Dark Matter (15 page)

"Why didn't he just quit altogether?"

"Eventually he did. But this was the Cold War. There were different kinds of pressure then. Oppenheimer was persecuted for years for his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Dad also met my mother at Oak Ridge. Things were better there.

They had my brother. I was born much later. An accident, really." I smiled at the memory of my parents revealing this fact to me. "I grew up in Oak Ridge, but when I was a teenager, Dad quit nuclear physics and moved us to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could work on the space program."

"I still don't see the medical connection."

"My mother was a pediatrician in Oak Ridge. She did a lot of good. It didn't take a genius to see that she was a lot happier in her work than my dad had been. That's what influenced me."

I glanced down at the phone, willing it to ring again. "Last night, I only told you part of the truth. When the president offered me this position, it felt oddly like poetic justice. I was being given the opportunity my father never had at Los Alamos. The chance to exercise some control over a great undertaking that was likely to change the world forever. For good or evil. I sensed that on the day I visited the Oval Office, and that's what put me here."

Rachel took a deep breath and slowly blew out the air. "It's all real, isn't it? Trinity, I mean."

"Yes. And I'm damned glad McCaskell called me back. "We need the president badly."

I stood up, half wanting to replay McCaskell's message, but a wave of fatigue rolled through me. I hoped it was just exhaustion, but then the familiar high-pitched humming began in my back teeth. Remembering I had no amphetamines left, I took a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge, popped it open, and drank a long pull for the caffeine.

"David?" Rachel was watching me strangely. "Are you all right? You look shaky."

"I may go out," I said, taking another gulp of the soda.

"Go out?" Her eyes widened. "Narcolepsy?"

She'd never witnessed one of my episodes. As I nodded, a shadow seemed to pass over my eyes. It left me with a vague feeling of threat, as though someone were in the room with us, there but unseen. "I'm missing something," I thought aloud.

"What are you talking about?"

An image of Geli Bauer came into my mind. "We're in danger."

Rachel looked worried, more about me than any external threat. "What kind of danger?"

"There's something about the way all this is happening. Godin giving us time off ... my chart being stolen from your office . . . McCaskell's call. I'm missing something, but I'm too tired to think of what."

"I thought McCaskell's call was good news."

"It is. It's just ..." As drowsy as I was, I felt a desperate need to have my gun in my hand. "I want you to do me a favor. Wait here for two minutes."

"What?" Worry darkened her eyes. "Where are you going?"

"To my neighbor's house." I hurried to the back door.

"David! What if you pass out?"

"Don't answer the door!" I called. "But if the phone rings, answer it and say I'll be right back."

I ran outside and crashed through the thick hedge that bordered the backyards of the houses on my street. I sprinted the length of three backyards, then cut back through the hedge behind a neighbor's utility shed. I'd slipped out of my house last night about 2 A.M. and hidden Fielding's box. beneath it. Inside the box were Fielding's electronic gadgets, my partially recorded videotape, Fielding's letter, and my pistol. I got on my knees and retrieved the box, then crawled back through the hedge and sprinted back to my own yard. By the time I reached it, I felt like a drunk running through an unfamiliar city.

Rachel was waiting just inside the back door. "That's the stuff from last night," she said. "Why do you need that?"

I tilted the box so she could see the gun.

She stepped back. "David, you're scaring me."

"You need to get out of here. You'll be fine for the time it takes me to tell my story to McCaskell." I set the box on the floor, put the gun in my waistband, then led her to the front of the house. "Spend the rest of the day somewhere public, like a mall. Don't go home until you hear from me."

She pivoted and stopped me from pushing her toward the door. Her assertiveness seemed to bring us eye to eye. "Stop this! You're so out of it right now you could shoot yourself by accident."

I started to reply, but my words went spinning off into the dark edges of my mind. I would be unconscious in less than a minute.

"I'm about to go under."

She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the hall, looking for a place to lay me down. I pointed to the door of my guest bedroom. Sensing that I was about to fall, she rushed me through the door and let me fall facedown across the mattress.

"Do you have any medication?"

"I ran out."

Her footsteps moved away. I heard cabinet doors banging, then Rachel's voice talking to herself. When the voice seemed closer, I managed to roll over.

There was a dark silhouette in the doorway.

"Coffee's brewing," Rachel said. "You're still awake?"

"Sort of."

She watched me like someone observing an animal during an experiment. "There's no food in your kitchen. Nothing but rock-hard saltines. When was the last time you went to the market?"

I couldn't remember. The last few weeks had been an endless parade of hours working with Fielding on experiments I barely understood.

Rachel sat on the bed and put her fingers against my carotid artery. Her fingertips were cool.

"I was like that for a while," she said, looking at her watch. Her lips moved slightly as she counted pulse beats. "After I lost my son. Not going to the market, I mean. Not paying bills. Not bathing. I guess it takes a man longer to get back to those kinds of things. In the end, I used those small chores to enforce some order in my life. It kept me from going completely mad."

I felt my lips smile. I liked that she didn't let psychiatry get in the way of using words like mad. I also liked the way her fingers felt against my neck. I wanted to tell her something about her touch. It reminded me of someone, but I couldn't think who . . .

"When's your birthday?" she asked.

I couldn't remember.

"David?"

A black wave rolled over me, covering me in darkness.

I'm walking up a suburban sidewalk, studying the perfect houses in their perfect rows. It's Willow Street. I live on Willow—sleep on it, anyway—but it has little in common with the street I lived on as a boy. On Willow Street, I don't know my neighbors well, and some not at all. The NSA told me not to make friends, and that has turned out to be easy. On Willow Street, no one makes an effort. In Oak Ridge the houses were smaller, but I could name everyone who lived in them. My little neighborhood was a world unto itself, filled with faces I knew like those of my own family. On Willow Street the children stay inside more than outside. The fathers don't cut the lawns, hired men do. In Oak Ridge, the fathers cared for their lawns like little fiefdoms, spent hours discussing various mowers and fertilizers with each other.

I walk around a curve and see my own house. White with green trim. From the outside it looks like a home, but it's never felt like home to me. A black Labrador retriever lopes across the street without its master, a rare sight here. A Lexus rolls toward me, slowing as it passes. I wave at its driver, a tall, imperious woman. She stares at me as if I'm a dangerous interloper. I cross the street and walk up to my front door.

My hand goes into my pocket for my key, then to the doorknob. I insert something into the lock, but. . . it's not my key. It's thin and metallic, like a file. I jiggle it in the lock. There's a moment of resistance, then the lock gives. I open the door, slip inside, and quickly close it behind me.

My hand digs into my other pocket, brushing against something cold. My fingers close around wood, and my hand emerges gripping the butt of a gun, an automatic. I don't recognize the weapon. From my other pocket I withdraw a perforated silencer and slowly screw it onto the gun barrel. It seats itself with satisfying finality. From the hallway, I hear a tinkle of glass.

Someone's in the kitchen. I take one careful step forward, testing the floorboards, then begin to walk—

I snapped awake in panic and jerked my pistol from my waistband. A revolver, not an automatic. And no silencer. I wanted to call out to Rachel, but I suppressed the urge. In a single motion I rolled off the bed, landed on my feet, and moved to the bedroom door.

At first I heard only a soft humming in a female register. The tune sounded like "California" by Joni Mitchell.

The hardwood floor of the hallway creaked.

I drew a silent breath and held it.

The floor creaked again. Someone was passing my door from right to left. I closed my eyes and waited. Another creak. I counted slowly to ten. Then I reached down with my free hand and slowly turned the knob. When it had turned far enough, I yanked open the door, leapt into the hall, and aimed my .38 to the left.

A long-haired blond man stood six feet away, his arms extended through the kitchen door. I couldn't see his hands, but I knew they held a gun.

I pulled the trigger.

There was no boom or kick. I'd forgotten to cock the hammer, so the double-action trigger only went halfway back. As I jerked it home, the blond man whirled and a silenced automatic whipped into view, its bore black and bottomless. Then my trigger broke, and an orange flash illuminated the hallway. I blinked against it, and when I opened my eyes, the blond man was gone.

A woman was screaming an ice pick through my eardrums.

I looked down. The blond man lay on the floor, blood pouring from his skull. I moved forward and stepped on the wrist of the hand holding the gun. The screaming wouldn't stop. I glanced to my right. Rachel was standing with her back against the sink, her face deathly gray, her mouth open wide.

"Stop it!" I yelled. "Stop!"

Her mouth remained open, but the scream died.

I pulled the automatic from the blond man's hand, then checked his brachial pulse. Thready. The bullet had entered the skull just above the right ear. His gray eyes were glazed, both pupils fixed and dilated. Leaning down, I saw exposed brain matter. He wouldn't last five minutes.

I sensed more than saw Rachel moving. Looking up, I saw her holding the kitchen telephone, preparing to dial.

"Put that down."

"I'm calling for paramedics!"

"He doesn't have a chance."

"You don't know that!"

"Of course I do. Examine him, if you don't believe me." I straightened up.

"Even if he did, we couldn't risk it."

"What? What do you mean?"

"Who do you think this is? Some street punk? A crackhead breaking into my house in broad daylight? Look at him."

Rachel glanced down for perhaps a second. "I don't know who he is. Do you know him?"

As I stared down at the ruined young face, I realized that I did. At least I'd seen him before. Not often, but I had passed him in the parking lot at Trinity, a tall, lanky blond with the look of someone you'd meet on a mountain trail in Europe. Like Geli Bauer, he had the physique of a climber, or an elite soldier.

"I do know him. He works for Geli Bauer."

Rachel squinted in confusion. "Who's that?"

"She's Trinity. She's Godin. She's the NSA." I laid both guns on the kitchen counter. "Someone ordered her to take me out too. You, too, apparently."

Something in me still resisted the idea that Peter Godin had ordered my death.

Yet nothing at Trinity happened without his approval.

"We have to call the police," Rachel said. "We'll be all right. He was about to shoot me. This was self-defense, or justifiable homicide, whatever they call it."

"The police? You can't call local police to investigate the NSA. I told you that."

"Why not? He was going to kill me. That's a state crime."

I almost laughed. "The NSA is the largest and most secret intelligence agency in the United States. Everything they do is classified. It would take a court order to get a cop past the front gate at Fort Meade."

"This isn't Fort Meade."

"To the NSA, it is. Look, until I talk to the president, we're on our own. Do you understand?"

She looked down at the growing pool of blood. "Maybe he is a street punk."

"Don't you get it? This is why they stole my file from your office!"

"What?"

"They already knew they were going to kill you."

She opened her mouth but said nothing.

"Otherwise they would have photocopied the file and left it in place. They wanted nothing left in your office for the Durham police to connect you to the project."

She was shaking her head, but my logic was difficult to refute. I stuck the automatic into my waistband and picked up my .38. ' "We have to get out of here. Fast. There could be others close by."

Her eyes went wide. "Others?"

Suddenly I saw it all. "The NSA taps my phones. When they heard Ewan McCaskell leave his message, they knew I hadn't spoken to the president yet. That's all they were waiting for. I was too excited to see the implications."

I grasped her hand. It was cold and limp. "We have to run, Rachel. Right now.

If we don't, we'll die here."

"Run where?"

"Anywhere. Nowhere. We have to disappear."

"No. We haven't done anything wrong."

"That doesn't matter." I pointed at the man on the floor and saw that he was no longer breathing. "Do you think that corpse is one of my hallucinations?"

"You killed him," she said in the voice of a child.

"And I'd do it again. He was about to fire a bullet into your head."

She wobbled on her feet. I steadied her, then led her to the guest bedroom where I'd lain unconscious only minutes ago.

"Stay here. I have to get something." I tried to put my .38 in her hand, but she recoiled. "Keep it," I insisted, closing her fingers around it. "If you leave this house alone, you'll be killed."

She stared hollow-eyed at me.

I took the silenced automatic from my waistband and checked to make sure the safety was off. "Promise me you won't leave."