The Footprints of God

by Greg Isle

  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?"

  "I'm parked in the driveway of some out-of-town neighbors."

  "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 b
ull 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.

  Geli closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. She had made the case to Godin for taking out Tennant along with Fielding, but the old man had resisted. Yes, Godin conceded, Tennant had broken regulations and spent time with Fielding outside the facility. Yes, Tennant had supported Fielding's effort to suspend the project. And it was Tennant's tie to the president that had made that suspension a reality. But there was no proof that Tennant was part of the Englishman's campaign to sabotage the project, or that he was privy to any of the dangerous information Fielding possessed. Since Geli did not know what that information was, she could not judge the risk of letting Tennant live. She had reminded Godin of the maxim “Better safe than sorry," but Godin did not relent. He would, though. Soon.

  Geli said, "JPEG, Fielding, Lu Li." An image of a dark-haired Asian woman appeared on her monitor. Born Lu Li Cheng, reared in Canton Province, Communist China. Forty years old. Advanced degrees in applied physics.

  "Another mistake," Geli muttered. Lu Li Cheng had no business inside the borders of the United States, much less in the inner circle of the most sensitive scientific project in the country. Geli touched the key that connected her to Thomas Corelli in the surveillance car outside the Fielding house. "You see anything strange over there?"

  "No."

  "How easily could you search Tennant's car when he arrives?"

  "Depends on where he parks."

  "If you see a FedEx envelope in the car, break in, read it, then put it back. And I want video of their arrival."

  "No problem. What are you looking for?"

  “I'm not sure. Just get it."

  Geli removed a pack of Gauloises from her desk, took out a cigarette, and broke off its filter. In the flare of the match she caught her reflection in her computer monitor. A veil of blonde hair, high cheekbones, steel-blue eyes, nasty burn scar. She considered the ugly ridged tissue on her left cheek as much a part of her face as her eyes or mouth. A plastic surgeon had once offered to remove the discolored mark at no cost, but she'd turned him down. Scars had a purpose: to remind their bearer of wounds. The wound that had caused that scar she would never let herself forget.

  She punched a key and routed the signals from the microphones in the Fielding house to her headset. Then she drew deeply on her cigarette, settled back in her chair, and blew a stream of harsh smoke toward the ceiling. Geli Bauer hated many things, but most of all she hated waiting.

  Chapter 4

  We drove in silence, the Acura moving swiftly through the dusk. At this time of evening, it was a quick ride from my suburb to Andrew Fielding's house near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rachel didn't understand my demand for silence, and I didn't expect her to. When I first became involved in Trinity, the xenophobic level of security had stunned me. The other scientists—Fielding included—had worked on defense-related projects before and accepted the intrusive security as a necessary inconvenience. But eventually, even the veterans complained that we were enduring something unprecedented. Surveillance was all-pervasive and reached far beyond the lab complex. Protests were met with a curt reminder that the scientists on the Manhattan Project had been forced to live behind barbed wire to ensure the security of "the device." The freedom we enjoyed came with a price—or so went the party line. Fielding didn't buy it. "Random" polygraph tests occurred almost weekly, and surveillance extended even to our homes. Before I could begin my video today, I'd had to plug pinholes in my walls that concealed tiny microphones. Fielding discovered them with a special scanner he'd built at home and marked the bugs with tiny pins. He had made something of a hobby out of evading Trinity surveillance. He warned me that speaking confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech microphones. The Englishman's cat-and-mouse game with the NSA had amused me at times, but there was no doubt about who had got the last laugh.

  I looked over at Rachel. It felt strange to be in a car with her. In the five years since my wife's death, I'd had relationships with two women, both before my assignment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn't a "relationship" in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.

  She'd come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.

  "David, you don't have to drive around all night," she said. "I'm not going to hold this against you."

  Right, I thought. What's wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? "Be patient," I told her. “It's n
ot much farther."

  She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. "What's the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?"

  "About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because ..." I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my "delusion."

  I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?

  From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my "hallucination" without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn't tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind.

  Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was a marker for schizophrenia, but in the classical sense of visions. Revealed visions, like those described by prophets. For a man who had not believed in God since he was a boy, it was a singularly disturbing state of affairs.

  My dreams had not begun with the first narcoleptic attacks. The first episodes were true blackouts. Holes in my life. Gaps of time, lost forever. I would be working at my office computer, then suddenly become aware of a high-pitched vibration in my body. Generalized at first, it would quickly localize to my teeth. This was a classic onset symptom of narcolepsy. I'd begin to feel drowsy, then suddenly jerk awake in my chair and find that forty minutes had passed. It was like going under anesthesia. No memory at all.