'But why do you want to help Tennant?' Ravi asked. 'Why do they? The newspapers are saying Ten¬nant wants to kill the president.'
Godin swallowed painfully. 'Presidents know better than to believe newspapers. And you're forgetting it was Matthews who foisted Tennant on me in the first place. He wants Tennant's side of the story.'
'I see.' Ravi didn't see at all. 'What do you want me to do in Jerusalem?'
'Kill Tennant.'
Ravi closed his eyes.
'He's practically brain-dead now,' Godin said. 'One tiny push from you and he's gone, and nobody the wiser.'
'Peter, I can't walk into an Israeli hospital and…'
'Why not? You were prepared to murder me. Why not Tennant?'
'I never intended to hurt you.'
The right side of Godin's face clenched in spasm.
'Has the pain returned?'
'Shut up, Ravi. This is your chance to redeem your¬self. Your one chance to live.'
Ravi cut his eyes at Geli. Anything was better than being alone with her again. 'All right. But what if I can't do it? I mean, what if it's impossible?'
'You won't be the only one trying.'
'I see. Well… when am I leaving?'
'I want you airborne in ten minutes. My Gulfstream is fueled on the strip. Go to Administration first. You'll have a telephone call waiting.'
A telephone call? 'All right, Peter.'
Ravi started to leave, but some remnant of profes¬sional responsibility held him back. 'What about you?'
'Dr. Case can keep me alive until Trinity state is reached.' Godin waved him away. 'Don't worry. Tennant will probably die before you get there.'
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 presi¬dent 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 med¬ical 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?”
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 undis¬covered 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 rain¬storm 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 pro¬found 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 surround¬ings. 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.'
