of light, a quarter million of them each second.
The impact sparked microscopic fireworks far grander than anything Dr. Georg Dumenco had seen these Americans display on their Fourth of July celebrations.
The Ukrainian emigre devoted his time to worrying about physics instead of politics. His days of research for political expediency were long over, now that he had fled to America and made his home alone, near Chicago, where he could work at Fermilab’s magnificent Tevatron, the world’s largest particle accelerator-or, as the local newspaper called it, an “atom smasher.”
Even here after hours, twenty feet underground, the buried racetrack of the Main Ring and the parallel Tevatron hummed continuously. When the Fermilab teams had “good beam,” they liked to keep the accelerator running without interruption.
Dumenco worked down in one of the experimental target chambers, a dead-end bull’s-eye at the termination of a shunt path a quarter mile long. There, the main beam could be deflected like a high-energy bullet into a small target of metal foil. The crash of the beam into the foil was enough to shatter nuclei and pound protons into constituent elementary particles with a resulting shower of radiation.
With the Tevatron operating in its continuous loop, Dumenco could tinker with his own apparatus in the distant target chamber. He wasn’t supposed to be in this room when the beam was actually running, but the confusion of Fermilab’s new Main Injector Ring under construction allowed him to circumvent a few interlocks. Even with all the chaos of construction, sufficient checks and controls still operated to protect any personnel in hazardous locations. He felt safe.
Relatively safe.
Unlike back in the Ukraine, he did not waste time with paranoia. Not any more. Now, six years after the nail-biting time of his defection, and his dire worries about the safety of his family members, Dumenco knew he had made the right choice to flee, despite all the heartache.
At Fermilab he didn’t have to inflate his results, cope with incompetent technicians or shoddy apparatus, watch the administrators for bureaucratic bumbling, or protect himself from the suspicious eyes and narrow minds of the political police.
One of his coworkers had called Fermilab a “Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for high-energy physicists,” referring to a children’s film Dumenco had never seen. But he understood the reference-the Tevatron and the high-energy experiments provided a virtual playground for physicists like himself.
Dumenco walked down the low tunnel. Inside protective cages, the bright lights flickered with a barely perceptible rhythm, the pulse of the accelerator. Overhead, a heavy dirt berm shielded the beam tube itself, while a thick concrete housing surrounded the test area like a munitions bunker.
Munitions, weapons, high-energy power sources. It felt so rewarding to be working on pure science instead, fundamental studies, the creation of antimatter particles, increased production of antiprotons from the existing beam and collisions with targets in experimental chambers…
In the six years since he had left the Ukraine -after Chernobyl, after the fall of the Soviet Union -Dumenco had re-created his life’s work from scratch. He pushed to reconfirm his ground-breaking theories, his fantastic results about the nature of antimatter. He had sworn to keep that old research secret-to protect his family, if not himself-but he had already re-created the groundwork from first principles. The march of science swept on like a swollen river out of control.
Surrounded by motivated graduate students-some more motivated than others-Fermilab’s support staff, and a generous grant from the National Science Foundation, Dumenco had accomplished so much so quickly, in part because he had already made the time-consuming initial mistakes where no one in the West could see them. This year he was already under serious consideration for the Nobel Prize in Physics. And winning the Nobel would justify all that “other work.”
But right now, nothing seemed to be going right.
Growling, he took his tools and his diagram to inspect the antimatter flow, the diagnostics, the p-bar traps. If he hadn’t already secretly known the results to expect from his classified work years ago, he would never have suspected anything was wrong.
But his experimental runs weren’t producing nearly the amount of antimatter particles he expected.
Breathing heavily, tasting the sour leftovers of coffee in his mouth, Dumenco crawled into the beam-tube alcove. For the fifth time in an hour, he traced a complicated logic-flow diagram with a thin finger. The diagram outlined the complex interconnections, the feedback mechanisms, and the fault-tree circuitry of his experiment.