The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  Lu Li had been raised in a Communist country with ruthless security police. Her willingness to believe the worst was deeply ingrained. “Did they kill my Andy?” she whispered.

  “I hope not. Given Andrew’s health, age, and habits, a stroke was possible. But…I don’t think it was a stroke. What makes you think he might have been murdered?”

  Lu Li closed her eyes, squeezing tears out of them. “Andy knew something might happen to him. He tell me so.”

  “Did he say this once? Or often?”

  “Last two weeks, many times.”

  I exhaled long and slowly. “Do you know why Andrew wanted to see me at Nags Head?”

  “He want to talk to you. That all I know. Andy very scared about work. About Trinity. About…”

  “What?”

  “Godin.”

  Somehow I had known it would be Godin. John Skow was easy to hate—an arrogant technocrat with no moral center—but he did not generate much fear. Godin, on the other hand, was easy to like—a genius, a patriot in the best sense of the word, a man of conviction—yet after you worked with him awhile, you sensed a disturbing vibration radiating from him, a Faustian hunger to know that disdained all limits, disregarded all boundaries. One thing was plain: anyone or anything that stood between Godin and his goal would not remain there long.

  Godin and Fielding had got along well in the beginning. They were from roughly the same generation, and Godin possessed Robert Oppenheimer’s gift for motivating talented scientists: a combination of flattery and provocative insight. But the honeymoon had not lasted. For Godin, Trinity was a mission, and he pursued it with missionary zeal. Fielding was different. The Englishman did not believe that just because something was possible, it should be done. Nor did he believe that even a noble end justified all means to attain it.

  “Did Andy have papers to show me?” I asked hopefully.

  “I don’t think so. Every evening he make notes, but every night before bed”—she pointed to the fireplace—“he always burn them. Andy very secret. He always try to protect me. Always to protect me.”

  He did the same for me, I thought. Suddenly, I remembered the words in Fielding’s letter. “Did Andrew take his pocket watch to work with him today?”

  Lu Li didn’t hesitate. “He take it every day. You no see it today?”

  “No. But I’m sure it will be returned to you with his personal effects.”

  Her lower lip began to quiver, and I sensed another imminent wave of tears, but it didn’t come. Watching Lu Li’s stoicism, I felt a sharp pang of grief, familiar yet somehow new to me. I was no stranger to mourning, but what I felt now was different from what I’d felt after the loss of my wife and daughter. Andrew Fielding was one of the few men of his century who might have answered some of the fundamental questions of human existence. To know that such a mind had gone out of the world left me feeling hollow, as though my species were diminished in some profound and irrecoverable way.

  “What will happen to me now?” Lu Li asked quietly. “They send me back to China?”

  Not a chance, I thought. One reason Trinity was so secret was the belief held in some quarters that other countries might be at work on a similar device. With its history of aggressive technology theft, Communist China ranked high on that list. The NSA would never let a Chinese-born physicist who had been this close to the project return to her native land. In fact, I worried about her survival. But I could do little to protect her until I talked to the president.

  “They can’t send you back,” I assured her. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Andy say the government do anything it want.”

  I was about to answer when headlight beams shone through the foyer. A car was passing slowly by the house.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Lu Li, I don’t like saying this, but the best thing you can do right now is to cooperate with the NSA. The less trouble they see you making, the less they’ll perceive you as a threat. Do you understand?”

  Her face tightened. “You say now I should let them kill my Andy and say nothing? Do nothing?”

  “We don’t know that Andy was killed. And there’s very little you can personally do right now. I want you to leave everything to me. I’ve called the president, and I could hear back from him at any time. He’s in China now, of all places. Beijing.”

  “I see on TV. Andy tell me you know this president.”

  “I’ve met him. He was a friend of my brother’s, and he appointed me to my job. And I promise you that one way or another I’ll find the truth about Andrew’s death. I owe him that. And more.”

  Lu Li suddenly smiled through her anguish. “Andy was good man. Kind, funny man. And smart.”

  “Very smart,” I agreed, though words like smart meant little when applied to men like Andrew Fielding. Fielding had been a member of one of the smallest fraternities on the planet, those who truly understood the mysteries of quantum physics, a field reserved—as Fielding’s Cambridge students often joked—for those students who were “too smart to be doctors.”

  Rachel squeaked in surprise as a white ball of fur raced into the room and leapt into Lu Li’s lap. The furball was a small dog, a bichon frise. Lu Li smiled and vigorously stroked the bichon’s neck.

  “Maya, Maya,” she cooed, then murmured softly in singsong Cantonese.

  The bichon seemed anxious at the presence of strangers, but it did not bark. Its little brown eyes locked on me.

  “You know Maya, Dr. David?”

  “Yes. We’ve met.”

  “Andy buy her for me. Six weeks ago. Maya my baby. My baby until God blesses Andy and me with…”

  As she lapsed into silence, I realized that my sixty-three-year-old friend had been trying to have child with his forty-year-old wife.

  “I’m sorry,” I said uselessly. “I’m so sorry.”

  Rachel looked as though she wanted to speak, but there were times when even a gifted psychiatrist found herself at a loss for words. As Lu Li stared into space, my anxiety grew. If Fielding had suspected that he might be murdered, and he had voiced that fear to his wife, then the NSA might know he had done that. They almost certainly knew I was here now. If they were outside, they had probably photographed Rachel and would be trying to figure out what she was doing here.

  “Maya looks like she could use a walk,” I said brightly.

  Lu Li started from her trance.

  “I’ll be glad to take her out for you,” I added.

  “No. Maya no need—”

  I cut her off with an upraised hand. “I think the air would do us all good.”

  Lu Li stared at me for several moments. “Yes,” she said finally. “Is good idea. Me inside all day.”

  Looking around for something to write with, I saw a message pad by the telephone. I went to it and wrote, Do you have a portable tape recorder? Then I pulled off that sheet and wrote my cell phone number on the next page.

  When Lu Li read my question, she walked back to Fielding’s study and returned with a Sony microcassette recorder, the type used for dictation. I put it in my pocket and led both women to the glass doors that opened onto the patio.

  Maya followed us out but stuck close to Lu Li, who attached a leash to the dog’s collar. About a hundred meters through the woods lay the University of North Carolina’s outdoor amphitheater. On two previous occasions, Fielding had taken me there to talk.

  “I know Andrew swept the house,” I whispered to Lu Li, “but I still don’t feel safe talking inside. I need to speak to Rachel alone for a few minutes. I want you to go back inside. Lock the doors, but leave Maya with us. We’re going to walk through the woods to the amphitheater. We’ll be back very soon. I have my cell phone, and I left the number on your message pad. If anything strange happens, call me immediately.”

  Confusion and worry wrinkled Lu Li’s face. “You need Maya?”

  “For cover. You understand? An excuse to walk out here.”

  She nodded slowly, then knelt, whispered
something to the dog, and retreated into the house. I picked up the whimpering bichon and walked swiftly across the backyard to a narrow path that led through the woods. Rachel struggled to keep up as branches began to pull at our clothes.

  “What are we doing?” she hissed.

  “Keep quiet. I have to talk to you, and I don’t think we have long.”

  I wasn’t sure of the source of my fear, but I knew it ran deep. Without being aware of it, I had shifted the dog to my left hand and drawn my gun with my right.

  Chapter

  7

  “Ritter’s here,” said Corelli, his voice sounding tense in Geli’s headset. “He’s already got the laser trained on the front window.”

  “What’s he hearing?”

  “Definite sounds, but no conversation. Like one person moving around the house. They could be in one of the back rooms.”

  “Change position and put the laser on a back window. Hurry.”

  “Right.”

  Geli could hardly stay in her chair. Something was going down at the Fielding house, and she had only one way to know what it was. A minute passed, then Ritter’s deeper voice said, “Nichts.”

  “You’re not getting anything in back?” she asked.

  “Nein.”

  “They know where the bugs are, and they’ve plugged them.”

  “Ahh,” said Ritter. “How could they know that?”

  “Fielding.”

  “That bastard,” said Corelli. “He was always playing games with us.”

  Geli nodded. Around Trinity, Fielding had acted like an absentminded professor, but he was the sharpest son of a bitch in the place.

  “They’ve probably left the house,” Geli said. “Fielding and Tennant did that twice before. Walking Fielding’s dog. I’m going to put a team in the woods.”

  “Nein,” said Ritter. “Tennant will hear them.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “I’ll go alone.”

  “Okay, but I’m setting up a perimeter. Tennant could be trying to run.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s a stupid way to run. And Tennant’s not stupid.”

  “Why stupid?”

  “When you run, you don’t take women with you. You move fast and light.”

  Geli smiled to herself. “Tennant’s not like you, Liebchen.”

  Ritter laughed. “He’s a man, isn’t he?”

  “He’s American and he was raised in the South. I knew guys like him in the army. Born heroes. They have this romantic streak. It gets a lot of them killed.”

  “Like the English?” Ritter asked.

  Geli thought of Andrew Fielding. “Sort of. Now get going. Tell Corelli to cover the front.”

  “Ja.”

  Geli got out of her chair and began to pace the narrow alley between the racks of electronic gear. She thought of calling John Skow again, but Skow didn’t want to be bothered. Fine. She’d call him when Tennant bolted, then see what the smug bastard had to say about not keeping the leash too tight.

  Chapter

  8

  I moved silently through the dark trees. Rachel sounded like a blind bear blundering along behind me. On a Manhattan street she probably maneuvered like a pro halfback, but the woods were alien to her. I slowed until she caught up, then told her to hold on to the back of my belt. She did.

  When we were fifty yards away from the house, I said, “Do you believe me about Fielding now?”

  “I believe you worked with him,” Rachel said. “I’m not sure he was murdered. I don’t think you are either.”

  I stepped over a fallen log, then helped her over. “I know he was murdered. Only two people at Project Trinity opposed what was being done there. Fielding was one, and now he’s dead. I’m the other.”

  “Are you going to tell me about Trinity now?”

  “If you’re willing to listen. I think you understand now that it could be dangerous for you.”

  She sucked in her breath as briers raked her arm. “Go on.”

  “When you came to my house today, I was making a videotape to give to my lawyer. He was to open it if something happened to me. I never finished it. And the truth is, I’m worried about seeing tomorrow morning alive.”

  Rachel stopped in the overgrown track. “Why don’t you just call the police? Lu Li clearly shares your suspicions, and I think there’s enough circumstantial evidence to—”

  “City police can’t investigate the NSA. And that’s who oversees Trinity.”

  “Call the FBI then.”

  “That’s like calling the FBI to investigate the CIA. There’s so much ill will between those agencies that it would take weeks to get anything done. If you really want to help, become my videotape. Listen to what I have to tell you, then go home and keep it to yourself.”

  “And if something happens to you?”

  “Call CNN and The New York Times and tell them everything you know. The sooner you tell it, the safer you’ll be.”

  “Why don’t you do that? Tonight?”

  “Because I can’t be sure I’m right. Because the president could be trying to reach me as we speak. And because, as juvenile as it may sound, this is a national security matter.”

  Holding Lu Li’s whimpering bichon in my left arm, I put my gun in my pocket and pulled Rachel forward. Forty yards on, I saw a deeper darkness ahead. The trees gave way like thinning ranks of soldiers, and then a man-made wall stopped me in my tracks. When my eyes adjusted, I saw the door I had known was there. I opened it with my free hand and led Rachel through. We emerged into a moonlit bowl, lined with cut stone.

  “My God,” she said.

  The amphitheater looked as though it had magically been transported to the Carolina woods from Greece. To our right was the elevated stage, to our left a stone stairway leading up through the seats to the top row. Not far above that lay Country Club Road. The view down from the road was almost completely blocked by pines and hardwoods, but I could see the broken beams of headlights passing high above us.

  I took Rachel’s hand, stepped onto the stone floor, and led her to the edge of the stage. There I tied Maya’s leash around a low light stanchion. While the dog sniffed an invisible scent trail, I set the tape recorder on the edge of the stage and depressed RECORD. “This is David Tennant, M.D.,” I said. “I’m speaking to Dr. Rachel Weiss of the Duke University Medical School.”

  Playback gave me a staticky facsimile of my words. I looked at my watch. “We need to do this in less than ten minutes.”

  Rachel shrugged, her eyes full of curiosity.

  “For the past two years, I’ve been working on a special project for the National Security Agency. It’s known as Project Trinity, and it’s based in a building in the Research Triangle Park, ten miles from here. Trinity is a massive government-funded effort to build a supercomputer capable of artificial intelligence. A computer that can think.”

  She looked unimpressed. “Don’t we already have computers that can do that?”

  This common misconception surprised me now, but when I went to work at Trinity, I hadn’t known much better myself. For fifty years, science fiction writers and filmmakers had been creating portrayals of “giant electronic brains” taking over the world. HAL, the speaking computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, had entered pop consciousness in 1968 and remained firmly embedded there ever since. In the subsequent thirty-five years, we had witnessed such a revolution in digital computing that the average person believed that a “computer that can think” was just around the corner, if not already within our capabilities. But the reality was far different. I had no time to go into the complexities of neural networks or strong AI; Rachel needed a simple primer and the facts about Trinity.

  “Have you heard of a man named Alan Turing?” I asked. “He’s one of the men who broke the Germans’ Enigma code during World War Two.”

  “Turing?” Rachel looked preoccupied. “I think I’ve heard of something called the Turing Test.”

  “That’s the classic
test of artificial intelligence. Turing said machine intelligence would be achieved when a human being could sit on one side of a wall and type questions into a keyboard, then read the answers coming onto his screen from the other side and be certain that those answers were being typed by another human being. Turing predicted that would happen by the end of the twentieth century, but no computer has ever come close to passing that test. Using conventional technology, it’s still probably fifty years off.”

  “Didn’t that IBM computer finally beat Garry Kasparov at chess? I know I read that somewhere.”