“Sounds like a good deal,” Paige said, tossing her blond hair over her shoulder.

“For good reason. Less friendly countries were making overtures to get the weapons scientists- Libya, Iraq, North Korea, anybody who wanted their own private little specialist who could take advantage of previous work done in the Soviet Union. One good recruit could leapfrog a threshold country into the ranks of the Big Boys.”

“Like what we did with the German rocket scientists,” Paige said.

“Right-‘Operation Paperclip,’ people like Wernher von Braun and his crew from Peenemünde. After the fall of the Third Reich, we grabbed as many German scientists as we could before the Russians got the rest. Those refugees formed the basis of our respective rocketry programs.”

“Good analogy,” Paige said. She leaned across the table. “Dumenco came here and immediately began doing brilliant work at the Tevatron. He thrived in this place, as if he already had a good head start. You can see by the stack of breakthrough technical papers he published in the last few years, shaking subatomic physics down to the quantum level, you might say.” She sniffed at her own joke, and Craig allowed himself a smile.

“I couldn’t comprehend any of his articles,” Craig said, “not even the abstracts, although I’m a reasonably technical person.”

“Dumenco’s pushing the frontiers of science,” Paige said, “moving the borderline between the unfathomable and the simply nonsensical.”

“What does that mean?” Craig said.

“Dumenco found answers to some crucial problems in high-energy physics of the so-called ‘Standard Model,’ leading to a Grand Unified Theory. But because we can only observe indirect interactions of basic particles, even the answers are sometimes so bizarre they’re incomprehensible.”

“Then maybe I am understanding them,” said Craig, “because they are certainly incomprehensible.”

“The elegance of Dumenco’s work gained notice from the Stockholm Nobel committee,” Paige continued. “With his initial Fermilab results, he achieved breakthroughs in areas that had stymied people for years.”

“Well, what work was Dumenco doing in the Ukraine?” Craig said, flipping to the end of his dossier. “I’ve got practically every month of his employment here, but nothing about that entire earlier part in his life.”

“I couldn’t find out much about that either,” Paige admitted. “The records weren’t transferred over. I’ve uncovered nothing about his family or his education in the Soviet Union. I think he had a wife, two daughters and a son, but their whereabouts are currently unknown. He may have left them behind when he defected.”

“Our government offered this man everything he wished for,” Craig said, tapping his pen against the edge of the table. “Sure, he’s since proven himself to be a brilliant man-but on what did we base our assumption that he would make so many breakthroughs if we gave him the chance? Yet, we instantly gave him an extraordinary amount of time on the world’s largest particle accelerator, granting him all the research assistance and funding he could possibly want? Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

“Yes, I do.” Paige nodded. “But somebody must have known the work he did in the Ukraine.”

“I don’t know about you,” Craig said, “but knowing that someone tried to murder an eminent physicist currently on the short list for the Nobel Prize makes me very suspicious. Especially when I see that a large portion of his past work has been hidden under wraps.”

He tucked his pen back in his pocket. “When something is swept under the rug like that, I see a big suspicious lump. It makes me think that a few of our important answers lie there.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Wednesday, 10:12 a.m.

New Delhi, India

Stepping nervously from the narrow air-conditioned Concord into the New Delhi airport, Nicholas Bretti felt as if he had entered another world. The sleek supersonic jet was a vision of the future, a flying metal island immaculately clean and incredibly well-maintained; but the New Delhi airport was a nightmare that couldn’t heave itself out of the past.

A mix of heat, humidity, and overpowering smells slammed into him as he stepped off the plane onto the jetway. He knew he would never be able to forget the smells. Or the people.

Bretti blinked, stumbling ahead, as if all his senses had overloaded. He lit a cigarette to calm himself. Already unsteady on his feet because of the six Grand Marniers he had downed in an attempt to calm himself, he tried to regain his full alertness. This Indian connection was important, his safety net, his only chance at escaping what he had done back at Fermilab. He wouldn’t get a second chance to make a first impression on the VIPs coming to meet him.

Swallowing hard, he looked over the jostling bodies just outside the customs area. Gentlemen in immaculate business suits elbowed beggars in torn robes. Women wore yellow and orange cloth wrapped around their bodies; dirty children without shoes or shirts swarmed about. Brownian motion, he thought, Indian motion.

People everywhere, all with black hair, brown skin. People. Noise.

The alcohol buzz wore off quickly. He had a headache, and the panic inside him turned to sour, sick despair. Was this the best future he could hope for?

The incredible humidity made his shirt go limp against him, as if he had just been steam blasted. The airport reeked of urine, mold, animal manure, and decaying garbage. Outside, vendors at stalls added their sweet and biting smells of burning incense, spices, and cooking food, perfumes, and curry.

It was a world far removed from Chicago, and even more so from the upscale neighborhood in Fairfax, Virginia, where he had grown up. Now Bretti wished he had gone back home on his supposed fishing trip after all, instead of just faking it for his alibi.

What did he care about the Indian government’s desire for antimatter, their intent to use it for medical applications? New isotopes for cancer treatments. If they made breakthroughs in medical technology, their country would make billions on the world market. The Indians weren’t really paying him all that much money, after all-and nothing was worth the crap he was going through. Especially not after shooting that FBI agent.

Bretti wanted just to turn around, climb back aboard the Concord, and go back to Chicago. But he was trapped here, maybe for the rest of his life. He didn’t know what he was going to do.

He wavered, then swallowed the sour taste of chicken vindaloo from the onboard meal that crawled up his throat. Drawing deeply on his cigarette, he tossed the butt to the floor and ground it out.

“Excuse me, Dr. Bretti?” A man’s high-pitched voice startled him, piercing through the drone and clangor of so many people.

Bretti whirled around unsteadily. The man was dressed in white cotton pants and tunic with a matching white hat; brown plastic glasses made his eyes large and goggling. His full mustache curled up nearly to his nose.

“Dr. Bretti? My name is Rohit Ambalal, from the People’s Liberty for All party.” He carried a blue soft-sided briefcase. “I am here to expedite you through customs. Come this way. Quickly please.”

Ambalal motioned Bretti toward a red door to the right of a long line by the customs table. A military guard in a khaki uniform with red-and-black rank insignia stood by the door, eyeing them.

Bretti’s mouth felt dry and cottony as his guide started for the red door. People’s Liberty for All party? he thought. What the hell is this? Did it have something to do with his contact, Mr. Chandrawalia?

Perspiration soaked his shirt, as much from anxiety as from the oppressive humidity. The military guard made him very uneasy. Bretti swallowed, but his throat was dry. He tried to think, but could dredge only a little of the background that Chandrawalia had told him some months before. India ’s leadership tottered back and forth among the dozens of political parties; no ideology held a convincing grip on the nation’s government. He hoped he wasn’t going to be caught up in some sort of power struggle.