Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

"What are you hearing, Thomas?"

“Normal background noise. TV. Bumps and clatters."

"Did you hear Mrs. Fielding's end of the phone call?"

"Yeah, but it's hard to understand that Chinese accent."

"Are you out of sight?"

“I'm parked in the driveway of some out-of-town neighbors."

"Tennant will be at your location in five minutes. He has a woman with him. Dr. Rachel Weiss. Stay on this line.”

Geli clicked off, then said clearly, "JPEG. Weiss, Rachel."

A digital photograph of Rachel Weiss appeared on her monitor. It was a head shot, a telephoto taken as the psychiatrist left the Duke University hospital. Rachel Weiss was three years older than Geli, but Geli recog¬nized the type. She'd known girls like that at boarding school in Switzerland. Strivers. Most of them Jews. She would have known Weiss was Jewish without hearing her name or seeing her file. Even with fashionably wind¬blown hair, Rachel Weiss looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had the dark martyr's eyes, the premature lines around the mouth. She was one of the top Jungian analysts in the world, and you didn't reach that level without being obsessive about your work.

Geli had been against involving Weiss. It was Skow who had allowed it. Skow's theory was that if you held the leash too tight, you were asking for trouble. But it was Geli's head that would roll if there was a security breach. To prevent that eventuality, she received tran¬scripts of Weiss's sessions with Tennant and recordings of every telephone call the psychiatrist made. Once a week, one of her operatives slipped into Weiss's office and photocopied Tennant's file, to be sure that nothing escaped Geli's scrutiny.

That was the kind of hassle that came from dealing with civilians. It had been the same at Los Alamos, with the Manhattan Project. In both cases the government had tried to control a group of gifted civilian scientists who through ignorance, obstinacy, or ideology posed the great¬est threat to their own work. When you recruited the smartest people in the world, you got crackpots.

Tennant was a crackpot. Like Fielding. Like Ravi Nara, the project's Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist. All six Trinity principals had signed the tightest possible security and nondisclosure agreements, but they still believed they could do anything they wanted. To them the world was Disneyland. And doctors were the worst. Even in the army, the rules had never quite seemed to apply to M.D.s. But tonight Tennant was going to step far enough over the line to get his head chopped off.

Her headset beeped. She opened the line to her man at Tennant's house. "What is it?"

"I'm inside. You're not going to believe this. Someone put painter's putty in the holes over the mikes."

Geli felt a strange numbness in her chest. "How could Tennant know where they were?"

"No way without a scanner."

"Magnifying glass?"

"If he knew to look for them. But that would take hours, and you'd never be sure you got them all."

A scanner. Where the hell would an internist get that? Then she knew. Fielding. "Tennant took that FedEx delivery. Do you see an envelope anywhere?"

"No."

"He must have taken it with him. What else do you see? Anything strange?"

"There's a video camera set up on a tripod."

Shit. "Tape in it?"

“Let me check. No tape."

"What else?"

“A vacuum cleaner in the backyard."

What the hell? "A vacuum cleaner? Take the bag out and bring it here. We'll chopper it to Fort Meade for analysis. What else?"

"Nothing."

“Take one last look, then get out." Geli clicked off, then said, "Skow-home." The com¬puter dialed the Raleigh residence of Project Trinity's administrative director.

"Geli?" Skow said. "What's going on?"

Bauer always thought Kennedy when she heard John Skow's voice. Skow was a Boston Brahmin with twice the usual brains of his breed. Instead of the customary liberal arts and law background of his class, Skow had advanced degrees in astronomy and mathematics and had served for eight years as deputy director of special projects for the NSA. His primary area of responsibility was the agency's top secret Supercomputer Research Center. Skow was technically Geli's superior, but their relationship had always been uncomfortable. Short of taking a human life, Geli had independent responsibility for Project Trinity's security. She held this power because Peter Godin-citing security leaks at government labs- had demanded that he pick his own team to protect Trinity.

The old man had found her just as she was leaving the army. Geli believed heart and soul in the warrior cul¬ture, but she could no longer endure the bloated and hidebound bureaucracy of the army, or its abysmal qual¬ity standards for new recruits. When Godin appeared, he'd offered her a job she had wanted all her life but hadn't believed existed.

She would receive $700,000 a year to work as chief of security for special projects for Godin Supercomputing. The salary was immense, but Godin was a billionaire. He could afford it. Her conditions of employment were unique. She would follow any order he gave, without question and without regard for legality. She would not reveal any information about her employer, his company, or her employment. If she did, she would die. Geli could hire her own staff, but they would accept the same condi¬tions and penalty, and she would enforce that penalty. She was amazed that a public figure like Godin would dare to set such terms. Then she learned that Godin had found her through her father. That explained a lot. Geli had hardly spoken to her father in years, but he was in a posi¬tion to know a lot about her. And she could tell by the way Godin looked at her that he knew something about her as well. Probably the stories that had filtered out of Iraq after Desert Storm. Peter Godin wanted a security expert, but he also wanted a killer. Geli was both.

John Skow was not. Unlike Godin, who had fought as a marine in Korea as a young man, Skow was a theo¬retical warrior. The NSA man had never seen blood on his hands, and around Geli he sometimes acted like a man who'd been handed a leash with a pit bull on the end of it.

"Geli?" Skow said again. "Are you there?"

"Dr. Weiss went to Tennant's house," she said into her headset.

"Why?"

"I don't know. We got almost none of their conversa¬tion. They're on their way to the Fielding house now. Lu Li Fielding called him. Upset."

Skow was silent for a moment. "Going over to com¬fort the grieving widow?"

"I'm sure that will be their story." She wanted to gauge Skow's level of anxiety before giving him more details. "Do we let them go in?"

"Of course. You can hear everything they say, right?"

"Maybe not. There was a problem with the bugs at Tennant's house."

"What kind of problem?"

"Tennant put putty over the mikes. And there was a video camera set up on a tripod in there. No tape in it." She let that sink in. "Either he wanted to say something on tape that he didn't want us to hear, or he wanted to talk to Dr. Weiss without us hearing. Either way, it's bad."

She listened to Skow breathe for a while.

"It's all right," he said finally. "We're going to be okay on this."

"You must know something I don't, sir."

Skow chuckled at the contempt with which she said "sir." The NSA man was tough in his own way. He had the detached coldness of mathematical intelligence. "The perks of leadership, Geli. You did well this morning, by the way. I was amazed."

Geli flashed back to Fielding's corpse. The termination had gone smoothly enough, but it was a stupid move. They should have taken out Tennant as well. She could easily have manipulated both men into the same vehicle, and after that… simple logistics. A car accident. And the project wouldn't be in the jeopardy it was in now. "Has Tennant actually talked to the president, sir?"