Paige held the folder so tightly her knuckles whitened. “He was quite insistent about having them. Let me guess-you must be Trish?”

“It’s Patrice.” The room temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees.

Craig interrupted. “This is Paige Mitchell, from Fermilab, on Dr. Dumenco’s request. It was the only way he would agree to go back to his hospital room.” He looked intently at Trish’s sepia eyes behind her delicate eyeglasses. “Let him have the papers,” he said, lowering his voice. “Those experimental results mean more to Dumenco than anything right now. Maybe he loses a little sleep, but he’ll die a lot happier.”

Trish’s eyes flashed, but she backed away, gesturing Paige inside.

Dumenco sat up in his hospital bed with an expression of such extreme delight that Craig knew he had made the right decision. The scientist swept the chessboard off the small table, knocking magnetic pieces in all directions. “Bring them here-thank you, thank you. You’re very kind.”

“It’s the least I could do,” she said. “Dr. Piter also asked me to pass along that he is at your disposal if you require anything else.”

Dumenco rolled his eyes. “That man has been a thorn in my side for years, just because some of my work contradicts his old CERN papers. I’m glad he is at least pretending to have a change of heart.”

As the scientist pawed through the papers, Craig knew he would have to look elsewhere for clues. Georg Dumenco was otherwise occupied.

Maybe Goldfarb had found something.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Tuesday, 2:37 p.m.

Fermilab,

Beam-Sampling Substation

Breathing hard, Nicholas Bretti paused to take a closer look at the man he had just shot, even as he tried to scramble out of the isolated blockhouse.

Everything had happened so fast, so unexpectedly. He hadn’t meant to do it. But, shit-the FBI! You take one quick little step down that slippery slope, and it sucks you down to hell like grease-covered glare ice!

The federal agent looked like a dark-suited Pillsbury doughboy on the floor. He didn’t move, didn’t appear to breathe. Dark liquid oozed from the wounds in his chest.

Bretti looked to the heavy door, the harsh glare of sunlight outside. No one ran into the blockhouse to see what was the matter, no one raced to investigate the gunshots. Should he call for help? Get an ambulance?

Or was there a chance he might be able to get away? Nobody knew he was here-he was supposed to be gone, days’ deep into his annual fishing trip in the wilds of West Virginia.

Bretti slapped his hands together, stepped toward the shot FBI agent, then turned toward the door. I must look like an idiot, he thought, confused, panicked.

Keep cool, he reminded himself. Get the apparatus. Pack it in the car, and drive to the embassy. Just like the plan. They had gotten him into this, and they could help him out. No problem, no sweat, no heartburn… no fucking way!

Bretti had never hurt anyone before, certainly never killed anyone-hell, he’d never broken the law, never cheated on a college exam… though if he had, maybe it wouldn’t have taken him seven years as a grad student and still no hope of seeing a Ph.D. anytime soon. This should have been his ticket to a better life. Antimatter. A simple, invisible embezzlement of atomic particles, bled off from the main beam.

No one should have noticed, except maybe that damned Dumenco. But then, nothing in Bretti’s life had ever turned out the way it should. Though it sure seemed possible when that Indian, Chandrawalia, had first approached him, showed up at his apartment. No wonder he had tracked Bretti down-the world’s oldest grad student.

He swallowed hard, close to hyperventilating, took a half step toward the man on the floor, then ignored him entirely. No turning back now. He had to deliver the old Penning trap with whatever load it had managed to store in two days. Maybe that would be enough. It would have to be enough, since the main p-bar supply had been annihilated.

The FBI man’s handgun burned a hole in his pocket. He wanted to get rid of it, but he couldn’t leave it there. Fingerprints, evidence… he didn’t know what sort of magic the crime lab could do these days.

How could things go so wrong so fast? First the emergency beam dump on Sunday, which caused a power outage, blowing the hell out of his demo stash. And now some FBI suit came snooping around when he was transferring the last day’s run of p-bars.

Why couldn’t the bastard have waited another ten minutes? Bretti would have completed his task, and no one would have suspected. Nobody was supposed to see him at Fermilab. During his week of vacation, he should have had plenty of time to slip off to India, make his delivery, take his payment, and get back to Illinois to pretend that nothing had happened. Nobody would have noticed, or cared, except maybe Dumenco and his unexpected results.

Well, after the curmudgeonly Ukrainian’s radiation exposure, Dumenco wouldn’t be chasing lost antiprotons for long. He certainly hadn’t spent much time being a good advisor, helping Bretti make it through the academic hoops, taking the grad student under his wing, using a bit of professional pull to get him through the hard parts.

Crap, the old fart only cared about his own theories and the damned Nobel Prize. Now, maybe Bretti would have to accept it for his dear-departed mentor.

Nicholas Bretti took a deep breath. The fading rush of adrenaline had left him with a case of the shakes. He had to move fast before anyone found the man he’d shot. He had to take his equipment and get out of there.

Over at his work station, Bretti carefully disconnected the transfer mechanism from the Penning trap. Working quickly, he attached the much smaller, but much more efficient crystal-lattice trap and accelerometer to a port upstream from the main detector, where the substation tapped into the Tevatron flow. The crystal trap was the real key, a treasure chest for storing antimatter-but it needed nearly a week to collect enough p-bars to make it worthwhile.

Similar to the hundreds of other diagnostics attached to the beam channel, his small device had never drawn attention. Many teams of technicians had their own equipment in these substations, and nobody ever messed with someone else’s diagnostics. It just wasn’t done.

Instead of passively imaging the intense, rotating beam of p-bars, Bretti’s lattice trap would bleed off antimatter particles after they had been laser cooled and slowed by the accelerometer.

Glancing at an oval clock that one of the grad students had wired to run counterclockwise, Bretti saw that it hadn’t been more than three minutes since he had fired the shots. Still, much too long. He had to get out of there.

Grunting, Bretti lifted the disconnected Penning trap. Its case was lined with high-efficiency lithium-ion batteries, making up the majority of the weight. Two insulating Dewars, one inside the other, held the Penning trap itself-three strips of room-temperature superconducting magnets that created a precise magnetic field shaped like a bottle, bouncing the p-bars back and forth along the axis. Over time, the bottle would leak, but the lithium-ion batteries would keep the magnetic field alive long enough for him to get to India, while he filled the more efficient crystal-lattice trap that could literally hold nine orders of magnitude more antimatter.

He walked carefully away from the isolated substation as if carrying a suitcase full of bricks. He locked the door to the blockhouse-with any luck, and with many of the temporary hires on break, the agent’s body wouldn’t be found until Bretti was safely out of the country.

Making his way to his car, Bretti realized he didn’t even have time to drive back to his apartment and pick up his bags. He had a plane to catch.