Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

I found myself staring at a shining silver disk with a hole in it. The disk lay on the marble base of the altar, a foot off the floor. I put out my shaking right hand and laid my palm on the disk.

The pain in my hands instantly eased.

"This is the place," I said. "This is where Jesus left the earth."

"He is right," said Ibrahim. "That disk marks the spot where the cross stood in the ground. To the right and left are black disks where the thieves' crosses stood, one being good, another being bad. Afterward, Jesus was taken away to the tomb of Joseph of Aramathea and rose from the death three days later."

"No," I said.

Ibrahim blanched. "Sir, you cannot say such things here!"

"Whisper," Rachel pleaded.

"What's the hole in the disk for?" I asked, my hand caressing the cool silver.

"You may put fingers through and touch Golgotha. The rock of Calvary."

I closed my eyes and slipped two fingers through the hole. My fingertips scraped rough stone.

"Did you dream of this?" Rachel asked.

I couldn't speak. Something was flowing into me from the living rock. Rachel's voice receded and did not return. I felt as if my bones were singing, vibrating in sympathy with something in the earth. At first the feel¬ing was something like joy, but as the intensity built, I began to shake, then to jerk spastically.

It s a seizure, said a familiar voice in my head. My medical voice. A tonic-clonic seizure. Through the fog of receding consciousness, I heard people yelling in several languages. Then I fell, and Rachel screamed.

The impact of the floor was like water.

WHITE SANDS

At 7:52 A.M. mountain standard time, Peter Godin went into code blue. Ravi Nara wasn't in the hospital hangar, but he was sleeping nearby, and he got to Godin's bedside in less than two minutes. He'd been expecting the old man to crash. Without a shunt to relieve the pressure in the fourth ventricle of the brain, hydrocephalus was inevitable. But when Ravi arrived in the Bubble, he found the old man suffering a garden-variety heart attack.

Godin's two nurses had already intubated and bagged him, and one was defibrillating his heart. Ravi read the EKG and confirmed their diagnosis: ventricular tachycar¬dia. They were using the paddles because Godin had no pulse. It took two drug combinations and a 360-joule shock to bring the heart back to a sinus rhythm. Ravi drew blood to check for cardiac-specific enzymes that would tell him how much damage had been done to the heart muscle. Then, since Godin remained unconscious, Ravi sat down for a moment to decompress.

He hated clinical medicine. Something was always coming out of left field to surprise you. Godin had had a coronary bypass fifteen years ago, and a cardiac stent implanted in 1998. The risk of an MI was constant, but under the strain of treating the brainstem glioma, Ravi had let the cardiac risk recede in his mind. The nurses had noticed his hesitancy during the code. Not exactly what they expected from a Nobel laureate in medicine. After years in research labs, he was out of practice. So what? A veterinarian could run the protocols of a code blue.

As a nurse started to attach the ventilator to Godin's breathing tube, the old man tried to speak, but his effort produced only squeaks.

Ravi leaned down to his ear. "Don't try to talk, Peter. You had a little arrhythmia, but you're stable now."

Godin held up his hand for something to write with. A nurse gave him a pen, then held a hard-backed pad up to his hand.

Godin scribbled: DON'T LET ME DIE! WE'RE SO CLOSE!!!

"You're not going to die," Ravi assured him, though he was far from sure himself. Hypoxia could easily trig¬ger the fatal hydrocephalus he'd been expecting. He squeezed Godin's shoulder, then ordered the nurses to put him on the ventilator. It would make the old man furious, but he would endure it.

To avoid Godin's protests, Ravi left the Bubble. As he closed the hatch, he saw Zach Levin rush into the hangar.

"What is it?" Ravi asked. "What's happened?"

Levin had to catch his breath before he could speak. "Fielding's model is cracking the final algorithms! He's got the memory area linked to the processing areas, and he's creating all new interface circuitry. I've never seen anything like it."

"You mean Fielding's model is doing all that."

"Yes, yes. But I've got to tell you, even with the machine running at only fifty percent capacity, I can feel him in there. It's like talking to the man I worked with for the past two years. Like he's alive again."

"You're at fifty percent efficiency?"

Levin grinned. "And rising. I should have had more faith in Peter's instincts."

Ravi tried to conceal his shock. Ninety percent effi¬ciency was the point at which Godin had predicted that a neuromodel would become fully conscious-a condi¬tion he had termed the Trinity state.

"You said 'talking,'" Ravi thought aloud. "Is the voice synthesizer working? Is Fielding talking to you?"

"He's trying. He can't really explain what he's doing, but the efficiency is creeping steadily upward. We've got a definite timeline now."

Despite the complexities of his personal situation, Ravi couldn't suppress his excitement. "How long?"

"Twelve to sixteen hours."

"To Trinity state?"

Levin nodded. "And I'd bet closer to twelve. We've got a pool going in Containment."

Ravi looked at his watch. "How certain are you?"

"As certain as anything gets in this business. I've got to tell Peter what's happening."

Ravi didn't want Godin hearing about this until he had talked to Skow. "You can't go in right now. He won't hear you. Peter coded twenty minutes ago."

Levin stiffened in alarm. "He's not dead!"

"No, but he's on the ventilator."

"Conscious?"

"Not enough to understand you. And he can't speak."

"But he has to know this! It will double his will to fight."

Ravi tried to look sympathetic. "He's never lacked that."

"No, but this will change everything."

"I'm sorry, Zach. I can't allow you to go in."

Levin looked down at Ravi with disdain. "You don't make decisions like that. Limiting Peter's access to criti¬cal information?"

"I am his physician."

"So, do your fucking job. It doesn't take a doctor to see that the best thing anyone could do for Peter's health right now is to give him this information."

Levin turned away and stepped into the UV decontaminator. Ravi started to argue, but the engineer stamped on the start button, making conversation pointless.

If Levin insisted on entering the Bubble, Ravi couldn't stop him. Godin would probably ask for him soon anyway.

Ravi hurried to the exit. He needed to talk to Skow immediately. Because Zach Levin was right: with Trinity twelve to sixteen hours from becoming a reality, Godin would almost certainly live to see it. And that changed everything. Skow was preparing the president for Trinity's failure, setting up to blame Godin for every¬thing, and using Ravi to help him do it. If Skow went too far-and Godin at the eleventh hour delivered the revolutionary computer he had promised- Ravi could find himself in a precarious position. Peter Godin would not take betrayal lightly. He would exact his own form of justice. An image of Geli Bauer came into Ravi 's mind. He was damned glad she was lying in a hospital in Maryland.

JERUSALEM

Rachel braced herself against the side of the ambulance as it tore through all but impassable traffic. David lay unconscious on a gurney on the floor. The paramedic in back spoke enough English to communicate with Rachel, but he could tell her little and do even less, given his patient's condition.

When David collapsed in the church, Rachel had known instantly that he was having a seizure. She'd knelt and cradled his head to keep him from banging it on the floor, but that was all she could do. Seizure vic¬tims swallowing their tongues was a myth, and you could lose fingers trying to prevent it. Ibrahim had used his walkie-talkie to call the ambulance, and Rachel got the feeling he'd done it before.