The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  “And you?” she asked. “Where do you think evil comes from?”

  “The human heart.”

  “The heart pumps blood, David.”

  “You know what I mean. The psyche. The dark well where primitive instincts mix with human intelligence. When you look at the atrocities man is capable of, it’s difficult to imagine a divine plan behind any of it. I mean, look what happened to your grandfather.”

  Rachel gripped my arm and looked at me with almost desperate urgency. “On the day my grandfather was murdered, there was a moment when he could have killed that guard. They were alone at a rock quarry, one guard and three prisoners. The Americans were only a day away. But he didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?” I asked, stunned by her passion.

  “I think he knew something that we’ve forgotten.”

  “What?”

  “That if you take up the weapon of your enemy, you become like him. Jesus knew that. Gandhi, too.”

  “Even with your son standing there beside you? Needing your protection? You turn the other cheek and sacrifice yourself?”

  “You don’t commit murder,” Rachel said firmly. “If my grandfather had killed that guard, he and my father might have been executed that night. We can’t know the future. That’s why what I did yesterday shook me so badly. I picked up your gun and shot a fellow human being. What did I really do when I did that?”

  “You saved my life. Yours, too.”

  “For a while.”

  I squeezed her hand tight. “We’re alive, Rachel. And I believe I have something very important to do before I die.”

  “I know you do.”

  A male flight attendant appeared in the aisle beside us. I didn’t want to look up, so I motioned for Rachel to turn.

  “Yes?” Rachel asked in a sleepy voice.

  “Are you going to want dinner tonight?”

  She looked back at me, and I nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”

  The flight attendant glanced at me, then walked away.

  Rachel was holding her breath. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed odd, but maybe he was checking to see if we were going to sleep through dinner.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do this.”

  “Yes, you can. We’re fine.”

  “What about the Tel Aviv airport?”

  “We’ll make it through.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  I touched her cheek and spoke with conviction I had not known was in me. “I do know. There’s something waiting for me in Jerusalem.”

  “What?”

  “An answer.”

  Chapter

  28

  WHITE SANDS, NEW MEXICO

  Ravi Nara revved the throttle of his Honda ATV and drove toward what Godin’s technical staff was deluded enough to call the hospital. The New Mexico air parched his throat, and the scorching sun left the neurologist so drained that he tried to stay indoors as much as possible. A white-coated technician crossed his path on foot and raised an arm in greeting. Ravi braked angrily and drove on.

  It had taken all his nerve to telephone John Skow, even with the scrambled cell phone the NSA man had given him. But with Godin close to death, he’d had to take the risk. Skow had made it clear that if Godin died before Trinity became a reality, all their careers—and maybe their lives—could be destroyed. Zach Levin, Godin’s chief engineer, had predicted that the Trinity prototype could go fully operational in seven to ten days. But that estimate assumed the continued participation of Godin himself. Ravi knew he’d be lucky to keep the old man alive for another twenty-four hours.

  He doubted that any doctor had ever worked so hard to keep a patient alive. At thirty-six, Ravi Nara was already a revered scientist. In his native India he was treated as a hero, despite his having become an American citizen. But if Trinity failed under a cloud of scandal caused by the murder of a fellow Nobel laureate, nothing would save his reputation.

  Again he wondered if someone had overheard his call to Skow. The security in North Carolina had been intrusive, but White Sands was a bloody military reservation. Still, no one had confronted him yet. Maybe the remoteness of the place made the security people less paranoid.

  White Sands was bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island put together. The parcel fenced off for Trinity research was a mole on a white elephant, part of a larger tract administered by the U.S. Army Intelligence School at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Before Ravi visited the base, Godin had described the living conditions there as “spartan.” A transplanted New Yorker, Ravi had thought North Carolina was the middle of nowhere. White Sands was a hole in the world, a moonscape of white gypsum and rock with only rattlesnakes for company. He half-expected Indians to come riding over the dunes with John Ford cowboys in pursuit, but they never did.

  The Trinity compound was laid out with geometric simplicity. There were four major buildings: the research lab, the hospital, Administration, and Containment. There were also barracks, a machine shop, a massive electrical power plant, and an airstrip that could take military jets. The buildings weren’t really buildings, but converted aircraft hangars assembled by army engineers in five frantic weeks of construction. Only Containment was different. Containment housed the Trinity prototype.

  Ravi could see the strange building to his right, standing alone at the center of the compound. Built like a World War Two pillbox, Containment had four-foot-thick concrete walls reinforced with tempered steel and shielded with lead. It was served by four giant electrical cables, two plumbing pipes, and a residential air-conditioning system. No telephone lines, coaxial cables, or cat-5 network cable ran to it. No antennae or satellite dishes sprouted from its roof, as they did from all the other buildings. Containment was like a structure built to hold Harry Houdini, if Houdini could have digitized himself and escaped through wires or beamed transmissions. If the Trinity prototype ever went fully operational, no one—not even Peter Godin—wanted it connected to the Internet.

  Ravi had avoided the hospital today. Godin had been dying by inches for weeks, but two days ago he’d finally begun the slide toward eternity. Ravi was convinced that Fielding’s death had done it, a ruthless necessity that hit the old man harder than he’d expected. Of course, Fielding’s death had given them the crystal, so any doubts about the rightness of killing him were pointless.

  Within hours after getting the crystal, they had made up all the ground lost to Fielding’s sabotage, and after discovering the independent work Fielding had done, they’d found themselves within spitting distance of a working prototype. The euphoria of this success had been undercut by the problems with Tennant and his psychiatrist. Godin could ill afford the stress of dealing with that, yet in the final analysis, it was the cancer that was killing him, as it killed everyone who got his type of malignancy.

  Ravi parked the ATV in front of the hospital hangar and walked inside. The hangar was divided into “rooms” by partitions. None had ceilings—not even the bathrooms—so foul smells drifted throughout the building with annoying regularity. Peter Godin was not bothered by this. He occupied an airtight chamber with positive pressure that no infectious agent could penetrate. Served by filtered air and water, the plastic cubicle known as the Bubble sat like an incubator at the center of the hangar floor.

  To spare Ravi and the nurses from having to waste time with protective suits, a UV decontaminator had been installed near the Bubble’s door. To sterilize himself, Ravi had only to scrub his hands, don a mask, then stand in the radiation long enough to rid his skin and clothing of dangerous organisms. The process only took two minutes, but lately it had begun to get on his nerves. Still, he couldn’t blame Godin. Steroids and chemotherapy had beaten the old man’s immune system into submission, and Godin wanted what every man had wanted since the beginning of time: to cheat death.

  The humming UV unit finally went dark. Ravi stepped on a button that opened the Plexiglas hatch in the Bubble and stepped inside. Godin
lay unconscious on a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors and resuscitation equipment. His body was pierced by a central IV line and coupled to the monitors by thin wires. His commanding head had scarcely more color than the white sheet it lay on.

  Two nurses bookended the bed, watching for the slightest change in their patient’s status. Ravi nodded to them, then lifted the chart from its slot at the end of the bed and gave it a token look. Brainstem glioma, diffuse and inoperable. He’d made the diagnosis six months ago, when he’d first seen the Super-MRI scan of Godin’s brain. It was eerie to see a tumor growing inside one of the most gifted minds on earth. When Godin asked Ravi to keep his cancer secret, Ravi hadn’t hesitated. Revealing Godin’s condition might have ended his chance to take part in the greatest scientific effort in history. Of course, Ravi had exacted a price for his cooperation. It was only proper. Peter Godin was rich, Ravi Nara relatively poor. That imbalance had now been addressed, if only in a small way. Yet the fortune in cash and stock Ravi had received now seemed trivial in the face of what might happen.

  “Ravi?” croaked the old man. “Is that you?”

  Ravi looked up from the chart and saw the intense blue eyes fix upon him.

  “Why am I so tired?” Godin asked.

  “Your seizures, probably.” Godin still suffered from epilepsy caused by his exposure to the Super-MRI.

  Ravi walked around the bed and looked down into the slack face. Peter Godin had been one of the most vital men he’d ever known, yet cancer had laid Godin as low as it would any street beggar. Well…that wasn’t quite true. No street beggar had Ravi Nara and almost limitless wealth keeping him alive. Even near death, with his hair and eyebrows gone, Godin retained the hawklike profile that had made the driven young computer designer so recognizable in the late 1950s, and for five decades afterward.

  “Your tumor is very advanced, Peter. There’s only so much I can do. It’s a battle between keeping you conscious and keeping you free enough from pain to function.”

  “Damn the pain.” Godin clenched one arthritic hand into a fist.

  “I can stand pain.”

  “That’s not what you said last night. Last night you told me your face was on fire.”

  Godin shuddered. “I’m conscious now. Send Levin to me.”

  Zach Levin had led the R&D department at Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View until he was brought to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity computer. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.

  “I’ll send him in,” Ravi said.

  Godin held up one hand. “What have you heard about Tennant and Weiss?”

  “There’s been no sign of them since Union Station.”

  The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. “The woman shot Geli?”

  “They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes.”

  When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he’d always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi’s skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.

  “How is Geli doing?” Godin asked.

  “Remarkably well, I hear. They transferred her to Walter Reed. Her father arranged that.”

  A trace of a smile touched Godin’s lips. “If she’d known that, she wouldn’t have gone.” The smile vanished. “What do you think Tennant was trying to accomplish in Washington? The president’s still in China.”

  Ravi wished he knew. For most of the project, the internist had been his biggest headache. Hiding cancer from laymen was easy, but Tennant was always noticing Godin’s fluctuating weight, his gait disturbances, and the body changes caused by steroids. The old man’s rheumatoid arthritis explained some of that, but for the last six weeks Ravi had been forced to keep his patient practically isolated from Tennant.

  “I have no idea, Peter. It worries me.”

  As a nurse gave Godin a sip of water, Ravi tried to gauge the time left to the tenacious old man. It wasn’t easy. He hadn’t worked directly with patients for years, and Godin was well past the mortality tables for his type of tumor. Predicting survival in these circumstances was the kind of augury at which doctors like Tennant excelled. Years of clinical experience gave them a sixth sense about life and death. But any Madras midwife might do as well.

  A buzz and a purple flash made Ravi turn. Through the Bubble’s transparent hatch he saw Zach Levin standing in the UV decontaminator.

  Levin spent most of his time in the concrete womb of Containment, but he always seemed to sense when Godin had regained consciousness. Levin and his technicians were like a priesthood, tending their master as he died and his creation as it was born. Priests of science, Ravi thought. What a contradiction in terms. He waved to Levin and thought, You get on my last bloody nerve—

  “There’s Levin now,” he said, and forced a smile.

  “How long will I be conscious?” Godin asked.

  “Until the pain gets unbearable.”

  “Send Levin in on your way out.”

  Ravi suppressed his anger. He’d been a wunderkind all his life, but for the past six months he’d felt more like a royal physician tending the bed of a king. The whims of a tyrant ruled his days. He stepped on the button that opened the hatch and walked out of the Bubble.

  Zach Levin nodded from the decontaminator. Technically, Levin and his team were Ravi’s subordinates. But the hardware and software of the Trinity computer were so complex that Ravi could not hope to lead Levin’s people in any meaningful way, except where the brain itself was concerned. Even when they approached him with neurological questions, he felt more used than listened to. They swam like piranhas through his mind, devouring what they needed for their excursions into the labyrinthine neuromodels—

  “How’s he doing?” Levin asked loudly.

  The UV decontaminator buzzed and shut down.

  “He’s awake,” Ravi said. “Lucid.”

  “Good. I have some exciting news for him.”

  But not for me, Ravi thought bitterly. “Have you put any more questions to Tennant’s model?”

  Levin’s seemed to consider his reply. “I dumped Dr. Tennant from the computer an hour ago.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Godin.

  “At this point,” said Levin, “bringing Trinity to full operational status is more important than any damage Dr. Tennant could do the project.”

  Ravi felt the same way, but he didn’t want the engineer to know that. “How does dumping Tennant’s model help you to do that?”

  “Peter thinks some of the problems we’re now experiencing could have a quantum etiology. He thought perhaps Andrew Fielding might be able to help us.”

  “Fielding? You mean you’ve loaded Fielding’s neuromodel into the prototype?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you really think his model can help you solve your remaining problems?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t see why his model should perform any differently than Dr. Tennant’s. But it’s interesting. Dr. Fielding is going through the same acclimatization problems Tennant experienced—terror, confusion, feedback loops from his biological survival circuits having incorrectly balanced relief outlets—but he seems to be adapting to them at a significantly faster rate.”

  Ravi shivered. Levin spoke as if Fielding were still alive. “What do you think that means?”

  The engineer shrugged. “Maybe nothing. But Peter’s intuition has been accurate too many times to ignore it. And it was the work stored in Dr. Fielding’s crystal that brought us this far. If the processing areas of his model perform at a higher efficiency level than Dr. Tennant’s…it could be a whole new ball game.”

  Ravi’s heartbeat quickened. “
What are the odds of that happening?”

  Levin didn’t answer.

  Ravi felt like slapping the taller man’s face, but the implications of what he’d learned drove such thoughts from his head. “Well, carry on.”

  Levin’s arrogant smile told Ravi just how little weight his words carried now.

  Ravi walked out of the hangar, climbed aboard his ATV, and gunned the engine. If what Levin said was true, then his phone call to Skow had been premature. Trinity might quickly become a reality despite Godin’s death. And if that happened, it would change everything. Instead of looking for scapegoats, the president would be looking for chests to pin medals on. And if Ravi played his cards right, he could be first in line.