The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  He lit another cigarette and thought about the letter he’d FedExed to David Tennant. It didn’t say enough. Not nearly. But it would have to do until they met at Nags Head. Tennant would be working a few steps up the hall from him all afternoon, but he might as well be in Fiji. No square foot of the Trinity complex was free of surveillance and recording devices. Tennant would get the letter this afternoon, if no one intercepted it. To prevent this, Fielding had instructed his wife to drop it at a FedEx box inside the Durham post office, beyond the sight line of anyone following her from a distance. That was all the spouses usually got—random surveillance from cars—but you never knew.

  Tennant was Fielding’s only hope. Tennant knew the president. He’d had cocktails in the White House, anyway. Fielding had won the Nobel in 1998, but he’d never been invited to 10 Downing Street. Never would be, in all likelihood. He’d shaken hands with the PM at a reception once, but that wasn’t the same thing. Not at all.

  He took a drag on the cigarette and looked down at his desk. An equation lay there, a collapsing wave function, unsolvable using present-day mathematics. Not even the world’s most powerful supercomputers could solve a collapsing wave function. There was one machine on the planet that might make headway with the problem—at least he believed there was—and if he was right, the term supercomputer might soon become as quaint and archaic as abacus. But the machine that could solve a collapsing wave function would be capable of a lot more than computing. It would be everything Peter Godin had promised the mandarins in Washington, and more. That “more” was what scared Fielding. Scared the bloody hell out of him. For no one could predict the unintended consequences of bringing such a thing into existence. “Trinity” indeed.

  He was thinking of going home early when something flashed in his left eye. There was no pain. Then the visual field in that eye swirled into a blur, and an explosion seemed to detonate in the left frontal lobe of his brain. A stroke, he thought with clinical detachment. I’m having a stroke. Strangely calm, he reached for the telephone to call 911, then remembered that the world’s preeminent neurologist was working in the office four doors down from his own.

  The telephone would be faster than walking. He reached for the receiver, but the event taking place within his cranium suddenly bloomed to its full destructive power. The clot lodged, or the blood vessel burst, and his left eye went black. Then a knifelike pain pierced the base of his brain, the center of life support functions. Falling toward the floor, Fielding thought again of that elusive particle that had traveled faster than the speed of light, that had proved Einstein wrong by traversing space as though it did not exist. He posed a thought experiment: If Andrew Fielding could move as fast as that particle, could he reach Ravi Nara in time to be saved?

  Answer: No. Nothing could save him now.

  His last coherent thought was a prayer, a silent hope that in the unmapped world of the quantum, consciousness existed beyond what humans called death. For Fielding, religion was an illusion, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Project Trinity had uncovered hope of a new immortality. And it wasn’t the Rube Goldberg monstrosity they were pretending to build a hundred meters from his office door.

  The impact of the floor was like water.

  I jerked awake and grabbed my gun. Someone was banging the front door taut against the security chain. I tried to get to my feet, but the dream had disoriented me. Its lucidity far surpassed anything I’d experienced to date. I actually felt that I had died, that I was Andrew Fielding at the moment of his death—

  “Dr. Tennant?” shouted a woman’s voice. “David! Are you in there?”

  My psychiatrist? I put my hand to my forehead and tried to fight my way back to reality. “Dr. Weiss? Rachel? Is that you?”

  “Yes! Unlatch the chain!”

  “I’m coming,” I muttered. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes! Open the door.”

  I stuffed my gun between the couch cushions and stumbled toward the door. As I reached for the chain latch, it struck me that I had never told my psychiatrist where I lived.

  Chapter

  2

  Rachel Weiss had jet-black hair, olive skin, and onyx eyes. Eleven weeks ago, when I’d arrived at her office for my first session, I’d thought of Rebecca from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Only in the novel Rebecca had a wild, unrestrained sort of beauty. Rachel Weiss projected a focused severity that made her physical appearance and clothing irrelevant, as though she went out of her way to hide attributes that would cause people to see her as anything other than the remarkable clinician she was.

  “What was that?” she asked, pointing to the sofa cushion where I’d stashed the gun. “Are you self-prescribing again?”

  “No. How did you find my house?”

  “I know a woman in Personnel at UVA. You missed two consecutive sessions, but at least you called ahead to cancel. Today you leave me sitting there and you don’t even call? Considering your state of mind lately, what do you expect me to do?” Rachel’s eyes went to the video camera. “Oh, David…you’re not back to this again? I thought you stopped years ago.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  She didn’t look convinced. Five years ago, a drunk driver flipped my wife’s car into a roadside pond. The water wasn’t deep, but both Karen and my daughter Zooey drowned before help arrived. I was working at the hospital they were brought to after the accident. Watching the ER staff try in vain to resuscitate my four-year-old daughter shattered me. I spent hours at home in front of the television, endlessly replaying videotapes of Zooey learning to walk, laughing in Karen’s arms, hugging me at her third birthday party. My medical practice withered, then died, and I sank into clinical depression. This was the only fact of my personal life I had discussed in detail with my psychiatrist, and this only because after three sessions she had told me that she’d lost her only child to leukemia the year before.

  She confided this because she believed my disturbing dreams were caused by the tragic loss of my family, and she wanted me to know she had felt the same kind of pain. Rachel, too, had lost more than her child. Unable to handle the devastating effects of his son’s illness, her lawyer husband had left her and returned to New York. Like me, Rachel had descended into a pit of depression from which she was lucky to emerge. Therapy and medication had been her salvation. But like my father, I’ve always been fiercely private, and I fought my way back to the land of the living alone. Not a day went by that I didn’t miss my wife and daughter, but my days of weeping as I replayed old videotapes were over.

  “This isn’t about Karen and Zooey,” I told Rachel. “Please close the door.”

  She remained in the open doorway, car keys in hand, clearly wanting to believe me but just as clearly skeptical. “What is it, then?”

  “Work. Please close the door.”

  Rachel hesitated, then shut the door and stared into my eyes. “Maybe it’s time you told me about your work.”

  This had long been a point of contention between us. Rachel considered doctor/patient confidentiality as sacred as the confessional, and my lack of trust offended her. She believed my demands for secrecy and warnings of danger hinted at a delusional reality I had constructed to protect my psyche from scrutiny. I didn’t blame her. At the request of the NSA, I’d made my first appointment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the paranoia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work—and my obsession with “protecting” her—had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.

  What Rachel didn’t know was that I had only been allowed to see her after winning a brutal argument with John Skow, the director of Project Trinity. My narcolepsy had developed as a result of my work at Trinity, and I wanted professional help to try to understand the accompanying dreams.

  First the NSA flew in a
shrink from Fort Meade, a pharmacological psychiatrist whose main patient base was technicians trying to cope with chronic stress or depression. He wanted to fill me up with happy pills and find out how to become an internationally published physician like me. Next they brought in a woman, an expert in dealing with the neuroses that develop when people are forced to work for long periods in secrecy. Her knowledge of dream symbolism was limited to “a little historical reading” during her residency. Like her colleague, she wanted to start me on a regimen of antidepressants and antipsychotics. What I needed was a psychoanalyst experienced in dream analysis, and the NSA didn’t have one.

  I called some friends at the UVA Medical School and discovered that Rachel Weiss, the country’s preeminent Jungian analyst, was based at the Duke University Medical School, less than fifteen miles from the Trinity building. Skow tried to stop me from seeing her, but in the end I told him he’d have to arrest me to do it, and before he tried that, he’d better call the president, who had appointed me to the project.

  “Something’s happened,” Rachel said. “What is it? Have the hallucinations changed again?”

  Hallucinations, I thought bitterly. Never dreams.

  “Have they intensified? Become more personal? Are you afraid?”

  “Andrew Fielding is dead,” I said in a flat voice.

  Rachel blinked. “Who’s Andrew Fielding?”

  “He was a physicist.”

  Her eyes widened. “Andrew Fielding the physicist is dead?”

  It was a measure of Fielding’s reputation that a medical doctor who knew little about quantum physics would know his name. But it didn’t surprise me. There were six-year-olds who’d heard of “the White Rabbit.” The man who had largely unraveled the enigma of the dark matter in the universe stood second only to his friend Stephen Hawking in the astrophysical firmament.

  “He died of a stroke,” I said. “Or so they say.”

  “So who says?”

  “People at work.”

  “You work with Andrew Fielding?”

  “I did. For the past two years.”

  Rachel shook her head in amazement. “You don’t think he died of a stroke?”

  “No.”

  “Did you examine him?”

  “A cursory exam. He collapsed in his office. Another doctor got to him before he died. That doctor said Fielding exhibited left-side paralysis and had a blown left pupil, but…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t believe him. Fielding died too quickly for a stroke. Within four or five minutes.”

  Rachel pursed her lips. “That happens sometimes. Especially with a severe hemorrhage.”

  “Yes, but it’s comparatively rare, and you don’t usually see a blown pupil.” That was true enough, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking that Rachel was a psychiatrist, and as good as she was, she hadn’t spent sixteen years practicing internal medicine, as I had. You got a feeling about certain cases, certain people. A sixth sense. Fielding had not been my patient, but he’d told me a lot about his health in two years, and a massive hemorrhage didn’t feel right to me. “Look, I don’t know where his body is, and I don’t think there’s going to be an autopsy, so—”

  “Why no autopsy?” Rachel broke in.

  “Because I think he was murdered.”

  “I thought you said he died in his office.”

  “He did.”

  “You think he was murdered at work? Workplace violence?”

  She still didn’t get it. “I mean premeditated murder. Carefully thought out, expertly executed murder.”

  “But…why would someone murder Andrew Fielding? He was an old man, wasn’t he?”

  “He was sixty-three.” Recalling Fielding’s body on his office floor, mouth agape, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, I felt a sudden compulsion to tell Rachel everything. But one glance at the window killed the urge. A parabolic microphone could be trained on the glass.

  “I can’t say anything beyond that. I’m sorry. You should go, Rachel.”

  She took two steps toward me, her face set with purpose. “I’m not going anywhere yet. Look, if anyone died while not under a doctor’s supervision in this state, there has to be an autopsy. And especially in cases of possible foul play. It’s required by law.”

  I laughed at her naiveté. “There won’t be an autopsy. Not a public one, anyway.”

  “David—”

  “I really can’t say more. I shouldn’t have said that much. I just wanted you to know…that it’s real.”

  “Why can’t you say more?” She held up a small, graceful hand. “No, let me answer that. Because to tell me more would put me in danger. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  She rolled her eyes. “David, from the beginning you’ve made extraordinary demands about secrecy. And I’ve complied. I’ve told colleagues that the hours you spend in my office are research for your second book, rather than what they really are.”

  “And you know I appreciate that. But if I’m right about Fielding, anything I tell you now could put your life at risk. Can’t you understand that?”

  “No. I’ve never understood. What sort of work could possibly be so dangerous?”

  I shook my head.

  “This is like a bad joke.” She laughed strangely. “‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’ It’s classic paranoid thinking.”

  “Do you really believe I’m making all this up?”

  Rachel answered with caution. “I believe that you believe everything you’ve told me.”

  “So, I’m still delusional.”

  “You’ve got to admit, you’ve been having disturbing hallucinations for some time now. Some of the recent ones are classic religious delusions.”

  “But most not,” I reminded her. “And I’m an atheist. Is that classic?”

  “No, I concede that. But you’ve also refused to get a workup for your narcolepsy. Or epilepsy. Or even to get your blood sugar checked, for that matter.”

  I’ve been worked up by the foremost neurologist in the world. “That’s being investigated at work.”

  “By Andrew Fielding? He wasn’t an M.D., was he?”

  I decided to go one step further. “I’m being treated by Ravi Nara.”

  Her mouth fell open. “Ravi Nara? As in the Nobel Prize for medicine?”

  “That’s him,” I said with distaste.

  “You work with Ravi Nara?”

  “Yes. He’s a prick. It was Nara who said Fielding died of a stroke.”

  Rachel appeared at a loss. “David, I just don’t know what to say. Are you really working with these famous people?”

  “Is that so hard to believe? I’m reasonably famous myself.”

  “Yes, but…not in the same way. What reason would those men have to work together? They’re in totally different fields.”

  “Until two years ago they were.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Go back to your office, Rachel.”

  “I canceled my last patient so I could come here.”

  “Bill me for your lost time.”

  She reddened. “There’s no need to insult me. Please tell me what’s going on. I’m tired of hearing nothing but your hallucinations.”

  “Dreams.”

  “Whatever. They’re not enough to work with.”

  “Not for your purpose. But you and I have different goals. We always have. You’re trying to solve the riddle of David Tennant. I’m trying to solve the riddle of my dreams.”

  “But the answers are bound up in who you are! Dreams aren’t independent of the rest of your brain! You—”

  The ringing telephone cut her off. I got up and went into the kitchen to answer it, a strange thrumming in my chest. The caller could be the president of the United States.

  “Dr. Tennant,” I said from years of habit.

  “Dr. David?” cried a hysterical female voice with an Asian accent. It was Lu Li, Fielding’s Chinese wife. Or widow…

/>   “This is David, Lu Li. I’m sorry I haven’t called you.” I searched for fitting words but found only a cliché. “I can’t begin to express the pain I feel at Andrew’s loss—”

  A burst of Cantonese punctuated with some English flashed down the wire. I didn’t have to understand it all to know I was hearing a distraught widow on the verge of collapse. God only knew what the Trinity security people had told Lu Li, or what she had made of it. She’d come to America only three months ago, her immigration fast-tracked by the State Department, which had received a none-too-subtle motivational call from the White House.