The Footprints of God (19 page)

I shake my head. "Do not say this of me. Speak from
your hearts of what you have seen. No more."

"Yes, Master," answers a man named John, whose
eyes are large and brown like a woman's. He looks at Peter, then speaks cautiously to me. "I'm told you mean
to go to Jerusalem."

"Yes."

John shakes his head. "If you do this, the priests will
not know what to do with you. They will fear you, and they'll condemn you to death."

"This cup has been passed to me. I must drink."

The men fall silent. As I contemplate the plain below,
fear simmers in the pit of my belly. To know the gift of
this life, this body, and then to give it up . . .

I snapped awake and grabbed the dashboard, my eyes on the rear of a tractor-trailer ahead. Rachel grabbed my knee.

"It's all right, David! I'm here."

My hands were shaking, the fear of the dream still palpable. "How long have we been on the road?"

"An hour and twenty minutes. We just passed Plymouth."

"I told you to wake me up!"

"You were sleeping so hard, I hated to do it."

"Have you seen anything suspicious?"

"We passed a state trooper a half hour ago, and a couple of Plymouth cops, but none of them looked twice at us. I think we're okay."

Rachel looked anything but okay. And once our immediate goal of escape was accomplished, her composure would crack. I was no different. My reaction to killing Geli Bauer's assassin had been blunted by a flood of neurochemicals evolved for my survival. Images from my dream returned in flashes of color and light, but the fear was fading, and in its wake I felt a strange sort of relief. After months of vagueness and mystery, the dreams were finally localizing to a specific place. Jerusalem. Logically this made no sense. I had never been to Israel, and I knew little about it beyond the bloody conflict I'd seen for decades on the evening news. But where had logic led me so far?

"David?" Rachel said. "Maybe we can hole up for a while at the—"

I clapped my hand over her mouth. "Don't. I'm sorry, but I warned you already."

She nodded, and I took my hand away. "If the NSA is so all powerful," she whispered, "what were you doing making that videotape in your own living room? Wouldn't they hear that?"

I reached into the backseat, lifted Fielding's box of homemade electronic toys, and set it on my lap. From it I withdrew a metallic wand about ten inches long. "Fielding showed me where their bugs were. In tiny holes in the Sheetrock."

"What was he doing with equipment like that? Don't you think that's a little suspicious?"

"I can see how it would look that way. You had to know him."

Even as I said that, I wondered if I really had known the eccentric Englishman. I poked through his box, looking for signs of a secret agenda. Most of the home-built devices looked like the projects of a teenager who spent his weekends at RadioShack. One resembled the old View-Master toy of my youth, a plastic frame with tubular eyepieces and a switch on the right side. I held the makeshift goggles up to my face, aimed them at Rachel, and flipped the switch. An amber haze fell across my field of vision, but beyond that, nothing happened.

"What are those?" Rachel asked.

"I'm not sure." I turned the goggles toward the windshield and looked out over the road.

My heart turned to ice. A thin, green beam of coherent light—a laser—was hitting the Audi's front windshield at an angle almost perpendicular to the ground. I'd seen many such beams in physics labs at MIT. The only other places I had seen them was in films, on laser-gun sights. Someone was aiming a laser at us from the air! I wanted to scream a warning to Rachel, but my throat was glued shut. Shoving my foot across the floor, I hit the brake, throwing the Audi into a skid.

Rachel screamed and tried to control the spinning car. I turned the goggles and searched for the laser. It was about forty yards away, tracking back toward the car like the hand of God. The Audi shuddered to a stop on the grassy shoulder.

"Why the hell did you do that?"
Rachel yelled.

Our nearest cover was a line of trees fifty yards from the shoulder. Someone with an automatic weapon could easily cut us down before we reached the tree line. I held the goggles up to Rachel's eyes.

"Someone's going to shoot at us! Get under the dash. As far as you can."

As she tried to fold herself under the steering column, I reacquired the laser beam. I expected it to move onto me, but instead it froze on the windshield glass. The beam didn't penetrate the glass; it terminated at the windshield's surface. By extending the beam in my mind, I realized it would not intersect with either me or Rachel, but the dashboard.

"If they wanted to shoot us," I thought aloud, "they could have done it before I ever turned on the goggles."

"What?"

"It's not a gun sight."

"What are you talking about?"

The laser could be a bomb designator, but not even panic would drive the NSA to drop a smart bomb on the shoulder of an American highway. They had too many other options. Suddenly I understood. The laser was a surveillance device. By bouncing the beam off the windshield and measuring the vibration of the glass, eavesdroppers in a plane or helicopter could hear every word we said inside.

"Get up! Get up and drive!"

Rachel struggled back into her seat, shifted the car into drive, and pulled onto the highway. The green beam stayed locked on our windshield like a satellite weapon aimed from space. Taking the map off the floor, I folded it down to a small rectangle and tapped a spot three times to indicate our location.

She nodded.

I then followed 64 eastward for a couple of miles, to a small rural road that broke to the left. There I wrote,
Take this turn.

When Rachel nodded again, I leaned down to her ear and said, "Take the turn no matter what happens. Understand?"

"I will. Is whatever you saw still there?"

I checked through the goggles, then squeezed her shoulder. "It's there. Speed up."

She pressed the accelerator to the floor.

CHAPTER 
15

Geli Bauer stood alone in David Tennant's kitchen, alone with the corpse of her lover. The carpet-cleaning-service truck was still parked outside, its vacuum equipment running loudly. By any operational standard, she should have moved Ritter's corpse long ago. But she couldn't. She wanted to understand what had happened here. From the wound in Ritter's head and the way his body was lying, it seemed he had been shot from the front or slightly to the side. She couldn't imagine an untrained man winning a shootout with a former member of Germany's most elite counterterror unit. That left two options.

One: Tennant had somehow surprised Ritter and fired very accurately as Ritter whirled to shoot him.

Two: Tennant was not what he seemed.

He had been raised in the rural area around Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which might make him proficient with a hunting rifle, but not with a handgun. And where had he learned to sweep rooms for microphones? Had Fielding taught him that, or had he learned it elsewhere?

His escape from the crime scene raised more questions. The team in the carpet van had arrived to find Rachel Weiss's Saab parked out front but Tennant's garage empty. A second team had combed the neighborhood and discovered Tennant's Acura parked behind some hedges at a vacant house. It had taken a half hour of police liaison to learn that a silver Audi A8 had been stolen from the house down the street.

Without the voiceprint analysis that had turned up Fielding's covert call from a convenience store, Tennant and Weiss might have slipped through her net. But four days ago, Fielding had reserved a cabin at Nags Head on the Outer Banks in the name of Mr. Lewis Carroll. This, combined with Tennant's having received a FedEx letter from Fielding yesterday, had been enough for Geli to put air assets over Highway 64, the route to Nags Head. And that had put Tennant back into her hands.

As she looked down at Ritter's shattered skull and blood-matted hair, her cell phone rang. "Bauer," she said.

"This is Air-One. They know we're following them."

"How high are you flying?"

"Ten thousand feet. There's no way they could have made us from looking at the sky. They had to see the beam."

"That's impossible without special equipment."

"They must have some."

"What are they doing now?"

A crackle of static. "They ran off the road like they saw the beam and panicked. They ducked under the dash for a while, then got back on the highway. They're doing about ninety now, still headed east."

"What are they saying?"

"Nothing about a destination."

"Where are our ground units?" Geli asked.

"Closest is fifteen minutes away, give or take two."

"I'll call you back." She speed-dialed Skow's scrambled cell phone. He answered after eight rings.

"What is it, Geli?"

"Tennant detected our airborne surveillance. He's taking evasive action."

"You must be joking. Have your people lost him?"

"The plane has the Audi now, but they could lose it."

"I suppose you want to terminate them now?"

Geli sensed Skow's finger on the chicken switch. "That's my standing order from you."

"The situation has changed."

"The geography has changed. Not the situation."

"I don't like it. How will it play?"

The bureaucrat's mantra,
Geli thought scornfully. "Tennant went psychotic. He killed his Trinity guard and kidnapped his psychiatrist. We're attempting a rescue."

There was a long silence. Then Skow said, "Peter was right to hire you. Good luck with that rescue."

"Fuck you very much," Geli muttered, and hung up. She opened her connection to the plane and her ground units.

"Air-One, do you still have the Audi in sight?"

"Affirmative. And they definitely know we're here. Tennant leaned out and looked up at us."

"Ground units, when you get there, wait for low traffic, then box in the car and take them."

"Take them out?" asked a voice with the eerie calm of a fighter pilot on a mission.

Geli looked down at Ritter's corpse, remembering last night. He was still alive inside her. "Tennant may have kidnapped his psychiatrist. We're not sure. We do know that he's highly unstable, armed, and he's already killed one of ours. Ritter Bock, which should tell you something. Nobody take any chances. Protect your own lives first."

There was a chorus of "Affirmative."

"Am I understood?"

The responding silence said more than the subsequent acknowledgments. This was why she hired former soldiers.

"Ah, that's a rog," said a cold male voice.

"Call it play by play for me, Air-One."

"Will do."

Geli smiled. Tennant and Weiss wouldn't live to see nightfall.

CHAPTER 
16

As the Audi roared eastward toward the turn, I scanned the highway behind us. The nearest vehicle was two hundred yards back. It looked like a pickup truck. I doubted it was NSA, but you never knew. With aerial surveillance, ground units wouldn't have to follow closely to stay up with us. They could even drive ahead of us. There was simply no way to know who or where our pursuers were. If we were lucky, whatever aircraft was up there had acquired us only minutes before I saw the laser.

Rachel reached out and pulled me close enough to whisper. "I think I see the turn. Is it Highway 45?"

I checked the map. "Yes, but it's no highway. Take it."

She slowed to fifty, then screeched left onto 45.

"Punch it," I said.

She hit the accelerator and shot down the two-lane blacktop at seventy miles per hour. I put the goggles up to my face and looked for the laser. It had lost us at the turn, but it quickly tracked back onto our rear windshield. I leaned over to Rachel's ear.

"We're going to cross a bridge over the Cashie River where it flows into Albemarle Sound. Take the next left after that."

"Just tell me when to turn."

The A8 devoured the road like a starving tiger, racing up and over the high bridge that arced across the Cashie. I leaned far enough out the window to look skyward. A small plane was flying over the road at about five thousand feet. A wave of relief went through me. My fear was a helicopter that could set down on the road and deploy a SWAT team armed with submachine guns. A fixed-wing aircraft could land on a highway, but not on the twisting road we would soon be driving.

Rachel pointed at an intersection ahead. I nodded. She slowed just enough to make the turn, then whipped onto a much smaller road that was heavily forested on both sides.

"Look at those trees," I said, bracing my hands on the dash.

A hundred yards ahead, towering oaks closed over the road, turning it into a shadowy tunnel. When we entered it, I rolled down my window and leaned out again. First I saw nothing but branches. Then I caught a silver gleam as the plane swooped over the road behind us at about two thousand feet.

"Go!" I yelled. "We're losing them!"

"If I go any faster, I'll lose control."

"You're doing fine."

Law enforcement used fixed-wing aircraft for surveillance because they could stay on station much longer than helicopters. Today they would pay a heavy price for that strategy. A plane couldn't crisscross the sky in tight enough patterns to maintain contact on a twisting road with heavy cover.

The Audi's big tires squealed as Rachel took another tight curve at seventy-plus. My right shoulder compressed against the door. Struggling to hold the map steady, I searched for an escape route. If we took the next tiny rural road to the left, we would quickly recross the Cashie River, but not by bridge. The Cashie looked scarcely wider than a creek at that point, and an italic legend said,
Ferry.
That could mean anything from a free-floating vessel to a cable barge.