The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  Geli took a sip of hot coffee and held it in her mouth.

  “I think you cared more for Ritter than anyone knew,” Skow added.

  She swallowed. “You’re a shrink now?”

  “Something just hit me. If you’re so sure that Weiss is my secret source, Tennant may conclude the same thing. I mean, as you said…how else could that SWAT have been waiting at Frozen Head?”

  “Go on.”

  “If Tennant decides Weiss is informing on him, he’ll dump her. We should put out an APB on her and cover the phones and homes of everyone she’s close to.”

  “I’ve already covered everybody she might call, but not for that reason. Tennant won’t leave Dr. Weiss anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s in love with her.”

  “He can’t ignore logic that obvious.”

  Geli laughed softly. “Of course he can. People do it all the time.”

  Chapter

  23

  I snapped awake with a rush of terror. Rachel was behind the wheel of the pickup truck, and we were moving. I lay crumpled on the floor on the passenger side. Pulling myself onto the seat, I saw that we were racing down a deserted rural highway. There was nothing behind us but empty road.

  “How did you get in?” I asked. “Did I not lock the door?”

  She didn’t look at me. “You locked it. There was a piece of heavy wire in the truck bed. I made a hook and pulled the lock from inside the doorframe.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Almost to Caryville. From the signs, it looks like I-75 runs through there.”

  I shook the remnants of the Jerusalem dream from my head. How long had I been unconscious? “Where’s the SWAT team?”

  “Looking for us, I’m sure.”

  I was certain that Rachel had betrayed our destination to the NSA. So why was she driving me down a deserted road? Maybe she was driving back toward Frozen Head.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But you’re wrong. Someone else had to know about Frozen Head Park. Maybe you told someone at Trinity about it. Ravi Nara? Before you started hating each other?”

  “No. You’re the only person alive who knew about that cave. At least about its connection to me.”

  I rolled down the window, leaned out, and scanned the sky. I saw nothing, at least in the space visible between the trees that lined the narrow blacktop. Was there any reason Geli Bauer’s people wouldn’t move in if they knew where I was? I couldn’t think of one. Anything Geli wanted from me she would get quicker by torturing me than by following me.

  “If you’re not helping them, why are you still with me?”

  Rachel looked at me then, her eyes filled with sadness. “I’m not even going to answer that.”

  I wanted to believe in her, but I’d be a fool to do so. “Look…if you didn’t tell them about Frozen Head, they could not have been waiting there.”

  “You’re missing something,” she insisted. “You have to be.”

  “No. My father and brother are dead. The NSA would have to be able to read my mind to know—”

  I froze with my mouth open. Revelation had stunned me like a blow to the head.

  “David? What’s the matter?”

  “They’ve done it,” I whispered. “Good God.”

  “Done what?”

  “Trinity. They’ve got a prototype up and running.”

  “How do you know?”

  I put a shaking hand to my forehead. Somewhere in America, the Super-MRI scan of my brain had been loaded into a Trinity computer. And that neuromodel now existed—at least to some degree—as David Tennant. I felt as if the people hunting me had discovered I had a twin brother, an evil twin who shared all my memories and would betray me on demand. The feeling of violation was absolute. My mind was my most sacred refuge from the world. I felt raped in some incomprehensible way, robbed of my individuality.

  Where else are they waiting for me? I wondered.

  “David, don’t shut me out,” she pleaded. “Talk to me.”

  “They have my memories, Rachel. They have me, loaded into their computer. That’s how they knew to be waiting at Frozen Head. They don’t have to chase us anymore. They know what I’ll do before I do it.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “No. That’s exactly what they’ve been working toward for two years. I know these people. I know Peter Godin. And I know it’s true.”

  She slowed the truck for a hairpin turn. “You’re saying that Fielding was right? They’ve been working on the computer somewhere else all along?”

  “Yes. While Fielding and I screwed around trying to figure out the MRI side effects, they were building the goddamn thing at some secret location.” I slapped the dashboard. “That’s why they laid off certain teams during the suspension.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “After we suspended the project, groups of engineers were told to take paid leave. Sometimes there were only skeleton crews in the building. The team most conspicuously absent was the Interface Team, led by a guy named Zach Levin.”

  “What’s the Interface Team?”

  “The team responsible for trying to communicate with the neuromodels once they’re successfully loaded. Remember what I said at the amphitheater? If you download a human brain into a computer, what do you really have? A deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed human being, scared to death. Half the battle is giving that brain eyes, ears, and a voice. That’s the job of the Interface Team. With the project suspended, it made sense for them to be laid off. But now I see. God, I wish Fielding were here.”

  Rachel glanced at me. “But if they were that close to success, why kill Fielding? If Godin actually made Trinity work, would anyone really care about medical side effects or anything else?”

  “You’ve got a point. If they’ve really done it, Godin will be almost invulnerable. We don’t have enough information. Maybe—” My hands went cold. “Oh, God.”

  “What is it?”

  “I know why they killed Fielding.”

  “Why?”

  “They could afford to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yesterday, John Skow announced that he wasn’t going to replace Fielding. I thought he was crazy. But now I understand. If they have a prototype computer up and running, Fielding isn’t dead.”

  Rachel turned to me in confusion. “What does that mean?”

  “I mean they can load Fielding’s neuromodel the same way they’ve loaded mine. They’ll have Andrew Fielding’s mind at their fingertips. He can solve their remaining problems for them!”

  She drove for a few moments without speaking. “Okay. Let’s just say this is possible for a minute. Why would Fielding help the people who murdered him?”

  An eerie feeling of admiration came over me. Peter Godin was more ruthless than I ever imagined. “Fielding’s neuromodel will help them because it won’t know he’s been murdered. It was made six months ago, when Fielding was scanned by the Super-MRI. It has no memories of anything that’s happened since then. That Andrew Fielding doesn’t even know he married Lu Li.”

  “David, this can’t be happening.”

  “Sure it can. We just happen to be standing close to a revolutionary leap in science. Splitting the atom. Unraveling the human genome. Cloning a sheep.”

  “What you’re talking about isn’t like those things. Liberating consciousness from the human body?”

  I thought about it. “You’re right. This is bigger because it will give us the ability to make those kinds of advances at an exponential rate. Or not us, exactly. Whatever you call the new form of consciousness that Trinity will evolve into. And it will evolve very fast.”

  “You don’t know for sure that they’ve done it.”

  “They’re at least part of the way there. Maybe they just have a crude version up and running. Maybe they can access my memories—pull out images, for example—but not actually operate the model as a functioning mind. Huma
n memory is Ravi Nara’s specialty, and they made a lot of progress in that area early on. There’s just no way to know.”

  Rachel touched my arm. “If you’re right, what do they know about what we’re doing now?”

  “Nothing, I hope. They can’t read my mind in any mystical way. They probably have my memories from childhood up to six months ago, when I was scanned by the Super-MRI. As for my thought processes, my judgment, my personality—that would take a fully functional computer. And if they have that…”

  “What?”

  “The president won’t care what happened to a couple of doctors. The nation accepts more casualties to build a skyscraper or a bridge. You and I are a negligible price to pay for the strategic superiority Trinity will bring. If they’ve truly completed Trinity, we’re dead.”

  She pointed through the windshield. “There’s Caryville. And I-75. Are we going north or south?”

  “Pull over.”

  She slowed gradually, then turned the wheel and stopped on the shoulder, just short of the northbound on-ramp.

  “I’m trying to escape from myself,” I thought aloud. “To do that, we have to make utterly random choices. But how random can my choices be? I suppose we could flip a coin every time we come to an intersection like this.”

  Rachel was shaking her head. “They don’t have a scan of my brain. They can’t predict anything I would do. I’ll just make the choices from now on.”

  She saw doubt in my eyes. “You still don’t trust me?”

  “It’s not that. But by now Geli Bauer knows everything there is to know about you. She knows things even you don’t remember.”

  Rachel’s lips compressed into a white line. “I hate her. I hate her, and I don’t even know her.”

  “I know. But hate’s not going to save us.”

  “Why can’t we just disappear into nowhere? Pay cash at a no-name motel in a no-name town? Back this truck up to a fence and go to sleep for three days. America is a big place. Even for the NSA.”

  “You ever watch America’s Most Wanted? They catch criminals every week who try what you just suggested. Television makes America a lot smaller than you think.”

  I leaned back in my seat and tried to let instinct take over. Cars and trucks passed in both directions, some slowly, others shaking the truck with the wind they threw off. As I sat there, the situation began to clarify itself.

  In three days, we would get a chance to see the president. Our problem was staying alive long enough to talk to him. The odds of that were long and getting longer. Even if we did reach Matthews, I’d have to convince him that I was telling the truth and that everyone else involved in Project Trinity was lying. To do that, I needed hard evidence. And I had none. My other option—going public—would only convince the president that I was the loose cannon everyone at Trinity claimed I was and alienate the one man who could save us. Three days…

  “How long are we going to sit here?” Rachel asked.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Hiding was not the answer. Running wasn’t either. Not in any conventional way. We needed to take a step so radical that no entity in the world could predict it. But what?

  As I stared through the windshield at the oncoming traffic, I realized I was sitting here with Rachel for one reason: my dreams. My dreams had brought us together. Without my dreams, we would both have been shot back at my house. Yet I was no closer to understanding them than I had been on the day I first walked into Rachel’s office.

  For months they had progressed, like a persistent message being sent from a distant radio source. In the beginning, the incomprehensible images had troubled and even frightened me. But over time—and especially during the past three weeks—a conviction had begun to crystallize within me that something important was being communicated to me. Of course, schizophrenics felt the same conviction. What separated me from them?

  I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind, but the opposite happened. I suddenly saw a walled city on a hill, its stones glowing yellow in the sun. There was a gate set in its face.

  The eastern gate, whispered a voice in my head. Jerusalem.

  Never had I experienced a vision while awake. I opened my eyes and saw Rachel staring at the dashboard. I closed my eyes again, but the city vanished like the afterimage of a flashbulb.

  “David? What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Nothing.”

  I rubbed my temples and tried to open my mind to whatever was coming. I’d felt drawn to specific places before. During my twenties, I’d traveled a lot, and while I was usually driven by student wander-lust, there were times when something deeper had pulled me off my planned track.

  While visiting Oxford University, I’d awakened one morning with a feeling that I needed to get to Stonehenge—not just to see it, but to be in the presence of the sarsen stones. My companion assured me that there was no rush; the stones had been standing for five thousand years and would surely wait another few days. But still I rented a car and drove south until I reached Salisbury Plain. After darkness fell, I approached the ancient ring alone and did what tourists can do no longer: walked among the stones in the moonlight and lay upon the sacrificial altar. I was no New Age dilettante, but a medical student from the University of Virginia, looking toward a stable career. Yet this wasn’t the only time such a thing had happened. I was drawn to Chichén Itzá the same way. And on a drive to the Grand Canyon, I changed course and camped at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico for a week instead. In Greece it was Delphi over Athens. In all these situations I had felt an external pull, as though something were calling me to a specific place.

  What I felt now was different, an internal compulsion to travel to Jerusalem, whatever the consequences. That the city was sacred to three great religions was irrelevant. I had nothing in common with the faithful millions planning pilgrimages to the Holy Land. I sensed only that the city held answers for me, answers that could be found nowhere else.

  “Where are we going?” Rachel asked irritably.

  “Israel,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Jerusalem.”

  “David—”

  “It’s because—”

  “Don’t tell me. Because of your hallucinations, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached out and lifted my chin, then looked deeply into my eyes. “David, people are trying to kill us. The government is trying to kill us. You’ve been having hallucinations for reasons we don’t understand, but which may have been caused by damage to your brain. And you want to use those hallucinations to guide you in trying to save our lives?”

  “Whoever will save his life shall lose it.”

  “What?”

  I turned up my palms. “I’m not saying this will save our lives. I’m saying that if I’m going to be hunted down and killed, I’d rather it happen while I’m trying to learn the meaning of something I believe has meaning.”

  “You truly believe your hallucinations have meaning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t explain it logically. It’s just something I know. Like a bird flying south.”

  She sighed like an exhausted mother talking to a child. “Try, okay? Try to explain.”

  I closed my eyes and searched for words to explain the inexplicable. “I feel as though I’ve been chosen.”

  “For what?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Chosen by whom?”

  “God.”

  “God God?”

  “Yes.”

  She took a deep breath and folded her hands in her lap. She was clearly struggling to remain calm. “I think it’s time you told me what these recent hallucinations have been about. Are you still dreaming that you’re Jesus?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s different about these visions as compared to the older ones? Why have you hidden them from me?”

  We’d finally arrived at the line between sanity and the rubber room. I was glad w
e were in a truck on a highway and not in Rachel’s office. There was no one she could call to have me committed. “Because I no longer believe they’re hallucinations. Or dreams. I think they’re memories.”

  She expelled air in a frustrated rush. “Memories? My God, David. What’s happening in these dreams?”

  “I’m reliving parts of Jesus’ life. His travels to Jerusalem. His experiences there. I hear voices. My own…the disciples. Rachel, what I see in my head is more real than what I see around me. And events are moving rapidly. I’m approaching the crucifixion.”