The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  “Not enough to understand you. And he can’t speak.”

  “But he has to know this! It will double his will to fight.”

  Ravi tried to look sympathetic. “He’s never lacked that.”

  “No, but this will change everything.”

  “I’m sorry, Zach. I can’t allow you to go in.”

  Levin looked down at Ravi with disdain. “You don’t make decisions like that. Limiting Peter’s access to critical information?”

  “I am his physician.”

  “So, do your fucking job. It doesn’t take a doctor to see that the best thing anyone could do for Peter’s health right now is to give him this information.”

  Levin turned away and stepped into the UV decontaminator. Ravi started to argue, but the engineer stamped on the start button, making conversation pointless.

  If Levin insisted on entering the Bubble, Ravi couldn’t stop him. Godin would probably ask for him soon anyway.

  Ravi hurried to the exit. He needed to talk to Skow immediately. Because Zach Levin was right: with Trinity twelve to sixteen hours from becoming a reality, Godin would almost certainly live to see it. And that changed everything. Skow was preparing the president for Trinity’s failure, setting up to blame Godin for everything, and using Ravi to help him do it. If Skow went too far—and Godin at the eleventh hour delivered the revolutionary computer he had promised—Ravi could find himself in a precarious position. Peter Godin would not take betrayal lightly. He would exact his own form of justice. An image of Geli Bauer came into Ravi’s mind. He was damned glad she was lying in a hospital in Maryland.

  JERUSALEM

  Rachel braced herself against the side of the ambulance as it tore through all but impassable traffic. David lay unconscious on a gurney on the floor. The paramedic in back spoke enough English to communicate with Rachel, but he could tell her little and do even less, given his patient’s condition.

  When David collapsed in the church, Rachel had known instantly that he was having a seizure. She’d knelt and cradled his head to keep him from banging it on the floor, but that was all she could do. Seizure victims swallowing their tongues was a myth, and you could lose fingers trying to prevent it. Ibrahim had used his walkie-talkie to call the ambulance, and Rachel got the feeling he’d done it before.

  Israeli soldiers quickly cordoned off the chapel. By the time the ambulance arrived, David’s seizure was over, but he had not awakened. The paramedics checked his blood sugar and found a normal glucose level. With coma, that was the limit of what they could do at the scene, so they fitted a collar on him, put him on a backboard, and had the soldiers carry him out to the ambulance in the courtyard.

  As they careened though the streets, Rachel mentally raced through the possible causes of coma. Drugs were the most common cause after hypoglycemia, but David had no history of substance abuse. He hadn’t hit the floor hard enough to cause head trauma, and forty-one was old even for late-onset epilepsy, though she’d suspected it ever since hearing about the hallucinations. Ravi Nara ruled out epilepsy, she recalled.

  A stroke could cause seizure and coma, but only rarely. Poisoning? She thought of the white powder from Fielding’s FedEx envelope. Had there been some toxic agent in the “sand” that the Duke scientists had failed to detect? West Nile encephalitis was a possibility. David could have been bitten by a mosquito in Tennessee and only now have developed brain swelling. He could also have picked up a meningitis bacterium in JFK airport. A brain tumor was possible, but Trinity’s Super-MRI unit should have detected any masses.

  Even as she made mental notes to relate all this to the emergency physician, Rachel cursed herself for not insisting that David submit to a full workup while under her care. Actually, she had insisted. He had refused.

  The ambulance finally broke out of traffic and accelerated up a long green hill toward a building that looked like a fortress. Its roof was studded with more satellite dishes and antennae than a television station.

  “Is that the hospital?” Rachel asked.

  The paramedic nodded. “Hadassah. The best.”

  They screeched to a stop in a concrete receiving area, and the paramedics rolled David into the emergency department. They didn’t waste time with triage; they took him straight to a treatment room. Rachel had told them she was a physician, so they allowed her to follow them. She took a chair against the wall and stayed out of the way.

  A nurse checked David’s IV, then switched him from bottled oxygen to hospital oxygen. Another undressed him and attached leads from a heart monitor to his chest. Seeing David naked and helpless pierced Rachel in a place that her professional armor did not cover. She took his money belt and clothes and put them into a plastic bag.

  A man in white came to the door and spoke Hebrew to the paramedics. He glanced at Rachel, then entered and in heavily accented English asked her to summarize what had happened at the church. She complied, then gave David’s medical history as best she knew it.

  He had been unconscious for thirty minutes. Most patients suffering a grand mal seizure would be coming out of it by now. The doctor ordered blood work; X rays of the chest and cervical spine; a CT scan to rule out stroke, tumors, or subarachnoid hemorrhage; and a spinal tap to rule out meningitis.

  After a nurse drew the blood, an aide moved David to radiology for the CT scan, which took nearly an hour. When he returned to the treatment room, he was still unconscious. Next the ER doctor performed the spinal puncture. The escaping spinal fluid had normal pressure, and Rachel breathed much easier when she saw that the fluid was clear. Infection was highly unlikely.

  The next step was a referral to neurology, and at that point Rachel began to panic. A neurology referral meant admission to the hospital, which would bring questions about medical insurance and payment. There was $15,000 in the two money belts, but she didn’t want to raise suspicions by showing that kind of cash. She nearly hugged the ER doctor when he informed her that there were no beds available in neurology. David would have to remain in the emergency department.

  When an EEG tech wheeled in a portable machine to do an electroencephalogram of David’s brain, Rachel saw instantly that he was sharp. He switched off most of the electrical equipment in the room before performing the test, which eliminated background interference and made for a much clearer tracing.

  As the tracing emerged from the machine, the tech looked concerned, and Rachel soon saw why. David’s brain showed only alpha wave activity, of uniform frequency and amplitude. The tech leaned forward and clapped his hands near David’s right ear, but the alpha waves did not desynchronize. They didn’t change at all.

  Rachel’s heart sank. David appeared to be in a state known as alpha coma. Few patients emerged alive from alpha coma.

  “Are you a doctor?” the tech asked, noticing her expression.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes softened. “I’m sorry.”

  As he reached to shut off the machine, Rachel saw a theta wave appear on the screen.

  “Wait!” she cried, pointing.

  “I see it.”

  The theta waves increased steadily in amplitude. Then some beta waves appeared.

  “He’s dreaming,” Rachel said, hardly believing it. “Could he only be asleep?”

  The tech pinched David’s arm. There was no response. He leaned down to one ear and yelled, “Wake up!”

  Nothing.

  “He’s not sleeping,” the tech said thoughtfully. “But those thetas are definitely increasing in strength.”

  “What do you think is happening?”

  “This guy’s definitely in alpha coma. But his brain is doing something. What, I don’t know.” The tech walked to the door, then looked back at Rachel. “I’m going to leave the machine connected and get a neurologist down here. Okay?”

  “Thank you.”

  She sat alone beside the bed, her hands shaking as she watched the screen. Until she’d seen that theta wave, she’d believed David was as good as dead. Now she
had no idea what was happening. But something was going on in his head. Could he be hallucinating in coma as he had during his narcoleptic attacks? Maybe he wasn’t really in coma at all. Sometimes a patient could appear to be comatose when he was actually having small seizures. Yet the EEG didn’t show that. It showed an alpha coma state, interrupted by inexplicable theta and beta intrusions.

  She didn’t want to think about what David had been doing prior to his seizure, but she couldn’t stop herself. In the medieval gloom of Holy Sepulchre, he had been searching for some remnant of Jesus’ life on earth. Or of his death. He had scorned the traditional places venerated by pilgrims—the anointing stone, the tomb itself—but at the place marked as the spot where Jesus died on the cross, he had fallen to his knees and whispered, “This is the place.” Then the seizure had started.

  The incident had actually begun before that. When David looked at the mural depicting Christ being nailed to the cross, he had clenched his fists as though his hands were in agony. What had been going on in his mind? Did he really believe that he was Jesus Christ? Believe it so completely that he felt Jesus’ wounds? She’d heard of cases of stigmata caused by the mind, but she had never really believed them. Was she witnessing something similar?

  She grasped David’s limp hand. Despite the EEG, she half-expected him to open his eyes. Yet they remained closed. She silently thanked God that the ER doctor had ordered a CT scan rather than an MRI. How could she have talked him out of what he would see as a harmless imaging test? How could she protect David from anything here? She didn’t know what her enemy was. The only person she could think of who might have answers about this strange coma was Ravi Nara. But according to David, Nara was part of the group that wanted to kill them.

  “Wake up, David,” she said softly in his ear. “For God’s sake, wake up.”

  Chapter

  32

  WHITE SANDS

  Ravi Nara parked his ATV outside the hospital hangar and walked to the door. In his pocket was a syringe of potassium chloride that would stop Godin’s weakened heart as surely as a bullet.

  He paused at the hangar door, unable to open it. It had taken hours to steel himself for this visit, and without Skow threatening him, he would not have made it this far. They’re watching this on monitors somewhere, he said to himself. Move.

  He entered the hangar, slipped on a fresh lab coat, then walked into the decontaminator and stepped on the floor switch. High-intensity UV light bombarded him from all sides. As he stood in the purple glow, he stared through the hatch in the Bubble. Godin’s nurses sat like guard dogs on either side of the bed. It’s him or me, he told himself. Remember what Skow said….

  The NSA man had not shouted with joy when he’d learned that the computer might reach Trinity state within twelve hours. He’d asked how long Godin was likely to live. When Ravi answered more than twelve hours, Skow told him that could not be allowed to happen.

  “Why not?” Ravi had asked, afraid he already knew the answer.

  “Because it’s too late,” Skow snapped. “The president called me from China, very upset about the Tennant situation. Very suspicious, too. I had to tell him something that made sense.”

  “Something besides the truth, you mean.”

  “Exactly. I told him that Peter has been ill all along, and that I was afraid he might be responsible for Fielding’s death. I told him that Peter had disappeared, and that there might be a secret research facility somewhere. The FBI is tearing apart the Godin Supercomputing complex in Mountain View as we speak.”

  Ravi shut his eyes and prayed this was a nightmare. In the conference room in North Carolina, the decision to end Fielding’s life had seemed almost an official government act. Trinity existed to strengthen America’s strategic position in the world. Fielding had sabotaged its progress. But when you stripped away the window dressing, Fielding’s “termination” had been plain old murder.

  “Ravi?”

  “I’m here.” He knew what Skow was going to ask of him. And he dreaded it.

  “You know what has to be done.”

  Ravi made one last stand. “You said that if we delivered Trinity, no one would care who had died to make it happen.”

  “That was before the mess with Tennant. We’ve had a shooting in Washington, for God’s sake. I’ve painted Tennant as a dangerous psychotic, but that’s all right. I have medical evidence to support that.”

  “Those are problems for you, not me.”

  Skow spoke calmly, but his words chilled Ravi’s blood. “You’re not the only person who knows you were part of Fielding’s death. I have recordings of you. Very incriminating recordings. We’re all in the same boat, Ravi. You, me, Geli, and General Bauer. If we all tell the same story, no one can touch us. But Peter has to die.”

  Ravi closed his eyes in anguish.

  “Our lives are in your hands, Ravi. A few seconds of courage will wash you clean.”

  Clean? he thought. I’ll never be clean again.

  Was it morally wrong to kill Godin? The man was only hours from a natural death, and without Ravi he would have died days ago. Godin had ordered the murder of Andrew Fielding without any visible compunction. And beyond that, there was the almost fantastic reality that killing Godin’s biological body would not really end his life. As long as his neuromodel existed, his mind and personality could be resurrected in the Trinity computer.

  The problem was not one of morality, but of opportunity. When a man was as sick as Godin, there were a half dozen ways to push him over the edge. But Godin’s nurses never left him alone. Ravi had tested them twice today; in both instances they had taken cell phones from their pockets and awakened sleeping relief nurses for assistance.

  After considering several options, Ravi had prepared the syringe of potassium chloride. As a diversion, he would trigger an alarm on one of the monitors, then inject the potassium into Godin’s IV line. A code blue would follow—one that Godin would never survive.

  The UV lights of the decontaminator buzzed and went dark. Ravi saw the blur of nurse’s whites through the Bubble’s Plexiglas door.

  Where the hell is Geli Bauer? he thought. This job is tailor-made for her.

  Ravi opened the Bubble’s hatch and stopped, his throat sealed shut. Standing beside one of Godin’s nurses was Geli Bauer. She wore black from head to toe, and she looked every bit as dangerous as she had when he had last seen her in North Carolina.

  “Hello, Ravi,” she said. “You look surprised to see me.”

  Ravi could not speak. Geli wore an armored vest over her black bodysuit, and a web belt laden with pistol, Taser, and knife.

  Godin raised the upper half of his bed with a switch, his blue eyes locked on Ravi. Only then did Ravi realize that Godin had been taken off the ventilator.

  “What do you have to say, Ravi?” the old man asked.

  “I’m surprised to see Geli up and around,” he stammered. “I’d heard it was a neck wound.”

  Geli smiled, then pulled down her black turtleneck, revealing a white pressure bandage. “Just another scar to add to my collection. I had a good surgical team.”

  Ravi’s heart thumped against his sternum. What the hell was Geli doing in White Sands? And why was she guarding Godin? According to Skow, she’d accepted the necessity of Godin’s death and was on board with Skow’s plan.

  The old man seemed amused by Ravi’s discomfort. “Well, here I am, back from the dead,” he rasped. “They tell me it was my heart this time.”

  “Ventricular tachycardia,” Ravi confirmed.

  “I hear it was my nurses who brought me back.”

  All Ravi could think about was the syringe in his pocket. He felt sure that Geli was going to walk over to him, pull out the syringe, and jam it into his jugular vein.

  “They did everything perfectly,” Ravi said.

  Godin nodded. “Would you have done the same, Ravi? If you were alone with me?”

  Ravi’s stomach flipped over. “I don’t understand,
Peter. Of course I would have.”

  Godin ignored his answer. “As for Geli…I wanted her with me. I feel safer when she’s around.”

  The piercing blue eyes fixed Ravi with a relentless stare. “What are you doing here, Dr. Nara?”

  “I was hoping to take you off the ventilator. But I see your nurses have already done that.”

  Godin glanced at Geli. They seemed to be sharing a private joke.

  Ravi searched for something to support his lie. “Levin told me the prototype could reach Trinity state soon. I knew you’d want to be as alert as possible when that happens.”

  “And all due to Andrew Fielding,” Godin said. “The ironies are breathtaking.”

  Ravi glanced nervously at Geli. “It’s a miracle, Peter. You’re going to live to see your dream come true.”