Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

She didn't answer.

I stepped in front of her and ordered two chicken and broccoli plates. As I paid, I heard a man's voice behind me.

"Hi, there. We were in line with you at the El Al counter. You going over for Western Holy Week?"

"Uh… no," Rachel replied.

I glanced back and saw two dark-skinned men of medium height standing behind us. They had quick eyes and easy smiles. They looked like brothers.

"Visiting family then?" said the second man, who wore a gold chain around his neck.

"No," Rachel said awkwardly. "It's a private matter. A health problem."

Concerned looks. "Oh. Sorry to pry."

They're looking for terrorists, I told myself. Not pres¬idential assassins. I turned around and nodded to the two men.

The silence was uncomfortable, but suddenly Rachel straightened up and came to life. "I guess it's nothing to be embarrassed about," she said. "My OB-GYN is sending me over. I was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer. It's advanced, but he has a friend at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. There's a clinical trial for culturing your own T cells and reinjecting them to fight the tumors. My doctor's an old friend. He made all the arrangements for us, thank God. Planes, the hotel, all of it." She put her hand over her heart. "I'm sorry to run on. It's just the first ray of hope I've had, and it feels better to talk about it."

"Quite all right," said the man wearing the chain. "I'm sure you'll do very well. The doctors at Hadassah are the best in the world."

"The trial looks very promising," I chimed in, not wanting to appear awkward. "The lead researcher did his training at Sloan-Kettering."

"You sound like a doctor yourself," said the shorter man, and I lost any remaining doubt that they were El Al security. Suddenly all I could think about was the $16,000 in cash in the money belts concealed beneath our clothes.

"Food, mister," snapped one of the Chinese clerks.

"Thank you," I said, glancing back at the plates. "Yes, I'm an internist."

"You know about arthritis?" asked the shorter man. "They tell me I got psoriatic arthritis. You know about that?"

Answer him? I wondered. Act arrogant? "Well, there are five types. Some are relatively mild, others crippling."

"What's the bad kind?"

"Arthritis mutilans."

The man grinned happily. "That's not me, thank God. I got something about phalanges."

"Distal interphalangeal predominant." I lifted his hands and looked at his fingernails, which showed marked pitting. "It could be a lot worse."

He pulled back his hand. "Good, good. Well, enjoy your food."

"Good luck at Hadassah," said the one wearing the chain. "You're going to the right place for a cure."

I put both plates on a tray and carried it to a vacant table. Rachel followed me, looking shell-shocked. I glanced back at the food counter and saw the two men walk away without ordering.

"You did great," I said softly. "Academy Award cal¬iber."

"Survival," she said, taking her seat. "Everybody has it in them. You told me that in North Carolina, and I didn't believe you. Now I know better."

I picked up my fork. "There's no point feeling guilty about it."

"They'd already talked to Adam. That's the feeling I got."

"No doubt. He must have given them the same story. If we make it onto the plane without being arrested, I'm going to send that guy a case of champagne."

Rachel closed her eyes. "Are we going to make it?"

"Yes. Just keep it together for another half hour."

The 747 was crowded despite being a late flight, but we were insulated from our nearest neighbors by two empty seats and an aisle, and that gave us some privacy. I sat by the window with my Yankees cap on, taking care not to make eye contact with anyone as I retrieved two blankets and covered us both to the neck.

We sat at the gate for what seemed like two hours, but it was only forty minutes by my watch. While pas¬sengers around us talked excitedly about their upcoming visit to the Holy Land, Rachel and I pretended to sleep, holding hands under the blanket. At last the El Al jetliner taxied out onto the runway and lumbered into the night sky.

"Thank God," she whispered as the wheels lifted off the concrete.

We would have to clear security at Tel Aviv in eleven hours, but making it into the air was half the battle, and I tried to focus on that small victory. "Are you all right?"

She opened her eyes, which were separated from mine only by the bill of my Yankees cap. In them I saw emo¬tions I could not read.

"I need to ask you some things, David." She sounded more like the psychiatrist I had known before we made love. "We're going to Jerusalem, and I need to get to the bottom of why. I'd like you to treat this as a session."

"No. If you ask me things, I can ask you things. And you have to answer honestly. That's where we are now." She hesitated, then nodded. "Fair enough. You've told me you're an atheist. You said your mother believed in something greater than humanity, but not in organized religion. What about your father? Was he a declared atheist?"

"No. He just didn't believe in the conventional con¬cept of God. A God who focused all his attention on man. Dad was a physicist. They're a skeptical bunch, as a rule."

"Did he believe in a supreme being of any kind?" My father wasn't the type to "get cosmic" very often, but on a few occasions-camping in the mountains under a star-filled sky-he had talked to my brother and me about what he'd really believed.

"Dad had a simple conception of the way things are. Simple but profound. He didn't see man as separate from the universe, but part of it. He always said, 'Man is the universe becoming conscious of itself.'"

"Have I heard that before?"

"Maybe. I've heard New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra say it. But my father was saying it twenty-five years ago."

"What do you think he meant?"

"Exactly what he said. He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intel¬ligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog's brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire."

Rachel looked thoughtful. "That's a beautiful idea. Not exactly a religious view, but a hopeful one."

"Practical, too. If we're the universe becoming con¬scious of itself, we have a moral duty to survive. To pre¬serve the gift of consciousness. And to do that, we have to live in peace. From that you can derive a workable set of laws, ethics, everything."

Rachel reflected on this. "Do you subscribe to his view of the universe?"

"I did until a couple of weeks ago. My latest visions don't exactly fit into it."

She laid her hand on my knee. "We don't know where they fit, all right? And I don't think your father's view precludes the existence of a creator. Do you still have anxiety that you'll die if you don't reach Jerusalem before you dream of the crucifixion?"

The immediate threat of capture by police had dis¬tracted me from this concern. "I still feel some urgency, but not like before. The fact that we're going there seems to have eased the pressure a bit."

"If you do dream of the crucifixion, you shouldn't worry about it. A dream never killed anybody."

I wasn't so sure. "Let's talk about you for a minute. You say you believe in God. What exactly do you believe?"

"I don't see how that relates to what we're doing."

"I think we're both on this plane for a reason. And I think what you believe matters."

A look of ineffable sadness entered her face. "I came to God very late. As a child I was never taken to syna¬gogue or church."