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Craig saw what the other agent meant and took off, plowing through the grass, stumbling on insidious
weeds, old lichen-covered branches, and rocks that pro-truded from the uneven ground. He swiped
blades of grass out of the way like a safari explorer plunging through an uncharted jungle.
Black smoke filled the air. His quarry, Bretti, had fled far on the other side of the fire while he and
Jackson struggled to continue their roundabout pursuit.
Soot and ashes and sparks flew around him, and the blaze swept toward them no matter how fast they
ran.
Jackson pounded Craig on the shoulder to smother an ember that had settled on his suit jacket.
The downside to the other agent s plan about getting to the holding pond was that the vegetation also
grew thickest around the water s edge. The two agents stum-bled through the weeds with the flames hot
on their heels.
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The rippling wall of fire approached with a hissing roar. Craig turned to see they had no choice but to
head into the pond itself. Without a pause, Jackson rammed into him, knocking him down the slope
toward the muddy water. Craig maintained his balance in greenish-brown pond scum up to his knees,
while Jackson, over-exerted, stumbled, and sat down in the water.
Kicked onward by the increasing breeze, the fire struck the obstacle of the pond and curled around it,
devouring the grass at the water s edge. Frogs hiding in the shore weeds splashed into the pond, while
indige-nous birds took flight. Craig ducked and kept his face low to the water.
Finally, once the fire line had passed, Craig helped Jackson splash out of the pond. Dripping, they
sprinted across the burned stubble, the ground still smoldering and charred beneath their soggy shoes.
Thick with smoke, the air scraped Craig s throat and lungs raw. His eyes burned, stinging from the heat
and the soot, but he kept racing toward where he had last seen Bretti.
The grass fire had already consumed an amazing sec-tion of ground. Helicopters thrummed overhead,
and emergency response teams finally arrived at the newly destroyed substation half a mile behind them.
Ground fire crews rushed out across the flat ground to control the blaze, but it would take them a long
time to get up to speed and pull their act together.
Craig was in close pursuit now. Bretti had to be near. He staggered into the smoke, unable to see,
frequently losing his balance. Once, he barely caught himself from plunging face-first into the hot embers
of a burned tree.
Just ahead, though, he spotted a dim figure moving through the murk. He yanked out his handgun and
bel-lowed an ultimatum. Bretti! Federal agents give up now, sir! Craig s smoke-clogged throat made
his voice hoarse, and his words came out as a raspy croak. The soot burned his throat and eyes and
nose, which were still raw from breathing chlorine gas less than two days earlier.
The fleeing suspect, barely seen, did not respond. In-stead, the figure moved closer, threatening. Craig
blinked his burning eyes, desperately trying to get a pos-itive ID. Bretti, this is the FBI!
Craig! Jackson shouted from the side, and then pointed, forcing him to take a closer look. It s not
hunt-ing season yet.
Craig realized that the large form was one of the do-mesticated male bison, its hide singed. Lost and
disori-ented, the beast lumbered past, snorting, its huge round eyes red-rimmed. Frightened and
aggressive, the bull thundered away from the flames, avoiding their noise.
You have a lot of faith in your firearm, if you expect a weapon of that caliber to do anything more than
piss off a buffalo.
It s a Sig-Sauer, Craig said, abashed, a little more powerful than my old Beretta. He continued
running after the fleeing grad student. They dashed across the blackened ground until finally covered
with soot and drenched with both perspiration and stagnant pond wa-ter they reached the end of the
burn zone.
Craig bent over, placing hands on his shuddering knees as he squinted into the distance beyond the
Fermilab boundary, toward the cluster of buildings in Batavia, the streets, parked cars& a wealth of
places to hide. He removed his sunglasses, blinking in the light, straining to see ahead but he saw no
sign of their suspect.
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Craig took a deep breath shaking his head. Sweat dripped into his eyes from his chestnut-brown hair.
Once again, Nicholas Bretti had escaped.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Friday, 11:44 a.m.
Fox River Medical Center
On the last day of his life, Georg Dumenco s exiled family members began to arrive spectators at a
pre-mature wake. Paige led them in, hesitant but proud to perform one last service.
On his hospital bed, Dumenco looked hideous with his skin blistered, reddened, and sloughing off in wet
flakes; it seemed a mercy for him to remain drugged, but the scientist rallied and fought, insisting on a last
few hours of use out of his brilliant mind.
Upon learning that his prediction was correct after all, but that the antimatter was being bled off and
thereby ruining the data from the detector apparatus, Dumenco sagged into stunned relief, as if prepared
to die now that he had verified his precious theories.
The Ukrainian struggled to wakefulness and squinted at the new visitors in his hospital room, trying to
see through the translucent curtain surrounding his bed. Paige thought Dumenco s face bore a dreamlike
expres-sion, as if he couldn t believe that his family had finally come to him, that this wasn t just
radiation-induced de-lirium.
Paige stood beside the visitors, trying to remain un-obtrusive. This was their moment with their long-lost
Georg. She had the flight schedules. The FBI had ar-ranged for their tickets with the greatest expediency,
rushing them from their hiding places across the mid-western United States.
Dumenco s wife, Luba, his youngest daughter, Alyx, and his son, Peter, had come from Minneapolis,
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