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

stop in at the gift shop to pick up souvenirs for his two daughters. The only way they forgave him for being gone on FBI business so often was that he brought them tiny keepsakes. The one time he’d forgotten, Megan and Gwendolyn had heaped him with massive guilt unsurpassed even by the efforts of his own Jewish mother. Goldfarb had vowed never to forget again.
    Since it was Chicago, he thought he might get something nice for Julene, too. His wife always worried about him when he was on a case, paranoid that he’d get hurt in the line of duty. Last year, during an investigation of a Nevada militia group, he’d been caught in an explosion and suffered a broken pinkie—but Julene had fretted so much that it seemed as if he had become a lifetime paraplegic. Goldfarb worried more about getting hurt for her sake than for his own.
    Standing outside a locked and nondescript concrete building didn’t seem terribly hazardous. The squarish pillbox appearance of the beam-sampling substation made it look like a bunker for decommissioned military ordnance. Conduits ran from the substation at strategic points to sample the energetic flow, diagnostic probes dipping into the uniformity of the currents. The sampling stations were simple enough, just data-recording devices in austere equipment racks, with pipes that ran across to the huge ring of the accelerator buried under the flat Illinois prairie.
    Goldfarb pondered the whirlwind of high-energy particles, trillions of electron volts sweeping clockwise underneath the bucolic landscape. When the counter-rotating beams collided, physicists like Georg Dumenco and Nels Piter studied the shrapnel of subatomic particles.
    But one of the blockhouses had vanished in a flash of light on the very night Dumenco had received his lethal exposure. There must be some connection. He just had to figure out what it was.
    Goldfarb walked around the concrete blockhouse, crunching across the uneven gravel, but he found nothing interesting, only signs announcing “No Trespassing” and “Danger—High Voltage.”
    When he rounded the last corner of the blockhouse, he saw that the heavy metal blast door hung ajar, its padlock dangling on the hasp. Goldfarb stopped, cocking his eyebrows. This substation should have been sealed, like the others. Perhaps Schultz and his bomb-sniffing dogs had been careless. Maybe a technician or a custodian had opened up the place for routine maintenance. He was in luck. This way he’d have a chance to look inside.
    He held the badge and ID wallet in his left hand as he pulled the door wide enough for him to enter. It was heavy and squeaked on its hinges, an iron plate that might have come from an old battleship hull. He grunted with the effort.
    Inside, he saw two naked bulbs burning inside wire cages. The unfinished ceiling was strung with pipes, wires, and cable-trays leading down to a bank of old computer monitors, oscilloscopes, and strip-chart recorders. He smelled tobacco smoke, as if someone had just snuffed out a cigarette. As he stepped into the shadows, the sudden difference in light was enough to blind him. He blinked, holding up his badge wallet.
    “This is the FBI,” he called. “Identify yourself.”
    He heard a rapid movement, a sucked intake of breath, and a gasped “Oh, shit!” A metal swivel chair slid aside, rattling its casters.
    Goldfarb instantly became alert. “Wait a minute,” he said. His eyesight was still too murky for him to make out many details, but he did see a figure, a man with dark hair and a goatee wearing a lab technician’s smock. The figure staggered backward from some kind of apparatus hooked up below the oscilloscopes and computer monitors.
    “Federal agent,” Goldfarb said, “I just want to ask you a few questions about—”
    But the other man wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He lunged toward Goldfarb, brandishing something heavy and metal in his hand. He uttered no outcry, no roar of challenge: he simply