The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  She looked down at the growing pool of blood. “Maybe he is a street punk.”

  “Don’t you get it? This is why they stole my file from your office!”

  “What?”

  “They already knew they were going to kill you.”

  She opened her mouth but said nothing.

  “Otherwise they would have photocopied the file and left it in place. They wanted nothing left in your office for the Durham police to connect you to the project.”

  She was shaking her head, but my logic was difficult to refute. I stuck the automatic into my waistband and picked up my .38.

  “We have to get out of here. Fast. There could be others close by.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Others?”

  Suddenly I saw it all. “The NSA taps my phones. When they heard Ewan McCaskell leave his message, they knew I hadn’t spoken to the president yet. That’s all they were waiting for. I was too excited to see the implications.”

  I grasped her hand. It was cold and limp. “We have to run, Rachel. Right now. If we don’t, we’ll die here.”

  “Run where?”

  “Anywhere. Nowhere. We have to disappear.”

  “No. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” I pointed at the man on the floor and saw that he was no longer breathing. “Do you think that corpse is one of my hallucinations?”

  “You killed him,” she said in the voice of a child.

  “And I’d do it again. He was about to fire a bullet into your head.”

  She wobbled on her feet. I steadied her, then led her to the guest bedroom where I’d lain unconscious only minutes ago.

  “Stay here. I have to get something.” I tried to put my .38 in her hand, but she recoiled. “Keep it,” I insisted, closing her fingers around it. “If you leave this house alone, you’ll be killed.”

  She stared hollow-eyed at me.

  I took the silenced automatic from my waistband and checked to make sure the safety was off. “Promise me you won’t leave.”

  “I won’t leave,” she said dully.

  I left the guestroom and raced upstairs. My bedroom was on the left side of the landing. On the right was a bedroom I used for storage. I pulled an old chair into the closet of that room and stood on it. With my arms stretched high, I could just reach the plywood panel that gave access to the attic. I pushed out the wooden square, then lifted myself by main strength and wedged my body through the space.

  Standing half-erect to avoid the roofing nails jutting down from above, I balanced on two rafters and looked around to get my bearings. Enough light was showing through the eaves and soffit vents to show my way. I crept twenty feet to my left and knelt. Lying on pink fiberglass insulation were a hammer and crowbar I’d left there four weeks ago, as though dropped carelessly. I picked them up and moved quickly to an area floored with quarter-inch plywood.

  Jamming the crowbar into a seam between two pieces of wood, I hammered it deeper, then leaned heavily on the bar. The plywood splintered. I shoved the end of the bar through the resulting hole, then jerked upward, ripping open a two-foot section of wood. From the dark cavity below I removed a small nylon gym bag and unzipped it. The light filtering through the eaves illuminated the rectangular outlines of a passport and two thick bundles. The bundles were stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth.

  Five weeks ago, when Fielding told me I needed to cache a bag like this, I’d laughed at him. But he had known this day would come. Zipping the bag shut, I crab-walked across the rafters to the access hole, then dropped the bag onto the closet floor. My arms quivered from strain as I lowered myself back down to the chair and pulled the plywood square back over the opening.

  When my feet hit the floor, an image of Rachel running from the house in panic filled my mind. I grabbed the bag and ran downstairs.

  She was still sitting on the bed, her eyes blank with shock.

  “Time to go,” I told her. “Are you ready?”

  She blinked but said nothing.

  I took her free hand and pulled her to her feet. “I need you to keep it together for five minutes. After that, you can collapse if you need to. Here we go.”

  I led her through the hall and kitchen to the laundry room, which opened into the garage. Leaving her there, I retrieved Fielding’s box from the back door, then returned and took my .38 back from her.

  “Hold this,” I said, giving her the box. “Wait here till I call for you.”

  Without pausing long enough for fear to take hold, I threw open the door from the house to the garage and charged through with the automatic extended, traversing it right and left to cover all angles of fire.

  The garage looked empty.

  I made a quick circuit of my Acura, then dropped to my knees and looked beneath it. “Come on!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

  Rachel’s shoes hissed on the smooth cement. I opened the passenger door for her, then took Fielding’s box and set it on the backseat. “If anything bad’s going to happen, it’s going to happen right now,” I said, getting behind the wheel. “Get down in your seat.”

  She slid to the floor. The top of her head showed above the doorframe. I pushed it down, then started the engine and put the car in reverse.

  “Stay down.”

  I touched the remote control clipped to my visor. The garage door motor groaned above us, and the wide white door began to rise. With the killer’s gun clenched in my hand, I watched for the silhouette of legs in the growing rectangle of sunlight.

  I saw nothing.

  The instant the garage door cleared roof height, I gunned the engine. The Acura shot backward over the cement and into blinding sunlight. I hit the remote to lower the garage door, then spun the wheel left. I didn’t touch the brake until the car was pointed up Willow Street.

  “What’s happening?” Rachel cried, alarmed by my sudden stop.

  “Stay down!”

  I’d planned to drive calmly if the street was clear, but as we stopped, I could almost feel an unseen marksman taking aim. I shifted into DRIVE, floored the accelerator, and fishtailed up Willow, leaving six feet of rubber on the pavement behind us.

  Chapter

  13

  In the Trinity building’s control center, Geli Bauer stood absolutely still and spoke into her headset.

  “We heard a shot. In Tennant’s house.”

  “Isn’t that what you expected?” Skow asked.

  Idiot. “No. Ritter had a silenced weapon.”

  “And Tennant was carrying his gun last night.”

  “Right.”

  Skow processed this in silence. “That doesn’t mean Ritter failed.”

  “No. In fact, I can’t imagine a scenario like that.”

  “Good. What do you want to do?”

  Geli had always pegged Skow as a theoretical warrior, and now that bullets were flying, he was looking to her for guidance. “I pulled my other assets back so nothing would look suspicious. But if I don’t get confirmation of success within five minutes, I’m putting in a team to check things out.”

  “You have cover?”

  “A carpet-service truck.”

  “Is there any chance the shot might have been reported to local police?”

  “Some. If a patrol car shows up before we’ve cleared the scene—”

  “Use your NSA credentials to quarantine the house,” Skow finished, showing some balls at last. “Then contact me immediately.”

  “I will.”

  “I’m out.”

  “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  Geli was tired of being in the dark. “Tennant asked me about the pocket watch.”

  “What pocket watch?”

  Her bullshit detector pegged the meter. “I checked the storage room this morning. Fielding’s personal effects. Everything was there except his pocket watch.”

  Skow was silent for a time. Then he spoke almost to himself, “Fielding must have told him something
about it.”

  “You want to tell me something about it?”

  “That knowledge isn’t necessary for you to do your job.”

  Anger flashed through her. “If it’s on Tennant’s mind, it may be important.”

  “It is important. Just not to you. Keep me posted on the situation at the house.”

  Skow hung up.

  Geli sat in her chair. She hated the mushroom treatment, but that was the nature of intelligence work. Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit. She understood the value of compartmentalizing knowledge. And for the past two years, she hadn’t really needed to know what the scientists were working on. But things had changed. Since the project’s suspension, Peter Godin had been spending a great deal of time away, supposedly visiting his corporate headquarters in California. Geli no longer believed that. Sometimes Godin took Ravi Nara with him, and that made no sense. Nara had nothing to do with Godin Supercomputing, and Godin didn’t even like the neurologist.

  Now Godin had dropped off the face of the earth. Had Fielding’s pocket watch gone with him? How could the watch be so important? When Fielding first came to work at Trinity, an NSA engineer had disassembled the pocket watch to be sure it contained no data-recording device. He’d pronounced the watch clean. It was disassembled again this year, on a day chosen at random. The watch was clean again. So why had it been taken from the storeroom? Geli pictured the watch in her mind. A heavy gold case, scarred from use. There was a chain attached, and a crystal on the end of the chain. But the crystal was transparent. Nothing could be hidden inside that. At least nothing she knew about.

  Her direct line to the NSA flashed red. She routed the call to her headset. “Bauer.”

  “Jim Conklin here.” Conklin was her main contact in Crypto City at Fort Meade.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re still running those intercepts on the pay phones around Andrew Fielding’s house. All pay phones within three miles, twenty-four hours a day. You never rescinded the order.”

  “I never meant to.”

  “Well, with all the intercepts we’re doing for the antiterror effort, we’re running a few days behind on screening for voiceprint matches.”

  Geli’s heartbeat quickened. “You have something?”

  “Andrew Fielding made a call four days ago from a servicestation convenience store. I think you’ll want to hear it.”

  “Can you send me the audio file?”

  “Sure. I’ll use Webworld.” Webworld was the NSA’s secure intranet, and Geli was one of the few outsiders linked to it. “You want the spectrograms of the matches?”

  “No. I know Fielding’s voice.”

  “Two minutes.”

  Geli clicked off, looked at her watch, then said, “JPEG, Fielding, Andrew.” A photo of Fielding filled her computer screen. The white-haired Englishman had an angular, handsome face that bloomed red in the cheeks. Fielding had liked his gin. But it was his eyes that got you. Sparkling blue, they held a childish mischief that almost blinded you to the deep intelligence beneath it. As Geli looked into those eyes, she realized how formidable an adversary Fielding was. He might be dead, but he was still controlling events.

  An audio file icon popped onto the corner of her screen. The NSA was nothing if not efficient. She was about to open it when her headset beeped an alert code from her team in the carpet-service van.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a police cruiser coming up the road. Somebody must have reported the shot.”

  Geli closed her eyes. She would have to invoke her federal authority and quarantine Tennant’s house. The NSA’s presence in Chapel Hill was about to become the knowledge of municipal police.

  “I’m on my way.”

  “We’re gone.”

  Geli hit an alarm button on her desk, alerting every member of her security teams, whether inside the building, on surveillance duty, or sleeping at home. In two minutes a net would close on David Tennant’s house from every direction.

  Chapter

  14

  I was about to drive out of my subdivision when I realized I was making a mistake. The open highway looked like escape but wasn’t. I knew Geli Bauer better than that. Yanking the wheel left, I did a 180 in the middle of Hickory Street, then turned onto Elm.

  “Why are you turning around?” Rachel asked from the floor on the passenger side.

  “Have you ever hunted rabbit?”

  She blinked in confusion. “Rabbit? I’m from New York.”

  A woman on a mountain bike rode by us and waved, a toddler in a baby seat perched on the back fender. In our present circumstances, the image looked surreal.

  “When a rabbit runs for its life, it takes a zigzag course at lightning speed. But it always circles back to where it started. It’s a good escape strategy. Of course, rabbit hunters know that. That’s why they use dogs. The dogs chase the rabbit while the hunter stands there waiting to shoot him when he comes back around.”

  Rachel’s face showed disgust. “That’s barbaric.”

  “It puts food on the table. The point is, the people hunting expect us to run like humans. But we’re going to take a lesson from the rabbit.”

  “What do we gain by doing that?”

  “A car, for one thing. We wouldn’t get five miles in this one. Yours, either.”

  “Whose car can we get?”

  “Just sit tight.”

  Elm Street circumnavigated my subdivision. When I came to the east entrance of Oak Street—which paralleled Willow—I turned left. As I drove, I watched between the houses to catch a glimpse of the roofs on my street. When I saw my own, I began scanning the lawns ahead. A hundred yards up Oak Street, I saw what I wanted. A blue- and-white FOR SALE sign. The house it advertised had a long, curving driveway with no cars parked in it. Turning into the drive, I pulled quickly off the cement and rolled behind a thick stand of boxwood shrubs.

  “Follow me,” I said, getting out.

  Rachel climbed off the floor and opened her door. Her face was pale, her hands shivering. The shooting at my house had put her into shock. It had rattled me, too. I had killed before. I’d injected my own brother with narcotics and potassium, then watched the last spark of consciousness wink out of his eyes. But blowing a man’s brains out was something else. And when Geli Bauer learned that I’d killed one of her people, she would move heaven and earth to take her revenge.

  I walked over to Rachel and pulled her against me, hugging her as I once had my wife and daughter. “We’re going to be all right,” I said, not really believing it. Her hair smelled familiar. My wife had used the same shampoo. I put the memories out of my mind. “But we have to run. Do you understand?”

  She nodded into my chest. I stroked her hair, still not quite believing what had happened myself. Thirty minutes ago, I’d believed the nightmare was over. Ewan McCaskell would call back, and the president would take control of Trinity. Now that hope was blown to hell.

  “We’re going to walk a little ways,” I said, “and then we’re going to borrow a car. Nobody will bother us. With me carrying Fielding’s box, it’ll look like we’re selling something. Can you do it?”

  She nodded.

  I got Fielding’s box from my car and started down Oak Street, Rachel beside me. “There’s a hedge in these backyards that runs behind the lots on my street. You’ll see it in a minute. We’re going to cut through it to my street. I’ll tell you when.”

  Using the sidewalk, we quickly covered the hundred yards back to where I’d seen my roof. I walked her past two more lawns, then said, “Right here. Cut between the houses.”

  A wooden privacy fence blocked the space between the two houses I’d chosen.

  “If the gate’s locked, we’ll climb over,” I said.

  “What if someone’s in the backyard?”

  “I’ll deal with it.”

  The gate opened easily. The backyard contained some plastic playground equipment and a parked lawn mower, but no people. With my hand
in the small of Rachel’s back, I guided her across the yard. There was no gate in the back fence, so I bent and interlocked my fingers, boosted her over, then slung myself up and dropped to the ground beside her.

  The space between the fence and the hedge was only a couple of feet wide. I crawled through an opening at the bottom of the bushes, then got to my feet behind the utility shed where I’d hidden Fielding’s box earlier. Rachel followed, grabbed my hand, and pulled herself up. I didn’t know what the shed’s owner did for a living, but I assumed he had some sort of sales job, because he was hardly ever home.