The Footprints of God

  I thought about that. There’d been no attempt on my life until McCaskell returned my call at my house, which had told the Trinity security people that I hadn’t yet talked to the president. If McCaskell was tied to anyone at Trinity, he would have communicated this to them long before that phone call. “I trust him. But I’ll have to see his face.”

  “Well…it looks like you’re just going to have to lie low until we get back. McCaskell and the Secret Service will pick you up then. Can you get to Washington in four days?”

  “I can. Mr. President, could I ask you one thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you believe anything I’ve said?”

  Matthews replied in a less folksy voice. “David, I won’t lie to you. John Skow says Dr. Fielding died of natural causes, and that you shot a Trinity security officer outside your house without provocation. He also says you’ve kidnapped your psychiatrist.”

  I blinked in disbelief. Skow had finally made a mistake.

  “Hold on, sir.” I handed the phone to Rachel. “Tell him who you are.”

  She hesitantly took the phone and held it to her ear. “This is Dr. Rachel Weiss…. Yes…. No, sir. I came with Dr. Tennant of my own free will…. That’s right. Yes, people are trying to kill us…. Yes, sir. I will.”

  She handed me the cell phone.

  “Mr. President?”

  “I’m here, David. Look, I’m not sure what to think. But I know you come from good people, and I want to see you and hear you out.”

  The first tiny fillip of relief went through me. “Thank you, sir. All I ask is a fair hearing.”

  “You’ll get that as soon as I get back. Keep your ass in the grass, Dave.”

  A bubble of laughter burst through the lump in my throat. That saying was right out of my older brother’s mouth. “Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll see you then.”

  I clicked end.

  Rachel was watching me expectantly. “What do you think?”

  “I think we’re better off than we were five minutes ago. What did he ask you?”

  “Whether I was under duress. He also told me to take care of you. My God…I can’t believe this. What are we going to do for the next four days?”

  I pressed down the accelerator and sped up to seventy. “We’re going to Oak Ridge.”

  “Tennessee?”

  “Yep. I know that place like nowhere in the world. Five miles outside of town, you’re lost in the wilderness. No police. No TVs to broadcast photos of wanted fugitives and stolen trucks. Nothing.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “Eight hours.” I passed a slow-moving car and settled back into the right lane. “Settle in and get some sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep in a car.”

  “This is a truck.”

  “Wiseass.”

  Escaping the plane and reaching the president had produced a sense of elation in both of us, but that feeling wouldn’t last long. “I’m not kidding about the sleep. You’re going to need every bit of energy you have in the morning.”

  “For what?”

  “Mountains.”

  Chapter

  19

  Geli was running on adrenaline, her body charged by the chase. Between the hunt for Tennant and Weiss and the search for Lu Li Fielding, her resources were stretched to the limit. But when the lack of manpower vexed her, she thought back to the Iraqi desert, where her total force had numbered only eight Delta Force commandos.

  Her latest headache was Jutta Klein, the German MRI expert. Klein had apparently taken advantage of her reduced surveillance and driven to Atlanta, where she’d boarded a Lufthansa flight for Germany. The German government had pledged to “assist in any way possible,” but Geli knew they would welcome Klein and her newfound expertise with open arms.

  Geli spun in her chair. Someone with the day’s access code had buzzed through the door of the control center. John Skow stepped out of the shadows, clad in his unvarying Brooks Brothers suit, his eyes glinting with fear or excitement.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

  Skow straddled a chair opposite Geli and folded his almost feminine hands on its back.

  “Tennant just spoke to the president. Matthews was in Air Force One, en route from Beijing to Shanghai. Our routine intercepts over China picked it up, and I just broke the executive comm codes.”

  Geli felt as though she’d opened the door of a hot oven. No wonder Skow hadn’t wanted to talk on the air. “What did they say?”

  “The president tried to arrange for the Secret Service to pick up Tennant somewhere, but Tennant wouldn’t bite.”

  “Did Matthews buy our story? Or does he believe Tennant?”

  Skow bit one side of his lower lip, like a man weighing odds. “I’d say he’s leaning toward us. But he told Tennant he would get a fair hearing.”

  “And how will that happen?”

  “Ewan McCaskell and the Secret Service will meet Tennant and pick him up when the president gets back. Tennant trusts McCaskell.”

  “When does the president get back?”

  “Four days.”

  “Are we talking D.C.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Why?”

  Geli had already foreseen that Tennant might run for Washington. “D.C. gives us a perfect cover story to take Tennant out. Starting now, we maximize our effort to discredit him, expanding on what we’ve already said. Tennant’s side effects worsened to psychosis. He shot his security guard and kidnapped Dr. Weiss.”

  “And?”

  “Now he’s threatened the president’s life.”

  Skow’s eyes narrowed. “But he just talked to Matthews. And he didn’t make any threats.”

  Geli rolled her eyes. “Tennant is saying whatever he has to say to get access to the man he wants to kill. By painting him as a deranged assassin, we can use every metro cop in D.C. to hunt him down. And once you give him the Lee Harvey Oswald treatment, the Secret Service won’t let him near the president.”

  “That’s an elegant strategy. What do we use for evidence?”

  “We have hundreds of hours of recordings from Tennant’s house and phone. Is the Godin Four still running upstairs?”

  “I didn’t notice. Why?”

  “With the right programs from the NSA—and our Godin Four—you could piece together a verbal threat against the president that no one could prove was fake.”

  Skow smiled with appreciation. “That’s good, Geli. Very good.”

  “That’s why I’m here. The question is, will Tennant go straight to D.C. or wait the four days?”

  “My source says no,” said Skow. “I’ve got a short list of places Tennant might run, and Washington is at the bottom.”

  Anger tightened Geli’s jaw muscles. “Who is this source, damn it?”

  “I can’t give you that. I’m sorry.”

  “But he says Tennant will run somewhere besides D.C.?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it just common sense? Why should Tennant risk going straight to Washington when the meet is four days away?”

  “Because he knows people there who have access to POTUS. The surgeon general. The director of the National Institutes of Health. The politicians from his home state. Senator Barrett Jackson heads the Select Committee on Intelligence, for God’s sake. He can get access to the Oval Office with a phone call. And if Tennant convinces someone like Barrett Jackson that he’s sane…”

  “I see. All right. But we can’t be sure where he’ll run. And our assassin story will allow us to bring in other federal assets to cover the other locations.”

  “Good. You take care of the media. You also need to hit everyone Tennant knows inside the Beltway with a classified NSA security warning. Emphasize his mental instability. Can you do that gracefully?”

  Skow’s thin lips flattened into something like a smile. “That’s why I’m here.”

  Geli nodded, feeling better than she had in hours.
“You’d better get upstairs and make sure they keep the Godin Four fired up. Or get it moved back here quick.”

  Skow had never touched Geli before, but he reached out and laid his hand on her wrist. “You have four days to kill Tennant and Weiss. After that, the Secret Service will be running things, and they’ll work very hard to trap Tennant rather than kill him.”

  “That’s why you’re going to make sure nothing he says will be believed.”

  Skow nodded. “Right.”

  “Don’t worry,” Geli assured him. “The president will never see Tennant again. In twenty-four hours he’ll be as dead as his brother.”

  Chapter

  20

  It was dark by the time we reached Raleigh. Highway 64 turned to I-40, and then we were rolling back through Research Triangle Park, moving west toward Tennessee.

  “Look at that,” Rachel said, watching the familiar lights drift by. “When it’s dark like this, I can almost believe you could drop me off at my house in Durham, and I could go inside and make a cup of tea.”

  “You know better now.”

  She looked at me for a long time, then sighed in the dark.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” I said. “I haven’t really apologized yet.”

  “I got myself into it.”

  “No. I did that when I chose you as my analyst.”

  The weariness in Rachel’s face told me she was accustomed to dealing with other people’s guilt. “Don’t start trying to figure out the vagaries of fate. If a butterfly had flapped its wings in Malaysia before you called, you would have found someone else. That’s the way life is.”

  I’d said that kind of thing to myself before, but in this case I didn’t believe it. “No. I sought you out because you’re the best at what you do. And Jungian analysts aren’t like psychologists, one on every corner. I know it sounds juvenile, but I have this feeling I was meant to find you.”

  She looked at me with infinitely perceptive eyes, but beneath her perception I saw pain. Somehow, I had prodded a deep nerve. When she spoke, it was in a voice devoid of emotion.

  “It’s easy to tell ourselves that whatever happens to us was meant to be. It’s comforting. It gives us a sense that there’s some larger plan. I thought my husband and I were meant to be together. But we weren’t. It was just a bad choice that I rationalized as fate. It’s pathetic, really.”

  “Pathetic? That marriage gave you your son.”

  “Who died frightened and in pain at the age of five.”

  Her tone had a warning edge to it. I’d seen many children die during my years practicing medicine, and I knew how it could affect parents. They could be shattered beyond recovery. Even hospital staff weren’t immune. The exoskeleton of professionalism melts easily in the presence of a suffering child. For me that suffering—the agony of innocents—was one of the primary obstacles to believing in God.

  “You and your son gave each other five years of unconditional love. Would you rather he’d never lived, to spare you both the pain at the end?”

  She fixed me with an indignant glare. “You’ll say anything, won’t you? You don’t observe any boundaries.”

  “Not when I’ve earned the right to cross them.” I was speaking of the loss of my own child, and she knew it.

  She looked out the window again. “Let’s not talk about this.”

  “We don’t have to talk at all. But we need supplies. I’m going to stop at an all-night Wal-Mart in Winston-Salem or Asheville. That gives you a couple of hours to sleep.”

  “I am exhausted,” she admitted.

  “Come here.”

  “What?”

  “Lean over here.”

  “On your shoulder?”

  “No. Be brave. Curl up on the seat and lay your head on my lap.”

  She shook her head, but not in refusal. I kept my eyes on the road. After a few moments, she pulled off her shoes, then folded her legs on the seat and laid her head on my right thigh. I sensed that her eyes were open, but I didn’t look down. I lowered my right hand and began to stroke her forehead, sliding my fingers back into her hair.

  “This reminds me of when I was a little girl,” she said.

  “I’m not talking to you. Close your eyes.”

  After a while, she did.

  We hit Asheville at 10:30 P.M. A brightly lit Wal-Mart store appeared like an oasis out of the dark, and I pulled off the interstate. Rachel’s head was still in my lap, and my right leg was nearly numb. She didn’t respond when I spoke. I was tempted to leave her in the truck while I went into the store, but I didn’t want her to wake up alone in the parking lot. There was also a chance that the local police had received an APB on the fisherman’s stolen pickup. To avoid being ambushed when we came out of the store, I awakened Rachel and posted her just inside the glass doors, where she could see anyone who took an undue interest in our maroon Ram.

  I went straight to the sporting goods department and began piling items beside an unattended cash register. A two-man tent. Sleeping bags. Backpacks. A Coleman lantern, a stove ring, and fuel. From another aisle I selected two Silent Shadow camouflage jumpsuits, camo headgear, rubber camo boots, and insulated underwear. One aisle over again, I chose a compound bow, eight arrows, and a quiver. I topped off my pile with a compass, a pair of binoculars, a Gerber knife, water purification tablets, a Maglite, and two battery-powered walkie-talkies. Then I went in search of a salesperson to ring it all up.

  The young Mexican woman I found was suspicious of my cash. While she checked each hundred-dollar bill for authenticity, I went to the toiletries section and got toothpaste, toothbrushes, and soap. The total purchase came to $1429.84. After paying, I pushed my cart to the front of the store and left it with Rachel, then took another to the grocery section and grabbed enough basics to keep us alive for a couple of weeks, plus some bottled water. As I went through the checkout aisle, I thought how amazing it was that I could pull off the highway late at night and in one stop outfit myself for long-term survival in the wilderness. My father wouldn’t have believed it.

  Rachel made an “okay” sign with her hand while I checked out, and I breathed a little easier. The rent-a-cop at the exit stopped me, but only to check my receipt against what was in my cart. Ten seconds later we were walking through the parking lot. I tossed everything behind the seat, then helped Rachel inside and started back toward I-40.

  Just before we reached the interstate, I turned into the parking lot of a Best Western motel and parked between two trucks on the back side. One was a blue Dodge Ram with a horse trailer attached. Using a screwdriver from our glove box, I removed the Texas license plate from that Ram and exchanged it for the plate on our maroon one. Then I drove up the access ramp to I-40 and headed west toward the Tennessee line, which lay somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains before us.

  Soon Rachel was snoring softly, her head on my lap again. I tuned the radio to a station playing David Gray and let my eyes blur until all they tracked were the edges of the road. We were driving into my past, into the forests of my youth, a world of strange contrasts and indelible memories. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory was one of the most high-tech installations in the country, yet it was nestled in thickly forested wilderness. There I had gone to school with the children of brilliant men and women from Chicago and New York, and the children of emaciated men and women who’d never left the county where they were born. Some of the scientists found the rural setting boring, if not downright disturbing, but for my family the wooded mountains surrounding Oak Ridge had been a paradise.

  There were several isolated spots around Oak Ridge where we could hide, but one was perfect for us. Last year, I’d heard from a boyhood friend that because of budget constraints, the government was closing the Frozen Head State Park. My brother and I had camped there countless times, and by now the mountainous park would be deserted but for a few fanatical hikers who wouldn’t bother anyone enjoying the same illicit recreation they sought.

  We crossed the
Tennessee line at the south end of the Pisgah National Forest. Then we broke out of the big trees, and by midnight we were passing through Knoxville. I continued west on 62 and in less than thirty minutes we were driving through Oak Ridge, America’s “secret city” of the Second World War. Today it is known worldwide for its nuclear facilities, but during World War Two it hadn’t even existed on maps. Between 1945 and 1975—the year I left it for Alabama—Oak Ridge had grown into something resembling a normal American town. But it never quite was. There was always a shared sense of mission in Oak Ridge, and the proof of the town’s value was invisible but ever present. We who lived there knew that in the event of nuclear war, we would be vaporized in the first few minutes. Even in the dark I could see that the city had grown since I’d left it. There were more franchise restaurants on the strip, more chain stores, but the town’s heart was still the laboratory and the old wartime uranium piles, which drew tourists curious to see the tools that had won the war against the Japanese.