Dumenco sat up, wild eyed. “Go away-away from me!” he croaked, as if afraid Craig intended to kill him as well.

Craig stood back in shock, his stomach knotting in revulsion to see how much the physicist’s condition had degenerated overnight. His skin was scarlet, and his joints were so swollen he could barely move. His eyes were crimson, covered with a thin film of blood from hemorrhaging vessels.

“Georg, it’s us,” Trish said in an attempt to be soothing, but her voice came out dry and strained. “Dr. LeCroix and Agent Kreident. You’re safe. We have extra guards at your room.”

The scientist sagged, and recognition seeped into his face. Craig came closer. “We need to talk to you, Dr. Dumenco. Please, who did this? What did you see?”

Overnight, more medical instruments had been hooked up to his disintegrating body, replacing fluids, deadening the spreading pain, suppressing nausea and raising his dwindling blood pressure. Oxygen tanks had been wheeled in beside his bed, with a respirator mask that he had removed; Craig could still see the marks the mask had pressed into the damaged skin of his face. Only apparatus kept his lungs breathing, his heart beating.

Dumenco squirmed away as Craig spoke firmly. “Dr. Dumenco, you must have some idea who this man was. Why did he try to kill you?”

“No!” he said, moaning as he turned from side to side. Part of the skin on his shoulder split open, oozing blood-tinged fluid, like sap from a sliced-open tree. “I have put us all in danger. I brought this upon myself, and I won’t make it worse. Better just to let it die, let me die!”

Craig seized on the words and leaned forward. “So you do have an idea! Who is it? We have to stop him.”

Dumenco shook his head. “If they knew enough about my work at Fermilab, if they were worried about what I would reproduce, if they could get inside and cause my accident… they can find anyone.”

Trish backed away, sickened and deeply concerned. Her professional demeanor dissolved into that of someone emotionally attached to the patient. “They’ve been looking for a long time, haven’t they, Georg?”

Craig turned to her, struck by her reaction. “Do you know something? Trish, what aren’t you telling me?”

“Nothing,” Trish stammered. “I… I’m still shaken by the killer.”

Dumenco slumped back in his bed. “Perhaps it is best if you ignore the case, Agent Kreident. Call it an accident, and everything will be neatly explained. I never should have brought you here.”

Craig crunched his jaws together in an effort to remain calm. Trying a different tack, he removed the photographs from his jacket pocket. “Dr. Dumenco, take a look at these photos, please. Who are these people, and why did you have their photographs hidden in your drawer?”

The dying physicist blinked and stared, trying to focus his eyes-and then he recoiled in shock. Tears began to stream down the old scientist’s face. As his body wracked with sobs, a line of blood trickled out of his mouth. But he refused to answer.

Trish saw the pictures and gasped in surprise. Craig glared at her, and she answered immediately. “His family,” she said. “I met them on my Chernobyl trip. But I haven’t seen them since he defected from the Ukraine. I know he didn’t bring them to Chicago.”

“Leave the pictures here, so they can be by my side,” Dumenco said.

Trish removed the photos from Craig’s hands and stared down at the snapshots for a long moment. A strange expression crossed her face before she lovingly stood them up in their small frames on his bedside table.

“Good thing you took them from my apartment,” Dumenco said, his voice rattling. “Otherwise he would have gotten them.”

“Who, Georg?” Trish asked. “Who would have gotten them? The man who tried to kill you?”

Craig took out his notebook. The family members added a new twist. Was Dumenco protecting them? Were they hostages somewhere? Had they already been killed by the assassin?

“Why are you protecting someone who just tried to kill you?” He took a gamble. “Is it something to do with your physics work in the Soviet Union? What research did you do before you came to this country, and why was the U.S. so anxious to get you here?”

“No records,” Dumenco said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“If it has something to do with who’s trying to kill you, it does matter! Why were all your papers and results covered up? They’re not in your files.”

Dumenco sat up in the bed with a Herculean effort, completely lucid now. Now he seemed almost paternal. “You don’t understand, Agent Kreident. There are some vows I made, some promises I intend to keep. And I’m not going to change my mind. Not because I’m so close to death I can put my arms around my own tombstone.”

Craig shook his head in disgust, and he tossed a last glance at the photos of Dumenco’s wife and children. The frames stood on the data printouts from his Fermilab antimatter experiment. Craig couldn’t imagine the scientist doing any deep mental calculations in this state of mind.

“If you have anything to tell me, Dr. Dumenco, we’ll have other agents standing by. They can get in touch with me,” he said with a bitter voice. “Meanwhile, I have a case to solve, with or without your help.”

As he turned to leave, Trish followed him out. He faced her. “And what do you have to tell me? I can see that you’re hiding something. Did you see something this morning?”

“No, Craig,” she said, her face flushing. “I didn’t.”

He frowned at her. “I know you too well for that, Trish.” But she just met his gaze with stony silence. He had seen the same sort of doggedness when she had moved away from California, leaving everything they had and going on her own to Johns Hopkins.

He shook his head in disgust. “Everyone around here is a marvel of cooperation.” As he passed the hospital security officers and the FBI man outside the door, he snapped, “I want this guard to be airtight!”

Craig looked at his watch, then back at Trish, giving her the brush-off. “Paige is picking me up to go to Fermilab. I have another meeting with Dr. Piter.” At least Paige was interested in solving the case.

He glanced back at the closed door to the Ukrainian’s room. “Dead men tell no tales,” he said to himself, shaking his head. “But dying men aren’t much help either.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Thursday, 9:07 a.m.

Fermilab

Hanging up the phone, Randall Jackson couldn’t decide whether to be frustrated and angry… or elated at having found a solid lead. Regardless, he couldn’t wait to tell Craig. At the least they’d meet that afternoon in Ben Goldfarb’s hospital room, as they had agreed.

Dumenco’s graduate student and assistant, Nicholas Bretti had been gone on vacation in West Virginia for the past week. He had not called his advisor, had not shown that he even knew about Dumenco’s lethal exposure, though the story had been on most of the major news media.

Explainable enough, Jackson thought, if Bretti was out on a family fishing trip, on the deep lakes and icy rivers in the isolated West Virginia mountains, as he had told his colleagues. Jackson himself rarely watched the news when he was on vacation.

But Bretti’s family had no idea where their son was. No, they did not know that he was on vacation, and the last time he and his father had gone fishing was when he had been twelve years old.

Jackson had thanked them, hung up. And let his suspicions grow.

Nicholas Bretti was not where he had claimed to be, and perhaps he held other secrets as well.

Jackson flipped through a stack of lab notebooks in the cluttered cubicle while Nels Piter’s grad student Frank Chang watched by his side. The hardback notebooks had cloth spines and numbered, lined paper inside-not the typical cheap, spiral bound college special Jackson had used as an undergraduate. But each volume had NICHOLAS BRETTI stamped proudly on the front. Other than the notebooks, the cubicle office held nothing but physics texts, journal articles, preprints, and equipment manuals.