The Footprints of God (2 page)

My hands were shaking. The man who had written this note was now as cold as the morgue table he was living on, if indeed he was lying in a morgue. No one had been able—or willing—to tell me where my friend's body would be taken. And now the white powder. Would Fielding have put powder in the envelope and neglected to mention it in his letter? If he didn't, who did? Who but the person who had murdered him?

I laid the letter on the sofa, stripped off the surgical gloves, and rewound the videotape to the point at which I'd walked out of the frame. I had decided to make this tape because I feared I might be killed before I could tell the president what I knew. Fielding's letter had changed nothing. Yet as I stared into the lens, my mind wandered. I was way ahead of Fielding on calling my "late brother's friend." The moment I'd seen Fielding's corpse on the floor of his office, I knew I had to call the president. But the president was in China. Still, as soon as I got clear of the Trinity lab, I'd called the White House from a pay phone in a Shoney's restaurant, a "safe" phone Fielding had told me about. It couldn't be seen by surveillance teams in cars, and the restaurant's interior geometry made it difficult for a parabolic microphone to eavesdrop from a distance.

When I said "Project Trinity," the White House operator put me through to a man who gruffly asked me to state my business. I asked to speak to Ewan McCaskell, the president's chief of staff, whom I'd met during my visit to the Oval Office. McCaskell was in China with the president. I asked that the president be informed that David Tennant needed to speak to him urgently about Project Trinity, and that no one else involved with Trinity should be informed. The man said my message would be passed on and hung up.

Thirteen hours separated North Carolina and Beijing. That made it tomorrow in China. Daylight. Yet four hours had passed since my call, and I'd heard nothing. Would my message be relayed to China, given the critical nature of the summit? There was no way to know. I did know that if someone at Trinity heard about my call first, I might wind up as dead as Fielding before I talked to the president.

I hit start on the remote control and spoke again to the camera.

"In the past six months I've gone from feeling like part of a noble scientific effort to questioning whether I'm even living in the United States. I've watched Nobel laureates give up all principles in a search for—"

I went still. Something had passed by one of my front windows. A face. Very close, peering inside. I'd seen it through the sheer curtains, but I was sure. A face, framed by shoulder-length hair. I had a sense of a woman's features, but. . .

I started to get up, then sat back down. My teeth were vibrating with an electric pain like aluminum foil crushed between dental fillings. My eyelids felt too heavy to hold open.
Not now,
I thought, shoving my hand into my pocket for my prescription bottle.
Jesus, not now.
For six months, every member of Trinity's inner circle had suffered frightening neurological symptoms. No one's symptoms were the same. My affliction was narcolepsy. Narcolepsy and dreams. At home, I usually gave in to the trancelike sleep. But when I needed to fight off a spell—at Trinity, or driving my car—only amphetamines could stop the overwhelming waves.

I pulled out my prescription bottle and shook it.
Empty.
I'd swallowed my last pill yesterday. I got my speed from Ravi Nara, Trinity's neurologist, but Nara and I were no longer speaking. I tried to rise, thinking I'd call a pharmacy and prescribe my own, but that was ridiculous. I couldn't even stand. A leaden heaviness had settled into my limbs. My face felt hot, and my eyelids began to fall.

The prowler was at the window again. In my mind, I raised my gun and aimed it, but then I saw the weapon lying in my lap. Not even survival instinct could clear the fog filling my brain. I looked back at the window. The face was gone.
A
woman's face.
I was sure of it. Would they use a woman to kill me? Of course. They were pragmatists. They used what worked.

Something scratched at my doorknob. Through the thickening haze I fought to aim my gun at the door. Something slammed against the wood. I got my finger on the trigger, but as my swimming brain transmitted the instruction to depress it, sleep annihilated consciousness like fingers snuffing a candle flame.

Andrew Fielding sat alone at his desk, furiously smoking
a cigarette. His hands were shaking from a confrontation
with Godin. It had happened the previous day, but
Fielding had the habit of replaying such scenes in his
mind, agonizing over how ineffectually he had stated his
case, murmuring retorts he should have made at the time
but had not.

The argument had been the result of weeks of frustration. Fielding didn't like arguments, not ones outside the
realm of physics, anyway. He'd put off the meeting until the last possible moment. He pottered around his office,
pondering one of the central riddles of quantum physics:
how two particles fired simultaneously from the same source could arrive at the same destination at the same
instant, even though one had to travel ten times as far as
the other. It was like two 747s flying from New York to
Los Angeles
—
one flying direct and the other having to
fly south to Miami before turning west to Los Angeles
—
yet both touching down at LAX at the same moment.
The 747 on the direct route flew at the speed of light, yet
the plane that had to detour over Miami still reached L.A. at the same instant. Which meant that the second
plane had flown
faster
than the speed of light. Which
meant that Einstein's theory of Special Relativity was flawed. Possibly. Fielding spent a great deal of time thinking about this problem.

He lit another cigarette and thought about the letter he'd FedExed to David Tennant. It didn't say enough.
Not nearly. But it would have to do until they met at
Nags Head. Tennant would be working a few steps up
the hall from him all afternoon, but he might as well be
in Fiji. No square foot of the Trinity complex was free of
surveillance and recording devices. Tennant would get
the letter this afternoon, if no one intercepted it. To prevent this, Fielding had instructed his wife to drop it at a
FedEx box inside the Durham post office, beyond the
sight line of anyone following her from a distance. That
was all the spouses usually got
—
random surveillance from cars
—
but you never knew.

Tennant was Fielding's only hope. Tennant knew the President. He'd had cocktails in the White House, anyway. Fielding had won the Nobel in 1998, but he'd never
been invited to 10 Downing Street. Never would be, in
all likelihood. He'd shaken hands with the PM at a reception once, but that wasn't the same thing. Not at all.

He took a drag on the cigarette and looked down at his desk. An equation lay there, a collapsing wave function, unsolvable using present-day mathematics. Not
even the world's most powerful supercomputers could
solve a collapsing wave function. There was one machine
on the planet that might make headway with the problem
—
at least he believed there was
—
and if he was right,
the term
supercomputer
might soon become as quaint and archaic as
abacus.
But the machine that could solve a collapsing wave function would be capable of a lot more
than computing. It would be everything Peter Godin had
promised the mandarins in Washington, and more. That “more” was what scared Fielding. Scared the bloody hell
out of him. For no one could predict the unintended consequences of bringing such a thing into existence. “Trinity” indeed.

He was thinking of going home early when something flashed in his left eye. There was no pain. Then the visual field in that eye swirled into a blur, and an explosion seemed to detonate in the left frontal lobe of his brain.
A stroke,
he thought with clinical detachment.
I'm having a stroke.
Strangely calm, he reached for the telephone to call
911,
then remembered that the world's
preeminent neurologist was working in the office four
doors down from his own.

The telephone would be faster than walking. He reached for the receiver, but the event taking place
within his cranium suddenly bloomed to its full destructive power. The clot lodged, or the blood vessel burst,
and his left eye went black. Then a knifelike pain pierced the base of his brain, the center of life support functions.
Falling toward the floor, Fielding thought again of that
elusive particle that had traveled faster than the speed of light, that had proved Einstein wrong by traversing space
as though it did not exist. He posed a thought experiment: If Andrew Fielding could move as fast as that particle, could he reach Ravi Kara in time to be saved?

Answer: No. Nothing could save him now.

His last coherent thought was a prayer, a silent hope
that in the unmapped world of the quantum, consciousness existed beyond what humans called death. For
Fielding, religion was an illusion, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Project Trinity had uncovered hope
of a new immortality. And it wasn't the Rube Goldberg monstrosity they were pretending to build a hundred
meters from his office door.

The impact of the floor was like water.

I jerked awake and grabbed my gun. Someone was banging the front door taut against the security chain. I tried to get to my feet, but the dream had disoriented me. Its lucidity far surpassed anything I'd experienced to date. I actually felt that I had died, that I
was
Andrew Fielding at the moment of his death—

"Dr. Tennant?" shouted a woman's voice. "David! Are you in there?"

My
psychiatrist?
I put my hand to my forehead and tried to fight my way back to reality. "Dr. Weiss? Rachel? Is that you?"

"Yes! Unlatch the chain!"

"I'm coming," I muttered. "Are you alone?"

"Yes! Open the door."

I stuffed my gun between the couch cushions and stumbled toward the door. As I reached for the chain latch, it struck me that I had never told my psychiatrist where I lived.

CHAPTER 
2

Rachel Weiss had jet-black hair, olive skin, and onyx eyes. Eleven weeks ago, when I'd arrived at her office for my first session, I'd thought of Rebecca from Sir Walter Scott's
Ivanhoe.
Only in the novel Rebecca had a wild, unrestrained sort of beauty. Rachel Weiss projected a focused severity that made her physical appearance and clothing irrelevant, as though she went out of her way to hide attributes that would cause people to see her as anything other than the remarkable clinician she was.

"What was that?" she asked, pointing to the sofa cushion where I'd stashed the gun. "Are you self-prescribing again?"

"No. How did you find my house?"

"I know a woman in Personnel at UVA. You missed two consecutive sessions, but at least you called ahead to cancel. Today you leave me sitting there and you don't even call? Considering your state of mind lately, what do you expect me to do?" Rachel's eyes went to the video camera. "Oh, David . . . you're not back to this again? I thought you stopped years ago."

"It's not what you think."

She didn't look convinced. Five years ago, a drunk driver flipped my wife's car into a roadside pond. The water wasn't deep, but both Karen and my daughter Zooey drowned before help arrived. I was working at the Hospital they were brought to after the accident. Watching the ER staff try in vain to resuscitate my four-year-old daughter shattered me. I spent hours at home in front of the television, endlessly replaying videotapes of Zooey learning to walk, laughing in Karen's arms, hugging me at her third birthday party. My medical practice withered, then died, and I sank into clinical depression. This was the only fact of my personal life I had discussed in detail with my psychiatrist, and this only because after three sessions she had told me that she'd lost her only child to leukemia one year before.

She confided this because she believed my disturbing dreams were caused by the tragic loss of my family, and she wanted me to know she had felt the same kind of pain. Rachel, too, had lost more than her child. Unable to handle the devastating effects of his son's illness, her lawyer husband had left her and returned to New York. Like me, Rachel had descended into a pit of depression from which she was lucky to emerge. Therapy and medication had been her salvation. But like my father, I've always been fiercely private, and I fought my way back to the land of the living alone. Not a day went by that I didn't miss my wife and daughter, but my days of weeping as I replayed old videotapes were over.

"This isn't about Karen and Zooey," I told Rachel. "Please close the door."

She remained in the open doorway, car keys in hand, clearly wanting to believe me but just as clearly skeptical. "What is it, then?"

"Work.
Please
close the door."

Rachel hesitated, then shut the door and stared into my eyes. "Maybe it's time you told me about your work."

This had long been a point of contention between us. Rachel considered doctor/patient confidentiality as sacred as the confessional, and my lack of trust offended her. She believed my demands for secrecy and warnings of danger hinted at a delusional reality I had constructed to protect my psyche from scrutiny. I didn't blame her. At the request of the NSA, I'd made my first appointment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the paranoia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work—and my obsession with "protecting" her—had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.