The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  Lu Li’s gaze went to the couch, and her face wrinkled in confusion. “No. Nothing.”

  “Did you drop it off at the FedEx box?”

  “Yes. How you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I knew Lu Li had dropped off the envelope because I had been inside Fielding’s head during my last dream. I felt a sudden compulsion to get out of the house. “Rachel? The taxi?”

  “Any minute,” she said from behind me.

  “I want you to go into the garage,” I told Lu Li. “When you hear me tap the horn, open the door for me. After I pull in, close the door.”

  “Okay.” She left the room without a word.

  I picked up the Ziplocs, then led Rachel to the darkened living room, where wide windows looked onto the street. I dropped the Ziplocs on a chair, then sat on a sofa opposite the window to wait for the cab.

  “Is the taxi for me?” she whispered, sitting beside me.

  “Yes.”

  “But my car’s parked at your house.”

  “You don’t want to go back to my house. You can get it in the morning if you want to. I’d rather you take a taxi to work.”

  “Did I hear you tell Lu Li you’re going back to work tomorrow?”

  “If I don’t hear from the president tonight, I am.”

  “Why? If they killed Fielding, why won’t they kill you, too?”

  Her question gave me a perverse satisfaction. “It sounds like you’re buying into my delusion.”

  Her lips tightened, and I could see that she was genuinely afraid.

  “Look, if they really wanted to kill me, I’d be dead already. And if they decide to kill me before tomorrow, nothing will stop them. But I think they’re too worried about how the president would react to try that. If I’m alive tomorrow morning, it’s all right for me to go in.”

  Rachel sighed and rubbed her temples with her fingers.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I whispered. “If anyone questions you, tell as much truth as you can. You came to my house because I missed three sessions. I got a call from the wife of a friend who died today. She has no family here, so you offered to help console her. We calmed her down and walked her dog. That’s all you know.”

  She studied my face in the dim light. “This isn’t what I expected.”

  “I know. You really thought I was crazy.”

  She bit her lip, the gesture almost girlish. “I suppose I did. Part of me hoped I was wrong. But now I’m frightened. I know about psychiatric problems. This is something else.”

  I pulled her close and spoke into her ear. “I want you to forget it all. Unless something happens to me. Then you remember. Remember and scream to high heaven.” I pulled back and looked into her eyes. “I won’t be coming back to your office.”

  She stared at me as though I’d said, “We’re never going to see each other again,” which deep down was what I felt.

  “David—”

  “Here’s your taxi.” I stood as headlights rolled to a stop in front of the house, looking close to make sure there was a taxi light on the roof.

  She was shaking her head, almost helplessly.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to be fine. You’ve helped a lot.”

  “I didn’t do a damned thing for you.”

  I pulled her out of sight of the window, then took the recorder from my pocket, removed the tape, and put it in her hand. “If you want to help, here’s your chance.” I started to send her on, then hesitated. “There is one more thing you could do.”

  “Tell me.”

  I pointed to the Ziploc bags on the chair. “Is there someone at Duke who could safely test that powder for infectious agents and poisons?”

  “Of course. There are guys over there who live for that kind of thing.”

  There was a slipcover on one of the sofa pillows. I took it off the pillow, then put the Ziplocs inside it and handed it to her. “Be very careful with those.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir.”

  I squeezed her arm. “Thank you. Now, go.”

  She didn’t go. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me gently on the lips. “Be careful. Please, please be careful.”

  As I stared, Rachel slid the slipcover under her blouse, then walked to the foyer. I heard the front door close softly. Through the front window I watched her get into the taxi. The cab pulled into Lu Li’s driveway, then backed out and rolled up Gimghoul Street.

  I went out to my car, pulled up to Fielding’s garage door, and tapped my horn. Lu Li opened the door from inside, then closed it behind me.

  She pulled open my passenger door and set her husband’s cardboard box on the front seat. I reached across it and gripped her wrist, my eyes boring into hers.

  “Tell me the truth, Lu Li. Do you know what they’re trying to build at Trinity?”

  After several seconds of eye contact, she nodded once.

  “Don’t ever tell anyone that,” I warned. “Never.”

  “Me Chinese, David. Know what can happen.”

  For an instant I flashed back to her standing silhouetted in the patio doors, a target awaiting an assassin.

  “Come with me,” I said suddenly. “Right now. Just get in with your dog and we’ll go. I’ll keep you safe.”

  A sad smile touched her lips. “You good man. Like Andrew. Don’t worry. I already make my own arrangements.”

  Arrangements? I couldn’t imagine what these might be. I didn’t think she knew anyone in the States. “What are they?”

  She shook her head. “Better you don’t know. Yes? I be okay.”

  For some reason, I believed her. The revelation that Lu Li had not been rendered helpless by her grief made me ask one more question.

  “In his letter, Andy told me that if anything happened to him, I should remember his pocket watch. What’s so special about that watch?”

  Lu Li studied my eyes for what seemed a long time. Then, in a nearly inaudible whisper, she said, “Not watch. Fob.”

  “Fob?”

  “Watch fob.”

  I closed my eyes and pictured Fielding’s watch. It was a scarred but precious heirloom, and at the end of its chain was a small, diamond-shaped crystal.

  “The crystal?” I asked.

  Lu Li smiled. “You smart man. You figure it out.”

  Chapter

  9

  Geli Bauer was on her feet, pacing the control center and shouting into her headset at John Skow. She’d never lost her temper with him before, but without Godin backing her up, Skow was proving maddeningly obstinate.

  “Haven’t you heard a word I said? Can’t you see what’s happening?”

  Skow answered in a condescending voice, “This is what you’ve told me. Dr. Tennant and Dr. Weiss visited the grieving widow and walked her dog. Dr. Weiss kissed Tennant, then she went home in a cab.”

  Geli closed her eyes and tried to suppress her anger. “Tennant pulled into the garage and closed the door before he left the Fielding house. He obviously took something that he didn’t want us to see.”

  “That’s possible,” Skow said. “But as far as you can tell, he’s headed home now. What’s the problem?”

  “We couldn’t hear a damn thing! They plugged the bugs, same as they did at Tennant’s house. And Weiss left her Saab at Tennant’s house, instead of taking the cab there to pick it up. Why would she do that? Tennant might be planning to run or even to go public. Maybe both.”

  “I think you’re projecting your own paranoia onto him.”

  “Ritter heard them talking about MRI side effects.”

  “That’s small potatoes. You couldn’t know that, of course. The Super-MRI unit is Tennant’s pet ethical concern, and it’s got nothing to do with the central issue.”

  “But they talked for ten minutes before that. And Ritter thinks he saw a tape recorder.”

  Skow sighed. “What would you have me do about that?”

  “Take them out.”

  The NSA man caught his breath.
“Did I hear you correctly?”

  “You know you did. We have to assume Weiss knows the full details of Trinity and about Tennant’s suspicions regarding Dr. Fielding’s death.”

  “Dr. Weiss is a private citizen who’s broken no law.”

  “If you won’t take them out, then bring them in for interrogation with prejudice.”

  The resulting silence seemed interminable. Then Skow said, “Do you have someone following Dr. Weiss’s cab?”

  Ritter was covering Weiss. “My best man. He could easily stage an accident.”

  Skow’s voice, when it came, was like shaved ice. “Listen to me, Geli. Your man will follow the cab to Dr. Weiss’s residence, then break contact. He will not let her see him. He will not even breathe hard in her direction.”

  “What?”

  “Call off your dog. And your team on Dr. Tennant will follow him to his residence and set up a static surveillance post as per normal procedure.”

  Geli could barely control her voice. “Project security has been breached. If we allow things to proceed, we’ll lose control of the situation, if we haven’t already.”

  “Ms. Bauer, tomorrow the president of the United States could ask to see David Tennant in the Oval Office. Do you understand that? They may already have talked. So you do whatever you have to do to calm down. Take a tranquilizer. Get laid. I detest crudeness, but that’s the bottom line. Now…I’m with my family. Don’t bother me unless Tennant tries to reach the president or he shoots somebody in a public place.”

  “I want to go on record as protesting this decision.”

  “Fine.”

  “I want to talk to Godin.”

  “Impossible. He can’t be reached right now.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Mountain View, handling a crisis.”

  “He was still in town at lunchtime today.”

  “Peter didn’t buy a G5 to leave it parked in the hangar.”

  Geli could hear Skow’s teenage sons arguing in the background, and the mindless babble of a television. “I’m afraid I can’t accept your assessment of the situation. I can’t ignore my responsibilities because you haven’t got the balls to do what’s necessary to protect Trinity.”

  “Are you out of your mind? I’ve spoken to Peter twice this evening. I know what he wants done and not done. And if you take matters into your own hands…not even your father will be able to protect you.”

  Geli hadn’t liked Skow before, but she hated him now.

  She hung up and stared at her computer screen, which still displayed the list of Fielding’s personal effects. Why the hell would somebody keep a cobra’s fang? She wanted to go to the storage room and check the actual objects against the list, but she was too pissed off to deal with that.

  She had always worked with incomplete information at Trinity. It hadn’t bothered her much. The army was good training for that. You could guard a building for twenty-four hours without knowing whether it contained nuclear bombs or cases of underwear. But now there was too much she didn’t know. The mystery at the heart of Trinity was taking control of everyone and everything around it. Yet there was nothing she could do. She had to talk to Godin, and he was incommunicado.

  Faced with this impasse, she called Ritter Bock and told him to break contact with Weiss. The taciturn young German was needed back at the control center. Skow had ordered her to calm down, and Geli knew only one way to do that. She needed to take some orders rather than give them.

  Chapter

  10

  Dreamless sleep evaporated in a rush of pounding blood and the memory of Fielding lying dead in his office. Sunlight knifed through a crack in the curtains. I had survived the night, but still I reached beneath my pillow for my .38. Only then did I slap the top of my clock radio, killing the alarm.

  My phone had not rung during the night, so the president hadn’t tried to reach me. I checked my answering machine in case I had slept through a call, but there were no messages. Trying not to think about the implications of this, I dialed Lu Li Fielding’s house. A machine answered. The taped message still had Andrew’s voice on it, brimming with humor. Hoping Lu Li was a hundred miles from Chapel Hill by now, I hung up and carried my gun into the bathroom, then locked the door behind me.

  I shaved quickly. A surveillance car had been parked nearby when I got home from Fielding’s house last night. It pulled away as I approached. After removing the sensitive items from my trunk, I called Rachel at home to be sure she’d made it. Then I lay awake for two hours, listening for the sounds of a break-in and thinking of Fielding’s pocket watch. It had a dull gold case, worn from rubbing, and a yellowed face with Roman numerals. Not the watch, Lu Li had said. The fob. I’d asked Fielding about the crystal on his watch chain once. He told me a Tibetan monk had given it to him near Lhasa, promising it would ensure an unfailing memory. Fielding belly-laughed when he told me that story, but I hadn’t gotten the joke. Now I did.

  One new computer technology perfected by the Trinity team was holographic memory storage. Rather than storing data in microchips, Trinity engineers stored it as holograms within the molecules of stable crystals. Using lasers to read and write data, they could store enormous amounts of information within the crystal’s symmetrically arranged atoms. The crystals I had seen in the Trinity holography lab were the size of NFL footballs, but I saw no reason that a smaller one could not be used. Like the one on Fielding’s watch chain.

  Somehow, the Englishman had been downloading Trinity data into his crystal watch fob. And because no one outside Trinity’s inner circle of scientists and engineers knew this was even possible, Fielding could walk it in and out of the building every day without anyone suspecting a thing.

  But why would he steal information? To sell to the highest bidder? Fielding was old school. Even if he were desperate for money, he was the last person I would suspect of corporate espionage. Had he secretly embraced some ideology? Or abandoned one? Was he a politically naive scientist who believed all nations should share access to the latest technology? Possibly. But I didn’t think he would want a rogue nation to possess something as powerful as a Trinity computer. To hear Fielding talk sometimes, you would think he didn’t want any country to possess one.

  Was that it? Had he been working to prevent Trinity from becoming a reality? That scenario seemed the most likely, but I didn’t have enough information to make an accurate guess. And without the watch, I couldn’t prove anything.

  I showered in near-scalding water, then dressed in chinos and a sport jacket and walked quickly to my car, trying not to think too much about what I was doing. My primary goal in returning to Trinity was to find Fielding’s pocket watch, but in truth I saw little choice. Staying home would only invite closer NSA scrutiny, and running—as I hoped Lu Li had done—would bring the full resources of the agency down upon me. But if I could preserve the illusion of normalcy a little longer—until the president got back to me—I might be able to avenge Fielding’s death.

  On a good traffic day, the Trinity complex was a twenty-minute drive from my house in suburban Chapel Hill. Research Triangle Park, the manicured haven of corporate research known locally as the RTP, lay between Raleigh and Durham and was named for the triangle formed by Duke University, UNC at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State. Its quiet lanes led through expansive lawns that suggested an exclusive country club, but instead of golf links, the seven-thousand-acre RTP boasted labs owned by DuPont, 3M, Merck, Biogen, Lockheed, and dozens of other blue-chip names. Forty-five thousand people reported to work within its borders every day, but less than three hundred knew what lay behind the walls of the Trinity building. I drove slowly, hoping in some juvenile way that I would never arrive at my destination.

  The Trinity lab stood two hundred yards back from an understated sign that read ARGUS OPTICAL. A forbidding five-story block of steel and black glass, it sat on sixty wooded acres with extensive subbasements and a heliport. The steel and glass was just a shell constructed for
show. Behind it, high-tech copper cladding code-named Tempest encased the inner building, preventing electromagnetic radiation from passing in or out of Trinity. The same stuff protected the NSA operations buildings at Fort Meade.

  Because the building had been sited in a sort of bowl, its first two floors lay out of sight. The main entrance was on the third floor. To reach it, staff had to cross a roofed catwalk forty yards long. Inside a fortified archway at the far end, they confronted a narrow passage guarded by a security officer and lined with sensitive metal detectors, electronic bomb-sniffers, and fluoroscope machines. Authorized entry required photo ID, a fingerprint scan, and a mandatory search of all bags.