Czytaj książkę: «Dark Matter»
GREG ILES
Dark Matter
US TITLE:
The Footprints of God
We should take care not to make the intellect our god.
—Albert Einstein
All things return to the One.
What does the One return to?
—Zen koan
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books By Greg Iles
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
“My name is David Tennant, M.D. I’m professor of ethics at the University of Virginia Medical School, and if you’re watching this tape, I’m dead.”
I took a breath and gathered myself. I didn’t want to rant. I’d mounted my Sony camcorder on a tripod and rotated the LCD screen in order to see myself as I spoke. I’d lost weight over the past weeks. My eyes were red with fatigue, the orbits shiny and dark. I looked more like a hunted criminal than a grieving friend.
“I don’t really know where to begin. I keep seeing Andrew lying on the floor. And I know they killed him. But … I’m getting ahead of myself. You need facts. I was born in 1961 in Los Alamos, New Mexico. My father was James Howard Tennant, the nuclear physicist. My mother was Ann Tennant, a pediatrician. I’m making this tape in a sober state of mind, and I’m going to deposit it with my attorney as soon as I finish, on the understanding that it should be opened if I die for any reason.
“Six hours ago, my colleague Dr. Andrew Fielding was found dead beside his desk, the victim of an apparent stroke. I can’t prove it, but I know Fielding was murdered. For the past two years, he and I have been part of a scientific team funded by the National Security Agency and DARPA—the government agency that created the Internet in the 1970s. Under the highest security classification, that team and its work are known as Project Trinity.”
I glanced down at the short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 in my lap. I’d made sure the pistol wasn’t visible on camera, but it calmed me to have it within reach. Reassured, I again stared at the glowing red light.
“Two years ago, Peter Godin, founder of the Godin Supercomputing Corporation, had an epiphany much like that mythical moment when an apple dropped onto Isaac Newton’s head. It happened in a dream. Seemingly from nowhere, a seventy-year-old man visualized the most revolutionary possibility in the history of science. When he woke up, Godin telephoned John Skow, a deputy director of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland. By six A.M., the two men had drafted and delivered a letter to the president of the United States. That letter shook the White House to its foundations. I know this because the president was my brother’s close friend in college. My brother died three years ago, but because of him, the president knew of my work, which is what put me in the middle of all that followed.”
I rubbed the cool metal of the .38, wondering what to tell and what to leave out. Leave out nothing, said a voice in my head. My father’s voice. Fifty years ago, he’d played his own part in America’s secret history, and that burden had greatly shortened his days. My father died in 1988, a haunted man, certain that the Cold War he’d spent his youthful energy to perpetuate would end with the destruction of civilization, as it so easily could have. Leave out nothing …
“The Godin Memo,” I continued, “had the same effect as the letter Albert Einstein sent President Roosevelt at the beginning of World War Two, outlining the potential for an atomic bomb and the possibility that Nazi Germany might develop one. Einstein’s letter spurred the Manhattan Project, the secret quest to ensure that America would be the first to possess nuclear weapons. Peter Godin’s letter resulted in a project of similar scope but infinitely greater ambition. Project Trinity began behind the walls of an NSA front corporation in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina. Only six people on the planet ever had full knowledge of Trinity. Now that Andrew Fielding is dead, only five remain. I’m one. The other four are Peter Godin, John Skow, Ravi Nara—”
I bolted to my feet with the .38 in my hand. Someone was rapping on my front door. Through thin curtains, I saw a Federal Express truck parked at the foot of my sidewalk. What I couldn’t see was the space immediately in front of my door.
“Who is it?” I called.
“FedEx,” barked a muffled male voice. “I need a signature.”
I wasn’t expecting a delivery. “Is it a letter or a package?”
“Letter.”
“Who from?”
“Uhh … Lewis Carroll.”
I shivered. A package from a dead man? Only one person would send me a package under the name of the author of Alice in Wonderland. Andrew Fielding. Had he sent me something the day before he died? Fielding had been obsessively searching the Trinity labs for weeks now, the computers as well as the physical space. Perhaps he’d found something. And perhaps whatever it was had got him killed. I’d sensed something strange about Fielding’s behavior yesterday—not so easy with a man famed for his eccentricities—but by this morning he’d seemed to be his old self.
“Do you want this thing or not?” asked the deliveryman.
I cocked the pistol and edged over to the door. I’d fastened the chain latch when I’d got home. With my left hand, I unlocked the door and pulled it open to the length of the chain. Through the crack, I saw the face of a uniformed man in his twenties, his hair bound into a short ponytail.
“Pass your pad through with the package. I’ll sign and give it back to you.”
“It’s a digital pad. I can’t give you that.”
“Keep your hand on it, then.”
“Paranoid,” he muttered, but he stuck a thick orange pad through the crack in the door.
I grabbed the stylus hanging from the string and scrawled my name on the touch-sensitive screen. “Okay.”
The pad disappeared, and a FedEx envelope was thrust through. I took it and tossed it onto the sofa, then shut the door and waited until I heard the truck rumble away from the curb.
I picked up the envelope and glanced at the label. “Lewis Carroll” had been signed in Fielding’s spidery hand. As I pulled the sheet of paper from the envelope, a greasy white granular substance spilled over my fingers. The instant my eyes registered the color, some part of my brain whispered anthrax. The odds of that were low, but my best friend had just died under suspicious circumstances. A certain amount of paranoia was justified.
I hurried to the kitchen and scrubbed my hands with dish soap and water. Then I pulled a black medical bag from my closet. Inside was the usual pharmacopoeia of the M.D.’s home: analgesics, antibiotics, emetics, steroid cream. I found what I wanted in a snap compartment: a blister pack of Cipro, a powerful broad-spectrum antibiotic. I swallowed one pill with water from the tap, then took a pair of surgical gloves from the bag. As a last precaution, I tied a dirty T-shirt from the hamper around my nose and mouth. Then I folded the FedEx envelope and letter into separate Ziploc bags, sealed them, and laid them on the counter.
As badly as I wanted to read the letter, part of me resisted. Fielding might have been murdered for what was written on that page. Even if that weren’t the case, nothing good would come from my reading it.
I carefully vacuumed the white granules from the carpet in the front room, wondering if I could be wrong about Fielding’s death being murder. He and I had worked ourselves into quite a state of suspicion over the past weeks, but then we had reason to. And the timing was too damn convenient. Instead of putting the vacuum cleaner back into the closet, I walked to the back door and tossed the machine far into the yard. I could always buy another one.
I was still eerily aware of the letter sitting on the kitchen counter. I felt like a soldier’s wife refusing to open a telegram. But I already knew my friend was dead. So what did I fear?
The why, answered a voice in my head. Fielding talking. You want to keep your head in the sand. It’s the American national pastime …
More than a little irritated to find that the dead could be as bothersome as the living, I picked up the Ziploc containing the letter and carried it to the front room. The note was brief and handwritten.
David,
We must meet again. I finally confronted Godin with my suspicions. His reaction astounded me. I don’t want to commit anything to paper, but I know I’m right. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night. Please join us. It’s close quarters, but discreet. It may be time for you to contact your late brother’s friend again, though I wonder if even he can do anything at this point. Things like this have a momentum greater than individuals. Greater even than humanity, I fear. If anything should happen to me, don’t forget that little gold item I asked you to hold for me one day. Desperate times, mate. I’ll see you Saturday.
There was no signature, but below the note was a hand-drawn cartoon of a rabbit’s head and the face of a clock. The White Rabbit, an affectionate nickname given Fielding by his Cambridge physics students. Fielding always carried a gold pocket watch, and that was the “little gold item” that he had asked me to hold for him one day.
We were passing each other in the hallway when he pressed the watch and chain into my hand. “Mind keeping that for an hour, old man?” he’d murmured. “Lovely.” Then he was gone. An hour later he stopped by my office to pick it up, saying he hadn’t wanted to take the watch into the MRI lab with him, where it could have been smashed against the MRI unit by the machine’s enormous magnetic fields. But Fielding visited the MRI lab all the time, and he’d never given me his pocket watch before. And he never did again. It must have been in his pocket when he died. So what the hell was he up to that day?
I read the note again. Lu Li and I are driving to the blue place on Saturday night. Lu Li was Fielding’s new Chinese wife. The “blue place” had to be code for a beach cabin at Nags Head, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Three months ago, when Fielding asked for a recommendation for his honeymoon, I’d suggested the Nags Head cabin, which was only a few hours away. Fielding and his wife had loved the place, and the Englishman had apparently thought of it when he wanted a secure location to discuss his fears.
My hands were shaking. The man who had written this note was now as cold as the morgue table he was lying on, if indeed he was lying in a morgue. No one had been able—or willing—to tell me where my friend’s body would be taken. And now the white powder. Would Fielding have put powder in the envelope and neglected to mention it in his letter? If he didn’t, who did? Who but the person who had murdered him?
I laid the letter on the sofa, stripped off the surgical gloves, and rewound the videotape to the point at which I’d walked out of the frame. I had decided to make this tape because I feared I might be killed before I could tell the president what I knew. Fielding’s letter had changed nothing. Yet as I stared into the lens, my mind wandered. I was way ahead of Fielding on calling my “late brother’s friend.” The moment I’d seen Fielding’s corpse on the floor of his office, I knew I had to call the president. But the president was in China. Still, as soon as I got clear of the Trinity lab, I’d called the White House from a pay phone in a Shoney’s restaurant, a “safe” phone Fielding had told me about. It couldn’t be seen by surveillance teams in cars, and the restaurant’s interior geometry made it difficult for a parabolic microphone to eavesdrop from a distance.
When I said “Project Trinity,” the White House operator put me through to a man who gruffly asked me to state my business. I asked to speak to Ewan McCaskell, the president’s chief of staff, whom I’d met during my visit to the Oval Office. McCaskell was in China with the president. I asked that the president be informed that David Tennant needed to speak to him urgently about Project Trinity, and that no one else involved with Trinity should be informed. The man said my message would be passed on and hung up.
Thirteen hours separated North Carolina and Beijing. That made it tomorrow in China. Daylight. Yet four hours had passed since my call, and I’d heard nothing. Would my message be relayed to China, given the critical nature of the summit? There was no way to know. I did know that if someone at Trinity heard about my call first, I might wind up as dead as Fielding before I talked to the president.
I hit START on the remote control and spoke again to the camera.
“In the past six months I’ve gone from feeling like part of a noble scientific effort to questioning whether I’m even living in the United States. I’ve watched Nobel laureates give up all principle in a search for—”
I went still. Something had passed by one of my front windows. A face. Very close, peering inside. I’d seen it through the sheer curtains, but I was sure. A face, framed by shoulder-length hair. I had a sense of a woman’s features, but …
I started to get up, then sat back down. My teeth were vibrating with an electric pain like aluminum foil crushed between dental fillings. My eyelids felt too heavy to hold open. Not now, I thought, shoving my hand into my pocket for my prescription bottle. Jesus, not now. For six months, every member of Trinity’s inner circle had suffered frightening neurological symptoms. No one’s symptoms were the same. My affliction was narcolepsy. Narcolepsy and dreams. At home, I usually gave in to the trancelike sleep. But when I needed to fight off a spell—at Trinity, or driving my car—only amphetamines could stop the overwhelming waves.
I pulled out my prescription bottle and shook it. Empty. I’d swallowed my last pill yesterday. I got my speed from Ravi Nara, Trinity’s neurologist, but Nara and I were no longer speaking. I tried to rise, thinking I’d call a pharmacy and prescribe my own, but that was ridiculous. I couldn’t even stand. A leaden heaviness had settled into my limbs. My face felt hot, and my eyelids began to fall.
The prowler was at the window again. In my mind, I raised my gun and aimed it, but then I saw the weapon lying in my lap. Not even survival instinct could clear the fog filling my brain. I looked back at the window. The face was gone. A woman’s face. I was sure of it. Would they use a woman to kill me? Of course. They were pragmatists. They used what worked.
Something scratched at my doorknob. Through the thickening haze I fought to aim my gun at the door. Something slammed against the wood. I got my finger on the trigger, but as my swimming brain transmitted the instruction to depress it, sleep annihilated consciousness like fingers snuffing a candle flame.
Andrew Fielding sat alone at his desk, furiously smoking a cigarette. His hands were shaking from a confrontation with Godin. It had happened the previous day, but Fielding had the habit of replaying such scenes in his mind, agonizing over how ineffectually he had stated his case, murmuring retorts he should have made at the time but had not.
The argument had been the result of weeks of frustration. Fielding didn’t like arguments, not ones outside the realm of physics, anyway. He’d put off the meeting until the last possible moment. He pottered around his office, pondering one of the central riddles of quantum physics: how two particles fired simultaneously from the same source could arrive at the same destination at the same instant, even though one had to travel ten times as far as the other. It was like two 747s flying from New York to Los Angeles—one flying direct and the other having to fly south to Miami before turning west to Los Angeles—yet both touching down at LAX at the same moment. The 747 on the direct route flew at the speed of light, yet the plane that had to detour over Miami still reached L.A. at the same instant. Which meant that the second plane had flown faster than the speed of light. Which meant that Einstein’s general theory of relativity was flawed. Possibly. Fielding spent a great deal of time thinking about this problem.
He lit another cigarette and thought about the letter he’d FedExed to David Tennant. It didn’t say enough. Not nearly. But it would have to do until they met at Nags Head. Tennant would be working a few steps up the hall from him all afternoon, but he might as well be in Fiji. No square foot of the Trinity complex was free of surveillance and recording devices. Tennant would get the letter this afternoon, if no one intercepted it. To prevent this, Fielding had instructed his wife to drop it at a FedEx box inside the Durham post office, beyond the sight line of anyone following her from a distance. That was all the spouses usually got—random surveillance from cars—but you never knew.
Tennant was Fielding’s only hope. Tennant knew the president. He’d had cocktails in the White House, anyway. Fielding had won the Nobel in 1998, but he’d never been invited to 10 Downing Street. Never would be, in all likelihood. He’d shaken hands with the PM at a reception once, but that wasn’t the same thing. Not at all.
He took a drag on the cigarette and looked down at his desk. An equation lay there, a collapsing wave function, unsolvable using present-day mathematics. Not even the world’s most powerful supercomputers could solve a collapsing wave function. There was one machine on the planet that might make headway with the problem—at least he believed there was—and if he was right, the term supercomputer might soon become as quaint and archaic as abacus. But the machine that could solve a collapsing wave function would be capable of a lot more than computing. It would be everything Peter Godin had promised the mandarins in Washington, and more. That “more” was what scared Fielding. Scared the bloody hell out of him. For no one could predict the unintended consequences of bringing such a thing into existence. “Trinity” indeed.
He was thinking of going home early when something flashed in his left eye. There was no pain. Then the visual field in that eye swirled into a blur, and an explosion seemed to detonate in the left frontal lobe of his brain. A stroke, he thought with clinical detachment. I’m having a stroke. Strangely calm, he reached for the telephone to call 911, then remembered that the world’s preeminent neurologist was working in the office four doors down from his own.
The telephone would be faster than walking. He reached for the receiver, but the event taking place within his cranium suddenly bloomed to its full destructive power. The clot lodged, or the blood vessel burst, and his left eye went black. Then a knifelike pain pierced the base of his brain, the center of life support functions. Falling toward the floor, Fielding thought again of that elusive particle that had traveled faster than the speed of light, that had proved Einstein wrong by traversing space as though it did not exist. He posed a thought experiment: If Andrew Fielding could move as fast as that particle, could he reach Ravi Nara in time to be saved?
Answer: No. Nothing could save him now.
His last coherent thought was a prayer, a silent hope that in the unmapped world of the quantum, consciousness existed beyond what humans called death. For Fielding, religion was an illusion, but at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Project Trinity had uncovered hope of a new immortality. And it wasn’t the Rube Goldberg monstrosity they were pretending to build a hundred meters from his office door.
The impact of the floor was like water.
I jerked awake and grabbed my gun. Someone was banging the front door taut against the security chain. I tried to get to my feet, but the dream had disoriented me. Its lucidity far surpassed anything I’d experienced to date. I actually felt that I had died, that I was Andrew Fielding at the moment of his death—
“Dr. Tennant?” shouted a woman’s voice. “David! Are you in there?”
My psychiatrist? I put my hand to my forehead and tried to fight my way back to reality. “Dr. Weiss? Rachel? Is that you?”
“Yes! Unlatch the chain!”
“I’m coming,” I muttered. “Are you alone?”
“Yes! Open the door.”
I stuffed my gun between the couch cushions and stumbled toward the door. As I reached for the chain latch, it struck me that I had never told my psychiatrist where I lived.
TWO
Rachel Weiss had jet-black hair, olive skin, and onyx eyes. Eleven weeks ago, when I’d arrived at her office for my first session, I’d thought of Rebecca from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Only in the novel Rebecca had a wild, unrestrained sort of beauty. Rachel Weiss projected a focused severity that made her physical appearance and clothing irrelevant, as though she went out of her way to hide attributes that would cause people to see her as anything other than the remarkable clinician she was.
“What was that?” she asked, pointing to the sofa cushion where I’d stashed the gun. “Are you self-prescribing again?”
“No. How did you find my house?”
“I know a woman in Personnel at UVA. You missed two consecutive sessions, but at least you called ahead to cancel. Today you leave me sitting there and you don’t even call? Considering your state of mind lately, what do you expect me to do?” Rachel’s eyes went to the video camera. “Oh, David … you’re not back to this again? I thought you stopped years ago.”
“It’s not what you think.”
She didn’t look convinced. Five years ago, a drunk driver flipped my wife’s car into a roadside pond. The water wasn’t deep, but both Karen and my daughter Zooey drowned before help arrived. I was working at the hospital they were brought to after the accident. Watching the ER staff try in vain to resuscitate my four-year-old daughter shattered me. I spent hours at home in front of the television, endlessly replaying videotapes of Zooey learning to walk, laughing in Karen’s arms, hugging me at her third birthday party. My medical practice withered, then died, and I sank into clinical depression. This was the only fact of my personal life I had discussed in detail with my psychiatrist, and this only because after three sessions she had told me that she’d lost her only child to leukemia the year before.
She confided this because she believed my disturbing dreams were caused by the tragic loss of my family, and she wanted me to know she had felt the same kind of pain. Rachel, too, had lost more than her child. Unable to handle the devastating effects of his son’s illness, her lawyer husband had left her and returned to New York. Like me, Rachel had descended into a pit of depression from which she was lucky to emerge. Therapy and medication had been her salvation. But like my father, I’ve always been fiercely private, and I fought my way back to the land of the living alone. Not a day went by that I didn’t miss my wife and daughter, but my days of weeping as I replayed old videotapes were over.
“This isn’t about Karen and Zooey,” I told Rachel. “Please close the door.”
She remained in the open doorway, car keys in hand, clearly wanting to believe me but just as clearly skeptical. “What is it, then?”
“Work. Please close the door.”
Rachel hesitated, then shut the door and stared into my eyes. “Maybe it’s time you told me about your work.”
This had long been a point of contention between us. Rachel considered doctor/patient confidentiality as sacred as the confessional, and my lack of trust offended her. She believed my demands for secrecy and warnings of danger hinted at a delusional reality I had constructed to protect my psyche from scrutiny. I didn’t blame her. At the request of the NSA, I’d made my first appointment with her under a false name. But ten seconds after we shook hands, she recognized my face from the jacket photo of my book. She assumed my ruse was the paranoia of a medical celebrity, and I did nothing to disabuse her of that notion. But after a few weeks, my refusal to divulge anything about my work—and my obsession with “protecting” her—had pushed her to suspect that I might be schizophrenic.
What Rachel didn’t know was that I had only been allowed to see her after winning a brutal argument with John Skow, the director of Project Trinity. My narcolepsy had developed as a result of my work at Trinity, and I wanted professional help to try to understand the accompanying dreams.
First the NSA flew in a shrink from Fort Meade, a pharmacological psychiatrist whose main patient base was technicians trying to cope with chronic stress or depression. He wanted to fill me up with happy pills and find out how to become an internationally published physician like me. Next they brought in a woman, an expert in dealing with the neuroses that develop when people are forced to work for long periods in secrecy. Her knowledge of dream symbolism was limited to “a little historical reading” during her residency. Like her colleague, she wanted to start me on a regimen of antidepressants and antipsychotics. What I needed was a psychoanalyst experienced in dream analysis, and the NSA didn’t have one.
I called some friends at the UVA Medical School and discovered that Rachel Weiss, the country’s preeminent Jungian analyst, was based at the Duke University Medical School, less than fifteen miles from the Trinity building. Skow tried to stop me from seeing her, but in the end I told him he’d have to arrest me to do it, and before he tried that, he’d better call the president, who had appointed me to the project.
“Something’s happened,” Rachel said. “What is it? Have the hallucinations changed again?”
Hallucinations, I thought bitterly. Never dreams.
“Have they intensified? Become more personal? Are you afraid?”
“Andrew Fielding is dead,” I said in a flat voice.
Rachel blinked. “Who’s Andrew Fielding?”
“He was a physicist.”
Her eyes widened. “Andrew Fielding the physicist is dead?”
It was a measure of Fielding’s reputation that a medical doctor who knew little about quantum physics would know his name. But it didn’t surprise me. There were six-year-olds who’d heard of “the White Rabbit.” The man who had largely unraveled the enigma of the dark matter in the universe stood second only to his friend Stephen Hawking in the astrophysical firmament.
“He died of a stroke,” I said. “Or so they say.”
“So who says?”
“People at work.”
“You work with Andrew Fielding?”
“I did. For the past two years.”
Rachel shook her head in amazement. “You don’t think he died of a stroke?”
“No.”
“Did you examine him?”
“A cursory exam. He collapsed in his office. Another doctor got to him before he died. That doctor said Fielding exhibited left-side paralysis and had a blown left pupil, but …”
“What?”
“I don’t believe him. Fielding died too quickly for a stroke. Within four or five minutes.”
Rachel pursed her lips. “That happens sometimes. Especially with a severe hemorrhage.”
“Yes, but it’s comparatively rare, and you don’t usually see a blown pupil.” That was true enough, but it wasn’t what I was thinking. I was thinking that Rachel was a psychiatrist, and as good as she was, she hadn’t spent sixteen years practicing internal medicine, as I had. You got a feeling about certain cases, certain people. A sixth sense. Fielding had not been my patient, but he’d told me a lot about his health in two years, and a massive hemorrhage didn’t feel right to me. “Look, I don’t know where his body is, and I don’t think there’s going to be an autopsy, so—”
“Why no autopsy?” Rachel broke in.
“Because I think he was murdered.”
“I thought you said he died in his office.”
“He did.”
“You think he was murdered at work? Workplace violence?”
She still didn’t get it. “I mean premeditated murder. Carefully thought out, expertly executed murder.”
“But … why would someone murder Andrew Fielding? He was an old man, wasn’t he?”
“He was sixty-three.” Recalling Fielding’s body on his office floor, mouth agape, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, I felt a sudden compulsion to tell Rachel everything. But one glance at the window killed the urge. A parabolic microphone could be trained on the glass.
“I can’t say anything beyond that. I’m sorry. You should go, Rachel.”
She took two steps toward me, her face set with purpose. “I’m not going anywhere yet. Look, if anyone died while not under a doctor’s supervision in this state, there has to be an autopsy. And especially in cases of possible foul play. It’s required by law.”
I laughed at her naiveté. “There won’t be an autopsy. Not a public one, anyway.”
“David—”
“I really can’t say more. I shouldn’t have said that much. I just wanted you to know … that it’s real.”
“Why can’t you say more?” She held up a small, graceful hand. “No, let me answer that. Because to tell me more would put me in danger. Right?”
“Yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “David, from the beginning you’ve made extraordinary demands about secrecy. And I’ve complied. I’ve told colleagues that the hours you spend in my office are research for your second book, rather than what they really are.”
“And you know I appreciate that. But if I’m right about Fielding, anything I tell you now could put your life at risk. Can’t you understand that?”
“No. I’ve never understood. What sort of work could possibly be so dangerous?”
I shook my head.
“This is like a bad joke.” She laughed strangely. “‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.’ It’s classic paranoid thinking.”
“Do you really believe I’m making all this up?”
Rachel answered with caution. “I believe that you believe everything you’ve told me.”
“So, I’m still delusional.”
“You’ve got to admit, you’ve been having disturbing hallucinations for some time now. Some of the recent ones are classic religious delusions.”
“But most not,” I reminded her. “And I’m an atheist. Is that classic?”
“No, I concede that. But you’ve also refused to get a workup for your narcolepsy. Or epilepsy. Or even to get your blood sugar checked, for that matter.”
I’ve been worked up by the foremost neurologist in the world. “That’s being investigated at work.”
“By Andrew Fielding? He wasn’t an M.D., was he?”
I decided to go one step further. “I’m being treated by Ravi Nara.”
Her mouth fell open. “Ravi Nara? As in the Nobel Prize for medicine?”
“That’s him,” I said with distaste.
“You work with Ravi Nara?”
“Yes. He’s a prick. It was Nara who said Fielding died of a stroke.”
Rachel appeared at a loss. “David, I just don’t know what to say. Are you really working with these famous people?”
“Is that so hard to believe? I’m reasonably famous myself.”
“Yes, but … not in the same way. What reason would those men have to work together? They’re in totally different fields.”
“Until two years ago they were.”
“What does that mean?”
“Go back to your office, Rachel.”
“I canceled my last patient so I could come here.”
“Bill me for your lost time.”
She reddened. “There’s no need to insult me. Please tell me what’s going on. I’m tired of hearing nothing but your hallucinations.”
“Dreams.”
“Whatever. They’re not enough to work with.”
“Not for your purpose. But you and I have different goals. We always have. You’re trying to solve the riddle of David Tennant. I’m trying to solve the riddle of my dreams.”
“But the answers are bound up in who you are! Dreams aren’t independent of the rest of your brain! You—”
The ringing telephone cut her off. I got up and went into the kitchen to answer it, a strange thrumming in my chest. The caller could be the president of the United States.
“Dr. Tennant,” I said from years of habit.
“Dr. David?” cried a hysterical female voice with an Asian accent. It was Lu Li, Fielding’s Chinese wife. Or widow …
“This is David, Lu Li. I’m sorry I haven’t called you.” I searched for fitting words but found only a cliché. “I can’t begin to express the pain I feel at Andrew’s loss—”
A burst of Cantonese punctuated with some English flashed down the wire. I didn’t have to understand it all to know I was hearing a distraught widow on the verge of collapse. God only knew what the Trinity security people had told Lu Li, or what she had made of it. She’d come to America only three months ago, her immigration fast-tracked by the State Department, which had received a none-too-subtle motivational call from the White House.
“I know this has been a terrible day,” I said in a comforting voice. “But I need you to try to calm down.”
Lu Li was panting.
“Breathe deeply,” I said, trying to decide what approach to take. Safest to use the corporate cover the NSA had insisted on from the beginning. As far as the rest of the Research Triangle Park companies knew, the Argus Optical Corporation developed optical computer elements used in government defense projects. Lu Li might know no more that this.
“What have you been told by the company?” I asked cautiously.
“Andy dead!” Lu Li cried. “They say he die of brain bleeding, but I know nothing. I don’t know what to do!”
I saw nothing to be gained by further agitating Fielding’s widow with theories of murder. “Lu Li, Andrew was sixty-three years old, and not in the best of health. A stroke isn’t an unlikely event in that situation.”
“You no understand, Dr. David! Andy warn me about this.”
My hand tightened on the phone. “What do you mean?”
Another burst of Cantonese came down the wire, but then Lu Li settled into halting English. “Andy tell me this could happen. He say, ‘If something happen to me, call Dr. David. David know what to do.’”
A deep ache gripped my heart. That Fielding had put such faith in me … “What do you want me to do?”
“Come here. Please. Talk to me. Tell me why this happen to Andy.”
I hesitated. The NSA was probably listening to this call. To go to Lu Li’s house would only put her at greater risk, and myself, too. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t fail my friend. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
“Thank you, thank you, David! Please, thank you.”
I hung up and turned to go back to the living room. Rachel was standing in the kitchen doorway.
“I have to leave,” I told her. “I appreciate you coming to check on me. I know it was beyond the call of duty.”
“I’m going with you. I heard some of that, and I’m going with you.”
“Out of the question.”
“Why?”
“You have no reason to come. You’re not part of this.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “For me it’s simple, okay? If you’re telling the truth, I’ll find the distraught widow of Andrew Fielding at the end of a short drive. And she’ll support what you’ve told me.”
“Not necessarily. I don’t know how much Fielding confided in her. And Lu Li hardly speaks English.”
“Andrew Fielding didn’t teach his own wife English?”
“He spoke fluent Cantonese. Plus about eight other languages. And she’s only been here a few months.”
Rachel straightened her skirt with the flats of her hands. “Your resistance tells me that you know my going will expose your story as a delusion.”
Anger flashed through me. “I’m tempted to let you come, just for that. But you don’t grasp the danger. You could die. Tonight.”
“I don’t think so.”
I picked up the Ziploc bag containing the white powder and the FedEx envelope and held it out to her. “A few minutes ago I received a letter from Fielding. This powder was in the envelope.”
She shrugged. “It looks like sand. What is it?”
“I have no idea. But I’m afraid it might be anthrax. Or whatever killed Fielding.”
She took the package from me. I thought at first she was examining the powder, but she was reading the label on the FedEx envelope.
“This says the sender is Lewis Carroll.”
“That’s code. Fielding couldn’t risk putting his name into the FedEx computer system. The NSA would pick that up immediately. He used ‘Lewis Carroll’ because his nickname was the White Rabbit. You’ve heard that, right?”
Rachel looked as if she were really thinking about it. “I can’t say that I have. Where’s this letter?”
I motioned toward the front room. “In a plastic bag on the couch. Don’t open it.”
She bent over the note and quickly read it. “It’s not signed.”
“Of course not. Fielding didn’t know who might see it. That rabbit symbol is his signature.”
She looked at me with disbelief. “Just take me along, David. If what I see supports what you’ve told me, I’ll take all your warnings seriously from this point forward. No more doubts.”
“That’s like throwing you into the water to prove there are sharks in it. By the time you see them, it’s too late.”
“That’s always how it is with these kinds of fantasies.”
I went and got my keys off the kitchen counter. Rachel followed at my heels. “All right, you want to come? Follow me in your car.”
She shook her head. “Not a chance. You’d lose me at the first red light.”
“Your colleagues would tell you it’s dangerous to accompany a patient while he chases a paranoid fantasy. Especially a narcoleptic patient.”
“My colleagues don’t know you. As for the narcolepsy, you haven’t killed yourself yet.”
I reached under the sofa cushion, brought out my pistol, and thrust it into my waistband. “You don’t know me either.”
She studied the butt of the gun, then looked into my eyes. “I think I do. And I want to help you.”
If she were only my psychiatrist, I would have left her there. But during our long sessions, we had recognized something in each other, an unspoken feeling shared by two people who had experienced great loss. Even though she thought I might be ill now, she cared about me in a way no one else had for a long time. To take her with me would be selfish, but the simple truth was, I didn’t want to go alone.
THREE
Geli Bauer sat within the dark bowels of the Trinity building, a basement complex lit only by the glow of computer monitors and surveillance screens. From here electronic filaments spread out to monitor the people and the physical plant of Project Trinity. But that was only the center of her domain. With the touch of a computer key, Geli could interface with the NSA supercomputers at Fort Meade and monitor conversations and events on the other side of the globe. Though she had wielded many kinds of power during her thirty-two years on earth, she had never before felt the rush of knowing that all the world bounded by electronics could be manipulated by the touch of her finger.
On paper, Geli worked for Godin Supercomputing, which was based in Mountain View, California. But it was her company’s quasi-governmental relationship with the NSA that had lifted her into the stratosphere of power. If she deemed a situation an emergency, she could stop trains, close international airports, retask surveillance satellites, or lift armed helicopters into the skies over U.S. soil and order them to fire. No other modern woman had wielded such power—in some ways her authority rivaled that of her father—and Geli did not intend to give it up.
On the flat-panel monitor before her glowed a transcript of the conversation between David Tennant and an unknown White House functionary, recorded at a Shoney’s restaurant that afternoon, but Geli was no longer looking at it. She was speaking on the headset phone to a member of her security team, the man who was watching Tennant’s residence.
“I only heard conversation in the kitchen,” she said. “That makes no sense. He and Dr. Weiss had to be talking elsewhere.”
“Maybe they were getting it on.”
“We’d have heard it. Weiss looks like a screamer to me. It’s always the quiet ones.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get in there and check the mikes.”
Geli tapped a key on the pad before her, which connected her to a young ex-Delta operator named Thomas Corelli, who was covering Andrew Fielding’s house.
“What are you hearing, Thomas?”
“Normal background noise. TV. Bumps and clatters.”
“Did you hear Mrs. Fielding’s end of the phone call?”
“Yeah, but it’s hard to understand that Chinese accent.”
“Are you out of sight?”
“I’m parked in the driveway of some out-of-town neighbors.”
“Tennant will be at your location in five minutes. He has a woman with him. Dr. Rachel Weiss. Stay on this line.”
Geli clicked off, then said clearly, “JPEG. Weiss, Rachel.”
A digital photograph of Rachel Weiss appeared on her monitor. It was a head shot, a telephoto taken as the psychiatrist left the Duke University hospital. Rachel Weiss was three years older than Geli, but Geli recognized the type. She’d known girls like that at boarding school in Switzerland. Strivers. Most of them Jews. She would have known Weiss was Jewish without hearing her name or seeing her file. Even with fashionably windblown hair, Rachel Weiss looked like she carried the weight of the world on her shoulders. She had the dark martyr’s eyes, the premature lines around the mouth. She was one of the top Jungian analysts in the world, and you didn’t reach that level without being obsessive about your work.
Geli had been against involving Weiss. It was Skow who had allowed it. Skow’s theory was that if you held the leash too tight, you were asking for trouble. But it was Geli’s head that would roll if there was a security breach. To prevent that eventuality, she received transcripts of Weiss’s sessions with Tennant and recordings of every telephone call the psychiatrist made. Once a week, one of her operatives slipped into Weiss’s office and photocopied Tennant’s file, to be sure that nothing escaped Geli’s scrutiny.
That was the kind of hassle that came from dealing with civilians. It had been the same at Los Alamos, with the Manhattan Project. In both cases the government had tried to control a group of gifted civilian scientists who through ignorance, obstinacy, or ideology posed the greatest threat to their own work. When you recruited the smartest people in the world, you got crackpots.
Tennant was a crackpot. Like Fielding. Like Ravi Nara, the project’s Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist. All six Trinity principals had signed the tightest possible security and nondisclosure agreements, but they still believed they could do anything they wanted. To them the world was Disneyland. And doctors were the worst. Even in the army, the rules had never quite seemed to apply to M.D.s. But tonight Tennant was going to step far enough over the line to get his head chopped off.
Her headset beeped. She opened the line to her man at Tennant’s house. “What is it?”
“I’m inside. You’re not going to believe this. Someone put painter’s putty in the holes over the mikes.”
Geli felt a strange numbness in her chest. “How could Tennant know where they were?”
“No way without a scanner.”
“Magnifying glass?”
“If he knew to look for them. But that would take hours, and you’d never be sure you got them all.”
A scanner. Where the hell would an internist get that? Then she knew. Fielding. “Tennant took that FedEx delivery. Do you see an envelope anywhere?”
“No.”
“He must have taken it with him. What else do you see? Anything strange?”
“There’s a video camera set up on a tripod.”
Shit. “Tape in it?”
“Let me check. No tape.”
“What else?”
“A vacuum cleaner in the backyard.”
What the hell? “A vacuum cleaner? Take the bag out and bring it here. We’ll chopper it to Fort Meade for analysis. What else?”
“Nothing.”
“Take one last look, then get out.”
Geli clicked off, then said, “Skow—home.” The computer dialed the Raleigh residence of Project Trinity’s administrative director.
“Geli?” Skow said. “What’s going on?”
Bauer always thought Kennedy when she heard John Skow’s voice. Skow was a Boston Brahmin with twice the usual brains of his breed. Instead of the customary liberal arts and law background of his class, Skow had advanced degrees in astronomy and mathematics and had served for eight years as deputy director of special projects for the NSA. His primary area of responsibility was the agency’s top secret Supercomputer Research Center. Skow was technically Geli’s superior, but their relationship had always been uncomfortable. Short of taking a human life, Geli had independent responsibility for Project Trinity’s security. She held this power because Peter Godin—citing security leaks at government labs—had demanded that he pick his own team to protect Trinity.
The old man had found her just as she was leaving the army. Geli believed heart and soul in the warrior culture, but she could no longer endure the bloated and hidebound bureaucracy of the army, or its abysmal quality standards for new recruits. When Godin appeared, he’d offered her a job she had wanted all her life but hadn’t believed existed.
She would receive $700,000 a year to work as chief of security for special projects for Godin Supercomputing. The salary was immense, but Godin was a billionaire. He could afford it. Her conditions of employment were unique. She would follow any order he gave, without question and without regard for legality. She would not reveal any information about her employer, his company, or her employment. If she did, she would die. Geli could hire her own staff, but they would accept the same conditions and penalty, and she would enforce that penalty. She was amazed that a public figure like Godin would dare to set such terms. Then she learned that Godin had found her through her father. That explained a lot. Geli had hardly spoken to her father in years, but he was in a position to know a lot about her. And she could tell by the way Godin looked at her that he knew something about her as well. Probably the stories that had filtered out of Iraq after Desert Storm. Peter Godin wanted a security expert, but he also wanted a killer. Geli was both.
John Skow was not. Unlike Godin, who had fought as a marine in Korea as a young man, Skow was a theoretical warrior. The NSA man had never seen blood on his hands, and around Geli he sometimes acted like a man who’d been handed a leash with a pit bull on the end of it.
“Geli?” Skow said again. “Are you there?”
“Dr. Weiss went to Tennant’s house,” she said into her headset.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We got almost none of their conversation. They’re on their way to the Fielding house now. Lu Li Fielding called him. Upset.”
Skow was silent for a moment. “Going over to comfort the grieving widow?”
“I’m sure that will be their story.” She wanted to gauge Skow’s level of anxiety before giving him more details. “Do we let them go in?”
“Of course. You can hear everything they say, right?”
“Maybe not. There was a problem with the bugs at Tennant’s house.”
“What kind of problem?”
“Tennant put putty over the mikes. And there was a video camera set up on a tripod in there. No tape in it.” She let that sink in. “Either he wanted to say something on tape that he didn’t want us to hear, or he wanted to talk to Dr. Weiss without us hearing. Either way, it’s bad.”
She listened to Skow breathe for a while.
“It’s all right,” he said finally. “We’re going to be okay on this.”
“You must know something I don’t, sir.”
Skow chuckled at the contempt with which she said “sir.” The NSA man was tough in his own way. He had the detached coldness of mathematical intelligence. “The perks of leadership, Geli. You did well this morning, by the way. I was amazed.”
Geli flashed back to Fielding’s corpse. The termination had gone smoothly enough, but it was a stupid move. They should have taken out Tennant as well. She could easily have manipulated both men into the same vehicle, and after that … simple logistics. A car accident. And the project wouldn’t be in the jeopardy it was in now. “Has Tennant actually talked to the president, sir?”
“I don’t know. So keep your distance. Monitor the situation, but nothing more.”
“He also took a delivery from FedEx. A letter. Whatever it was, he took it with him. We need to see that.”
“If you can get a look at it without him knowing, fine. Otherwise, talk to FedEx and find out who sent it.”
“We’re doing that.”
“Good. Just don’t—”
Geli heard Skow’s wife calling his name.
“Just keep me informed,” he said, and rang off.
Geli closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. She had made the case to Godin for taking out Tennant along with Fielding, but the old man had resisted. Yes, Godin conceded, Tennant had broken regulations and spent time with Fielding outside the facility. Yes, Tennant had supported Fielding’s effort to suspend the project. And it was Tennant’s tie to the president that had made that suspension a reality. But there was no proof that Tennant was part of the Englishman’s campaign to sabotage the project, or that he was privy to any of the dangerous information Fielding possessed. Since Geli did not know what that information was, she could not judge the risk of letting Tennant live. She had reminded Godin of the maxim “Better safe than sorry,” but Godin did not relent. He would though. Soon.
Geli said, “JPEG, Fielding, Lu Li.” An image of a dark-haired Asian woman appeared on her monitor. Born Lu Li Cheng, reared in Canton Province, Communist China. Forty years old. Advanced degrees in applied physics.
“Another mistake,” Geli muttered. Lu Li Cheng had no business inside the borders of the United States, much less in the inner circle of the most sensitive scientific project in the country. Geli touched the key that connected her to Thomas Corelli in the surveillance car outside the Fielding house. “You see anything strange over there?”
“No.”
“How easily could you search Tennant’s car when he arrives?”
“Depends on where he parks.”
“If you see a FedEx envelope in the car, break in, read it, then put it back. And I want video of their arrival.”
“No problem. What are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. Just get it.”
Geli removed a pack of Gauloises from her desk, took out a cigarette, and broke off its filter. In the flare of the match she caught her reflection in her computer monitor. A veil of blonde hair, high cheekbones, steel-blue eyes, nasty burn scar. She considered the ugly ridged tissue on her left cheek as much a part of her face as her eyes or mouth. A plastic surgeon had once offered to remove the discolored mark at no cost, but she’d turned him down. Scars had a purpose: to remind their bearer of wounds. The wound that had caused that scar she would never let herself forget.
She punched a key and routed the signals from the microphones in the Fielding house to her headset. Then she drew deeply on her cigarette, settled back in her chair, and blew a stream of harsh smoke toward the ceiling. Geli Bauer hated many things, but most of all she hated waiting.
FOUR
We drove in silence, the Acura moving swiftly through the dusk. At this time of evening, it was a quick ride from my suburb to Andrew Fielding’s house near the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rachel didn’t understand my demand for silence, and I didn’t expect her to. When I first became involved in Trinity, the xenophobic level of security had stunned me. The other scientists—Fielding included—had worked on defense-related projects before and accepted the intrusive security as a necessary inconvenience. But eventually, even the veterans complained that we were enduring something unprecedented. Surveillance was all-pervasive and reached far beyond the lab complex. Protests were met with a curt reminder that the scientists on the Manhattan Project had been forced to live behind barbed wire to ensure the security of “the device.” The freedom we enjoyed came with a price—or so went the party line.
Fielding didn’t buy it. “Random” polygraph tests occurred almost weekly, and surveillance extended even into our homes. Before I could begin my video today, I’d had to plug pinholes in my walls that concealed tiny microphones. Fielding discovered them with a special scanner he’d built at home and marked the bugs with tiny pins. He had made something of a hobby out of evading Trinity surveillance. He warned me that speaking confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech microphones. The Englishman’s cat-and-mouse game with the NSA had amused me at times, but there was no doubt about who had got the last laugh.
I looked over at Rachel. It felt strange to be in a car with her. In the five years since my wife’s death, I’d had relationships with two women, both before my assignment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn’t a “relationship” in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and discussed the most disturbing aspect of my life—my dreams. Through her questions and interpretations, she had probably revealed more about herself than she had learned about me, yet much remained hidden.
She’d come down from New York Presbyterian to accept the faculty position at Duke, where she taught a small cadre of psychiatry residents Jungian analysis, a dying art in the world of modern pharmacological psychiatry. She also saw private patients and carried out psychiatric research. After two years of virtual solitude working on Trinity, I would have found contact with any intelligent woman provocative. But Rachel had far more than intelligence to offer. Sitting in her leather chair, dressed impeccably, her dark hair pulled up in a French braid, she would watch me with unblinking concentration, as though peering into depths of my mind that even I had not plumbed. Sometimes her face—and particularly her eyes—became the whole room for me. They were the environment I occupied, the audience I confided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would question me about certain images, then question the answers I gave. She sometimes offered interpretations of my dreams, but unlike the NSA psychiatrists I had seen, she never spoke with a tone of infallibility. She seemed to be searching for meaning along with me, prodding me to interpret the images myself.
“David, you don’t have to drive around all night,” she said. “I’m not going to hold this against you.”
Right, I thought. What’s wrong with delusions of a secret government conspiracy? “Be patient,” I told her. “It’s not much farther.”
She looked at me in the semidark, her eyes skeptical. “What’s the monetary award for a Nobel Prize?”
“About a million U.S. Fielding got a little less than Ravi Nara, because …” I trailed off, realizing that she was only probing again, trying to puncture my “delusion.”
I focused on the road, knowing that in a few minutes she would have to admit that my paranoia was at least partially grounded in fact. What would she think then? Would she open her mind to my interpretation of my dreams, however irrational it might sound?
From our first session, Rachel had argued that she could not make valid interpretations of my “hallucinations” without knowing intimate details of my past and my work. But I couldn’t tell much. Fielding had warned me that the NSA would consider anyone who knew anything about Trinity or its principals to be a potential threat. Beyond this concern, I felt that what I saw during my narcoleptic episodes had nothing to do with my past. The images seemed to be coming from outside my mind. Not in the sense of hearing alien voices, which was a marker for schizophrenia, but in the classical sense of visions. Revealed visions, like those described by prophets. For a man who had not believed in God since he was a boy, it was a singularly disturbing state of affairs.
My dreams had not begun with the first narcoleptic attacks. The first episodes were true blackouts. Holes in my life. Gaps of time, lost forever. I would be working at my office computer, then suddenly become aware of a high-pitched vibration in my body. Generalized at first, it would quickly localize to my teeth. This was a classic onset symptom of narcolepsy. I’d begin to feel drowsy, then suddenly jerk awake in my chair and find that forty minutes had passed. It was like going under anesthesia. No memory at all.
The dreams began after a week of blackouts. The first one was always the same, a recurring nightmare that frightened me more than the blackouts had. I remember how intrigued Rachel was when I first recounted it, and how uncharacteristically sure she was that she understood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair opposite her desk, closed my eyes, and described what I had seen so often.
I’m sitting in a dark room. There’s no light at all. No sound. I can feel my eyes with my fingers, my ears, too, but I see and hear nothing. I remember nothing. I have no past. And because I see and hear nothing, I have no present. I simply am. That’s my reality. I AM. I feel like a stroke victim imprisoned within a body and brain that no longer function. I can think, but not of any specific images. I feel more than I think. And what I feel is this: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I alone? Was I always here? Will I always be here? These thoughts don’t merely fill my mind. They are my mind. There’s no time as we know it, only the questions changing from one to another. Eventually, the questions resolve into a single mantra: Where did I come from? Where did I come from? I’m a brain-damaged man sitting in a room for eternity, asking one question of the darkness.
“Don’t you see?” Rachel had said. “You haven’t fully dealt with the deaths of your wife and daughter. Their loss cut you off from the world, and from yourself. You are damaged. You are wounded. The man walking around in the world of light is an act. The real David Tennant is sitting in that dark room, unable to think or feel. No one feels his grief or his pain.”
“That’s not it,” I told her. “I did a psychiatry rotation, for God’s sake. This isn’t unresolved grief.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Doctors always make the worst patients.”
A week later, I told her the dream had changed.
“There’s something in the room with me now.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it.”
“But you know it’s there?”
“Yes.”
“Is it a person?”
“No. It’s very small. A sphere, floating in space. A black golf ball floating in the dark.”
“How do you know it’s there?”
“It’s like a deeper darkness at the center of the dark. And it pulls at me.”
“Pulls how?”
“I don’t know. Like gravity. Emotional gravity. But I know this. It knows the answer to my questions. It knows who I am and why I’m stuck in that dark room.”
And so it went, with slight variations, until the dream changed again. When it did, it changed profoundly. One night, while reading at home, I “went under” in the usual way. I found myself sitting in the familiar lightless room, asking my question of the black ball. Then, without warning, the ball exploded into retina-scorching light. After so much darkness, the striking of a match would have seemed an explosion, but this was no match. It blasted outward in all directions with the magnitude of a hydrogen bomb. Only this explosion did not suck back into itself and blossom into a mushroom cloud. It expanded with infinite power and speed, and I had the horrifying sense of being devoured by it, devoured but not destroyed. As the blinding light consumed the darkness, which was me, I somehow knew that this could go on for billions of years without destroying me altogether. Yet still I was afraid.
Rachel didn’t know what to make of this dream. Over the next three weeks, she listened as I described the births of stars and galaxies, their lives and deaths: black holes, supernovas, flashes of nebulae like powdered diamonds flung into the blackness, planets born and dying. I seemed to see from one end of the universe to the other, all objects at once as they expanded into me at the speed of light.
“Have you seen images like these before?” she asked me. “In waking life?”
“How could I?”
“Have you seen photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope?”
“Of course.”
“They’re very much like what you’re describing.”
Frustration crept into my voice. “You don’t understand. I’m not just seeing this. I’m feeling it. The way I might feel watching children, or combat, or lovers together. It’s not merely a visual display.”
“Go on.”
That was what she always said. I closed my eyes and submerged myself in my most recent dream.
“I’m watching a planet. Hovering above it. There are clouds, but not as we know them. They’re green like acid, and tortured by storms. I’m diving now, diving down through the clouds, like a satellite image zooming in to ground level. There’s an ocean below, but it’s not blue. It’s red, and boiling. I plunge through its surface, deep into the red. I’m looking for something, but it’s not there. This ocean is empty.”
“A lot of things came to me when you described that,” Rachel said. “The color imagery first. Red could be important. The empty ocean is a symbol of barrenness, which expresses your aggrieved state.” She hesitated. “What are you looking for in that ocean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“I’m not looking for Karen and Zooey.”
“David.” A hint of irritation in her voice. “If you don’t think these images are symbolic, why are you here?”
I opened my eyes and looked at her perfectly composed face. A curtain of professionalism obscured her empathy, but I saw the truth. She was projecting her sense of loss about her own family onto me.
“I’m here because I can’t find answers on my own,” I said. “Because I’ve read a mountain of books, and they haven’t helped.”
She nodded gravely. “How do you remember the hallucinations in such detail? Do you write them down when you wake up?”
“No. They aren’t like normal dreams, where the harder you try to remember, the less you can. These are indelible. Isn’t that a feature of narcoleptic dreams?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “All right. Karen and Zooey died in water. They both drowned. Karen probably bled a good bit from her hands, and where she hit her head on the steering wheel. That would give us red water.” Rachel reclined her chair and looked at the ceiling tiles. “These hallucinations have no people in them, yet you experience strong emotional reactions. You mentioned combat. Have you ever been in combat?”
“No.”
“But you know that Karen fought to save Zooey. She fought to stay alive. You told me that.”
I shut my eyes. I didn’t like to think about that part of it, but sometimes I couldn’t banish the thoughts. When Karen’s car flipped into the pond, it had landed on its roof and sunk into a foot of soft mud. The electric windows shorted out, and the doors were impossible to open. Broken bones in Karen’s hands and feet testified to the fury with which she had fought to smash the windows. She was a small woman, not physically strong, but she had not given up. A paramedic from the accident scene told me that when the car was finally winched out of the muck and its doors opened, he found her in the backseat, one arm wrapped tightly around Zooey, the other arm floating free, that hand shattered and lacerated over the knuckles.
What had happened was clear. As water filled the car and Karen fought to break the windows, Zooey had panicked. Anyone would, and especially a child. At that point, some mothers would have kept fighting while their child screamed in terror. Others would have comforted their child and prayed for help to come. But Karen had pulled Zooey tight against her, promised her that everything was going to be all right, and then with her feet fought to her last breath to escape the waterbound coffin. For her to cling to Zooey while suffering the agony of anoxia testified to a love stronger than terror, and that knowledge had helped bring me some peace.
“Green clouds and a red ocean have nothing to do with a car accident five years ago,” I said.
“No? Then I think you should tell me more about your childhood.”
“It’s not relevant.”
“You can’t know that,” Rachel insisted.
“I do.”
“Tell me about your work, then.”
“I teach medical ethics.”
“You took a leave of absence over a year ago.”
I whipped my head toward her and opened my eyes. “How do you know that?”
“I heard it at the hospital.”
“Who said it?”
“I don’t remember. I overheard it. You’re very well known in the medical community. Physicians at Duke refer to your book all the time. They did at New York Presbyterian, too. So, is it true? Did you take a leave of absence from the medical school?”
“Let’s stick to the dreams, okay? It’s safer for both of us.”
“Safer how?”
I didn’t answer.
By the next week’s appointment, the dreams had changed again.
“I’m looking at the Earth. Suspended in space. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Blue and green with swirling white clouds. It’s a living thing, a perfect closed system. I dive through the clouds, a hundred-mile swan dive into deep blue ocean. It’s bursting with life. Giant molecules, multicelled creatures, jellyfish, squid, serpents, sharks. The land, too, is teeming. Covered with jungle. A symphony of green. On the shore, fish flop out of the waves and grow legs. Strange crabs scuttle onto the sand and change into other animals I’ve never seen. Time is running in fast-forward, like evolution run through a projector at a million times natural speed. Dinosaurs morph into birds, rodents into mammals. Primates lose their hair. Ice sheets flatten the jungles and then melt into savannah. Twenty thousand years pass in one breath—”
“Take it slow,” Rachel advised. “You’re getting agitated.”
“How could I be seeing all that?”
“You know the answer. Your mind can create any conceivable image and make it real. That photograph of the earth from space is an icon of modern culture. It moves everyone who sees it, and you must have seen it fifty times since childhood.”
“My mind can create animals I’ve never seen? Realistic-looking animals?”
“Of course. You’ve seen Hieronymus Bosch paintings. And I’ve seen the kind of time-lapse images you’re describing on television. In the old days, Life magazine did things like that in print. ‘The Ascent of Man,’ like that. The question is, why are you seeing these things?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
“Are you present in this surreal landscape?”
“No.”
“What do you feel?”
“I’m still looking for something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’m like a bird scanning the earth and sea for … something.”
“Are you a bird in the dream?”
She sounded hopeful. Birds must mean something in the lexicon of dream interpretation. “No.”
“What are you?”
“Nothing, really. A pair of eyes.”
“An observer.”
“Yes. A disembodied observer. T. J. Eckleburg.”
“Who?”
“Nothing. Something from Scott Fitzgerald.”
“Oh. I remember.” She put the end of her pen in her mouth and bit it. An unusual gesture for her. “Do you have an opinion about why you’re seeing all this?”
“Yes.” I knew my next words would surprise her. “I believe someone is showing it to me.”
Her eyes widened, practically histrionics from Rachel Weiss. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“Who is showing this to you?”
“I have no idea. Why do you think I’m seeing it?”
She moved her head from side to side. I could almost see her neurons firing, processing my words through the filters that education and experience had embedded in her brain. “Evolution is change,” she said. “You’re seeing change sped up to unnatural velocity. Uncontrollable change. I sense this may have something to do with your work.”
You could be right, I thought, but I didn’t say that. I simply moved on. My silence was her only protection. In the end, it didn’t matter, because the theme of evolution died, and what came to dominate my sleeping mind shook me to the core.
There were people in my new dreams. They couldn’t see me, and I only saw flashes of them. It was as though I were watching damaged strips of film cobbled together out of order. A woman walking with a baby on her hip. A man drawing water from a well. A soldier in uniform, carrying a short sword, the gladius I had learned about in Mrs. Whaley’s eighth-grade Latin class. A Roman soldier. That was my first real clue that this was no random series of images, but scenes from a particular era. I saw oxen pulling plows. A young woman selling herself on the street. Men exchanging money. Gold and copper coins with the imperious profile of an emperor upon them. And a name. Tiberius. The name triggered something in my mind, so I checked the Internet. The successor of Augustus, Tiberius was a former commander of legions who spent much of his reign leading military campaigns in Germania. One of the few important events of his rule—seen through the lens of hindsight—was the execution of a Jewish peasant said to have claimed to be king of the Jews.
“Was your father deeply religious?” Rachel asked, upon hearing about these new images.
“No. He was … he looked at the world in a more fundamental way.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s not relevant.”
An exasperated sigh. “Your mother, then?”
“She had faith in something greater than humanity, but she wasn’t big on organized religion.”
“You had no religious indoctrination as a child?”
“Sunday school for a couple of years. It didn’t take.”
“What denomination?”
“Methodist. It was the closest church to our house.”
“Did they show films about Jesus’s life?”
“It’s possible. I don’t remember.”
“You grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right? It’s more probable than not. And of course we’ve all seen the grand biblical epics from the fifties. The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. Those things.”
“What are you saying?”
“Only that the accoutrements of these hallucinations have been sitting in your subconscious for years. They’re in all of us. But your dreams seem to be moving toward something. And that something may be Jesus of Nazareth.”
“Have you heard of dreams like this before?” I asked.
“Of course. Many people dream of Jesus. Of personal interactions with him, receiving messages from him. But your dream progression has a certain logic to it, and a naturalistic tone rather than the wildness of obsessive fantasy. Also, you claim to be an atheist. Or at least agnostic. I’m very interested to see where this goes.”
I appreciated her interest, but I was tired of waiting for answers. “But what do you think it means?”
She pursed her lips, then shook her head. “I’m no longer convinced that this has to do with the loss of your wife and daughter. But the truth is, I simply don’t know enough about your life to make an informed evaluation.”
We were at a stalemate. I still didn’t believe that my past had anything to do with my dreams. Yet as the days passed, the scarred strips of film in my head began to clear, and certain dream characters to reappear. The faces I saw became familiar, like friends. Then more familiar than friends. A feeling was growing in me that I remembered these faces, and not merely from previous dreams. I described them for Rachel as accurately as I could.
I’m sitting in the midst of a circle, rapt bearded faces watching me. I know I’m speaking, because they’re obviously listening to me, yet I can’t hear my own words.
I see a woman’s face, angelic yet common, and a pair of eyes I know like those of my mother. They don’t belong to my mother, though, not the mother who raised me in Oak Ridge. Yet they watch me with pure love. A bearded man stands behind her, watching me with a father’s pride. But my father was clean shaven all his life …
I see donkeys … a date palm. Naked children. A brown river. I feel the cold, jarring shock of immersion, the beat of my feet on sand. I see a young girl, beautiful and dark-haired, leaning toward my face for a kiss, then blushing and running away. I’m walking among adults. Their faces say, This child is not like other children. A wild-eyed man stands waist deep in water, a line of men and women awaiting their turn to be submerged, while others come up from the water coughing and sputtering, their eyes wide.
Sometimes the dreams had no logic, but were only disjointed fragments. When logic finally returned, it frightened me.
I’m sitting beside the bed of a small boy. He can’t move. His eyes are closed. He’s been paralyzed for two days. His mother and aunt sit with me. They bring food, cool water, oil to anoint the boy. I speak softly in his ear. I tell the women to hold his hands. Then I lean down and speak his name. His eyes squeeze tight, expressing mucus. Then they open and light up with recognition of his mother. His mother gasps, then screams that his hand moved. She lifts him up, and he hugs her. The women weep with happiness …
I’m eating with a group of women. Olives and flat bread. Some women won’t meet my eyes. After the meal, they take me into a bedroom, where a pregnant girl lies on the bed. They tell me the baby has been inside her too long. Labor will not begin. They fear the child is dead. I ask the women to leave. The young mother fears me. I calm her with soft words, then lift the blanket and lay my hands on her belly. It’s distended, tight as a drum. I leave my hands there for a long time, gently urging, speaking softly to her. I can’t understand what I’m saying. It’s like a soft chant. After a time, her mouth opens. She’s felt a kick. She cries out for the other women. “My baby is alive!” The women lay their hands on me, trying to touch me as if I possess some invisible power. “Surely he is the one,” they say.
“These are stories from the Bible,” Rachel said, “known by millions of schoolchildren. There’s nothing unique about them.”
“I’ve been reading the New Testament,” I told her. “There’s no record of Jesus healing a little boy of paralysis. No description of him eating a meal with only women, then inducing labor.”
“But those are both healing images. “And you’re a physician. Your subconscious seems to be casting Jesus in your image. Or vice versa. Perhaps the problem really is your work. Have you moved further away from pure medicine? I’ve known doctors who fell into depression after giving up hands-on patient care for pure research. Perhaps this is something like that?”
She’d guessed correctly about my moving away from patient care, but my lucid dreams weren’t some strange expression of nostalgia for my days in the white coat.
“There’s another possibility,” she suggested. “One more in line with my original interpretation. These images of divine healing could be subconscious wishes that you could bring Karen and Zooey back. Think about it. What were two of Jesus’ most notable miracles?”
I nodded reluctantly. “Raising Lazarus from the dead.”
“Yes. And he also resurrected a little girl, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yes. But I don’t think that’s the significance of these dreams.”
Rachel smiled with infinite patience. “Well, one thing is certain. Eventually, your subconscious will make its message clear.”
That turned out to be our last session. Because that night, my dreams changed again, and I had no intention of telling Rachel how.
The new dream was clearer than any that had come before, and though I was speaking in a foreign language, I could understand my words. I was walking down a sandy road. I came to a well. The water was low in the well, and I had nothing to draw it with. After a time, a woman came with an urn on a rope. I asked if she would draw me some water. She appeared surprised that I would speak to her, and I sensed that we were of different tribes. I told her the water in the well would not cure her thirst. We talked for a time, and she began to look at me with appraising eyes.
“I can see you are a prophet,” she said. “You see many things that are hidden.”
“I’m no prophet,” I told her.
She watched me in silence for a while. Then she said, “They speak of a Messiah who will come someday to tell us things. What do you think of that?”
I looked at the ground, but words of profound conviction rose unbidden into my throat. I looked at the woman and said, “I that speak to you am he.”
The woman did not laugh. She knelt and touched my knee, then walked away, looking back over her shoulder again and again.
When I snapped out of that dream, I was soaked in sweat. I didn’t lift the phone and call Rachel for an emergency appointment. I saw no point. I no longer believed any dream interpretation could help me, because I was not dreaming. I was remembering.
“What are you thinking about?” Rachel asked from the passenger seat.
We were nearing the UNC campus. “How you got here.”
She shifted in her seat and gave me a concerned look. “I’m here because you missed three sessions, and you wouldn’t have done that unless things had taken a turn for the worse. I think your hallucinations have changed again, and they’ve scared the hell out of you.”
I gripped the wheel tighter but didn’t speak. Somewhere, the NSA was listening.
“Why don’t you tell me?” she said. “What could be the harm?”
“This isn’t the time. Or the place.”
The UNC theater was up ahead on the left. To our right the Forest Amphitheater lay in the trees below the road. I made a hard right and coasted down a dark hill on a street that ran between two rows of stately homes, a single-entrance neighborhood that housed tenured professors and affluent young professionals. Fielding had lived in a small, two-story house set well back from the street. Perfect for him and the Chinese wife he hoped to bring to America.
“Where are we?” Rachel asked.
“Fielding’s house is right up here.”
I looked in the direction of the house but saw only darkness. I’d expected to find the place ablaze with light, as my own had been after I lost Karen and Zooey. I had a moment of panic, a premonition that I’d driven into one of those 1970s conspiracy films where you walk up to a familiar house and find it vacant. Or worse, with an entirely new family living there.
A porch light clicked on thirty yards from the street. Lu Li must have been watching from a darkened window. I turned my head and scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. I frequently spotted the NSA surveillance cars assigned to tail me. Either the security teams didn’t care if we saw them or, more likely, they wanted us to know we were being watched. Tonight I saw nothing suspicious, but I did sense that something wasn’t as it should be. Perhaps there were watchers who did not want to be seen. I turned into Fielding’s driveway and pulled up to the closed garage door.
“A Nobel laureate lives here?” Rachel asked, gesturing at the modest house.
“Lived,” I corrected. “Stay here. I’m going to the door alone.”
“For God’s sake,” she snapped. “This is ridiculous. Just admit this is all a charade, and let’s go get some coffee and talk about it.”
I grabbed her arm and looked hard into her eyes. “Listen to me, damn it. It’s probably okay, but this is the way we’re going to do it. I’ll whistle when it’s all right for you to come up.”
I walked up to the front door of my dead friend’s house, my hands in plain sight, my mind on the .38 in my pocket.
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