“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.
Craig came back out of the hospital room, looking devastated and angry. “I should have shot Bretti when I had the excuse,” he said bitterly. “He never even came to see all the grief he caused.”
Paige stood next to Piter, who sat helplessly in a chair. “It wasn’t Bretti,” she said, looking at the lethargic Belgian, knowing he wasn’t up to repeating his confession. She explained everything Piter had said, while Craig listened in amazement.
Piter looked down at the floor and spoke in a whisper. “Who in his right mind would ever have thought it was possible to generate billions of times more p-bars than had ever been produced before? As long as it only needed to hold small amounts of antimatter, my crystal-lattice trap worked perfectly. But as soon as a threshold was reached, it became unstable. Dumenco knew about it all along. I should have discovered that flaw, but I was too blind, too confident-and now my life’s work was for naught.”
Craig stood tall, intimidating. He started to withdraw his handcuffs, prepared to make an arrest.
But Piter hadn’t finished talking. He looked up, and his voice took on a desperate edge. “It wasn’t my fault Dumenco was in the area! I didn’t know he was in there. He knew the beam dump was off-limits, but the new construction allowed people to circumvent the safety interlocks. He wanted to check out his detectors personally, because he knew the data were wrong. He knew he should have detected more p-bars.”
“Because Bretti stole them,” Craig said.
Shaking his head, Piter drew in a deep breath. “Dumenco knew a lot more than any of us.”
Craig said, “I’m going to have to arrest you, Dr. Piter.”
“I was only trying to delay his results until the Nobel committee made the selection. If Dumenco couldn’t show results that verified his underlying theories, the committee would choose me.” He looked down at the floor and whispered, “The greatest day of my life. And it doesn’t mean a thing.”
Paige looked at Craig and crossed her arms over her blouse. She was struck by the difference in the two men. Unlike Nels Piter, Craig was strong under pressure, silent, thoughtful, unassuming… yet extremely confident in his abilities.