by Greg Iles
“I know this has been a terrible day,” I said in a comforting voice. “But I need you to try to calm down.”
Lu Li was panting.
“Breathe deeply,” I said, trying to decide what approach to take. Safest to use the corporate cover the NSA had insisted on from the beginning. As far as the rest of the Research Triangle Park companies knew, the Argus Optical Corporation developed optical computer elements used in government defense projects. Lu Li might know no more that this.
“What have you been told by the company?” I asked cautiously.
“Andy dead!” Lu Li cried. “They say he die of brain bleeding, but I know nothing. I don’t know what to do!”
I saw nothing to be gained by further agitating Fielding’s widow with theories of murder. “Lu Li, Andrew was sixty-three years old, and not in the best of health. A stroke isn’t an unlikely event in that situation.”
“You no understand, Dr. David! Andy warn me about this.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “What do you mean?”
Another burst of Cantonese came down the wire, but then Lu Li settled into halting English. “Andy tell me this could happen. He say, ‘If something happen to me, call Dr. David. David know what to do.’”
A deep ache gripped my heart. That Fielding had put such faith in me…“What do you want me to do?”
“Come here. Please. Talk to me. Tell me why this happen to Andy.”
I hesitated. The NSA was probably listening to this call. To go to Lu Li’s house would only put her at greater risk, and myself, too. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t fail my friend. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Thank you, thank you, David! Please, thank you.”
I hung up and turned to go back to the living room. Rachel was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“I have to leave,” I told her. “I appreciate you coming to check on me. I know it was beyond the call of duty.”
“I’m going with you. I heard some of that, and I’m going with you.”
“Out of the question.”
“Why?”
“You have no reason to come. You’re not part of this.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “For me it’s simple, okay? If you’re telling the truth, I’ll find the distraught widow of Andrew Fielding at the end of a short drive. And she’ll support what you’ve told me.”
“Not necessarily. I don’t know how much Fielding confided in her. And Lu Li hardly speaks English.”
“Andrew Fielding didn’t teach his own wife English?”
“He spoke fluent Cantonese. Plus about eight other languages. And she’s only been here a few months.”
Rachel straightened her skirt with the flats of her hands. “Your resistance tells me that you know my going will expose your story as a delusion.”
Anger flashed through me. “I’m tempted to let you come, just for that. But you don’t grasp the danger. You could die. Tonight.”
“I don’t think so.”
I picked up the Ziploc bag containing the white powder and the FedEx envelope and held it out to her. “A few minutes ago I received a letter from Fielding. This powder was in the envelope.”
She shrugged. “It looks like sand. What is it?”
“I have no idea. But I’m afraid it might be anthrax. Or whatever killed Fielding.”
She took the package from me. I thought at first she was examining the powder, but she was reading the label on the FedEx envelope.
“This says the sender is Lewis Carroll.”
“That’s code. Fielding couldn’t risk putting his name into the FedEx computer system. The NSA would pick that up immediately. He used ‘Lewis Carroll’ because his nickname was the White Rabbit. You’ve heard that, right?”
Rachel looked as if she were really thinking about it. “I can’t say that I have. Where’s this letter?”
I motioned toward the front room. “In a plastic bag on the couch. Don’t open it.”
She bent over the note and quickly read it. “It’s not signed.”
“Of course not. Fielding didn’t know who might see it. That rabbit symbol is his signature.”
She looked at me with disbelief. “Just take me along, David. If what I see supports what you’ve told me, I’ll take all your warnings seriously from this point forward. No more doubts.”
“That’s like throwing you into the water to prove there are sharks in it. By the time you see them, it’s too late.”
“That’s always how it is with these kinds of fantasies.”
I went and got my keys off the kitchen counter. Rachel followed at my heels. “All right, you want to come? Follow me in your car.”
She shook her head. “Not a chance. You’d lose me at the first red light.”
“Your colleagues would tell you it’s dangerous to accompany a patient while he chases a paranoid fantasy. Especially a narcoleptic patient.”
“My colleagues don’t know you. As for the narcolepsy, you haven’t killed yourself yet.”
I reached under the sofa cushion, brought out my pistol, and thrust it into my waistband. “You don’t know me either.”
She studied the butt of the gun, then looked into my eyes. “I think I do. And I want to help you.”
If she were only my psychiatrist, I would have left her there. But during our long sessions, we had recognized something in each other, an unspoken feeling shared by two people who had experienced great loss. Even though she thought I might be ill now, she cared about me in a way no one else had for a long time. To take her with me would be selfish, but the simple truth was, I didn’t want to go alone.
Chapter
3
Geli Bauer sat within the dark bowels of the Trinity building, a basement complex lit only by the glow of computer monitors and surveillance screens. From here electronic filaments spread out to monitor the people and the physical plant of Project Trinity. But that was only the center of her domain. With the touch of a computer key, Geli could interface with the NSA supercomputers at Fort Meade and monitor conversations and events on the other side of the globe. Though she had wielded many kinds of power during her thirty-two years on earth, she had never before felt the rush of knowing that all the world bounded by electronics could be manipulated by the touch of her finger.
On paper, Geli worked for Godin Supercomputing, which was based in Mountain View, California. But it was her company’s quasi-governmental relationship with the NSA that had lifted her into the stratosphere of power. If she deemed a situation an emergency, she could stop trains, close international airports, retask surveillance satellites, or lift armed helicopters into the skies over U.S. soil and order them to fire. No other modern woman had wielded such power—in some ways her authority rivaled that of her father—and Geli did not intend to give it up.
On the flat-panel monitor before her glowed a transcript of the conversation between David Tennant and an unknown White House functionary, recorded at a Shoney’s restaurant that afternoon, but Geli was no longer looking at it. She was speaking on the headset phone to a member of her security team, the man who was watching Tennant’s residence.
“I only heard conversation in the kitchen,” she said. “That makes no sense. He and Dr. Weiss had to be talking elsewhere.”
“Maybe they were getting it on.”
“We’d have heard it. Weiss looks like a screamer to me. It’s always the quiet ones.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get in there and check the mikes.”
Geli tapped a key on the pad before her, which connected her to a young ex-Delta operator named Thomas Corelli, who was covering Andrew Fielding’s house.
“What are you hearing, Thomas?”
“Normal background noise. TV. Bumps and clatters.”
“Did you hear Mrs. Fielding’s end of the phone call?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to understand that Chinese accent.”
“Are you out of sight?”
“Tennant will be at your location in five minutes. He has a woman with him. Dr. Rachel Weiss. Stay on this line.”
Geli clicked off, then said clearly, “JPEG. Weiss, Rachel.”
A digital photograph of Rachel Weiss appeared on her monitor. It was a head shot, a telephoto taken as the psychiatrist left the Duke University hospital. Rachel Weiss was three years older than Geli, but Geli recognized the type. She’d known girls like that at boarding school in Switzerland. Strivers. Most of them Jews. She would have known Weiss was Jewish without hearing her name or seeing her file. Even with fashionably windblown hair, Rachel Weiss looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had the dark martyr’s eyes, the premature lines around the mouth. She was one of the top Jungian analysts in the world, and you didn’t reach that level without being obsessive about your work.
Geli had been against involving Weiss. It was Skow who had allowed it. Skow’s theory was that if you held the leash too tight, you were asking for trouble. But it was Geli’s head that would roll if there was a security breach. To prevent that eventuality, she received transcripts of Weiss’s sessions with Tennant and recordings of every telephone call the psychiatrist made. Once a week, one of her operatives slipped into Weiss’s office and photocopied Tennant’s file, to be sure that nothing escaped Geli’s scrutiny.
That was the kind of hassle that came from dealing with civilians. It had been the same at Los Alamos, with the Manhattan Project. In both cases the government had tried to control a group of gifted civilian scientists who through ignorance, obstinacy, or ideology posed the greatest threat to their own work. When you recruited the smartest people in the world, you got crackpots.
Tennant was a crackpot. Like Fielding. Like Ravi Nara, the project’s Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist. All six Trinity principals had signed the tightest possible security and nondisclosure agreements, but they still believed they could do anything they wanted. To them the world was Disneyland. And doctors were the worst. Even in the army, the rules had never quite seemed to apply to M.D.s. But tonight Tennant was going to step far enough over the line to get his head chopped off.
Her headset beeped. She opened the line to her man at Tennant’s house. “What is it?”
“I’m inside. You’re not going to believe this. Someone put painter’s putty in the holes over the mikes.”
Geli felt a strange numbness in her chest. “How could Tennant know where they were?”
“No way without a scanner.”
“Magnifying glass?”
“If he knew to look for them. But that would take hours, and you’d never be sure you got them all.”
A scanner. Where the hell would an internist get that? Then she knew. Fielding. “Tennant took that FedEx delivery. Do you see an envelope anywhere?”
“No.”
“He must have taken it with him. What else do you see? Anything strange?”
“There’s a video camera set up on a tripod.”
Shit. “Tape in it?”
“Let me check. No tape.”
“What else?”
“A vacuum cleaner in the backyard.”
What the hell? “A vacuum cleaner? Take the bag out and bring it here. We’ll chopper it to Fort Meade for analysis. What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Take one last look, then get out.”
Geli clicked off, then said, “Skow—home.” The computer dialed the Raleigh residence of Project Trinity’s administrative director.
“Geli?” Skow said. “What’s going on?”
Bauer always thought Kennedy when she heard John Skow’s voice. Skow was a Boston Brahmin with twice the usual brains of his breed. Instead of the customary liberal arts and law background of his class, Skow had advanced degrees in astronomy and mathematics and had served for eight years as deputy director of special projects for the NSA. His primary area of responsibility was the agency’s top secret Supercomputer Research Center. Skow was technically Geli’s superior, but their relationship had always been uncomfortable. Short of taking a human life, Geli had independent responsibility for Project Trinity’s security. She held this power because Peter Godin—citing security leaks at government labs—had demanded that he pick his own team to protect Trinity.
The old man had found her just as she was leaving the army. Geli believed heart and soul in the warrior culture, but she could no longer endure the bloated and hidebound bureaucracy of the army, or its abysmal quality standards for new recruits. When Godin appeared, he’d offered her a job she had wanted all her life but hadn’t believed existed.
She would receive $700,000 a year to work as chief of security for special projects for Godin Supercomputing. The salary was immense, but Godin was a billionaire. He could afford it. Her conditions of employment were unique. She would follow any order he gave, without question and without regard for legality. She would not reveal any information about her employer, his company, or her employment. If she did, she would die. Geli could hire her own staff, but they would accept the same conditions and penalty, and she would enforce that penalty. She was amazed that a public figure like Godin would dare to set such terms. Then she learned that Godin had found her through her father. That explained a lot. Geli had hardly spoken to her father in years, but he was in a position to know a lot about her. And she could tell by the way Godin looked at her that he knew something about her as well. Probably the stories that had filtered out of Iraq after Desert Storm. Peter Godin wanted a security expert, but he also wanted a killer. Geli was both.
John Skow was not. Unlike Godin, who had fought as a marine in Korea as a young man, Skow was a theoretical warrior. The NSA man had never seen blood on his hands, and around Geli he sometimes acted like a man who’d been handed a leash with a pit bull on the end of it.
“Geli?” Skow said again. “Are you there?”
“Dr. Weiss went to Tennant’s house,” she said into her headset.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We got almost none of their conversation. They’re on their way to the Fielding house now. Lu Li Fielding called him. Upset.”
Skow was silent for a moment. “Going over to comfort the grieving widow?”
“I’m sure that will be their story.” She wanted to gauge Skow’s level of anxiety before giving him more details. “Do we let them go in?”
“Of course. You can hear everything they say, right?”
“Maybe not. There was a problem with the bugs at Tennant’s house.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Tennant put putty over the mikes. And there was a video camera set up on a tripod in there. No tape in it.” She let that sink in. “Either he wanted to say something on tape that he didn’t want us to hear, or he wanted to talk to Dr. Weiss without us hearing. Either way, it’s bad.”
She listened to Skow breathe for a while.
“It’s all right,” he said finally. “We’re going to be okay on this.”
“You must know something I don’t, sir.”
Skow chuckled at the contempt with which she said “sir.” The NSA man was tough in his own way. He had the detached coldness of mathematical intelligence. “The perks of leadership, Geli. You did well this morning, by the way. I was amazed.”
Geli flashed back to Fielding’s corpse. The termination had gone smoothly enough, but it was a stupid move. They should have taken out Tennant as well. She could easily have manipulated both men into the same vehicle, and after that…simple logistics. A car accident. And the project wouldn’t be in the jeopardy it was in now. “Has Tennant actually talked to the president, sir?”
“I don’t know. So keep your distance. Monitor the situation, but nothing more.”
“He also took a delivery from FedEx. A letter. Whatever it was, he took it with him. We need to see that.”
“If you can get a look at it without him knowing, fine. Otherwise,
talk to FedEx and find out who sent it.”
“We’re doing that.”
“Good. Just don’t—”
Geli heard Skow’s wife calling his name.
“Just keep me informed,” he said, and rang off.