The Footprints of God

  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.

  Chapter 2

  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 one 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 anti-depressants 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 are 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? W
orkplace violence?"

  She still didn't get it. "I mean premeditated murder. Carefully thought out, expertly executed murder." "But would someone murder Andrew Fielding? He was an old man, wasn't he?"

  "He was sixty-three." Recalling Fielding's body on the 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 than 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.