Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

When my feet hit the floor, an image of Rachel run¬ning from the house in panic filled my mind. I grabbed the bag and ran downstairs.

She was still sitting on the bed, her eyes blank with shock.

"Time to go," I told her. "Are you ready?"

She blinked but said nothing.

I took her free hand and pulled her to her feet. "I need you to keep it together for five minutes. After that, you can collapse if you need to. Here we go."

I led her through the hall and kitchen to the laundry room, which opened into the garage. Leaving her there, I retrieved Fielding's box from the back door, then returned and took my.38 back from her.

"Hold this," I said, giving her the box. "Wait here till I call for you."

Without pausing long enough for fear to take hold, I threw open the door from the house to the garage and charged through with the automatic extended, traversing it right and left to cover all angles of fire.

The garage looked empty.

I made a quick circuit of my Acura, then dropped to my knees and looked beneath it. "Come on!" I shouted. "Hurry!"

Rachel's shoes hissed on the smooth cement. I opened the passenger door for her, then took Fielding's box and set it on the backseat. "If anything bad's going to hap¬pen, it's going to happen right now," I said, getting behind the wheel. "Get down in your seat."

She slid to the floor. The top of her head showed above the doorframe. I pushed it down, then started the engine and put the car in reverse.

"Stay down."

I touched the remote control clipped to my visor. The garage door motor groaned above us, and the wide white door began to rise. With the killer's gun clenched in my hand, I watched for the silhouette of legs in the growing rectangle of sunlight.

I saw nothing.

The instant the garage door cleared roof height, I gunned the engine. The Acura shot backward over the cement and into blinding sunlight. I hit the remote to lower the garage door, then spun the wheel left. I didn't touch the brake until the car was pointed up Willow Street.

"What's happening?" Rachel cried, alarmed by my sudden stop.

"Stay down!"

I'd planned to drive calmly if the street was clear, but as we stopped, I could almost feel an unseen marksman taking aim. I shifted into DRIVE, floored the accelerator, and fishtailed up Willow, leaving six feet of rubber on the pavement behind us.

In the Trinity building's control center, Geli Bauer stood absolutely still and spoke into her headset.

"We heard a shot. In Tennant's house."

"Isn't that what you expected?" Skow asked.

Idiot. "No. Ritter had a silenced weapon."

"And Tennant was carrying his gun last night."

"Right."

Skow processed this in silence. "That doesn't mean Ritter failed."

"No. In fact, I can't imagine a scenario like that."

"Good. What do you want to do?"

Geli had always pegged Skow as a theoretical warrior, and now that bullets were flying, he was looking to her for guidance. "I pulled my other assets back so nothing would look suspicious. But if I don't get confirmation of success within five minutes, I'm putting in a team to check things out."

"You have cover?"

"A carpet-service truck."

"Is there any chance the shot might have been reported to local police?"

"Some. If a patrol car shows up before we've cleared the scene-"

"Use your NSA credentials to quarantine the house," Skow finished, showing some balls at last. "Then con¬tact me immediately."

"I will."

"I'm out."

"Wait."

"What is it?"

Geli was tired of being in the dark. "Tennant asked me about the pocket watch."

"What pocket watch?"

Her bullshit detector pegged the meter. "I checked the storage room this morning. Fielding's personal effects. Everything was there except his pocket watch."

Skow was silent for a time. Then he spoke almost to himself, "Fielding must have told him something about it."

"You want to tell me something about it?"

"That knowledge isn't necessary for you to do your job."

Anger flashed through her. "If it's on Tennant's mind, it may be important."

"It is important. Just not to you. Keep me posted on the situation at the house."

Skow hung up.

Geli sat in her chair. She hated the mushroom treat¬ment, but that was the nature of intelligence work. Keep them in the dark and feed them bullshit. She understood the value of compartmentalizing knowledge. And for the past two years, she hadn't really needed to know what the scientists were working on. But things had changed.

Since the project's suspension, Peter Godin had been spending a great deal of time away, supposedly visiting his corporate headquarters in California. Geli no longer believed that. Sometimes Godin took Ravi Nara with him, and that made no sense. Nara had nothing to do with Godin Supercomputing, and Godin didn't even like the neurologist.

Now Godin had dropped off the face of the earth. Had Fielding's pocket watch gone with him? How could the watch be so important? When Fielding first came to work at Trinity, an NSA engineer had disassembled the pocket watch to be sure it contained no data-recording device. He'd pronounced the watch clean. It was disas¬sembled again this year, on a day chosen at random. The watch was clean again. So why had it been taken from the storeroom? Geli pictured the watch in her mind. A heavy gold case, scarred from use. There was a chain attached, and a crystal on the end of the chain. But the crystal was transparent. Nothing could be hidden inside that. At least nothing she knew about.

Her direct line to the NSA flashed red. She routed the call to her headset. "Bauer."

"Jim Conklin here." Conklin was her main contact in Crypto City at Fort Meade.

"What is it?"

"We're still running those intercepts on the pay phones around Andrew Fielding's house. All pay phones within three miles, twenty-four hours a day. You never rescinded the order."

"I never meant to."

"Well, with all the intercepts we're doing for the antiterror effort, we're running a few days behind on screening for voiceprint matches."

Geli's heartbeat quickened. "You have something?"

"Andrew Fielding made a call four days ago from a service-station convenience store. I think you'll want to hear it."

"Can you send me the audio file?"

"Sure. I'll use Webworld." Webworld was the NSA's secure intranet, and Geli was one of the few outsiders linked to it. "You want the spectrograms of the matches?"

"No. I know Fielding's voice."

"Two minutes."

Geli clicked off, looked at her watch, then said, "JPEG, Fielding, Andrew." A photo of Fielding filled her computer screen. The white-haired Englishman had an angular, handsome face that bloomed red in the cheeks. Fielding had liked his gin. But it was his eyes that got you. Sparkling blue, they held a childish mis¬chief that almost blinded you to the deep intelligence beneath it. As Geli looked into those eyes, she realized how formidable an adversary Fielding was. He might be dead, but he was still controlling events.

An audio file icon popped onto the corner of her screen. The NSA was nothing if not efficient. She was about to open it when her headset beeped an alert code from her team in the carpet-service van.

"What is it?"

"There's a police cruiser coming up the road. Somebody must have reported the shot."

Geli closed her eyes. She would have to invoke her fed¬eral authority and quarantine Tennant's house. The NSA's presence in Chapel Hill was about to become the knowledge of municipal police.

"I'm on my way."

"We're gone."

Geli hit an alarm button on her desk, alerting every member of her security teams, whether inside the build¬ing, on surveillance duty, or sleeping at home. In two minutes a net would close on David Tennant's house from every direction.