by Greg Isle
As I hit the fourth-floor landing, an image of Fielding sitting in a cloud of smoke filled my mind. The Englishman smoked like a chimney, but smoking was forbidden everywhere in the Trinity complex, even for the top scientists. This wasn't due to federal regulations; Peter Godin couldn't stand a hint of smoke in the air.
Ever resourceful, Fielding had found a place where he could indulge his habit. In the materials lab on the second floor was a large vacuum chamber that had been used during the project's early stages, for testing the properties of carbon nanotubes. There were smoke detectors in the lab, but none in the vacuum chamber. Fielding had managed to pile enough boxes around the chamber that most people had forgotten its existence. When I couldn't locate him anywhere else, I'd always known I could find him there.
If Fielding were in the Trinity building and afraid for his life, I reasoned, wouldn't he have tried to distance the crystal watch fob from himself? He wouldn't hide it in his office, which would certainly be searched. But the vacuum chamber was only one floor away, and he could be fairly sure that I would eventually search his informal sanctum sanctorum.
I exited the Stairwell and made my way down the hall to the materials lab. Two engineers recruited from Sun Microsystems walked out of the lab and separated to pass me, heading toward the elevators. I forced a smile, then slowed my walk so that I would reach the materials lab after they rounded the corner behind me.
The lab was empty. I moved swiftly to the pile of boxes that obscured the steel vacuum chamber and began uncovering the door. The forbidding machine was like a large decompression chamber for scuba divers, with a porthole window and a large iron wheel set in its hatchlike door. I turned the wheel that unlocked that hatch. The lights came on automatically.
My heart thudded when I stepped inside. I remembered wide shelves cluttered with tools, clamps, and old scraps of carbon. There was nothing in the chamber now. Even the shelves were gone. The entire floor looked as though it had been steam cleaned.
"Geli Bauer,” I breathed.
If Fielding's pocket watch had been hidden here, she had it now. I hurried out of the chamber, half-expecting her to confront me in the lab. But the lab was still, as was the hall. Slipping back into the stairwell, I descended to the third floor and walked toward the security desk, where Henry awaited me.
Upon exiting Trinity, staff had to submit to a body search to prove they weren't trying to remove computer disks or papers from the building. How Fielding must have laughed inside every time Henry ignored his crystal watch fob. As I approached the desk, I realized that Henry was speaking into his collar radio.
"What's up, Henry?" I said, pausing to wait for his pat-down.
"Just a minute, Doc."
My heartbeat accelerated. I imagined Geli Bauer giving him orders: Don't let Tennant out of the building . . .
"I really need to get moving," I said. "I have an appointment."
Henry looked at me, then said into the mike, "He's right here."
Jesus. If Geli had to ask if I was at the door, that meant she wasn't watching me on camera from the security office. She was probably on her way here. My limbic brain was telling me to run like hell, but how far would I get? Harmless-looking Henry was armed with a 9mm Glock automatic. Still, it took a supreme act of will not to bolt for the door.
Henry listened to his ear-bud for a few seconds, looking confused. "Are you sure?" he asked. "All right."
He came around the desk, and I suddenly knew that if Henry reached for his gun, survival instinct would dictate the next few seconds. I tensed for action when his hands dropped, but then he squatted and began his normal pat-down, starting with my pant legs.
Geli had decided to let me go. Why? Because she can't be sure whether I've talked to the president.
"Good to go, Doc," Henry said, patting me on the shoulder. "For a second I thought she—I mean they—wanted me to hold you here."
As I looked into Henry's face, I saw something in his eyes that I didn't understand. Then I did. He didn't like Geli Bauer any more than I did. In fact, he was afraid of her.
The minute I cleared the armored-glass doors, my cell phone began ringing. I hit SEND and held the phone to my ear.
"Hello?"
"David! Where the hell have you been?"
"Don't say your name," I snapped, recognizing Rachel's voice.
"I've been trying to reach you for an hour!"
No cellular transmissions could pass through the copper cladding that encased the Trinity building. "Just tell me what's wrong."
"Did you come to my office this morning?"
"Your office? Of course not. Why?"
"Because someone practically tore it to pieces. Your file is missing, and everything's out of place."
I sucked in a lungful of air and forced myself to keep walking toward my car. "I haven't been near your office today. Why do you think I'd do something like that?"
"To bolster your delusions in my eyes! To make me think they're real!"
She sounded close to hysteria. Had she understood nothing last night? "We need to talk. But not like this. Are you at your office now?"
"No, I'm on Highway 15."
Rachel could take 15 all the way from the Duke Medical Center to Chapel Hill. "Are you in a cab?"
"No. I went and got my car this morning."
"Meet me where you saw me making the videotape."
"You mean—"
"You know where. I'm on my way. Hang up now."
She did.
It took all my self-control not to run the last few steps to my car.
Chapter 12
Rachel's white Saab was parked in front of my house. Rachel herself was sitting on my front steps, her chin in her hands like a college girl waiting for a class to begin. Instead of her usual silk blouse and skirt, she wore blue jeans and a white cotton oxford shirt. I tapped my horn. She looked up, unsmiling. Waving once, I pulled into my garage and walked through the house to open the front door.
"Sorry you got here first," I said, glancing up the street for unfamiliar vehicles.
Her eyes were red from crying. She went into the living room but didn't sit. Instead, she paced around my sparse furniture, unable to remain still.
"Tell me what happened," I said.
She paused long enough to fix me with a glare, then continued pacing. "I was at the hospital, checking on a patient who attempted suicide two days ago."
"And?"
"I decided to run by my office and dictate some charts. When I got there, I realized someone else had been there. I mean, the office was locked, but I could tell, you know?"
"You said the place was torn to pieces."
She averted her eyes. "Not exactly. But lots of things were out of place. I know, because I like my things a certain way. Books arranged from small to large, papers stacked . . . never mind."
"You're obsessive-compulsive."
Her dark eyes flashed. "There are worse problems than having OCD."
"Agreed. You said my file was missing?"
"Yes."
"Any other patient records missing?"
"No."
"That's it, then. What I don't understand is why they would steal my file. Why not just photocopy it? I'm sure they've read it before. They probably read it every week."
Rachel stopped pacing and looked at me in disbelief. "How could they do that?"
"By sneaking someone into your office. Probably the nights of my appointment days."
"Why didn't I notice anything before?"
"Maybe this time they were in a hurry."
"Why?"
"They're frightened."
"Of what?"
"Me. Of what I've done. What I might do."
She sat on the edge of my sofa as though to collect herself. "I need to be clear on this, David. Just who is they? The NSA?"
"Yes and no. They're the security people for Project Trinity, which is funded by the NSA."
"And this is who you say murdered Andrew Fielding?"
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"Yes."
She closed her eyes. "I had a friend at the medical center test that white powder you gave me. It's not contaminated with anthrax or any other known pathogen or poison." Her eyes opened and looked into mine. "It's sand, David. Gypsum. White sand. No threat to anybody."
My mind began spinning with the possible significance of that. Microchips were made of silicon, a kind of sand. Was gypsum the basis of some new semiconductor Godin had discovered? Maybe Fielding was trying to tell me something like that without being overt—
"Have you tried to reach the president again?" Rachel asked.
I opened my mouth in surprise.
"What?"
"I forgot to check my answering machine. Excuse me."
I went to the kitchen. The machine's LED showed one message waiting. When I hit the button, a New England accent crackled from the tiny speaker:
"Dr. Tennant? This is Ewan McCaskell, the president's chief of staff. I remember you from your visit a couple of years ago. I just received your message. I'm sure you understand that we're very busy over here. I can't involve the president until I know what this is about, but I do want to talk to you as soon as possible. Please remain at this number, and I'll call back as soon as time permits."
My relief was almost overwhelming. I put my hand on the counter to steady myself. The caller ID unit showed that McCaskell’s call had come in twenty minutes ago.
"Who was that?" Rachel asked.
I replayed the message for her.
"I have to admit," she said, "that sounded like Ewan McCaskell."
"Like him? That was him. Didn't you understand anything you saw last night?"
She pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat in front of me. "Listen to me, David. Do you know why I'm here? Why I helped you last night?"
"Tell me."
"Your book."
"My book?"
"Yes. Every day in the hospital I see things they never told me about in medical school. Cases that fall into the cracks between reality and legality. Dilemmas the government hasn't got the guts to face. I do what I can about them ... maybe I complain to another doctor, but that's it. You wrote it down for the world to read, without giving a damn what would happen to you. Abortion. Last-year-of-life care versus prenatal care. Euthanasia. My God, you wrote about assisting your own brother to die."
I closed my eyes and saw an image of my older brother, unable to move anything but his eyelids due to the ravages of ALS, then unable to move even those. We'd made a pact. At that point I would help him end what remained of his life.
"I nearly left that out,'" I said.
She gripped my forearm. "But you didn't. You took the risk, and you helped countless people by leaving it in. People you'll never know. But they know you. I know you. And now you're ill. You've needed help for months, and conventional therapy wasn't working. I couldn't break through the walls you'd put up." Her hand tightened on my arm, and she smiled encouragingly. believe you're involved in some kind of special work, okay? But tell me this. If the Trinity computer is all you say it is, then why you? You know? You wrote a great book. The president knew your brother. But does that qualify you to make judgments about the kind of science you've told me about?"
She was right. There was more to it. I'd kept my past secret for so long that to speak of it now required a surprising act of will.
"My father was a nuclear physicist," I said softly. "He worked at Los Alamos during the war. He was the youngest physicist to work on the Manhattan Project."
Her dark eyes flashed. "Go on."
"My undergraduate degree is in theoretical physics. MIT."
"My God. I really know nothing about you, do I?"
I touched her shoulder. "Sure you do. Look, my father was part of the group that began to protest using the bomb. Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, those guys. The Germans had surrendered, and the Japanese just didn't have the resources to build an atomic bomb. My father's group wanted our bomb demonstrated for the Japanese army, not used on civilians. Their dissent was ignored, and Hiroshima became history.
"But we live in a different world now. Once the president realized the implications of Trinity—we're talking about liberating human intelligence from the body, for God's sake—he knew he'd be vulnerable politically if the public learned he'd gone ahead without concern for ethics or morality. Look at the craziness that surrounds cloning and fetal tissue research. So he demanded ethical oversight. He knew my book, he knew the public trusts me to tell the truth, and he trusted me because he'd known my brother. Beyond that, my pedigree for conscientious objection went back to my father and the Manhattan Project. So, who better than I?"
Rachel was shaking her head. "Why did you become a doctor rather than a physicist?"
She couldn't stop being a shrink. Or maybe she was just being a woman. "After Hiroshima, my dad led a troubled life. Edward Teller was gearing up to build the hydrogen superbomb. Oppenheimer opposed it. So did my father. Dad requested a transfer. General Groves didn't want to release him from weapons work, but they agreed to give him a more technical job, one more removed from the actual warheads. They moved him to the national lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee."
"Why didn't he just quit altogether?"
"Eventually he did. But this was the Cold War. There were different kinds of pressure then. Oppenheimer was persecuted for years for his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Dad also met my mother at Oak Ridge. Things were better there. They had my brother. I was born much later. An accident, really." I smiled at the memory of my parents revealing this fact to me. "I grew up in Oak Ridge, but when I was a teenager, Dad quit nuclear physics and moved us to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could work on the space program."
"I still don't see the medical connection."
"My mother was a pediatrician in Oak Ridge. She did a lot of good. It didn't take a genius to see that she was a lot happier in her work than my dad had been. That's what influenced me."
I glanced down at the phone, willing it to ring again. "Last night, I only told you part of the truth. When the president offered me this position, it felt oddly like poetic justice. I was being given the opportunity my father never had at Los Alamos. The chance to exercise some control over a great undertaking that was likely to change the world forever. For good or evil. I sensed that that the day I visited the Oval Office, and that's what put me here."
Rachel took a deep breath and slowly blew out the air. "It's all real, isn't it? Trinity, I mean."
"Yes. And I'm damned glad McCaskell called me back. We need the president badly."
I stood up, half wanting to replay McCaskell's message, but a wave of fatigue rolled through me. I hoped it was just exhaustion, but then the familiar high-pitched ringing began in my back teeth. Remembering I had no amphetamines left, I took a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge, popped it open, and drank a long pull for the caffeine.
"David?" Rachel was watching me strangely. "Are you all right? You look shaky."
"I may go out," I said, taking another gulp of the soda.
"Go out?" Her eyes widened. "Narcolepsy?"
She'd never witnessed one of my episodes. As I nodded, a shadow seemed to pass over my eyes. It left me with a vague feeling of threat, as though someone were in the room with us, there but unseen. "I'm missing something," I thought aloud.
"What are you talking about?"
An image of Geli Bauer came into my mind. "We're in danger."
Rachel looked worried, more about me than any external threat. "What kind of danger?"
"There's something about the way all this is happening. Godin giving us time off . . . my chart being stolen from your office . . . McCaskell's call. I'm missing something, but I'm too tired to think of what."
"I thought McCaskell's call was good news."
"It is. It's just..." As drowsy as I was, I felt a desperate need to have my gun in my hand. "I want you to do me a favor. Wait here for two minutes."
"What?" Worry darkened her eyes. "Whe
re are you going?"
"To my neighbor's house." I hurried to the back door.
"David! What if you pass out?"
"Don't answer the door!" I called. "But if the phone rings, answer it and say I'll be right back."
I ran outside and crashed through the thick hedges that bordered the backyards of the houses on my street. I sprinted the length of three backyards, then cut back through the hedge behind a neighbor's utility shed. I had slipped out of my house last night about 2 a.m. and I had hidden Fielding's box beneath it. Inside the box were Fielding's electronic gadgets, my partially recorded videotape, Fielding's letter, and my pistol. I got on my knees and retrieved the box, then crawled back through the hedge and sprinted back to my own yard. By the time I reached it, I felt like a drunk running through an unfamiliar city.
Rachel was waiting just inside the back door. "That's the stuff from last night," she said. "Why do you need that?"
I tilted the box so she could see the gun.
She stepped back. "David, you're scaring me."
"You need to get out of here. You'll be fine for the time it takes me to tell my story to McCaskell." I set the box on the floor, put the gun in my waistband, then led her to the front of the house. "Spend the rest of the day somewhere public, like a mall. Don't go home until you hear from me."
She pivoted and stopped me from pushing her toward the door. Her assertiveness seemed to bring us eye to eye. "Stop this! You're so out of it right now you could shoot yourself by accident."
I started to reply, but my words went spinning off into the dark edges of my mind. I would be unconscious in less than a minute.
"I'm about to go under."
She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the hall, looking for a place to lay me down. I pointed to the door of my guest bedroom. Sensing that I was about to faint, she rushed me through the door and let me fall face-down across the mattress. "Do you have any medication?"
"I ran out."
Her footsteps moved away. I heard cabinet doors banging, then Rachel's voice talking to herself. When the voice seemed closer, I managed to roll over. There was a dark silhouette in the doorway.