by Greg Iles
My relief was almost overwhelming. I put my hand on the counter to steady myself. The caller ID unit showed that McCaskell’s call had come in twenty minutes ago.
“Who was that?” Rachel asked.
I replayed the message for her.
“I have to admit,” she said, “that sounded like Ewan McCaskell.”
“Like him? That was him. Didn’t you understand anything you saw last night?”
She pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat in front of me. “Listen to me, David. Do you know why I’m here? Why I helped you last night?”
“Tell me.”
“Your book.”
“My book?”
“Yes. Every day in the hospital I see things they never told me about in medical school. Cases that fall into the cracks between reality and legality. Dilemmas the government hasn’t got the guts to face. I do what I can about them…maybe I complain to another doctor, but that’s it. You wrote it down for the world to read, without giving a damn what would happen to you. Abortion. Last-year-of-life care versus prenatal care. Euthanasia. My God, you wrote about assisting your own brother to die.”
I closed my eyes and saw an image of my older brother, unable to move anything but his eyelids due to the ravages of ALS, then unable to move even those. We’d made a pact. At that point I would help him end what remained of his life.
“I nearly left that out,” I said.
She gripped my forearm. “But you didn’t. You took the risk, and you helped countless people by leaving it in. People you’ll never know. But they know you. I know you. And now you’re ill. You’ve needed help for months, and conventional therapy wasn’t working. I couldn’t break through the walls you’d put up.” Her hand tightened on my arm, and she smiled encouragingly. “I believe you’re involved in some kind of special work, okay? But tell me this. If the Trinity computer is all you say it is, then why you? You know? You wrote a great book. The president knew your brother. But does that qualify you to make judgments about the kind of science you’ve told me about?”
She was right. There was more to it. I’d kept my past secret for so long that to speak of it now required a surprising act of will.
“My father was a nuclear physicist,” I said softly. “He worked at Los Alamos during the war. He was the youngest physicist to work on the Manhattan Project.”
Her dark eyes flashed. “Go on.”
“My undergraduate degree is in theoretical physics. MIT.”
“My God. I really know nothing about you, do I?”
I touched her shoulder. “Sure you do. Look, my father was part of the group that began to protest using the bomb. Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, those guys. The Germans had surrendered, and the Japanese just didn’t have the resources to build an atomic bomb. My father’s group wanted our bomb demonstrated for the Japanese army, not used on civilians. Their dissent was ignored, and Hiroshima became history.
“But we live in a different world now. Once the president realized the implications of Trinity—we’re talking about liberating human intelligence from the body, for God’s sake—he knew he’d be vulnerable politically if the public learned he’d gone ahead without concern for ethics or morality. Look at the craziness that surrounds cloning and fetal tissue research. So he demanded ethical oversight. He knew my book, he knew the public trusts me to tell the truth, and he trusted me because he’d known my brother. Beyond that, my pedigree for conscientious objection went back to my father and the Manhattan Project. So, who better than I?”
Rachel was shaking her head. “Why did you become a doctor rather than a physicist?”
She couldn’t stop being a shrink. Or maybe she was just being a woman. “After Hiroshima, my dad led a troubled life. Edward Teller was gearing up to build the hydrogen superbomb. Oppenheimer opposed it. So did my father. Dad requested a transfer. General Groves didn’t want to release him from weapons work, but they agreed to give him a more technical job, one more removed from the actual warheads. They moved him to the national lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
“Why didn’t he just quit altogether?”
“Eventually he did. But this was the Cold War. There were different kinds of pressure then. Oppenheimer was persecuted for years for his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Dad also met my mother at Oak Ridge. Things were better there. They had my brother. I was born much later. An accident, really.” I smiled at the memory of my parents revealing this fact to me. “I grew up in Oak Ridge, but when I was a teenager, Dad quit nuclear physics and moved us to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could work on the space program.”
“I still don’t see the medical connection.”
“My mother was a pediatrician in Oak Ridge. She did a lot of good. It didn’t take a genius to see that she was a lot happier in her work than my dad had been. That’s what influenced me.”
I glanced down at the phone, willing it to ring again. “Last night, I only told you part of the truth. When the president offered me this position, it felt oddly like poetic justice. I was being given the opportunity my father never had at Los Alamos. The chance to exercise some control over a great undertaking that was likely to change the world forever. For good or evil. I sensed that on the day I visited the Oval Office, and that’s what put me here.”
Rachel took a deep breath and slowly blew out the air. “It’s all real, isn’t it? Trinity, I mean.”
“Yes. And I’m damned glad McCaskell called me back. We need the president badly.”
I stood up, half wanting to replay McCaskell’s message, but a wave of fatigue rolled through me. I hoped it was just exhaustion, but then the familiar high-pitched humming began in my back teeth. Remembering I had no amphetamines left, I took a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge, popped it open, and drank a long pull for the caffeine.
“David?” Rachel was watching me strangely. “Are you all right? You look shaky.”
“I may go out,” I said, taking another gulp of the soda.
“Go out?” Her eyes widened. “Narcolepsy?”
She’d never witnessed one of my episodes. As I nodded, a shadow seemed to pass over my eyes. It left me with a vague feeling of threat, as though someone were in the room with us, there but unseen. “I’m missing something,” I thought aloud.
“What are you talking about?”
An image of Geli Bauer came into my mind. “We’re in danger.”
Rachel looked worried, more about me than any external threat. “What kind of danger?”
“There’s something about the way all this is happening. Godin giving us time off…my chart being stolen from your office…McCaskell’s call. I’m missing something, but I’m too tired to think of what.”
“I thought McCaskell’s call was good news.”
“It is. It’s just…” As drowsy as I was, I felt a desperate need to have my gun in my hand. “I want you to do me a favor. Wait here for two minutes.”
“What?” Worry darkened her eyes. “Where are you going?”
“To my neighbor’s house.” I hurried to the back door.
“David! What if you pass out?”
“Don’t answer the door!” I called. “But if the phone rings, answer it and say I’ll be right back.”
I ran outside and crashed through the thick hedge that bordered the backyards of the houses on my street. I sprinted the length of three backyards, then cut back through the hedge behind a neighbor’s utility shed. I’d slipped out of my house last night about 2 A.M. and hidden Fielding’s box beneath it. Inside the box were Fielding’s electronic gadgets, my partially recorded videotape, Fielding’s letter, and my pistol. I got on my knees and retrieved the box, then crawled back through the hedge and sprinted back to my own yard. By the time I reached it, I felt like a drunk running through an unfamiliar city.
Rachel was waiting just inside the back door. “That’s the stuff from last night,” she said. “Why do you need that?”
I tilted the box so she could see the gun.
S
he stepped back. “David, you’re scaring me.”
“You need to get out of here. You’ll be fine for the time it takes me to tell my story to McCaskell.” I set the box on the floor, put the gun in my waistband, then led her to the front of the house. “Spend the rest of the day somewhere public, like a mall. Don’t go home until you hear from me.”
She pivoted and stopped me from pushing her toward the door. Her assertiveness seemed to bring us eye to eye. “Stop this! You’re so out of it right now you could shoot yourself by accident.”
I started to reply, but my words went spinning off into the dark edges of my mind. I would be unconscious in less than a minute.
“I’m about to go under.”
She grabbed my arm and dragged me into the hall, looking for a place to lay me down. I pointed to the door of my guest bedroom. Sensing that I was about to fall, she rushed me through the door and let me fall facedown across the mattress.
“Do you have any medication?”
“I ran out.”
Her footsteps moved away. I heard cabinet doors banging, then Rachel’s voice talking to herself. When the voice seemed closer, I managed to roll over. There was a dark silhouette in the doorway.
“Coffee’s brewing,” Rachel said. “You’re still awake?”
“Sort of.”
She watched me like someone observing an animal during an experiment. “There’s no food in your kitchen. Nothing but rock-hard saltines. When was the last time you went to the market?”
I couldn’t remember. The last few weeks had been an endless parade of hours working with Fielding on experiments I barely understood.
Rachel sat on the bed and put her fingers against my carotid artery. Her fingertips were cool.
“I was like that for a while,” she said, looking at her watch. Her lips moved slightly as she counted pulse beats. “After I lost my son. Not going to the market, I mean. Not paying bills. Not bathing. I guess it takes a man longer to get back to those kinds of things. In the end, I used those small chores to enforce some order in my life. It kept me from going completely mad.”
I felt my lips smile. I liked that she didn’t let psychiatry get in the way of using words like mad. I also liked the way her fingers felt against my neck. I wanted to tell her something about her touch. It reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who…
“When’s your birthday?” she asked.
I couldn’t remember.
“David?”
A black wave rolled over me, covering me in darkness.
I’m walking up a suburban sidewalk, studying the perfect houses in their perfect rows. It’s Willow Street. I live on Willow—sleep on it, anyway—but it has little in common with the street I lived on as a boy. On Willow Street, I don’t know my neighbors well, and some not at all. The NSA told me not to make friends, and that has turned out to be easy. On Willow Street, no one makes an effort. In Oak Ridge the houses were smaller, but I could name everyone who lived in them. My little neighborhood was a world unto itself, filled with faces I knew like those of my own family. On Willow Street the children stay inside more than outside. The fathers don’t cut the lawns, hired men do. In Oak Ridge, the fathers cared for their lawns like little fiefdoms, spent hours discussing various mowers and fertilizers with each other.
I walk around a curve and see my own house. White with green trim. From the outside it looks like a home, but it’s never felt like home to me. A black Labrador retriever lopes across the street without its master, a rare sight here. A Lexus rolls toward me, slowing as it passes. I wave at its driver, a tall, imperious woman. She stares at me as if I’m a dangerous interloper. I cross the street and walk up to my front door.
My hand goes into my pocket for my key, then to the doorknob. I insert something into the lock, but…it’s not my key. It’s thin and metallic, like a file. I jiggle it in the lock. There’s a moment of resistance, then the lock gives. I open the door, slip inside, and quickly close it behind me.
My hand digs into my other pocket, brushing against something cold. My fingers close around wood, and my hand emerges gripping the butt of a gun, an automatic. I don’t recognize the weapon. From my other pocket I withdraw a perforated silencer and slowly screw it onto the gun barrel. It seats itself with satisfying finality. From the hallway, I hear a tinkle of glass. Someone’s in the kitchen. I take one careful step forward, testing the floorboards, then begin to walk—
I snapped awake in panic and jerked my pistol from my waistband. A revolver, not an automatic. And no silencer. I wanted to call out to Rachel, but I suppressed the urge. In a single motion I rolled off the bed, landed on my feet, and moved to the bedroom door.
At first I heard only a soft humming in a female register. The tune sounded like “California” by Joni Mitchell.
The hardwood floor of the hallway creaked.
I drew a silent breath and held it.
The floor creaked again. Someone was passing my door from right to left. I closed my eyes and waited. Another creak. I counted slowly to ten. Then I reached down with my free hand and slowly turned the knob. When it had turned far enough, I yanked open the door, leapt into the hall, and aimed my .38 to the left.
A long-haired blond man stood six feet away, his arms extended through the kitchen door. I couldn’t see his hands, but I knew they held a gun.
I pulled the trigger.
There was no boom or kick. I’d forgotten to cock the hammer, so the double-action trigger only went halfway back. As I jerked it home, the blond man whirled and a silenced automatic whipped into view, its bore black and bottomless. Then my trigger broke, and an orange flash illuminated the hallway. I blinked against it, and when I opened my eyes, the blond man was gone.
A woman was screaming an ice pick through my eardrums.
I looked down. The blond man lay on the floor, blood pouring from his skull. I moved forward and stepped on the wrist of the hand holding the gun. The screaming wouldn’t stop. I glanced to my right. Rachel was standing with her back against the sink, her face deathly gray, her mouth open wide.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “Stop!”
Her mouth remained open, but the scream died.
I pulled the automatic from the blond man’s hand, then checked his brachial pulse. Thready. The bullet had entered the skull just above the right ear. His gray eyes were glazed, both pupils fixed and dilated. Leaning down, I saw exposed brain matter. He wouldn’t last five minutes.
I sensed more than saw Rachel moving. Looking up, I saw her holding the kitchen telephone, preparing to dial.
“Put that down.”
“I’m calling for paramedics!”
“He doesn’t have a chance.”
“You don’t know that!”
“Of course I do. Examine him, if you don’t believe me.” I straightened up. “Even if he did, we couldn’t risk it.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Who do you think this is? Some street punk? A crackhead breaking into my house in broad daylight? Look at him.”
Rachel glanced down for perhaps a second. “I don’t know who he is. Do you know him?”
As I stared down at the ruined young face, I realized that I did. At least I’d seen him before. Not often, but I had passed him in the parking lot at Trinity, a tall, lanky blond with the look of someone you’d meet on a mountain trail in Europe. Like Geli Bauer, he had the physique of a climber, or an elite soldier.
“I do know him. He works for Geli Bauer.”
Rachel squinted in confusion. “Who’s that?”
“She’s Trinity. She’s Godin. She’s the NSA.” I laid both guns on the kitchen counter. “Someone ordered her to take me out too. You, too, apparently.”
Something in me still resisted the idea that Peter Godin had ordered my death. Yet nothing at Trinity happened without his approval.
“We have to call the police,” Rachel said. “We’ll be all right. He was about to shoot me. This was self-defense, or justifiable homicide,
whatever they call it.”
“The police? You can’t call local police to investigate the NSA. I told you that.”
“Why not? He was going to kill me. That’s a state crime.”
I almost laughed. “The NSA is the largest and most secret intelligence agency in the United States. Everything they do is classified. It would take a court order to get a cop past the front gate at Fort Meade.”
“This isn’t Fort Meade.”
“To the NSA, it is. Look, until I talk to the president, we’re on our own. Do you understand?”
