The Footprints of God

by Greg Isle

  "I don't want to make things worse," Rachel said, "but since you can't call the president anymore, what exactly can you do? Where can we go?"

  "I'm hoping something at the cabin will give me a clue. Right now I'm just trying to keep us alive."

  "Why don't we just go public? Drive to Atlanta and tell it all to CNN?"

  "Because the NSA could just say I was lying. What can I really prove at this point?"

  She folded her arms. "You tell me. Would a Nobel laureate like Ravi Nara perjure himself to cover all this up?"

  "He wouldn't hesitate. National security is the ultimate rationalization for lying. And as for the Trinity building, it could be totally empty by now."

  "Lu Li Fielding would support you."

  "Lu Li has disappeared."

  Rachel's face lost some color.

  "Don't assume the worst yet. She had a plan to escape, but I have no idea whether she made it or not."

  "David, you must know more than you're telling me."

  "About Lu Li?

  "About Trinity!"

  She was right. "Okay. A couple of weeks ago, Fielding decided that the suspension of the project was just a ruse to distract the two of us. He thought the real work on Trinity was continuing elsewhere, and maybe had been for a long time."

  "Where else could they be working on it?"

  "Fielding's bet was the R and D labs at Godin Supercomputing in California. Godin's been flying out there quite a bit on his private jet. Nara's gone with him several times."

  "That doesn't prove anything. For all you know, they're playing golf at Pebble Beach."

  "These guys don't play golf. They work. They'd sell their souls for what they want. When you think of Peter Godin, think Faust."

  "What do they want?"

  "Different things. John Skow was about to be canned by the NSA when Godin asked that he administer Project Trinity. That resurrected his career."

  "Why would Peter Godin want a man like that?"

  "I think Godin has something on Skow. He probably compromised him a long time ago and knows Skow will keep quiet about anything he's told to. Working at the NSA doesn't make you rich. But being the man who delivered a Trinity computer to the agency would put Skow in the director's chair. And after that, he'd be invaluable to private corporations. Skow will do anything necessary to make Trinity a reality."

  "And Ravi Nara?"

  "Nara demanded a million dollars a year to come on board. What the government wouldn't pay, Godin made up in cash. Beyond that, Nara's contribution to Trinity would give him a lock on another Nobel. Shared with Godin and Jutta Klein, of course. Fielding would deserve it the most, but the Nobel committee doesn't give posthumous awards. Tack on unlimited research funds for life, Nara's name in the history books ..."

  "And this Jutta Klein?"

  "Klein is straight. She's an older German woman, and she already shared a Nobel with two other Germans back in 1994. She's on loan to Trinity from Siemens. That's the way it's set up with several companies. Godin wanted the best people in the world, so he borrowed them from the R and D divisions of the best computer companies. Sun Micro. Silicon Graphics. In exchange, those companies will get to license certain parts of the Trinity technology once it's declassified. If it's declassified."

  "If Jutta Klein is straight," Rachel said, "maybe she's the person who can help us."

  "She couldn't if she wanted to. They'll have her sewed up tight."

  Rachel gave a frustrated sigh. "And Godin? What does he want?"

  "Godin wants to be God."

  "What?"

  I eased into the left lane to pass a motor home. "Godin doesn't care about Trinity making a profit. He's a billionaire. He's seventy-two years old, and he's been a star since he was forty. So forget being the father of artificial intelligence or anything like that. He wants to be the first—maybe the only—human being whose mind is ported into a Trinity computer."

  Rachel pushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "What's he like? An egomaniac?"

  "He's not that simple. Godin is a brilliant man who believes he knows what's wrong with the world. He's like the people you knew in college who thought Atlas Shrugged was the answer to the world's problems, only he's a genius. And he's made major contributions to science. So far, America is truly a better place because Peter Godin lived here. His supercomputers played a significant role in winning the Cold War."

  "It sounds like you admire him."

  "He's easy to admire. But he scares me, too. He's practically killing himself to build the most powerful computer in the world, and he doesn't care that he won't understand how it works when it finally does. Godin's building Trinity to use it himself. And I don't know if there's anything more dangerous than a powerful man obsessed with remaking the world in his own image."

  As I reached out to set the Audi's cruise control, my vision started to blur. A wave of fatigue washed through me, and Rachel's last words slipped out of my head. My eyesight cleared, but the familiar high-pitched humming had begun in my head. I braked and swerved onto the shoulder.

  "What is it?" asked Rachel.

  "You need to drive. I may go under."

  She sat up. "Okay."

  I got out and walked around to her side of the car. Rachel climbed over the console and slid behind the wheel. Before getting back in, I looked up and down the highway. Traffic was moderate but steady, and no drivers showed any interest in me.

  She studied me closely. "Are you all right, David?"

  "A little shaky."

  She reached over and fastened my safety belt. "Is it an episode?"

  The humming had descended to my back teeth. "Yes."

  "Close your eyes. I've got the wheel."

  "Just keep going east. Our destination is about"—I held up three fingers—"hours away." In the glove compartment was a map of the Carolinas. I located Highway 64 and pointed to Plymouth, near where the Roanoke River ran into Albemarle Sound. "If I don't wake up by the time we reach here, wake me up."

  Rachel put the Audi in gear and began accelerating along the shoulder. When she reached fifty, she pulled onto the highway and goosed the pedal.

  "Is it getting worse?" she asked.

  In my mind I said, I'm fine, but some part of my brain realized that my lips had not moved. I was about to go under. My palms were tingling, and my face felt hot. Rachel laid a hand on my forehead.

  "You're burning up. Does that always happen?"

  I tried to answer, but I felt as I had as a boy in the Oak Ridge swimming pool, trying to talk to my friends underwater. We yelled as loud as we could, but we couldn't make our words understood. Rachel's hand seemed to be melting into my forehead. That pleased me somehow. I wanted to check the visor mirror and see if her hand really was melting, but I couldn't move. A woman was calling my name from far away. Before I could answer, the deep blue swell of a wave broke over me and I went under, rolling and tumbling into darkness.

  I'm sitting outdoors in a circle of sleeping men, leaning against a wall. Banked embers glow at the center of the circle. The sky is on fire with stars. A robed man named Peter sits beside me. He seems upset.

  "Why do you want to do this?" he whispered. "If you go, you'll suffer all manner of indignities. Even if the people listen, you'll be rejected by the priests and elders. And what of the Romans? I fear you will be killed."

  Though he does not name the place, I know he's speaking of Jerusalem. "Go away," I tell him. "You value what the dog values. Your body, your next meal, your life."

  He takes hold of my arm and shakes it. "You don't drive me off so easily! I've seen it in a dream. If you go, you will be executed."

  "Whoever will save his life shall lose it," I reply.

  Peter shakes his head, his eyes filled with confusion.

  The scene changes suddenly. I'm on a high mountain, looking out over a plain. Three men sit with me.

  "When you go into the towns," I ask, "who do you say that I am?"

  "We say you are the ano
inted one."

  I shake my head. "Do not say this of me. Speak from your hearts of what you have seen. No more."

  "Yes, Master," answers a man named John, whose eyes are large and brown like a woman's. He looks at Peter, then speaks cautiously to me. "I'm told you mean to go to Jerusalem."

  "Yes."

  John shakes his head. "If you do this, the priests will not know what to do with you. They will fear you, and they'll condemn you to death."

  "This cup has been passed to me. I must drink."

  The men fall silent. As I contemplate the plain below, fear simmers in the pit of my belly. To know the gift of this life, this body, and then to give it up . . .

  I snapped awake and grabbed the dashboard, my eyes on the rear of a tractor-trailer ahead. Rachel grabbed my knee.

  "It's all right, David! I'm here."

  My hands were shaking, the fear of the dream still palpable. "How long have we been on the road?"

  "An hour and twenty minutes. We just passed Plymouth."

  "I told you to wake me up!"

  "You were sleeping so hard, I hated to do it."

  "Have you seen anything suspicious?"

  "We passed a state trooper a half hour ago, and a couple of Plymouth cops, but none of them looked twice at us. I think we're okay."

  Rachel looked anything but okay. And once our immediate goal of escape was accomplished, her composure would crack. I was no different. My reaction to killing Geli Bauer's assassin had been blunted by a flood of neurochemicals evolved for my survival. Images from my dream returned in flashes of color and light, but the fear was fading, and in its wake I felt a strange sort of relief. After months of vagueness and mystery, the dreams were finally localizing to a specific place. Jerusalem. Logically this made no sense. I had never been to Israel, and I knew little about it beyond the bloody conflict I'd seen for decades on the evening news. But where had logic led me so far?

  "David?" Rachel said. "Maybe we can hole up for a while at the—"

  I clapped my hand over her mouth. "Don't. I'm sorry, but I warned you already."

  She nodded, and I took my hand away. "If the NSA is so all powerful," she whispered, "what were you doing making that videotape in your own living room? Wouldn't they hear that?"

  I reached into the backseat, lifted Fielding's box of homemade electronic toys, and set it on my lap. From it I withdrew a metallic wand about ten inches long. "Fielding showed me where their bugs were. In tiny holes in the Sheetrock."

  "What was he doing with equipment like that? Don't you think that's a little suspicious?"

  "I can see how it would look that way. You had to know him."

  Even as I said that, I wondered if I really had known the eccentric Englishman. I poked through his box, looking for signs of a secret agenda. Most of the home-built devices looked like the projects of a teenager who spent his weekends at RadioShack. One resembled the old View-Master toy of my youth, a plastic frame with tubular eyepieces and a switch on the right side. I held the makeshift goggles up to my face, aimed them at Rachel, and flipped the switch. An amber haze fell across my field of vision, but beyond that, nothing happened.

  "What are those?" Rachel asked.

  "I'm not sure." I turned the goggles toward the windshield and looked out over the road.

  My heart turned to ice. A thin, green beam of coherent light—a laser—was hitting the Audi's front windshield at an angle almost perpendicular to the ground. I'd seen many such beams in physics labs at MIT. The only other places I had seen them was in films, on laser-gun sights. Someone was aiming a laser at us from the air! I wanted to scream a warning to Rachel, but my throat was glued shut. Shoving my foot across the floor, I hit the brake, throwing the Audi into a skid.

  Rachel screamed and tried to control the spinning car. I turned the goggles and searched for the laser. It was about forty yards away, tracking back toward the car like the hand of God. The Audi shuddered to a stop on the grassy shoulder.

  "Why the hell did you do that?" Rachel yelled.

  Our nearest cover was a line of trees fifty yards from the shoulder. Someone with an automatic weapon could easily cut us down before we reached the tree line. I held the goggles up to Rachel's eyes.

  "Someone's going to shoot at us! Get under the dash. As far as you can."

  As she tried to fold herself under the steering column, I reacquired the laser beam. I expected it to move onto me, but instead it froze on the windshield glass. The beam didn't penetrate the glass; it terminated at the windshield's surface. By extending the beam in my mind, I realized it would not intersect with either me or Rachel, but the dashboard.

  "If they wanted to shoot us," I thought aloud, "they could have done it before I ever turned on the goggles."

  "What?"

  "It's not a gun sight."

  "What are you talking about?"

  The laser could be a bomb designator, but not even panic would drive the NSA to drop a smart bomb on the shoulder of an American highway. They had too many other options. Suddenly I understood. The laser was a surveillance device. By bouncing the beam off the windshield and measuring the vibration of the glass, eavesdroppers in a plane or helicopter could hear every word we said inside.

  "Get up! Get up and drive!"

  Rachel struggled back into her seat, shifted the car into drive, and pulled onto the highway. The green beam stayed locked on our windshield like a satellite weapon aimed from space. Taking the map off the floor, I folded it down to a small rectangle and tapped a spot three times to indicate our location.

  She nodded.

  I then followed 64 eastward for a couple of miles, to a small rural road that broke to the left. There I wrote, Take this turn.

  When Rachel nodded again, I leaned down to her ear and said, "Take the turn no matter what happens. Understand?"

  "I will. Is whatever you saw still there?"

  I checked through the goggles, then squeezed her shoulder. "It's there. Speed up."

  She pressed the accelerator to the floor.

  Chapter 15

  Geli Bauer stood alone in David Tennant's kitchen, alone with the corpse of her lover. The carpet-cleaning-service truck was still parked outside, its vacuum equipment running loudly. By any operational standard, she should have moved Ritter's corpse long ago. But she couldn't. She wanted to understand what had happened here. From the wound in Ritter's head and the way his body was lying, it seemed he had been shot from the front or slightly to the side. She couldn't imagine an untrained man winning a shootout with a former member of Germany's most elite counterterror unit. That left two options.

  One: Tennant had somehow surprised Ritter and fired very accurately as Ritter whirled to shoot him.

  Two: Tennant was not what he seemed.

  He had been raised in the rural area around Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which might make him proficient with a hunting rifle, but not with a handgun. And where had he learned to sweep rooms for microphones? Had Fielding taught him that, or had he learned it elsewhere?

  His escape from the crime scene raised more questions. The team in the carpet van had arrived to find Rachel Weiss's Saab parked out front but Tennant's garage empty. A second team had combed the neighborhood and discovered Tennant's Acura parked behind some hedges at a vacant house. It had taken a half hour of police liaison to learn that a silver Audi A8 had been stolen from the house down the street.

  Without the voiceprint analysis that had turned up Fielding's covert call from a convenience store, Tennant and Weiss might have slipped through her net. But four days ago, Fielding had reserved a cabin at Nags Head on the Outer Banks in the name of Mr. Lewis Carroll. This, combined with Tennant's having received a FedEx letter from Fielding yesterday, had been enough for Geli to put air assets over Highway 64, the route to Nags Head. And that had put Tennant back into her hands.

  As she looked down at Ritter's shattered skull and blood-matted hair, her cell phone rang. "Bauer," she said.

  "This is Air-One. They know
we're following them."

  "How high are you flying?"

  "Ten thousand feet. There's no way they could have made us from looking at the sky. They had to see the beam."

  "That's impossible without special equipment."

  "They must have some."

  "What are they doing now?"

  A crackle of static. "They ran off the road like they saw the beam and panicked. They ducked under the dash for a while, then got back on the highway. They're doing about ninety now, still headed east."

  "What are they saying?"

  "Nothing about a destination."

  "Where are our ground units?" Geli asked.

  "Closest is fifteen minutes away, give or take two."

  "I'll call you back." She speed-dialed Skow's scrambled cell phone. He answered after eight rings.

  "What is it, Geli?"

  "Tennant detected our airborne surveillance. He's taking evasive action."

  "You must be joking. Have your people lost him?"

  "The plane has the Audi now, but they could lose it."

  "I suppose you want to terminate them now?"

  Geli sensed Skow's finger on the chicken switch. "That's my standing order from you."

  "The situation has changed."

  "The geography has changed. Not the situation."

  "I don't like it. How will it play?"

  The bureaucrat's mantra, Geli thought scornfully. "Tennant went psychotic. He killed his Trinity guard and kidnapped his psychiatrist. We're attempting a rescue."

  There was a long silence. Then Skow said, "Peter was right to hire you. Good luck with that rescue."

  "Fuck you very much," Geli muttered, and hung up. She opened her connection to the plane and her ground units.

  "Air-One, do you still have the Audi in sight?"