Paige drove along the narrow, patched service road past other strangely shaped facilities and unique designs. Craig asked, “Ben and I noticed all this unusual architecture. What’s with all the odd buildings?”
Paige laughed. “Indulgence, I suppose. Robert Wilson, the first director of the laboratory, was an aspiring architect. Very much influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright. Wilson designed a lot of the buildings himself. It was his opinion that a research laboratory should be an attractive cultural center in the community and the nation. He actually won a few architectural awards for the uniqueness of our design.”
“As long as it’s functional,” Craig said.
“And beautiful,” Paige added. “The buildings here serve both purposes. Though you might get a little tired of blue and orange after a while. It seems everything here is either one color or the other, down to the linoleum on the lab floors.”
She turned from the main road to a narrower access lane that followed the ring of the particle accelerator. “I’ll show you where the substation exploded. The FBI team is already running plenty of tests. That should kill enough time before our meeting with Dr. Piter underground at the Collider Detector.”
Craig stared out the window, adjusting his sunglasses. “Can you think of any connection between the explosion out here and Dumenco’s exposure in the experimental target area?”
Paige shook her head. “Not as far as anyone can tell. The accelerator experienced an uncharacteristic fluctuation, which caused an emergency shutdown to take place. But since the explosion occurred a few seconds after the emergency shutdown, it couldn’t have caused Dumenco’s accident.”
“No clue back in the substation?” Goldfarb asked.
She turned around in her seat. “Ben, there isn’t even any substation left.”
She slowed the car as they approached a sloppily erected drift fence wound with yellow police tape. The barricade blocked a large area from curiosity seekers. “This is the spot,” Paige said. “I’ve only been out here once, and it’s still incomprehensible to me. Reminds me of Sedan Crater out in Nevada, only on a smaller scale.”
Two other workers adjusted the fence, while a safety crew and some sort of administrator walked on the far side of the blast area, all wearing hardhats. An inspector holding a radiation detector crouched over a section of dirt. Craig recognized evidence technicians, FBI inspectors, and one man in a suit similar to his own.
Craig got out of the car. An FBI agent came toward him, his face round and sunburned, his pale hair blowing around his head. “This is a restricted area, gentlemen, with an investigation pending.”
Craig removed his ID wallet and badge. “Special Agent Craig Kreident, sir. This is my partner Ben Goldfarb. I checked in with your SSA.”
Ben shook his hand. “And I spoke to you yesterday on the phone.”
“That’s right. I’m John Schultz.” He studied Craig’s ID. “You’re from the Oakland office? How can I help you guys?”
“It’s in an unofficial capacity,” Craig said. “Checking into a radiation exposure, supposedly a fatal one. The victim is… a friend of a friend.”
Paige looked at him curiously.
“The Ukrainian guy, right?” Schultz asked. “His accident occurred the same night as this explosion, but the two were widely separated in distance. One event could not have influenced the other.”
“Still seems an awfully big coincidence,‘’ Craig said. ”Could we see the site of the explosion?‘’
Schultz snorted. “You can see the crater, but that’s about all. It didn’t leave very much else for us to sweep up for analysis. There’s some residual radiation around, so be careful.”
Craig looked up sharply. “A nuclear explosion?”
“No way. The spectrum is off, and nothing was activated by neutron radiation. We’ve shipped a sample back to the Hoover building for crime lab analysis.”
Craig walked up to the sagging drift fence and peered over, sucking in a deep breath of astonishment. The crater was like a glassy bowl vaporized from the dirt, as if someone from high above had stubbed out a giant cigar butt, annihilating the entire substation. The earth had been fused in the flash, the blockhouse itself totally obliterated.
“Wow-I’ve never seen anything like that,” Goldfarb said.
Agent Schultz said, “The detonation was equivalent to a few hundred pounds of high explosive-extremely high energy, with a small amount of residual radiation. It’s almost like a massive electrical explosion happened, since the power was knocked out-but the techs find no indication of a short. We can’t figure it out.”
Craig wiped his sunglasses clean as his stomach clenched with awe. He couldn’t imagine what could cause specific, incredible destruction like this.
Trish had been right to call him after all. This case was getting stranger and stranger by the moment.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tuesday, 11:23 a.m.
Collider Detector at Fermilab
Once Craig followed Paige and Goldfarb into the experimental area, he felt as if he had entered another world, one detached from the prairie above them, away from the buffalo and tall, waving grass. This was the business end of the laboratory, the reason why Fermilab existed in the first place. Craig couldn’t tell how thick the concrete walls were, but they sprawled up in massive blocks, as if formed from an enormous mold.
“Feels like we entered the bowels of a power plant,” Goldfarb said.
The low ceilings were strung with piping and electrical conduits. The air smelled of cement, grease, and metal. An oppressive background of white noise droned around them.
Craig tried to reach a chain-link gate before Paige, so he could hold it open for her, but she beat him to it. After she telephoned in for access to the next section of tunnel, they walked briskly along the sealed concrete floor toward the Collider Detector. Racks of machinery and diagnostics stood next to a large cylindrical apparatus that resembled an iron lung.
“Nels!” Paige called, raising her voice to be heard over the background drone echoing in the confined tunnel. She moved to meet a dapper-looking, thin man who wore a lab coat like a costume over his brown suit. He stood behind the apparatus, glancing over the shoulders of the technicians actually running the diagnostics. His face and hands were tanned, his thinning sandy hair neatly combed. The man didn’t seem to belong down here at all with the intent technicians in their casual flannel shirts and old jeans.
His face brightened upon seeing her. Craig fought off his instinctive and immediate reaction to dislike the man.
“Craig, this is Dr. Nels Piter, one of our most respected scientists at Fermilab.” Paige reached out to brush her fingers against the scientist’s sleeve. “At CERN he made quite a name for himself with his crystal-lattice trap storage device.”
Nels Piter reached out to shake Craig’s hand with a soft, cursory grip. Craig spotted a gold Rolex watch on the man’s wrist. “That was just my early work. I’ve moved on to other things now.”
Craig fished his FBI ID from his jacket. “Thank you for taking time from your schedule to see us, Dr. Piter.”
Piter waved the FBI credentials away. “Any friend of Paige’s is certainly a friend of mine.” He slipped into a pleasant, chatty demeanor as he tried to establish rapport with the two FBI agents.
Craig encouraged the man to talk-it always amazed him how much people would reveal about themselves without being prodded. He quickly discovered that Piter, a native Belgian, had worked for years at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, known as CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. His early research there had gained him attention from this year’s Nobel committee.