Greg Iles - Dark Matter

I hurried to the kitchen and scrubbed my hands with dish soap and water. Then I pulled a black medical bag from my closet. Inside was the usual pharmacopoeia of the M.D.’s home: analgesics, antibiotics, emetics, steroid cream. I found what I wanted in a snap compartment: a blister pack of Cipro, a powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic. I swallowed one pill with water from the tap, then took a pair of surgical gloves from the bag. As a last precaution, I tied a dirty T-shirt from the hamper around my nose and mouth. Then I folded the FedEx envelope and letter into separate Ziploc bags, sealed them, and laid them on the counter.

As badly as I wanted to read the letter, part of me resisted. Fielding might have been murdered for what was written on that page. Even if that weren’t the case, nothing good would come from my reading it.

I carefully vacuumed the white granules from the carpet in the front room, wondering if I could be wrong about Fielding’s death being murder. He and I had worked ourselves into quite a state of suspicion over the past weeks, but then we had reason to. And the timing was too damn convenient. Instead of putting the vacuum cleaner back into the closet, I walked to the back door and tossed the machine far into the yard. I could always buy another one.

I was still eerily aware of the letter sitting on the kitchen counter. I felt like a soldier’s wife refusing to open a telegram. But I already knew my friend was dead. So what did I fear?

The why, answered a voice in my head. Fielding talking. You want to keep your head in the sand. It’s the American national pastime …

More than a little irritated to find that the dead could be as bothersome as the living, I picked up the Ziploc containing the letter and carried it to the front room. The note was brief and handwritten.

David,

We must meet again. I finally confronted Godin with my suspicions. His reaction astounded me. I don’t want to commit anything to paper, but I know I’m right. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night. Please join us. It’s close quarters, but discreet. It may be time for you to contact your late brother’s friend again, though I wonder if even he can do anything at this point. Things like this have a momentum greater than individuals. Greater even than humanity, I fear. If anything should happen to me, don’t forget that little gold item I asked you to hold for me one day. Desperate times, mate. I’ll see you Saturday.

There was no signature, but below the note was a hand-drawn cartoon of a rabbit’s head and the face of a clock. The White Rabbit, an affectionate nickname given Fielding by his Cambridge physics students. Fielding always carried a gold pocket watch, and that was the “little gold item” that he had asked me to hold for him one day.

We were passing each other in the hallway when he pressed the watch and chain into my hand. “Mind keeping that for an hour, old man?” he’d murmured. “Lovely.” Then he was gone. An hour later he stopped by my office to pick it up, saying he hadn’t wanted to take the watch into the MRI lab with him, where it could have been smashed against the MRI unit by the machine’s enormous magnetic fields. But Fielding visited the MRI lab all the time, and he’d never given me his pocket watch before. And he never did again. It must have been in his pocket when he died. So what the hell was he up to that day?

I read the note again. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night. Lu Li was Fielding’s new Chinese wife. The “blue place” had to be code for a beach cabin at Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Three months ago, when Fielding asked for a recommendation for his honeymoon, I’d suggested the Nags Head cabin, which was only a few hours away. Fielding and his wife had loved the place, and the Englishman had apparently thought of it when he wanted a secure location to discuss his fears.

My hands were shaking. The man who had written this note was now as cold as the morgue table he was lying on, if indeed he was lying in a morgue. No one had been able—or willing—to tell me where my friend’s body would be taken. And now the white powder. Would Fielding have put powder in the envelope and neglected to mention it in his letter? If he didn’t, who did? Who but the person who had murdered him?

I laid the letter on the sofa, stripped off the surgical gloves, and rewound the videotape to the point at which I’d walked out of the frame. I had decided to make this tape because I feared I might be killed before I could tell the president what I knew. Fielding’s letter had changed nothing. Yet as I stared into the lens, my mind wandered. I was way ahead of Fielding on calling my “late brother’s friend.” The moment I’d seen Fielding’s corpse on the floor of his office, I knew I had to call the president. But the president was in China. Still, as soon as I got clear of the Trinity lab, I’d called the White House from a pay phone in a Shoney’s restaurant, a “safe” phone Fielding had told me about. It couldn’t be seen by surveillance teams in cars, and the restaurant’s interior geometry made it difficult for a parabolic microphone to eavesdrop from a distance.

When I said “Project Trinity,” the White House operator put me through to a man who gruffly asked me to state my business. I asked to speak to Ewan McCaskell, the president’s chief of staff, whom I’d met during my visit to the Oval Office. McCaskell was in China with the president. I asked that the president be informed that David Tennant needed to speak to him urgently about Project Trinity, and that no one else involved with Trinity should be informed. The man said my message would be passed on and hung up.

Thirteen hours separated North Carolina and Beijing. That made it tomorrow in China. Daylight. Yet four hours had passed since my call, and I’d heard nothing. Would my message be relayed to China, given the critical nature of the summit? There was no way to know. I did know that if someone at Trinity heard about my call first, I might wind up as dead as Fielding before I talked to the president.

I hit START on the remote control and spoke again to the camera.

“In the past six months I’ve gone from feeling like part of a noble scientific effort to questioning whether I’m even living in the United States. I’ve watched Nobel laureates give up all principle in a search for—”

I went still. Something had passed by one of my front windows. A face. Very close, peering inside. I’d seen it through the sheer curtains, but I was sure. A face, framed by shoulder-length hair. I had a sense of a woman’s features, but …

I started to get up, then sat back down. My teeth were vibrating with an electric pain like aluminum foil crushed between dental fillings. My eyelids felt too heavy to hold open. Not now, I thought, shoving my hand into my pocket for my prescription bottle. Jesus, not now. For six months, every member of Trinity’s inner circle had suffered frightening neurological symptoms. No one’s symptoms were the same. My affliction was narcolepsy. Narcolepsy and dreams. At home, I usually gave in to the trancelike sleep. But when I needed to fight off a spell—at Trinity, or driving my car—only amphetamines could stop the overwhelming waves.

I pulled out my prescription bottle and shook it. Empty. I’d swallowed my last pill yesterday. I got my speed from Ravi Nara, Trinity’s neurologist, but Nara and I were no longer speaking. I tried to rise, thinking I’d call a pharmacy and prescribe my own, but that was ridiculous. I couldn’t even stand. A leaden heaviness had settled into my limbs. My face felt hot, and my eyelids began to fall.

The prowler was at the window again. In my mind, I raised my gun and aimed it, but then I saw the weapon lying in my lap. Not even survival instinct could clear the fog filling my brain. I looked back at the window. The face was gone. A woman’s face. I was sure of it. Would they use a woman to kill me? Of course. They were pragmatists. They used what worked.