Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

He doubted that any doctor had ever worked so hard to keep a patient alive. At thirty-six, Ravi Nara was already a revered scientist. In his native India he was treated as a hero, despite his having become an American citizen. But if Trinity failed under a cloud of scandal caused by the murder of a fellow Nobel laureate, nothing would save his reputation.

Again he wondered if someone had overheard his call to Skow. The security in North Carolina had been intru¬sive, but White Sands was a bloody military reservation. Still, no one had confronted him yet. Maybe the remote¬ness of the place made the security people less paranoid.

White Sands was bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together. The parcel fenced off for Trinity research was a mole on a white elephant, part of a larger tract administered by the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Before Ravi visited the base, Godin had described the living conditions there as "spar¬tan." A transplanted New Yorker, Ravi had thought North Carolina was the middle of nowhere. White Sands was a hole in the world, a moonscape of white gypsum and rock with only rattlesnakes for company. He half-expected Indians to come riding over the dunes with John Ford cowboys in pursuit, but they never did.

The Trinity compound was laid out with geometric simplicity. There were four major buildings: the research lab, the hospital, Administration, and Containment. There were also barracks, a machine shop, a massive electrical power plant, and an airstrip that could take military jets. The buildings weren't really buildings, but converted aircraft hangars assembled by army engineers in five frantic weeks of construction. Only Containment was different. Containment housed the Trinity proto¬type.

Ravi could see the strange building to his right, stand¬ing alone at the center of the compound. Built like a World War Two pillbox, Containment had four-foot-thick concrete walls reinforced with tempered steel and shielded with lead. It was served by four giant electrical cables, two plumbing pipes, and a residential air-condi¬tioning system. No telephone lines, coaxial cables, or cat-5 network cable ran to it. No antennae or satellite dishes sprouted from its roof, as they did from all the other buildings. Containment was like a structure built to hold Harry Houdini, if Houdini could have digitized himself and escaped through wires or beamed transmis¬sions. If the Trinity prototype ever went fully opera¬tional, no one-not even Peter Godin-wanted it con¬nected to the Internet.

Ravi had avoided the hospital today. Godin had been dying by inches for weeks, but two days ago he'd finally begun the slide toward eternity. Ravi was convinced that Fielding's death had done it, a ruthless necessity that hit the old man harder than he'd expected. Of course, Fielding's death had given them the crystal, so any doubts about the rightness of killing him were pointless.

Within hours after getting the crystal, they had made up all the ground lost to Fielding's sabotage, and after discovering the independent work Fielding had done, they'd found themselves within spitting distance of a working prototype. The euphoria of this success had been undercut by the problems with Tennant and his psychiatrist. Godin could ill afford the stress of dealing with that, yet in the final analysis, it was the cancer that was killing him, as it killed everyone who got his type of cancer. Ravi parked the ATV in front of the hospital hangar and walked inside. The hangar was divided into "rooms" by partitions. None had ceilings-not even the bathrooms-so foul smells drifted throughout the build¬ing with annoying regularity. Peter Godin was not both¬ered by this. He occupied an airtight chamber with posi¬tive pressure that no infectious agent could penetrate. Served by filtered air and water, the plastic cubicle known as the Bubble sat like an incubator at the center of the hangar floor.

To spare Ravi and the nurses from having to waste time with protective suits, a UV decontaminator had been installed near the Bubble's door. To sterilize him¬self, Ravi had only to scrub his hands, don a mask, then stand in the radiation long enough to rid his skin and clothing of dangerous organisms. The process only took two minutes, but lately it had begun to get on his nerves. Still, he couldn't blame Godin. Steroids and chemother¬apy had beaten the old man's immune system into sub¬mission, and Godin wanted what every man had wanted since the beginning of time: to cheat death.

The humming UV unit finally went dark. Ravi stepped on a button that opened the Plexiglas hatch in the Bubble and stepped inside. Godin lay unconscious on a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors and resuscita¬tion equipment. His body was pierced by a central IV line and coupled to the monitors by thin wires. His com¬manding head had scarcely more color than the white sheet it lay on.

Two nurses bookended the bed, watching for the slightest change in their patient's status. Ravi nodded to them, then lifted the chart from its slot at the end of the bed and gave it a token look. Brainstem glioma, diffuse and inoperable. He'd made the diagnosis six months ago, when he'd first seen the Super-MRI scan of Godin's brain. It was eerie to see a tumor growing inside one of the most gifted minds on earth. When Godin asked Ravi to keep his cancer secret, Ravi hadn't hesitated. Revealing Godin's condition might have ended his chance to take part in the greatest scientific effort in his¬tory. Of course, Ravi had exacted a price for his cooper¬ation. It was only proper. Peter Godin was rich, Ravi Nara relatively poor. That imbalance had now been addressed, if only in a small way. Yet the fortune in cash and stock Ravi had received now seemed trivial in the face of what might happen.

"Ravi?" croaked the old man. "Is that you?"

Ravi looked up from the chart and saw the intense blue eyes fix upon him.

"Why am I so tired?" Godin asked.

"Your seizures, probably." Godin still suffered from epilepsy caused by his exposure to the Super-MRI.

Ravi walked around the bed and looked down into the slack face. Peter Godin had been one of the most vital men he'd ever known, yet cancer had laid Godin as low as it would any street beggar. Well… that wasn't quite true. No street beggar had Ravi Nara and almost limitless wealth keeping him alive. Even near death, with his hair and eyebrows gone, Godin retained the hawk¬like profile that had made the driven young computer designer so recognizable in the late 1950s, and for five decades afterward.

"Your tumor is very advanced, Peter. There's only so much I can do. It's a battle between keeping you con¬scious and keeping you free enough from pain to func¬tion."

"Damn the pain." Godin clenched one arthritic hand into a fist. "I can stand pain."

"That's not what you said last night. Last night you told me your face was on fire."

Godin shuddered. "I'm conscious now. Send Levin to me."

Zach Levin had led the R amp;D department at Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View until he was brought to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity com¬puter. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.

"I'll send him in," Ravi said.

Godin held up one hand. "What have you heard about Tennant and Weiss?"

"There's been no sign of them since Union Station."

The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. "The woman shot Geli?"

"They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes."

When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he'd always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi's skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.