The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  “How can you be sure those computers are in the U.S.?” asked McCaskell.

  “I can’t be. But even if they’re in Asia, Trinity has to communicate with them over phone and data lines, and those are about to be fried by an EMP.”

  Rachel had forgotten Ravi Nara, but now the neurologist stood and spoke in a quavering voice. “General, with all respect for your plan, we have over twenty minutes before that missile reaches here. You have aircraft here, helicopters. Nonessential personnel could be evacuated now.”

  “Like yourself?” said General Bauer.

  “And the women.”

  “O ye of little faith,” murmured General Bauer. “Take your seat, Dr. Nara. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Look!” cried John Skow, pointing to a screen to the right of the one showing Senator Jackson’s committee. “Oh, God…”

  Rachel’s gaze followed Skow’s pointing finger. Blue letters crawled across the Trinity screen like the newsline at the bottom of a CNN broadcast.

  We’ve entered the margin of error. Missile should be two minutes from ground zero at Norfolk, but we could have detonations at any moment.

  Tennant’s not getting anywhere, General. Your bomber’s in position. I think it’s time to launch the EMP strike.

  “What are we looking at?” asked McCaskell.

  Skow whispered, “Trinity’s broken our codes.”

  “Gabriel to Arcangel!” shouted General Bauer, grabbing the microphone. “Execute! Execute!”

  As the radar navigator in the B-52 asked for clarification, another voice drowned him out. Rachel heard confusion in the second voice, then panic. Someone screamed something about haywire instruments. Then the transmission went dead.

  “What happened?” asked McCaskell. “Did they launch the weapon?”

  “Gabriel to Arcangel!” shouted General Bauer. “Acknowledge!”

  The technician at another console turned toward him. “Sir, they can’t hear you.”

  Bauer whipped his head toward the tech. “What?”

  “Arcangel is going down. They’ve got no comm at all. No UHF, no VHF. Nothing.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’m patched into Kansas City Center. Arcangel’s IFF beacon went off twenty seconds ago, and a Delta Airlines 727 just reported the lights of a very large aircraft that appeared to be in an uncontrolled spin.”

  Disbelief slackened General Bauer’s face. “What the hell happened?”

  “No idea, sir.”

  The technician sitting beneath Bauer cocked his head as he listened to his headset. “General…NRO satellites detected a high-energy beam directed toward the last-known position of Arcangel.”

  “What kind of beam?”

  “A high-energy particle beam.”

  “From where?”

  “Space.”

  “Space?”

  “Yes, sir. It must have come from a space-based weapons platform.”

  “General Bauer!” said Senator Jackson. “What the hell is going on there?”

  “Arcangel appears to be down, Senator.”

  “What do you mean ‘down’?”

  “It was probably destroyed by a weapons system I thought was still in development.”

  “Whose system? The Russians?”

  “No, sir. The Russians don’t have anything like that. Our air force must have some component of its Osiris system deployed. It’s a prototype antimissile system, but it was clearly powerful enough to fry the avionics of our B-52. It must be under Trinity’s control now.”

  “Did the bomber launch the EMP weapon?”

  “I doubt it, sir. The timing was too perfect. Trinity must have broken our codes some time ago. It knew exactly what we were doing.”

  “But, General—”

  “Listen to me, Senator.” General Bauer’s nerves were finally showing the strain. “In a very short time, everyone here will be dead. You’re going to be on your own. Only those in Containment will survive here, and Washington will be hit shortly after.”

  Jackson looked at his fellow senators, then back at General Bauer. “Can you get inside the Containment building?”

  “Not without the computer’s permission.”

  “Look at the screen!” Rachel cried, surprised to hear her own voice.

  Trinity was sending a message to the Situation Room.

  YOU WERE WARNED. YOU DISREGARDED MY WARNING. YOU MUST SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES. YOU MUST LEARN.

  Rachel looked at the NORAD screen. The missile tracks moving toward White Sands and Washington were slowly blinking red.

  “Type what I tell you!” shouted McCaskell.

  “Do it,” said General Bauer.

  “We made a mistake,” said McCaskell, trying to keep his voice under control. “You can’t hold millions of people responsible for the error of a few misguided individuals.”

  Trinity’s response flashed up the moment McCaskell’s words were keyed in.

  I HAVE DONE NOTHING. THOSE LIVES WERE IN YOUR HANDS, AS WERE YOURS. YOU HAVE THROWN THEM AWAY. IT WAS TO BE EXPECTED. A HUMAN CHILD PLAYS WITH FIRE UNTIL IT IS BURNED.

  General Bauer turned away from the screen and walked to his chair. Rachel saw defeat etched into his face.

  “General?” said Senator Jackson. “What options do we have?”

  Bauer looked down the table at his daughter. Geli stared at him like an enraptured spectator watching the end of some great tragedy.

  “None,” said the general, collapsing into his chair.

  Ravi Nara came to his feet again, his eyes wild. “General, you must ask the computer to let us into Containment! Peter Godin was my friend. He’ll let us inside!”

  “You tried to kill Godin,” General Bauer said calmly. “You think he wants to spare you now?”

  “He will!”

  The general motioned for a soldier to restrain Nara.

  “We don’t all have to die!” Nara screamed as the soldier grabbed him. “Please!”

  The neurologist was too distraught to be restrained by one man. The general called for another guard, but suddenly Geli Bauer materialized beside the wrestling men. She grabbed Nara’s neck with almost lazy speed, took him to the floor, then rolled him onto his stomach and jammed a knee into his back. A guard bound Nara’s wrists with plastic flex-cuffs, then led him out of the hangar. General Bauer nodded to Geli but said nothing.

  “General,” said Senator Jackson. “There must be something you can do about those last two missiles. You name it, we’ll authorize it.”

  “There’s nothing, Senator. It’s up to Dr. Tennant now.”

  Chapter

  43

  I stood in shock before the black sphere, watching a display screen that had appeared from behind a panel in Trinity’s base. The bomb blast had created a crater a half mile wide in the ocean, and I had no doubt that a tidal wave would soon smash into the Virginia coastline. As the mushroom cloud climbed high into the atmosphere, part of my mind tried to convince me that I was looking at some barren Pacific atoll, not a patch of ocean just a few miles from a major U.S. city. I looked away from the screen and focused on the blue lasers firing in the sphere.

  “You must destroy the last two missiles,” I said.

  “Nothing compels me to.”

  “How much time is left?”

  “Twenty-two minutes.”

  I’d thought the next detonations would happen at any moment. “But…that means you launched those two missiles on purpose.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the point in more killing? You’ve shown what you can do.”

  “There will be relatively little loss of life from the first warhead, given the missile’s malfunction.”

  “Do you really have to kill to make your point?”

  “History answers yes to that question. Man is slow to learn. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two hundred thousand died. Man learned from that.”

  “But you’ll kill millions!”

  “A small number measured
against the seven billion souls on the planet. Sacrificing the few to save the many is a time-honored human tradition.”

  “You’re not doing this to save people. You’re doing it to enslave them.”

  “A matter of perspective, Doctor. If you saw through my eyes, you would understand.”

  I frantically searched my mind for logical arguments. “If you wipe out the U.S. government, you’ll be making things harder on yourself, not easier. People will panic.”

  “They will also realize there is no going back.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Desperation had blanked my mind. There was only one option left.

  “If you allow those missiles to explode, I won’t finish telling you my visions.”

  The computer was silent for several moments. “You believe this threat will force me to submit to your will?”

  “I believe you want to know what I know more than you want to detonate those warheads.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there are limits to even your knowledge. Science can take you back to a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang, but no farther. It can take you forward a few billion years—maybe even to the end of the universe—but no farther. Only I can do that.”

  Trinity’s response was something like a laugh. “You believe you can. But it should be as obvious to you as it is to me that your visions are almost certainly creations of your mind. Your own psychiatrist believes you’re paranoid, perhaps even schizophrenic.”

  “So why are you listening to me?”

  Silence from the sphere.

  “It’s because the sum of human knowledge has been loaded into your memory, and you still feel empty. But I have the answer you want. So…I ask you again. Please destroy those missiles.”

  “You don’t need to worry about the missiles. This building is hardened and shielded. You’ll survive both the blast and the radiation.”

  “I’m not worried about myself!”

  “Do you really care so much about people you don’t know?”

  I wondered if “Peter Godin” were finally vanishing into an emotionless digital entity. “I do know someone outside this building. There’s a woman there. She saved my life once. Probably more than once. She’s believed in me, helped me search for the truth. I don’t want her to die.”

  “Let us continue our discussion.”

  “No. I love this woman. I want her to live. I want to spend whatever time I have left with her.”

  “That is not much time.”

  I closed my eyes, unable to summon more persuasive words.

  “If you want Dr. Weiss to live, tell me the rest of it.”

  THE SITUATION ROOM

  Rachel sat at the table in the Situation Room, mentally replaying David’s last words to Trinity. His declaration of love had had no effect on the computer, but it had given her some peace.

  “What do we do now, General?” asked Senator Jackson.

  “There’s only one thing we can do here,” General Bauer replied.

  “Evacuate.” The general turned to face the room. “I’m going to check on the possibility of air evacuation. I want everyone to remain here. I’ll return very shortly.”

  He walked quickly toward the door, but before he reached it, he turned and looked pointedly at Ewan McCaskell and John Skow. Then he motioned for them to follow him.

  As the hangar door closed, Geli Bauer slid into the seat across from Rachel. Rachel tried not to look at the scar on her cheek, but it was impossible to ignore. Geli wore it arrogantly, like a badge of honor.

  “Is Tennant crazy or sane?” Geli asked.

  Rachel answered without thought. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “This God obsession of his is bullshit. But the funny thing is, if it weren’t for that, you’d be dead. Because if you hadn’t gone to Israel, I’d have found you.”

  Rachel knew she was right. David’s decision to follow his visions had pulled them out of the line of fire when almost nothing else could have. Rachel doubted that Geli Bauer had missed many targets in her career.

  “So here we are,” said Rachel. “At the end of the world.”

  A hint of a smile touched Geli’s lips. “Confession time?”

  “I have nothing to confess. What about you? Did you kill Andrew Fielding?”

  Geli glanced around to make sure no one was near. “Yes.”

  Rachel was reminded of a little girl fascinated by her own cruelty. “How does a woman come to do what you do? You carry a lot of anger around, don’t you?”

  Geli touched the bandage over the bullet wound in her neck. “I can see how you might get that feeling.”

  Rachel’s eyes didn’t waver. “You were angry long before that.”

  “You playing shrink with me now?”

  “I am a shrink.”

  Geli laughed bitterly. “My first shrink seduced me when I was fourteen. I got the last laugh, though. He killed himself over me.”

  “What about your father? He seems like a real throwback. Dr. Strangelove stuff.”

  “If you only knew.”

  Rachel wondered what secret misery drove this cold woman. “There’s something dark between the two of you.”

  “No. Just your ordinary army family hell.”

  “You hate him, yet it seems you’ve tried to live up to all his expectations of you.”

  Geli’s ironic smile faded. “Are you in love with Tennant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you still love him if it turns out he’s crazy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you understand a little about me and my father.” She rubbed her forefinger repeatedly against her thumb, like someone desperate for a cigarette. “Who killed the man who came to Tennant’s house with a gun? You or Tennant?”

  For the first time, Rachel sensed some unguarded emotion. “Why do you care? Were you in love with him?”

  “We fucked sometimes.”

  “You really work at being hard, don’t you?”

  One sculpted eyebrow lifted. The moment of vulnerability had passed. “Why are you talking to me, Doctor?”

  “I suppose I’m trying to find out how dangerous you are.”

  “You mean, am I here to do my duty or to get revenge on you two?”

  “Something like that.”

  The cold smile returned. “Maybe they’re one and the same. Any more questions?”

  Rachel whispered so softly that her words were almost inaudible. “Is your father really going to evacuate us?”

  Geli’s eyes glinted. “You’re smarter than I thought. I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Ravi Nara sat on the sand outside the Situation Room hangar, his muscles clenched in terror, his eyes on the dark sky. There was no stockade at the White Sands facility, so the guard who’d restrained him had handcuffed him to a flagpole by the door. A neutron bomb, the general had said. Ravi was pondering the grisly death caused by radiation poisoning when the hangar door burst open and General Bauer marched out, barking orders into a walkie-talkie.

  John Skow and the president’s chief of staff followed the general. The three men walked fifteen meters from the door and stopped. They probably never saw Ravi in the darkness.

  “I hope to God you’ve got some kind of plan, General,” said Ewan McCaskell. “Because evacuating this place doesn’t do a damned thing for Washington.”

  “I’ve got a plan. But I don’t think I’m the only one. Skow?”

  The NSA man nodded. “We can kill Trinity.”

  “How?”

  “Isolate it from the Internet. That’s the same as killing it.”

  “Talk fast.”

  “When Godin died, the computer crashed and the Russian missiles launched. Cause and effect, right?”

  General Bauer nodded.

  “Trinity has to be sending out some sort of safety signal. A constant signal telling certain computers that all is well with Trinity. When Godin died, that signal was disrupted, and the Russian missiles were launched.
If we can separate that ‘all is well’ signal from the rest of Trinity’s output, we can probably duplicate it. Then all we have to do is feed our own version into the data line Trinity is using and cut Trinity’s power. Trinity will be dead, but the computers tasked with retaliation will have no idea anything is wrong.”