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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] I know that, Paige said, also keeping her voice low. But his daughters are here, his wife, his son. You said yourself that he doesn t have much time left, maybe hours, maybe days. Trish shook her head. He ll never survive to the end of this day. Then leave him awake and conscious for these last few moments with loved ones he hasn t seen in a long time. I m a doctor. I m supposed to ease suffering and relieve pain, Trish said, holding up the hypodermic as if it were a dagger. How can I let him lie here and ignore his condition when I know what agony he s going through? What are you afraid he s going to say with his last breath? Paige said coldly. Something about you? Something you don t want anybody to hear? Trish looked at her in astonishment. Paige knew all about Trish s activist work, the lectures she had given, and how many hard-line stands she had taken& but now, all the hypothetical situations had changed, and she was faced with a real patient and perhaps for the first time, a real man she had known very well. Trish backed off without answering Paige s question. She returned the hypodermic to its tray. We ll Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html leave him awake for now, she said. But I have to watch him very carefully. She stood back at an uneasy dis-tance from Paige. Dumenco s family clung together at his bedside and waited for the scientist to die. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX Friday, 11:57 a.m. Fermilab Craig stood on the blackened grass, angry and dishev-eled. Bretti had escaped from right under their noses. And the grad student now had an extraordinarily valu-able and dangerous cache of antimatter. The sheer rarity of antiprotons made the sample Bretti carried in his crystal-lattice trap worth thousands of times more than any precious metal or gem. But where would he sell it? And, if Dumenco s comments were correct, the crystal-lattice trap was also disastrously unstable. Bretti had a bomb large enough to take out dozens of city blocks. Did he even know? Behind him, fire trucks from the towns of Batavia and Aurora formed a semicircle to contain the grass fire. Crews dressed in metallic-silver suits with full-face mask respirators dangling at their sides pushed aside a firebreak and wetted down the brown prairie as a last line of defense against the spreading flames. Other crews sprayed streams of water high in the air back and forth across the grass fire. Jackson trudged up, his dark face smudged with smoke and his suit jacket flapping open in the wind. Holding up his cell phone, he wiped his arm across his sweaty brow. We re lucky this still works. Dr. Piter is getting us Bretti s home address from the head office our own info on Bretti is back at the temporary command post. I d like to be the one to catch that little bastard. Craig took a deep breath, then straightened his sun-glasses. Get the Chicago office to set up roadblocks while we check out Bretti s place. See if Schultz will send us some backup. And get a search warrant. Got it. A cloud of smoke from the fire swirled around them as Jackson immediately started punching in numbers. The lean FBI agent held the cell phone to his ear. With the prairie fire raging behind him, he looked like a lone survivor from a bombing raid. Jackson pulled the rental car up to the empty curb in front of a line of duplex ranch houses. Beside him, Craig squinted through his sunglasses at the mailbox numbers out by the road. Number one hundred twenty two should be right around the corner, on the right. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html You don t think he could have found anolder part of town to live in, do you? Jackson said as he punched in numbers in his cell phone, checking on their backup. What a bunch of dumps. He s a grad student, remember? Craig said. He re-membered his own days of starvation wages, when even a professor s salary seemed like a huge amount of money. A duplex like this was anice place to live, com-pared with some of the student dives he had seen. At Stanford, while working part time for the private investigator Elliot Lang, Craig had spent many hours studying for classes, thinking through term papers, fight-ing boredom outside rows of apartments in San Fran-cisco, keeping a tail on a cheating husband or a supposedly injured worker milking an insurance claim. Back then he only had to wait and watch, maybe take a few pictures. Now they were walking into a literally explosive sit-uation. Jackson put down the cell phone. Schultz says the backup won t be here from downtown for fifteen minutes. Craig thought quickly. They had already obtained a verbal okay for the search warrant from a local magis-trate who had worked with Agent Schultz in the past. I don t think Bretti s coming back here not after what just happened out at Fermilab. But he may have left something inside that we need to know. He recalled the vital information he had found in the abandoned home of the leader of the Eagle s Claw militia near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. And if Bretti s on the run with an unstable container of antimatter, he can go a long way in fifteen minutes. Jackson nodded. Okay, let s take a look. He sounded anxious to get to the renegade grad student. Almosttoo anxious, to avenge Ben Goldfarb s shooting. Craig shrugged on his suit jacket, glancing up and down at the other low-rent houses to see if they had been spotted. He straightened his tie, trying to keep from tele-graphing his nervousness. Together, moving like two professionals, they started toward Bretti s duplex, the left-hand side of the building. Weeds and crabgrass covered the small yard. A crum-bling concrete driveway dotted with fresh oil spots ran from the street to a one-car garage. A chain-link fence split the yards in two. They stepped back, out of sight from the front win-dow. Craig pressed his lips together, looked around [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |