The Footprints of God

by Greg Isle

I nodded reluctantly. "Raising Lazarus from the dead."

  "Yes. And he also resurrected a little girl, if I'm not mistaken."

  "Yes. But I don't think that's the significance of these dreams."

  Rachel smiled with infinite patience. "Well, one thing is certain. Eventually, your subconscious will make its message clear."

  That turned out to be our last session. Because that night, my dreams changed again, and I had no intention of telling Rachel how.

  The new dream was clearer than any that had come before, and though I was speaking in a foreign language, I could understand my words. I was walking down a sandy road. I came to a well. The water was low in the well, and I had nothing to draw it with. After a time, a woman came with an urn on a rope. I asked if she would draw me some water. She appeared surprised that I would speak to her, and I sensed that we were of different tribes. I told her the water in the well would not cure her thirst. We talked for a time, and she began to look at me with appraising eyes.

  "I can see you are a prophet," she said. "You see many things that are hidden."

  "I'm no prophet," I told her.

  She watched me in silence for a while. Then she said, "They speak of a Messiah who will come someday to tell us things. What do you think of that?"

  I looked at the ground, but words of profound conviction rose unbidden into my throat. I looked at the woman and said, "I that speak to you am he."

  The woman did not laugh. She knelt and touched my knee, then walked away, looking back over her shoulder again and again.

  When I snapped out of that dream, I was soaked in sweat. I didn't lift the phone and call Rachel for an emergency appointment. I saw no point. I no longer believed any dream interpretation could help me, because I was not dreaming. I was remembering.

  "What are you thinking about?" Rachel asked from the passenger seat.

  We were nearing the UNC campus. "How you got here."

  She shifted in her seat and gave me a concerned look. "I'm here because you missed three sessions, and you wouldn't have done that unless things had taken a turn for the worse. I think your hallucinations have changed again, and they've scared the hell out of you."

  I gripped the wheel tighter but didn't speak. Somewhere, the NSA was listening.

  "Why don't you tell me?" she said. "What could be the harm?"

  "This isn't the time. Or the place."

  The UNC theater was up ahead on the left. To our right the Forest Amphitheater lay in the trees below the road. I made a hard right and coasted down a dark hill on a street that ran between two rows of stately homes, a single-entrance neighborhood that housed tenured professors and affluent young professionals. Fielding had lived in a small, two-story house set well back from the street. Perfect for him and the Chinese wife he hoped to bring to America.

  "Where are we?" Rachel asked.

  "Fielding's house is right up here."

  I looked in the direction of the house but saw only darkness. I'd expected to find the place ablaze with light, as my own had been after I lost Karen and Zooey. I had a moment of panic, a premonition that I'd driven into one of those 1970s conspiracy films where you walk up to a familiar house and find it vacant. Or worse, with an entirely new family living there.

  A porch light clicked on thirty yards from the street. Lu Li must have been watching from a darkened window. I turned my head and scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. I frequently spotted the NSA surveillance cars assigned to tail me. Either the security teams didn't care if we saw them or, more likely, they wanted us to know we were being watched. Tonight I saw nothing suspicious, but I did sense that something wasn't as it should be. Perhaps there were watchers who did not want to be seen. I turned into Fielding's driveway and pulled up to the closed garage door.

  "A Nobel laureate lives here?" Rachel asked, gesturing at the modest house.

  "Lived," I corrected. "Stay here. I'm going to the door alone."

  "For God's sake," she snapped. "This is ridiculous. Just admit this is all a charade, and let's go get some coffee and talk about it."

  I grabbed her arm and looked hard into her eyes. "Listen to me, damn it. It's probably okay, but this is the way we're going to do it. I'll whistle when it's all right for you to come up."

  I walked up to the front door of my dead friend's house, my hands in plain sight, my mind on the .38 in my pocket.

  Chapter 5

  Geli Bauer listened intently as Corelli reported from the Fielding house.

  "They're going inside now. Tennant went up first. The shrink is hanging back. Now she's going up. Wait ... I think the doc is carrying."

  "Which doc?"

  "Oh. Tennant. He's got a gun in his pocket. Right front."

  "You see the butt?"

  "No, but it looks like a revolver."

  What the hell does Tennant think he's up to? The cell connection crackled.

  "What do you want me to do?" asked Corelli.

  "Sit tight and make sure the mikes are working."

  "The widow just answered the door. She's pulling them inside."

  "Keep me posted."

  Geli killed the connection to Corelli. If Tennant was carrying a gun, he was afraid for his life. He must believe Fielding had been murdered. But why? The drug that had killed Fielding caused a fatal bleed in the brain—a true stroke. Without an autopsy, murder couldn't be proved. And there would be no autopsy. Tennant must know more than Godin thought he did. If the FedEx letter he'd received had been sent by Fielding, it might have contained some sort of evidence.

  She touched her headset mike and said, "Skow. Home." Her computer dialed John Skow's house in Raleigh.

  "What is it now?" Skow said after two rings.

  "Tennant and Weiss hardly spoke on the way to Fielding's house."

  "So?"

  "It wasn't natural. They're avoiding conversation."

  "Tennant knows he's under surveillance. You've always wanted them all to know that."

  "Yes, but Tennant's never been evasive like this. He's up to something."

  "He's a little freaked-out. It's natural."

  "He's carrying a gun."

  A pause. "Okay, he's a lot freaked-out. We knew he had one in his house."

  "That's different than carrying the damn thing."

  Skow chuckled. "That's the kind of reaction you inspire in people, Geli. Seriously, you need to calm down. Everything is context. We know Tennant was suspicious already. His best friend died today. He's naturally paranoid. What we don't want to do is make him more suspicious."

  She wished she could talk to Godin. She'd tried his private cell number, but he hadn't answered or called back. It was the first time that had ever happened. "Look, I think—"

  "I know what you think," Skow said. "Take no steps without my approval."

  "Asshole," Geli said, but Skow was already off the line.

  She pressed a button that connected her to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Her liaison there was a young man named Conklin.

  "Hello, Ms. Bauer," he said. "You calling about the FedEx query again?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I've got what you want. The package was dropped into a collection box at a post office in Durham, North Carolina. The sender was listed as Lewis Carroll."

  So, Fielding had sent something to Tennant. She knew he hadn't dropped it off himself, but his wife almost certainly had. Geli clicked off and leaned back in her chair, reassessing the situation.

  Seven hours ago, she had killed a man on Godin's order, without knowing precisely why. She had no problem with that. Fielding posed a threat to the project, and under the conditions of her contract, that was enough. If she needed a moral justification, Project Trinity was critical to American national security. Executing Fielding was like killing a spy caught in the act of treason. Still, she was curious as to motive. Godin had told her that Fielding was sabotaging the project and stealing Trinity data. Geli wasn't sure. Rigorous precautions had been taken to prevent sabotage. No o
ne could physically move data in or out of the building. And as for electronic theft, Skow's NSA techs made sure that not a single electron left the building without first being cleared by him.

  So, why did Fielding have to die? Six weeks ago, he and Tennant had gotten the project suspended by raising medical and ethical concerns. If that were the motive, then why wait to kill Fielding? And why kill only him? Peter Godin had appeared almost desperate when he visited Geli last night. And she had never seen Godin desperate before. Was he that anxious to get the project back on-line? She knew little about the technical side of the Trinity research, but she did know that success was still quite a ways off. She could read that in the faces of the scientists and engineers who reported to work every day.

  Project Trinity was building—or attempting to build—a supercomputer. Not a conventional supercomputer like a Cray or a Godin, but a computer dedicated to artificial intelligence—a true thinking machine. She didn't know what made this theoretical computer so difficult to build, but Godin had told her a little about the genesis of the project.

  In 1994, a Bell Labs scientist had theorized that an almost infinitely powerful code-breaking computer might be built using the principles of quantum physics. Geli knew little about quantum physics, but she understood why a quantum computer would be revolutionary. Modern digital encryption—the code system used by banks, corporations, and national governments—was based on the factoring of large prime numbers. Conventional supercomputers like those used by the NSA cracked those codes by trying one key after another in sequence, like testing keys in a lock. Breaking a code this way could take hundreds of hours. But a quantum computer—in theory—could try all possible keys simultaneously. The wrong keys would cancel each other out, leaving only the proper one to break the code. And this process wouldn't take hours or even minutes. A quantum computer could break digital encryption codes instantaneously. Such a machine would render present-day encryption obsolete and give whatever country possessed it a staggering strategic advantage over every other nation in the world.

  Given the potential value of such a machine, the NSA had launched a massive secret effort to design and build a quantum computer. Designated Project Spooky, after the description Albert Einstein had given to the action of certain quantum particles—"spooky action at a distance"—it was placed under the direction of John Skow, director of the NSA's Supercomputer Research Center. After spending seven years and $600 million of the NSA's black budget, Skow's team had not produced a prototype that could rival the performance of a Palm Pilot.

  Skow was probably days from being terminated when he received a call from Peter Godin, who had been building conventional supercomputers for the NSA for years. Godin proposed a machine as revolutionary as a quantum computer, but with one attribute the government could not resist: it could be built using refinements of existing technology. .Moreover, after a conversation with Andrew Fielding, the quantum physicist he'd already enlisted to work on his machine, Godin believed there was a strong chance that his computer would have quantum capabilities.

  By dangling these plums before the president. Godin had been able to secure almost every concession he demanded. A dedicated facility to work on his new machine. Virtually unlimited government funds to pay for a crash effort modeled on the Manhattan Project. The right to hire and fire his own scientists. For government oversight he got John Skow, whom he had compromised ears before by bribing Skow to choose Godin computers over Grays for the Supercomputer Research Center. The president's single demand had been on-site ethical oversight, which materialized in the form of David Tennant.

  And Tennant had seemed only a minor annoyance in the beginning. Everything had seemed perfect.

  But now two years had passed. Nearly a billion dollars had been spent, and there was still no working Trinity prototype. In the secret corridors of the NSA's Crypto City, people were starting to draw parallels to the failed Project Spooky. The difference, of course, was Peter Godin. Even Godin's enemies conceded that he had never failed to deliver on a promise. But this time, they whispered, he might have taken on more than he could handle. Artificial intelligence might not be as theoretical as quantum computing, but more than a few companies had gone bankrupt by promising to deliver it.

  Which was why Geli didn't understand the necessity of Fielding's death. Until last night, Godin had apparently viewed the brilliant Englishman as critical to Project Trinity's success. Then suddenly he was expendable. What had changed?

  On impulse, she punched her keyboard and called up a list of Fielding's personal effects, which she had made after his death, at Godin's request. Fielding's office had been a jumble of oddities and memorabilia, more like a college professor's than that of a working physicist.

  There were books, of course. A copy of the Upanishads in the original Sanskrit. A volume of poetry by W. B. Yeats. Three well-thumbed novels by Raymond Chandler. A copy of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Various scientific textbooks and treatises. The other objects were more incongruous. Four pairs of dice, one pair weighted. One cobra's fang. A mint copy of Penthouse magazine. A saxophone reed. A Tibetan prayer bowl. A wall calendar featuring the drawings of M. C. Escher. A tattered poster from the Club-a-Go-Go in Newcastle, England, where Jimi Hendrix had played in 1967, autographed by the guitarist. A framed letter from Stephen Hawking conceding a wager the two men had made about the nature of dark matter, whatever that was. There were store-bought compact discs by Van Morrison, John Coltrane, Miles Davis. The list of objects went on, but all seemed innocuous enough. Geli had flipped through the books herself, and a technician was listening to every track on the CDs, to make sure they weren't fakes being used to store stolen data. Aside from Fielding's office junk, there were his wallet, his clothes, and his jewelry. The jewelry was simple: one gold wedding ring, and one gold pocket watch on a chain, with a crystal fob on the end.

  As she pondered the list, Geli suddenly wondered whether all this stuff was still in the storage room where she had locked it this afternoon. She wondered because John Skow had access to that room. What if Fielding had been killed for something in his possession? Maybe that was why they'd wanted him to die at work. To be sure they got whatever it was they wanted. If so, it would have to be something he carried on him. Otherwise they could simply have taken it from his office. Geli was about to go check the storage room when her headset beeped again.

  "I think we've got a problem," Corelli said.

  "What?"

  "Just like Tennant's house. They're inside, but I'm not hearing any conversation. Just faint echoes, like spillover from mikes in a distant room."

  "Shit." Geli routed the signal from the Fielding house microphones to her headset. She heard only silence. "Something's going down," she murmured. "What do you have with you?'"

  "I've got a parabolic, but it's no good through walls and next to useless with a window. I need the laser rig."

  "That's here." She mentally cataloged her resources. "I'll have it to you in twelve minutes."

  "They could be gone in twelve minutes."

  "What about night vision?"

  "I wasn't expecting anything tactical."

  Goddamn it. "It's all on the way. Check Tennant's car for that FedEx envelope. And give me the address of the driveway where you're parked."

  Geli wrote it down, then pressed a button that sounded a tone in a room at the back of the basement complex. There were beds there, for times when her teams needed to work around the clock. Thirty seconds later, a tall man with long blond hair shuffled sleepily into the control center.

  "Was ist this?" he asked.

  "We're going on alert," Geli said, pointing to a coffee machine against the wall. "Drink."

  Ritter Bock was German, and the only member of her team handpicked by Peter Godin. A former GSG-9 commando, Ritter had worked for an elite private security service that provided bodyguards for Godin when he traveled in Europe and the Far East. Godin had hired Ritter permanently after the former commando averted a ki
dnapping attempt on the billionaire. Ruthless, nerveless, and skilled in areas beyond his counterterror specialty, the twenty-nine-year-old had turned out to be Geli's best operative. And since she had spent her early summers in Germany, there was no language problem.

  Ritter sipped from a steaming mug and looked at Geli over its rim. He had the gray machine-gunner's eyes of the boys who had attracted her as a teenager, while her father was stationed in Germany.

  "I need you to deliver the laser rig to Corelli," she said. "He's parked in a driveway near the UNC campus."

  She tore off the top sheet of her notepad and laid it on the desktop beside her.

  Ritter sniffed and nodded. He hated gofer jobs like this one, but he never complained. He did the scut work and waited patiently for the jobs he was born to do.

  "Is the laser in the ordnance room?" he asked.

  "Yes. Take four night-vision rigs with you."

  He drained the steaming coffee, then picked up the address off the desk and left the room without a word. Geli liked that. Americans felt they had to fill every silence, as though silence were something to be feared. Ritter wasted no effort, either in conversation or in action. This made him valuable. Sometimes they worked together, other times she slept with him. It hadn't caused problems yet. She'd been that way in the army, too, taking her pleasure where she could find it. Just as she had at boarding school in Switzerland. There was always risk. You just had to be able to handle aggressive men—or women—and the fallout after you'd finished with them. She had always been up to both tasks.

  "Corelli?" she said. "What are you hearing now?"

  "Still nothing. Faint spillover. Unintelligible."

  "I'm calling an alert. Ritter's on the way."

  There was only static and silence. Geli smiled. Ritter made the others uncomfortable. "Did you hear me?"

  "Affirmative. I'm at Tennant's car now."

  "What do you see?"

  "No FedEx envelope. He must have taken it inside with him."

  "Okay."

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Go back to your car and wait for Ritter."