The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  JERUSALEM

  Rachel sat by the telephone and prayed that the return call from Washington would come soon. If a bed opened up in neurology, someone would come to move David out of the ER. She was thinking of going to check his EEG tracing when the telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  A distinctly American voice said, “Is this Dr. Rachel Weiss?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Ewan McCaskell, the president’s chief of staff.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and tried to keep her voice steady. “I recognize your voice.”

  “Dr. Weiss, I’m calling to assure you that the president has the utmost concern for Dr. Tennant’s health. We’re not quite sure about the reasons behind the events of the past few days, but we intend to find the truth. The president is back in the United States now, and I assure you that Dr. Tennant is going to get a fair hearing.”

  Something inside her let go then, a tangled knot of fear and tension that had been building ever since she’d seen David shoot the gunman in his kitchen. A stuttering rush of sobs came from her throat.

  “Dr. Weiss?” said McCaskell. “Are you all right?

  “Yes…thank you so much for calling. There’s something terrible going on, and Dr. Tennant has been trying to warn the president about it.”

  “Try to calm down, Doctor. I know you have a medical situation there, so I’m going to bring Dr. Ravi Nara in on our call. I’m told he’s the only man who has the knowledge to deal with Dr. Tennant’s problem.”

  Rachel tensed at the mention of Nara. There was a crackle as though the connection had been lost.

  “Dr. Nara?” said McCaskell. “Are you there?”

  A precise voice in a higher register came on the line. “Yes, hello? Dr. Weiss? This is Ravi Nara. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand that Dr. Tennant has gone into an alpha coma state. Is that correct?”

  “Not precisely. There were theta and beta wave intrusions for a while. Now only alpha again. I’m afraid he’s going to stop breathing.”

  “He’s not. I went into alpha coma myself after being scanned by Trinity’s Super-MRI unit. You’re aware of this machine?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was in coma for thirty-two hours and awakened without any ill effects. I expect David to wake up at any time.”

  The confidence in Ravi Nara’s voice was bracing. The Nobel laureate was renowned throughout the medical world, and she found it difficult to discount his words, especially when they offered hope.

  “Dr. Nara, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m going to fly over there myself,” Nara said. “I’m told that the president is making arrangements for David to be admitted to a more secure facility. I’ll be in Jerusalem in fourteen hours.”

  “My God.”

  “David will surely be awake by then, but don’t panic if he’s not. We’re going to take this one step at a time. All right?”

  Rachel was overwhelmed. “Yes. Thank you. I look forward to meeting you.”

  “And you, Doctor. Good-bye.”

  Nara clicked off, but McCaskell stayed on the line. “Do you feel a little better now, Dr. Weiss?”

  “I can’t begin to thank you for this.”

  “You’ll get your chance. I’ll be talking to you again soon.”

  Rachel hung up and took some deep breaths. Then she wiped her face with a Kleenex and pushed open the door to the treatment room.

  David was sitting up on the treatment table, his eyes wide open, tears running down both cheeks.

  Chapter

  34

  My eyes opened like those of a newborn, startled by the world’s bare brightness. As I blinked against the overhead bulb, my body announced itself with aching hunger and an overwhelming urge to empty my bladder. I sat up and looked around. I was sitting in a medical treatment room. I’d worked in dozens just like it.

  Water, I thought. I need water.

  A woman somewhere said, “I can’t begin to thank you for this.” Her voice was familiar. I listened for more words, but none followed.

  A door opened across the room. Rachel walked in and froze. Then her hand flew to her mouth, and she started toward me.

  “David? Can you hear me?”

  I held up my hand, and she stopped.

  “You’ve been in a coma. You’ve been out for…” she looked at her watch—“fifteen hours. Alpha coma nearly all that time. I thought you were brain dead.” She pointed at my face. “Why are you crying?”

  I wiped my face. My fingers came away wet. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember anything? The seizure at the church?”

  I remembered kneeling, then thrusting my fingers through a hole in a silver plate. A current of energy had shot into my arm, straight up to my brain, a current too intense to endure. I felt as though my mind were a tiny glove, and the hand of a giant was trying to force its way inside it. My body began to shake, then…

  “I remember falling.”

  “Do you remember anything after that?”

  I fell toward the floor, but before I reached it, the boundary of my body melted away, and I felt an oceanic unity with everything around me: the earth and rock beneath the church, the birds nesting among the stones above, the flowers in the courtyard and the pollen they loosed on the wind. I was not falling but floating, and I saw that a deeper reality underlay the world of things, a pulsing matrix in which all boundaries were illusory, where the pollen grain was not distinct from the wind, where matter and energy moved in an eternal dance, and life and death were but changing states of both. Yet even as I hovered there, floating in the world like a sentient jellyfish, I sensed that beneath that pulsing matrix of matter and energy lay something still deeper, a thrumming substrate as ephemeral and eternal as the laws of mathematics, invisible but immutable, governing all without force.

  The thrumming was deep and distant, like turbines churning in the heart of a dam. As I listened, I discerned a pattern, more numerical than melodic, as of an undiscovered music whose notes and scales lay just beyond my understanding. I tuned my mind to the sound, searching for repetitions, the elusive keys to any code. Yet though I listened with all my being, I could not read meaning in the sound. It was like listening to a rainstorm and trying to hear the pattern of the individual drops as they hit the ground. Something in me craved knowledge of the underlying order, the vast sheet music that scored the falling of the rain.

  And then I understood. The pattern I was searching for was no pattern at all. It was randomness. A profound randomness that pervaded the seeming order of the world. And in that moment I began to see as I had never seen before, to hear what few men had ever heard, the voice of—

  “David? Can you hear me?”

  I blinked and forced myself to focus on my surroundings. Medical cabinets. An EEG machine on a cart. Rachel’s exhausted eyes.

  “I hear you.”

  She took a step forward, wringing her hands. “I called Washington. I told them we were here. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “I know.”

  “Did you hear the call?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  The same way I know we’re in danger now. I looked down and started to pull the IV line from my wrist.

  “Don’t do that!”

  “We have to go.”

  Her eyes went wide. “What?”

  “This is going to bleed when I pull it out. Could you find me a bandage? Where are my clothes?”

  She quickly closed the distance between us and stopped me from pulling out the IV. “David, you’re not yourself right now. You’ve been unconscious for a whole night. I spoke to Ewan McCaskell. The president is flying Ravi Nara over here to treat you. He’s seen this type of coma before. He was in one himself for over thirty hours, and he woke up with no ill effects. They want to help us—”

  “Ravi Nara was never in alpha coma. His MRI side effect was uncont
rollable sexual compulsions. Nothing else.”

  “But he told me—”

  “He told you what he knew would calm you down. We have to leave. Now.”

  “But the president wants to get to the truth. McCaskell told me that, and I believe him.”

  There was no way I could communicate the knowledge inside me without appearing insane. I stood, and the sheet fell away from my body.

  “If we stay here, we won’t live to see the president. I have something very important to do. Please get my clothes.”

  As Rachel looked toward a bag in the corner, I yanked the IV catheter from my wrist. Dark blood ran down the back of my hand. I applied pressure, then went to the counter and found a 4x4 bandage in a glass jar. Rachel saw what I was doing and taped the gauze tightly over the IV site.

  “Keep your hand on that,” she said. Then she got the plastic bag from the corner and laid it on the examining table. “Your clothes.”

  There was a commode against one wall, but no curtain or partition for privacy.

  “I need to use that,” I told her, pointing.

  “Go. I’ve seen it before.”

  I walked to the commode and turned my back to her.

  “Why do you think people are coming to kill us?” she asked.

  “Because nothing has changed in their minds. And now they know where we are.”

  “You still don’t trust anyone? Not even the president?”

  “The president has no idea what’s really happening.”

  I walked back to the table and slipped on my shirt, then fastened my money belt around my waist.

  “But where do you want to go?” Rachel asked.

  “White Sands.”

  “Where?”

  “White Sands Proving Ground.” I carefully pulled on my pants, then sat on the floor to put on my shoes. “It’s in New Mexico.”

  “Why do you want go there?”

  “That’s where the real Trinity prototype is.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  She shook her head. “You’re scaring me, David.”

  “Don’t think about it.”

  “Wait.” She held up one hand. “That’s what was in Andrew Fielding’s FedEx letter. White gypsum. White sand. Is that what he was trying to tell you? Where the second Trinity site was?”

  “Yes. He wanted to let me know, but he didn’t want anyone who intercepted that letter to know that he knew.” I looked at the closed door. “What part of the hospital are we in?”

  “The emergency department.”

  “Good. First floor. You know the way out?”

  “Yes, but…”

  I stood and took her hand in mine. “Everything has changed, Rachel. I know what I have to do. But we have to go now.”

  I saw her faith in me cracking under the weight of her training as a psychiatrist and her desire to deny the danger.

  “Please help me.”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. Then she went to the window and tried it. The window was sealed shut, and barred outside.

  I went to the door and opened it a crack. Two nurses sat at a receiving desk, but they were turned partly away from me. One was talking on a telephone.

  “What’s past those nurses?” I whispered.

  “A corridor that leads to the ambulance bay outside. There’s a guard.”

  The guard was probably there to challenge people entering rather than leaving, but in Israel you never knew.

  The nurse who wasn’t on the phone got up and went into a treatment room. “Get ready,” I said. When the other nurse was distracted, we walked quickly across the floor to the hall that led outside.

  Rachel waved to the guard seated at the desk, then started to lead me past him.

  The guard said something in Hebrew.

  Rachel slowed but did not stop. “Do you speak English?”

  “A little,” said the guard.

  “Dr. Weinstein told me to make sure this patient got some fresh air this morning. Do you know Dr. Weinstein?”

  The guard looked confused. Then he smiled and flicked his hand as if to say, “Go ahead, go ahead.”

  We walked unhindered into the morning light.

  Two ambulances sat parked beneath a flat concrete roof. I moved quickly to the left, where an access road led around the hospital. There was no footpath, so we walked on the curb. When we rounded the building, I saw the Dome of the Rock flashing gold in the Old City. The road beside us led down a long hill, and cover was minimal. To our right was a huge cemetery that looked vaguely colonial.

  “We’re going to have to find a taxi,” Rachel said. “We won’t get anywhere on foot.”

  “Listen.”

  Out of the general hum of the city below, a more urgent sound was emerging. A siren.

  We crouched behind a row of low shrubs. Thirty seconds later, two dark green vans raced up the hill toward us. They didn’t look like ambulances. One screeched to a stop at the hospital’s front entrance, the other wheeled around back. The van in front disgorged two men wearing business suits, then a squad of paramilitary police carrying submachine guns.

  “Who’s that?” Rachel whispered.

  “Shin Beth, maybe. Some branch of the secret police. Whoever Washington called to secure the hospital and prevent us leaving.”

  “Ravi Nara told me they were going to move you to a more secure hospital.”

  “Do they need a SWAT team for that?” I pulled her to her feet.

  “Come on!”

  Though cover was scarce, we used every bit we could find as we made our way down the hill. Rachel wanted to run toward the Old City, but I led her down Churchill Street toward a Hyatt Regency Hotel, glancing back at the hospital all the way. The van was still parked out front. I could only imagine the frantic search inside.

  A rank of taxis waited at the Hyatt. I climbed into the first in line, and Rachel got in after me.

  “American?” asked the driver.

  “American. I need an Internet bar.”

  The driver seemed to be working this out in his head. “You need computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hyatt has computer inside. Pay by half hour.”

  “I want a public place. I don’t like this hotel.”

  “Not many such bars in Jerusalem. The Strudel has computers, but it may not be open yet.”

  “Take us there.”

  The cabbie cranked his engine and pulled onto Ha-Universita. I saw a phalanx of police cars parked in a lot to our left. “What’s that place?”

  “National Police Headquarters. I hope you don’t want to go there.”

  “The Strudel. Make it fast. I have important business.”

  “Yes, sir. Ten minutes, tops.”

  WHITE SANDS

  A uniformed soldier drove Ravi Nara to the airstrip. The limitless desert night had once made Ravi uncomfortable, but tonight it comforted him. As the Jeep approached the runway, a Learjet taxied around the hangar and parked beside Godin’s Gulfstream 5. The Lear was black and had no markings. When its door opened, John Skow bent and stepped through it.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you!” the NSA man called. “Is something wrong with your phone?”

  Ravi looked at his military escort again, but the soldier seemed oblivious to the conversation. “I’m on my way to Jerusalem.”

  Skow gripped Ravi’s arm and walked him ten paces away from the soldier. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Peter’s sending me to Jerusalem.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Panic and anger distorted Skow’s features. “Did you even try?”

  “Yes, goddamn it!”

  “Why is Peter sending you to Jerusalem?”

  “To make sure Tennant dies.”

  Skow tilted back his head like a man looking to the heavens for assistance. “Forget that. You’re not going anywhere. Tennant escaped from Hadassah Hospital.”

 
“But…they said he was in alpha coma.”

  “He must have come out of it. Rachel Weiss sure didn’t carry him out of there.”

  Ravi couldn’t believe it. “Maybe somebody else did.”