'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 sup¬ported Fielding's effort to suspend the project. And it was Tennant's tie to the president that had made that suspen¬sion 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 infor¬mation 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.
CHAPTER 4
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 to 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 speak¬ing confidentially in cars was impossible. Automobiles were simple to bug, and even clean vehicles could be covered from a distance, using special high-tech micro¬phones. 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 assign¬ment to Trinity. My time with Rachel wasn't a 'relation¬ship' in the romantic sense. Two hours per week for the past three months, I had sat in a room with her and dis¬cussed 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 psy¬chiatry. 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 concentra¬tion, 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 con¬fided in, the judgment I awaited. But those eyes were slow to judge, at least in the beginning. She would ques¬tion 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 'hallucination' 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 under¬stood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair oppo¬site 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
