Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

My hand digs into my other pocket, brushing against something cold. My fingers close around wood, and my hand emerges gripping the butt of a gun, an automatic. I don't recognize the weapon. From my other pocket I withdraw a perforated silencer and slowly screw it onto the gun barrel. It seats itself with satisfying finality. From the hallway, I hear a tinkle of glass. Someone's in the kitchen. I take one careful step forward, testing the floorboards, then begin to walk-

I snapped awake in panic and jerked my pistol from my waistband. A revolver, not an automatic. And no silencer. I wanted to call out to Rachel, but I suppressed the urge. In a single motion I rolled off the bed, landed on my feet, and moved to the bedroom door.

At first I heard only a soft humming in a female regis¬ter. The tune sounded like " California " by Joni Mitchell.

The hardwood floor of the hallway creaked.

I drew a silent breath and held it.

The floor creaked again. Someone was passing my door from right to left. I closed my eyes and waited. Another creak. I counted slowly to ten. Then I reached down with my free hand and slowly turned the knob. When it had turned far enough, I yanked open the door, leapt into the hall, and aimed my.38 to the left.

A long-haired blond man stood six feet away, his arms extended through the kitchen door. I couldn't see his hands, but I knew they held a gun.

I pulled the trigger.

There was no boom or kick. I'd forgotten to cock the hammer, so the double-action trigger only went halfway back. As I jerked it home, the blond man whirled and a silenced automatic whipped into view, its bore black and bottomless. Then my trigger broke, and an orange flash illuminated the hallway. I blinked against it, and when I opened my eyes, the blond man was gone.

A woman was screaming an ice pick through my eardrums.

I looked down. The blond man lay on the floor, blood pouring from his skull. I moved forward and stepped on the wrist of the hand holding the gun. The screaming wouldn't stop. I glanced to my right. Rachel was stand¬ing with her back against the sink, her face deathly gray, her mouth open wide.

"Stop it!" I yelled. "Stop!"

Her mouth remained open, but the scream died.

I pulled the automatic from the blond man's hand, then checked his brachial pulse. Thready. The bullet had entered the skull just above the right ear. His gray eyes were glazed, both pupils fixed and dilated. Leaning down, I saw exposed brain matter. He wouldn't last five minutes.

I sensed more than saw Rachel moving. Looking up, I saw her holding the kitchen telephone, preparing to dial.

"Put that down."

"I'm calling for paramedics!"

"He doesn't have a chance."

"You don't know that!"

"Of course I do. Examine him, if you don't believe me." I straightened up. "Even if he did, we couldn't risk it."

“What? What do you mean?"

"Who do you think this is? Some street punk? A crackhead breaking into my house in broad daylight? Look at him."

Rachel glanced down for perhaps a second. "I don't know who he is. Do you know him?"

As I stared down at the ruined young face, I realized that I did. At least I'd seen him before. Not often, but I had passed him in the parking lot at Trinity, a tall, lanky blond with the look of someone you'd meet on a moun¬tain trail in Europe. Like Geli Bauer, he had the physique of a climber, or an elite soldier.

"I do know him. He works for Geli Bauer."

Rachel squinted in confusion. "Who's that?"

"She's Trinity. She's Godin. She's the NSA." I laid both guns on the kitchen counter. "Someone ordered her to take me out too. You, too, apparently."

Something in me still resisted the idea that Peter Godin had ordered my death. Yet nothing at Trinity hap¬pened without his approval.

"We have to call the police," Rachel said. "We'll be all right. He was about to shoot me. This was self-defense, or justifiable homicide, whatever they call it."

"The police? You can't call local police to investigate the NSA. I told you that."

"Why not? He was going to kill me. That's a state crime."

I almost laughed. "The NSA is the largest and most secret intelligence agency in the United States. Everything they do is classified. It would take a court order to get a cop past the front gate at Fort Meade."

"This isn't Fort Meade."

"To the NSA, it is. Look, until I talk to the president, we're on our own. Do you understand?"

She looked down at the growing pool of blood. "Maybe he is a street punk."

"Don't you get it? This is why they stole my file from your office!"

"What?"

"They already knew they were going to kill you."

She opened her mouth but said nothing.

"Otherwise they would have photocopied the file and left it in place. They wanted nothing left in your office for the Durham police to connect you to the project."

She was shaking her head, but my logic was difficult to refute. I stuck the automatic into my waistband and picked up my.38.

"We have to get out of here. Fast. There could be oth¬ers close by."

Her eyes went wide. "Others?"

Suddenly I saw it all. "The XSA taps my phones. When they heard Ewan McCaskell leave his message, they knew I hadn't spoken to the president yet. That's all they were waiting for. I was too excited to see the implications."

I grasped her hand. It was cold and limp. "We have to run, Rachel. Right now. If we don't, we'll die here."

"Run where?"

"Anywhere. Nowhere. We have to disappear."

"No. We haven't done anything wrong."

"That doesn't matter." I pointed at the man on the floor and saw that he was no longer breathing. "Do you think that corpse is one of my hallucinations?"

"You killed him," she said in the voice of a child.

"And I'd do it again. He was about to fire a bullet into your head."

She wobbled on her feet. I steadied her, then led her to the guest bedroom where I'd lain unconscious only minutes ago.

"Stay here. I have to get something." I tried to put my.38 in her hand, but she recoiled. "Keep it," I insisted, closing her fingers around it. "If you leave this house alone, you'll be killed."

She stared hollow-eyed at me.

I took the silenced automatic from my waistband and checked to make sure the safety was off. "Promise me you won't leave."

''I won't leave," she said dully.

I left the guestroom and raced upstairs. My bedroom was on the left side of the landing. On the right was a bedroom I used for storage. I pulled an old chair into the closet of that room and stood on it. With my arms stretched high, I could just reach the plywood panel that gave access to the attic. I pushed out the wooden square, then lifted myself by main strength and wedged my body through the space.

Standing half-erect to avoid the roofing nails jutting down from above, I balanced on two rafters and looked around to get my bearings. Enough light was showing through the eaves and vents to show my way. I crept twenty feet to my left and knelt. Lying on pink fiberglass insulation were a hammer and crowbar I'd left there four weeks ago, as though dropped carelessly. I picked them up and moved quickly to an area floored with quarter-inch plywood.

Jamming the crowbar into a seam between two pieces of wood, I hammered it deeper, then leaned heavily on the bar. The plywood splintered. I shoved the end of the bar through the resulting hole, then jerked upward, ripping open a two-foot section of wood. From the dark cavity below I removed a small nylon gym bag and unzipped it. The light filtering through the eaves illuminated the rec¬tangular outlines of a passport and two thick bundles. The bundles were stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Twenty thousand dollars' worth.

Five weeks ago, when Fielding told me I needed to cache a bag like this, I'd laughed at him. But he had known this day would come. Zipping the bag shut, I crab-walked across the rafters to the access hole, then dropped the bag onto the closet floor. My arms quivered from strain as I lowered myself back down to the chair and pulled the plywood square back over the opening.