The Indian lowered the briefcase. “This is a simple misunderstanding. Here, I’ll show you. Just a salt crystal, not a bomb.”
His fingers fumbled with the latches. Craig suddenly wondered if opening the case without the proper precautions would destabilize or even kill the power to the solid-state lasers carefully aligned on the crystal lattice. A simple power shutdown had resulted in the annihilation of an entire substation last Sunday night.
Chandrawalia’s finger touched the latch.
Craig whipped out his Sig Sauer, dropping his badge wallet on the floor and stretching the handgun forward in a perfect isosceles firing position. Stop the threat. “If you move another hair I am going to put a nine-millimeter bullet through the center of your forehead.”
The Indian gasped at Craig’s tone, at his expression. He froze.
Craig said to the security man, “Take the case from him please. Gently.”
“Me?”
Craig said nothing, just kept his eyes fixed on the Indian official. The security man came forward, moving with jerky motions, and took the briefcase from Chandrawalia’s hands. The man didn’t resist.
“I will lodge an official complaint,” Chandrawalia said, his voice hard. “This treatment is inexcusable. I will speak directly to your State Department.”
Only when Craig held the briefcase tightly in one hand did he lower the handgun. Back at the end of the service corridor he heard other footsteps, the backup agents running toward him.
“Complain all you want,” Craig said. “This is enough for multiple felony charges, with this evidence in hand. You can’t just buy antimatter at the airport gift shop. And I’m sure it’s enough for your government to waive your diplomatic immunity.”
Chandrawalia then faltered, looking uncertain as the other teams of FBI agents rushed in. Craig wondered just how much support this guy would receive from the Indian government, or if he was just a freelancer with big plans.
One of the backup agents stopped next to him while two others took covering positions on either side of Chandrawalia. The agent looked down at the briefcase in Craig’s hands. “Did you get it?”
“Yeah,” Craig said with a sigh, “I got it.”
Cornered, Bretti wet his lips and looked from side to side. He glanced at Jackson, as if considering making a run for it. His rapidly packed clothes and personal items lay strewn about the floor in the lounge. He flicked his gaze toward the open door.
“Don’t,” said Jackson quietly as he leveled his handgun at Bretti. He remained utterly firm in his stance.
The grad student drew himself up and jutted his chin, poking out the goatee. “You wouldn’t shoot me with all these people here.” He took a step backward.
“Try me,” said Jackson coolly. “You shot my partner, remember?”
From the look in the other agent’s eyes, Bretti decided to believe him.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Friday, 5:32 p.m.
Fox RiverMedicalCenter
In Dumenco’s room, the silence of death felt like a heavy shroud. His family members stood around the bed, stunned and quietly grieving.
Paige felt out of place as she looked at the destroyed man. Yet, she realized that death had come as a relief to him. Through a sheen of tears, she saw the polished stone chess set Craig had given him, the icons and crosses and framed Ukrainian cathedrals Trish had retrieved from his apartment.
She had not felt so confused, or devastated, since her father had died, nearly four years ago. The anger and frustration from feeling helpless-and, now, knowing what Nels Piter had done to Dumenco-nearly overwhelmed her. She’d thought she would have been able to handle Dumenco’s death better with his family here- but she was wrong.
Kathryn and Alyx stood close with their mother, holding each other, relieved to have visited their lost father one last time. Young Peter, barely a teenager, looked the most stricken of all those by the bedside. “But I haven’t finished telling you, Father,” he said. “I had so much more to say. We didn’t even thank you for bringing us here to America…”
Ashen-faced, Trish turned away from the scientist’s body and picked up her clipboards, jotting down notes, filling out the death certificate, trying anything to avoid concentrating on what had just happened. “It was so senseless,” she muttered. “Another one for the books, for the database. But we still don’t know how to do anything about such radiation exposures.”
Nels Piter looked awkward at the edge of the doorway, and Paige didn’t know what to do, how to deal with him. He had just confessed to causing the accident that had resulted in Dumenco’s lethal exposure. Murder. Should she call hospital security? She didn’t think the Belgian scientist was a particular risk for wild flight- he had admitted what he’d done, after all. She could wait for Craig, she supposed.
No one paid attention to Piter, no one even seemed to notice him. At the doorway he crumpled up the telegram into a hard little ball and threw it into the waste-basket before he stumbled out into the hall.
Paige followed hesitantly, though she could see he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He shuffled aimlessly down the hall with his head low, his shoulders slumped. This wasn’t the self-confident man she had known for nearly a year, the handsome, sometimes abrasive, always quick-witted professor. A Nobel nominee.
This man looked defeated. A far cry for someone just achieving his lifelong dream.
Paige stopped to retrieve the paper, snatching it out of the trash, thinking it might be an important souvenir. But as she unfolded it and straightened the wrinkles, she glanced down at the text, reading the words there with widening eyes.
The elevator doors by the nurse’s station opened. Craig and Jackson tumbled out, headed directly for Dumenco’s room. Paige wondered as an afterthought if they had recovered the antimatter-but it all seemed insignificant now with Dumenco’s death.
Craig ran past Piter, his chestnut hair flying and his tie flipped over his shoulder. He skidded to a stop on the hospital’s old linoleum floor; Jackson pulled up beside him.
“We captured Nicholas Bretti,” Craig said. “He’s the one who shot Ben Goldfarb and stole the antimatter. It should only be a matter of time before he confesses to having killed Dumenco.” Then he recognized the Belgian’s stricken expression and looked up to see Paige also standing there stunned. “Are we too late-?” Craig hurried into the Ukrainian’s room.
Jackson remained in the hall, silent for a moment, then he turned back for the elevators. He opened and closed a sinewy fist, as if still trying to massage tension out of his muscles. “I’ll go check on Ben.”
Paige held up the telegram as Piter sat down dully in one of the visitor’s chairs. “Nels-you did it.”
The physicist didn’t respond. He looked down at the floor as if she was flouting the accusation. But she meant the telegram, not the lethal exposure.
“Nels, you let Dumenco think he had won. This telegram from the Stockholm committee congratulates you for winning the Nobel Prize. You’re a Nobel laureate, not Dumenco. You did that for him.” She felt exhausted, drained. “You let Dumenco die thinking it was him, validating all the black-program work he had done for the former Soviet Union.”
Piter looked up, stung. His eyes were red, his face drawn in long lines. “I always thought that winning the Nobel Prize would mean everything to me.” He shook his head. “But instead it means nothing.”
Paige frowned. “You gave a dying man his final wish. He died peacefully because of you-”
“He died because of me!” Piter wavered, then seemed to wither. “My research was shit. I tried to push the envelope farther than anyone else, and instead I built a crystal-lattice trap that had been invented years before, in a country that was falling apart!” Piter was almost sobbing.