Jackson spotted an emergency phone on the wall to his right. He edged over, keeping his eyes on the equipment in the alcove, wondering where Bretti could have gone. He wouldn’t allow himself to get in the same situation as Goldfarb without a backup.

He glanced at the digits while punching in the numbers for Craig’s cellular phone. He looked up but could see no movement. Three cheerful tones played, then a metallic voice: “I’m sorry, the number you have dialed is not valid. Please dial eight to access numbers outside the laboratory.”

Jackson swung his attention back to the phone-

The lights clicked off, plunging the alcove into darkness. He heard someone moving, gasping deep breaths, then the heavy metal door slammed, sealing Jackson inside.

Stumbling forward, holding his handgun in front of him, Jackson made his way toward the door. He tried to keep low, not sure if anyone remained in the room. He couldn’t be more than ten feet from the door, but it seemed a mile away.

His knee struck something hard-one of the metal carts. A sharp edge cut his leg. Finally, he crashed into the door, found the handle. Pushed-

Nothing. Some kind of locking mechanism had fallen into place, and he was trapped.

Then he heard the low frequency thrumming grow louder in the conduit running across the room. Had the accelerator powered up again? Icy sweat bristled on his brow as he pounded on the sealed door.

His situation must be just like Dumenco’s, just before he had received his lethal exposure.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Friday, 8:43 a.m.

Fox RiverMedicalCenter,

Intensive Care Unit

Despite intensive searching, the FBI computer files had no match for the fingerprints found on the bleached-blond assassin Jackson had shot in the hospital. Craig looked down at the faxed notice he had just received from FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and frowned.

He hoped June Atwood wasn’t holding out on him again this time.

He crumpled the fax and turned to Trish who stood next to him in Dumenco’s room. From her mannerisms, her extreme attentiveness, she seemed more like a grieving friend than a concerned doctor. Even after all of her ministrations, the dying man had entered his final stages and she could do little to help him.

Less than a week ago he had been a driven, intelligent physicist on the verge of winning a Nobel Prize. Day by day, he had disintegrated.

Trish looked at Craig for support, but he found it hard to credit her grief for what it was. Once, she’d been the most intimate friend Craig had ever had. Even before their breakup, though, Trish had spent so much time with her impassioned causes, her intense medical studies, her outspoken work with the victims of Chernobyl… he wasn’t even sure he knew who she was anymore.

Dumenco tried to sit up, coughing. Fluids had leaked into his lungs, and each breath was labored. Trish had muttered something about him developing ARDS- adult respiratory distress syndrome-secondary to his sepsis. His words were now heavily accented and difficult to understand.

“I feel… detached, Dr. LeCroix,” he said. “My body is fighting off a thousand infections, as if I’m rejecting my own internal organs.”

Trish bent closer to him. “That’s a good way of describing it.”

“Having trouble thinking, too. Connections aren’t fitting together right in my thoughts, leading to nonsense.” He coughed out a small laugh. “Maybe now I’ll be able to understand quantization…”

It seemed important for Dumenco to give Trish all the data he could, describing his symptoms in excruciating detail day by day as he degenerated. He meant to leave one last legacy to science. Looking pained, Trish wrote down the notes he dictated.

Craig could hardly bear to watch. Awkwardly, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the gift he had bought at a strip mall. He stepped forward, placing the flat, squarish box on the table beside the hospital bed, weighing down the sheafs of experimental papers.

“I brought you something, Dr. Dumenco,” he said. As the scientist turned his attention, Craig opened the ends of the deceptively heavy cardboard box. Moving gingerly, he slid out a small but beautifully polished chessboard made of alternating squares of onyx and jade; two smaller boxes in his jacket pockets held the tissue-wrapped chessmen.

“I remember our first conversation, Doctor. You’re right, you should have a chance to play one last game on a fine chess set. My gift to you.”

The Ukrainian’s eyes, hideously damaged and barely able to see, filled again with tears. He reached a swollen hand toward the polished chess king. His fingers looked like pieces of meat that had begun to rot.

Dumenco spoke, having trouble forming each word, as if the thoughts kept eluding him before he could manage to get them out. “I’m afraid… I would not be a worthy opponent for you, Agent Kreident. A good investigator like you, sharp-witted… more than a match for me.”

“On the contrary”-Craig smiled-“judging from our previous game, I think the stakes now are a bit more even.”

Working diligently to distract himself, Craig set up the pieces on the slick stone board, though he didn’t know if Dumenco had sufficient dexterity to move them.

Trish watched him curiously. Behind her delicate glasses, her rich brown eyes held a warm and grateful expression.

The door opened and Paige Mitchell entered, escorting a shaken-looking Nels Piter. The Belgian scientist’s suave dress and cultured appearance looked disheveled, as if too much had been weighing him down for a few days.

Recognizing them, Dumenco grew indignant. “Come to see me off, Nels?”

Paige stepped forward. “Dr. Piter wanted to see you. He has something I think you’d want to hear.”

Craig wondered if the Nobel Prize committee had announced their decision. But the administrator scientist had something else in mind. “Professor… we’ve gathered some strange data at the Tevatron. Of course you wouldn’t find them surprising.” He stopped, at a loss for words.

When Piter paused, Dumenco closed his eyes and whispered, “My results. The p-bar production rate… far too low. Should be higher. Has to be higher. Something is wrong with the data, not the experiment.”

He glanced at where his papers lay stacked under the chessboard. Craig didn’t think Dumenco had touched them in the previous day, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the scientist had memorized enough data to work out the difficulties with no other tool but his own degenerating mind.

“I’ve been tracking the data myself,” Piter said with an effort. “Until recently, they seemed to fit within the parameters I had predicted, proving that your gamma-laser enhancement technique was ineffective.” Piter swallowed. “Until this morning.”

Dumenco jerked his hand sideways in a spasm that knocked the papers and the chessboard off the table and onto the floor. Paige and Trish bent over quickly to pick up the mess, but Dumenco only had eyes for the other scientist.

Craig watched the confrontation between the two titans of science. Even on his deathbed, Dumenco doggedly defended his work. “Your predictions were incorrect,” he muttered. “Wrong.” His swollen hand clenched into a fist, and the skin cracked. He didn’t even feel the pain.

Trish stood up, her hands full of scattered papers. “Calm down, Georg. Don’t overexert yourself.”

Piter shook his head. “You had no data to back up your predictions, and yet you still insisted. I thought you were irrational, self-centered, and blind to the self-evident data-a disappointment to science.”

“The data was wrong,” Dumenco said, somewhat petulant.

Now Piter looked upset, and he stepped closer. “But how could you know? This morning the p-bar production rate went up dramatically, reaching the levels you had predicted all along. I shut down the beam until we could understand the mechanism, discover what is happening. But with this result you’ve at least proved your theory viable. How did you know it would happen?”