Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

Israeli soldiers quickly cordoned off the chapel. By the time the ambulance arrived, David's seizure was over, but he had not awakened. The paramedics checked his blood sugar and found a normal glucose level. With coma, that was the limit of what they could do at the scene, so they fitted a collar on him, put him on a back¬board, and had the soldiers carry him out to the ambu¬lance in the courtyard.

As they careened though the streets, Rachel mentally raced through the possible causes of coma. Drugs were the most common cause after hypoglycemia, but David had no history of substance abuse. He hadn't hit the floor hard enough to cause head trauma, and forty-one was old even for late-onset epilepsy.

take his money belt and clothes and put them into a plastic bag.

A man in white came to the door and spoke Hebrew to the paramedics. He glanced at Rachel, then entered and in heavily accented English asked her to summarize what had happened at the church. She complied, then gave David's medical history as best she knew it.

He had been unconscious for thirty minutes. Most patients suffering a grand mal seizure would be coming out of it by now. The doctor ordered blood work; X rays of the chest and cervical spine; a CT scan to rule out stroke, tumors, or subarachnoid hemorrhage; and a spinal tap to rule out meningitis.

After a nurse drew the blood, an aide moved David to radiology for the CT scan, which took nearly an hour. When he returned to the treatment room, he was still unconscious. Next the ER doctor performed the spinal puncture. The escaping spinal fluid had normal pressure, and Rachel breathed much easier when she saw that the fluid was clear. Infection was highly unlikely.

The next step was a referral to neurology, and at that point Rachel began to panic. A neurology referral meant admission to the hospital, which would bring questions about medical insurance and payment. There was $15,000 in the two money belts, but she didn't want to raise suspicions by showing that kind of cash. She nearly hugged the ER doctor when he informed her that there were no beds available in neurology. David would have to remain in the emergency department.

When an EEG tech wheeled in a portable machine to do an electroencephalogram of David's brain, Rachel saw instantly that he was sharp. He switched off most of the electrical equipment in the room before performing the test, which eliminated background interference and made for a much clearer tracing.

As the tracing emerged from the machine, the tech looked concerned, and Rachel soon saw why. David's brain showed only alpha wave activity, of uniform fre¬quency and amplitude. The tech leaned forward and clapped his hands near David's right ear, but the alpha waves did not desynchronize. They didn't change at all.

Rachel's heart sank. David appeared to be in a state known as alpha coma. Few patients emerged alive from alpha coma.

"Are you a doctor?" the tech asked, noticing her expression.

"Yes."

His eyes softened. "I'm sorry."

As he reached to shut off the machine, Rachel saw a theta wave appear on the screen.

"Wait!" she cried, pointing.

"I see it."

The theta waves increased steadily in amplitude. Then some beta waves appeared.

"He's dreaming," Rachel said, hardly believing it. "Could he only be asleep?"

The tech pinched David's arm. There was no response. He leaned down to one ear and yelled, "Wake up!"

Nothing.

"He's not sleeping," the tech said thoughtfully. "But those thetas are definitely increasing in strength."

"What do you think is happening?"

"This guy's definitely in alpha coma. But his brain is doing something. What, I don't know." The tech walked to the door, then looked back at Rachel. "I'm going to leave the machine connected and get a neurologist down here. Okay?"

"Thank you."

She sat alone beside the bed, her hands shaking as she watched the screen. Until she'd seen that theta wave, she'd believed David was as good as dead. Now she had no idea what was happening. But something was going on in his head. Could he be hallucinating in coma as he had during his narcoleptic attacks? Maybe he wasn't really in coma at all. Sometimes a patient could appear to be comatose when he was actually having small seizures. Yet the EEG didn't show that. It showed an alpha coma state, interrupted by inexplicable theta and beta intrusions.

She didn't want to think about what David had been doing prior to his seizure, but she couldn't stop herself. In the medieval gloom of Holy Sepulchre, he had been searching for some remnant of Jesus' life on earth. Or of his death. He had scorned the traditional places vener¬ated by pilgrims-the anointing stone, the tomb itself- but at the place marked as the spot where Jesus died on the cross, he had fallen to his knees and whispered, "This is the place." Then the seizure had started.

The incident had actually begun before that. When David looked at the mural depicting Christ being nailed to the cross, he had clenched his fists as though his hands were in agony. What had been going on in his mind? Did he really believe that he was Jesus Christ? Believe it so completely that he felt Jesus' wounds? She'd heard of cases of stigmata caused by the mind, but she had never really believed them. Was she witnessing something similar?

She grasped David's limp hand. Despite the EEG, she half-expected him to open his eyes. Yet they remained closed. She silently thanked God that the ER doctor had ordered a CT scan rather than an MRI. How could she have talked him out of what he would see as a harmless imaging test? How could she protect David from any¬thing here? She didn't know what her enemy was. The only person she could think of who might have answers about this strange coma was Ravi Nara. But according to David, Nara was part of the group that wanted to kill them.

"Wake up, David," she said softly in his ear. "For God's sake, wake up."

WHITE SANDS

Ravi Nara parked his ATV outside the hospital hangar and walked to the door. In his pocket was a syringe of potassium chloride that would stop Godin's weakened heart as surely as a bullet.

He paused at the hangar door, unable to open it. It had taken hours to steel himself for this visit, and with¬out Skow threatening him, he would not have made it this far. They're watching this on monitors somewhere, he said to himself. Move.

He entered the hangar, slipped on a fresh lab coat, then walked into the decontaminator and stepped on the floor switch. High-intensity UV light bombarded him from all sides. As he stood in the purple glow, he stared through the hatch in the Bubble. Godin's nurses sat like guard dogs on either side of the bed. It's him or me, he told himself. Remember what Skow said…

The NSA man had not shouted with joy when he'd learned that the computer might reach Trinity state within twelve hours. He'd asked how long Godin was likely to live. When Ravi answered more than twelve hours, Skow told him that could not be allowed to happen.

"Why not?" Ravi had asked, afraid he already knew the answer.

"Because it's too late," Skow snapped. "The president called me from China, very upset about the Tennant situ¬ation. Very suspicious, too. I had to tell him something that made sense."

"Something besides the truth, you mean."

"Exactly. I told him that Peter has been ill all along, and that I was afraid he might be responsible for Fielding's death. I told him that Peter had disappeared, and that there might be a secret research facility some¬where. The FBI is tearing apart the Godin Supercomputing complex in Mountain View as we speak."

Ravi shut his eyes and prayed this was a nightmare. In the conference room in North Carolina, the decision to end Fielding's life had seemed almost an official gov¬ernment act. Trinity existed to strengthen America 's strategic position in the world. Fielding had sabotaged its progress. But when you stripped away the window dressing, Fielding's "termination" had been plain old murder.