Free Lethal Exposure by Kevin J. Anderson, Doug Beason Page A

scientist pawed through the papers, Craig knew he would have to look elsewhere for clues. Georg Dumenco was otherwise occupied.
    Maybe Goldfarb had found something.

CHAPTER 8
    Tuesday, 2:37 P.M.
    Fermilab
    Beam-Sampling Substation
    Breathing hard, Nicholas Bretti paused to take a closer look at the man he had just shot, even as he tried to scramble out of the isolated blockhouse.
    Everything had happened so fast, so unexpectedly. He hadn’t meant to do it. But, shit— the FBI ! You take one quick little step down that slippery slope, and it sucks you down to hell like grease-covered glare ice!
    The federal agent looked like a dark-suited Pillsbury doughboy on the floor. He didn’t move, didn’t appear to breathe. Dark liquid oozed from the wounds in his chest.
    Bretti looked to the heavy door, the harsh glare of sunlight outside. No one ran into the blockhouse to see what was the matter, no one raced to investigate the gunshots. Should he call for help? Get an ambulance?
    Or was there a chance he might be able to get away? Nobody knew he was here—he was supposed to be gone, days’ deep into his annual fishing trip in the wilds of West Virginia.
    Bretti slapped his hands together, stepped toward the shot FBI agent, then turned toward the door. He must look like an idiot, confused, panicked.
    Keep cool , he reminded himself. Get the apparatus. Pack it in the car, and drive to the embassy. Just like the plan. They had gotten him into this, and they could help him out. No problem, no sweat, no heartburn . . . no fucking way!
    Bretti had never hurt anyone before, certainly never killed anyone—hell, he’d never broken the law, never cheated on a college exam . . . though if he had, maybe it wouldn’t have taken him seven years as a grad student and still no hope of seeing a PhD anytime soon. This should have been his ticket to a better life. Antimatter. A simple, invisible embezzlement of atomic particles, bled off from the main beam.
    No one should have noticed, except maybe that damned Dumenco. But then, nothing in his life had ever turned out the way it should. Though it sure seemed possible when that Indian, Chandrawalia, had first approached him, showed up at his apartment. No wonder he had tracked Bretti down—the world’s oldest grad student.
    He swallowed hard, close to hyperventilating, took a half step toward the man on the floor, then ignored him entirely. No turning back now. He had to deliver the old Penning trap with whatever load it had managed to store in two days. Maybe that would be enough. It would have to be enough, since the main p-bar supply had been annihilated.
    The FBI man’s handgun burned a hole in his pocket. He wanted to get rid of it, but he couldn’t leave it here. Fingerprints, evidence . . . he didn’t know what sort of magic the crime lab could do these days.
    How could things go so wrong so fast? First the emergency beam dump on Sunday, which caused a power outage, blowing the hell out of his demo stash. And now some FBI suit came snooping around when he was transferring the last day’s run of p-bars.
    Why couldn’t the bastard have waited another ten minutes? Bretti would have completed his task, and no one would have suspected. Nobody was supposed to see him at Fermilab. During his week of vacation, he should have had plenty of time to slip off to India, make his delivery, take his payment, and get back to Illinois to pretend that nothing had happened. Nobody would have noticed, or cared, except maybe Dumenco and his unexpected results.
    Well, after the curmudgeonly Ukrainian’s radiation exposure, Dumenco wouldn’t be chasing lost antiprotons for long. He certainly hadn’t spent much time being a good advisor, helping Bretti make it through the academic hoops, taking the grad student under his wing, using a bit of professional pull to get him through the hard parts.
    Crap, the old fart only cared about his own theories and the damned Nobel Prize. Now, maybe Bretti would