Sealing the suitcase, Bretti looked at his watch. Time to move. He carried the other, nearly empty crystal-lattice trap to the door of the substation and connected wires to the wall, and to the door jamb. The next time the door was opened, it would cut power to the cross-feeding lasers-releasing a few hundred nanograms of antimatter.
Enough to blow the hell out of the blockhouse.
Enough to keep the FBI busy for quite some time.
Bretti had to erase his tracks, create an immediate diversion, and keep away from the relentless federal agents. The stakes were high, the time was now, and everything would depend on how he managed to get through the next few hours. He didn’t have any other choice.
He already had his ticket for the Concord, a one-way trip to India… and safety for the rest of his life, compliments of the Liberty for All party. He had his passport and packed suitcase waiting in the trunk of the rental car.
Lugging the main trap with him, Bretti departed from the blockhouse and carefully closed the metal door behind him, connecting the leads and preparing the booby-trap. Not looking back, he set off across the dry, shoulder-high grasses of the restored prairie. It was the most direct way to his car, with the least chance of him being seen, swallowed by the tall waving grass.
He had just stepped into the shelter of the prairie when he saw a gold rental car racing toward the blockhouse. Kicking up dust, it drove along the narrow access road that followed the curve of the racetrack accelerator. Bretti ducked down in the dry grass, his heart pounding. Already! Shit!
He backed slowly away, rustling through the grass as he waited for the fireworks to start.
Minutes earlier, in the first blockhouse around the accelerator ring-where Goldfarb had been shot-Craig, Jackson, and Piter had found nothing, exactly as Craig had expected. Schultz’s evidence technicians had scoured the substation for clues. Among the fingerprints found there, Craig was sure they would identify Bretti’s-but that proved nothing, since the grad student had been authorized to work in that building, after all.
The site of the second blockhouse held only the glassy crater, which they now guessed had been caused by a failed antimatter trap.
As they approached the third substation, though, Craig felt the hairs tingle on the back of his neck. He wasn’t thoroughly familiar with the small and ugly buildings, but something about the trampled grass around the exterior, the mussed gravel around the steel door, the way the padlock hung on the latch, made him think that someone had been here not long before.
Squinting through his sunglasses, he looked over at Jackson. The other agent stood tense, as if he could sense something in the air. The three men cautiously approached the substation door, and Craig nodded to Nels Piter. “Give me the key. Let’s open it up and see what we find inside.”
The Belgian scientist fumbled with his key ring. Selecting a key and handing it to Craig, Piter stood back and watched. Craig twisted it in the padlock with a click, and hung the lock on the ring, swinging aside the hasp.
Before opening the heavy door, Craig looked around, squinting into the bright autumn morning. The brown grass stretched ahead of him inside the circle of the buried accelerator, rasping together like witches’ brooms in the brisk, chill breeze. He sensed someone watching him, but he put it down as nerves. Fermilab’s famous buffalo wandered out on the prairie, incongruous among the high-tech substations and high-voltage electrical wires that ran around the lab. An intense silence hung in the air.
Craig pulled on the door. Before he could say anything, though, before the words could even form in his mind, an explosion ripped through the thick-walled blockhouse.
The blast hurled Craig backward like a punch from a giant fist. All he could see were dazzling flames and a bright wall of light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Friday, 11:36 a.m.
Fermilab Accelerator,
Beam-Sampling Substation
The overpressure wave hurled Craig backward into Nels Piter and slammed the battleship-steel door against the outer wall with a thunderous clang. He covered his head with his arms, sheltering Piter with his body. His ears throbbed from the boom, and heat seared his skin.
The concrete-block walls split and cracked, squirting flames like blood leaking from a cracked scab. A secondary fire crackled with plumes of greasy, noxious smoke, but the blaze found little fuel inside the blockhouse. Broken fragments of cinderblock and metal rebar rained around them like a snowstorm of junkyard objects.
Moments later, Piter groaned and rolled to the side. Craig stood up, shaking his head. His suit jacket was torn, dusty, battered, and he did his best to brush himself off.
Jackson had tumbled to the rough ground, skidding his shoulders across the gravel and into the autumn-dead grass. Now he got to his hands and knees, cradling his skull, disoriented and stunned. “Was that another antimatter release?” he asked. “Did we set one off?”
When Craig shrugged, his head throbbed with the sudden movement. His ears continued ringing. “If so, this one wasn’t as powerful.”
Piter sat down heavily on the gravel pathway, looking comical with his dapper appearance now smudged with soot and dust. “We shouldn’t go inside the rubble, in case there’s residual radiation.” He gripped his knees with long, angular hands and blinked his pale blue eyes. “We’re lucky the blockhouse walls and the heavy door were thick enough to absorb the prompt radiation-otherwise, we’d be going to the hospital like Dr. Dumenco.”
Jackson was silent for a long time. “Bretti set that up deliberately,” he said finally, keeping his voice under control. “A boobytrap.”
“Just like how he must have boobytrapped Dumenco in the beam-dump alcove,” Piter said quickly.
“After he locked me down in the tunnel, he knew we’d come looking for him. So he was waiting for us here. Could have been a diversion, or maybe he’s just homicidal.” Jackson ’s voice was a growl. “That guy is really starting to annoy me.”
“After this explosion, and after shooting Goldfarb, and after dumping the lethal exposure on Dumenco, it’s safe to say he’s got a bloodthirsty streak a mile wide.” Craig placed his hands on his hips, scanning the silent prairie that stretched around them for miles. “I’ve got a gut feeling, though, that we missed him by only a few minutes.”
He heard sirens swelling in the distance, emergency response crews from Fermilab racing to the site of the explosion. Bretti had grabbed their attention, all right- but by now the grad student could be anywhere.
They would comb the area inch by inch, get all available FBI and law-enforcement personnel to barricade the exits. They had to trap Bretti here before he did anything else.
From his hiding place in the thick grass, Bretti watched the explosion. He had jury-rigged the power to disengage from the crystal-lattice the moment the substation door opened the merest crack; but he didn’t think the FBI would be so close behind him. He should have had more time, even just a few more minutes.
He hadn’t wanted to kill the agents outright-just incapacitate them, get them out of the way so he could make his last run, escape from this place forever. Of course, he had already shot another FBI agent, the curly-haired one, even though he hadn’t meant to. At this point, with everything that had happened, with everything he had already done, Bretti hoped the other agents would make a distinction between Attempted Murder and Murder.
But those FBI men looked really pissed off.
All the more reason to get out of the country, politically safe from any possible extradition. He’d gotten in much too deep to talk his way out, and he had to keep plunging forward no matter who else he had to step on. He just wished he had a little more faith in Chandrawalia and the crackpot nuclear weapons schemes of a renegade political party.